by Ted Bell
When he looked again, the count was once more the picture of beneficent charm, so convincing that Alex wondered if he only imagined what he’d seen.
“Yes, yes, of course,” the count said, “First, please say hello to Alex Hawke, Vladimir. Alex, this is my old comrade, Vladimir Rostov.”
“Good evening,” the Russian said, badly slurring his words and not offering his hand.
“Good evening,” Hawke said, standing aside so that the man might enter Korsakov’s study. He recognized him now, the current president of the Russian Federation.
Once President Rostov was safely inside, the count quickly closed the door, and Alex was left standing alone in the great vaulted hallway. There was a good deal of shouting in Russian, and he desperately wished Ambrose were at his side translating. He heard the word Amerikanski a number of times, from both men, and so at least the subject matter of their violent disagreement was known.
He decided to linger a moment, see if he could pick up anything interesting. A moment later, he heard the inebriated Russian president shout something in English. “The Americans will annihilate us for this insanity!”
For what insanity? Hawke wondered, but the shouting match had quickly reverted to Russian. What the hell had the Russians done now?
He looked down at his hand and saw a tumbler of good black rum. That’s a bloody waste, he said half aloud, quaffing it at one draught. The count and the president seemed to have moved deeper into the study, their voices no longer audible through the door. He looked left, then right. He realized he hadn’t the faintest notion how to get through this architectural wonderland to his bloody room.
To the right, he thought, lay the Great Hall, where he’d met the twins. He’d start there, if he could find it, and do a little exploring on his way to bed and Anastasia. Snooping, really, but then, he was a natural-born spy and couldn’t help himself. He had noticed a very large hangar out beyond the stables, a corrugated-aluminum structure that looked large enough to accommodate the real Hindenburg.
If this bloody snowstorm would just ease up a bit, and if he could find himself a warm fur coat and a pair of size-twelve Wellies in a mudroom somewhere, he thought he just might go out and poke around a bit.
He looked at his watch. No, he had more important things to do than snoop about the count’s hangar. With the time difference, he could still make a few calls via his sat phone. Yes, it was still early enough in London to catch C before he went to bed. He thought C would find the confrontation between Korsakov and an angry Rostov most interesting. He’d call Ambrose in Bermuda as well, bring him up to speed on recent developments.
Red Banner had a lot to talk about.
Harry Brock was waiting for him in Moscow, staying at the Hotel Metropol under an assumed name. Simon Weatherstone, as Harry’s passport now described him, was holding secret meetings around Moscow with the small cadre of newly recruited agents of Red Banner. Hawke decided he’d call Harry’s room at the Metropol first thing in the morning, rather than wake him in the middle of the night. Harry and his new Red Banner resources might come in handy in ferreting out the source of Rostov’s anger.
Insanity? American anger? What could that mean?
45
Count Ivan Korsakov stared in angry disbelief at the raving lunatic standing before his fireplace, pounding his fist on the wooden mantel, sending a few precious silver-framed family photographs crashing to the floor. He’d known Vladimir Rostov for many, many years and had never seen him so enraged. Such fury made his drunkenness almost incidental, comical, were it not so late in the evening and so much to be done by morning.
He glared at the Russian president, now stomping on broken glass.
“The Americans will annihilate us for this insanity!”
“Calm down, Volodya. Enough,” the count said, reverting to Russian. He listened in hostile silence to this calumny, his anger building.
“Enough? Have you lost your fucking mind?” Rostov bellowed, looking wildly around the room, as if answers to his shouted questions might be hiding in dark corners or floating up near the ceiling. His eyes were rolling around in his head like marbles.
“Now, you listen to me,” Korsakov said, as calmly as he could. “You are a guest in this house. I won’t be addressed in this manner. Sit down in that chair, and shut up until you can compose yourself.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you? Answer me! This leads to annihilation, I tell you! Annihilation!”
Korsakov, furious, came out of his chair, grabbed the irate man by his shoulders, shook him violently, and then wrestled him down onto a large leather sofa. He held him there, his hands around his throat, squeezing, until Rostov’s arms and legs stopped flailing.
The president lay back against the cushions, red-faced and breathing heavily, but he was no longer shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Are you quite finished with this outrageous behavior?” Korsakov snarled, removing his hands from the president’s reddened throat. He’d had countless men shot, poisoned, beheaded, and even impaled. But he had never killed a man with his bare hands before, and he could see the attraction.
“I asked you, are you finished?”
“Yes, yes. Just leave me alone for a moment.”
The count crossed the room and picked up the receiver of a telephone sitting on his desk. He whispered a few words into the mouthpiece and hung up. He looked angrily at the broken picture frames and shattered glass on the stone hearth floor, then collapsed into the same fireside chair where he’d been sitting earlier. After a few moments’ contemplation, he leaned forward with his hands on his knees and stared at the drunken president until he had his full attention.
“Now, in a slow, calm voice, I want you to tell me what in God’s name you are so incensed about. If you raise your voice, even slightly, I shall have the servants throw you out in the snow. Do we understand each other?”
