Tsar: A Thriller (Alex Hawke)

by Ted Bell

  “Unless you stop him.”

  “Unless you stop him, Lord Hawke. I can never be seen as having anything to do with this, this…whatever you intend to do, for obvious reasons. I believe the current American expression is plausible deniability. I intend to have very plausible deniability, I assure you. Excruciatingly plausible.”

  Hawke glanced at Halter, wondering how much he already knew of all this. Had Stefanovich Halter traveled all the way to Bermuda to take Hawke’s measure for Kuragin? It was surely possible they’d been planning a role for him even then. But Halter was giving nothing away. Men who’d spent their lives playing both sides of the scrimmage line were good at that kind of thing, else they paid in blood.

  “I think perhaps we understand each other, general,” Hawke said, making his decision even as he said the words, raising his glass. Putin was far from perfect, but he was vastly preferable to the vainglorious psychopath who represented the status quo.

  The pawn now saw the whole board as if from above and found he was more than willing to make the next move.

  “To world peace,” Kuragin said, raising his own glass.

  “To world peace,” the other two echoed, and then all three of them downed their drinks in a single draught.

  “General,” Hawke said, glancing at his watch, “tell me more about your lovely bracelet and the object attached to it.”

  “Certainly,” Kuragin said, pushing the detonator closer to Hawke. “What do you wish to know?”

  “How does it work, for starters?” Hawke asked, picking it up and turning it over in his hands. He eyed the detonator carefully, contemplating the enormous power of it. It was simply a smaller version of the brain-shaped Zeta computer but without the brain-stem stalk to support it. Polished to a mirror finish. Quite heavy, with a hairline crack around the exterior, where it opened.

  “The two extant detonators, called Beta machines, are connected by Bluetooth and other sophisticated wireless servers to every Zeta machine on the planet. I can easily program this Beta to blow up a single Zeta or, say, a hundred million of them. Individually or simultaneously. Only at the Tsar’s command, of course.”

  “You actually can blow up the whole world with this thing,” Hawke said, eyeing Halter again. “Right here. Right now.”

  “Basically, yes, I can, but I won’t. I am not insane. Not yet, anyway. The Tsar, on the other hand, would be perfectly happy to do so if someone on the other side either miscalculates or underestimates and gets in his way.”

  “Amazing,” Hawke said, placing the Beta machine carefully on the table. He took the carafe from where it stood in front of Kuragin, poured himself a fresh drink, and looked at the two men with something akin to admiration.

  Hawke said, “You don’t stockpile bombs or spend billions on reactors, delivery systems, nuclear subs, ICBMs. No, you distribute your bombs among your enemies! Better yet, you make a fortune by selling your enemies the seeds of their own destruction. Millions of them over a period of years. Such a simple, ingenious way to gather the fate of the world into one’s own hands.”

  “Thank you,” General Kuragin said.

  “This was your idea?” Hawke said, astonished. He’d naturally assumed the mad genius had been Ivan Korsakov.

  “Yes, I’m to blame for this madness, I’m afraid. The military strategy of seeding the bombs, at any rate. Korsakov was the scientific genius behind designing and creating the actual Zeta machine. My grievous error was in letting my military strategy for Russian dominance fall into the wrong hands.”

  “The Tsar’s.”

  “Of course. I should have seen this coming. I did not. Now, I will pay for my mistake and correct it at a single stroke.”

  “Still, the Zeta-network idea is brilliant in its simplicity,” Hawke said. “I’ll give you that much.”

  “Simplicity is a cornerstone of genius. Tell me, Lord Hawke, have you ever heard anyone exclaim, ‘I love this idea. It’s so damn complicated!’”

  Hawke smiled. Here he was, sharing a bottle with a man who’d hatched an evil scheme for world domination, and he found he rather liked him.

  “General,” Halter said, “you were telling me earlier that each of the two Beta detonators also contains Hexagon explosives, correct? Like the explosives inside the Zeta computers.”

  “Yes, but each Beta is packed with twice the explosive power. This one can explode the one in the Tsar’s possession, and vice versa.”

  “Why?” Hawke asked.

