The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  Such men were distasteful. They were ugly.

  But they were a fact of life.

  There was dirty work to be done, and someone had to do it.

  Men like Medvedev culled the herd, took out rising threats, made it impossible for anyone to grow strong enough to challenge the president.

  In the process, they became dangerous themselves, but that was a necessary evil. Unavoidable.

  The oligarchy was a nest of vipers, and Medvedev was the biggest among them. He was a vicious dog that would one day bite the hand of his master. The president knew that, and watched carefully for the day he had to bring him outside and shoot him like the dog he was.

  A servant arrived with an ice bucket, and Vladimir picked up two perfect cubes with the tongs and dropped them in his glass.

  He heard vehicles outside and went to the window. A bodyguard stood outside, his back turned, watching over the snow-covered lawn of the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential estate.

  Six armored cars were coming down the driveway, preceded by federal police cruisers, their lights flashing.

  It was Medvedev’s convoy.

  The dog had finally arrived.

  18

  Sandra Shrader had been NSA director precisely one week and still wasn’t sure she was up to the job. On a technical level, she was the best of the best, but the politics, the intrigues, the senate hearings, that was a world she had no knowledge of. The president had gone to bat for her, coming out strongly in support of her confirmation, but that didn’t stop the nagging doubts in the back of her mind.

  The NSA was responsible for overseeing the collection of a truly staggering amount of data, more than any other organization on the planet, and interpreting it felt at times like trying to divine the future from tea leaves.

  Those at the top of the intelligence community were now convinced that the next major attack against the United States could be perfectly foreseen in the terabytes of data gathered by the NSA every second.

  But Sandra knew the challenge wasn’t in getting enough data, but making sense of it.

  The agency had just completed construction of the Mission Data Repository in the Utah desert, and Sandra knew expectations were sky-high. The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee just wrote an op-ed for The Times, in which he said that given the nation’s upgraded data gathering abilities, a repeat of 9/11 was now inconceivable.

  Sandra almost threw up when she saw it.

  A server farm in Utah was going to do precisely nothing to stop a terrorist attack. But the politicians were too star-struck by all the zeroes in their technical reports to use their own common sense. They saw that their shiny new facility was capable of processing more than twelve exabytes of data, more data than had yet been created in all of human history, and thought it was going to magically make all their problems disappear.

  And it did give them power.

  They could now track everything. Every swipe, click, tap, keystroke, camera movement, weather development, transaction, timestamp, price change, radar blip, flight path, truck route, cab ride, facial recognition. Everything.

  When a terrorist attack did happen, seeing the prelude, the build-up, the warning signs, would be all too easy. Money moved from this account to that. Plane tickets were purchased by so and so on this date. Explosives landed at this port on this vessel in this container.

  Everything had a number. Everything had a row in a database.

  But before the attack, when it was all just raw data racking up like the number on the national debt clock in New York, who could make sense of it?

  That was Sandra Shrader’s job. Seven days ago, after a fiercely contested confirmation hearing, she’d stood in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised her right hand, and sworn an oath to the country and to God that she would perform her role truthfully and faithfully.

  It still felt surreal.

  She’d never been overly ambitious. She’d gone into intelligence work because the president asked her.

  Before working for the government, she’d developed one of the most commercially valuable algorithms of all time. It was a mathematical equation that transformed a small Silicon Valley upstart into a company worth over a trillion dollars.

  She was good with numbers, not people and politics. She watched the news like a normal person, but the world of espionage or foreign intrigue was still new to her. Her staff had spent the months leading up to her confirmation giving her a crash course in world politics. They’d succeeded in showing her that essentially anyone in the world was a threat to the United States and that she should therefore use the NSA to watch everything, everywhere, all the time.

  A job that was easier said than done.

  But at least that was a language she understood. As far as she was concerned, her job was pure data analysis, divorced from what the numbers actually stood for.

  Making sense of the data, adding the names, the faces, the motives, seeing the specifics, that was the CIA’s job.

  She wasn’t one of those institutional warriors who wanted to destroy the CIA, although she knew some of her colleagues felt that way. In her view, it was the CIA who got the raw deal. They were the ones who had to strap guns to their waists and get on airplanes. They were the ones who said goodbye to their families when they went to work, not knowing if they’d ever come home.

  The NSA was more of a digital weather forecaster, working from the safety of a government office, giving warning of brewing storms, trying to determine exactly where they would make landfall, but leaving the job of responding to others.

  If the NSA was the National Weather Center, the CIA was the Coast Guard, the ones who would actually get wet.

  And Sandra was content to keep things that way.

  It was five AM, and she was staring at the vaulted, oak ceiling above the enormous bed in the master suite of her new, six-bed, seven-bath, colonial home in Annapolis, Maryland. She’d been shocked when she saw how high home prices were in the area. Like everyone else in the tech industry, she’d thought nothing could compare to San Francisco’s prices.

