THE PRESIDENT’S
FIXER
A THRILLER NOVELLA
By
WILLIAM WIELD
Author’s note
The President’s Fixer is a novella prequel to the Legacy Thriller Series and was written in response to some reader’s requests for an introduction to some of the main characters in the series - though it has turned into a standalone thriller in its own right. Naturally I hope that you enjoy reading it enough to be tempted to move on to the other full-length novels in the series. I have written all of them to be fast-paced, page-turners – the kind of thrillers I myself like to read and hope they meet your expectations in this regard. Happy reading – William Wield.
For further information and news of my other books, please visit my website williamwield.com or email me at [email protected]
The President’s Fixer is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © David Stuart Black 2016
All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
Chapter 1
Wednesday 2 March, evening
Patriarsky Ponds District, Moscow
Vasily Bazarov gave a sigh of relief as he let himself into his apartment – his haven from the hassle of keeping a sometimes fractious President happy. As he threw off his overcoat, he hoped to cast off his cares along with it. But in the dimly-lit hallway the fear that this afternoon he had been the cause of the president’s tirade clung to him like a pall; the president’s parting words rang in his ears now, just as they had less than an hour ago …
‘And if you can’t find it again, I’ll get someone who can.’
Only two months earlier, the finding of the new weapon that had been developed in the UK had been the making of him; he had taken every opportunity to excite the president with accounts of how the weapon’s new technology would allow him to exact revenge on the West for their sanctions. Overnight he had become one of the closest of president’s innermost circle. But then disaster – just as he was finalizing his plans for its theft, the weapon had been moved. Now, with huge sums already spent looking for it again, as of this morning, it was still nowhere to be found.
As he made his way through the apartment, he tried to console himself that his current unpopularity would soon be overtaken by some other event in the constant round of presidential crises. Tomorrow he would come up with another stalling tactic whilst his and the State’s desperate searches ground on – maybe they would be lucky soon?
On reaching the sitting room, he went straight to a large baroque chest of drawers on top of which there was a range of bottles and glasses set out on a lacquered papier-maché tray. He picked a heavy crystal glass, poured a large Scotch – a Talisker single malt whisky – and added a splash of soda water; reaching to his right he switched on the music-center which immediately restarted where it had left off – near the beginning of Grieg’s piano concerto in A Minor.
Turning, he walked slowly over to the panoramic windows and stood there looking down over the wide boulevard below. He sipped his drink as he watched the busy shoppers and the cars of the commuters, willing these mundane sights to replace the president’s threat ‘someone who can’ still nagging at the back of his mind.
Over the gentle sounds of Grieg, he never heard the opening of the apartment’s front door thirty feet behind him, just as it never occurred to him that anyone determined enough would have little trouble getting a spare apartment keys from his cleaning lady or the building’s managers.
‘Vasily Bazarov?’ came the deep bark of a voice, slicing through Grieg’s music. He spun round but even before he had a chance to reply, the dull whistling thud of the first shot hit his chest, just right of center, straight through his heart. The second shot, less than a second after the first, struck him in his forehead, equidistant from his pale blue eyes. The squelching impact of the two low velocity rounds made almost more noise than the silenced gun itself – a classic professional hit.
Two huge men stepped forward fast enough to catch him as he crumpled to the floor, even before much blood had yet come from his wounds; they lifted his body into a heavy duty body-bag and swiftly zipped it shut.
‘The usual,’ said the assassin, ‘but this time, do it right now.’
The two large men had already started to lift the body-bag to take it away, but now lowered it again placing well to the left of where the whisky glass had fallen and where a few spots of blood now stood out on the pale deep-pile carpet. One of the two went back towards the door, picked up a small black canvas bag and brought it over. The two of them then went to work using in turn three different fluids on the few spots of blood and spilt whisky and when they had finished the whole area was as spotless. The dropped whisky glass was carefully washed and returned to the papier-maché tray and the top was put back onto the bottle of Talisker. The assassin watched all of this but said nothing.
When, after maybe twenty minutes, the two considered their work done, they looked back to their leader. He nodded. Opening his clam mobile telephone, he pressed a quick dial number, uttered just one word into it, ‘done’, and shut it again. The two men lifted the body-bag and with the black canvas bag balanced on top of it, all three made their way back towards the apartment’s front door; they turned off the music and left everything as they imagined it would have been had Bazarov never come home that night. On getting back to the hallway they lay the body down and the assassin pointed to a cupboard let into the wall.
‘If the tip-off’s right it’ll be in there,’ he said.
