RED Hotel

by Fuller, Ed; Grossman, Gary;

  “Will the senator from Alabama yield,” Chairman Davidson interrupted.

  “Of course,” Cole agreed.

  “Mister Reilly …” He drew out the last name for emphasis. “What about our oil interests abroad? Corporations of all stripes? Do you recommend that we open our intelligence files to every business and protect every square inch the way we do our embassies and outposts?” The senator smiled as he considered his next thought. “As if we’ve done a good job at that!”

  “Sir, I’m sorry, you’re asking exactly what?” Reilly said, reframing the interrogative.

  “You heard me. But I’ll put it more simply. Do you believe the CIA should be making its files available to your company and every business? Because if you do—”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Reilly interjected, fixing his eyes on Davidson with no intention of giving any ground to the arrogant senator, “an attack on an American hotel in Mali or Jakarta impacts confidence in Paris and New York. When it comes to targets, there’s no us and them.

  It can happen anywhere—from the world’s capitals to America’s smallest cities and towns. While hotel chains can and must take steps to protect their clientele, we do not run a global intelligence service. The United States does.”

  TOKYO

  At this time of night? Nikaido thought. Odd.

  He typed a command on his computer that brought the front portico camera full screen. The FedEx truck slowed down, swung into the valet parking area, and came to a full stop short of the entrance. Its headlights were on high beam and remained that way. The brilliance flared the camera lenses trained on the area and blinded anyone approaching the truck.

  Nikaido tapped the officer to his right. “Daichi, look at this.”

  “What?”

  “The truck.”

  “Damn driver has his brights on,” the younger man said. “Hard to see. FedEx?”

  “Yes, and he can’t make a delivery in front, or at this hour,” Nikaido added. “He needs to go to the service entrance. Call down there and get him out.”

  “Too late,” Eto said. “The driver’s getting out.”

  WASHINGTON, DC

  “We’re not the CIA or Homeland Security, Mr. Reilly,” Moakley Davidson chided.

  “I know you’re not,” Reilly shot back. “But this committee represents the interests of Americans and their safety is in your best interest, just as it is in ours. We have to find ways to work together.”

  TOKYO

  The FedEx driver turned his back to the hotel entrance, ignoring the valet’s shouts. Rather than taking out a package for delivery, he continued to walk away.

  Takayuki Nikaido grew more concerned when the driver failed to stop and even crossed the street. In just a few steps he would be out of camera range.

  “This isn’t right,” Nikaido declared, his heart racing. “This isn’t right,” he repeated.

  Nikaido quickly stood. He grabbed his only weapon, a baton, and tore out of the security station, through the lobby, and toward the portico.

  Eto followed a few steps behind while radioing a warning. Imamura, confused, didn’t know what to do. He watched his colleagues run off, briefly taking his attention away from the monitors. Distracted, he missed seeing two men hurriedly leave through the hotel’s rear entrance.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  “Hotels invest a great deal of money to install protective techniques. But we are not in the intelligence business,” Reilly testified. “Our computers aren’t tied into the nation’s security databases. We are response driven. As I’ve said, general information is no longer enough. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, planning for emergencies requires communication, collaboration, and control. Don’t you think it’s time?”

  TOKYO

  Takayuki Nikaido covered the distance from the front door to the truck in just eight seconds. His eyes darted between the truck and the driver, who was already well across the street. Nikaido looked inside the truck. No keys. No way to push it out of the way.

  “Clear the area!” he screamed. “Now!”

  WASHINGTON, DC

  “Terrorism is a tool of religious fundamentalists, lone wolves, individuals determined to make a statement, and nations intent on nation-building,” Dan Reilly said. “Left wing, right wing. Separatists, environmentalists, fundamentalists, nationalists. It’s a political tool.” He lowered his voice. “A deadly political tool.”