  But Annapolis was a place where the charm of the colonial era combined perfectly with proximity to Washington. Throw in the prestige of the Naval Academy, the best yacht clubs in the world, and some of the most exclusive golf courses in the country, and you had yourself a real little enclave.

  Sandra went to the gym in the basement and spent forty minutes on the treadmill, flicking through cable news channels, half paying attention to the latest round of disasters that kept the twenty-four-hour news cycle churning.

  If there was one thing her prep for the senate hearings taught her, it was that the world was changing fast. The prevailing world order was being completely upended.

  Not everyone in Washington saw it yet, but the counter-insurgency footing US forces had been on since 9/11 was out of date. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, America emerged as the world’s last remaining superpower. The nation’s military strategists looked at the world and genuinely weren’t sure where to turn. The two Boeing 767’s that flew into the World Trade Center on a September morning in 2001 gave them their answer.

  For the next two decades, America saw the primary threats to its security coming from terrorist organizations, not other powerful nations. The Pentagon directed research into countering asymmetrical threats, attacks by fanatical jihadists, and took its eye off the rising military might of its main rivals.

  Russia and China had taken advantage of the intervening years to build their militaries, so that today, they posed a far greater challenge to America’s long-term security than Islamic terrorist cells ever did.

  The nation was transitioning from a position of unrivaled global power to being forced to compete with a rising China and a resurgent Russia.

  The CIA’s new director, Levi Roth, was making waves by reorienting the intelligence community to this new superpower footing. Many in the Pentagon did not appreciate being told they’d squandered the last tw
enty years chasing bogeymen in the Afghan mountains when they should have been watching China. But as far as Sandra could tell, Roth was correct. The future threat came from Moscow and Beijing, not caves in the Hindu Kush.

  She showered and went to the kitchen, where her new automatic coffee maker had just finished brewing a pot of rich dark roast, supposedly customized to all her preferences. She poured herself a cup and took a sip. It tasted the same as every other cup of coffee she’d ever had.

  She went to her office and opened the safe in the wall and removed a blue file. In red ink, stenciled by hand on the cover, just like in the movies, were the words Top Secret.

  It had been sent the night before by Roth himself and was drafted by a young specialist named Laurel Everlane.

  Roth had highlighted a section stating that by 2030, the US would no longer be able to rely on the presumption of overwhelming military might to sway its negotiations with rivals.

  It said that while Russia had lost its superpower status in the early nineties, it was well on its way to reclaiming that position. Decades of investment in capabilities aimed solely at harrying American influence in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea, the Baltic, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, were paying off. At the same time, it was expected to continue acting as a rogue state, refusing to play by the rules of the international community, and interfering in American domestic affairs.

  While it was not too late to contain Russia, the report regarded China as a power that the US would ultimately be unable to contain.

  China had already broken out of its role as a regional power, and the report found that over the coming years, American influence in the Far East would steadily recede as China continued its blistering growth. In strategically contested flashpoints like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, America would eventually have to come to a new position, in which China would be able to demand more of what it wanted.

  Sandra noticed that the title of the next section had been changed. Previously, it read:

  The USA vs. China

  A Statistical Comparison

  Now it read:

  Battle Scenarios China could Win

  It was a dramatic headline, and as she sipped her coffee, she wondered where this Laurel Everlane had come up with the balls to write such a report.

  There were still powerful voices in the Pentagon who would destroy the career of anyone who dared suggest America could lose a war. Sandra knew they would come down particularly hard on a woman. They would bury her career beneath a mountain of vitriol and shit, making her unhirable anywhere in Washington for the rest of her life.

  The report went on to spell out exactly how China might win a hot war in certain contained scenarios. Taiwan was the one that jumped out at Sandra.

  Ever since the Carter administration, the American position on Taiwan had been that if China made any move to retake it, America would respond with force.

  In 1996, the last time China seriously tested this commitment, President Clinton sent the largest naval force since the Vietnam war into the Taiwan Strait. Two carrier groups, Nimitz and Independence, entered the hundred-mile stretch of water that separated Taiwan from mainland China.

  The Chinese had absolutely no way of standing up to such an overwhelming show of force and had to stand down.

  The crisis garnered relatively little attention in the US, but in China, it was seminal. China had been humiliated by foreign powers for centuries. Its entire national trajectory since the end of the civil war in 1949 had been one long road to regaining international respect. Backing down to Clinton’s two carrier groups was a humiliation the Beijing government vowed never to repeat.

  In the years since, a huge portion of China’s military investment had been directed toward strengthening its position in a potential Taiwan Strait conflict. Demonstrating supremacy over that small stretch of water, which was right on its doorstep, and had the major cities of Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Fuzhou on its coast, was the first step toward claiming a position of global military power.

  It became the litmus test of China’s military rise. The day it could beat the Americans in the strait would be the day it rose to superpower status.

