by Saul Herzog
The president shook his head. He looked closely at Medvedev, trying to gauge if this had been some sort of willful defiance, or if he genuinely thought this was what had been asked of him.
“What did you tell Ying?”
“I said that if he makes a promise to Moscow, he better keep it.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then his daughter will have a very fruitful career in the red light district under my personal supervision.”
The president let out a long sigh. His heart was pounding in his chest, but he couldn’t show that to Medvedev. Not now. This plan was happening, the force was committed, and for the duration of the battle, he couldn’t afford to flinch even for a second.
“You’ve raised the stakes,” he said. “The Chinese aren’t going to let us get away with this.”
“They’ll forgive us if they emerge with the world knowing America is no longer top dog.”
“If anything goes wrong,” the president said.
“Sir,” Medvedev said. “With all due respect, I would rather have the Chinese jumpy, worrying about this little girl, than looking for a way to fuck us.”
The president leaned back in his chair. This had the potential to go seriously wrong. They needed the Chinese. They couldn’t pull this off alone.
Medvedev was right. It was the only way. It was too big to trust Ying without leverage like this.
And when the girl was returned, the leadership in Beijing would be pragmatic. They’d make Ying swallow it.
They were committed then. Both nations.
Both embassies were going to be attacked simultaneously.
He needed something to calm his nerves. He opened the humidor on his desk and pulled out two thick Cohiba Robustos.
He cut them and handed one to Medvedev.
“That still leaves the problem of the Americans,” he said, lighting his cigar. His hand quivered ever so slightly as he held the flame, and to hide it, he leaned forward and gave Medvedev the lighter rather than lighting it for him.
“When these two embassies go up,” Medvedev said, rolling the cigar between his thumb and forefinger, examining it as if he was going to be asked to pay for it, “America will have two options.”
“Either they’ll declare war, or they won’t,” the president said.
“And you’re worried they’ll go to war,” Medvedev said.
“If they go to war with us, Mikhail, they will win.”
“But they won’t do it, sir. Not with us and the Chinese simultaneously.”
“You don’t know that,” the president said.
“You think I’m mentally deficient,” Medvedev said, “but I know this. I know self-interest. I know how people act when their back is against the wall. The Americans will not go to war over this.”
“They won’t have a choice,” the president said. “They’ve been number one for so long, their prestige, their honor will be at stake.”
“The Americans won’t go to war over two buildings,” Medvedev said.
“They’re not just two buildings, Mikhail. They’re the symbols of US power, of US hegemony, of the entire post-war global order. These two buildings prove America won the Cold War.”
“It’s two buildings,” Medvedev said again.
The president sucked on his cigar and blew out a long cloud of smoke. He shook his head.
“There’s no point making this attack more provocative than it needs to be,” he said.
Mikhail was lighting his cigar. He looked up.
“The whole thing is an act of provocation, sir.”
“Mikhail, I want to make sure this doesn’t lead to an all-out response,” the president said.
“You don’t trust my judgment?”
“Not when the stakes are this high,” the president said. “We need to guarantee they don’t go to war over their honor. We need to give them an out. A way to save face when they fail to stand up to us.”
“But the whole point of this is to make them lose face.”
“We’ll still do that, but politically, we have to give them an out. Otherwise, they’ll call our bluff. I fucking know it, Mikhail.”
Medvedev shrugged. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“We make these look like terrorist attacks. You tell Ying the same thing.”
“Everyone will know we were behind them,” Medvedev said.
The president smiled. “Exactly,” he said. “They’ll know that, and we’ll know it, and the public around the world will know it, but officially, we’ll all say it was terrorists and that we’re cooperating and that’s how they’ll shy away from war.”
Medvedev shrugged. “All right,” he said. “If it makes you feel better.”
“It does make me feel better,” the president said curtly.
“I suppose,” Medvedev said, “if the American president has to choose between blaming the attacks on terrorists, or admitting he’s too afraid to stand up to us and the Chinese, there’s no question which way he’ll go.”
“And the world,” the president said, “will still know America backed down. Their dominance will be over. The age of American hegemony will be finished.”
Medvedev leaned forward and tapped his cigar on the gold ashtray.
“I’d say that calls for celebration,” he said.
“Not so fast,” the president said. His mind was racing through all the ways this could still go wrong. “If two simultaneous attacks are being planned in Moscow and Beijing, the Americans will find out.”
“Sir,” Medvedev said. “I’m handling the preparations personally. This is not going to be leaked.”
“They just got that Mission Data Repository on line. I don’t want to risk the NSA picking up on chatter.”
Medvedev scoffed. “A computer is not going to be able to prevent this,” he said.
“If the US finds out about these attacks before they go off, this entire thing goes off the rails,” the president said. “The Chinese will bail. We’ll be left holding the bag by ourselves.”
“All right,” Medvedev said. “How do you propose we prevent that?”