  TOKYO

  The driver, now more than a block away, faced the hotel. He watched a security officer frantically bark orders. None that would make a difference. He actually wished he could be closer to gaze into his eyes and to see that special moment between life and death. It always fascinated him. One moment alive. Existing. The next, nothing and nothingness. But what of the in-between. The space between the two. The instant. The nanosecond. Is there a recognition? A feeling? What could it possibly be? As an assassin, it had long been an area of personal research.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Reilly leaned toward the microphone to continue, but commotion outside the hearing room drew his attention. The disturbance quickly evolved into shouting, and a sergeant at arms was dispatched to the hall.

  Everyone turned in their seats as a man rushed in. He bumped into the security detail, but powered past.

  “I’ve got to get through.” Spotting Reilly, he called out to him. Then he saw the cameras.

  Reilly recognized the intruder, who was a young executive on his staff.

  Reilly stood. “It’s okay. He’s with me.”

  The officer released him.

  “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Chairman. If you’ll please.”

  Davidson was annoyed, yet no more than he projected during his questioning. “Mr. Reilly, this better be important.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Just a moment.”

  The executive, now fully aware the TV cameras were following him, nervously stepped forward.

  “Quickly!” Moakley Davidson demanded.

  The gallery buzzed with curiosity as the man slid next to Reilly, cupped his hand over the microphone and whispered into his boss’s ear.

  Davidson cleared his voice; another audible display of his displeasure.

  Reilly stuck a finger in the air indicating he needed a moment. He nodded twice as his aide briefed him. The conversation concluded with Reilly letting out a long breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he stated, focusing again on the arrogant chairman. “We’ve just gotten terrible news.”

  Simultaneously, three committee members felt cell phones vibrate in their jacket pockets. Even Moakley Davidson’s phone pulsated. He fumbled trying to retrieve a text.

  Reilly raised his voice. “You’ll have to excuse me. Our hotel in Tokyo, the Envoy Diplomat, has been bombed.”

  Without asking permission, Daniel J. Reilly gathered his papers and abruptly left.

  More cell phones vibrated and rang at different pitches throughout the gallery. For the first time during the day, Senator Moakley Davidson was utterly speechless.

  TOKYO

  There was nothing left of the FedEx truck—1,500 pounds of explosives had decimated the area and anyone within 50 feet. The portico had collapsed. Shrapnel shot through the lobby at more than 400 feet per second, decapitating people in the bar, ripping through bodies all the way to the elevators. But it was only the beginning.

  Sixty seconds later, as people rushed out, three other bombs detonated. Fireballs shot up through the elevator banks. Debris poured through the hallways. The eighth floor swimming pool collapsed, flooding the floors below with 97,500 gallons of water. Eighty-one people died in the first few minutes. The fate of another 125 would not be known for hours.

  Emergency vehicles screamed toward ground zero. Rubberneckers seeing an opportunity to shoot viral video ran to the smoldering scene. But most people, fearing another bomb, pushed and shoved their way toward safety. In all the tumult, no one took any notice of a tall European man strolling by quite casually. Not the first responders or
the police. Not the gawkers or the survivors. No one focused on the man with a blue shirt tucked under his arm and a very satisfied smile on his face.

  PART ONE

  FLASH POINT

  1

  POTSDAM, THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

  DECEMBER 1989

  “Fool!” Nikolai Gorshkov slammed the telephone headset down with such brute force it cracked in two and sent plastic shards upward, grazing his face. “A fucking functionary!” the 37-year old, thin, blond KGB lieutenant colonel shouted. “Can’t be bothered. You have your orders,” he said, “so carry them out!”

  His aide, a younger lieutenant, was busy fulfilling those orders. But he nodded in complete agreement. Andre Miklos knew well enough not to interrupt his superior when he was on a rant. He motioned to other KGB agents who were in earshot not to say anything either.

  “Popov. Stanislav Popov,” Gorshkov whispered the name he had just scribbled on a sheet of paper. “Never forget that name, Andre. Never.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Miklos.

