by Drew Chapman
“Asset bubbles. Flash crashes. Panics,” Alexis said.
“Exactly.”
Alexis looked over to Garrett, who was staring right back at her. She realized that he’d been gauging her reaction. She guessed Garrett knew exactly what Wolinski was going to say, and that the entire interview was for Alexis’s benefit.
“Because of interconnectivity, financial turmoil can spread across the globe in seconds,” Wolinski continued. “And every financial institution is linked, in some way or another, to every other institution. Banks trade with banks, which trade with hedge funds, which take out insurance policies against those banks, which bet on the debt of corporations, which store their money at that first set of banks. And all of them get lines of credit from each other. The CEOs of all of these entities believe they are cleverly spreading the risks of financial meltdown among many companies, thus limiting their own exposure. If I sell a little bit of risk to many parties, then I am shrinking the overall risk to the national or global economy.”
“But you think the opposite is true,” Alexis said.
Wolinski nodded. “What if, by spreading little bits of risk throughout the system, you are actually increasing the chances of complete economic Armageddon? What if risk works not like a wildfire, where containment is key, and small amounts of fire are actually beneficial to a forest ecosystem, but more like a flu? Like a virus? Where even the smallest exposure sickens the entire host. And potentially kills it.
“The global economy is not healthy right now. Government debt is high. Bank exposure to exotic investment instruments is murky, and their capital requirements are too low. And civil unease is growing across the planet. The worldwide system is not prepared for a true shock. A small virus, a less-than-lethal flu, can kill a patient with a compromised immune system. To my mind, our system is dangerously compromised.
“So much right now in the modern economy is predicated on real-time events. ‘Just in time’ manufacturing at factories and plants requires no lag time between the arrival of raw materials and their assembly into finished products. But that lack of lag time requires ready cash—or in the case of large companies, credit. And credit requires healthy banks and a credit system functioning at the top of its game. Easy credit, fast credit. Supermarkets also require this, getting their produce and meats exactly when they need them, and not a moment sooner. They also require the fast flow of credit.
“When credit stops, work stops. Production stops. Food stops. And as a British member of Parliament once famously said, ‘Every city on the planet is a mere nine meals away from anarchy.’ We miss one meal and we become cranky. Two and we are hungry. But nine?”
Garrett spoke, taking up Wolinski’s narrative. “If a big bank—a really big bank, goes bad, from who knows what—bad debts, exposure to bad debts, losses, or incompetence—then investors would run for the hills. But because all the big banks are so closely linked, the process of fleeing one bank would have the opposite effect.”
“Garrett is right,” Wolinski said. “Instead of protecting those fleeing the institution from risk, it would actually bring the risk back on themselves. We are all in a vast theater together. If someone yells fire, you cannot save yourself by fleeing. By fleeing, you bring the fire to the rest of the world.”
A chill ran down Alexis’s spine. She realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled. “And if that were to happen?”
“Supply chains would collapse. Credit freezes, companies cannot pay their workers. Food and water would not be delivered. Electricity and gas would be shut down. Transportation would stop. ATM machines would run dry. You would be limited to the cash you have on hand. A cascading chain of failure that could race around the country—or the globe—in a matter of days. In some cases, hours. Think about that, Ms. Truffant. No power, no lights, no cash, no food in stores, no water from your tap. The entire enterprise comes to a sudden, grinding halt.”
Wolinski stopped for a moment. Alexis could hear a clock ticking in the hallway. Wolinski took a last sip of her wine, draining the glass.
“You may not want to hear this, Ms. Truffant, but we live in an economic house of cards. The dollars you have in your purse have value, of course, but they only retain that value as long as you believe in them. As long as everyone using those dollars believes in them. The moment you lose faith in your money, then it is simply a piece of paper, and nothing more.”
Alexis’s mouth went dry. She wanted a sip of the professor’s red wine. No, she wanted the entire bottle.
“It would not be easy,” Wolinski said. “And it would require great cunning. But the answer is, yes, an economic terrorist could destroy the global economy. They could send us all back to the barter system. Back to the Middle Ages.”
