by Mitch Silver
As his bodyguards came to the aid of the hobbled Russian president at the foot of the rostrum, the image behind them changed into one from halfway down the Refuge’s hill. Now, even the individual oilrigs were clearly visible. The woman’s voice, accustomed to projecting to the far reaches of lecture halls, continued. “This is the very spot where our American guest has walked and spoken with the workers. And seen the oil, oceans of it, that even now—at the start of the working day over there—is pouring up out of the ground.”
The American president on the podium didn’t know Russian, but when he heard the word Amerikanski, he decided to smile.
Now the visual everyone was watching changed again, and what had been oilrigs and production buildings became wooden props and circus tents. Another, louder gasp arose from the crowd. The man the Secret Service called Mogul turned from the scene and, looking down at his injured Russian confederate, shot him his most tight-lipped, anger-unmanaged grin.
Out in the Square, the cameramen were shooting whatever they could: now the giant images on the wall, now the President, now the crowd.
Trina, kneeling in the shadows well beyond the truck, was continuing her vigorous ministrations over the already-dry trousers of Alexei, who seemed lost in the moment. Two other men, though, were in motion; one lanky, one massive, both determined. Lara was perfectly placed to see them leave the anonymity of the crowd and hurry toward the truck.
Chapter 69
The laughter started somewhere in the back of Red Square, a little tittering at first. It spread through the crowd with each successive image from Lev’s camera of faked canvas buildings and painted wooden props made to look like rigs.
The picture of the lone telephone pole holding up the largest tent—with the words ALASKA POWER AND TELEPHONE COMPANY clearly stenciled in yellow paint across the barrel of the pole—drew a guffaw among those who could read English. The laughing seemed to die down for a bit while the Anglophones translated the words for their Russian-only neighbors, then it burst out again, rebounding off the buildings surrounding the Square, amplifying it.
A line of nondescript oil tankers flying American flags came on next. A man on the video’s soundtrack was saying, “There, you can just barely see it, the one with the orange insignia: The Atlantic Pioneer. If you look carefully, you can see where they painted over the Russian name.”
Another man asked him, “Kak dolgo vy budete nasosnoĭneftʹ?” For some reason, the question of “how long will you be pumping the oil?” set the crowd off again.
The two thugs had reached the door of the mobile production suite with their guns out. The big one, Suslov, peered around the side of the truck, looking for the kid. “Alexei, zip up and get over here!”
The young man pushed Katrina away and joined the others at the entrance to the truck. He took out the knife from his back pocket.
Lara saw everything. In a panic she called Viktor’s mobile. “Did you lock the door? Nikki’s goons are right outside!”
Too late. In a matter of seconds, there was no longer a door to lock. The crack it made coming off its hinges and crashing to the ground just added to the noise when several fireworks were set off at once. But then the enormous individual who’d accomplished the feat filled the open doorway for a moment before dropping the heavy door on the ground, leaving a rectangle of light where the entrance had been. A second, taller man moved in behind him, and then a shot rang out.
The sound finally caused the TV cameramen to swing their lights away from the rostrum toward the scene, where a third, younger man had something in his hand, something that glinted in the lights.
There were two more shots. Then the whole son et lumière suddenly went dead, and the panicked crowd began racing for the exits. These Russians needed no reminder of what insurgents from the North Caucasus had done, bombing the airport in 2011 and the Metro a year earlier; or the Chechens’ deadly hostage-taking at a Moscow theater, and the massacre at the Beslan school, before that.
By this time, the American’s Secret Service people had surrounded him and were trying to hustle him down the temporary viewing stand. Other statesmen were being protected by clumps of their own bodyguards, causing a twenty-leader pileup that resembled rush hour on the Outer Ring.
Inside the truck, Suslov had been momentarily off-balance when he’d ripped off the door, and his gun had gone clattering under the console. Chernuchin, scrambling in right behind, saw a military man over by the controls. Was that … Maltsev, from Intelligence? He delayed before lifting his gun to fire and Suslov, trying to get up, knocked his comrade sideways, making him miss.
Just then, Grigoriy Gerasimov returned with the program’s director and a borrowed set of now-useless keys. Before he could stop him, Pyotr Tamnov hurried up from behind and swung his clipboard with all his might, catching the big man above his right ear and knocking him back down to the floor, unconscious. Chernuchin, seeing what happened, whirled and took out the TV director with his second slug.
Viktor had his own gun in his hand by now. Army training had made him an expert shot, but now he hesitated, unwilling to risk hitting Gerasimov. Chernuchin, whirling back around, had no such qualms, and his third bullet was a through-and-through, hitting Viktor in the non-shooting arm. It kept going, shattering the mixer board controlling the light show and putting it, finally, out of action. Then the shooter took one in the gut himself—as the inquest would later show—from the wounded officer working security in the truck, identified as Major Vassily Bondarenko, Commander of the Sakhalin Island barracks, and he fell on his longtime comrade.
