by Saul Herzog
Agata’s department tracked every detail of Russian armaments, and she knew all too well that the AK-12 had been brought into service just two years earlier. It would eventually replace the older AK-74M, but production delays meant that only the highest priority units had so far been issued the new weapon.
Priority for delivery was based on one factor.
Likelihood of imminent combat.
She knew what it meant that the guns were being stockpiled here.
Her heart pounded in her chest.
She opened the next crate and what she found was even more terrifying. Rows of neatly stacked, RPG-7 shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, as well as the more advanced 9K333 Verba surface-to-air launchers.
Either of them was more than capable of taking down a forty-year-old forestry biplane.
In the next crate was a stack of papers in a sealed, plastic document sleeve. In the sleeve was a twenty-five-thousand-to-one scale map of the border region around Ziguri.
She couldn’t help but notice that the Latvian border surveillance posts were marked on the map with red crosses. Those were the same positions that, according to the men back in Ziguri, were at this very moment being vacated.
She also noticed that these maps were an order of magnitude more detailed than anything she’d ever seen before. The roads, including the tracks she’d just driven in on, and which had not been marked on her car’s GPS system, were laid out in such detail that special markings showed where trees were too close together to allow a three-meter-wide vehicle to pass.
Bridges were shown with codes for the material from which they were made, their official weight capacity, and their probability of carrying a fifty-five-ton vehicle.
Agata was only too aware that the new Russian T-14 Armata happened to weigh exactly fifty-five tons and had a width of exactly three meters. A test batch of a hundred tanks had been delivered to the Second Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division, based in the town of Kalininets, south-west of Moscow.
The Taman Division was the most decorated formation in Soviet military history, and the most elite unit in the First Guards Tank Army of Russia’s Western Military District.
In countless war game scenarios, the Latvian military had concluded that if Russia was ever going to launch a lightning ground invasion, that was the unit they were most likely to deploy. Even with the assistance of regional NATO forces, the T-14’s would be unstoppable and would overwhelm Latvian defenses.
They could be in Riga in a matter of hours if the bridges weren’t destroyed.
Everyone in Agata’s division took the threat of a Russian invasion seriously. They treated it as an imminent threat. They memorized railway time tables, route probabilities, bridge carrying capacities, unit formations, and equipment measurements.
They knew what a Russian ground invasion would look like in perhaps even more detail than the officers of the Russian High Command.
And this was it.
Agata looked out at maps, the crates, the camouflage netting above the structure, and she knew exactly what she was looking at.
This was an advance cache.
She didn’t know for certain which side of the border she was on. It was nearly impossible to tell. But what she did know was that, either way, if Arturs Alda had accidentally flown a little too close to one of these caches, that would explain exactly what had happened to him.
She stuffed the map and some of the other documents into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She was about to take photos of the crates, when she felt the darkness of a shadow cross her from behind.
She ducked, just in time to avoid three bullets right overhead. They lodged into the pine crate, sending splinters of wood into her face.
She pulled out her gun and fired instinctively in the direction the gunfire had come from, not taking time to aim.
More bullets, definitely from an automatic weapon, came at her, shattering the side of the crate. She dove for cover behind it. Laying prone on the ground, she looked up through the gap between the crates and tried to see where the bullets were coming from.
She scanned the treeline and saw the flash of a muzzle as the next volley came her way.
As far as she could tell, there was only one gunman.
“State Police,” she called out. “Hold your fire.”
Her warning was met with another burst of fire. She waited, then rose up and fired six shots consecutively at the precise spot she’d seen the muzzle flash.
She dropped back down, but no more shots were fired.
She thought she’d hit him but couldn’t be certain. Maybe he was trying to lure her out into the open.
She waited behind the crate, watching through the gap for any sign of movement. She watched for about five minutes, and would have watched a good deal longer were it not for the sound of a chopper flying in from the east. From the sound of it, she could tell it was a few miles out, but she didn’t want to still be there when it arrived.
She got to her feet, took a breath, then ran for it. Keeping as low as possible, she made a mad dash for the trees.
No one fired at her, and she climbed up the slope and down the other side, slipping and falling and ripping her coat as she went. Just before she reached her car, she saw an off-road, four-wheeler with extra-wide tires painted a military green.
She recognized it too as Russian.
She kept running through the last stretch of trees and onto the muddy track she’d driven in on. She reached her car, got in, and revved the engine. Reversing expertly, she got all the way back down the track until the first fork, where she put her foot down hard on the brake and swung the car around to face forward.
Then she really put her foot down, sliding and skidding through the mud until she reached the paved road by the old factory.
She didn’t slow down or look back once, not even when she got onto the main road back toward Riga.
She didn’t realize that her badge, which she’d left on the dashboard, was gone.
7
Jacob Kirov looked out the window of the cab and shivered. His plane had been delayed by four hours because of a blizzard, and he was severely jet-lagged. He was also drunk. The bar on the private jet carried the best of everything, and he’d gotten into the scotch.
