by Tom Clancy
Van Damm said, “A high-profile Russian dissident getting poisoned, presumably while in the U.S., and exposing the White House to contamination? This isn’t going to look good, Jack.”
“No shit.” Ryan sighed. “Sorry, Arnie. You are doing what you have to do. But we’ll deal with it head-on. It’s the only way.”
Jack walked back with Cathy into the Oval Office, and they spent a few minutes with the children, letting them know that everything was fine. Cathy explained that a visitor had become sick, and they needed to clean up the places he visited very carefully, but there was nothing at all to worry about.
Kyle was sold on the explanation as soon as he learned his father would let him sleep on the couch in his office. Katie was old enough and clever enough to raise her eyebrows in doubt, but Cathy managed to convince her that they were safe after a little more frank explanation.
Within minutes Cathy was seated at the desk in the Oval Office, getting in touch with doctors on the case at George Washington, probing for details about Golovko’s condition that could not be relayed by Van Damm, who might have been one hell of a chief of staff, but he was clearly no doctor. She then woke up colleagues at Johns Hopkins, experts in nuclear medicine and radiation sickness, obtained their confidentiality, and asked them for their take on the situation.
Ryan let his wife take charge; he knew he was lucky to have her expertise on hand in the first moments of this crisis so he could focus on what he needed to do. He headed over to Arnie’s office and they concentrated on the political fallout, which, he was afraid, would be every bit as radioactive. The two of them called in the national security team, asking them to get in as soon as possible. The West Wing was all but closed for the evening, but they ordered coffee to be sent to the Cabinet Room in advance of the middle-of-the-night meeting.
* * *
Jack headed into the dimly lit Cabinet Room, and Cathy met him there moments later. They sat down at the long table. “What did you hear from GW?” he asked.
Cathy said, “He’s bad, Jack. They suspect a high dose of polonium-210.”
“Why didn’t they know this immediately?”
“The hospital didn’t check for it when he came in. It’s so rare, it’s just not part of any normal toxicology screening.”
“And how radioactive is he?”
Cathy sighed. Passing on bad news was an unfortunate part of her job; she had a lot of experience with it. There were times when a little sugarcoating was necessary. But this was Jack; she knew he’d want the facts as cut-and-dried as she could possibly make them. She said, “Let me explain it this way. If he is not cremated, after he dies, his bones will be hissing with radioactivity for more than a decade.”
“Unbelievable.”
“By mass, polonium-210 is a quarter of a million times more deadly than cyanide. A portion the size of a grain of salt, if ingested, is more than enough to kill a full-sized man.”
“I thought we had radiation detectors in the White House?”
“Polonium emits alpha particles. They don’t show up as well on radiation detectors. That’s also why it is easy to smuggle into the country.”
“Terrific,” Jack mumbled. “But you are certain you are okay?”
“Yes. The effects are dose-dependent, and I didn’t get any dose to speak of. You touched Golovko yourself, when you shook his hand. They will test us, but as long as we didn’t ingest the poison, we are fine.”
“How the hell do you know more about this than I do?”
Cathy answered with a shrug. “I’m around radiation every day, Jack. You learn to take it seriously. But you also learn to live with it.”
“Sergey’s really going to die?”
Cathy nodded grimly. “I don’t know how much he was poisoned with, but the amount will only determine how long he suffers. For his sake, I hope whoever did this gave him a large dose. I’d guess he has no more than a couple of days. I’m so sorry. I know he was your friend.”
“Yeah. We go back a long way.”
12
The national security team met in the Cabinet Room at one a.m. Mary Pat Foley was there, as were the heads of NSA, CIA, and Homeland Security, as well as the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Attorney General Dan Murray stood outside the Oval Office conferring with his senior staff both in person and over the phone, and he stepped in with the others only as the meeting was getting started.
Jay Canfield, director of the CIA, set the agenda with his opening comment: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just going to go right out and say it. If anyone in this room doubts for a second that the Kremlin is responsible for this, they are hopelessly naive. You have to understand, this material is very uncommon. Only about one hundred grams are produced worldwide each year. Production is highly controlled and storage is highly regulated. We know where our polonium is.”
President Ryan said, “You don’t have to sell me on the concept that this was an assassination attempt by the Kremlin.”
“Mr. President. I’m sorry. I know he is your friend. But this was no assassination attempt. It was an assassination. Sergey Golovko is not dead yet. But it’s just a matter of time.”
Jack nodded soberly.
Mary Pat Foley spoke from her seat on Ryan’s left. “Golovko was a thorn in Valeri Volodin’s side. Of course Volodin killed him. The question is, can we prove it?”
AG Murray said, “We’ll have to do some more testing, but the chemical properties will lead us back to a specific nuclear reactor. I’m going to venture to guess that reactor will be somewhere in Russia.”
Scott Adler asked, “If this is so easily traceable, why didn’t they just kill him some other way?”
Mary Pat Foley took this one. “For the same reason they didn’t kill him in London. Look, I see this as payback for Estonia. They kill the President’s friend and they blame us at the same time.”
Adler didn’t buy that line of thinking. “But we will be able to prove the Russians did this.”
