by Tom Clancy
Starinov regarded Pedachenko appraisingly.
“Let’s hear it, then,” he said. “I want to get home before dawn.”
Pedachenko nodded.
“What seemed a good idea when Yeltsin sank into a tub of vodka has obviously proven unworkable,” he said. “Have you noticed the GUM department store across this very plaza?”
A mordant smile touched Starinov’s lips. “I’ve not had much time for shopping lately.”
“Ah, but even from your high perch, it must be clear that the lines at the shops and food stands have vanished. Merchandise gathers dust on the shelves. The hollow prosperity your deceased president once trumpeted has crashed down into a black hole.” Pedachenko spread his hands. “Our nation is in deepening turmoil, Vladimir. The international food relief effort has stalled, crime barons rape the people at every turn, a moral degeneration has—”
“My God, Pedachenko, look around you! There are no television cameras here. So, please, save the sanctimony for your viewers. I’ve already asked you once to get to the point.”
Pedachenko’s face showed its rigid, superficial smile again. Starinov felt as if he were looking at a cardboard mask.
“The country needs one leader to guide it, not three,” Pedachenko said. “The troika’s fractured vision has made our people stagger in descending circles.” He gazed at Starinov with unblinking eyes. “I’ve come to propose that you step down. Cede power to me for the good of our motherland.”
Starinov looked at him.
“I wish I could say you’ve surprised me, Arkady,” he said. “But this is just the sort of thing I expected.”
“And?”
“And what alternative do you offer? This third Great Patriotic War I’ve been hearing about?” Starinov laughed. “It is nothing but an admittedly stirring diversion. Icons and fanfare and ethnic superiority holding it together. I can’t help but be reminded of the rallies at Nuremburg.”
Pedachenko’s smile drew in at the edges until it was gone. “You should choose your words more carefully,” he said.
Starinov gave him a look of mock surprise. “Ah, you take umbrage. I’m reminded of Milosevic in the Balkans.”
“Whom you embraced.”
“Out of political necessity, as I do in your case,” Starinov said. “How sensitive men like you become when we evoke comparisons with the Nazis. Why is that, Pedachenko? Do you fear the demon in the mirror?”
“I fear the loss of our national honor and dignity. I fear the humiliation of going to the United States for handouts. I fear having Russia sold out to its enemies. Zgranista nam pamoshit, foreign countries will help us. That is your solution to every problem.”
The wind flapped Starinov’s collar. He felt cold fingers of air slip under his scarf and fended off a shiver.
“Listen to me, please,” he said quietly. “The world is not as either of us would wish it to be, yet we are in an age when no nation can be a fortress.” He paused. “Do you know the American satellite station in Kaliningrad? The one being built by Roger Gordian? When it is completed, it will be technically possible to place a telephone booth on an upper slope of Mount Everest, and communicate with someone tens of thousands of miles away. Without wires, and with only solar batteries for power. Think of it, Arkady. Is that not miracle and wonder? You must recognize that mankind will be linked in the future, not divided.”
“And if your miracle means the mountain reaches will echo with American popular songs?”
“Then we will pray that what we have gained is worth what was lost,” Starinov said. He waited a moment, then shrugged. “To be plain, Arkady, I reject your proposal. There will be no retreat into the glorified past.”
Pedachenko stood there in silence. His eyes were a wall of ice.
“You can’t prevail,” he said finally. “The people will not stand by while the country goes to ruin. They will assemble behind me.”
“You speak so confidently, I might indeed think you had the power of prediction,” Starinov said. “Like Saint Basil.”
Pedachenko remained motionless for another long moment, fixing Starinov with his cold, blue stare. Then his shoulders stiffened, and he whipped around and strode across the cobbled plaza to his guards.
Starinov watched him move away until he’d faded into the darkness, then walked off in the opposite direction.