“First time in Saint Petersburg?” the driver asked, his thick, uneducated accent bringing Kirov immediately back to his boyhood.
“I grew up here.”
The driver nodded. He had no idea who Kirov was but had noticed the expensive coat, the diamond-encrusted Piaget chronograph, the Louis Vuitton luggage. He worked for tips, after all.
“Welcome home, then.”
Kirov was not happy to be home. As Russian Consul-General in New York, he’d grown accustomed to certain luxuries that were, let’s just say, difficult to acquire in other cities of the world. He’d heard recently that New York had more Russian-born prostitutes than Moscow, and he knew from personal experience it was true.
It was the greatest city in the world, as far as he was concerned. And America, which allowed all that vice to prosper while maintaining an air of pristine Protestant puritanism, was the greatest country.
A country’s greatness, Kirov believed, rested entirely on its ability to conjure a narrative, a false reality, in which men could do all the things they lusted to do, while telling themselves they were doing God’s work.
It had been that way in every great empire in history.
And it was the one feature the USSR had so gravely lacked.
After all, what was the point in fighting for universal brotherhood and the good of one’s fellow man when no one up above was watching?
Life became futile.
It was like playing and not keeping score.
It had been many years since Kirov had returned to the city of his birth, and the view through the window brought a strange mix of emotions. Memories of cabbage soup and walking to school in torrential rain. Memories of his mother’s face, and his grammar teacher’s
silky white hands.
The man had later been charged with molestation, not of Kirov but other children. No conviction was ever secured.
Not to worry.
Kirov had taken it upon himself to track the man down. Even though he was well into his eighties, Kirov’s assassin, following careful instructions, cut off the man’s balls and forced him to eat them. He recorded it on video, the old man’s mouth moving up and down like a marionette as the assassin’s gloved hands opened and closed his jaw forcibly.
A disgusting affair.
The footage was locked away in a safe in the New York consulate.
“There used to be a very good fish restaurant on this street,” Kirov said. He had memories of dining on sturgeon and caviar to the point of vomitting, and following that up with the very finest cognac and Gurkha cigars. “Looks like it’s gone,” he added.
The driver nodded.
They rounded the corner of the square, and high above them, the towering façade of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral rose toward the sky like the peak of a mountain. Kirov strained to see the top, the snow whipping around its spires like little demons.
Directly across the square from it was the former German Imperial Embassy. From the days when Saint Petersburg, and not Moscow, was the capital.
Kirov had always thought the placement of the buildings was appropriate.
God on one side, the Germans on the other.
“The Astoria Hotel, sir,” the driver announced, pulling up in front of a grand, six-story tall, Neoclassical building that stretched the length of the square’s eastern side. “Allow me to bring in the luggage.”
“No,” Kirov said, “the bellhop will do it.”
They waited in the car until the luggage had been removed and loaded onto a brass cart by the bellhop, then Kirov pulled up the collar of his coat and stepped out into the cold.
He hurried up the steps and through the hotel’s ornate revolving doors.
Everything was exactly as he remembered. The chandeliers, the marble, the enormous palms at the foot of the staircase. To his left was the legendary bar where Mikhail Bulgakov scratched out the first draft of his most famous novel.
Kirov was staying in the hotel as a guest of the president, and as such, was escorted directly to the expansive penthouse suite overlooking the square. He had a view straight down the Malaya Morskaya, to the house where Dostoyevsky wrote White Nights.
It was writers everywhere in Saint Petersburg. The city cherished them the way other cities valued their sports teams.
He waited for the bellhop to bring his luggage, tipped him, then locked the door. He looked around the room. It was the epitome of classical European luxury. It might not have had the amenities of a New York hotel, but what it lacked in function, it made up for in effort. Everything oozed effort. The wallpaper, the four-posted bed, the marble fireplaces and extravagantly gilded candelabra. It exuded a sense of opulence that was so self-conscious it was almost smothering.
Vladimir Lenin had once stayed in the suite.
As had Elton John.
Kirov looked at his watch and then went to the minibar. He wanted a drink but thought better of it. He grabbed a Heineken and opened it against the corner of the marble mantle above the fireplace.
Then he lit a cigar.
At some point, he fell asleep. It was dark when he woke, and a mess of ash lay on the carpet beneath his arm.
The only light came from the embers in the fireplace and the streetlights outside the window. He switched on a lamp and checked the time.
He had a shower.
By the time he’d shaved and dressed in a Canali velvet tuxedo jacket and matching pants, it was time to leave.
He put on his coat and gloves and walked out to the corridor. Two men in suits were standing outside his door.
“Federal security service, sir,” one of them said.
Kirov nodded. It was normal. They were for the president’s protection, not his.
“We’re going to the Trocadéro,” Kirov said.
