The seat next to John Madejski was empty, and it was still empty when Barcelona scored, and still empty when the teams came in for halftime. The Barcelona Deputy Chairman, Andre di Stefano, was absolutely mystified.
"I have an e-mail from his secretary, dated yesterday. He was flying in today directly from Yekaterinburg in a private jet owned by Emirates Airlines. I have the flight arrival time, but the airline guys say he never boarded the plane."
"Well, where the hell is he?" asked the Reading Chairman.
"Tell you the truth, we thought you'd probably know."
"I haven't spoken to him since Sunday, and he said he'd see me here for a glass of wine before the kickoff."
"So unlike him," said Andre. "To have informed no one he wasn't coming. Something must have happened."
"Well, it's close to midnight in Russia," replied John Madejski. "His office is shut, and I tried his mobile twenty minutes ago and it was switched off…so perhaps he had to fly somewhere else first, and will get here for the second half. That's a huge business he runs."
"I still think it's totally unlike him to vanish without informing anyone…but…maybe a girlfriend?" di Stefano chuckled.
"What! Instead of watching the game against Arsenal? No chance," replied Madejski.
And the second half kicked off without Jaan Valuev. And Arsenal scored three times to thunderous roars that could have been heard in Piccadilly Circus six underground stops away.
The game ended and the dinner began, with places rearranged to close the gap left by the absent Siberian soccer chief.
At the end of the evening, as John Madejski slipped out of the stadium to where his chauffeur, Terry, had the big blue Rolls Bentley waiting, a reporter from the London Daily Telegraph approached the Reading Chairman for a quote about the game. But what he really wanted was a quote about the rumored bid to buy Arsenal.
John Madejski, of course, was far too wily to fall for that. "It was a wonderful game," he said. "Played with great spirit. We saw four superb goals and Arsenal deserved it." As an afterthought he added, "Tell you the truth, it was a little disappointing for me, because Mr. Valuev was unable to get here…and that was a shame. He would have loved it, even though his beloved Barcelona lost."
And that was sufficient for the football writer. Not for tonight's report. That was already filed. But for tomorrow's follow-up to the biggest game of the season:
SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE MISSES BARCELONA'S BIG ONE
Mystery of Jaan Valuev's Arsenal No-Show
The following report pointed out the reason Jaan missed the game was because of the protracted speculation that he and John Madejski might be scheming to buy Arsenal Football Club.
They quoted Madejski as saying "Rubbish." And the Barcelona club as saying they were not privy to all of their Chairman's travel arrangements. No, they had not heard from him since the defeat in North London.
Yes, they were quite certain he would be back in the director's box for the game against Spanish rivals Real Madrid at the Birnabau Stadium in the Spanish capital a week from Saturday.
1100, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe was in heaven. Or, as near to heaven as an organizational hell such as his own office permitted. A colleague from the National Surveillance Office, just returned from Europe, had dropped him off a pristine copy of yesterday's London Daily Telegraph.
This was a fairly regular occurrence up here on the eighth floor behind the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS2B Building. Lt. Commander Ramshawe's voracious appetite for top foreign newspapers was well known.
Leaning back in his swivel chair, feet on the desk, he sipped a cup of fresh coffee before reaching for his newspaper and turning to his favorite pages. As it happened there was not much going on in London to interest him, and he kept wandering through the newspaper until he finally landed on the sports pages.
And one word jumped straight out at him: Siberian. Right in the headline. If the word had been set in smaller type he'd most certainly have missed it.
But there was no missing this. SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE.
"Hallo," said Jimmy. "One of the late Mr. Masorin's mates. What's he done to get himself in with the bloody football players?"
One minute later: "Christ, the bugger's vanished. Those Siberians aren't having much luck lately."
On nothing more than pure reflex, he picked up his phone and called Lenny Suchov.
"Lenny, you seen anything about this Siberian oil guy gone missing?"
"Funny you should mention that. We just got a highly classified report in from our man up in Noyabrsk pointing out the Chairman of SIBNEFT has vanished — not been seen for two or three days.
"Our guys think he may have been snatched by agents of Moscow, and put in the slammer, just like they did to poor old Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the biggest Yukos oil shareholder, six years ago.
"Anyway, how did you find out about it?"
"I've just read it in the London Daily Telegraph."
"Impossible. This has only just broken. It's not even in the Russian newspapers yet."
"Maybe not, but the old Siberian was supposed to be at a football game coupla nights ago in London and he never showed."
"A what!"
"A football game. He's the Chairman of Barcelona."
"What the hell are you talking about? The missing Siberian is called Sergei Pobozhiy. And he's supposed to be at SIBNEFT's northern site office near the oil field in the West Siberian Basin. Not at a football game."
"What do'you say his name is?"
"Sergei Pobozhiy."
Jimmy grappled with the London broadsheet. "Well, that's a different guy. My man's called Jaan Valuev. He's the boss of some Russian oil company, but it doesn't say here which one. Anyway it does say he's vanished."
"Christ, Jimmy, that's two missing and one dead in the last couple of weeks, all major Siberians…what the hell's going on?"
"Beats the hell outta me, old mate."
"Okay, I'll get another couple of field agents on this. Tell you what. I'll keep you posted. But this isn't anything military, or to do with national security. Give me a call in an hour, and I'll tell you where we stand."
11:30 A.M., SAME DAY
MOSCOW
The President of Russia, a big, burly, sallow-faced former deputy head of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, missed the old sledgehammer rule of the authoritarian Central Government more than most.
He rubbed along adequately with both houses of the Russian Parliament — the Federation Council and the Duma — but as the elected Head of State he had enormously broad powers, including the appointment of his deputy, the Prime Minister, and all government ministers.