  “In case one or the other ever fell into the wrong hands, of course. The Tsar wanted to be able to eliminate that person instantly. He’s not comfortable sharing such power.”

  “Except with you.”

  Kuragin nodded his head, “Except with me, the only man on earth he trusts.”

  Hawke ignored the implicit irony in this and said, “You’re saying you could use it now, to kill the Tsar?”

  “I could. There is a code, known only to me. I enter it, arm this machine, press Detonate, and it will instantly explode the other Beta. If the Tsar is anywhere within, say, a radius of five hundred yards, he dies. But I never murder people, Lord Hawke. I have people murdered. It’s why I’m still alive.”

  “The Tsar presumably has the Beta with him at all times?” Hawke asked.

  “Of course. His nuclear football. Chained to the wrist of his bodyguard, named Kuba, a highly trained assassin who doubles as his driver. Kuba is never more than a few hundred yards away from his lord and master.”

  Kuragin pulled a pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket, extracted one, and lit it with a paper match. The same brand Putin smoked, Hawke noticed, Sobranie Black Russians from the Ukraine.

  Hawke pushed his chair back from the table and smiled at the general.

  “General Kuragin, when was the last time you checked your account in Geneva?”

  “I don’t really know. Some months ago, I suppose.”

  “And what was the balance at the time?”

  “Five million, I believe. American dollars.”

  Hawke pulled his sat phone from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table in front of the Russian.

  “You might want to give your Swiss bankers a call, general. Just to confirm your current balance. According to Dr. Halter, it should now be twenty-five million.”

  “Twenty million dollars to save the whole world? It hardly seems enough,” Kuragin said, gazing at them from beneath his heavily lidded eyes.

  “Shall we say thirty million?”

  “Say it and find out.”

  “Thirty million.”

  “Not enough.”

  “All right. We are prepared to pay you forty million dollars for that machine, General Kuragin. And the code that goes with it, of course. Effective immediately. Dr. Halter will call the bank in Geneva with wiring instructions for an additional twenty million dollars.”

  “Can you say fifty?”

  Hawke glanced at Halter, who nodded his head. Stefan had held the sat phone to his ear, speaking French to an anonymous banker in Geneva as the negotiation progressed.

  “Fifty million dollars,” Hawke said. “Final offer.”

  “I accept.”

  Halter spoke a few more words into the phone, handed it to Kuragin, and said, “This gentleman will confirm that an additional thirty million dollars has been electronically placed in your account, general.”

  “This is Kuragin. My account number is 4413789-A. May I have my balance, please? I see. Well, thank you very much. Au revoir, monsieur, et merci.”

  He handed the phone back to Halter and pulled a gold pen from inside his uniform jacket.

  “Here, I’ll write the code down for you inside this matchbook cover. Now, I must ask you both to leave the room. But first, please bring me some clean towels and a large bowl of ice. Also, that meat cleaver hanging by the stove, if you’d be so kind. It looks reasonably sharp.”

  Hawke and Halter looked at each other, stunned, as the Cambridge don pocketed the matchbook with the
detonator code printed inside.

  “Surely you’re not planning to do anything foolish, general.”

  “On the contrary. If it appears in any way that I have given up this damn thing voluntarily, I won’t last five minutes. Every KGB agent in the world will be lining up to assassinate me.”

  “Wait,” Hawke said. “I’m sure we can get that damn bracelet off with a hacksaw. We’ll think of some way to make it look as if you were abducted, and then—”

  “No. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’ve been drinking vodka all day in anticipation of what’s coming, and I’m damn well ready to do it. It is the only way for me to survive this, I promise you. Even the most cynical Russian would never believe a man capable of doing such a thing to himself!” He laughed at his own notion and filled his glass to the brim.

  “You’ll have to explain giving up the code, general,” Hawke said.

  “A moment of weakness? A butcher has a meat cleaver poised above your left hand, and he asks you for a number. Few among us could resist the temptation to give it to him, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Hawke and Dr. Halter rose from the table and brought him the items he’d requested. Hawke couldn’t resist running his index finger along the edge of the heavy cleaver’s blade. Sharp as a razor, it instantly produced a thin line of bright red blood on the pad of his fingertip.

