Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  “Thank you, thank you very much,” he began. “It is, after all, you who we, the Board of the Purpose Fund, should be applauding, you who do the hard work to advance our knowledge as the human race. You do the work that matters, that will make it possible for us to live better lives in the face of the ever-changing conditions on this planet.

  “For me, the Purpose Fund gives reason for the many years that I have struggled in the fields of private equity, real estate, energy, and agribusiness. Those years of effort made me a very rich man, as you know, but what good does it do a man to have money unless there is a purpose for acquiring that wealth?

  “That is why I was so pleased to join Zhang Wei, Sheikh Arbaaz, Konstantin, and Sir Clive in coming together to create the Purpose Fund several years ago. We each initially contributed the equivalent of three billion pounds to the foundation’s science and research programs, which include our own laboratories, exploration teams, and even satellites. We are also proud to sponsor some of the most cutting-edge work at many of the world’s most prestigious institutions through these annual research grants.

  “We have also over the years created a series of joint corporations, to invest together in ventures, which we believe will over time create a continuing stream of revenue, much of which will go to the Purpose Fund in the out years. We also believe that these investments will help assure that the world’s peoples will have a continuing supply of energy, food, and raw materials to support a global economy well into this century and out into the next.”

  Following his remarks, the grant recipients joined the board members for a Champagne reception in the mirrored ballroom next door to the hall in which they had held the press conference. Tuxedoed waiters poured Krug into crystal flutes, Krug Grande Cuvée 2012 for the researchers, Krug Clos d’Ambonnay 1995 for the board members.

  As Victoria Kinder guided her father from group to group of scientists, other board members hung back, subtly separated from the crowd by bodyguards in Savile Row suits, tailored to hide the small arms under the Super 150 weight wool. Konstantin Kuznetzov looked impatient, checking his Richard Mille Tourbillon wristwatch. He turned to the tall thin man at his side. “Sir Clive, shall we leave this show now and go upstairs and start our meeting? We have much to discuss. Are you sure this hotel is a safe place to have these discussions?”

  “Your man Sergey says it is,” the Brit replied. “He had his people sweep it and install the protective electronics. The hotel manager tried to stop him from ripping things up, but it is, after all, the Sheikh’s hotel.”

  Kuznetzov smiled. “Vladimir,” he called to one of the bodyguards. “In a minute, tell Kinder we have gone upstairs to the meeting. Ask him to join us as soon as he can break away. Discreetly, Vlad, discreetly this time.”

  35

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  HIGH SPEED COMPUTING CENTER

  LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

  “I don’t know how long they will let us stay here now that the election is over,” Dugout said, as he tapped away at his keyboard. “They have a lot of high-priority work backed up that needs the high-speed computer.” It was almost noon and Ray Bowman had returned from across San Francisco Bay to what had become their temporary headquarters, a room in the High Speed Computing Center at the Livermore National Lab.

  “You said it has the best chance of any computer to crack the encryption on the Potgeiters’ laptops, so we need it until it does,” Bowman said. “If they give you trouble, call Winston and have him tell the Energy Secretary to have the lab rats back off. What did your Minerva program find on Rogozin?”

  An image appeared on the large wall monitor, a series of annotated boxes with lines connecting them. “It did this link analysis based on the information Danny provided Mbali.” Ray glared at her, still upset that she and Avidar were exchanging information and that she was carrying around electronics that the Israeli had given her. Mbali smiled back at him.

  “Rogozin, the name Danny Avidar gave us, is CEO of Olympus Security, a security company headquartered in Cyprus, with offices around the world. They provide security to oil companies, celebrities, laboratories. He’s linked to a Polis Holdings Corporation of, wait for it, Polis, Cyprus. They own or lease ships, tankers, and freighters, as well as aircraft, cargo, and executive jets. It looks like Polis may own Olympus.”

  Bowman stared at the chart, with its array of corporations and different-colored links connecting them. “So who owns Polis?”

  “A company in the British Virgin Islands, which, you can see, links back to a company on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, which traces to a company in Bulgaria. That’s where I hit a wall. Not great corporate records online in Bulgaria.”

  Ray Bowman sat down, continuing to stare at the chart. Mbali had been making notes on a legal pad. “Just a hunch,” she said. “Olympus Security has offices around the world? Is that what you said?”

  “Yeah, here’s their home page. The picture is of Mount Olympus, the one in Cyprus, not the one in Greece,” Dugout explained.

  “Do they have a list of their branches?” she asked.

  “At least some of them, yeah.”

  “Do they have offices in South Africa?”

  “Yes, Pretoria,” Dugout answered.

  “And Austria, Australia, Israel, the UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore?” she asked.

  “That’s seven of the twelve,” Dug replied. “Since you are on a roll, do you want to guess the rest?”

  “London, everyone needs an office in London.”

  “Right, go on,” Dugout urged.

  “New York?” she guessed.

  “No, nothing in the U.S.”

  “That’s interesting,” Ray muttered. He looked like he was about to doze off. It had been a late night and his body was still unsure what time zone it was in.

  “Give up?” Dugout asked. Mbali shrugged. “Russia and the three Cs: Chile, Comoros, and Canada.”