The president picked up the photo of Ying’s daughter again.
“The new NSA director,” he said. “She also has a daughter.”
20
Sergey Sergeyevich was the Russian equivalent of a linebacker. At six feet eight inches, and a weight somewhere in the three-hundreds, he wasn’t the type of man anyone wanted to run into. It wasn’t all muscle, at least not these days. He was a man with appetites, and they’d started to show, but he’d been an athlete in his day.
He’d started out in ice hockey, moved on to wrestling, but found his true calling in competitive weight lifting.
He even tried out for the 1980 Russian Olympic team. The games were held in Moscow that year, and Sergey failed to qualify when his trainer set his opening snatch weight too high. Sergey couldn’t lift it, and since it was his opening lift, it meant his final score was zero.
His father beat him with a crowbar for the disgrace of it.
A week later, the trainer’s body was found in the Moskva River.
Sergey spent the next twenty years as a metallurgical worker, rising to the rank of foreman in Moscow’s Sickle and Hammer plant. He oversaw the electric foundry workshop and turned out tram cars for cities across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
When the plant shut down, he got a job as a security guard for a man whose prospects were on the rise. That man’s name was Mikhail Medvedev, and he was one of the few people in the city who had a size to match Sergey’s.
When the two rode around together, they drove a specially modified Mercedes G-Class. The roof had been heightened, the chairs customized, and together, they weighed so much that the entire suspension system had to be ripped out and replaced.
Sergey was sitting in the Mercedes now, waiting outside the Lyublino district medical center, watching children ice skating in the park across the street.
He saw G
enadi Surkov come out the front door of the hospital with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
“Genadi,” he called out. “Genadi Surkov.”
Genadi froze. “Sergey,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“Relax, Genadi. I’m just here to give you a ride.”
“A ride where?” Genadi said.
He was scared, as he should be. Their boss wasn’t in the habit of arranging rides for people, especially when they failed their missions, and Genadi knew that as well as anybody.
“Just get in the car, Genadi.”
Genadi looked around the parking lot. There were a few cars but no other people.
Sergey could already tell there was going to be trouble. Genadi was a trained assassin. He wasn’t going to make this easy.
“Either you come in peacefully,” Sergey said, “or I bring you in.”
Genadi’s arm was in a sling. He was fit, athletic, a lot faster on his feet than Sergey, even with the injury. He was also unarmed. Sergey knew because this medical center used metal detectors.
Sergey waited for it, and as Genadi made to run, he pulled his gun from inside his coat and fired three times. Genadi was faster than he’d expected and somehow managed to dodge the bullets and leap behind a low wall for cover.
Sergey watched the wall, but Genadi didn’t reappear.
“Fuck,” he muttered. He hated it when people made him run.
He got back in the Mercedes and swung a u-turn in front of the hospital entrance. He drove along the length of the wall, picking up speed as he approached the edge of the parking lot, then jammed the brakes as he swerved around the wall, blocking the path. As he did so, Genadi leaped across the hood of the car and out of the parking lot into the street.
Sergey opened his window and got another few shots off. Windows smashed, cars swerved, but Genadi kept running.
Sergey put his foot down and crashed through the parking barrier into the street. He accelerated toward Genadi, forcing traffic to swerve out of his way, and tried to hit him as he ran.
Genadi saw him coming and slipped through the gap between some parked cars. He continued to run along the sidewalk, knocking people out of his way, and Sergey followed in the street, the parked cars blocking him from getting a clear shot.
Genadi turned and entered a park, and Sergey drove up onto the sidewalk and through the pedestrian gates, knocking over a garbage can.
Once in the park, Genadi made his way for a treed area where the large Mercedes would have trouble following him.
Sergey floored it, the powerful engine kicking in and catching up to Genadi in seconds and ramming him from behind at forty miles per hour.
Genadi flew up over the hood and hit the windshield hard, cracking it. Sergey jammed the brakes, and Genadi fell off the front of the car onto the ground.
Sergey opened the door and stepped out.
“I told you to come peaceful.”
Genadi rolled on the ground in pain.
Sergey pulled him up by the collar and hit him hard with a single punch to the face. Genadi swung his leg and caught Sergey with a sharp kick to the back of the knee. Sergey’s leg collapsed, and he fell to one knee. The grass stained the tan slacks he was wearing, and he swung around and hit Genadi on the chin with another punch. He pulled his gun from his coat and smacked Genadi with it, over and over, until his face began to give way to a mush of flesh and blood that was scarcely recognizable.
Sergey didn’t stop until he was out of breath. He winced when he saw what he’d done. He looked around the park. There were people everywhere, staring in horror at the scene.
He picked up Genadi’s lifeless body and dragged him to the vehicle, loading him into the backseat. He checked for a pulse, and to his surprise, Genadi was still alive. He secured his wrists with a cable tie and slammed the door.
