Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  “You ready?” Ed said.

  Luke shrugged. “Born ready.”

  * * *

  There was chaos in Red Square.

  Someone was shouting through a speaker system. The sound was loud. The cops were driving the people out. They were firing tear gas shells from the tops of the armored trucks. A massive crowd was surging. People were running, falling, crying.

  Luke and Ed barely looked at it. They walked briskly along its edge. People ran past them, trying to get away.

  “We should probably find out what’s going on,” Ed said.

  Luke shook his head. “That’s their problem. I think we just need to leave.”

  They walked to the narrow overgrown area along the river. They crossed the condemned pedestrian bridge. A handful of protestors lurked here in the semi-darkness, hiding from the cops. Luke stepped over the mess where Chevsky’s ruined head had once been—no one seemed to notice it.

  On the far end of the bridge, a car was parked. It was the only car parked on the boulevard. Its engine was idling, steam rising from its tailpipe. Crowds of people streamed past it.

  BMW M-Series. It was Zelazny’s car.

  They opened the rear doors and climbed in. Albert looked back at them from the driver’s seat.

  “Good?”

  Luke nodded. “I think so.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “Hard drive,” Luke said. “Not sure what’s in it.”

  “I can open for you,” Albert said. “I can translate.”

  Luke shook his head. “Thanks. We have people for that.”

  Albert shrugged. He handed Luke an open bottle of vodka.

  “Drink. Spill some on yourselves. Checkpoints everywhere now. Putin is arrested. Government? Maybe collapse. Maybe not. I don’t know. You are Americans, out drinking. You care nothing of politics. I am taxi driver for you.”

  Luke stared at him. Putin was arrested? That raised some questions, but now was not the time. He took a swig of the vodka. He felt the heat in his mouth, down his throat, and in his belly. It tasted good. He poured a bit down the front of his shirt.

  “More,” Albert said. “Drink up.”

  He held his hand out to Ed. There was a box cutter in his palm. He pushed the lever forward and the razor blade extended outward.

  “What do I need that for?” Ed said.

  Albert gestured with his chin at Ed’s shirt. Then he made a slicing gesture with his finger. “Blood all over you. You cut your lip. Somebody punched you in bar.”

  He shrugged as if to say: That’s the best I can do.

  Ed looked at Luke. Now Luke shrugged. He handed Ed the vodka bottle and Ed took a swig. He swallowed the fire water and took a breath.

  He grimaced and dragged the blade across his bottom lip. The slice was deep, and the blood started flowing instantly.

  Albert nodded and smiled. “Good. It will swell up. Will need stitches.”

  He put his thick hand out again.

  “What now?” Ed said.

  “Knife. Please.”

  Ed handed him back his box cutter. “I wasn’t gonna keep it.”

  Albert winked. “I know Americans. Never steal anything. Just forget to return.”

  Ed and Luke both laughed.

  Albert looked at Luke. “Man has called me three times. Call I thought was Hungary before? No. Friend of yours. Now I must destroy phone. Please talk to him first.”

  He handed Luke a flip cell phone. Luke opened the last call and pressed the green button. There was a long silence. The phone beeped… and beeped… and beeped.

  “Hello?” a reedy male voice said. “Don Wellington.”

  Don… Wellington? Luke nearly laughed.

  Swann.

  Luke immediately assumed his alias. “Hi. This is Rob Simmons with Worldstar Entertainment. I’m in Moscow. My driver told me I got a call from this number.”

  “Yes, Mr. Simmons. This is Don Wellington with the State Department, sir. We’ve got a unique opportunity for you, which we think you will enjoy. It’s an invitation for you and your associate, Mr.… ah…”

  Luke looked at Ed. “Max Funk.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Funk. Long story short, we’ve got a delegation headed from Moscow to Athens in a couple of hours, a State Department plane, and we’d like you both to join that delegation as cultural attaches. The plane is leaving early because there’s a whole slate of activities scheduled for tomorrow with the Greek Ministry of Education. I think it will be a wonderful…”

  Luke smiled. “We’ll take it.”

  He listened while Swann gave him the details. A driver from the US embassy would meet them at the hotel. Once the driver got them, they’d be inside the protected womb of American diplomacy. Luke breathed deeply. It was good.

  Luke thought of the hard drive in his pocket.

  “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Wellington. I have something I would love to get your opinion about. But it’s on a computer file that I can’t seem to open at the moment. Would there be someone on the plane who can handle the technical details for me, and perhaps send you the material?”

  “Of course there would,” Swann said. “Consider it done.”

  Luke handed Albert the phone back. Albert drove away from Red Square and through the wide streets, looping out, and then back toward the hotel.

  “It will help me,” Albert said, “to know contents of hard drive.”

  Luke wasn’t sure how to answer that. Whatever turned out to be on that hard drive, it was bound to become classified.

  “Information. It is like money here. It keeps me alive.”

  “I will do my best,” Luke said.

  Up ahead, lights were flashing. They were about to hit a police checkpoint. Half a dozen cops stood by two cruisers, their roof lights spinning, throwing shadows across the roadway.