THIRTY-THREE
WASHINGTON, D.C. JANUARY 28, 2000
THE LIGHT WAS LIT ATOP THE ORNATE CAPITOL dome. A red bulb glowed above the north doors. A bell tolled out a single extended note in the chamber. The majority and minority leaders greeted each other with courtly decorum and then repaired to their front-row desks at either side of the center aisle. The parliamentarian, clerks, and secretaries were seated, the president pro tempore took his gavel in hand, unobtrusive C-SPAN cameras winked to life, and the day’s session of the august legislative body came to order.
Up in the gallery, Roger Gordian watched the opening speaker, Senator Bob Delacroix of Louisiana, take the floor, striding toward the rostrum with starch, dark-suited dignity, a pair of well-groomed young aides respectfully following at his rear.
The stuffed black bear the aides were carrying between them stood six feet tall and had on red satin wrestling trunks embroidered with the hammer and sickle emblem of the long gone U.S.S.R.
“Friends and colleagues, today I’m going to introduce you to Boris the Wrestling Bear!” Delacroix boomed. “By the way, the reason he dragged his old shorts out of the closet is that they fit a whole lot better than the new ones!”
Chuckles and applause on his side of the aisle.
Sidewise glances and enduring sighs on the other.
“Boris might look like a nice bear, but don’t let him fool you. No matter how much he eats, he’s always hungry. That’s because he’s growing bigger and stronger every day ... and you better believe he’ll bite the hand that feeds him!”
Gordian stifled a disgusted groan.
Ladeez and gents, he thought, welcome to the main attraction.
“Let me tell you a little story about Boris. It’s not pretty, and it won’t be for the fainthearted. But, hey, there’s a lesson to be learned from it,” Delacroix went on. “Once upon a time, Boris had an appetite so big he thought he could eat the whole world. Nothing would satisfy him! He ate and he ate and he ate until he got so heavy he collapsed from his own weight. That was when his kindly Uncle Sam stepped along, put him on the Dr. Freemarket diet, taught him manners, taught him how to be civilized, and tried convincing him to give up his gluttonous ways.”
Again there were snorts of laughter from slightly more than half the senators in the hall. The remainder looked embarrassed.
“Well, folks, for a few years the diet seemed to work, and Boris even squeezed himself into a pair of trunks that were the same red, white, and blue colors as Uncle Sam’s clothes—with the stripes in a different pattern, of course, just so nobody’d call him a copycat!” Delacroix’s voice projected to the chamber’s vaulted ceiling.
Gordian was suddenly reminded of Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker. Or was he thinking of that other movie, the one in which Lancaster played a tent-show evangelical? And the amazing thing was that it seemed to be working. Even if he was only preaching to the converted and semiconverted, they were becoming visibly roused.
“But then Boris fell back on his old, bad habits,” Delacroix continued. “Boris got hungry again. Only this time he’d become used to begging for handouts from Uncle Sam, sort of like those grizzlies in Yosemite that’ll come right up to your tent for food. And Uncle Sam, decent, generous soul that he was—overly generous, if you ask me—couldn’t bring himself to say no. See, Sam had convinced himself that by keeping Boris close to his tent, by letting him watch Uncle Sam conduct his daily business through the flaps, Boris would learn how to stand on his own two feet. Believe it or not, Uncle Sam gave him hundreds of thousands of tons of food. Tens of millions of dollars. You heard me, tens of millions, just to keep him
sticking around! And you know what happened? Can any of you guess? Boris turned on him! Boris sneaked into the tent and did something so horrendous, so unthinkable I can hardly bring myself to tell you about it. But I have to, you see, I have to. Because some of you still haven’t realized that you can take the bear out of the hammer and sickle, but you can never take the hammer and sickle out of the bear!”
Rapt silence in the hall. By now every one of the senators had read or heard about the intelligence reports linking Bashkir to the Times Square bloodbath, and they pretty well knew where Delacroix was heading.
Gordian realized that even he was leaning forward, riveted by the performance. He had wondered earlier if Delacroix would step out of his Boris spiel when he got to this point, perhaps curb the histrionics, but that surely wasn’t going to happen. The senator with the Cajun roots was a showman to the end.
