The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  “The Russian lab has been destroyed?”

  “Yes, sir. And we recovered my captured agent.”

  “So you have a clean house now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ready for action.”

  “I hope so, Mr. President.”

  The president nodded. “Always at the ready,” he said.

  Roth looked at him.

  “I feel I owe you an apology, Levi.”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “I was the one who forced Mansfield down your throat.”

  Roth looked at him.

  The president poured himself a scotch and held up the bottle. “A top up?”

  Roth nodded and the president topped up his glass. They sat on the sofas in the middle of the room and the president let out a long sigh.

  “That was not your fault, sir,” Roth said. “Mansfield was a traitor, pure and simple.”

  “I can’t believe I let him get so deep.”

  “It’s happened before, sir. And it will happen again.”

  “It’s my job to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

  “They’ll keep hitting us, sir. The only thing we can do is make sure we always hit back.”

  The president sipped his scotch. There was a small coffee table between them and he put his feet on it. “However hard they hit us,” he said, “we’ll hit them back harder. Every time.”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Like two kangaroos in a ring.”

  Roth nodded.

  “It’s a senseless game we play,” the president said, “isn’t it, Roth?”

  “Sir,” Roth said, “it was senseless long before we got here, and it will be senseless long after we’re gone.”

  “Those are some pessimistic words, Roth.”

  “Yes they are, sir.”

  “But I suppose, no one put us in power to pick daisies with the Russians and wish things weren’t the way they are.”

  “No they did not, sir.”

  The president leaned back and let out a long sigh. There was a humidor on the table and he opened it.

  “You want one?” he said.

  Roth shook his head.

  “You sure? They’re Nicaraguan. Very dark.”

  “All right,” Roth said, taking one of the cigars.

  They took a moment to light them and the president said, “I don’t suppose you brought the footage from the hotel room?”

  “Sir, I don’t think that’s anything you want to see.”

  “Do you have it, Roth?”

  Roth took a tablet from his briefcase and opened the file. The president watched it all, shaking his head, and when it was finished, watched it again.

  “That fucking traitor,” he said. “He deserves everything he got.”

  Roth nodded.

  “And the girl? Still no sign of her?”

  “Not a peep,” Roth said. “She disappeared after the hit. I’ve got a team searching for her now, but my guess, unless she wants to be found, we’ll never set eyes on her again.”

  “Is that something we can live with?”

  “It’s not ideal, sir. We like to be the ones calling the shots.”

  “But we’ve got bigger fish to fry?”

  “Yes we do, sir. And I think it’s fair to say she’s as sympathetic to our cause as anyone from her background could be. She helped us when she really had a chance to hurt us.”

  “She brought us the vial in the first place.”

  “Yes she did, sir.”

  “I hoped maybe we’d find a spot for her on our team,” the president said.

  Roth nodded. “I did too, sir. Believe me.”

  The president looked at Roth. “I bet you had an office picked out for her and everything.”

  Roth smiled. “Maybe we’ll see her again.”

  The president nodded. He puffed on the cigar, filling the room with a blue cloud of smoke.

  “Anyway,” he said, “she managed to get us some very valuable information before she disappeared.”

  “Absolutely,” Roth said. “One last gift. The great Evgraf Davidov himself.”

  “We knew the Dead Hand was involved.”

  “We did, sir. But we had no idea how high it went.”

  “Davidov’s one of the president’s closest advisors.”

  “They grew up together, sir. They’re practically brothers. Him being involved raises the stakes significantly.”

  “If we needed any more confirmation the Russians were preparing for war, this is it.”

  “It absolutely is, sir. I think it’s fair to say, war with Russia is closer now than at any time since the end of the Cold War.”

  “End of the Cold War?” the president said. “What a farce. That war never ended. The whole song and dance about openness and political reform in the nineties was nothing more than a sideshow, something to distract us while the KGB built a police state as totalitarian as anything Stalin ever dreamt of.”

  “Everything they fed us was a crock of shit,” Roth said.

  “Agreed,” the president said.

  “The Kremlin needs this war.”

  “Yes they do, Roth. They’re up against term limits. If they don’t get the constitution ripped up soon, the president will have to step down.”

  “And there’s no way that’s going to happen.”

  “A war with us is far preferable,” the president said.

  “It’s the biggest distraction there is.”

  The president stood up and went to the window. Through it, he could see the lights of downtown Washington DC, the capital city of the most powerful nation ever to put its flag on the map. Economically, it was unstoppable. Technologically, unsurpassed. Its military was more powerful than anything ever fielded by any nation or empire in any era in human history. Absolute supremacy, absolute power, could be brought down on any spot on the planet instantly.

  But watching him, the way his shoulders sagged, the way his head hung, Roth knew he felt anything but powerful at that moment.