  “Comoros?” Bowman said, coming alive. “Major commercial cities of the world, countries with interesting raw materials, and then the Comoros Islands? The ones in the Indian Ocean? The ones near Madagascar where the nuclear bombs were kept?”

  “Not only, but offices in Vienna, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Singapore, and Sydney. All of the cities where our five Trustees had their untimely departures,” Mbali added. “I’m calling back to my boys in Cape Town. We need a little nocturnal visit to the South African offices of this Olympus Security group. Perhaps we also make a visit to the Comoros. And I’ll ask Danny to examine Olympus in Tel Aviv, if he hasn’t already.”

  “Good, I’ll ask our friends in Hong Kong to do the same and Commissioner Deveaux to have the Mounties check on the Canadian office,” Ray added. “He owes me one after his guys killed the Potgeiters before we could question them.”

  “Let me ask Deveaux,” Mbali suggested. “He may owe you, but I think he likes me a little more. I haven’t tried invading his country with my special force commandos, unlike some other person I know.”

  THE CONNAUGHT HOTEL

  LONDON, UK

  “Nine days away,” Sir Clive Harcourt said to Konstantin Kuznetzov, as he looked across at the dinner’s detritus, spread over the long table—half-eaten desserts, emptied wine bottles, stubs of cigars. “I can’t believe, Konny, that we made it this far. I must admit, when you first proposed this, I thought you were crazy and would get us all arrested.”

  The two men were a study in contrast, the Brit tall and thin, the Russian short and squat. What they had in common was great wealth and, despite that, greed; greed and a desire to control things. Both men had failed to rise up to where they thought they should be in their national political systems, although they were each associated with their nation’s ruling elite. Although they had never discussed it with one another, both felt underappreciated in their societies; after all they had done to support the right charities, the proper political parties; after all the success they had ac
hieved in making money, they were still essentially unknowns in their own countries and certainly around the world.

  They would still be unknowns after what was about to happen, but they would have exercised power like few men ever had, changed the direction of things in bigger ways than all but a few men in history. And when the dust settled, it would be these two men and their partners who would dominate the world’s new economy, for what they owned now would be immensely more valuable then. Their hand in the creation of the chaos would have to remain secret, always, but they were confident that it would. None of them had any desire to claim the credit, or the opprobrium, and they had covered their tracks very well. The Americans, the Israelis, even the South Africans had all tried to track them down and failed. It looked now like they were almost giving up, after running down so many dead ends.

  “Don’t worry, Clive, my friend, we will not be arrested. They will never figure out it was us, even though, regrettably they do now probably know enough that they will figure out what happened after the fact. They just won’t know who did it,” Kuznetzov reassured him, as he poured out the last drops of the claret. “We have spread all sorts of rumors in the right places. The latest is that Hezbollah has the bombs, with help from Iran. The Americans and Israelis think Hezbollah are going to use the bombs in Tel Aviv and New York, the two biggest Jew cities in the world.”

  Sir Clive, whose maternal grandmother was Jewish, winced at the Russian’s description. “But, Konny, why would anyone believe that? Surely, Iran has its own nuclear bombs by now. Why would they need to buy the old South African bombs to give to Hezbollah?”

  “Deniability, Sir Clive, deniability,” the Russian said, sounding more than a little drunk. “The story we spread is that Iran didn’t want to use its own bombs because they could be traced back to Tehran and then America would fire off its nuclear missiles and turn the Persian sands into a sheet of glass.”

  “Well, I’m glad that won’t happen,” Sir Clive said, looking about the table for a bottle with some sparkling water left in it.

  “Oh, but it will, Clive, it will. That is the best part, it will.”

  The British lord stood halfway down the table pouring himself water in an attempt to prevent what he feared was going to be a bad hangover. “I don’t understand, Konny.”

  “You see, even though New York and Tel Aviv will not blow up, we will still spread evidence that it was Hezbollah and Iran who used the bombs, enough evidence that America will retaliate. They will need to attack somebody. They always do after a big disaster. It doesn’t matter if the evidence isn’t one hundred percent. Look at 9/11. They needed to attack somebody big time after that. So they accepted the theory that it was Iraq, that Iraq was involved in 9/11. There wasn’t much evidence and what there was, it was all a lie, but they destroyed Iraq. Iraq may never recover. This time they will destroy Iran, nuke it probably. Better that than they figure out it was us.”

  Sir Clive returned to Konstantin’s end of the table and sat down next to him, pulling his chair close to the Russian. “Konny, my old friend, there is something I have to ask you and I don’t want you to think me a weak sister when I ask.”

  The Russian looked uncomfortable and pushed his chair back a little, creating some space between him and the Brit. “Yes, what is it you wish to ask me?”

  “How do you deal with the deaths?” Sir Clive asked. “I know what we are doing is the right thing in the big picture, in the long sweep of history, but if the Americans nuke Tehran, if everything else goes as we expect it to, there will be many, many deaths. Many of them, most of them, innocent people. It doesn’t seem to bother you. I need to get there, so it won’t bother me when it happens and afterward. How do you think about it that makes it possible for you to sleep at night?”

