by Saul Herzog
“Because of what I heard.”
“Which was?”
She took a breath. “There’s going to be a major attack on the American embassy in Moscow.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer.
He looked at her.
“The club I work in. Powerful men go there. Politicians. Businessmen. It’s very close to the Lubyanka.”
“And you worked there when Tatyana came to you?”
“Yes.”
“You just happened to be working where the most powerful men in Russia blow off steam?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s convenient.”
She was agitated. She hadn’t expected to be challenged like this.
“It’s the truth,” she said. “I worked there when she found me. If you think this is some kind of set up, fine. I’ll leave, and you’ll never see me again.”
He looked at her. Something in the eyes. He knew it wasn’t a lie. He knew what it was like to be tricked by appearances, and this wasn’t that. This girl shared a father with Tatyana. He’d stake his life on it.
He sighed and put the gun back in his coat. He stepped forward and cut the cable tie around her wrists.
“Thank you,” she said, rubbing them.
“You overheard someone planning an attack on the embassy?” he said.
“They weren’t planning it,” she said.
She was breathing rapidly. She was scared.
“Take it easy,” Lance said. “Breathe. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She cleared her throat. “The man I met was Chinese. He was bragging about the attack. He said he’d been in the Lubyanka and that America was going to pay for its arrogance.”
“And you went to the locker.”
“Yes. I went to tell Tatyana, and that’s when I found the matchbook. That was our signal that she’d been burned and that I was to walk away.”
“Walk away from what?”
“From everything. It meant she was done, and I was alone.”
“And you panicked?”
“Of course I panicked. And that’s when I saw the phone number. We’d never discussed that, but when I saw it, I knew she meant for me to call.”
“Did it ever cross your mind that this was all a trap?” Lance said.
“What sort of trap?”
“Someone comes in and gives you the scoop of the century? Just like that, for no reason? This could be a ploy to get to Tatyana, or to get to me.”
“I don’t know,” Larissa said. “You’re the spy. If it looks like a trap to you, then do what you need to do. I’m just a dancer.”
“You’re not just a dancer,” Lance said.
She weighed what he said, unsure whether it was meant as a compliment or an insult.
“So what do we do?” she said.
“I say we both leave this building, walk away in opposite directions, and never see each other again.”
Larissa looked at him blankly.
“Doesn’t work for you?”
“This isn’t a trap,” she said.
“You don’t know if it is or not.”
“Maybe,” Larissa said, “but I know men. I might not be a spy like you, but you can bet your ass I know men better than you ever will.”
Lance raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you have a point.”
“This guy wasn’t lying. I saw how much he drank. I felt how his body reacted to the alcohol. His clammy skin. His breath. His flaccid…”.
“I get the picture,” Lance said.
“I’m just saying, it’s hard to lie to someone when they’re that close.”
“But you manage to do it.”
“I’m a professional,” she said.
Lance sighed. This wasn’t good. It was unexpected, out of the blue, and he did not like surprises. But he couldn’t turn this woman away. It wasn’t just loyalty to Tatyana. If she was right, if someone really was planning an attack on the embassy, then he had to look into it.
There was a chair by the sofa, and he sat on it, facing Larissa. He pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one.
“Do you mind?” Larissa said.
Lance gave her the one he’d just lit and put another in his mouth.
“You understood,” he said, thinking how to put it, “you knew that the information you were passing to Tatyana…”.
“I understood that it was off the books, if that’s what you mean. I understood that we were fighting against Russia. Not for it.”
“How did you know that?”
“How does anyone know anything?”
“What does that mean?”
Larissa exhaled smoke. “We understood each other. We didn’t have to spell things out.”
“So, you called the number on the matchbook?”
“I knew I was supposed to walk away, but the information I have, it’s big. It could lead to war.”
“Tell me exactly what you heard,” Lance said.
She looked around the room, as if suddenly afraid someone might be listening.
“We’re alone,” Lance said.
“What I heard…,” she said, then leaned up and looked out the window behind her.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No, I’m just…”.
“Scared?”
She sighed. “I trust Tatyana. That’s the only reason I’m here.”
“Then tell me what you heard, because we don’t have time for games.”
“All I know is they’re planning an attack.”
“Who is?”
“The Chinese man. The one at the club. He said he was at the Lubyanka with someone named the Polar Bear.”
“The Polar Bear?”
“A big guy.”
“A Russian?”
“He never said he was Russian, but that’s what I assumed. Who else would meet him at the Lubyanka?”
“All right, so he met with this big guy.”
“He’s albino?”
“The Chinese?”
“No, the Russian.”
“So he’s a big, Russian albino who works in the Lubyanka?”
“Do you know him?”
“No,” Lance said, “but it won’t take a team of detectives to find him.”
Larissa smiled. “He does sound strange.”