  The president turned to Roth. “Let us not forget the significant interests in our own country that want this war.”

  Roth nodded. “Mansfield made that abundantly clear.”

  “That weaselly little slimeball,” the president said.

  “And who was paying him?”

  “Vultures, the lot of them,” the president said.

  “Trillions of dollars are at stake, sir. The military contracts alone would be enough to change the economic landscape of the entire nation for generations.”

  “They’re always after the same thing,” the president said. “No matter how much things change, they always stay the same.”

  “But who are they, sir?”

  “Who are they? Why Roth, they’re the men who run this country.”

  Roth thought about that. He thought about the networks of global interests that reached into Washington that even he, at the highest level of the CIA, couldn’t begin to infiltrate. He thought about the flood of foreign money that poured into congressional and senatorial election campaigns that no oversight committee could ever hope to stop. And he thought about Mansfield’s golf club, just a few miles away, that hadn’t wanted him as a member.

  The president looked at him. “This war will create a whole new generation of American oligarchs, Roth. You think we live in a shitshow now? Wait until you see what our democracy looks like after this.”

  “It will massively concentrate power,” Roth said.

  “Oh, those bastards will tighten their fists like a vise-grip. They’ll move in on the banks, on the capital markets, on the voting system, and you better believe they’ll move in on the military.”

  “The contracts.”

  “The average American won’t know what hit him, Roth. And the crazy thing is, I’m president, and there’s not a thing I can do to stop it.”

  “You mean if there’s war?” Roth said.

  “Oh, they’ll be untouchable for generations to come.”

>   “If this virus hits, sir, frankly, it will cut through us like a scythe in a cornfield. It will ravage us. There won’t be a person in the country who isn’t touched by it.”

  “And even the most peace-loving doves will be chomping at the bit for war.”

  “If they release this virus, sir, God himself couldn’t hold back war.”

  The president nodded. “A virus this powerful? It will wipe out entire swaths of the population. But would Davidov really use it?”

  “All I can say,” Roth said, “is that he ordered it to be harvested. He sent someone up there to dig it up. It didn’t crawl out of the permafrost on its own. He sent them looking for it.”

  “And when they found it…”

  “When they found it, they brought it to a lab and weaponized it. Tatyana said that when she was at the lab, they had at least two vials. One of them was given to her.”

  “The one she passed on to us?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the other?”

  “Was for Davidov.”

  “Every strand of this leads back to him,” the president said. “He’s the one man in the Kremlin with the mandate to do anything, literally anything, to keep the president in power. Even if it means unleashing Armageddon.”

  “Sir, they’d release a thousand Armageddons if it kept them in power.”

  The president nodded. He looked at Roth and said, “And the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

  74

  Lance had to go to a number of Roth’s safe houses to get everything he needed. He might have been going a little overboard, but this was one job he wasn’t taking any chances on.

  The word Kremlin came from the word for fortress, and the complex in central Moscow was one of the most formidable on the planet. It’s two miles of defensive walls were over sixty feet high and over twenty feet thick.

  The walls enclosed four cathedrals, five palaces, museums, gardens, and the president’s senate building, which housed the most secretive security organization in Russia, the Dead Hand.

  The precise location of the senate building was a triangular-shaped area between the former presidium site, the arsenal, and the Kremlin wall behind Red Square. It was widely regarded as one of the most securely protected, and difficult to infiltrate, patches of land anywhere on earth.

  Breaking in had been compared in complexity to breaking into the Pope’s private offices in the Vatican, or the section of the Louvre that housed the Mona Lisa.

  That wasn’t to say it couldn’t be done.

  Because it could, and had.

  The Mongols did it.

  Four hundred years later, the Poles did it.

  And in 1812, Napoleon did it.

  Napoleon actually ordered the entire fortress to be demolished on his retreat. The dynamite was laid, the charges were set, and for days, the site was ravaged by explosions. But the vast complex proved itself practically immune to Napoleon’s explosives, and the damage was quickly repaired.

  All those infiltrations had one thing in common. They’d been performed before the Soviet Union’s security upgrade program turned the entire Kremlin into a technological, as well as a physical, fortress.

  The senate building in particular was regarded as a difficult target.

  Lenin had made it his official residence in 1918.

  After his death, Stalin occupied it from 1924 until his own death in 1953.

  While it was still the official seat of presidential and executive power in Russia, the current president didn’t actually live there, but spent most of his time on the Novo-Ogaryovo estate west of the city.

  And that was the one thing Lance and Laurel had going for them. Since the president’s move to the estate, the senate building’s electronic security system had fallen down the list of upgrade priorities.

  It meant Lance and Laurel, from their hotel room overlooking Red Square, and with the aid of a plethora of highly advanced communications and infiltration equipment they’d been able to gather from Roth’s safe houses, were able to hack the senate building’s secure network and disable most of the sensors.