“... crept into Sam’s tent one night when he let down his guard, a night when he was celebrating, a night that was supposed to be about hope and peace and prayers for a glowing new century, and sank his teeth deep into his flesh,” Delacroix was saying. “He ripped at him, tore a chunk out of him, wounded him so badly, scarred him so grievously, that the pain will last forever. Forever! And you know what? Hold onto your seats with both hands, my dear friends, hold on tight as you can, because what I’m going to tell you next is really incredible.” Delacroix strode from behind the podium, his head craned exaggeratedly forward, his gaze ranging back and forth across the large room. “Are you listening? Are you holding on? Okay, here it is: The bear had the audacity to come back the next day and pretend nothing had ever happened. To actually beg for more food! And some people, some misguided, foolish people—I won’t mention any names, but we all know who they are—wanted Uncle Sam to close his eyes and do it!”
Delacroix stalked over to the bear now, grabbed it by the shoulders.
“Well, I’m not going to let that happen. Decide who to root for, everyone, make up your minds, because I’m getting in the ring with Boris. I’m taking a piece of him. I’m going to show him that his days of feeding off Uncle Sam are through, and that he’d better get on his way once and for all!”
Gordian had thought he was prepared for anything, anything at all, but what he saw next made his eyes open wide.
“Come on, Boris, wrestle me, take me if you can!” Delacroix frothed.
Then, the tails of his suit jacket flying out behind him, the tongue of his necktie whipping back over his shoulder, Delacroix took a running leap at the bear, knocking it down, locking his arms around it, tumbling around there before the eyes of the assembled senators, and the astonished observers in the public galleries, and the television cameras, until he’d rolled on top of the stuffed animal and pinned it to the floor.
“It’s over, Boris!” he shouted. “It’s over!”
And watching from the gallery, looking at the rapt faces of the senators, thinking about how Delacroix’s antics would play with public opinion once they made it to the nightly news, Gordian had the sinking feeling that it very well might be.
THIRTY-FOUR
NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 29, 2000
COME ON, BORIS. WRESTLE ME. TAKE ME IF YOU CAN!
Almost twenty-four hours after he had watched Delacroix’s antics on the floor of the Capitol building, Gordian could not get the scene out of his head. This was in part because it had been precisely the sort of sensational media lure he had expected it would be. Every network nightly news broadcast had led off with the story. CNN had done the same, and also made it their topic of discussion on Inside Politics, Crossfire, and Larry King Live, as well as their regular ten P.M. update on the Times Square bombing investigation. And this morning it was the lead story above the fold in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
He had to hand it to Delacroix, who had served two terms as mayor of New Orleans before making a successful bid for the Senate—he had brought a big, glittery suitcase full of Mardi Gras pizzazz to Washington with him, combined it with a sharp instinct for public relations, and turned it into a unique, and perhaps unmatchable, political asset.
Now Gordian tried to make himself comfortable in a commercial airline seat that even in first class wasn’t as comfortable as his own desk chair, and tried to take his mind off the possible ramifications of yesterday’s congressional session. But there was no retreat from his difficulties. What was the line in that poem? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. He thought about the conversation he’d had with Ashley before leaving for Washington. She had been staying in their San Francisco apartment for the past month and wanted to take steps to “fix” their marriage. Until she left him on New Year’s Eve, he hadn’t realized it was broken. In need of a minor tune-up, maybe, but that was about it. And then she had gone away. And now he faced the prospect of sharing their deepest intimacies with a third party whose profession he mistrusted. Of laying himself open to a perfect stranger.
It all seemed to Gordian a painful and distracting waste of time. He and his wife had been married for nearly twenty years. They had raised a wonderful daughter. If they couldn’t make sense of their own lives, how could they expect someone else to do it for them? He recalled the therapists he’d seen after being freed from the Hanoi Hilton, the endless, unendurable decompression program he’d been required to undergo by the Air Force. It wasn’t a memory that gave him confidence. He supposed it had done a lot of good for some men, had little doubt it had, but he’d gotten nothing out of it. Zero.
