The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  Larissa nodded. She paid the fare, tipping an extra thousand rubles, and walked through the lobby without making eye contact with anyone.

  She’d refused to allow herself to think of what might be happening to Lance, and once she was in the elevator, the tension in her chest made it difficult to breathe.

  She stepped out of the elevator and got to the door of the room before realizing she didn’t have a key.

  That was the last straw. She burst into tears.

  And then the door opened.

  45

  “There’s blood on your face,” Larissa said.

  Lance wiped his mouth with his sleeve, missing the blood, and let her into the room.

  She sat on the bed and kept crying. She couldn’t stop.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Lance said to her.

  She looked up at him. There wasn’t just blood on his face. It was on his hands, his shirt, spattered across his pants.

  “What did you do to those police?” she said.

  “They weren’t police.”

  She burst into another round of tears and Lance put his hand on her shoulder. He sat on the bed and let her rest her head on his shoulder. They sat like that, awkwardly, neither speaking, until she stopped crying.

  Lance got up and put on the kettle.

  “Are we sleeping here?” Larissa said.

  Lance didn’t look too happy at that prospect, but he could tell Larissa needed him to say yes. “We can stay a few hours,” he said. “Then we need to go. We’re too close to the embassy.”

  There was only the one bed, and Larissa said, “I can take the couch.”

  Lance smiled. He finished making the tea while she washed off in the bathroom. When she came back out, she felt more like herself.

  Lance handed her a cup.

  “This is good,” she said, sipping the tea.

  Lance was standing by the window, peering through the curtain. She could tell he was nervous. Police were still swarming outside, mopping up the dregs of the protest.

  They’d gone in and out of the hotel too many times.

  He wanted to move.

  But she needed time.

  “You should shower,” she said.

  He looked at himself in the mirror.

  “You should try to sleep,” he said.

  “Won’t you sleep too?”

  He shook his head.

  He was still on the clock, still alert. He wouldn’t stop until he knew where the threat to the embassy was coming from and had prevented it.

  “Do you think they’ll evacuate the embassy?” she said.

  Lance shrugged. “You know Americans,” he said. “We don’t like to back down from a fight.”

  “You could call it a tactical withdrawal,” Larissa said.

  Lance sighed. He wasn’t happy. Despite the riot, and one of the buildings catching fire, and his attempts to warn embassy security of the threat, nothing had been done. No evacuation had been ordered.

  He went into the bathroom and took off his shirt. He didn’t shut the door. He washed at the sink and toweled off.

  “You know how long that embassy’s been there?” he said.

  Larissa got up and went to the window. She looked out at it across the street. The floodlights along its perimeter were lit up, on high alert, and security guards were making a show of force, manning the towers overlooking the walls and doing patrols.

  The older buildings in the compound were from the nineteenth century. She had no idea how long they’d been part of the American embassy.

  She shook her head.

  “The older building,” Lance said. “The US took it over in 1953.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Lance was tired. She could tell he needed to sleep.

  “Stalin was still alive in 1953,” Lance said.

  Larissa nodded. It was, in fact, the year Stalin died.

  “That’s how long that compound has stood as the symbol of an American presence in this city.”

  “We should get some rest,” she said.

  “It’s never been evacuated,” Lance said. “Not once, in all that time. Not at the height of the Cold War, when the generals literally had their fingers on the nuclear launch buttons.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “So evacuating it, leaving it empty, for the first time…”.

  “It would be a statement,” Larissa said.

  “Let’s just say, it would be difficult to paint that as a tactical withdrawal,” Lance said.

  “It would have ramifications,” Larissa said.

  Lance shook his head. “Do you remember the first time you heard that America had won the Cold War?”

  Larissa shrugged. “That wasn’t exactly the way we looked at things.”

  “But it was clear, right? At some point? America beat the USSR, and the Cold War was over.”

  “I guess so,” Larissa said.

  “But the US and the USSR never fought.”

  “Not openly.”

  “So how could it be said that one side won?”

  “The American economy was stronger. It provided a higher standard of living.”

  “Sure,” Lance said, “but that was as true in Stalin’s time as it was in Yeltsin’s.”

  “Right,” Larissa said.

  She wanted to stop talking. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to get away from all this and never think about any of it again.

  But Lance seemed to need her to listen, like he needed to say these things out loud.

  “The reason America won the Cold War,” Lance said, “is because everybody, in Russia and America and around the world, believed they’d won.”

  “Right,” Larissa said.

  “It was about perceptions.”

  Larissa nodded. She poured herself more tea and sat on the windowsill.

  “Perception is everything. If people think you’re strong, you’re strong. If they think you won a war, you won the war.”

  “And if they see you evacuating the Moscow embassy?”

  “If they see you pulling out of a post like the Moscow embassy, well, maybe they start to rethink how powerful you are.”

