The Whole Truth

by David Baldacci

  “That was your opening offer, I assumed. I now want to negotiate.”

  “You assumed incorrectly. The price is firm. If you don’t want it, there’re a lot of other people who do.”

  The Iranian took a step forward. His men did likewise. “You will negotiate.”

  Shaw tapped the contents of the suitcase. “This is a gamma bomb, not a set of knives, not a diamond for the missus. I’m not running a special, no two-for-ones tonight.”

  “And the reason we cannot simply take it from you now? For nothing?”

  The Tunisian must’ve been a mind reader because he already had his knife back out and his eyes were burning, no doubt with the thought of sticking the blade to the hilt in Shaw’s thick neck.

  “And kill you,” the Iranian finished, quite unnecessarily, for Shaw had already gotten the point.

  Shaw motioned to a slit on the side of the dirty bomb that resembled a DVD intake slot. “That’s the import drive for the accompanying software package that has the automatic detonation codes and generally makes this thing go boom and the radiation go sizzle. You try to do it without the software the only thing that gets fried is your ass.”

  “And where is this package?”

  “Nowhere near here, that’s for damn sure.”

  The Iranian slapped the suitcase. “So this is useless to me!”

  “As the term sheet clearly said,” Shaw began in a weary voice, “you get the hardware with fifty percent down and the software when the other half is received in the designated account.”

  “And I must simply trust you?” the Iranian said, a nasty undertone to his words.

  “Just like we have to trust you. We’ve been doing this a long time, and never had a disappointed customer yet. You know that or you wouldn’t be here.”

  The Iranian hesitated.

  Come on, you maggot. Sacrifice a little lost face in front of your boys to get the golden egg. You know you want it. Think about how many Americans you can zap with this shit.

  “I will have to call someone first.”

  Shaw said in an annoyed tone, “I thought you had the authority to act.”

  The Iranian shot nervous glances at his men, the embarrassment clear on his finely cut features. “One call,” he said quickly. He pulled out his phone.

  Shaw held up a hand. “Hold it! Interpol crashing our little party does not figure into my vacation plans.”

  “I won’t be on it long enough for anyone to trace.”

  “You’ve been watching too many Dirty Harry movies. That’s not healthy in our line of business.”

  “What are you talking about?” snapped the Iranian.

  “I know you guys are really into the ninth century and all, but you need to get with the twenty-first century if you want to stay off death row. They don’t need you yakking on a rotary dial phone for two days to trace you. They need exactly three seconds for a satellite to track the digital fingerprint, run a triangulation, isolate the cell towers, burn a signal mark to within ten feet, and deploy the strike team.” Shaw was speaking mostly crap but it sounded good. “Why do you think bin Laden lives in a cave and writes his orders down on frigging toilet paper?”

  The Iranian glanced at his phone as though it had just stung him. Shaw reached slowly in his pocket, mindful of the bloodthirsty Tunisian, and withdrew his own cell phone, which he tossed to the terrorist leader.

  “State-of-the-art scrambler and signal diffuser. That sucker even has photon light burst encoding capability, so not even a quantum computer, in the event anyone has actually invented one, can crack the bytes packet. So dial away, my friend. The minutes are on me.”

  The man made the call, facing the wall so Shaw could not hear him or read his lips.

  Shaw turned his attention to the Tunisian. In a language he was reasonably sure neither the man nor any of the others spoke he said, “You like to hump little boys, don’t you?”

  The baffled Tunisian simply stared at him, unable to comprehend a Chinese dialect from a tiny province in the south of the communist country. Shaw had spent a year of his life there, almost died twice, and only managed to get out with the help of a peasant farmer and his ancient, belching Ford. With all that, he figured learning the language might come in handy, though he never saw himself going back there, at least voluntarily.

  The Iranian handed the phone back to Shaw, who flipped it into his pocket.

  “It is agreed,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it,” Shaw replied as his fist crushed the nose of the Tunisian. In the same motion he swung the heavy suitcase around, catching two other men flush on the temples. They toppled to the floor either dead or damn near it.

  An instant later the door burst open and a half dozen figures clad in body armor and hefting submachine guns crowded in, screaming at people to put their hands up and their weapons down and not necessarily in that order if they didn’t want a new eye in the middle of their foreheads.

  Then the Iranian did the unexpected. Hands over his face, he crashed through the window and flew out into space.

  Shaw raced to the window, convinced he would see the man end his life as a bloody splat on the street below.

  “Shit!” The man’s momentum had carried him just far enough out that he’d landed right in the canal.

  Shaw glanced at two of the armored men, who stared back at him, stunned. “Somebody get a tetanus shot lined up. My last one was a long time ago.”

  He tossed his phone to one of the men, snatched up the Tunisian’s knife, and muttered a curse. He perched on the windowsill for an instant, briefly mulled the insanity of what he was about to do, and then sprang out into nothing but fine Dutch air.

