“You don’t count, and I mean that in the friendliest possible way,” said Berg, getting a laugh out of all of them. “Anyway. The Dreery family bought the land encompassing the Mincy Conservation Area in the early eighteen hundreds. I think. The history is unclear. What we do know is that they leased much of the land to the Missouri Conservation Department in the nineteen thirties, withholding a few large parcels for their own use, to include the fifteen hundred or so acres now encompassing the camp. That parcel was sold to a corporation named Firebird Development, owned by the Belsky family, in 1971.

“Long story short, the original Belskys emigrated to the US from Russia in the late eighteen hundreds and accumulated a tidy fortune by American standards. Today’s Belskys renounced their US citizenship in 2001, after selling the company to Concordia Management and Consulting for an undisclosed sum, and emerged as well-connected oligarchs on the Moscow scene. Concordia Management and Consulting is owned by mega-oligarch Yuri Pichugin, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants. Pichugin rose to prominence between 2001 and 2003, after running a very successful Saint Petersburg catering company. He reportedly met Putin, who is a Saint Petersburg native, through catered events.”

“He must have served a mean pierogi,” said Devin, the joke falling flat.

“Piroshki, maybe,” said Berg. “Every eastern European country has a version of pierogi.”

“Sounds the same,” said Rich.

“Not even close. It’s a sweet or savory stuffed bun, panfried right before serving. To die for,” said Berg. “But I doubt that’s how Pichugin rose so quickly into the highest stratosphere of Russian power and wealth. I think the Belsky family originally bought the land, on behalf of the Soviets, for the original summer camp. Maybe they were secret Communists. Maybe they got paid. Who knows?”

“They sound like opportunists,” said Devin.

“Communists. Opportunists. All the same in the end,” said Berg. “Whatever the deal is—the Belskys turn the land over to the GRU, or whoever is running the sleeper network, and everything runs smoothly. The second generation is indoctrinated and trained at the camp before being launched into the world. Then things go dormant for a while, waiting for the third generation. Somewhere along the line, the Belskys figure out a way to cash out of this valuable possession.”

“Opportunism at its finest,” said Rich.

“It has to be Pichugin. I just don’t know how he got his mitts on the program. That’s the missing link here. How did the sleeper program come into his possession? Unless the Russian Federation outsourced it to him, and he’s just a proxy. My gut tells me it’s the other way around.”

“Why don’t we just go after Pichugin?” asked Devin.

Rich took over from there.