• • •
Alexis sat in the front seat of the rental car, Garrett at her side, as they drove south down Columbus Avenue. She stared out the windshield at the city’s somber, gloomy darkness. She tried to imagine what Professor Wolinski had described.
Supermarkets shuttered. Lights out. No water running. The city’s rapid descent into chaos. People would march in the streets. Or worse, tear the streets apart. Tear each other apart. Was this government—or any government—prepared to deal with that? It would be like Hurricane Katrina, but on a massive scale. The veneer of civilization suddenly seemed like just that—a veneer, a thin layer of rules and social niceties that held our baser motives in check. But could it really be that easy to push everything over the edge?
Perhaps it was already happening. Perhaps it was too late.
“I’ll get you whatever you need,” she said, as the nighttime city flashed past her window.
“The Ascendant team. We’ll need them.”
“It can be done.”
“What about Kline? How will you explain it to him?”
“I told him I was tracking down reporting errors in intelligence collating. Why I went to Miami. And here. I bought myself a day. Maybe two.”
“And after that?”
Alexis drove in silence for a moment. “I may have to go around him.”
Alexis could feel Garrett’s gaze turn to her, in what she could only assume was amazement. Was she really going to go out on that particular limb, on what was, at least at the moment, speculative information? Deceive her boss and risk discharge, or worse?
Alexis could barely believe the words had come out of her mouth, but they had. She looked over at Garrett in the passenger seat. “So?”
“I’m in.” Garrett’s mouth creased into a wry smile. “Let the hunt begin.”
PART 2
MINSK, BELARUS, JUNE 17, 10:51 A.M. (GMT +3)
Gennady Bazanov sniffed at the thick morning air. Wisps of smoke drifted over Svyardlova Street in central Minsk, the scent of burning tires mixing with the reek of old garbage. Bazanov could even detect a whiff of gunpowder. They were the smells of disobedience, and Bazanov knew them well. He knew them from Kazakhstan, Moldova, from Ossetia in north Georgia, and most recently from Ukraine—places full of restless citizens, who thought they wanted democracy, unfettered capitalism, and freedom. But they were wrong; what they wanted was an illusion, a momentary madness, and Bazanov’s job was to help make sure they understood that.
Nagi Ulyanin, a young Belarusian State Security officer, jogged to Bazanov’s side as he walked north toward Independence Square.
“My ih skoro perevezem, polkovnik,” Ulyanin said nervously in Russian, a sign of respect to Bazanov’s authority. Ulyanin wouldn’t dare speak the Belarusian language to his superior. We will move them soon, Colonel.
“Vozmozhno,” Bazanov answered. Perhaps. Or perhaps not, Bazanov thought to himself. Perhaps it will all go to shit. Because that is what usually happens.
Bazanov saw the State Security officer shudder involuntarily. He was afraid of Bazanov, and that was the way Bazanov liked it. People should fear him. Th
ey should fear the consequences of disobedience. Even at fifty years old, Bazanov cut a menacing figure: compact and muscled, like the welterweight boxer he had once been, he kept his head shaved smooth and his dark suits perfectly pressed. Bazanov was a fixer, a colonel in the S Directorate of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, successor to the dreaded KGB. He moved from country to country, always in the old Soviet sphere of influence, making sure that the people who ran those countries made the right decisions: that they stayed loyal to Mother Russia, and the SVR in turn, and that their elections—if you could call them elections—went according to plan.
And lately, he had become a busy man. Too busy. From Bazanov’s point of view, the world had gone completely to shit. Completely. To. Shit.
Ulyanin checked his watch and looked back down the broad boulevard. The streets were empty, and the shops were all closed, many boarded up, a few with broken windows and burnt awnings. The violence in Belarus had been devastating. Minsk had shut down. The country’s economy had come to a standstill and was on the verge of ruin.