“Damn it to hell,” Rostov said, sitting up and shakily pouring himself a drink from the decanter on the table. “Why wasn’t I informed of this decision? I’m still running this country, unless I missed a meeting.”
“I make a lot of decisions in a day. Which one are we speaking of?”
“What decision? Your decision to blow up an entire American town! Wipe it off the face of the fucking map! You know they will trace this back to us. Twenty-four hours. Maybe less. And then what? War? War with America? You know as well as I the number of American nuclear submarines even now prowling the Black Sea.”
“There will be no war with America, Volodya, I assure you.”
“No? You know the Americans have back-channeled the Syrians, the Iranians, and others. Told them that if any act of terror on American soil can be traced back to Damascus or Tehran, the capitals of those countries will cease to exist within twenty-four hours. You know that as well as I!”
“Syria and Iran are not Russia.”
“Thanks be to God. Jesus. We all want to go against the Americans. Every one of us. And we will. But, not now, Ivan. We’re not ready, damn it, we’re not even close!”
“I think we are ready. Destiny is an impatient mistress.”
“You don’t think repositioning our troops to the Baltic and East European borders is provocation enough? You don’t think we have already pushed the White House to the limit? Already they are making noises at the Security Council. You think the UN, pitiful and pathetic as it may be, will just look the other way? Or NATO? Really, it all defies belief. The Duma will have your head for this one, Ivan. That I can promise.”
“Or it may be that I will have the Duma’s heads, Volodya.”
Rostov stared at him in disbelief. This form of treachery far exceeded anything he’d thought possible. Even that lunatic Stalin had shown restraint when it came to—
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. A uniformed man strode through, shut the door, and locked it.
“Volodya, calm down. Look, here is your old friend General Kuragin, come to join our
little party. Nikolai, bring my special carafe of vodka from the drinks table, and join us, won’t you?”
General Nikolai Kuragin, a longtime aide to Rostov, had for years been secretly the head of Korsakov’s own private army. He did as he was told and moved to the drinks table. A skeletal man who looked more Teutonic than Russian in his sharply tailored black uniform, he was utterly ruthless. There was a large black leather case in his right hand, attached to his wrist by a stainless-steel chain and bracelet.
Inside the general’s black case was an electronic device, one of only two in existence, which carried the codes to initiate detonation of every single Zeta bomb on the planet. The one he carried was to be used only as a backup to the primary, that one always in the possession of Korsakov himself. Kuragin knew the codes as well. They were permanently inscribed in the folds of his brain. He’d never even written them down.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Kuragin said to Rostov, with a sharp nod of the head.
Rostov glared at him. “You’re part of this, aren’t you, Nikolai? You lying bastard. All these years, all I’ve done for you. You’ve pretended to be my friend and ally. And now you betray me for this perverted megalomaniac?”
“Watch your tongue,” Kuragin barked at him, and Rostov sank even deeper into the cushions. It was over now, he knew. All was lost. All.
Korsakov looked at Kuragin, a wry smile playing about his lips. “The president thinks we may have gone a bit over the line destroying the American city, Nikolai.”
“Really? Why does he think that?”
“He’s afraid of the American reaction. NATO. And the UN.”
“He’s afraid of shadows,” Nikolai said. “Always has been.”
“He needs courage, perhaps. Pour him another drink. From my carafe.”
Kuragin took Rostov’s glass from his hand and filled it from the silver carafe emblazoned with the Korsakov coat of arms. Handing him the glass, he said, “Drink.”
Rostov needed little encouragement at this point. He swallowed the contents in one gulp, then held out the crystal tumbler for a refill.
“Another?” Kuragin said, his eyes on Count Korsakov.
“Coals to Newcastle. Why not, Nikolai?”
His glass full once more, Rostov tilted it back, swallowed, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He glared at the two men who’d betrayed him.
“And tonight this fucking fox in the henhouse?” he managed to croak.
“Fox?” Korsakov asked the president. “Henhouse?”
“This Englishman you invite into your home! Who is he? Do you even know? He could well be a spy.”
“Oh, we know this fox quite well, do we not, Nikolai? We’ve had this particular fox in our sights for a very, very long time. Here. Have another drink, Volodya.”
President Rostov staggered to his feet, stood for a moment, then collapsed back into the deep leather cushions.
“You two want war with America, do you?” he said. “Ha! You know her submarines encircle us, like wolves underwater. With missiles aimed straight at our mothers’ hearts. You provoke whom you should appease, comrades. At least, until…until…”
He made a harsh choking sound and could not continue. His head fell back, and he stared at his two tormentors, glassy-eyed. The empty glass in his hand fell to the floor, smashing to bits on the stone.
“Are you all right?” Korsakov asked, looking at him carefully.
“Agh. A horrible headache. I feel…”
“Volodya. My dear old friend and comrade. I’m afraid it’s time you took your leave from this mortal coil,” Korsakov said, crossing his legs at the knee. “Your passing is premature, I’ll grant you. I was going to bid you farewell in the morning when the helicopter arrived to ferry you back to the Kremlin. But now—”
“Tomorrow?” the man croaked.