Two down, but not the third. Gerasimov was in the truck, trying to reach the wounded Army major. Before he could, the kid stepped out from behind a panel of machines and calmly stabbed him in the neck, sending him down behind the console. Which gave Viktor a clear shot at the boy, and he didn’t miss.
When the security guards reached the scene, they began administering first aid to the dying thugs and the Army major, not knowing good guy from bad. No one saw or heard the head of state broadcasting on the far side of the console as he lay bleeding out from his wound.
It was all over but the shouting. The screams from what was left of the crowd of fleeing people echoed off the bricks and cobblestones of Red Square. Lara desperately tried to get to Viktor and Grisha, but was among those being physically manhandled by a formed-up cordon of security people. The fireworks were still going off in the night sky above the darkened battlements of the Kremlin. So when she was shoved sideways by one of the guards, Lara was able to catch sight behind her of a man slowly, deliberately moving toward the risers from the rear of the Square.
Only now, with no one in charge and everyone jostling to get their own VIPs to the cars that were revving up behind the Square, had the American president made it down from his place of honor on the viewing stand. He’d caught one of his shoes in the corrugated metal planking of the bleachers as he was being frog-marched by his people, twisting his foot, and was now the last foreign leader to be led away, limping in obvious pain.
Had he been shot? The knot of American reporters on the trip had been gathered together below, hemming them in around the now-useless microphone as the First Lady, her press aides, and the Secret Service all tried to get through.
So no one could see what Lara saw: a well-built young man of twenty-five or so, with longish hair, holding a heavy leather book up in front of him.
Nikki!
The young man’s eyes were fixed on the politician in the middle of the maelstrom. His lips were moving, muttering something Lara was too far away to hear. As he was the only person actually walking toward the viewing stand in front of the Kremlin instead of running away, the TV cameramen who didn’t have a good angle on the truck now turned their lights and cameras and mikes on him.
In the TV truck, the monitors with the live feeds were still working. Weakened by the loss of blood and with no one to attend him, Gerasimov looked up and saw who it was on the screen. He tried to r
asp out, “Nikki, stop! No!!” but no one could hear him.
Nikki didn’t stop. He looked neither left nor right, but kept walking. The directional microphones from the camera positions were picking up his words now. “I don’t need a video, I don’t need a script! Here’s the proof, absolute proof, of the perfidy of the West! Of the so-called democrats, the ones with the blood of twenty-five million on their hands! More!”
And he was still coming on. “Throw out the foreigners! This is our country, made with our hands, with our blood. Nashi!! Ours!”
And then they saw yet one more gun.
Reporters and security people alike were tripping over each other and the maze of wires at the foot of the viewing stand to get away. Nikki raised his pistol. For a moment, the assassin had a clear shot at his target and, before anyone could stop him, he uttered the words “Russia for the Russians!” and fired, straight at the American’s heart.
Miraculously, the bullet bounced off the slender steel microphone stand. He aimed again. Lara, hurrying toward him but still twenty meters away to his left, knew she had one chance. “Nikki! Over here!”
When he turned to look at her, she stopped and aimed her uncapped laser pen, the one she used on the maps in class, directly into his eyes. With the red dot on its target she pressed the button, blinding him with three hundred megawatts of amplified light.
Afterward the judges, whose eventual verdict was insanity, were able to reconstruct from the din picked up by the microphones Nikki’s last words, even as he blindly emptied his gun toward the podium and injured three of the guards. “In the name of God, I defy you and your godless democracy and your Finns and your Armenians and your Tajiks and your Jews!”
Nearly simultaneously, automatic fire from several directions—no one could be certain later which of the bodyguards had fired first—mowed down the would-be assassin, who fell onto the cobblestones in front of millions of horrified TV viewers.
Chapter 70
Her mobile rang. It was the “Hunters’ Theme” from Peter and the Wolf. Grisha! By the time Lara could get to the truck, the wounded man behind the console had dropped his phone. Its clatter brought the medics, but by now there was little they could do.
Gerasimov smiled at Lara and, with a great effort, raised a hand up to touch her face. He seemed surprised to see his hand was covered in blood. “Larashka …”
She took his hand in both of hers. “Don’t try to talk.”
His words were little more than a hoarse whisper. “So much blood. Is Nikki all right?”