  Larissa looked down at the embassy gate. She remembered how it had been a few hours earlier. That seemed like a lifetime ago. The police had completely cleared the area, and embassy staff were arriving for work as if none of it had happened. Two police cars, directing traffic past the gates on the Garden Ring, and a single fire truck in the central courtyard, its lights off, were the only signs of the chaos she’d managed to whip up.

  “They’re not going to evacuate,” Lance said.

  “Because of the perception?”

  “No president wants to be the guy who backed down.”

  “But this is just an evacuation because of a bomb threat.”

  Lance shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s more than that. We don’t know who’s behind this threat. We don’t know the timescale of the threat. We don’t know if the attack is planned in the next day, the next week, the next month.”

  “Surely, a mistaken evacuation would be better than a bombing that killed American embassy workers.”

  “But how long would they keep it empty?”

  Larissa shrugged. Her eyelids were growing heavy. She leaned her forehead against the window and looked down the Garden Ring. Traffic was back to normal, heavy in the morning rush, but moving. A convoy of three large construction trucks was coming down the street.

  Lance lay back on the bed. He’d put his shirt on and was looking up at the ceiling.

  Larissa would have liked to share the bed with him.

  The trucks stopped outside the embassy and signaled to turn.

  The guards approached and spoke to the lead driver.

  “Lance,” she said.

  He looked at her.

  “You need to see this.”

  He looked right into her eyes and, without another word, knew what was about to happen.

  Everythin
g that followed was a blur.

  “Three trucks…” Larissa said.

  And before she finished the words, Lance was on his feet, moving like a cat, pure adrenaline fueling his every instinct.

  “What are you doing?” she said, but he was already gone.

  She looked at the door, open to the corridor, and stared at it as if expecting him to come back.

  Outside, the Russian security guards were waving the trucks into the compound.

  Lance emerged from the hotel, running toward the embassy.

  “Stop,” he yelled. “Stop those trucks.”

  Instead of doing what he said, the guards drew their weapons on Lance.

  Larissa had never seen anything in her life like what happened next. Lance ducked as the guards opened fire, rolling forward on his arm. Bullets sprayed the ground, smashed into vehicles, shattered glass. The guards didn’t care at all about collateral damage.

  Lance, still rolling, somehow managed to pull a handgun and get off a shot. One of the guards fell to the ground.

  Lance stopped behind a car. It took hundreds of bullets, its windows collapsing in sheets. The tires blew, and it dropped on its suspension. Lance waited a few seconds then leaped from behind it, hitting another guard in the forehead with a single shot.

  He took cover behind another vehicle, ran to the far side, and fired two more bullets before ducking. He repeated the maneuver, and the four remaining guards were on the ground.

  Lance then leaped over the hood of the car and closed the rest of the distance to the gate.

  The guards Lance had killed were Russian contractors, but as he reached the gates, it was US marines that came at him.

  “I’m CIA,” Lance yelled. “Stop those trucks. They’re loaded with explosives.”

  The marines lowered their weapons and turned to look at the three heavy construction trucks that had just entered the compound. Instinctively, they realized at once he was telling the truth.

  One of the marines started running toward them.

  And then, a blinding flash of light.

  Larissa felt as if she was being sprayed with water. The glass in the window flew into the room as if sucked by a vacuum. She fell backward onto the ground.

  She didn’t know how much time passed then, maybe a single second, maybe thirty. She ran her hands over her body. She was dazed, in shock, but the glass had been coated, and apart from a few cuts, she thought she was all right.

  She tried to stand and almost lost her balance. She wasn’t sure where she was.

  She stumbled in one direction and then another. Cold air came in from the open window. The curtain dangled in the breeze. She went to it and looked out at where the embassy had stood.

  There was nothing left.

  46

  The American Embassy was located inside a ten-acre compound in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. The eight-story glass and steel building, constructed in 2008, included over half a million square feet of office space, making it one of the largest diplomatic missions on the planet.

  As relations continued to deteriorate between the United States and China, it had come under increasingly brazen and sophisticated surveillance measures, unlike anything seen at the Moscow embassy during the worst years of the Cold War.

  The federal government had responded in kind, deploying defensive anti-surveillance measures such as jammers and radio signal blockers. Interior walls had been lined with metallic radio wave reflectors, while the exterior, including the roof, had been coated with an advanced light absorbing compound that made the building appear as a black blob on satellite photos. In addition, an array of nine military-grade geostationary satellites were in permanent orbit above the embassy.

  It meant that, short of Chinese offensive measures to disable the US military satellite system, communication between the embassy and the outside world could not be cut off.

  At Darpa headquarters in Arlington, an entire department spanning four floors had been set up to develop new ways to protect the embassy from Chinese surveillance and ensure its continued operability and usefulness during times of heightened tension with China.

