by Nick Cook
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘We’ll let the FSB be the judge of that. They are very keen to speak with you. Have you ever been to Lefortovo? No, of course you haven’t. This is your first time in Moscow. The basement there used to flood, so I’m told. It doesn’t any longer.
‘It is no business of mine what they do to you there. But I imagine they will be interested in what you and Sasha had to discuss in the former laboratory of my erstwhile father-in-law, M. M. Kalunin. And will want to know, too, why you were keen to make a donation to a Russian Orthodox church in Jerusalem.’
He turns to the guy with the wrench, who takes up position behind me.
‘The United States Secret Service is investigating you,’ I blurt.
‘So? Everything is negotiable. The FSB will wish to talk about this, too. Not that it will help you. The transcript of your discussion with Mr Kantner is already on the desk of the man waiting for you at Lefortovo. I have examined it myself. It clearly points to the fact that your visit here is unofficial. You may even be in breach of the terms of your visa.
‘Things are changing in Russia, as they are in your country. We too have a new president. Our security service, however, still adheres to the old rules. All of this can be discussed over the next few hours. But in two days’ time, nobody is going to miss a doctor, even one as famous as you, who went for a walk in the wrong part of Moscow.’
I hear the scrape of a shoe on the concrete behind me, and brace myself for a blow that doesn’t come. Ilitch turns and walks away.
Somebody grasps my arms and hauls me to my feet.
There’s an unmarked van at the back of the building. A black Audi directly behind it, lights on, engine running.
They drag me across the concrete and throw me in the back of the van.
My face hits the floor. A moment before the doors slam shut, I catch a glimpse of Ilitch clambering into the back of his Mercedes.
We drive for ten miles or so on a road that bends to the right. It’s freezing cold. I curl myself into a ball. The driver takes two more right turns and drives a hundred meters or so before he hits the brakes with such force I slam into the cab wall.
Yells from the front, the crashing of gears.
We fly into reverse.
A horn blares. We skid, hit something solid. Stop.
The driver’s door opens. There’s a shout and two shots.
From behind, a volley of automatic fire, more shouting, two more blasts.
The doors fly open and I’m confronted by a figure in a black balaclava gripping a pump-action shotgun.
He hauls me out. We’re on a main road, in an industrial area. Watery yellow light bleeds from a lone streetlamp. The van has reversed into a bollard. Just behind it, slewed across the road, the black Audi is riddled with bullets.
The guy who’s grabbed me is flanked by another, also masked. They drag me toward one of two gunmetal BMWs parked at the side of the road.
They throw me into the trunk and slam it shut.
We make a fast turn. Thirty seconds later, we’re back at the interchange, and a moment after that, accelerating fast. This time, it’s impossible to know which way we’re going.
After another fifteen minutes, we turn off and drive for about a mile before coming to a stop. I hear the passenger door open.
The lid pops and I catch a glimpse of a three-quarter moon through the branches of a tree and a black-clad figure against it.
I try to get up, but the whole of my right side is numb.
The man says something and pushes me back into the trunk. Throws a blanket over me. Leans forward. There’s something in his hand.
I know that voice.
The needle glints in the moonlight. He pulls up my left sleeve and jabs it into my upper arm.
I’m sinking.
But I know that voice …
55
I CAN SMELL DISINFECTANT AND BOILED MEAT.
I close my eyes and open them again. I didn’t imagine it. I’m in the bedroom of what looks like a moth-eaten ski chalet, and Dmitri Sergeyev has put a mug of coffee on the table beside me. He says something to a man with a shotgun, who nods and leaves.
He reverses a chair and sits, arms folded on the backrest. He’s holding an iPad. ‘This dacha belongs to a buddy of mine from way back – old-school guy.’
I remember his English from our meeting at the embassy – precise and quaintly idiomatic.
‘Far enough from Moscow, I hope, to keep the siloviki at a safe distance.’
‘Siloviki?’ I rub the back of my head.