  The senior officer—a spy whose cover was as a translator—now crumpled the sheet and tossed it into the wood-burning stove with the other secret documents the members of the Potsdam KGB office were destroying.

  Stanislav Popov. Stanislav Popov. Miklos mouthed the words as he fed more files into the stove.

  “He’ll pay, Andre. Stanislav Popov will pay,” Gorshkov said under his breath. “He’ll pay dearly for abandoning us.”

  The smell of scorched papers made the men cough as they worked on the top floor of the block-wide, three-story KGB headquarters in Potsdam, which was known as KGB Town. Together they were destroying four years’ worth of work; a comprehensive operation titled “Luch.”

  The documents chronicled East Germans they’d tricked, coerced, and recruited—journalists, professors, scientists, and technicians who had plausible reason to travel abroad and steal Western technology and NATO secrets. There were boxes filled with personal files, surveillance reports, arrest orders, interrogation transcripts, and records of Westerners entrapped by the KGB, all destined for the burn. Those were the most important secrets to destroy. Going up in smoke, a cruel picture of human rights violations by Moscow, by the KGB, and by the men covering their tracks.

  “Luch” was a daring KGB operation designed to secure badly needed Western know-how and intellectual property, executed out of the Potsdam office. Even the senior officer had to admit the Soviet Bloc was depressingly behind the US and Europe. There was no more visible evidence than the fact that agents and politicians preferred to work on the West’s Commodore PCs rather than their own inferior, Russian-built computers.

  Now, each page they tossed into the stove represented painstaking work and the infrastructure that had supported it, all to benefit Russia, to rescue Russia. And now Russia was not there for them.

  “Disorganization! Idiots!” the senior officer murmured. “All of our time wasted.”

  He blamed Mikhail Gorbachev’s directives. He blamed the decades of incompetence.

  The lieutenant colonel went for another document box, this one near the window. Before lifting it, he split the dusty louvered shades to peer outside. Anti-Russian and anti-German Democratic Republic crowds milled about, more today than the day before, and getting angrier by the hour. Students in particular had been feeling more empowered over the past two months—but they were not alone. Protesters who wanted the Soviets out included the elderly who had suffered since the end of World War II and women whose husbands and sons had been rounded up by the GDR’s dreaded Ministry of State security, the Stasi, never to be seen again.

  The end had been coming for two months, since November 9. That’s when an East German government spokesman bungled an announcement. He misstated that the frontiers were to be opened immediately. Hearing the news, thousands of East Berliners rushed the heavily armed border crossings demanding to be let through. Throngs overwhelmed the beleaguered guards who waited for orders to come down. Shoot or don’t shoot? Those orders never came. By morning, the Berlin Wall, the very symbol of Soviet tyranny, had been breached and with it, Communist domination over East Berlin and throughout East Germany crumbled.

  Now it was Potsdam’s turn to feel the change sweeping across Germany. The KGB mandate to the staff in the massive Potsdam office: Destroy everything.

  Across the street from the KGB outpost was one of Potsdam’s main Stasi headquarters. The KGB case officer relied on Stasi contacts to obtain personal favors, including a very basic one—a telephone in his flat to run operatives outside of typical work hours and also cultivate and manipulate political relationships. The telephone provided that access. But he now feared that Stasi records on his calls could expose him. The smoke coming from the Stasi building chimneys gave him little consolation. So much to cover up, he thought. And no help from Moscow.

  Even though Potsdam was the GDR’s ninth-largest city, Moscow viewed it as an important post because it housed a KGB prison used to interrogate and execute Western spies and Soviet soldiers arrested for desertion, mutiny, and anti-Soviet activity. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lieutenant colonel asked for assistance and protection from the Kremlin, but none came. Then he demanded it from the military, and finally from his venerated KGB superiors. Destroy everything was the only response. And so, abandoned, they continued to follow their orders.