  “Please leave me alone until it’s over and done,” Kuragin said. “When you return, you can bind me to this table in a convincing fashion. There is a length of heavy rope beneath my chair. Then call the emergency medical ambulance. And then you must leave at once. Understood? And never tell a living soul what has happened here. Never.”

  “Yes,” Hawke said, holding the swinging kitchen door open for Dr. Halter. “We understand perfectly.”

  The two men walked out into the adjacent living room and sat in the two wooden chairs facing the fire. Neither spoke for a few long minutes.

  “He’s finishing the vodka,” Hawke finally said, gazing into the flames, “then he’ll do it.”

  “Do it? You don’t actually think he’ll go through with this insanity, do you?” Halter said, an incredulous look in his eyes. “No one has that kind of courage. No one.”

  “We shall soon see, won’t we?”

  A moment later, a horrendous thunk was followed by a howl of animal agony that pierced Hawke’s soul. He leaped from his chair and raced into the kitchen.

  Kuragin had done it.

  Bright red blood spattered the white stucco wall beside the kitchen table. The bloody left hand, still twitching, was completely severed from the forearm by the blade of the meat cleaver, now buried at least an inch deep into the wooden table. The general had pitched forward in his chair when he passed out, his forehead resting on the table. He wasn’t making a sound. Shock had already set in, and the man was clearly unconscious, blood spurting wildly from the grievous wound at the end of his arm.

  Hawke quickly wrapped the man’s bloody stump in a tightly wound towel and plunged it into the bowl of ice, while Halter collected the blood-spattered Beta detonator that had fallen to the floor. That done, Halter picked up the kitchen phone and rang for an ambulance, giving the address of the farmhouse, saying only that a man had been found grievously injured and was losing a lot of blood. A doctor should come as quickly as humanly possible. He hung up without giving his name.

  “WHAT TIME IS the Tsar accepting his award tonight?” Hawke asked, as they carefully lifted the general’s body and placed him faceup on the table. Hawke used the heavy hemp rope the general had placed beneath his chair to bind the man in a position required for an amputation. It looked real enough, he decided, stepping back to inspect his efforts. As if a man had been bound and relieved of his hand with a meat cleaver. It might work.

  “The banquet is at seven, I believe,” Halter said. “Why?”

  “I plan to be there,” Hawke said. “I want to make sure his Imperial Majesty, the new Tsar of all Russia, gets the rousing welcome he so richly deserves.”

  “Alex, there’s something you should know right now. Korsakov is threatening to destroy an unspecified Western city with a population of one million if the NATO troops just deployed in Eastern Europe are not pulled back from the borders. He phoned the White House and gave President McAtee twenty-four hours to demonstrate his willingness to back off whilst he regained his lost territories.”

  “When was this?”

  “Sixteen hours ago.”

  “So, we’ve got to move very quickly.”

  “I’d say that’s an understatement of a huge order of magnitude.”

  “Get into the bloody car, then, man! You’ve got the code? The matchbook?”

  “Yes. In my waistcoat pocket.”

  “A bunch of random numbers, from the look of it. Mean anything to you, professor?” Hawke turned the key, praying the damn car would turn over. Now that the sun had dropped behind the forest, the temperature had plummeted. The highway back to Stockholm would be treacherous.

  “One-seven-ought-seven-one-nine-one-eight. Seventeen July, nineteen hundred and eighteen. The exact date of the night Commandant Yurokovsky and his Chekists herded the Romanovs down into the cellar of the house in Ekaterinberg and murdered Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress Katherine, the heir, their four daughters, and the servants.”

  “Why would Korsakov choose that date, do you suppose?” Hawke asked. The motor caught on the second try, and he grabbed first gear, racing out of the farmhouse yard, the old Saab whining in its traces.

  “It was the last night of the Tsars, Alex. Perhaps he fancies himself as the dawn of a new era, wouldn’t you suppose?”