Still, he needed to make a decision. And knew that the wrong one could result in Ashley leaving him forever.
The voice of the stewardess intruded on his reverie. “Ten minutes until takeoff, make sure your carry-on baggage is stored in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you.” Where the hell was Nimec? After receiving Pete’s late-night phone call in his hotel room, Gordian had exchanged his ticket for a nonstop return flight from D.C. to San Francisco, and gotten booked aboard a connecting red-eye at Kennedy Airport, in New York City. The same plane Nimec was flying on. Or was supposed to be, anyway. Pete had said he had something important for him, and wanted to present it in person. And as soon as possible. Had he always been this damned cryptic? Or, Gordian wondered, could it be that he himself had never felt so jangled and impatient? He knew Pete had been making tremendous progress in New York, and could hardly—
A plain manila envelope dropped onto Gordian’s lap and he once again lost his train of thought. He looked up and saw Nimec standing there in the aisle.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Airport traffic.”
“I wasn’t concerned,” Gordian replied, poker-faced. He lifted the envelope. “This what you said you had for me?”
Nimec nodded, pushed his bag into the overhead compartment.
“Can I open it now, or do I wait for next Christmas?” Gordian asked.
Nimec sat down. He had a local tabloid in his hand. There was a photo of Delacroix under the front-page headline.
“Not that long,” he said. “But I’d hold off till you’re back in your office.”
Gordian tapped the envelope against his knees. Took a deep breath.
“Okay, enough suspense, tell me what’s in it.”
Nimec smiled.
“Very good news about very bad people,” he said.
THIRTY-FIVE
KALININGRAD, RUSSIA JANUARY 30, 2000
MAX BLACKBURN’S AFFAIR WITH MEGAN BREEN HAD caught him totally by surprise; it wasn’t quite as though he’d opened his eyes one night and found himself between the sheets with her, but it wasn’t really so different from that either. If he’d been told a month ago, hell, even a week ago, that he’d be lying naked in bed right now, watching her stride across his room in nothing but a short kimono-style robe, admiring her long, coltish legs, thinking about the things they’d done the night before, thinking about how much he wanted to feel her body pressing against him that very minute, he’d surely have laughed. There couldn’t have been
a more unlikely pairing—the battle-scarred former Special Air Service officer and the Ivy League intellectual.
They had never been friends in the past, and the damnedest thing was that he wasn’t sure they were now. Wasn’t even sure they had much in common besides a die-hard loyalty to Roger Gordian, jobs that had required them to be sent thousands of miles from home to a country neither particularly wanted to be in, and a physical attraction that had seized them both fiercely from the moment they had realized it was there. They hardly knew each other, hardly knew what to say to each other when they weren’t discussing professional matters, and yet they were passionate, almost insatiable, lovers. No ambiguity on that account.
“I have to get going, Max,” she said, sitting down at the edge of the bed. “Scully wanted to meet me over at the communications center this morning.”
He sat up against his headboard. “It’s only seven o’clock.”
“Early this morning,” she said. “What can I tell you? Scull’s got a way of making people humor him.”
“What’s the fire?”
“Depends on when you’re asking.” She shrugged. His eye caught how the material pulled slightly over the curve of her breast. “A couple days ago he was concerned that we had too many of the technicians involved in reconfiguring the mainframe software for the Politika databases. Feels the operation’s draining manpower and technical resources away from completion of the satellite facilities ... which, in his opinion, ought to be our foremost priority here.”
“And his latest worry?”
“It builds on the first. He says that the security detail’s stretched thin, given that we’ve shifted our emphasis toward intelligence gathering, and inserted ourselves into a volatile international situation. My guess is he’s going to give me a grand tour to prove his point, then push for me to expand the force.”