Now Ryan reentered the conversation. “Prove it to whom? A board of scientists? The average person in Russia or even in the West, for that matter, isn’t going to believe our assertions that we can prove the Kremlin did this, nor are they going to read some third-party scientific study that corroborates the claim.”
Mary Pat said, “They will say we did it to frame them.”
Adler shook his head. “That is ridiculous.”
Ryan rubbed his tired eyes. “I’d bet seventy, seventy-five percent of his domestic population will believe Volodin. We’ve seen this over and over in the past year—he’s playing to his own room. Russia, and all the other countries in that part of the world, are under the effects of Russian-dominated informational space. Russian TV, which is more or less state-controlled, like the old days, is broadcast all over the region. Russia has a massive leg up on us as far as giving their perspective on any issue. The outside world to the majority of people in the former Soviet Union is the enemy, even for those who are no big fans of the Kremlin.”
Ryan said, “The head of SVR, and the former head of SVR, both targeted the same day. Something big is happening, and it is the job of everyone here to find out what it is.”
The meeting broke up a few minutes later, but Dan Murray, Arnie Van Damm, and Mary Pat Foley remained behind. Ryan said, “Dan, while you get started on your investigation, I am going to talk to Sergey myself.”
Murray replied, “I looked into getting a statement out of him already. You can’t talk to him now. He’s in ICU and is being treated. Even if they could wake him, he is on medication to where he could do little more than stare at you.”
Jack was undeterred. “It’s in the interests of U.S. national security that he is made coherent enough to communicate. Talk to his doctors, make it happen. I hate to do this to him, but trust me, he would understand. He knows the importance of information in a crisis, and both of our nations are at risk.”
Arnie Van Damm s
aid, “Look, Jack. Maybe we can set up a CCTV between the West Wing and his room in the ICU, but I don’t want you exposed to—”
“I’m going to the hospital. He is my friend. I want to talk to him in person. If I have to be decontaminated after or if I have to wear a fucking rubber suit, I still owe him a face-to-face visit, especially considering the fact I’m ordering his doctors to wake him up and take him off the sedation.”
Murray said, “If you are going to push for this, I’d like to get an agent in there to interview him, too. We can see if he knows when and how this happened.”
“That’s fine,” Jack said. “But they go in after I talk to him. We need to catch the assassin, but the larger ramifications of this are even more important. I don’t want them to wear him out before I get a chance to talk to him.”
Jack sipped his coffee. “I wish I thought finding the culprit in Golovko’s poisoning would lead back to Volodin and cut him off at the knees. There are those in the West, those on the margins, who will be swayed, but that’s not the point.”
Dan Murray, the law-and-order man, said, “The point is to catch an assassin. I’ve got my best people on it. We will find out when, where, and how. The why is going to have to come from CIA or State, I guess.”
Ryan put down his cup and thought about the prospects of catching the assassin. “Whoever did this is probably long gone from the U.S. CIA or State might end up involved in the takedown of the perpetrators. Keep them updated on the investigation.”
Murray nodded. “Will do.” He shook his head. “Can you believe it’s come to this? What the hell has happened to Russia? We’d come so far since the Cold War. A few years ago I was over there, working hand in hand with their Interior Ministry.”
Ryan said, “And I supported their short-lived move to NATO, helped them in their conflict with China. Times change.”
Mary Pat said, “The leadership changed, and that changed the times.”
“All right, everyone, keep me posted.” Jack looked to Arnie. Before he could say a word, Arnie spoke.
“I know. You want to be made available for anyone here if they need you.”
“You got it.”
13
The new U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, was on A. I. Sikorsky Street, in a leafy section on the western side of the city. Deep within the walls of the sprawling compound, the CIA station occupied a six-room professional suite on the third floor of the main embassy building. During the day a small cadre of case officers, administrative assistants, and secretaries filled the cubicles and offices, but in the evening the space had a tendency to quiet down. Virtually every weeknight at nine p.m., however, the lights in the small but well-appointed break room flicked on, and a gaggle of mostly middle-aged, mostly white men pulled whiskey and scotch out of a cupboard and sat at one of the break room’s large round tables.
The chief of Kiev Station was a forty-eight-year-old New Jerseyan named Keith Bixby. He ran a sizable staff of case officers here at the embassy, each of whom was tasked with running agents in the Ukrainian government, military, and local businesses, as well as with reaching out to diplomatic personnel from other nations who were themselves stationed in the city.
For many years Kiev Station was given short shrift by Langley for the simple reason that the best and the brightest officers, along with the vast majority of the dollars, went to combating Islamic terrorism, meaning this and other former Soviet republics were relegated to yesterday’s news.
But this had changed, slowly, at first—with the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the reduction in focus on the Middle East in general—and then more quickly, with the ascendance of Valeri Volodin to power in Moscow and his imperialistic aspirations. The former Soviet republics began receiving more focus from Langley, and nowhere was that renewed focus more important than in Kiev.
Even though the CIA was putting resources into Ukraine again, it remained a tough posting for Keith Bixby and his team. The country was divided between the nationalistic and somewhat pro-Western west side of the nation, and the staunchly pro-Russian eastern side of the country. Russia itself was actively meddling in the nation’s affairs, and like a dark cloud, a very real threat of Russian military power being used against the nation hung over everyone’s head.