Behind her, Lara could hear someone clattering up the stairs of the truck. She bent closer to Grisha. His lips were moving and she tried to catch his words. “… if only I was … a better referee …”
The woman named Tatiana Ivanova Gerasimova tapped Lara on the shoulder. “Let me be with him. He’s all I have left.”
Lara, reluctantly, turned away. She understood something about loss.
When she joined him outside the truck, Viktor’s arm was done up expertly in a sling. She took his good hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed her back. There was an ambulance across the Square to take him to the hospital.
Together they walked across Red Square, coming to the place where Nikki’s body lay. His hair was fanned out behind him, and medics, no longer in a hurry, were unzipping a black body bag.
The book was lying there on the cobblestones. Lara picked it up. There was a 9mm hole shot completely through it, obliterating any wormhole that had once been there.
They started walking toward the ambulance again.
Viktor turned to Lara. “We still have twenty days left to our marriage. Can we use them to try again, Mrs. Maltsev?”
“I will if you will, Mr. Maltsev.”
Then husband and wife walked away together into the night.
Author’s Note
T he Bookworm is the second novel I’ve written that blends fact with fiction. Some people who read this manuscript before publication have wondered which is which. Here’s a sampler, starting with the Prologue.
Legend has it that Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who was born exactly 900 years before I was, dropped her gold wedding ring into the waters at the Belgian town of Orval. She prayed for its return and, at once, a trout rose to the surface with the precious ring in its mouth. Matilda exclaimed, “Truly this place is a Val d’Or!” and proceeded to establish a monastery in her Valley of Gold. Then the unfeeling French burned it down in June of 1793.
In 1935, Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe, or Ancestral Heritage Organization, based on the claims of the founder of the Theosophical Movement, ‘Madame’ Helena Blavatsky. She posited that humans had evolved through various stages, each of which had ended in floods. An elite priesthood had escaped from the lost continent of Atlantis and fled to the Himalayas, and their successors were the Aryans. Others, too, proposed these Aryans, or Nordics, were descended from godlike men and had once lived in the icy north. Go figure.
In 2005, Sergey Ivanovich Morozov, Governor of the Ulyanovsk region 800 kilometers east of Moscow, declared September 12th as Procreation Day and suggested giving couples time off from work to produce the next generation. The first Grand Prize went to Irina and Andrei Kartuzov, whose baby was born the following June on Russia Day. For their troubles (?) they received a UAZ-Patriot, a sport utility vehicle made, not coincidentally, in Ulyanovsk. Other contestants won video cameras, TVs, washing machines, and refrigerators.
What else? Garry Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties with a single goal: ousting Vladimir Putin from power. The Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but couldn’t get him on the ballot. Seven years later he published Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.
A month before he died, Noël Coward sat for a filmed interview in which he discussed his work as a spy for England during the war, training with his friend Ian Fleming in secret at Bletchley Park. “Celebrity was wonderful cover,” he said. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy.”
Nashi, an “anti-oligarchic-capitalist movement,” was founded by senior figures in the Russian Presidential administration. By late 2007, it had grown in size to some 120,000 members between the ages of 17 and 25. Western critics have compared its deliberately cultivated resemblance to the Hitler Youth as Putinjugend.
On August 2, 2007, a Project Arktika submersible dropped a titanium tube containing the Russian flag on the ocean floor under the North Pole in support of their territorial claims to the Arctic. The International Seabed Authority, established under the United Nation’s Law of the Sea, repeatedly has rejected the claims.
And yes, John F. Kennedy’s major at Harvard really was International Relations.
Finally, my parents had several floral bath salts in seed packets. When I was seven, I emptied all of them into my bath, and the house smelled of Lily of the Valley for a week.
I made up almost everything else.
Acknowledgments
First, I want to thank Martin Cruz Smith. I don’t know him, but his book Gorky Park is so wonderful, and wonderfully imagined, that he made me want to set a novel in Moscow, too.
Thanks also to the people at Pegasus Books. Publisher Claiborne Hancock and his team of (in alphabetical order) Charles Brock, cover designer; Jessica Case, publicity director; Bowen Dunnan, editorial assistant; Maria Fernandez, interior designer/typesetter; and Sabrina Plomitallo-González, art director, took my manuscript and brought it to the life I’d hoped for it.
Thanks as well to my family and friends who read the book, made useful suggestions, or simply suffered through the writing with me. My wife, Ellen Highsmith Silver, is, naturally, foremost among them.
Lastly, thanks to the late literary agent Wendy Weil, who saw enough in this book to take me on shortly before her untimely death.
ALSO BY MITCH SILVER
In Secre
t Service
THE BOOKWORM
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 Mitch Silver
First Pegasus Books edition February 2018
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-641-5
ISBN: 978-1-68177-708-5 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
www.pegasusbooks.us