  CHAPTER 7

  IF THERE’S A BODY OF WATER outside of the former Soviet Union, or perhaps Venice, that one would not want to dive into, it would be one of the Amsterdam canals. They are famous, but not because of their clarity, cleanliness, or healthy circulation.

  Shaw hit the water, cleaving it neatly in two. Still, the impact from four stories up was jarring to every nerve and bone in his body. He turned and propelled back up, breaking the surface and looking around for his man. Nothing!

  Apparently the Iranian was a fast swimmer for a person hailing from a desert country. Shaw was also a strong swimmer, and when he finally spotted his quarry he shot across the narrow canal with a powerful stroke, nearly hooking the other man’s foot as he climbed out of the water. Kicking out, the Iranian caught him painfully on the jaw with the heel of his boot. It did nothing to improve Shaw’s mood.

  The two men squared off near the base of the Magere Brug, its cheerful lights offering an odd backdrop to a pair of boiling furies looking to kill each other.

  “You betrayed me!” screamed the Iranian.

  “You’ll get over it.”

  The Iranian assumed a sophisticated fighting stance. “I was trained as a mujahideen. I fought the devils in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. I look forward to killing you with my bare hands. Serve me well in death, filth.”

  Before he could attack, Shaw pulled his throwing knife and let it fly. It struck the other man in the foot, sliced through skin and bone, its point finally embedding in the wooden treads of the bridge underneath.

  The Iranian screamed in pain and hurled obscenities at Shaw as he tried to pull his limb free.

  Shaw used this moment of distraction to knock the Middle Easterner cold, his foot still pinned to the wood like a butterfly on a corkboard as he lay sprawled on the planks.

  “You talk too much,” he told the unconscious man.

  An hour later, Shaw sat in the back of a white van with a blanket around his burly shoulders sipping a cup of hot Dutch coffee. Two men in uniforms that were conspicuous for not having a single identifying mark, along with a third fellow in an off-the-rack business suit, sat across from him.

  “Diving out windows? Into the canal? At your age?” the suit said as he scratched at a patch of reddened skin on his bald, egg-shaped head.

  �
��Did you trace the call?”

  The man nodded. “Quick thinking giving him your phone. We nailed Mazloomi and his crew in Helsinki about ten minutes ago. Nasty group of people. Yeah, real tough.” The man did a mock shiver and then laughed.

  Shaw didn’t crack a smile. “Good guys rarely try to nuke innocent people. That’s why we have governments.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Yeah, and so do you, Frank, if you had the balls to admit it.”

  Frank looked at the twin uniforms and nodded at the door. They quickly got up and left. Frank edged closer to Shaw.

  “What’s this I hear about you wanting to hang it up?”

  “How long did you expect me to keep doing this?”

  “Didn’t you read the fine print? Until you died. Like you almost did tonight.”

  “Tonight? Not even close. This was about as dangerous as taking on a nun in a ruler smackdown.”

  “Well, if you do ever get around to dying, don’t let it be on my watch. I don’t need the hassle.”

  “Thanks for caring.”

  “Where to now?”

  “Dublin.”

  Frank said curiously, “Why?”

  “Vacation. Maybe you don’t think I deserve one after tonight.”

  “Oh, you can go, but you’ll be back,” Frank said confidently.

  Shaw rose, let the blanket slide off his shoulders, and handed his empty cup to Frank. His skin was itchy as hell and it felt like his hair was falling out.

  “Just as soon as you send me a picture of you swimming in the canal. Naked, of course.”

  “Right. Still glad you came over to our side?”

  “I really didn’t have a choice, now did I?”

  “Have a nice time in Dublin, Shaw.”

  “You can see for yourself, can’t you? Your boys will be right on my ass.”

  Frank lit up a Dutch cigar and gave Shaw a smirk through the curtain of smoke. “You think you’re important enough for us to chase all over the world? My God, what an ego.”

  “May you never grow old, Frank.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “REMEMBER KONSTANTIN” HAD REACHED fever pitch. There were rallies against the Russians in fifty countries and the United Nations had formally asked a furious President Gorshkov for a more thorough response. And yet calmer, or at least more skeptical, minds were establishing a wall against this groundswell of anti-Russian sentiment.

  A good number of political leaders, journalists, commentators, and think-tank types, stung in the past by rushes to judgment, urged caution and restraint in the wake of the “Remember Konstantin” outrage. More questions had been raised about the authenticity of the man and the video, particularly in the wake of detailed denials and unprecedented access to classified records provided by the Russian government to outside media. Soon after this measure of cooperation by Moscow, the worldwide sentiment that Russia was evil incarnate had begun to ebb a bit. And leaders around the globe began to breathe a little easier. However, this was merely the calm before the real eruption.

  Two days later the world received another collective shock when digitally goose-stepping across servers around the globe came the names and photos of thousands of Russians allegedly slaughtered by their own government. They included men, women, children; young, old, pregnant, and disabled. And included with the faces and names were details as to each of their lives and gruesome, tragic deaths. More damaging still, these files all possessed the indicia of coming right from the classified files of the Russian government.