One of the three was still wearing his thin blue rubber gloves and he pushed back the cupboard’s sliding doors to reveal a few overcoats with a shelf above them holding hats of various kinds. On the floor there was an assortment of boxes. Methodically, starting at the top of the cupboard, he searched the shelf brushing his hands along underneath the hats and some folded scarves and then moved on down to the coats and the boxes. His first complete search did not come up with the object they were looking for so he began tapping the rear wall of the cupboard; soon he looked back over his shoulder and grinned at the other two. He had found a secret panel. Sliding-back a false door, in a recess behind it, he found what they were looking for – a briefcase.
Carefully lifting it out into the hall, he shook it gently. It was unlocked and inside it there were a few folders and loose papers and a laptop. Sliding the false door shut and rearranging the coats and a couple of boxes so that none appeared to have been disturbed, he closed the cupboard door. Together the three of them picked up the body-bag, the small black bag of cleaning materials still on top of it and, with the assassin carrying the overcoat and the briefcase, all three left the apartment.
As they shut the front door behind them, a burly cleaning attendant pushing a large, wheeled laundry trolley in front of him came round the corner of the corridor and brought it over to meet the three of them. He opened the top of the trolley-bin and, as though the body-bag was just a suit to be sent to the cleaners, with the help of the others, he doubled it over into two and stuffed it into the bin. Behind them, by the lifts, a look-out man g
lanced at his watch and nodded to the assassin. As the cleaner and the other two headed for the service lifts, the assassin and the look-out man rang for one of the main lifts and when this arrived half a minute later, the assassin bade a polite ‘good evening’ to a lady who came out of it.
Less than twenty-five minutes after entering his apartment, Vasily Bazarov had left for the last time, never to be heard of again – other than a number of days later when there were several tree’s worth of newsprint speculating on the poor man’s mysterious disappearance. A tip-off had told the press that he had failed to attend the meeting of President’s innermost circle and a media circus had sprung into action. In response to the frenzy an official announcement stated that Vasily Bazarov ‘had gone off on a much needed holiday to come to terms with a terminal illness’.
Chapter 2
10am Friday 4 March
The Kremlin, Moscow
Though not the kind of man to suffer from imagined fears, as he left his office building in Nikol’skaya Street, Igor Komarov’s stomach heaved uncomfortably and a nagging fear pervaded his mind. At last week’s meeting of the president’s innermost circle of advisors, Vasily Bazarov had still been amongst those closest to the president. Yet, as he had just heard this morning, in the space of a week he had clearly lost favor in some spectacular manner and now had simply vanished – and under the current regime that meant only one thing. What worried Komarov most about this news was that, as the president’s chief fixer, he would normally have been asked to make the arrangements for such a disappearance.
As he walked briskly towards the Kremlin, his thoughts ran over these developments. Why had he not heard of this before now – worse – why had others been given the job of removing Bazarov? Over and over the same questions revolved and though a complete stranger to paranoia, he wondered now if he was losing his special position of power with the President.
He was brought up short by the furious blast of a horn as a small car nearly ran him down as he crossed the wide street to the Kremlin walls. He touched his astrakhan hat in apology and let it pass on its way; as he stepped forward again after the near-miss, he gave another thought to the car – idly he wondered which of the two of them would have come off worst from an actual collision, his six-foot-two, twenty stone mass or the aging little Fiat.
Safely onto the pavement under the Kremlin walls, he turned his mind back to the matter in hand. The thought of losing his position with the president was ridiculous; they had started together, young officers in the KGB in St. Petersburg and been together ever since, sharing secrets known only to the two of them – a sudden end to that was inconceivable, surely.
Once inside the great walls he made his way, automatically to the president’s private quarters, as though on some form of human autopilot. His summons had told him to be there at ten-thirty sharp – never in all his years had he been under instructions to be anywhere sharp.
Waiting in an anti-room, alone with just two minutes to go to the appointed time, he could not just sit as he had been invited to do, and he paced around the room, unable even to prepare what to say to his old friend as he had been given no hint of what the meeting was about. Eventually, exactly on time, he was ushered into the president who, without saying anything, gestured for him cross the room and sit in large chair by the fire while, with a wave of the other hand, he bade three others to leave them alone in the room.
As soon as these three were gone and the door had been shut, the president came past Komarov in his way over to the chair the other side of the fire and, as he passed, gave Komarov a heavy pat on the shoulder; as soon as he turned to sit, Komarov saw, to his relief, that he was smiling.
‘My dear Igor,’ said the president leaning forward on the arms of the chair, ‘I’m sorry for all this secrecy and for acting on my own over Bazarov, but I found that an important situation was getting out of control. I decided to do a clean-up job in a way that wouldn’t reflect back on you. That’s the only reason you’ve heard nothing of this until now.’
‘I understand,’ said Komarov, with a great surge of relief welling up in his throat.