“We know where you’re going, sir.”
The agents called the elevator, and when it arrived, they got in with him. They escorted him through the lobby and out to the street where a state limousine was waiting.
Kirov got in the backseat.
He’d been told he was meeting the president at one of the city’s most famous restaurants, a place that looked out across the Neva River at the spectacular Peter and Paul Fortress, but the car drove right past it, out of the city center along the Palace Embankment and past Summer Garden.
The further they went, the more Kirov grew nervous.
It would have been an elaborate way to get rid of him, to bring him all the way to Saint Petersburg and have him check into one of the world’s most expensive hotels, but the president was known to do stranger things.
He was a character.
He always injected flair into his dealings.
He liked to keep people on their toes.
It worked. Kirov had watched him retain power for more than two decades by deftly playing rival against rival, keeping them constantly off-balance, provoking responses that looked disastrous, but in the end, always served to cement his power.
He knew how to gamble, and he always raised the stakes.
The car turned away from the river and entered the Smolninskoye District, coming to a halt on Suvorovskiy Prospekt.
“What’s this?” Kirov said to the driver.
“This is where you’re meeting him,” the driver said, nodding out the window at a nondescript, unassuming building.
“Good thing I dressed up,” Kirov said.
There was a restaurant, an old-style Italian place, and he walked to the door slowly. A security agent with an earpiece opened it for him. Another took his coat and gloves, then patted him down.
The restaurant was warm, decorated in traditional Italian fashion with candles on the tables in little red bowls and a worn leather banquette along the wall. Behind the banquette were aged mirrors, and opposite was a well-stocked bar.
Apart from the two security agents at the door, the only other person present was the bartender, who stood behind the bar, dressed in a white shirt and bow tie.
Peasant music played from a small speaker in the ceiling.
“Where are we?” Kirov said to one of the agents.
“President’s favorite restaurant,” the guard said.
“The food’s that good?”
“It’s better than good,” the agent said, the expression on his face as serious as if he was giving testimony.
The bartender looked up from the glass he was polishing and said, “What’ll it be?”
Kirov squinted at the bottles behind the bar, it was all top-notch stuff, and said, “surprise me.”
He took a seat at the table across from the bar, it was the only one set, and lit a cigar.
A moment later, the bartender came over and placed a crystal glass on a napkin in front of him. “This is a thirty-year-old Port Ellen.”
“They told you what I like,” Kirov said.
“They filled me in.”
Kirov sat back and took a sip. It was potent stuff, viscous, almost like tar, as if it had been aged in barrels used to store diesel fuel.
He coughed.
“Is it all right?” the bartender said.
“It tastes like gasoline.”
“Very good, sir,” the bartender said and left him to enjoy it.
Kirov was about to take another sip when the door at the front of the restaurant opened.
It was the president.
He was dressed head to toe in a flamboyant, brown velvet suit that made him look more like an extra from a John Travolta film than the leader of one of the most powerful nations on the planet.
Nothing about Vladimir Molotov fit the mold, not the flashy clothing, not the carefully crafted mannerisms, and certainly not the diamond-encrusted, solid gold sunglasses he removed and placed on the table in front of Kiro
v.
Kirov stood in greeting, and the president motioned extravagantly for him to sit back down.
“Bartender,” he shouted. “Champagne. I haven’t seen this man in, what’s it been?”
“Too long, Mr. President.”
“Too long,” the president barked.
The president was famous for being loud. For being the life of the party. He caused no end of faux pas at international summits and had insulted virtually every leader on the world stage.
But Kirov had known him before. Back when he was still just a lowly KGB agent finding his way in the world, learning his craft. He’d been a fairly ordinary guy back then, but within a few years, had managed to transform every aspect of his personality. He worshipped Don Corleone and practiced every mannerism, every gesture, every inflection of his voice, for hours in front of a mirror.
None of what Kirov saw now, not the bravado, not the machismo, was innate to the man.
It was all an act.
A persona.
A conscious choice.
It was as if the Devil himself had one night spoken to Vladimir Molotov, and told him he could be the most powerful man on the planet, a man with absolute power, who would make nations cower and presidents quiver in their boots.
He could become a God.
And all he had to do to get it was play the part.
Speak the lines.
Not balk when things got bloody.
The waiter came over with the champagne and poured two glasses. Then he brought the president a Cohiba cigar and a gold lighter.
The president began lighting his cigar, and between puffs, he said to Kirov, “I hope you brought your appetite because they have the best food in the world here. All the secret recipes.”
Kirov nodded, and they clinked glasses.
The president seemed relaxed, happy to be there, like he was in no hurry, but Kirov knew something big was on the horizon. He hadn’t just crossed the Atlantic to discuss recipes.
He waited until the president’s cigar was burning, then lit one for himself.
“Do you know why you’re here?” the president said after draining his glass.
“I assume it has something to do with the embassy bombings,” Kirov said.