Assassin

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Yevgenni Anatolevich Tarankov was called the Tarantula because of the gargantuan web he’d spun over all of Russia in the past five years. From friends in the Kremlin and inside the old KGB, through the peoples of the central Russian plains and wheat fields still dotted with intercontinental ballistic missile silos, and beyond, to the independent-minded residents of the wild far eastern regions of Siberia, he was feared and loved. He was a force to be reckoned with. A Russian force, campaigning for the leadership of his country the Russian way, with bullets and bread. He was a man in his early fifties, whose most prominent features were his eyes, which were large, black and expressive. When he smiled his eyes lit up with a pleasant warmth like a crackling fire on a cold Siberian night. But when he was angry, the fire was replaced by a sharply bitter man-killing wind that, as a poet from St. Petersburg wrote, “chilled a man’s soul so completely that he forgot there ever could be such a season as summer.”

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