“We have put our past differences behind us, and together we will create the biggest economic market on earth.
“With America’s so-called Asia pivot, and the illegal attack against China’s mainland last year, the Chinese know it is in their interests to accept our friendship and our increased economic cooperation.”
The raven-haired beauty nodded thoughtfully and asked her next question as if it had just come to her organically as a response to Volodin’s last answer, although her questions had been written by her producers beforehand. “Mr. President, how do you feel this development will affect Russia’s relationship with the West? Recent conflicts with NATO and the USA have worried some Russians, who wonder if our economic future might be negatively impacted.”
Volodin looked directly at Molchanova now. “On the contrary, just the opposite is true. America’s domineering role in the world ends in our sphere of influence. They can make a lot of noise, threaten to expand NATO yet again, and they can continue to make threats on the world stage, but the Europeans need our products and services.
“Now that Russia and China have created a new world order, the childish threats of the West will have even less of an effect on us.”
“Mr. President. Do you consider Russia to be a world power?”
Volodin smiled. “No one can deny that the greatest powers of the twentieth century were the United States and the Soviet Union. The fall of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest tragedies of the last century. In my role as leader of Russia, I cannot say more than this without being branded by the West as a communist. This, of course, is a ridiculous accusation, because, frankly, who in modern Russia has had more success in the open markets than me?
“But it is the West that does not understand our history. The economic model was faulty, but the nation was strong. During our drive from command economy to market economy, we hit many patches of ice, but in retrospect, it was the West that was watering the road.”
“Are you saying the West now has less influence on Russia?”
Volodin nodded. “I am saying that exactly. Russia will make decisions based on Russia’s interests, and Russia’s interests alone, but this will be good for our neighbors.”
He smiled into the camera. “A strong Russia will create stability in the region, not discord, and I see it as my role to make Russia strong.”
27
President Ryan began his workday in the Oval Office just after six a.m. He still wasn’t sleeping well at Blair House, so he had developed the habit of getting into work about an hour before normal to make use of the time.
It was eight a.m. now, and Ryan was already dragging. But as difficult as it was to run the highest office in the land with little sleep, Jack did have to admit he was fortunate to fuel himself with some of the best coffee on the planet.
As soon as Mary Pat Foley arrived for their morning meeting, he poured her a cup, along with a second cup of the day for himself, knowing he’d pay a price for the caffeine by the early afternoon.
Just as they were about to get started, the intercom on Ryan’s desk beeped, and his secretary came over the speaker. “Mr. President, AG Murray is here.”
“Send him in, please.”
Attorney General Dan Murray entered the Oval Office with a fast, bouncing gait and excited eyes behind his thick glasses.
Ryan stood up. “You’ve got that look, Dan.”
Murray smiled. “That’s because I have good news. We’ve found the person who poisoned Sergey Golovko.”
“Thank God. Let me hear it.”
Murray said, “Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, I don’t have a hell of a lot of experience in dealing with polonium-poisoning investigations. It turns out there isn’t much out there easier to trace with the right equipment.
“The polonium leaves a trail wherever it goes. It’s called ‘creeping.’ We were able to follow Golovko backward from the White House to his hotel, to the limo he and his group took from Reagan National, then back to Lawrence, Kansas. Every location, every place he sat, everything he touched, all have traces of the isotope on it.
“At the University of Kansas he made a speech and took part in a Q-and-A with students at the Hall Center. His hotel, his rented vehicle, the dais on the stage in the auditorium where he talked, the waiting room, and the bathroom backstage where he got ready—they all have evidence of polonium.”
Murray smiled a little. “And then . . . nothing.”
Ryan cocked his head. “Nothing?”
“Yep. The place where he had breakfast before going to the university. Clean. The commercial aircraft he flew from Dallas to Lawrence. Clean. His hotel in Dallas. Clean. We went all the way through all his other stops on his trip. Every hotel, car, restaurant, airplane. There are no radiation traces anywhere before he went into a meet-and-greet room with students at KU.”
Mary Pat said, “That sounds suspiciously like a dead end.”
“You might think so, but we picked up the trail again. We found a glass in the kitchen of the cafeteria on campus that basically glowed in the dark, even though it’s been washed since the event. Witnesses said Golovko drank a Sprite while onstage—we think that was his glass.
“We got a list of the people who worked in the cafeteria during that shift, and we were going to start interviewing them one by one, but they have an employee locker room, so we started there, instead. We tested the lockers, and got a hit on one, both inside and out. It belongs to a twenty-one-year-old student, the same person who gave the drink to Golovko before he went onstage.”
“The student, don’t tell me he is Russian.”
“It’s a she, and she’s not Russian. She’s Venezuelan.”
“Oh, boy,” said Ryan. Venezuela was a close ally with Russia. If they sent an intelligence agent into the United States for an assassination, it would only further hurt U.S.–Venezuelan relations, which were already bad enough.