  Kuznetzov sighed, relieved at the question. “Oh, is that all? Sir Clive, we lost twenty million dead in World War II in the Soviet Union. Stalin, he killed another twenty million Soviet citizens. This is what happens at great moments in history. This is going to happen with or without us. The only questions are when, how fast, and who profits from it, who is left standing after it happens.”

  “I suppose you are right, Konny, it’s just going to be hard to watch.”

  “Clive, when you have a wound and you put a bandage on it, the wound heals and the bandage is still there, still sticking to your skin. Do you peel it off slowly or rip it off quickly? Which will hurt more?”

  Sir Clive Harcourt looked at the billionaire Konstantin Kuznetzov as if he were a drunken schoolboy. “Well, I suppose it would hurt more if you pulled slowly, wouldn’t it now.”

  Kuznetzov’s fist darted out and hit the Brit hard on the knee. “Exactly, you rip it off quickly. It hurts, but it is over fast. That is what we are going to do, Sir Clive, we are going to get it over faster so the pain will last a shorter time. And when it is over, what we have will be worth a lot more, a lot more.”

  36

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10

  MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS

  GLILOT JUNCTION

  OUTSIDE TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  “You are lucky we maintain all the phone records for a year,” said the Brigadier General from Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of America’s NSA, the signals intelligence unit. “It takes a lot of storage to keep all of those records.”

  “Thank you for coming, General, as the deputy of one intelligence agency to the deputy of another, I thank you,” Danny Avidar said as the two men sat in Avidar’s dimly lit office.

  “Not a problem. Next time you will visit our house, maybe come to see our base in the Negev.”

  “Perhaps. So, the question was last August fifteenth, at 0726 in the morning at the Haganah train station a man, Dawid Steyn, was murdered. We gave you his mobile number. Were you able to see if there were any mobiles of any interesting people at the time near Dawid Steyn in the station?”

  “We got the list of all the people Shin Beth thinks work for this Olympus Security you mentioned. We pulled up all of their mobiles. None of them were in the Haganah Station at 0726 on fifteen August. Or if they were, they had their mobiles turned off,” the General said.

  “Shit.”

  “But wait, it’s not over,” the General added. “We did what you asked us to do and what do we get, we got nothing. But we are the experts on these things, yes? So, we do what we would do. We expand. We expand the time period we are looking at and we expand the radius of where we are looking. This is what we do. You see, Danny, you asked the question wrong. But not to worry, we corrected the question for you, even though you did not know enough to ask us to do that. We did it anyway.”

  Avidar endured it. “Well, of course, you know much better than we how to do these things. Thank you for correcting the question. If we had asked the question right, what would you have found?”

  “If you had asked the question right, what we would have found is what we found when we asked the question our way. At 0734, a mobile called a number in Cyprus. The mobile was moving at the time and at the speed of and in the direction traveled by a local bus, probably the Dan line fifteen, which leaves the Haganah Station at 0730. I know your next question. Was the mobile one that belonged to someone from this Olympus? Yes, it happens that it was. Mobile number 52 612 is registered to Efrim Brodsky who is on the list of Olympus employees given to us by the Shin Beth.”

  Danny Avidar leaped up and struck out his hand to shake with the general from the 8200. The General remained seated and held up his hand to indicate stop. “It’s not over, yet. Do you think we at 8200 stop when there is more to collect? Never.”

  Avidar sat back down. “Of course not.”

  “‘Of course not’ is right. We are very professional. We may not get all the credit and all the fame that you guys do in the Mossad, but often it is us that provide you the leads that you need to do what you do. Without us, many times, Danny, you know you would not be able to track these bad guys.”

  “We appreciate all that you do,” Avidar
said, quietly, politely. “As an intelligence officer and a professional, you know that often what we do, what you do, must never be known, and no one can get the credit.”

  “Exactly,” the General agreed.

  “So tell me what the fuck more you know, all of it, now.”

  “All right, all right. No need to be nasty,” the General replied. “That mobile was last heard from when it pinged a mobile tower on October twenty-sixth. It didn’t call anyone. It just was turned on and it pinged the tower.”

  “Where?”

  “Odd. The tower was in the Comoros Islands.”

  37

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11

  HIGH SPEED COMPUTING CENTER

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

  “When will you be done?” the man in the lab coat asked, grabbing him by the arm as he entered the building.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Dugout asked, pulling away.

  “The guy who was scheduled to use High Speed. The guy you stole it from.”

  Dugout remembered him now. It was the climate change guy who had some huge model he was running simulations on, simulations that could only run on something as massively parallel as the Livermore High Speed computing array. Dug wanted to explain that he appreciated the importance of the man’s work, but that there was at present, an immediate need that trumped it. If nuclear bombs went off in our cities, the economy would so badly crash that any and all scientific research would be retarded for a century. No one would be able to do anything about climate change until it was too late, which would just compound the new Dark Ages started by the bombs. All of those thoughts dashed through his head in an instant, as well as the realization that he couldn’t explain that to a scientist who was not cleared to know about the mystery of the missing bombs.

  Instead, Dug just said, “I don’t know yet. Soon, maybe soon. I can’t promise you.”