  The reasons for this were simple, and well known to the Chinese. The US government used the Beijing embassy as its command and control center for a wide array of operations that defied the ruling communist regime and undermined its most aggressive international and domestic policies. On a wide variety of fronts, including the harboring of political defectors and dissidents, the protection of American technological superiority and intellectual property, and the deployment of cyberattacks against Chinese corporations and government organizations known to have stolen Western technology, the embassy was ground zero.

  Taiwanese dissidents and Hong Kong separatists called it the Beijing Hilton because of how supportive it was to their efforts. Internet users across the city knew that if they were anywhere near the embassy, they could avoid the government’s Great Firewall and skirt the efforts of official censors.

  The US government’s enormous warehouse at Tianzhu, which benefitted from the same diplomatic immunity as the embassy proper, was used to supply Uighur rebels in Xinjiang, while also smuggling out those most at risk from government crackdowns.

  In recent months, the Chinese had already forced the closure of US consulates in Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shenyang. It was only a matter of time before the remaining consulate in Shanghai was shuttered, leaving the embassy in Beijing as the last American outpost in the entire country.

  When eight trucks rolled into the embassy compound, just after rush hour on the morning in question, all bearing the markings of a local construction company specializing in the installation of luxury swimming pools, only four people on earth knew what they contained. Those were Mikhail Medvedev, Liu Ying, Liu Ying’s Moscow liaison, and a Beijing customs inspector who’d been tasked with loading the trucks.

  Within three hours of the trucks’ arrival at the embassy, all but Medvedev and Liu Ying would be dead, assassinated with a single bullet to the back of the head.

  The embassy’s two thousand personnel, including marines and other military personnel, diplomatic and consular staff, American support staff, and hundreds of carefully screened Chinese support workers, were well aware that the Beijing government was not their friend. They knew they were tolerated, rather than welcomed, in the city.

  They knew that relations between China and the US were at their lowest point since the creation of the modern Chinese state and getting worse by the day.

  But not a soul would have guessed that they were about to be the target of the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in modern Chinese history. There’d been zero indication, either from within the Chinese diplomatic mission or from the constant stream of intelligence reports coming from Langley and Fort Meade, to suggest that there was the slightest risk of an attack.

  The Chinese government was not above acts of aggression against its rivals. Along its disputed border with India in the Himalayas, in Hong Kong, in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, and the Taiwan Strait, it had been increasingly engaging in provocative paramilitary activities that were resulting in real casualties to foreign military personnel. Just two months ago, forty-two Indonesian naval personnel had been killed in a collision with a Chinese submarine inside the Indonesian exclusive economic zone around the Natuna Islands. On the border with India, dozens of troops on both sides had died in a series of increasingly violent clashes. In Hong Kong, eighteen American journalists had been arrested for violating newly enacted national security legislation. Two of the journalists later died while in Chinese custody, with the Chinese claiming they’d succumbed to pre-existing medical conditions. Despite the uproar created by the deaths, none of the other journalists had yet been released. Chinese naval vessels had begun ramming into Vietnamese fishing vessels around the disputed Paracel islands in the South China Sea, killing hundreds of fishermen.

  China was flexing its muscle.

  After decades of r
estraint, it was willing to get a little blood on its hands.

  It was willing to hurt people.

  It was the second most powerful nation on earth, rapidly gaining on the first, and was beginning to act like it.

  The trucks were loaded with a solid white, Chinese-made cyclonite nitramide whose chemical composition was based closely on RDX. It was odorless and tasteless and entirely undetectable by the embassy security system.

  RDX, an organic compound developed by the British during World War Two, was invented for use against German U-Boats that were being built with increasingly thick steel hulls. The British gave the explosive, which was more energetic and explosive than TNT, the codename Research Department Explosive. When it was introduced to the United States military in 1946, they shortened that to RDX.

  The Chinese compound was refined from an exceptionally high grade of RDX known as RDX-II and had a detonation velocity of over nine thousand meters per second. Its RE factor was eight, making it eight times as explosive as TNT.

  When six tons of it exploded simultaneously in the embassy’s central plaza, it created the largest non-industrial explosion on the Chinese mainland since the Second World War.

  The impact of the explosion was instantaneous.

  People within the initial blast radius heard nothing. They saw nothing. They were simply vaporized. The shockwave traveled from the explosion at speeds in excess of Mach twenty, creating temperatures above a thousand degrees Celsius.

  Those further away heard the explosion, the crashing of glass, the screaming of its victims.

  Ten miles away, people heard the blast so loudly that cars pulled over in the streets and stopped traffic. The plume of smoke could be seen from Tianjin and Baoding.

  It would take weeks for the federal government to get an accurate count of the number of casualties. By that time, American permission to operate anywhere on the Chinese mainland would be revoked, signaling the onset of a new Cold War.

  47

  The president tossed in his bed. He’d been short with his wife and regretted it. She was lying next to him now, ostensibly asleep, but he knew she was sulking.