‘As you’ll know better than most,’ continued the president, ‘we’re in shite-street right now over our various clashes of interest with the West and our economy’s in freefall. With the world crash in oil prices, our oil revenues down by two thirds – that’s hundreds of billions of dollars of shortfall; on top of that these bloody sanctions from the West are an absolute pain. And then, like an answer to a prayer, Bazarov comes along with his discovery. As you may imagine, I jumped at it.’
He sat back in his chair, and looked down for a moment as though uncertain how to continue.
‘You may think that I was rash to put so much faith in Bazarov’s plan to fight back against the West, ‘he said at last, ‘but when you see his files you’ll understand why his idea caught my imagination.’
‘I’m sure you had good reason to believe in what he was telling you,’ ventured Komarov, ‘but what exactly is it, this Bazarov solution?’
‘Difficult to explain the technology but you’ll see that when you’ve read all his files. The truth is that it has got far too big for him to handle. Whatever anyone else may tell you, it was for that reason that I got rid of him and why I want you to take it over. I don’t care what resources you use, you’re to do whatever it takes to find the weapon detailed in the files and get it for us. Whatever it takes,’ he repeated.
‘I’ll be happy to do that,’ said Komarov but at the same time wondered what he was committing himself to as the presidents still had told him neither what the weapon was nor what problems Bazarov had encountered trying to steal it.
‘Another reason I didn’t want you involved in Bazarov’s removal, was the nature of this weapon he had found and the constraints were going to have to impose on its use. Made him no longer suited to front the project, whereas you’re ideally suited,’ said the president. ‘As you will see when you’ve read-up about it, the use of this weapon would instantly be seen as an act of war. It also explains why the West has not used it against us – so far at least.’
‘Good God,’ said Komarov, ‘so what kind of weapon is it that neither side can use it openly – some new kind poison or nerve gas or an immune system destroyer?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ said the president looking shocked, ‘I don’t understand the weapon’s technology but it’s a whole new generation of cyber-weaponry, capable of devastating an enemy’s vital homeland facilities such as power, water, food distribution.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Komarov, ‘computer warfare? How the hell’s that going to …’
‘Before you do yourself out of s job,’ cut in the president, ‘you need to see exactly what it is that Bazarov has found.’ This comment brought Komarov’s line of doubt to an abrupt end but even before he could back-track, the president had continued; ‘Bazarov recently got some files from a mole in the heart of the UK government. They detail the trials of this new weapon. In a nutshell it has the power to bypass any known computer defense system there is. It means it can just break into anything – literally anything that’s run by computers and take over control of them.’
‘But surely that’s not possible,’ said Komarov. ‘You mean our rocket launch sites, power grids, air traffic control systems … I can’t believe it. That … that would mean …’
‘It would mean that conventional warfare has just gone out of the window and that the confrontations of the future will no longer be won the military, or rockets, or drones but by the geeks.’
‘And the files prove for certain this weapon is real, and not some kind of hoax?’ asked Komarov.
‘It certainly looks that way. It’s based on the technology being worked on by the Chinese – you know the quantum technology computer cable they’re laying between Shanghai and Beijing; apparently it will be completely un-hackable by us or the West thanks to the same quantum technology’.
‘As you know my i
nterest in computers is virtually nil,’ said Komarov, ‘and my knowledge is even less but as I understood it, quantum computing is still in its infancy.’
‘Well, that’s no longer true apparently,’ replied the president, ‘and whether our generation knows as much as we perhaps should, this new quantum technology is going to dominate everything so we’d better wise up pretty damn fast. This weapon is proof of that. It that can effectively bring the functions of a country to a grinding halt – that’s just too big to be left to a mere geek like Bazarov. So first, when you’ve read through them and had them checked out, get back to me with your plans of how we find where they’ve hidden this thing and how we’re going to get our hands on it. Got all of that?’
‘I have,’ said Komarov. ‘And if I read you right, if any of my people are caught stealing this weapon or then using it, you’ll be forced to deny any knowledge of it and we’ll be on our own?’
‘Yes, and that’s why from now you’ll need to do almost everything through your mafia connections – use them as a front and use their manpower as much as possible as well.’
Komarov was about to mount a weak protestation that his links to the mafia were a media lie but the president saw this coming and held up his hand to stop it.
‘Before you start I’ve known for years about your links to Anton Silayev, just as you’ve probably known that I have my own connections with that fraternity.’
Komarov smiled, grateful for this tit-for-tat admission.
‘In fact, as I’ve just said, your connection to Silayev is what now qualifies you best to take this matter over from Bazarov.’
Komarov just nodded, his fate clearly sealed before he had even got here this morning.
The President's Fixer: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – a prequel to the Legacy Thriller Series) Page 1