Keith Bixby had started his career as a young case officer in Moscow, but because of his organization’s focus on Islamic-based terrorism, he had spent the entire past decade in Saudi Arabia, scrambling to learn the lay of the land in a completely different environment and culture from what he was accustomed to. Only nine months earlier had that phase of his career ended, and he was given the top posting in Kiev.
And Kiev was, as far as he was concerned, ground zero in U.S. dealings with Russia.
Sure, COS Moscow would be a more prominent posting, but the Moscow Station chief’s movements were highly controlled and curtailed. Of course, Keith knew there were FSB agents here in Kiev, and they were no doubt monitoring U.S. embassy personnel to the extent they could. But Bixby and his case officers had a lot more mobility around the city and much more access to the cordons of local power than if they had been working in Russia itself, and for this reason he felt Kiev was a better and more important place to serve as COS.
Bixby worked extremely hard at his difficult job, and he’d been getting less than five hours of sleep a night ever since the conflict up north in Estonia, but he rewarded himself every evening by getting together a group of his staff to play Texas-hold-’em poker and drink Jack Daniel’s and Cutty Sark.
As much as he wished he could hang out in a local pub and take in the nightlife here in Kiev, his poker games were with his case officers, and they doubled as one more opportunity to talk shop each day. That wouldn’t be possible in the city, of course, so the office’s boring and antiseptic-smelling break room was the venue for the nightly event.
Some of Bixby’s best case officers were women, which came as no surprise to him, because Mary Pat Foley was known in CIA circles as perhaps the best on-the-ground case officer ever employed by the Agency. But every female case officer on Bixby’s staff had a family, and juggling their difficult jobs along with a domestic life was tough enough without adding on the additional chore of heading back up to the office each evening to play poker with the boss.
Keith and a half-dozen of his staff had been at their table for more than an hour when Ben Herman, the youngest case officer in the station, entered the break room with a folder in his hand.
One of the men at the table looked up from his cards and said, “Ben, if that folder in your hand is work, then get out of here. If it’s full of cash that you’re ready to lose, sit down and I’ll deal you in the next hand.”
The table erupted in laughter; it was funnier after a few shots of Jack, but COS Bixby waved away his subordinate’s comment and said, “You’ve got something you want to show me?”
Ben pulled up a chair. “Nothing earthshaking, but I thought you might be able to help.” The young officer opened the folder and pulled out several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. Bixby took them and spread them out on the table over the poker chips and cards.
“Where did these come from?”
“I got them from a guy in the Ukrainian Army who got them from a guy in the SSU.” The Security Service of Ukraine was the federal law enforcement arm of the nation’s judicial system, akin to the FBI in the United States. “These photos came from the corruption and organized-crime division.”
The photos were several shots of the same group of six men, all wearing coats and standing in front of a restaurant, smoking cigarettes and talking. They were definitely Slavic in appearance; five of them looked like they were in their late twenties to mid-thirties; one man was much older, perhaps in his late fifties.
Bixby whistled. “Look at these blockheads. OC?” OC was shorthand for organized crime.
Herman reached for a bag of pretzels on the table and grabbed a handful. “Yeah, they think so. This group was photographe
d meeting with enforcers for the Shali Wanderers, which is a franchise of a Chechen group active here in Kiev.”
Bixby gave Herman a look. “Kid, I didn’t just ship in this morning.”
“Oh… sorry, boss. I count tanks and helicopters. OC isn’t my beat. I’d never heard of the Shali Wanderers before today. I guess I’m not all that familiar with the mafia guys running around Kiev.” Herman had spent nine years in the Marine Corps, and his area of focus was the Ukrainian military.
“No problem.” Bixby looked at the pictures more closely. “Why did SSU send these pictures to the Ukrainian Army?”
“They were running surveillance on the Chechens, and then these guys turned up. They followed them back to the Fairmont Grand Hotel, and realized they had booked the entire top floor for a month. It’s obvious they are OC, but they aren’t local. One of SSU’s crime guys thought these guys looked military, or ex-military, so he sent it over to the Army to see if they recognized any of the faces. They didn’t, so a contact of mine in the Ukrainian Army reached out to me.”
Ben added, “They do look military, don’t they?”
Bixby was still going through the photos. “The younger guys do, that’s for sure. The older dude, not so much.”
Keith passed the pictures around to the other men at the table. At first no one recognized any of the men, but the last man at the table, a senior case officer named Ostheimer, whistled.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“What do you see?” asked Bixby.
“The older dude. I’ve got a name for him, sort of.”
“Spit it out.”
“He’s Russian, I think. They call him Scar.”
“Charming.”
“A couple years ago when I was posted in Saint Petersburg, this guy popped up on the radar. There was a BOLO for him with the local cops, they had a picture and his nickname. As far as OC guys go in this part of the world, he’s done a damn fine job of keeping himself off the radar. Nobody knows his real name. Scar’s gang was wanted for bank robberies and armored-car heists and contract hits on local government officials and businessmen.”