How had this happened? Simple, to Bazanov’s way of thinking. A portion of the Belarusian populace—dreamers and miscreants, Bazanov would say—had voted for the opposition candidate in the national elections two months ago. Forty-seven percent, enough to force a runoff election. She was a woman, the opposition candidate, young and pretty but completely unprepared for leadership, running on a platform of closer ties to the European Union, NATO, and the United States.
But did she really think Russia would allow that to happen? After Ukraine? After Crimea? Was the opposition that naïve? Belarus might be an independent nation, but it lay directly between Moscow and the historical enemy nations of Europe. Throughout time, armies had marched across this forested backwater of a nation to attack Russia with swords and bayonets, tanks and missiles. That would not happen this time. Not a chance in the universe.
And so this flat, inconsequential shithole had exploded into civil war. A civil war, nudged forward by Russia, and Bazanov in particular, that was tearing the country apart: separatist militias in the east; roving gangs of pro-Kremlin thugs in Minsk; two divisions of Russian ground forces just over the border, waiting to roll into Belarus. That was what they deserved. Reap what you sow.
“We start the operation in five minutes,” Ulyanin said. “The motorized tanks should be here. The rendezvous time is now.”
“And yet they are not here,” Bazanov said. “How unusual.”
Ulyanin caught the sarcasm and tried to force a weak smile to his lips. “You will not be displeased, Colonel Bazanov. We will redeem ourselves.”
Bazanov let out a low grunt and kept walking toward Independence Square. Belarus State Security had a lot to make up for. How they had let a national election proceed uncensored was beyond Bazanov’s imagination. How could they have missed the signs of voter revolt, of electoral unhappiness? That would never happen in Russia. The FSB—the portion of the reconstituted KGB that dealt with domestic politics—would not allow it. Bazanov himself would not allow it. He would have intimidated officials, arrested opposition candidates, closed TV stations, and blown up cell towers. And if that didn’t work, he would have bused in pro-Russian separatists and let them have their way with the local voters. It had worked wonders in Crimea, and it would work in Belarus.
“I hear trucks,” Bazanov said as he crossed Svyardlova Street. Those would be the OMON GAZ Tigrs, the Belarusian riot police’s antipersonnel vehicle of choice, gray and blue and mounted with tear-gas cannons.
“Yes, yes.” Ulyanin nodded eagerly. “You see, we are not late.”
“You were late two months ago,” Bazanov said. “And you remain late.”
Bazanov flashed back to that miserable morning in April, waking to his phone ringing in his Moscow apartment, Arkady calling from the Kremlin: “Gennady, turn on the fucking TV. Do you know what happened in Belarus? Lukashenko lost the fucking election by six points. How is this possible? Is nobody minding the goddamned store?” And then the endless meetings at Yasenevo, SVR headquarters, the hand-wringing, the blame. Ultimately, the responsibility for mopping up fell to Bazanov, as it always did. Which was fine. He was a fixer, and he would get it done.
Yet the truth was, anything that happened here, today, was a holding action, rearguard nonsense meant to stop the bleeding. The entire region was collapsing, one country after another. The Kremlin could mobilize all the tanks and soldiers it had, for as long as it could afford to do so, but Bazanov knew that what was truly called for was something much larger. A piece of business that could change the world, not just Belarus.
“The runoff election is in two weeks, Colonel,” Ulyanin said. Ulyanin was a toady, and an incompetent one at that: nobody called an SVR agent by his title in the field, where any passerby could hear it. “Today’s operation will break the back of the opposition thugs in Minsk. The western part of the country will react to this—shake with fear. They won’t know which way to vote. And the east will side with Moscow. The combination will be overwhelming. The runoff election will swing back to Lukashenko. It will be just as you wish.”
“And if it is not? Then what? Will you offer me your resignation? Or better, your head on a platter? Can I march you to the woods outside Orsha and have you shot?”
Ulyanin paled, laughing uncomfortably.
“Oh, you think we don’t do that anymore,” Bazanov snarled. “Don’t test me.”