Murray said, “We were going to put a surveillance package on her, to build an investigation, but we really need to know there isn’t any more polonium out there that might expose others to danger. My experts tell me they think she’s handled it so extensively and haphazardly she probably only has weeks to live, but if she’s got more of it than what she put in Sergey’s drink, then we need to find it and throw it in a lead box asap.”
Jack sighed. “Pick her up.” It really wasn’t a tough call to make, though it was frustrating to think they might miss an opportunity to film her meeting with a Russian intelligence agent.
Mary Pat asked, “What do you know about her?”
“Her name is Felicia Rodríguez. She has been living in Kansas since she was fifteen years old. She’s been back to see her grandparents a few times in Caracas, but not for any length of time. She doesn’t seem to be an active intelligence agent, or even affiliated with the ruling power in Venezuela.”
Jack said, “You can’t possibly think she was unwitting in this.”
“She obviously knew she was spiking Golovko’s beverage, but she might have been duped somehow. My experts tell me there are so many traces of polonium-210 in her locker, they think she had no idea what she was dealing with. Maybe she thought she was slipping him a roofie.”
“A roofie?”
“Yeah. You know, to slur his speech, make him look senile and out of it. The Cubans have done this sort of thing to marginalize their adversaries.”
“That’s true,” Mary Pat agreed.
Murray stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll make the call to have her arrested. They will get her to the hospital and put her in quarantine.” Murray added, “Where she will be well guarded, obviously.”
As Murray left the Oval Office, Ryan’s secretary announced the arrival of Robert Burgess, secretary of defense, along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mark Jorgensen. They were here for the morning meeting, but immediately Ryan could see something even more pressing was on their minds as they entered.
�
��What’s up?”
Burgess said, “Russia’s defense minister announced this morning that a series of war games are starting, today, in the Black Sea. Within an hour of his announcement, virtually the entire Black Sea fleet started mobilizing. Two dozen ships raised anchor and moved out of the port of Sevastopol.”
“They are calling this just a run-of-the-mill military exercise?”
“That’s right.”
“How threatening is it?”
“The fact that it was unannounced is unsettling, to say the least. It looks like it has been in the works, but that’s impossible to know. The Russians’ agreement with Ukraine states that military exercises with fewer than seven thousand participants do not have to be scheduled in advance.”
“Are they operating within those numbers?”
“Doubtful. There are thirty-six warships involved, and that is fewer than seven-K sailors, but there are also an unknown number of land-based aircraft in the exercise. On top of that, they’ve announced the drills will include members of paratroopers, GRU Spetsnaz, and Marines.”
Jorgensen said, “Just eyeballing the announcement, sir, I put the number around twenty-five thousand, minimum.”
“And this is on top of the troops they have already moved into Belarus?”
“Yes, and the forces on Russia’s western border.”
Ryan rubbed the bridge of his nose. “They are going to invade, aren’t they?”
Burgess said, “It sure looks like it. Volodin rattles his saber a lot, but this is a level of mobilization we haven’t seen. Even his attack of Estonia didn’t have these numbers attached to it.”
Ryan said, “The Crimea is a bigger prize.”
“Indeed it is.”
“What are our options?”
“Limited.”
“Limited as in strongly-worded-letter limited, or limited in some other way?”
Burgess said, “Militarily, not much we can do. We have a few boats in the Black Sea, but not enough to intimidate or impact their fleet operations. As far as diplomatic options, I guess that’s a question for Adler.”
Ryan nodded. He would need to confer with Scott Adler as soon as Scott got back to Washington.
He imagined that over in Moscow, Volodin did whatever the hell Volodin wanted. That was the rumor, anyhow. But was it true? Ryan knew there were rampant rumors about Volodin’s ties to organized crime. Although no one had really pinned him down on any involvement with criminal activity, Ryan liked to imagine the bastard was up to his eyeballs in dirty deals with mobsters who had him by the balls. Chances were, Jack knew, that the truth was probably exactly the opposite. With control over the nation’s military, interior ministry, and intelligence agencies, Volodin almost certainly was the one true power in Russia.
Ryan asked, “And the Ukrainian military is weak, correct?”
Jorgensen answered, “Very weak. Their defense spending is a whopping one percent of their GDP, just a couple billion dollars. It’s not enough money for new systems and equipment. They can barely maintain what they have.”
“Tactics and doctrine?”
“They will put up a fight on the border, and they have decent air defenses, but that’s about it. Through NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, we have been able to put about three hundred U.S. military personnel on the ground there. We have Green Berets training their infantry, Delta Force guys working with the CIA to get intel on the situation in the Crimea. All reports I’m getting on the situation is that the best Ukraine can hope to do is bloody the Russians’ noses a bit as they take the Crimea and the eastern regions of the country. If they make it painful enough, maybe Volodin won’t march his army all the way to Kiev in the west.”
“Jesus,” Ryan said. “The best-case scenario is they only lose a big chunk of their nation.”
“I’m afraid so.”
Ryan thought it over for a moment. “Our military on the ground. Do they know to get the hell out of the way if the shooting starts?”