  Albert slowed to a stop and opened his window. He handed the cop an ID card. Luke noticed the folded American dollar bills he slipped into the cop’s hand along with the card.

  The cop probed the car with a flashlight. He shined it on Ed and Luke. He said something in Russian. The words went by too fast. Luke didn’t catch what he said.

  Albert gestured back at Ed and Luke with his head.

  “Amerikantsov.”

  Yankees.

  “P’yanitsy.”

  Drunks.

  The cop laughed and shook his head. He waved them through.

  “Yes,” Albert said as he brought the car up to speed again. “Do your best. I do my best for you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  1:30 a.m. Moscow Daylight Time (5:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Premier Suite

  The Ritz-Carlton Moscow

  Tverskaya Street

  Moscow, Russia

  Oleg Marmilov waited for a knock at his door.

  The night was quiet. He wore a rich brown robe, and sat in the semi-darkness of the living room in his suite on the top floor of the Ritz-Carlton. He breathed deeply the smoke from his cigarette and let out a long exhale. He held a glass of red wine in his other hand.

  He regarded the cigarette. The hotel was no-smoking now, taking its cue from the West. Of course Marmilov smoked anyway—who would question him? The odd thing, though, altogether the strangest thing…

  …was how they made you feel guilty about it.

  In the course of his long career, Marmilov had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. It didn’t bother him in the least. Yet somehow he felt guilty about smoking in his own hotel suite—a place he had lived for more than two years—because it was against the rules.

  “It’s going to kill me one day and I know that,” he said to himself now. “But in the meantime, they would also guilt me, and deny me its pleasures.”

  Across the living room from him, a giant flat-screen television silently showed news footage of Red Square, empty now except for some soldiers and policemen patrolling near the Kremlin. The crowds from earlier had been dispersed.


  It had been an incredible night, and Putin must be reeling.

  The footage of him had gone around the world. The tape was ten years old, of course, and showed a younger, ambitious, but not yet in power Putin toasting the Serbs and their resistance to the Americans and NATO. The tape was also doctored—courtesy of Leonard Zelazny—with a fake timestamp and just enough haziness to mask Putin’s age. But it would take several days for anyone to realize these things.

  Meanwhile, the very real GRU assessment that Putin was enriching himself and his friends in the oil and gas industries had been released—along with a forged document suggesting the Alaska attack had been the result of these relationships.

  A rumor had gone around that Putin was arrested. This was not true, unfortunately. He had been questioned by FSB agents at his official residence in the Kremlin. Afterward, his own supporters had taken him to an undisclosed location—likely his Black Sea dacha—for fear that if he stayed in Moscow he might be arrested, or that a coup might kill him.

  But first impressions were best impressions, and they lasted the longest. Millions of people, across the whole world, and even in Russia, right now believed that Putin was under arrest. Many probably believed he was being tortured.

  Marmilov smiled at the thought.

  Putin was on the defensive now. He had abandoned the city. Already, three dozen GRU-friendly lawmakers in the Duma had demanded his resignation. There would be more tomorrow. Also tomorrow, a group of five members of the upper house, the Federation Council, would stand together and suggest that Dmitri Gagarin, the current Prime Minister, be sworn in as acting President until the crisis was past.

  Marmilov’s smile broadened.

  The office of Prime Minister, in the current era, was a toothless position with no real mandate. The Prime Minister spent a great deal of time cutting ribbons of various kinds, meeting with delegations of middling diplomats from other countries, and smiling on the TV. Gagarin was perfect for this role.

  He was tall and handsome and athletic, with a bright white smile. He was a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan (who seemed to have suffered no adverse psychological effects from it), and an upstanding family man with a wife and three grown children. He was quite charming and pleasant in public. But privately, he was a weakling with a penchant for young girls—very young girls. Unfortunately for him, there was no longer any such thing as privacy.

  In the past, Marmilov had procured lost souls to feed Gagarin’s unhealthy lusts, and of course Marmilov owned footage of some of these encounters. Naturally, Gagarin was well aware of this fact. Not to put too fine a point on it, Gagarin was Marmilov’s marionette. He would dance to whatever tune Marmilov chose to call.

  Marmilov took a sip of his wine. Yes, Dmitri Gagarin would make an exceptional acting President. How nice it would be if the Russian people in their wisdom decided that Gagarin should take on the role more permanently.

  A strange feeling began to come over Marmilov—he was very close to seizing control of this country. It was a heady, breathless feeling, and he must remind himself not to let it carry him away.

  A quiet knock came at the door to the suite.

  This was the knock Marmilov was waiting for. He insisted his visitor knock instead of ringing the doorbell because beautiful young Tamara was asleep in the bedroom after a celebratory lovemaking session, and Marmilov did not want to wake her.

  He padded across the carpeting to the door. When he opened it, the young man from the balcony at the Bolshoi was there. Marmilov silently waved him in.

  They stood perhaps two meters apart, near the unlit stone fireplace. The man was several inches taller than Marmilov. He looked tired, but he stood at attention.

