‘No,’ Calhoun said, ‘about this European situation. A lot of weird stuff has been happening over there since someone knocked off Calvin Mitchell. We’re getting frozen out a bit on what’s going down from the new guy – this Warren Tarrant.’
‘Where’s he from, anyhow?’ Randy Schweinburger asked, slightly slurring his words.
‘Some kinda European, think he’s a Limey,’ Roscoe Ickes said. ‘Not an American, that’s for sure.’
‘Damn Europeans!’ exclaimed Dick Newman, as he violently hurled a bottle he was holding into the far-off trees. A short, sharp yelp was heard from the direction the bottle had flown in. ‘Sorry, buddy,’ Newman yelled into the sky.
Newman staggered up to the other men, as they all came together in a group.
‘I’m still pissed off those damn Europeans left me out of the Algeria deal back in the nineties. That’s gratitude for you,’ Newman said, almost yelling. ‘The US armed forces not only saves their stupid old buildings for future generations of tourists, but also rebuilds a load more of ’em through the Marshall Plan, and they later freeze us out.’
Secretary of State Schweinburger sighed nostalgically. ‘Yes. We did damn well out of that war.’ His eyes misted up, ‘Ah, the days when we could do very well out of the rest of the world, with no questions asked. Gosh, I miss those days.’
‘Exactly,’ exclaimed Newman, snapping everyone back to the present. ‘Look at the attitude and freezing-out we get now. Ungrateful Limeys. The French are worse, the Spanish a disaster, and all the rest fall under the heading of stubborn Germanics. The whole place is a basket-case.’
‘All right,’ Calhoun said, with firmness in his voice. ‘Getting back to the current situation. The president has asked me to put men on this Mitchell thing, and this Tarrant guy. Good thing too, there are bombs going off all over the place relating to this company.’
Ickes jerked into life. ‘I put one of my boys onto it, too.’
‘Not that psycho from New Orleans?’ Calhoun asked.
Ickes gave a double thumbs-up.
‘Dammit, Roscoe!’ all the men chorused.
‘I told him to be real quiet-like,’ Ickes said.
‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word,’ Calhoun yelled. ‘I can’t have him running around under the feet of seasoned field agents.’
Newman burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny, Dick?’ Calhoun asked.
‘You don’t think the manufacturing interests of America wouldn’t be looking into this too?’ Newman replied. ‘We need our cheap oil to keep flowing, baby.’
‘Same goes for the members of the stock exchange,’ chimed in Wecksler. ‘We have a fiduciary duty to ensure that the status quo of profits is maintained.’
‘Oh no,’ Calhoun said. ‘So you’re all telling me that you’ve all released your own men to get into this thing.’
‘Hell, yeah!’ they all chorused, nodding.
‘Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!’ Calhoun’s scream echoed through the surrounding forest.
25
Moscow
Anatoly Kirkov, the Russian vice president, was cutting his daily swathe through the mid-afternoon Moscow traffic in his departmental limousine.
As he sat in the back and watched the workers flit by his window, looking cold and dirty, he was on the phone assuring one of his secretive and powerful backers that everything was coming back on plan.
‘I assure you,’ Kirkov said into the phone, as he leaned forward and took a drink out of the mini-bar. ‘The heat is dying down. Demetchev has been slapped down and put back in his box. He’s lost half his staff. Yes, yes, I agree, timing couldn’t have been better. He was starting to sniff into some uncomfortable areas.’
He took a sip of mineral water and leant back in his seat.
‘So the heat is going away and the president still suspects nothing – all he cares about is the image of the country on the international stage. The man’s obsessed by this, so he’s easy to manipulate. I’ll supply another update at the end of the week, okay, excellent. Goodbye.’ Kirkov closed the phone and took a thoughtful sip of his drink as he looked out of the window.
Things would be so easy once the bloody office worker is out of the way, he thought. He still found it hard to believe that some desk jockey analyst was running around out there as a dangerous loose end.
Kirkov hated loose ends.
He liked their lifespans to rival those of butterflies.
Kirkov was furious when he had first heard that Jonathan Marshall had somehow given the Tatar the slip in France. The Tatar’s handler had tried to explain that this was due to a weird collection of circumstances that were beyond his control. Once Kirkov had calmed down he realized there was no one else to send – the Tatar was the ultimate killer; this was the first time he had failed to kill on his first attempt, but he had never failed to complete a mission. Kirkov had instructed the handler that he wanted a phone call within twenty-four hours to say that the job had been completed. The response was swift – the Tatar would have them soon.
Kirkov sunk back slightly into his chair.
He felt confident.
The backers were assured that everything was under control. By and large, things were. He smiled and clicked a button to activate the intercom through to the driver.
‘Take me to my favourite place in the suburbs,’ he said into the intercom speaker by his side.
In the suburbs he would spend the afternoon in a house of pleasure, receiving multiple ‘relaxations’.
Everything is going to work out, he thought. I am going to be rich beyond my wildest dreams!