‘Corrupt politicians who have navigated their way to extreme wealth, often via the security services. Vladimir Ilitch has acted as banker for most of them – which is why you were on your way to an FSB cell at Lefortovo, and why, fortunately, we’ve been keeping a very close eye on him.’
‘What do you want, Dmitri?’
‘A little honesty.’
I prop myself up on the pillow and reach for the coffee.
‘Five weeks ago,’ he says, ‘we intercepted a call to a cellphone tagged to the White House Chief of Staff, your friend, Reuben Kantner. From a business jet over the Southern Rockies, owned and operated by the US Secret Service.
‘It reported a very recent raid, and instructed him to assemble the key players at Camp David. The caller, of course, was you.
‘Approximately three hours later, you talked again, via your personal cell, from Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling. You referred to something called the Grid, which you claimed had been part-funded by Ilitch. You also mentioned Professor M. M. Kalunin, his institute, the program he’d worked on during the Soviet era, and Thompson’s refusal to cancel the Jerusalem conference.’
He taps his iPad and hands it to me.
Cyrillic letters are interspersed among the telemetry running across the top of the screen. The shot is familiar. I can see the lenticular curve of the NSA’s Bluffdale facility, the salt-white sand and, in the bottom right corner, the Canyon. A curl of black smoke drifts from a vent at the top of the bunker toward Salt Lake City.
‘If you look very carefully,’ Sergeyev says, ‘you’ll spot two helicopters on the ground, between the perimeter and the bunker.’
I’ve always been amazed at what you can see from space.
‘Most notably,’ he adds, ‘this is the first instance we can identify during the modern era of one US federal agency taking down another.’
He lets me absorb this.
‘Let us now cut to our presidents’ scheduled meeting in Moscow – the trip that you and I were busy planning. The trip that was canceled the day after your unfortunate accident in the V-22.
‘Your president spoke with mine on the telephone about this. He was polite and apologetic and explained his reasoning: that his priority now was to focus on the Jerusalem peace conference, where they should jointly make the announcement they would have made in Moscow.’
‘What announcement?’
‘I’m not sure if you knew this, Joshua, but Christy Byford and I liaised regularly on the WMD search-and-destroy mission.’
I did know. In the Sit Room, before we launched the Bluffdale mission, in response to Thompson’s plea that the revelation of a Russian link to the Grid should not disrupt his developing relationship with his opposite number, Christy had told me she and Reuben were going to collaborate on a narrative for Sergeyev’s benefit.
‘What announcement?’ I repeat.
‘Judging by the call you made to Kantner, Joshua, you are already aware that Ilitch used every trick in the book to launder his and the silovikis’ money. Donations to bogus charitable causes are just the tip of the iceberg. But he knew that even Sledkom – our generally toothless anti-corruption agency – would catch up with him at some point.
‘So, six years ago, he began to invest his money in American tech. He and his friends didn’t mind the risk, because they were confident of the protection your intelligence community gives to its top-secret programs in Sil
icon Valley and elsewhere. Russian mafia funding helps them avoid the scrutiny of your congressional oversight system.
‘In Moscow, your president and mine were going to expose these strategies by the military-industrial complex to control a sizeable portion of your trillion-dollar defense and security budget, and thus maintain the cycle of threat, not just between our two countries, but globally.’
Graham’s reveal about the encrypted Ilitch file on Lefortz’s classified server suddenly makes sense. Lefortz, the most trusted guy in the White House, had been conducting the President’s probe into this snake pit. And even Reuben hadn’t known about it. Why not Reuben?
‘The GRU and the FSB are engaged in a turf war also – have been for decades. Regrettably, not everyone in my agency takes seriously the oath they swore to protect our new leader. But I do. And he takes very seriously the relationship he has begun to forge with yours.’
‘Who do you really work for, Dmitri?’
‘My president, Joshua. My job is to watch his back. Which is why you and I find ourselves here. Because I’m struggling to completely understand the sequence of events we have already touched upon: the Utah raid, you of all people talking about the threat this place presented, the leaders of every US intel agency assembling at Camp David, and your V-22 crash. Then your president changing his mind about Moscow and unveiling the Jerusalem event.’