“What about the Chinese?” Lance said. “What did he look like?”
“Like a typical businessman. Nothing extraordinary. His suit was expensive, but his manners weren’t fancy. He was really drunk.”
“What else?”
“He sweat. A lot. The more he drank, the more he sweat.”
“What else?”
“He had money. I recognized the watch.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“No, but he said he was from Beijing.”
“What about age, weight? I need everything.”
“He was like your average guy. Fifty maybe. Not in perfect shape but not fat either.”
“All right, so he told you there was going to be an attack on the Moscow embassy?”
“He said it was going to start a war. He was happy about it. Like that was the point.”
“Anything else?” Lance said. “Anything at all? Try to think.”
Larissa shrugged. “He said America was going to be put in its place.”
Lance’s eyes narrowed. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see about that.”
17
The Russian president, Vladimir Molotov, looked at his watch irritably.
Medvedev was late.
He tapped his cigar against the edge of a gold ashtray, and an inch of perfectly formed ash broke off. The ashtray was unique, a treasure, handmade in the Vuelta Abajo by Cuban artisans. It had been a gift from Fidel Castro to Nikita Khrushchev after the Cuban missile crisis, and, if the legend was to be believed, was made of Incan gold plundered by Pizzaro himself.
The presi
dent cracked his knuckles. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was a man who waited for no one, and no one dared make him wait.
No one, that was, except the insolent Mikhail Medvedev.
Thirty minutes already.
It was unheard of. If it had been anyone else, if Medvedev wasn’t capable of making any man in Russia piss his pants in fear, there was no way it would have been tolerated.
Medvedev was arrogant, he was power-hungry, his greed was legendary, and his ambition knew no bounds.
There were times the president seriously fantasized about killing him. He was a cancer, and all cancers metastasized eventually. But for now, he served a purpose.
The president looked again at his watch and flicked more ash in the tray. It wasn’t right. He was one of the most powerful men on earth, arguably the most powerful, and here he was, waiting for a common thug.
Vladimir knew Russia was not the power she’d once been. He knew the economy was a shambles, riddled with corruption, but he also knew the Americans and Chinese had yet to produce a man anywhere near as powerful as he was.
He had something their leaders lacked.
He had real personal power.
He could extend his term of office at will.
He could plunder the nation’s coffers.
He could kill his enemies, reward his allies, piss on the graves of former national leaders, and there wasn’t a man in the country who could say one word about it.
He didn’t care about polls, votes, campaign contributions, the news cycle. He didn’t worry about impeachment, parliamentary oversight, human rights, civil rights, or protests.
He was a king.
An emperor.
And in modern geopolitics, there was no man on earth like him.
Maybe the US had more aircraft carriers than he did, but what good were those to presidents who were voted out of office before they ever grew the balls to use them? Even the ones who had balls weren’t free to use their power at will. Everything required political backing. They couldn’t buy new weapons without congressional approval. They couldn’t board ships without weeks of coordination with the Pentagon. And when their term was up, a former president would struggle even to get his wife an invite to a naval academy luncheon.
To the Russian president, there was nothing so pathetic.
American leaders were a dime a dozen.
He had nothing but contempt for them.
Vladimir had already sat across the table from four of them. Every time the incumbent lost an election, the entire American leadership went back to square one, carrying over none of the tactical or strategic advantage gained by the preceding administration.
To the Russians, who prized themselves on their patience, any setback could always be remedied simply by waiting out the electoral cycle. The contest between Moscow and Washington was a decades-long chess match, and the Americans had to relearn all the rules every eight years.
Bitter partisan disputes meant new administrations in Washington were incapable of continuing the strategies of their predecessor.
What was more, everything they did, every move they made, every battle they fought and soldier they put in the field, was predicated entirely on short-term domestic issues.
The Pentagon frittered away its massive defense budget by ordering equipment based on which arms manufacturers were located in electoral battleground states, and which senators sat on the appropriations committee, and which corporations had made the right campaign contributions.
They had everything backward.
They put politics and money above even the lives of soldiers.
One thing was certain to Vladimir. If that was what was meant by democracy and the rule of law, America and the West could keep it.
Russia was on a path to reclaim its ability not only to threaten war, but to fight and win. Democratic reforms and the strengthening of civil society was not going to move that objective forward.
The way he saw it, the democracies were in a process of decline, their real war-fighting capabilities eroding by the day, giving way to decadence and weakness.
If America were Athens, Russia would be Sparta.
Instead of a parliament, he would have soldiers.
He believed he’d been put on earth to rebuild Russia’s vast army. It was the army of Stalin, the army that defeated Napoleon, that stopped Hitler in his tracks.
It was the army that would one day defeat America.