26
Madrid
The glaring Spanish sun forced Jonathan’s eyes to squint though the windscreen of the car as the concrete highway flew by in a constant stream of grey.
They were on the outskirts of Madrid, and he started directing the car towards the signs for the city centre. Jonathan had been to the city a few times before, mostly on a variety of business trips as well as one dodgy stag weekend, so he roughly knew the layout of the place.
Once off the highway, he navigated the clapped-out Renault towards the Escobar district – a place where the hotels were of sufficiently low quality that they did not ask for identification if enough cash was proffered to the landlord.
They would be off the Interpol and intelligence grids, and untraceable – unless the people trying to track them already had operatives working the area looking for them. Jonathan was hoping that was not yet the case, but he refused to discount anything after recent events.
Nobody other than Conor Wright knew they were in Spain, much less in Madrid. The parties doing the hunting might surmise that after the Mont Saint Michel disaster, they would have made a break for the French countryside in an effort to drop from sight. He doubted they would expect them to go to another European capital, where intelligence networks were strong.
The other thing Jonathan felt he and Julie had to do, before heading out into the public again, was to change their appearance. He pulled into the first chemist-looking store that he saw – a shop with bright green neon cross above the door that signified a dispensary.
Dashing down the aisles after leaving Julie in the car, he grabbed packets of dye to turn both men’s and women’s hair from brown to black. Scanning the incoherent wording on the back of the boxes, he realized that he had reached the limit of his knowledge of spy operations, gleaned from a lifetime of novels and films. The best guess according to his limited man-logic was that going dark was better, as going blond would make him, in particular, too noticeable.
Besides, he thought as he made his way to the till, then I would have blond hair and black eyebrows, and that stands out a mile.
He also grabbed some scarves for Julie from a rack near the counter.
Back in the car, Julie was pleased with the scarves but much less so with the hair-dye.
‘What the hell is this?’ she said, turning the box round in her hands
.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘be in disguise and all that – so no one will recognize us.’
Julie shook her head. ‘You poor, ignorant man,’ she said in a voice of feigned disappointment. She reached over and started stroking his hair. ‘I’ll help you … and I’ll change you.’ She had a face of pity. ‘But this ...’ She held the hair dye in front of his face. ‘This won’t work, and it’s not going to happen.’ She tossed the box of dye into the back seat and folded her arms while looking forward. ‘Now drive on, my good man.’ She was smiling.
‘Well, okay, then,’ he said, as he nosed the car back into the traffic, ‘Go, team!’
After cruising the back streets of Escobar for a while, they drove past a terraced building with a white flashing ‘Hotel’ sign, above the name ‘El Rancho’.
What attracted Jonathan was the driveway down the side of the building, which meant it had off-street parking.
‘This looks like the kind of place that charges by the hour,’ Julie said, as Jonathan slowed the car to a stop in the car park. Jonathan had to admit that it did look a bit vile from the outside – and that was probably the best part of it.
Jonathan reasoned that they weren’t on a romantic weekend break, but a mission to stay alive and find out the truth behind what was happening to them. If the mission was successful it did not matter so much if Julie was upset right now. It was getting dark, and he had driven pretty much all day. He felt shattered, and just wanted to climb into a bed of any description.
The landlord, as expected, was accommodating when extra euros were thrust at him. He assured them that he had never seen them, and they did not have to sign the register or show any documentation.
I’ll make it up to her later, Jonathan decided as they surveyed the room they had already paid for.
He could also tell from the look of disgust on her face in reception that nothing was going to happen between them tonight. He knew women were seldom in the mood for love when there were cockroaches present. So he’d ordered two twin beds to avoid the embarrassment when they got into the room.
Jonathan was so tired that he crawled straight into one of the beds.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ he mumbled at Julie as he pulled the covers up. ‘Tomorrow is going to be a big day … need to find these guys … need to talk to them.’ He could feel sleep coming fast.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ Julie said as she climbed into his bed. ‘There’s safety in numbers here in the fight between us and the cockroaches.’
They held each other tightly for a few minutes before both drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms.
27
Siberia
Five hundred million years ago, Siberia in northern Russia was a very different place. For one thing, it was not part of the land mass of modern Russia at all – it was a shallow sea.
Conditions for life on earth were very different at that time. Most living creatures were basic forms of life that existed in the oceans.
The shallow seas were especially full of organic life. As these primitive life-forms died, they sank to the bottom of the sea floor to form an organic-rich, shale-like layer.
Millennia passed, and layer upon layer of sediment covered the organic-based shale. The earth’s crust continued to move, and in specific areas the tectonic forces applied millions of years of pressure and heat to the buried layer of deceased microscopic animal and plant matter. When this pressure-cooking effect reached a temperature of around sixty degrees centigrade, the previously organic matter began transforming into liquid hydrocarbons – crude oil and natural gas.
Once the hydrocarbons formed, gravity pulled them from the place of their origin, through porous rock in the earth’s crust beneath, to eventually trap them in pockets between impenetrable rock in the layers of earth beneath.