He pauses for a moment, and chews on his lower lip.
‘Last night, Joshua, we tracked another of your calls to Kantner. You drew his attention to Patriarch Nikolai not showing up in Jerusalem, and to the blast radius from a church on the Mount of Olives. The blast radius of what? I suspect Ilitch and the FSB know, because they took the trouble to pick you up last night.’
He pauses again.
‘So, if we’re going to stop what you fear is about to happen, Joshua, you are going to need to tell me everything you know.’
The Soviet psi program left ours at the starting gate, Sergeyev says. While the CIA and INSCOM invested around $20 million on psi, his fellow countrymen spent around a billion.
All those schools, universities and academies scoured by the KGB for intuitives? All that money lavished on M. M. Kalunin’s institute? Though multi-faceted, the institute’s mission was dominated by one over-arching Cold War objective: the psychokinetic detonation of a US nuclear weapon on US soil.
We pull onto a two-lane stretch of road skirting the city of Nizhny Novgorod, and head into the leading edge of an east–west front that will take at least a day to blow over.
Sergeyev sits up front. Vasiliy, his shotgun-toting sidekick, drives. Between snow flurries, I get a fleeting impression of impenetrable forest, grime-stained ribbon settlements, faded road signs and the occasional skeleton of an abandoned Soviet-era vehicle. Behind us, there’s a second BMW with Vasiliy’s friends in it – the three other heavies responsible for springing me on the Moscow ring road.
We’re heading for a place that used to be known as Arzamas-16. Its purpose was to design, develop and build nuclear weapons. The road signs now call it Sarov, but little else seems to have changed. It continues to be known as a ZATO: a zakrytoe administrativno-territorial’noe obrazovanie; in essence, a closed military city. During the Soviet era, there were more than fifty ZATOs dedicated to the development and production of strategic weapons systems. Thirty years on, forty or so still remain.
Ilitch, Sergeyev says, made his first billion from Russia’s vast mineral resources: titanium, magnesium, nickel, gold, copper, iron ore, platinum and diamonds. He had assets that could cut the costly upstream phase of the mining process from years to weeks. He sold his former sponsors in the KGB and the GRU – men who rubbed shoulders with Vladimir Putin and went on to share his investment strategies – on the idea of using the intuitives to pinpoint where to dig and drill.
The siloviki became his protectors – along with the upper echelons of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, in Putin’s time, morphed into a de facto arm of the state, united in the suppression of unseemly non-Russian tendencies such as protest, liberalism and homosexuality.
Sergeyev’s team is sifting through historic communications traffic between St Alexei’s and Ilitch’s foundation, as well as the files held by the GRU on M. M. Kalunin’s institute. They are looking for pointers to, and connections between, the foundation and the monastery of St Alexei.
The monastery lies between the edge of the city and its northwest perimeter. Sergeyev shows me photos of thick, fortified walls, a moat, a drawbridge, towers at each of its four corners and cloisters where the monks live and worship.
I am about to go behind the lines in a country that is still at war with mine.
56
SERGEYEV PICKS UP DOCUMENTS TRANSMITTED TO HIM FROM Moscow at a field office outside Nizhny. They identify us as an inspection team with the 12th Chief Directorate, the branch of the military charged with nuclear security. I am a full colonel and Sergeyev is my deputy. FSB at the Sarov checkpoint will challenge us because they won’t have any notification of a visit, but that’s the whole point of a no-notice shock-inspection.
It’s coming up to 6 p.m., but the snow, the low cloud and the smoke from Nizhny’s factories make it feel as if we’re still in the Dark Ages. Sergeyev leafs through the paperwork. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by anything in Russia anymore, but the fact that the GRU transmits things it wants to keep ultra-secure by fax is a good one.
‘What do you know about Senator Abnarth?’ he asks me suddenly.
‘Nothing, except that his fingerprints are all over this.’
