The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  “Favor? What favor?”

  “I want Spector.”

  “If we knew where Spector was, we’d be going after him ourselves.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “You see to it that I get the information first.”

  “Why do you want Spector?”

  “That’s for me to know,” he said.

  “What if I can’t get it.”

  “Oh, you’ll get it,” he said. “You have so much riding on it.”

  “You sick fuck.”

  “Sandra,” he said, his voice so conciliatory it practically oozed.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “You find Spector, and you get the information to me before anyone on your side can take action. I want him, and I’m going to have him.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got footage of him killing your embassy guards. I suppose I could leak that and find him on my own.”

  “Don’t do that,” Sandra said. “I’ll find him.”

  50

  Tatyana couldn’t take her eyes from the screen. The news anchors didn’t know what to say. For once, they seemed genuinely speechless. The embassies were shown over and over, from dozens of angles, and when the helicopter footage started coming in, and she saw the full scale of the devastation, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  Smoke rose from the crater at ground zero as if there’d been a meteor strike.

  All she could think of was her sister.

  Laurel’s voice brought her from her thoughts. “This is how wars start,” she said.

  Tatyana nodded. This was going to change everything. Larissa had been right all along. Her warning, the conversation she’d overheard, it was all true.

  And now, she might have paid for it all with her life.

  Whoever planned these attacks knew exactly what they were doing. To pull off one would take months of planning and the ability to circumvent some of the most sophisticated security measures on earth.

  To pull off both?

  Simultaneously?

  “How could they let this happen?” Tatyana said, her eyes still fixed to the screen. “We knew it was coming. Lance broke into the embassy and laid it out in front of their faces.”

  Laurel just shook her head.

  “How could they be so blind?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said.

  “This is going to be unlike anything they’ve ever seen,” Tatyana went on. She was ranting, but Laurel didn’t interrupt her. “Whatever happened after 9/11, this is another level. Forget the Taliban. Russia and China? That’s no insurgency. They’re superpowers.”

  “I know,” Laurel said.

  “This is going to be the mother of all wars.”

  “I know,” Laurel said again.

  “Americans, they haven’t faced a threat like this in living memory. They’ve never fought a fight they didn’t already know they were going to win.”

  “We’ll win this fight,” Laurel said.

  “What if we don’t?”

  “We will, Tatyana.”

  Tatyana realized she was crying, tears were streaming down her face, and she couldn’t stop.

  “What if she’s dead,” she said.

  Laurel came forward and took her in her arms.

  “She’s going to be all right,” Laurel said.

  “How? How is she going to be all right?”

  “She was with Lance.”

  “And Lance ran right into it,” Tatyana cried. “We saw the feed. He ran right in, seconds before the blast. There’s no way he survived that.”

  Laurel let go of her, and instantly, Tatyana realized what she’d said.

  “Oh, Laurel,” she said.

  But Laurel just shook it off. “We don’t know what happened,” she said.

  “I’m sure he’s okay, Laurel.”

  Laurel looked at her and was about to say something when she stopped herself. She looked around the room, then made for the door without saying another word.

  Tatyana didn’t know what to do. In her concern for Larissa, she’d forgotten what Laurel must have been going through. She went to the door and followed Laurel.

  “Laurel, wait,” she said.

  Laurel rushed up the two flights of stairs and let herself out onto the porch at the back of the house.

  Tatyana went out after her.

  “I just need a second,” Laurel gasped.

  “I know,” Tatyana said.

  Laurel looked at her but said nothing. She wouldn’t allow herself to show weakness, vulnerability.

  Tatyana pulled out a chair for her and she sat.

  Neither of them said a word. The pool was uncovered, lit up, and steam rose off it. It had started to snow, and the flakes disappeared into the water.

  Tatyana reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth. She knew Laurel had been trying to quit but offered her one anyway.

  Laurel took it immediately and Tatyana gave her a light.

  Then they smoked in silence.

  51

  Lance didn’t know where he was.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  The sound in his ears was deafening, like someone had just struck a giant pitchfork right next to his head.

  He couldn’t see. Everything was so black he wasn’t even sure if his eyes were open. He rubbed them and tried to stand up, but stumbled back to the ground.

  He began coughing, choking on the smoke, and when he reached up and touched his head, it was sticky with blood.

  “Help,” he heard someone cry.

  Others were shouting too, and crying. Their words were in English and Russian.

  Dozens of people.

  He got up and stumbled a few feet forward, tripping over the body of a US marine. He crouched down and felt the man’s neck for a pulse. There was none.

  There was a flashlight next to the marine, and he picked it up.

  He shone it around, through the thick billowing smoke, and saw deep craters in the ground where the construction trucks had been.