The millions of years of sea-level changes that occurred across northern Russia ensured that the part of the sea floor that eventually rose up to become Siberia was riddled with oil reservoirs.
The oil sat there, quite peacefully, until the dawn of the hydrocarbon age of man in the late nineteenth century.
Once many cultures had, with alarming speed, become totally dependent on oil to enable their lifestyles, a contrast developed between Europe and the Middle East.
Western Europe was chock-full of countries rich in technology but poor in oil.
The twentieth century had been about achieving a balance between large markets of demand for oil products (Europe), and a large pool of supply (the Middle East).
Differences of culture and religion had meant the relationship was always going to be rocky at best, with only the bridge of commerce sustaining the fragile relationship.
At the end of that century, however, things began to change. Western countries were growing tired of their energy security being constantly held hostage by that decade’s flavour of dictator or religious fundamentalist. At the same time an old partner of Europe had resurfaced and been accepted back into the international community, and appeared ready to do business again – Russia, the country with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.
The problem, which was eternal in the oil game, was getting the oil easily and cheaply from the source of supply to the source of demand. From the wastelands of Siberia, where the bulk of Russia’s reserves resided, the oil needed to take a long trip west.
The current method is to ship it by means of the ‘oil superhighway’ – an endless fleet of tankers taking it through the narrow Bosphorus Strait of Istanbul and into the Mediterranean. There is a limit, though, to how many tankers could fit through this small channel, and every year a few supertankers inevitably drifted slightly and ploughed into some millionaire’s villa on the waterfront.
To make the transit of oil quicker and more profitable, a massive pipeline was needed that ran east to west, capable of pumping westward the equivalent of a tanker an hour.
The oil would begin its journey from Siberia and head west across the northern parts of Russia before dipping down and entering Eastern Europe in Latvia. It would continue south-west, then south-south-west, going through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia, before finally reaching the Mediterranean coast in Albania. From there the load could be split into tankers and sent to ports all around Europe and beyond. Tapping-off points could be set up in Belarus to plug it straight into existing European pipelines and take it directly west to Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The same thing could be done in Romania to take it to Italy.
Powerful men had been plotting this scenario for decades.
In one of the meeting rooms of the Kremlin in the early 1980s a powerful, clandestine and vociferously greedy group had formed, to make the oil transit vision a reality. With the fall of the communist USSR being inevitable, their main intention was to make a lot of money during the period of transition.
The problem they faced was property rights. The way for them to create a dynasty for themselves was to actually own the land that the pipeline sat on. They could sort the pipeline out easily enough going through Russia, but not all the way through the countries of Eastern Europe.
They recognized that Russia would only be able to push so far in the climate of instability that would characterize the late 80s and early 90s. The countries that they drew the line through on a large map in the Kremlin still technically held their own borders and owned the property within their countries – even under the old USSR structure which was already crumbling around them. The group had initially looked to acquire the land under the guise of Soviet government departments, but they were stymied by a myriad of bureaucratic responses from the opposing governments, who were getting ever bolder as the USSR weakened. The opposing governments knew they just had to hold off long enough till the whole corrupt communist system collapsed and they would break away to independence.
The clandestine group, far from being discouraged, saw how this could work in their favour. It would have been a losing
bet to force it on the countries, only to have the infrastructure nationalized the moment they became fully independent.
They foresaw that many of the lands the pipeline would go through would try to go the way of Europe, even eventually joining the European Union. For this to be the case, if they followed democratic systems, the countries would have to allow the purchase of property by individuals, and even investing companies – domestic and foreign.
The group set about preparing to transfer vast swathes of state assets to themselves as Russia changed: oil companies, manufacturing and mining interests. This would provide them with the necessary resources and funds. Once this was in place, they set about speeding up the fall of the USSR so that they could begin what was to become the greatest land and asset grab in the history of the world that did not involve the art of war or a treaty signed by a representative of the British Empire.
As the Eastern European countries became fledgling democracies, vast swathes of land began to be purchased by a web of investing companies, which could not be traced back to anyone in Russia. There was still enough corruption in the new governments to gain planning permission for the type of construction required by waving a few thousand dollars at the right people who held power.
Troublesome government employees who objected were simply removed in the night, never to be seen again.
The final piece of the puzzle was to gain a reliable partner in the West who had access to distribution systems for the oil and oil products in the Western countries.
An existing Western oil major, who already owned the infrastructure required, fitted the bill perfectly. Once this partnership was established, construction of the pipeline could begin.
Making billions was quite simple, really. With the right partners and the right amount of greed, anything was possible. The clandestine Russian group was in the final phase of implementing their plan. Nothing and no one had been allowed to inhibit their progress so far, and they were so close now: it didn’t matter who had to be killed, whether it was the CEO of the largest oil company in the world or the vice president of Russia. Nothing would stand in the way of them reaching their objective.
Transition Page 13