He knew he could outmaneuver whatever presidents the Americans put in his way. Those presidents would zig and zag with the passage of every election, while he, a single man, all-powerful, focused on a single objective, would play the long game.
Twenty years was an eternity in American politics. Vladimir himself had already been in power longer than that.
Even if America elected a man who saw all this, a president who wanted to play the long game and focus on winning out and staying ahead of Russia, it would make no difference. He would be out of office before the game was over.
US presidents didn’t own America. They weren’t given the faintest whiff of the power necessary to play the game. They couldn’t raid the banks. They couldn’t control their oil and gas revenues. If they walked into the New York stock exchange, the most they could hope for was a chance to ring the opening bell.
They were not kings.
They were civil servants, servants of the people, irrelevant mascots who, like the mayors of small towns, were hauled out to cut ribbons and wave from parade floats at the fall fair.
They were not lions.
They were sheep.
Weaker than weak, despite everything they supposedly possessed.
Vladimir looked at his watch again and couldn’t believe how long he’d been waiting. He should make an example of Medvedev, he thought. Teach him some manners.
His cigar was coming to an end, and he threw it in the ashtray and went to the bar cart. He had a selection of the finest vodkas in the world, lined up in crystal bottles and decanters that glittered in the sunlight from the window. He chose one and called for ice.
He slumped into a leather chair by the fireplace and stared at the flames. Sitting there in his flamboyant suit, the glass elegantly balanced in his hand, he looked like a mafioso in a Hollywood movie.
He’d always had a weakness for gangster movies. He believed Scorsese to be one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century.
When Vladimir pictured power, he pictured Robert De Niro in the movie Casino. Indeed, he’d spent years modeling his public persona on De Niro’s portrayal of Sam Rothstein. Every mannerism, every tick, every facial gesture, he worked on in front of a mirror until he had it down.
To Vladimir, a man was only as powerful as he acted, and that included the way he held himself, the way he drew from a cigarette, or swished his scotch so that the ice clinked on the glass.
Photos over the course of his career showed a gradual shift from a stiff KGB officer to the swaggering world leader of today, famous for his slicked-back hair and gold jewelry.
He was the first man since the days of the Czar to walk the corridors of the Kremlin dressed in suits that were not black, or brown, or gray. He had Gucci and Tom Ford send tailors and conduct personal fittings. At a recent summit, he stunned audiences in a wine-red velvet blazer, matching pants, and yellow shirt. During the photo-op afterward, he posed with the bland German Chancellor, deliberately making zero effort to keep his cigar smoke from her face.
That was what power looked like.
The images sent a carefully crafted message to the world.
They said, watch your back. Russia’s humiliation is over. America will not be the only game in town for long.
Politics was no more complicated than a place like Vegas in the eighties. Everything was run by gangsters, whether people admitted it or not. To get to the top, you had to fight, and you had to fight dirty.
It was all a game.
That was what the West forgot. London, P
aris, Berlin, Washington, all of them were more concerned with politically correct niceties than the ugly truths of raw power.
To be treated like a king, you had to act like a beast.
The future belonged to those willing to get down in the muck and filth.
The powerful were wild animals. And like other predators, their natural habitat was under threat. There was no longer space for men like Vladimir in America or Western Europe.
They were deemed too authoritarian.
Too despotic.
Too nationalistic.
Too aggressive.
Westerners liked to see their politicians kissing babies and shaking hands with old ladies outside churches. Vladimir, just in the previous month, had been filmed for national television driving a forty-six tone T-90 tank across a frozen lake in Nizhny Tagil. He trained three weeks to do it, even learning to aim and fire the 125mm smoothbore cannon, which he did for the cameras, hitting a target five kilometers away on his first shot.
Russia was not going to copy the mistakes of the West.
The Kremlin didn’t care what the people wanted.
The country could not afford to lose its will to fight. It would remain the place wolves roamed freely, and sheep suffered the fate nature had intended for them.
How could democratic leaders, who lived in constant fear of the electorate, who could be impeached or imprisoned for the slightest infraction, stand a chance against a country like that?
To Vladimir Molotov, being neutered like his American counterparts was a fate worse than death. He would do anything to avoid it. If anyone suggested it, they would find themselves at the bottom of the Moskva River. And if the nation ever seriously considered it, he would burn the whole place to the ground and unleash civil war.
Americans talked about democracy as if it was part of the natural order. To Vladimir, it was democracy that was the aberration. And if the slightest whiff of it ever came to Russian shores, it would be the end of all greatness and prestige.
Democracy was a castration, a humiliation.
In Russia, a strongman always ruled. That was what the people understood. That was what they demanded. And if, like the tsar, they were overthrown, it only meant they were too weak for the position.
That was the Russian way. It created strength where there would otherwise be only weakness and humiliation, but it also meant men like Medvedev were necessary.