  Gorshkov closed the shade, but not before a rock came hurtling through the window. It barely missed him. His neck veins tightened, his cheeks turned bloodred, and his eyes flared with hatred. But the hatred wasn’t directed at the German protester. It was reserved for Stanislav Popov, the last in a long line of bureaucrats to deny his request. The hatred extended as a proxy for all of the Popovs in the chain of command.

  “Sir!” Miklos shouted.

  “I’m all right.”

  He felt the winter cold that flowed through the window and now stoked the fire. But burning hotter was the flame inside the KGB agent. He told his aide, “Stanislav Popov and everyone like him will pay, Andre. With their power, their money, and their lives.”

  It was a proclamation born from betrayal. It might take years, even decades, but KGB agent Nikolai Gorshkov vowed to collect on the political debts.

  2

  WASHINGTON, DC

  PRESENT DAY

  Once Reilly left the Senate hearing room, he phoned Alan Cannon, a friend, confidant, and, more importantly, the Kensington Royal Vice President of Global Safety and Security.

  “What do we have?” Reilly asked.

  “Mostly what CNN’s been reporting. Sketchy, but the uploaded cell phone video looks really bad.”

  Reilly double-timed down the marble staircase through the Russell Senate Office Building, out onto Constitution Avenue, and into a waiting town car.

  “Any word from our people?” he asked Cannon.

  “No.” Cannon paused and lowered his voice. “We’re trying everyone. Circuits are busy.”

  “Damn it,” Reilly said. “Hold for a sec, Brenda’s calling in from Chicago.”

  “Hi,” he said to his assistant, Brenda Sheldon.

  “See my text?” she began. “There’s been—”

  “I know. Haven’t read anything yet, but I’m on with Cannon, getting up to speed. I’ll need—”

  “Flights. Our travel agent is already working on it. I’ll send you the options.”

  “Hitting the office here first, but see what’s available to Chicago this afternoon.”

  Reilly ended the call with Sheldon and returned to Alan Cannon.

  “Okay, from the top,” Reilly instructed as the car made its way toward the KR Washington offices on K Street.

  “Whole front is blown out,” Cannon reported. “Truck bomb. Other detonations inside. Still burning. Damage extends well into the lobby. Same in the back of the house. I’m watching a live helicopter feed on CNN. Can’t tell much more. Fire trucks have arrived, but you know the procedure. Another bomb could be set to explo
de to knock out the first responders. An anchor is trying his best to describe the footage, but they need a translator for the Japanese coverage. But there’s no question. It’s ours.”

  “Any contact with the GM or security?” Reilly asked.

  “Just their voice mail. Nobody’s picking up,” Cannon replied.

  “What about Matsuhito at the KR Suites across town?”

  “Good idea.”

  “Have him go over and keep him on the phone the whole time. In the meantime, I’ll call Chicago and get our crisis team together. Should be back at the office in ten.”

  Reilly’s call to Kensington Royal headquarters triggered the assembly of the crisis team. It included senior management, heads of legal, public relations, and HR, and alerts to all the regional executives. This was practiced procedure that now seemed lacking in an actual attack.

  The ten minutes back to the office Reilly estimated turned into twenty-five. DC traffic was snarled by a presidential motorcade. He phoned Brenda Sheldon.

  “I’ve cleared everything on your calendar and confirmed you out of Reagan on a 2:20 p.m.,” she said. “PR is dodging calls from the news. They want to send crews over to your office in DC or here.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “That’s what June said, too, but you might see cameras here anyway.”

  June Wilson, Kensington Royal’s public relations veep, would manage them. Reilly had more important worries.

  For the rest of the ride, he ran through the crisis agenda. Foremost on his mind: the lives of his staff and guests.

  Reilly raced into the office building that KR shared with Washington lobbyists, lawyers, marketing and PR agencies, and a Korean broadcaster. He waved at security, used his ID card to activate the elevator, and rose to the 18th floor.