  Lance was examining the Kremlin walls through the lace curtains of the hotel room window.

  “A sniper rifle, Lance? Come on.”

  “This scope is some real space age shit.”

  “What if someone sees you?”

  Through the multispectral scope, he could see the roof of the senate behind the walls. Slight variations in the surface temperature of the roof showed him where power lines ran, and where cameras and other motion sensors were set up.

  From what he could see through the scope, he was able to figure out exactly which electronic controls they’d hacked into controlled which cameras and sensors, and disable the ones needed.

  Laurel was sitting on the bed. She’d set up a satellite link with the Pentagon and they were waiting for the connection to be activated.

  “How do you feel?” Lance said.

  She looked at him. “Better.”

  He’d examined her wounds and patched her up as best he could. She’d been badly hurt.

  She did look better, though. When he’d found her in the forest he hadn’t been so sure. Even if she physically okay, she’d been through hell mentally. He doubted he’d ever be able to forgive himself for that.

  If he’d been in New York, she never would have been taken.

  “I’m going to tell you something that you might not like,” he said.

  She’d gotten up from the bed to make coffee and was putting a capsule in the machine.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “The plan, whatever Roth and the Langley guys say, it’s got to be me going in alone.”

  “I’ve got all the training for this,” Laurel said.

  “I know you do, Laurel,” he said. “And believe me, I’m not trying to put you in a box or anything.”

  “But you’re telling me I’m going to have to sit this one out?”

  “After everything that’s happened, I just think…”.

  “I know what you think.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You think I’m a helpless little girl…”.

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You were tortured, Laurel. They could have killed you.”

  “That’s the game we play, Lance.”

  “But, I can’t, I mean…”.

  “You can’t?” Laurel said. “You can’t what?”

  “I can’t stand the thought of losing you again.”

  “Again?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You’re thinking of Clarice.”

  “I thought you were dead when they took you,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You’re thinking of Clarice, aren’t you?”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You lost her once. Now you’re going to lose a girl who looks just like her.”

  Laurel was getting angry and Lance didn’t know if he’d be able to calm her down. He was getting emotional himself. She was right. He wasn’t sure what he’d meant.

  “Laurel,” he said.

  “No, Lance. I’m doing his. I’m coming. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to stop me.”

  “I can’t accept that,” he said.

  “I don’t care what you can accept. This isn’t your call. It’s mine. I’m not Clarice. I’m not your girlfriend.”

  “But you’re my handler.”

  “No, I’m not. I could have been. I wanted to be. But you sent me away.”

  He shook his head and she stepped toward him. She held out a cup and the memory of Sam throwing the hot coffee in his face came back to him.

  “Relax,” she said. “I’m not throwing it at you, I’m handing it to you, idiot.”

  He took the coffee from her.

  “Look,” she said. “I don’t know what you and Clarice had together, and I don’t want to know. I look like her, but I’m not her.
I’m not your girl. I never have been, and I never will be. So get used to it.”

  The satellite connection had been cleared and a call was coming through from the Pentagon.

  Laurel looked at Lance but he didn’t look like he was ready to take the call.

  “What?” she said.

  He didn’t speak. He couldn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” she said again, getting nervous.

  “You looking like Clarice, that isn’t a coincidence, is it?”

  She shook her head. “Can we not talk about that now.”

  He took a step toward her and she stepped back. He reached out and took her chin in his hand.

  “He did this to you, didn’t he?”

  “Lance,” she said, pushing his hand away.

  “You let him do it.”

  She shook her head again. It was all she could do. She’d always known he’d find out sooner or later, but she’d never quite figured out what to say to him when it happened.

  “We need to answer this call,” she said, looking at the computer.

  “You let him give you plastic surgery?”

  “Lance, we need to answer this.”

  He shook his head and she opened the call.

  “Laurel,” Roth said, a screen opening up to show a situation room in the Pentagon containing not just the president and Roth, but the Joint Chiefs, the CIA director, and a number of Pentagon specialists.

  “Mr. President,” Laurel said, “Group Director Roth, Generals.”

  “Laurel,” the president said. “It’s nice to see you back in action.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now, I’m afraid there’s some cold feet around here,” the president continued. “There are some doubts that breaking into the Kremlin is even possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” Laurel said.

  “There are also doubts politically, about the wisdom of attempting it.”

  “Politically, sir?”

  “If there’s a war coming, and we believe there is,” the president said, “then breaching the Kremlin might make it look like we were the ones who started it.”

  “Well,” Laurel said, turning to Lance for support, “There are a number of scenarios we’ve drawn up, sir.”

  “Maybe you could walk us through some of those.”

  “Well, as you know, sir, Davidov spends most of his time with the president.”