  The “RE:” line of the accompanying blast was simple and devastating: “Remember More Than Konstantin.” Soon everyone from so-called experts to expatriate Russians and people from former Soviet bloc countries went on TV, radio, and the Web to attack Russia for its obvious descent back into a maniacal, world-power-grabbing menace.

  It was as though the image of poor, tortured Konstantin, bolstered by the indelible imprint of thousands of “new” dead, had given people the courage to finally speak out. On a bizarre note, coffee mugs, and T-shirts silkscreened with Konstantin’s haunted image, apparently now the Che Guevara of his generation, flooded global markets. And the 1960s had suddenly returned with accompanying images of mushroom clouds alive in people’s collective nightmare.

  Folks claiming to be family or friends of Konstantin appeared on news shows around the world, telling and retelling the plight of a man who had never existed. Yet they spun their yarns with gusto, having apparently convinced themselves that he was real and they had known him. He was a martyr, famous and beloved, and now they were too. Their poignant appearances captured the attention and the hearts of people around the world.

  The talk show hosts and news anchors asked these folks many probing questions, like, “This is all very upsetting, isn’t it?” and “If he were alive right now what message do you believe poor, murdered Konstantin would like to deliver to our millions of viewers?”

  One man wisely intoned on a BBC channel, “In a world of scarce power, scarcer water, and new enemies cropping up every day, the Russians are clearly not content to play second fiddle to places like China and India, or even the United States.” The fellow went on to add that the Russians had tried democracy and they did not care for it. The Russian Bear was about to assert itself once more and the world had better damn well take notice.

  The world had taken notice, because the speaker of these words was none other than Sergei Petrov, the former number two man in the successor entity to the KGB, the Federal Security Service. He’d barely escaped his homeland with his life. Any day now he said he expected to be struck down by a bullet, bomb, or polonium-210-laced coffee for his candor. He’d also been well paid for his remarks from a source totally unknown to him. People were still trying to ferret out if all this was true or not. But they’d get no help from Petrov, for he had no love lost for his homeland.

  Yet the real question on everyone’s mind was, who was behind all this, and why were they doing it? And despite this being the information age, no one could find a definitive answer to that, for a very simple reason that most people overlooked: in the information age, there were not millions of places to hide, there were trillions.

  The multiple crises in the Middle East were forgotten. Crazy Kim in North Korea was relegated to the back pages. Every U.S. presidential candidate in the upcoming election was asked the same question: “What do you intend to do about a country with almost as many nukes as the United States and a past full of world-domination-minded leaders?”

  The American public, in particular, was furious. All this time, money, and lives wasted in the Middle East while the Russians secretly pursued their plans to crush the free world? Russia had thousands of fully realized nuclear warheads that it could deliver to any place on earth. It made bin Laden and al Qaeda look like petty criminals. How had all the smart people missed that one? And when the American public was upset, it let people in power know it.

  The incumbent president, who was running for reelection, saw his poll position go from first to fifth as his opponents successfully painted him as soft on Russia. Every major magazine had Konstantin’s picture on it. Every pundit show from Hardball to Face the Nation to Meet the Press and every blog, chat room, and cybercafé talked about nothing else other than the rise of Russia, the possibility of a return to the cold war, even the reemergence of a new Iron Curtain that some insensitive souls were already dubbing the Titanium Coffin.

  The political talk show pundits were screaming the loudest from their billion-watt stages, claiming that they’d been voicing this potential danger all along when of course they’d been laser-fixed on the Middle East like everyone else. Still, they collectively roared, “I speak for the common man when I say, nuke the damn Reds before they nuke us. It’s the only way.”

  The major television networks trotted out their enormous archives of grainy black-and-white images of nuclear bomb detonations. At least two generations of Americans for the first time saw pictures of w
ide-eyed 1960-s-era schoolchildren huddled under desks as though a bit of laminated wood and flimsy glass could actually protect them from a thermonuclear blast. Along with this came film footage of the communists parading their military might in front of the Kremlin. And it scared the hell out of everybody.

  As one op-ed piece candidly, if tastelessly, stated, “If Moscow hits New York with nukes, it won’t just be two buildings falling down. It’ll be all of them.”

  The U.S. military, the only viable counter to Moscow’s army other than perhaps China’s three-million-man machine, was beaten up, its numbers and morale down and its equipment destroyed by Iraqi sand and jerry-rigged IEDs. While it was true that the American air force and navy were far more than a match for anything the Russians could cobble together, the United States and the rest of the world were still holding their collective breath. No one knew what the crazy Russians would do next. Yet the planet did seem to know one thing.

  The Evil Empire was back.

  Nicolas Creel put down his newspaper and his coffee. He was presently flying seven miles above the earth on his way to a very important event. He’d been filled in on all the latest developments. Things were going along nicely. In the parlance of the perception management field, the world had firmly entered the “gripper” stage, where the majority of people embraced as true everything they were told. It was far easier to accomplish this than most would care or dare to believe. It was easy to manipulate people. Folks had been doing it pretty much forever with