  He kept moving, following the sound of voices, and passed some more marines. He checked the first. The man was unconscious but had a pulse.

  “Hey,” Lance said to another marine.

  The man was sitting on the ground with his back to the crater.

  “Hey, you, you all right?”

  The man looked at him blankly.

  Lance crouched down in front of him. “You know this man?” he said, pointing to the unconscious marine on the ground.

  The marine nodded slowly.

  “Pick him up and bring him that way,” Lance said, pointing back toward the front entrance of the compound.

  The man struggled to get up, and Lance helped him. He lifted the injured marine onto the other man’s shoulder and then sent him in the right direction.

  He continued forward into the smoke, passing the three craters.

  There were bodies everywhere. Ahead, he could make out the concrete entryway to one of the old embassy building’s underground sections. Everything above it was gone.

  He stumbled on through the dust and smoke. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the sound of generators coming to life. And then the sirens of dozens of emergency vehicles.

  By his feet was another body. A woman. He was about to step over her when she moved her hand and grabbed him by the ankle. Lance bent down to her. She was alive, but barely.

  He recognized her. It was the woman he’d spoken to earlier at the security desk.

  He looked around for anyone who could help, but there was no one. He lifted her over his shoulder and carried her toward the gate.

  Through the smoke, he could already make out the blue and red flashing lights of ambulances, and he walked toward them. As he approached, a team of medics came toward him, speaking in Russian.

  “She’s hurt,” Lance said, handing her over.

  The medics put her on a stretcher and lifted her in
to the back of an ambulance.

  “You’re hurt too,” a medic said to Lance.

  Lance brushed the man’s hand away and went back toward the embassy. He worked in a daze, not entirely sure whether the carnage around him was real or a nightmare.

  He found more and more bodies, marines, Russian contractors, diplomatic and consular staff. He checked for a pulse on twenty corpses before he came across another living person.

  It was a man in a suit, struggling to make his way toward the gates. His suit looked strangely intact, unsullied by the blast, apart from the fact that the man’s right arm, and the arm of the suit, had been completely blown off.

  “Here,” Lance said to him. “Let me help you.”

  The man reached out to him with his one arm and collapsed. Lance caught him as he fell.

  “I got you, buddy,” he said.

  The man was losing consciousness, and Lance tapped him lightly on the cheek. “Stay with me, buddy.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at Lance.

  “What’s your name,” Lance said.

  “Rapaport,” the man said.

  “You’re the CIA station chief,” Lance said.

  The man nodded, then looked at where his arm should have been. His uncomprehending eyes rolled back in his head, and he lost consciousness.

  Lance could see from the blood spurting from his arm that he still had a pulse, although it was getting weaker by the second. He pulled off his belt and tied it tightly around the stump that was left of the arm.

  Then he lifted Rapaport over his shoulder and carried him back toward the ambulances.

  “Is he even alive?” a medic said as he loaded him into the back of the ambulance.

  Lance grabbed the medic by the shoulders. “Yes, he’s alive,” he said to the man. “And you’re going to do everything you can to save him, or I’m going to track you down,” he said, grabbing the man’s name tag and pulling it from his shirt.

  As more and more police vehicles poured into the area, Lance realized he had to get out of there. He walked out onto the street and saw that all the hotel’s windows were completely blown out.

  He went into the lobby. The fire alarm was ringing. People were running everywhere. Some were injured, and the hotel staff helped them toward the ambulances. Lance took the stairs to the room.

  When he got there, Larissa was on the ground, her back to the wall, the curtains blowing above her in the shattered window frame.

  She was crying.

  When she looked up and saw him standing in the door, she shook her head, as if she didn’t believe her own eyes.

  “I thought ...” she said, but didn’t finish the sentence.

  52

  There was a conference room immediately off the command center, and the president entered it and shut the door. He needed to clear his head.

  The nation was under attack.

  He’d just ordered the arrest of his most trusted advisor, and a kill order on the CIA’s most valuable asset.

  He felt like he was blundering in the darkness, grasping at straws, and somewhere, deep down, he knew he was being outmaneuvered, manipulated.

  It was not a comfortable feeling, and his head spun at the endless permutations of what was happening.

  Who was behind the attacks?

  What was their objective?

  What trap was being set for him?

  There was a coffee machine on the side table, and he pushed the button for a dark roast. He took the plastic cup to the conference table and sat down.

  Russia and China.

  America’s two most powerful adversaries.

  The only nations on earth who could hope to attain superpower status and displace American hegemony.

  Attacking simultaneously.

  In geopolitical terms, it was by far the greatest challenge since the end of the Cold War.

  Whoever was behind it was making a statement.

  But what statement?