  “Yeah, I suppose he does,” Hawke said, accelerating up the snowy lane, careening once more off the snowbanks lining the road. He drove with ferocity. But in his mind was a perfectly composed picture of his beautiful Anastasia when last he’d seen her. They’d not spoken in days. Tonight, she would be with her father in Stockholm as he accepted his Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden. Somehow, he’d find her. She’d invited him, after all.

  Sooner or, he hoped, later, the Tsar would learn that the second detonator had been forcibly taken from Kuragin and fallen into enemy hands. When he did, Hawke knew Korsakov would instantly trigger the thing and detonate it, not caring which enemy had it or where they were.

  Which made the timing of everything to come a bit more interesting. He and his new friend Dr. Halter were literally babysitting a live bomb.

  Someone would be first to push the button. And someone else would be first to die.

  Hawke, his mind racing, knew he’d have to find some way to take the Tsar out when he was alone, or at least get him out in the open. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, accept any collateral damage. He could not conscience the death of innocents.

  Such as the woman he loved.

  Or, and here his heart paused a beat, their unborn child.

  65

  STOCKHOLM

  The Nobel Prize banquet ceremony is held each year at the Stadshuset in Stockholm. Even a monarch’s coronation cannot rival the Nobel celebration in terms of pure grandeur and epic scale. The massive Stadshuset complex, with its three-hundred-fifty-foot tower at one corner, is built in the Swedish Romantic style. It stands on the banks of the Riddarfjarden, a freshwater lake in the heart of Stockholm. Tonight, Sweden’s beautiful State House was ablaze with light.

  Alex Hawke, shivering as he climbed out of the Saab’s passenger seat, thought it looked like a great medieval fortress, but Professor Halter had informed him that it was built in 1923.

  “Are you sure you’re not going to freeze to death out here?” he asked the professor. Halter would remain in the car while Hawke went inside. Halter was dressed for Russian winter, wearing an ushanka, the Russian trapper’s fur cap with ear flaps, and a full-length bearskin coat. Sitting behind the wheel, his brow furrowed in concentration, he resembled some great bear, fiddling with the silvery Beta detonator on his lap, making sure he’d know how to use
it when the time came.

  “I’ll be fine. But try to hurry this up, will you?” he said. “It is frightfully cold, and we’re rapidly running out of time. He intends to destroy the first city on his agenda in a little less than two hours.”

  “I’ll be twenty minutes,” Hawke said, glancing at his watch. “Thirty max. Keep your eye on that entry door, and please keep the engine running. When he comes out, he will likely be in a hurry. You see his car and driver over there, the liveried chap standing beside the heavily armored Maybach? He’ll head for that, straightaway.”

  “How the hell do you know that’s his car?”

  “I’m a British spy, professor. Besides, it’s got Russian plates. Moscow. Now, try to stay awake. Maybe turn the heat down.”

  “What heat?”

  Hawke smiled, shut the passenger door, and raced across the snowy car park to join the party inside. He felt his mobile vibrating in his trouser pocket. Anastasia? He’d rung her cell phone from his room while he was shaving; perhaps she was returning the call. No time to find out now. He’d just have to call her later. He’d not spoken to her since they’d kissed good-bye when he boarded the Navy fighter at Ramstein. But since then, he’d been maintaining a fairly active schedule. With any luck, he’d see her tonight. But whether or not they’d have time alone, he had no idea.

  He knew he had roughly two hours to get the Tsar out into the open, in the countryside, preferably, somewhere where he could take him out without endangering anyone else. Two hours was enough time, perhaps, but there was a slight complication. He had no idea how he was going to accomplish this objective. Ah, well, he’d think of something.

  First things first, he thought, showing his beautifully engraved invitation to the security chaps at the entrance. He’d need to smoke Korsakov out of the massive crowd inside the banquet hall. Find a way to force him outside in the open. And do it rather quickly. That would be the trick.

  The Nobel guest list included some 1,300 dignitaries from around the world. This closely guarded A List included the Nobel laureates and their families, their majesties the king and queen of Sweden, and the entire royal family, plus various European heads of state and a smattering of celebrities and bigwigs. The dinner was always held in a magnificent space called the Blue Hall, and Hawke hurried there now, the inkling of a workable idea just forming in his mind.