He lit a cigarette and reflected upon the state of his life: running here, there, Chisinau, Donetsk, Minsk, trying to contain all those self-involved children, all asking for their freedoms, and all at once. If you let every last person do exactly as he or she pleased, then chaos would reign; you would be stuck with a globe full of screaming schoolchildren, without discipline or law. The very thought of it turned Bazanov’s stomach.
He slowed as they reached Kirava Street. Two blocks away, in front of the lobby of the now shuttered Crowne Plaza Hotel, a gnarled wall of overturned cars and barbed wire marked the barricade of the opposition brigands. Smoke rose from behind the ragged wall of broken concrete. The barricades were manned mostly by students, mixed in with unemployed hooligans. If they couldn’t make trouble at football matches, then marching in the street would suffice.
Behind Bazanov, on Svyardlova, the OMON riot trucks had appeared, their black grill ironwork making them look positively medieval. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Bazanov nodded approvingly: perhaps today would turn out better than he had thought.
“Step back, Colonel,” Ulyanin whimpered. “I don’t want you to be run over.”
“Yes, you do. You wish I would be run over. Then maybe your nightmare would end. And stop calling me colonel where anyone can hear, you idiot.”
Ulyanin hung his head and backed onto the sidewalk to let the trucks pass. Bazanov watched the Belarusian soldiers perched in the gun turrets above the truck roofs. He wished them courage. Actually, what he wished for them was ferocity. A willingness to die for the cause. If they had been Russians, he would have had no concerns. Russian security police were like dogs, bred to be ferocious unto death—at least the sober ones were.
All at once, the soldiers fired their tear-gas cannons, and Bazanov watched as contrails of white smoke arced over Kirava Street toward the barricades. Ulyanin handed him a yellow bandanna, soaked with water: “For the tear gas, for your face.” But Bazanov waved it off. He’d breathed in more lungfuls of tear gas in the last year than the baby-faced Ulyanin had breathed in lungfuls of oxygen in his entire life.
A line of Belarusian special forces double-stepped down the street to follow the Tigr trucks. They carried black truncheons and Milkor Stopper rubber-bullet rifles. Bazanov instantly recognized that as a mistake. In the last month, things had gotten far too out of hand for shooting rubber bullets at bands of street opposition. Lead was what was called for, and nothing less would do: lead in overwhelming vol
ume, that pierced hearts and shattered skulls.
Then, as if to confirm that opinion, gunfire erupted from behind the barricade. Even from two blocks away, through the tendrils of tear-gas smoke, Bazanov could see the red muzzle flashes of AK-47s from behind the car-and-concrete barriers. Bullets streaked through the air around Bazanov and Ulyanin, smashing into the building behind them, blowing out windows and pockmarking concrete. Bazanov spit out his cigarette and grabbed Ulyanin by the hand, running him toward cover. No wet bandanna would save their lives now.
“They have rifles!” Ulyanin shrieked, this time in Belarusian, his panic obviously getting the better of him. Bazanov understood the Belarus language. It was a cousin of Russian, the same alphabet, the same words, slightly different pronunciation. Hell, Belarus was basically the same country as Russia, which was why this uprising was such a betrayal.
“Yes,” Bazanov yelled back. “And your men better have rifles as well.”
“Of course, of course.” Ulyanin was on his hands and knees now, crawling behind a parked car as the bullets pounded into the pavement all around them. His tremulous voice betrayed his lack of confidence. The security men didn’t have rifles, and Bazanov knew it. This was another failure.
“Call for backup,” Bazanov said, crouching near Ulyanin behind a late-model, black BMW. “Tell them to bring double the troops, double the firepower. And tell them to hurry. Make the phone call. Now!”
Ulyanin fumbled with his cell phone. Bazanov scowled and then sprinted across the street to get a better look at the fighting. With bullets singing past his head, he flattened himself against the doorway of a shuttered bakery. Shots were ringing out from both sides now, and Bazanov hoped the OMON police were aiming true. But his heart sank as he saw the first of the Tigr trucks backing up, away from the barricades. A soldier who had been manning the tear-gas gun was slumped over, his lifeless body laid out on the truck roof, arms splayed out on the slate-gray steel.