“Yes, Mr. President, they aren’t going to stick around to fight with the Russians. I’ve ordered them all to keep a low profile. Things have been getting dicey in Sevastopol and Odessa, the major cities in the Crimea. Pro-Russian protests are kicking up all over and spreading like wildfire. A good portion of the citizenry wants the Russians to invade. Ukraine is using its military to quell some of the rioting, which just makes the nation look like a police state, which just increases the number of citizens who are backing a Russian ‘liberation.’”
Ryan groaned. “We don’t want any part of that.”
“No, sir,” agreed Mark Jorgensen.
As they were talking, Ryan’s secretary stepped into the doorway. “I’m sorry, sir. AG Murray is on the phone.”
Jack was surprised by this. Dan had just left the Oval Office five minutes earlier. “Put him through,” Ryan said, but he turned back to Jorgensen and Burgess. “I want to convene a meeting of our full national security staff to look over all options we have to stop Russia’s invasion. Let’s say seventy-two hours from now. I need your best and your brightest working around the clock, and I want to see all feasible options.”
The men left the Oval Office, and Jack went back to his desk to grab the phone. “What’s up, Dan?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid. Felicia Rodríguez was hit by a car. She’s dead.”
“Damn it. I thought you were picking her up.”
“I was just making the call when I got word. We had a team watching her, but they weren’t close enough to stop it.”
“And the car that ran her down?”
“Hit-and-run. It happened in the parking lot of her apartment building, no security cameras. Our surveillance team wasn’t mobile. By the time they got into their vehicle, the car was gone. We’re chasing down vehicles fitting the description, but I’d bet you a week’s pay it was stolen and will turn up burning under an overpass somewhere.”
Ryan looked off into space. “Does that sound like a professional job to you?”
“Very much so.”
“Russians or Venezuelans?”
“That’s the only question. Either way, it’s going to create massive headaches internationally.”
“And either way, it was definitely the Russians who orchestrated it,” said Jack. “But we find the truth, and we get it out there.”
“Absolutely. I’m working on it. Sorry about this, Jack. We should have been quicker.”
Ryan could hear the frustration in his AG’s voice.
“This will make your job harder, Dan. But don’t feel too bad for the girl. From what you told me earlier, she was covered with polonium. After having seen Sergey in the hospital the other night, I can say with authority that I would much rather get run over by a goddamned car.”
28
Throughout the day, Clark, Chavez, and Kryvov moved from one bar to the next, each more shady than the last, drinking beer and sitting around while Igor called and texted people he knew on the periphery of the Kiev underworld. They steered far away from the chaos of Independence Square, and instead remained in remote working-class neighborhoods outside the city center. At each different location men would show up, scope out the table of journalists from across the room, and then, as often as not, leave.
But half the suspicious characters that came into the bars to eyeball the two foreigners and their local fixer did, in fact, come over and sit down. These men were drug dealers, human traffickers, and a man who said he could get any car off a German street and into the driveway of any Ukrainian—for a price. Through these men with firsthand knowledge of the local underworld, Clark and Chavez learned a great deal about the workings of the organized-crime situation here in the city.
While it was true that there were representatives of Russian organized crime active in Kiev, Clark and Chavez were surprised to hear how many FSB active measures operations seemed to be going on in the area as well.
Another troubling bit of information that came to light involved the clashes go
ing on all over the city. The Nationalist Party had taken the presidency the year before, wrestling it away from a pro-Russian party that had been caught up in a series of corruption scandals. But the nationalists were not without issues of their own.
The rumor Clark and Chavez were picking up on the street, however, was that the current clashes were stoked on both sides by the FSB. It was said the Russians were organizing bus caravans from the pro-Russian east, filling the buses full of paid union workers, and dumping them in Kiev just upstream from the marches. At the same time, they secretly funded media outlets that pushed the pro-nationalist agenda.
If this was all true, it would show the Russians were interested less in winning hearts and minds in Ukraine, and more with causing chaos and civil strife.
—
By eight p.m. Clark called a halt to the day’s recon, and the men returned to the flat. After sitting together in the living room to discuss the day’s events, they decided they would go out for a quick dinner on nearby Khreshchatyk Street. They took a few minutes to sanitize and secure the flat, and then they headed out.
It was a breezy thirty-eight degrees outside, but the residents of Kiev considered this a spring evening; there were many pedestrians out in European Square as the six men walked along toward a restaurant recommended by Igor Kryvov.
As they walked through the square to the restaurant, they were spread out several yards wide, making their way through the crowd. Clark, Kryvov, and Chavez chatted in Russian, and the three non–Russian speakers mostly walked along with their hands in their pockets to keep warm. Gavin Biery was on the far right-hand side of the entourage, and when a group of young men got in front of him on the sidewalk, he moved to get out of the way. As he passed them, however, one of the men stepped into his path and shouldered straight into Biery’s side, spinning him around and knocking him to the ground.
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