  Marmilov had trouble understanding why anyone ever got tired. He had always been tireless, needing little sleep, and this had barely changed as he aged. Sleep? His work excited him, and kept him awake well into the night. Many mornings, he could not bear to stay in bed a moment longer than necessary.

  He spoke to his visitor in a low voice.

  “Excellent work tonight,” Marmilov said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Everything went as well as could possibly be expected. Now, what news of the TV producer?”

  “None, I’m afraid.”

  Marmilov didn’t like to hear that. His men always knew where to encounter Leonard Zelazny. Zelazny was fooling no one with his cover stories and his alleged girlfriends. The underground world he frequented was an open book to men like Marmilov.

  “None?” he said.

  “Sir, plainclothes agents entered the places he frequently haunts, but found no sign of him. He was last seen, very drunk, leaving the Noor Bar between ten and ten thirty p.m. He is not at his flat, and his car is not there. Neither is he at his office.”

  Marmilov thought about it for a long moment. Zelazny’s personal habits were an irritant. Marmilov should not, at a crucial juncture such as this, spend even a moment wondering about Zelazny’s whereabouts.

  “The engineer Chevsky is in frequent contact with him. Have you spoken with Chevsky?”

  “Chevsky does not answer his telephone, sir.”

  Marmilov shook his head and sighed. It was late and the men wanted to respect Chevsky’s privacy. He was a family man, after all. And he was a well-respected cog in this machine. But he was of the machine, and not above it. In earlier times, an agent like this would have known to simply go and knock on his door. If the door didn’t open, then the agent would kick it in.

  “Go to Chevsky’s home and wake him. This is important.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  After the agent left, Marmilov went back to his sofa. Zelazny bore thinking about. When he disappeared like this, the issues only became clearer. He was very skilled at his work, but it was dangerous to have him running around in the streets. He drank too much alcohol. He consorted with degenerates too much. He was deeply involved in Marmilov’s projects, and he knew too much about them.

  If he were to speak to someone, spill his secrets, perhaps during a tryst…

  It could lead to problems.

  Marmilov had kept him around all this time because his work was excellent and he delivered it quickly. But there were other TV producers in this world. Perhaps this was the right time to snip off a troublesome loose end.

  They just needed to find him first.

  Marmilov’s free hand clenched into a fist. Can you imagine? On a night like this, worrying about an expendable like Leonard Zelazny. No. Marmilov wouldn’t allow it. In a sense, this was a good thing. Zelazny had shown his true colors.

  And as a result, he would be dead before morning.

  “Chevsky will know how to find him,” Marmilov said, his voice quiet in the darkness. “A quick message from Chevsky, and then…”

  Marmilov smiled. And then right back to the business at hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  7:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (3:15 a.m. Moscow Daylight Time)

  The West Wing

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  “Why are you calling me? Do you have any idea where I am right now?”

  Robert Jepsum was in his tiny closet of an office, tucked behind a wide pillar about a hundred steps down a stately marble hallway from the Oval Office. The office was barely 250 square feet, and was packed with office equipment—there was hardly any room to move.

  His desk, his chair, his computer, three filing cabinets, a combination printer and fax machine, a large floor-mounted globe of the world that was nearly up to the minute in terms of the ever-shifting boundaries between countries, a small office refrigerator… these were just the big things that took up the most amount of space.

  There was also a hotplate where he made his Ramen noodles and his macaroni and cheese. He didn’t eat cheap food because it was cheap—he made very nice money, thank you—he ate it because it was fast, and he didn’t like to waste time. Also there was a coffee maker, a small mic
rowave oven, several baseballs mounted on pedestals and signed by entire major league teams—one day he would collect them all—a giant wall calendar with big day squares where he could scribble his scheduling notes (his handwriting looked like hieroglyphics), and a framed photograph of his parents. Yellow manila folders were piled high on top of a folding card table.

  This place was beyond cluttered. It was practically a fire hazard.

  He was almost surprised that they let him keep it like this. Then again, he was a hard worker who produced results and kept to himself most of the time. He was willing to bet that most people didn’t even know what this office was like. Jepsum didn’t know what their offices were like.

  He held the cell phone to his ear. This was very, very dangerous, calling him while he was at work. His heart skipped a beat, and a moment later, as the fact of it began to sink in, his pulse began to race. He ran a hand through his thinning hair.

  “We must talk,” the voice said. The man spoke English perfectly well, but his Russian accent was all too apparent.

  “I’ll have to call you back.”

  “When?” said the voice.

  “Five minutes.”

  Jepsum got up from his desk, went out in the hall, and locked his door. The wide hallways were quiet. A handful of people—the usual suspects—were still here working after hours, but a lot of people had already gone home. In the White House, you could tell who the people with real ambition were very easily—just look to see who was here in the middle of the night. Jepsum was always one of them.

  He walked down the hall toward the security checkpoint, his footfalls echoing off the stone floor. Two uniformed guards stood chatting by the metal detector and the X-ray machine. They were older men, clock punchers who worked eight hour shifts, and wouldn’t dream of doing anything else. To each their own.

  “Calling it a night?” one of them said as Jepsum passed.