“Yes. A doomed flight. Tragic. A crash in the Urals. A state tragedy. A world tragedy. But my dear Volodya, such things happen. Life goes on.”
“Doomed?”
“You are dying, old friend. Poisoned. Not slowly and painfully like our erstwhile friend Litvinenko in London some years ago. This method shouldn’t take long. Perhaps, what do you think, Nikolai? Twenty minutes?”
“Cyanide prevents the body’s cells from using oxygen so death should arrive in short order.”
“Time enough, then, to show him the future?”
“The future belongs to us, sir. We have more than enough to share.” Kuragin smiled.
“Ivan?” the dying Rostov repeated, his eyelids fluttering. “Are you there?”
“Volodya, can you still hear me? You see the case General Kuragin carries? Do you wonder at it? Our very own nuclear football, as the Americans would have it. I call it the Beta machine, or simply the Black Box.”
“Yes, Ivan, I see it,” Rostov said weakly, peering at the case Kuragin carried.
“You’ve been drinking cyanide, Volodya. Call me old-fashioned, but sophisticated nuclear poisons like polonium I find unnecessarily messy. Unless one wants to send a message. There is no message here tonight, Volodya. Only the future burying the past.”
“The Americans, I tell you.” Rostov gasped. “Will annihilate us.”
“Let me assuage you in your final moments. Nikolai, open your case. Show it to our dying friend.”
“Yes, sir,” Nikolai Kuragin said. He detached the leather case from his wrist and placed it on the low table, where Rostov could see its contents. When he entered a code into the keypad, the case popped open, and then the lid rose automatically. Inside the lid was a vivid CRT screen displaying a real-time satellite map of the world in three dimensions. Pinpoints of light, hundreds of them, thousands, millions, flashed on every continent.
“These lights represent countless Zeta machines, each broadcasting its precise GPS location and a unique identification number,” Korsakov said. “As you can see, they are everywhere on earth. Numberless millions of them, in every city, town, village. And inside each of them is eight ounces of Hexagon, Volodya, a powerful bomb waiting for my detonation signal.”
“Bombs everywhere,” Rostov mumbled.
“Everywhere on the planet. Many are controlled by my agents in the field on a strictly limited, as-needed basis. But on a worldwide basis, the millions are controlled by this single unit. Here, let me zoom in on a city. Which one? Paris? Honolulu? Bombay? No. L.A.”
Korsakov manipulated the controls to bring the city of Los Angeles forward to full screen. It was a solid mass of tiny blinking lights.
“This number here in the corner of the screen represents the number of Zeta machines within the Los Angeles city limits. As you can see, there are exactly three-point-four million units in this one city alone. Should I choose to, now, I could detonate any one of them in an instant. Or, more dramatically, every one of them in the same instant.”
Nikolai Kuragin laughed. “We could, at this very moment, do exactly to L.A. what we did to Salina.”
“Or London, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, or Beijing,” Korsakov said, scrolling rapidly through those cities, their skyline images coming up on the screen.
“You’re insane,” Rostov whispered, and they would be the last words he would utter in this earthly realm.
“Do you want me to remove him?” Nikolai asked, staring blankly at the corpse.
“Later. But have him incinerated tonight. And his remains placed aboard the helicopter as soon as it arrives in the morning. Along with his luggage, where I have already packed a Zeta. They’ll find his ashes and tiny shards of bones in the mountains with the burned-out wreckage.”
“Yes, sire.”
“Sire. I like the sound of that. So, Rostov is finally no concern of ours. Good. Now, tell me about the mood at the Duma. I plan to go before them tomorrow evening, as you know.”
“I don’t anticipate any problems with your succession to president. In fact, I anticipate unanimous support. Rostov is now gone; it’s the obvious thing to do. You’re revered throughout the co
untry. Most of the embittered Communists, members of the Other Russia, and other parties who would be opposed have already had their minds changed with offers of money, property, or positions in your new government. Those who refused, or balked, have already gone far away.”
“Never far enough. Dispose of them.”
“It will be done.”
“And how is our old friend Putin these days? Enjoying his forced retirement to Energetika Prison?”
“Glowing with enthusiasm, I should say.” Nikolai laughed. “Still, I wonder why you don’t simply introduce him to the tree with no limbs.”
“Impale him? No, too quick an exit. I want him to sit in that cell and rot slowly, lose his hair, his teeth, and finally, when he’s fried from within, then he can wither and die and never trouble us again.”
46
SALINA, KANSAS
Stoke flew commercial from Miami to Topeka, connecting through Charlotte. There was a young FBI guy waiting at the end of the jetway when he landed at Topeka airport. Navy-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, buzz-cut sandy-colored hair. Spit-shined black lace-up shoes. Stoke liked him on sight. He had a solid Midwestern smile, and even better, he looked as if he could have made the Olympic wrestling team if he hadn’t chosen law enforcement. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.
“Stokely Jones?” the kid said, extending his hand.
“Yep,” Stoke said, giving him five of the best.
“Special Agent John Henry Flood, sir,” he said, flashing his badge. “I’ve got a chopper waiting right here at the airport to take us up to what used to be Salina.”