When he got to the park gate, he pulled his GRU credentials and told the horrified crowd to get out of his way.
“Police business,” he grunted hoarsely as he drove past them.
Next to the park was a wide boulevard lined with cheap, concrete high-rises. He took it south toward the river and turned into the industrial area in Brateyevo. The land there was all scrub, and he pulled into an abandoned parking lot by the river.
He stopped the car and pulled Genadi out of the back seat by the ankles, letting his head knock the floor of the car and then the concrete pavement with two thuds.
He pulled him a little further from the car so the spatter wouldn’t get on it, then took out his gun and put a bullet in Genadi’s forehead.
Looking down at it, still breathless from his exertion, he spat on the corpse.
He dragged it to the edge of the river. The icy water flowed by fast, and Sergey rolled the body into it, not bothering to do anything to weigh it down.
Then he went back to the car and, cursing, wiped the blood from the upholstery on the backseat.
21
“Mr. President,” Sandra said, picking up the phone.
“Sandra, how are you?”
She was sitting in her new office at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Outside was a view of the National Vigilance Park, a memorial to the downed spy pilots during the Cold War. It contained several aircraft, a U-8D Seminole, a Hercules C-130, a Navy Skywarrior, propped up on concrete plinths like statues. Beyond the park, the traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway flowed smoothly.
“I’m very well, sir,” she said.
“Settling into the new role?”
“Absolutely.”
“I hope they’re not treating you too badly.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“And the move? Your daughter’s settling in?”
“It’s a process, sir. She’s still getting used to the security protocols. We both are, to be honest.”
“I understand completely,” the president said. “After the election, it took four months for the First Lady to move the kids to Washington. ‘Security be damned,’ she told me. ‘We’re not pulling the kids from school midway through the year.’”
Sandra laughed politely.
“If I may, sir,” she said, “I’d like to thank you for stepping in during the confirmation process.”
“Your record warrants it,” he said. “We just built the biggest computer in the world, and there’s no one better qualified to run it than you.”
“Well, thank you, sir. Your confidence is the only thing keeping me going right now.”
“Well,” he said, moving on to the topic he wished to broach, “I wanted to tell you that someone’s going to be reaching out to you today.”
“Who’s that, sir?”
“Levi Roth.”
“CIA Director Roth?”
“The one and only.”
“I saw him a few times on TV last week,” she said. “His confirmation hearings were even more heated than mine.”
“Well, he’s a controversial figure.”
“I saw that.”
“Real old school.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He likes his spies to be spies.”
“As he should, sir.”
“Not to say he doesn’t believe in what you’re doing, Sandra. He’s one hundred percent behind your appointment. He views your work as essential.”
“Very glad to hear it, sir.”
“With the two of you heading things up, we’re really going to give our enemies something to worry about,” the president said.
“We’ll knock ‘em dead, sir.”
The president laughed.
“Not literally,” she added.
“Knock them dead all you want, Sandra. You have my personal seal of approval.”
President Ingram Montgomery had always had a rebellious streak. As a senator, he’d gotten into more than his share of trouble. The recent shakeup of the intelligence agencies was only his latest gambit.
“Sir,” she said, “would you mind telling me why Roth is calling?”
“Oh, he�
��s not calling, my dear. He’s stopping by.”
“In person?”
“In an hour.”
Sandra glanced at the clock on her wall. “An hour?” she said.
Roth was one of the most influential figures in American intelligence during the last thirty years. He’d had the ear of presidents for decades. Meeting him was intimidating.
“He wants to talk about one of his specialists.”
“I see.”
“But don’t worry,” the president said. “I’m sending you a file now. It will level the playing field.”
“Level the playing field?”
“Read it before he arrives.”
The president hung up, and Sandra checked her inbox. There it was, a classified file sent directly from the oval office.
Internal Memo:
Levi Roth
Special Operations Group
She read the file, which explained that the Russians had just infiltrated one of the most clandestine and secretive operations in CIA history.
Levi Roth had been running a Top Secret team known as the Special Operations Group out of Langley.
The Group was responsible for some of the most sensitive and high-profile assassinations ever attempted, and its success rate was unprecedented. Its assassins were the president’s secret weapon, giving him a critical third option when diplomacy failed, and military action was impossible. They’d allowed the US to avoid wars, neutralize enemies, and at times, realign entire nations that were otherwise on fatal trajectories.
Like everyone in the intelligence community, Sandra had heard the rumors about Roth. According to agency lore, he’d been offered the directorship so many times that a box had been set aside in the Langley archive building solely for his rejection letters.
She saw now the real reason he’d never stepped up to the role.
His work with the Group was so sensitive that any attention his promotion attracted would put the lives of his assets at risk.
He’d practically written the book on twenty-first-century espionage, and Sandra now learned that his small Group, working out of the sixth floor of the CIA’s headquarter building at Langley, was legendary among those at the very top echelon of US military leadership.