  If it was terrorists, he could handle that. America had been on a counter-terrorist footing for twenty years. The military was perfectly equipped to go into some remote Afghan mountains and hunt down jihadists. It was strange to think it, but the best case right now was for terrorists to be behind this.

  Islamist or otherwise.

  Religious extremists, political radicals, environmental anarchists.

  There was a playbook to counter them.

  There was a frame of reference.

  More complicated, more destructive to the nation’s morale and prestige, would be an attack from the inside.

  The president had known Levi Roth for over thirty years. As much as one man could know the soul of another, he knew Roth’s. Or he thought he did.

  What if he was wrong?

  What if Roth had been drawn off course?

  The president found that hard to believe.

  With his own eyes, he’d seen Roth do things for his country that few people would even believe. He had difficulty imagining the man who did those things could become a traitor.

  But nothing was impossible.

  The NSA’s vast surveillance apparatus had been throwing up red flags left, right, and center. What if they were right?

  And then there was the question of Lance Spector. Who knew how many loose screws that man had rattling around? He’d been so poked and prodded by Langley that it was hard not to imagine him going off the deep end eventually.

  He was a trained killer who failed to report for duty or receive orders. He’d broken into the embassy just hours before the attack, and just minutes before, footage showed him killing embassy security guards.

  The Pentagon and the NSA were both gunning for him, and the president himself had just issued a kill order.

  But none of that was conclusive.

  It didn’t look good for Spector.

  And it would be convenient for the president if he did turn out to be behind the attacks.

  But without further data, it was impossible to know for sure what had been going on in Moscow. Not to mention Beijing. Whatever else Lance Spector was capable of, he had not, as far as the president was aware, developed the ability to be in two different places at once.

  The more he thought about it though, the more he saw that the Spector angle would be convenient for him politically.

  It would allow him to explain the attacks in a way that average citizens would understand.

  There had been lone gunmen before. Guys went off the deep end all the time. This guy was the perfect candidate. Military service. Experimental CIA programs. It wouldn’t be pretty, it would make the CIA look like a disaster, it would be the end of Levi Roth’s career, but it would be an explanation Joe Schmo on the street would understand.

  And sometimes, finding an explanation acceptable to Joe Schmo was all that mattered.

  Especially when the alternative was an outcome so bleak, the president refused to countenance it.

  War with Russia and China.

  In the nuclear age, that wasn’t something that could ever be allowed to happen.

  It would change everything.

  It would alter the international political landscape beyond recognition.

  It could end modern life as it was known.

  It could end life period.

  The president sipped his coffee.

  “No,” he said to himself.

  War, real war, against Russia and China, was not on the cards. To hell with everything else. Ingram Montgomery may not have been the most religious man on earth, but he attended church, he believed in God, and he was not going to face his Maker as the man who unleashed global war.

  If war were coming, he would fight it, but he would not go down as the man who started it. Not even after provocation of this magnitude.

  There could be no winning in a war like that. And even if there could, even if the world after such a war was something worth winning, Montgomery had access to facts that few people on the planet had ever seen.

  He knew w
hat the Chinese and Russian militaries were capable of.

  Victory in that conflict was not a foregone conclusion.

  While the balance was on the American side, there were circumstances, especially against both rivals simultaneously, in which the US military could lose the upper hand.

  There were wars that, despite the Pentagon’s brave rhetoric and optimistic projections, America could lose.

  America versus Russia and China was one of them.

  He clenched his fists and reminded himself, as much as it was distasteful to admit, his job was not to do what was right, it was not to seek justice or retribution, it was not to speak the truth.

  Above all else, his job was to protect the nation, ensure its continued existence, and preserve the lives of its citizens.

  There would be consequences to this attack, almost certainly there would be military consequences, but there was a line beyond which president Ingram Montgomery dared not cross.

  He knew what he needed to do, and he knew what he needed to say.

  Every news channel on the planet was showing footage of the embassies being blown to smithereens. The footage was being looped incessantly. The images would never be forgotten. The embassies were not in remote, backwater places. They were in the capital cities of America’s two greatest rivals for dominance.

  This was a crisis like none faced since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Franklin Roosevelt mobilized what ultimately turned out to be over ten million men.

  The studio was being set up and would be ready in a matter of minutes.

  But what could he, as president, say?

  What words would reduce the options available to him?

  What words would bring him closer to danger?

  What words did the men behind these monstrous attacks want to hear come from his mouth?

  He knew his job was not to console the nation, although he would have to appear to be doing so. He knew his job was not to explain what had happened, or to reveal those responsible.

  His job was not to do the right thing.

  His job was to maintain order, maintain control of the situation, protect American prestige, and make the country appear as powerful as possible.

  His job was to go on camera, address the nation, and save as much face for the United States of America as it was possible to do.