  Sandra had to admit, the numbers spoke for themselves.

  Fourteen hundred ballistic missiles.

  Eight hundred cruise missiles.

  All with sufficient range to hit every US base in the region.

  China’s missile capability could render Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, the most important American base region, unusable for the entirety of a four-month conflict.

  That meant, despite US fifth-generation fighters being superior to their Chinese counterparts in every respect, the US would be unable to field them in sufficient number to achieve air supremacy.

  Over China itself, the prospect of air supremacy was slimmer still. In 1996, the US had an airspace penetration capability that allowed it to fly jets over mainland China with minimal risk of loss. Enormous upgrades to the Chinese surface-to-air missile system meant that even with American fighters’ enhanced stealth capability, that was no longer possible.

  While the US was still capable of taking out all forty of China’s in-range airbases with long-range missiles, and that would eventually allow it to exert dominance in the airspace above the strait, the undeniable fact was that in a fight over the Taiwan Strait, America’s current options were radically different to what they’d been for President Clinton.

  America would still win.

  But it would take months.

  And it would cost lives.

  American jets would be shot out of the sky, ships would be lost, and bases would be destroyed.

  It would have more in common with the Vietnam war, where American forces were suffering such horrendous losses that the nation’s leadership and people were genuinely rattled, than with anything that happened after 9/11.

  Sandra finished her coffee and put the report in her briefcase. Then she went to the window and checked the driveway. Having a secret service detail was something she still wasn’t used to, and waiting for the driver to show up in the morning made her feel like a kid waiting for the school bus.

  The black Cadillac sedan was out there, the driver standing next to it, and she gave him a brief wave. He nodded awkwardly.

  “Lizzie,” she called out, making her way to the bottom of the staircase, “the driver is here.”

  Her fourteen-year-old daughter called down from her bedroom, “I told you I’d walk.”

  It was January, but it was a nice morning.

  In San Francisco, Sandra would have had no difficulty allowing Lizzie to walk the few blocks to school. Now, she wasn’t even sure it was allowed. She made a mental note to find out the full security protocols for her daughter.

  Sandra was a single mother. Her husband had died of a rare form of cancer when Lizzie was four. Her daughter’s wellbeing had been her only concern when the president offered her the job. She would have to uproot and move across the country. A new school. New town. New friends.

  Thankfully, it appeared as if Lizzie had made a few friends.

  She went back to the kitchen and poured Lizzie a bowl of Cheerios. They looked so good she put her diet aside and poured herself a bowl too.

  When Lizzie stepped in, Sandra looked up at a daughter whose appearance was decidedly more mature than expected.

  “Are you wearing makeup?” she said.

  “Mom,” Lizzie said as if the question was an affront to her pride.

  “Lizzie, you’re fourteen. Is it even allowed?”

  “All the girls wear it here,” Lizzie said. Sandra was skeptical, and Lizzie added, “It’s true, mom. Girls are different here. They’re more worldly.”

  Sandra doubted that, but she didn’t have time to argue about it this morning. She had a full schedule when she got to the office, including a call with the president.

  “Eat up,” she said. “We’re sharing a ride.”

  “I said I’m going to walk.”
<
br />   Sandra sighed. “Are you walking with someone?”

  “Yes, Lydia.”

  “Who’s Lydia?”

  “A friend.”

  Sandra nodded. “You can walk today, but I’m going to have to find out what the rules are with the Secret Service. You know we have to obey certain safety protocols now.”

  Lizzie nodded.

  Sandra was proud of her daughter. She’d done everything asked of her without complaint.

  Lizzie shoveled her cereal into her mouth and picked up the bowl to slurp down the last of the milk.

  “I told you that’s unladylike,” Sandra said.

  Lizzie put down the bowl and leaped from her stool. Her phone beeped, and she glanced at the screen.

  “Lydia’s here,” she said.

  “What about my kiss,” Sandra said.

  Lizzie came back and kissed her mother.

  “Don’t forget your coat,” Sandra said.

  Lizzie left by the front door, eyeing the Secret Service agent as she walked by. He gave her the same official-looking nod he’d given Sandra.

  Sandra watched Lizzie go down the path to the fence and tried to see the girl she was meeting, but the hedge blocked her view.

  She put on her own thick coat, January in Maryland was still something she was getting used to, grabbed her briefcase, and stepped out to the government-issue sedan in her driveway.

  “Fort Meade?” the driver said when he got in.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  19

  The president felt a shiver run down his spine as he watched Medvedev step out of his car. He dreaded these tête-à-têtes. Just the sight of the man gave him the creeps.

  Mikhail Medvedev was known inside the depths of the Kremlin’s national security apparatus by two nicknames. To most, he was the Polar Bear. He was seven feet tall, had a nose like a snout, and his skin and hair were white as the driven snow. That, combined with the fact that his name was derived from the Russian word for bear, made it inevitable.