David Mars

"***DAVID MARS:** London-based businessman*"

**David James Mars** had been born Feodor Ivanoich Zakharov in Minsk, then part of the Soviet Union. His parents were from Moscow, both military officers, and they returned to the capital when he was still young.

He was a smart and physically fit child, enjoyed mountain climbing, chess, and foreign languages. It was a foregone conclusion that he would follow his taciturn father, by now a colonel, into the Army. He graduated from Frunze Military Academy and entered the officers' corps of the Soviet Army. Picked for his able brain and strong body to join the GRU, Russian military intelligence, he went to Afganistan shortly after the war began. He interrogated prisoners and supported troops with his intelligence product, paid off goat herders for information about enemy supply lines from Pakistan, and, even though, he was not a frontline infantryman, survived over a dozen attacks by Mujahidin fighters during his time there.

By the mideighties, he was back in Moscow, learning deep-cover tradecraft, including but not limited to improving his English and his ability to blend into foreign environs.

He met Irene Carson, a young and beautiful language teacher from Los Angeles, and the two married after approval from GRU leadership. They had two children: Feodor and then, two years later, Zoya. After the fall of the Union, his entire family was sent to embassies in London and Washington. He was, ostensibly, a military attaché, but with his skills, he was able to slip out of opposition coverage of his house, almost at will, and run agents throughout whatever capital he'd been assigned to. This he and his family did for nearly a decade.

Irene had long since changed her name to Irina, and she and their kids bolstered his cover as a mild-mannered family man, but Irina wasn't an intelligence operative herself.

That was Feodor Zakharov's role. Over the years he became the GRU's best spy.

Until his next promotion sent him back to Moscow. He was assigned to the Aquarium, GRU's headquarters. He made general, became a deputy to the GRU chief, and when the man retired after a year, the president of Russia himself handpicked Zakharov from a list of candidates to take the reins of Russian military intelligence.

He was young for the job, in his early forties, and he remained ensconced in this position for several years.

And then his wife Irina was run down by a truck that had been stolen from the Red October Chocolate Factory and dumped in the Moskva River after the incident. Inconsolable, he began to look for the culprit.

Evidence came out that the entire sleeper deep-penetration program that she was a trainer for had been compromised to MI6 by a leak at the Kremlin, and while the SVR could never positively conclude that Irina Zakharova had been murdered by British agents, Zakharov's own personal digging into the situation uncovered clues that the compromise at SVR was, in fact, due to a British intelligence operation. These clues sent him on a self-financed private trip to London to slip back into one of his characters using false papers.

To obtain his own private security and foot soldiers in the UK, he reached out to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the largest of the Russian mafia groups, and he was put in touch with a brigade commander there in London. He built networks of other criminal organizations, local British groups, and transnational satellites operating in London, and soon enough he had men working for him in the Metropolitan Police Force.

He was months into his own investigation of his wife's death at the hands of the British, still living in London when he had his target. A high-level MI6 operations officer named Wellstone. Zakharov decided to assassinate the man, on the streets of London, in the most dramatic fashion he could imagine.

The operation was underway, but Zakharov shut it down when he learned Feo Feodorovich, his twenty-one-year-old son, was in a hospital in Moscow suffering from advanced-stage leukemia.

Zakharov raced home after that but his son Feo died that very night. The elder Zakharov blamed the British for his son's death and no one else knew of any evidence to support that. His lust for revenge only grew.

After the death of Feo, Feodor Zakharova went to the Kremlin and demanded the opportunity to operate against Britain personally for both the murder of his wife and their involvement in the death of his older child. He himself adopted the plan that was ultimately approved by the president. He was pleasantly surprised that the president agreed to it so easily, but the Kremlin had been looking for to send a dedicated intelligence leader into the UK to organize the Bratvas there into a proxy force, to acquire intelligence on the powerful anti-Kremlin dissidents who lived there, to oversee the offshoring of Russian money through and to UK banks, and to conduct targeted killings at the behest of Moscow.

They recognized that Zahget another GRU chief, but there was no one else with the skill, training, and motivation to do what needed to be done on the ground in the most important foreign location for Russian interests.

Zakharova flew to Dagestan, where war raged against Shariat Jamaat; he was declared dead on the battlefield after photographs were taken purporting to show his body; and spent the next two months undergoing cosmetic surgery. He grew the first beard he'd worn since fighting through the Afghanistan winter of 1983-84, and he darkened his hair several shades, making it almost black.

General Feodor Zakharova turned into David James Mars, a wealthy real estate mogul who'd lived most of his life in the Caribbean, which accounted for the fact that few around town knew much about him. By becoming David Mars, Feodor Zakharova himself became a sleeper, an operative who has not come to the attention of police or security forces.

He slipped into London's elite circles with few questions asked, bolstered by contacts made through front companies run by the SVR around the world, and connections in the UK purchased with Russia's billions funneled into UK banks.

He resumed working with the Solntsevskaya Bratva, whose leadership assigned him to an English-educated Vor named Artyom Primakov. Primakov had been an SVR agent and graduate of the school where Irina Zakharov taught, and he blended into London just as well as Mars.

Zakharova and Primakov, now David Mars and Roger Fox, spent the next several years working for Russian interests across the United Kingdom.

No one in the mafia other than senior leadership and Artyom Primakov knew David Mars was Russian, and neither did any but a very few at the Kremlin. Instead he went by a code name: Chernny Volk, Black Wolf.

The money for Mars's operations came from Vladimir Belyakov, the billionaire Russian oligarch who, despite a very public falling-out with the government in Moscow, was in truth a dedicated foot soldier for the Kremlin, a member of the Siloviki, the politically influential elite. The Kremlin eased off the Solntsevskaya Bratva while simultaneously increasing their menace of other mafia groups to further bolster the operation.

David Mars had spent the past several years operating in London against the UK interests and in furtherance of Russian interests, but he had no ties to the Kremlin at all. He was the Russian president's "fire and forget" weapon, sent to cause mayhem, set up with virtually unlimited men and money, and left to his own devices.

He was careful at first, building contacts in intelligence circles, not just in the United Kingdom but with all the Five Eyes nations, paying for dirt on IC personalities, socking it all away so he could initiate his schemes when the moment was right.

Zakharov's operational tempo increased when Britain began threatening to strip assets from the Russian kleptocracts who had taken up residence in and around London. The Kremlin let it be known to Mars, through a half dozen cutouts, that it was time the gloves came off.