‘As part of my job to understand Thompson, we needed to know whether his talk of justice, the desire for peace and his intention to dismantle the excesses of the military economy were real or for show. It was one of the reasons I was told to get close to you. And to try and fathom his relationship with Abnarth.’
I agree Abnarth is key.
Abnarth gave Reuben his first job on the Hill.
Abnarth, the dealmaker and kingmaker, the doyen of Washington’s political scene, anointed Thompson.
Abnarth used to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Abnarth insisted that funds were appropriated from the secretly resurrected remote viewing program into the development of hardware for the exploration of consciousness.
‘Is Abnarth in Jerusalem?’
Sergeyev nods. ‘And it’s unlikely he’d go there knowing somebody would detonate a bomb, don’t you think? But maybe this has something to do with it.’
He passes me his iPad. Onscreen is a typewritten document entitled ‘Toward a Unification of the Abrahamic Faiths’.
‘A paper written by an idealistic twenty-one-year-old trainee lawyer and would-be politician with a master’s degree in theology. It sets out, with some zeal, how the three great monotheistic religions – Islam, Judaism, Christianity – are just marginally different slants on the same faith.
‘I have to say, as a piece of work, it is scarcely original – but embarrassing nonetheless, if you’re running as the Democratic Congressman for the 37th District of the great, Bible-thumping State of Texas.’
I don’t know how Sergeyev came by it, or how he knows it was Abnarth who made it vanish from the archives of Princeton, Thompson’s alma mater, where it had presumably languished until he first ran for public office.
‘Did Sasha voice the suspicion,’ Sergeyev asks, ‘harbored by her father’s military paymasters at the time, that he had withheld certain aspects of his research?’
‘Yes. She said Ilitch had been obsessed with their discovery. Why?’
‘There’s a seminary in New York City. The Church of St Simeon on the Lower East Side. During the Pope’s last trip to the US, he and Thompson met there. You may recall the photos. A paparazzo managed to get shots of the two of them praying together. They were all over the papers.’ He gives me a hint of a smile. ‘Two days later, a call was placed between the Oval Office and the Holy See.’
The person who made the call, he says, wasn’t Thompson.
It was Abnarth.
‘We believe the recipient was Cardinal Rafaello Alonzo, the Pope’s senior adviser. Abnarth said to him: “Do we agree?” Alonzo gave a positive response. We believe this relates to some kind of shared view, or a document, perhaps, that had passed between the Pope and Thompson when they went into that church.’
I think back to my hypnotherapy session with Thompson – the origins of his visceral antipathy to organized religion, his telling me that it was the destructive impact of faith that his administration was finally going to address. Their NYC love-in – that apparently spontaneous decision to pray together – was their second meeting. The first was while Thompson had been on the campaign trail in Dallas.
Did Thompson share his thesis at that point?
Or had this already been done by Abnarth?
‘Here’s something that puzzled both the GRU and the FSB,’ Sergeyev says. He passes me several of the faxed sheets. Photographs, taken with a long lens, of the back of a very gaunt, thin man in a thick coat and fur hat, entering a church.
‘Two years before the USSR collapsed, the Vatican and Moscow re-established diplomatic relations for the first time in nearly seventy years.
‘Shortly before he died, Professor M. M. Kalunin walked into the Church of St. Louis of the French, one of the only Roman Catholic churches in Moscow, during a mass. He took a seat somewhere near the front. He was followed and watched the entire time, of course.
‘Among those in the congregation, sitting a few places from him, was the apostolic nuncio – the new ambassador. Nothing was seen to pass between the two men, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t. Due to the nuncio’s diplomatic status, we were unable to detain him, but Kalunin was taken in for questioning and searched.
‘He admitted to nothing beyond a desire to feel close to God. If something had passed between Kalunin and the nuncio, I invite you to speculate on what that might have been. I also invite you to think about the circumstances we find ourselves in. We have three enlightened men in power – your president, my own and the Pope – who will come together for the first time in Jerusalem. What might that mean, do you suppose?’