Some Presidents of the Russian Federation are more approachable than others. This one was very remote, yearning in his heart for the old days of the Politburo, the huge brutal power of the Soviet machine, which could deal with "trouble" instantly and ruthlessly. This President was not really a committee man.
If anyone had found out what had been perpetrated at the oil summit in Siberia, the President might very well have faced a career-ending onslaught in the Parliament. But this President held power, like so many of his recent predecessors, with an iron grip. The Duma and the Federation Council found out what he wanted them to know.
Russia was ruled from this grand suite of offices where the President now sat, sipping coffee at the head of a highly polished table. With him were just four men, gathered here in the domed rotunda on the second floor of the Senate building, today the ultimate seat of Russian power, situated on the east side of the Kremlin.
The great yellow-and-white, triangular, eighteenth-century neoclassical edifice stands east of Peter the Great's Arsenal building, alongside the old 1930s Supreme Soviet. It is situated behind the ramparts that flank the Senate Tower, directly behind Lenin's tomb.
Like the current Russian President, Vladimir Ilych Len
in both lived and worked in the Senate, a measure of history adored by the reigning President. But perhaps the leader in 2010 liked even better the fact that during World War II, this rotunda hosted the Red Army Supreme Command, under Stalin.
The President was relaxed in this cradle of Russian history, feeling as he always did in the rotunda a vast sense of confidence, impregnability, and destiny. The men who depended entirely upon him for their exalted positions and grandiose lifestyles were apt to treasure his every word.
It was almost impossible to imagine the old days, when Politburo members occasionally vanished for incurring the wrath of their Communist Party leader. Almost impossible. Not quite.
The President smiled at those whose undying trust he enjoyed. There was the Prime Minister, Valery Kravchenko, who like himself was a native of St. Petersburg. There was the current head of the FSB, Boris Patrushov; the Energy Minister, Oleg Kuts; the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Oleg Nalyotov, who literally strutted around in his vast authority, pompously occupying the office once held by the great Andrei Gromyko.
The last man at the table, placed to the right of Nalyotov, was Gregor Komoyedov, the former Moscow oil executive who now occupied the critically important Ministry for Foreign Trade. Above them all fluttered the white, blue, and red horizontal tricolor of the Russian Federation, high atop the flagstaff at the pinnacle of the rotunda.
Twelve hundred meters to the south, the Moscow River flowed icily eastward, lazily as Russian history. And beyond the great Senate Tower, in Red Square, a thousand tourists stared up and over the Kremlin ramparts, most of them gazing at the towering gilded dome of Ivan the Great's Bell Tower, still the tallest structure in the Kremlin, and once the tallest building in Moscow.
From the wide windows of the rotunda, the Russian President and his colleagues could see the riotous colors, the greens, the yellows, and the bloodred livery of St. Basil's Cathedral with its twisting domes jutting skyward to the south of the square.
One glance through those windows could engulf the mind with visions of the stark and tumultuous history of Russia. Every man at the table sensed it, especially the President. And they sensed it every time a highly classified meeting was invoked. As ever, for former middle-line government officials elevated to the grandeurs of power, destiny beckoned.
"Gentlemen," said the President, "first of all, I think we owe a vote of thanks to Boris Patrushov, to the quite brilliant way he first located, and then dealt with, that treasonous and seditious conference that took place in Yekaterinburg. I think our mutual role model, the late First Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, would have been very proud."
The head of the new secret police looked modestly down at his notes, and said quietly, "Thank you, Comrade. But I should say our success was entirely due to the very alert observation of our little mole in the office of the Chairman of the Siberian Oil Company. The rest was routine for me. That conference represented a threat to the Russian people. A threat to the bedrock of our economy. It had to be extinguished."
"Absolutely correct," interjected Oleg Nalyotov. "The consequences of their proposed actions were unthinkable for any Russian not resident in Siberia."
The President nodded. "However," he continued, "the Siberian threat remains. They are a vast Russian protectorate, which, at the top at least, suspects it no longer needs our protection. I think it is likely that such an intention, to secede from the Motherland, may very well occur again, though probably not for a while.
"We have probably silenced it for maybe five or six years. But we have not killed it, any more than we could ever kill it. The will of the Siberians, to profit and prosper from the oil and gas that lies beneath their godforsaken frozen soil, will surely rise again.
"But first I would like to deal with more immediate matters. The…er…termination of the careers of the treacherous men who gathered in Yekaterinburg on Monday. Plainly they will be missed. Probably already have been…"
Foreign Minister Nalyotov intervened. "With respect, Comrade, the Western press has already picked up a lead on the disappearance of Jaan Valuev, the Surgutneftegas President…apparently failed to turn up at some soccer game…caused questions in sports circles…now we have formal inquiries from foreign media asking if he's been found."
The President nodded, very seriously. "Nothing else?" he asked.
"Well, they seem to think Sergei Pobozhiy, the Chairman of SIBNEFT, is mysteriously vanished. I think Gregor Komoyedov might have some information."
The Energy Minister nodded and said, "Very little, I am afraid. But I understand there have been some serious inquiries inside the corporation as to his whereabouts. The Chairman does not often go missing, and I did hear they were talking to his wife. That'll be public knowledge in twenty-four hours."
"Plainly," said the President, "we must move on this. I think the best course of action would be an accident in a military aircraft deep in the tundra. We need not give details, as the mission was highly classified. But I have drafted a press release, which should be issued directly from the military. It should begin something like this…
"With deep regret we announce the loss of a Russian Air Force jet, which disappeared over the arctic tundra somewhere north of the Siberian oil fields earlier this week. Unfortunately, the aircraft was known to have been transporting several important personnel from the Russian national oil and gas industry, as well as several senior Siberian politicians. Severe weather conditions have made the search for bodies almost impossible.
"Their ultimate destination was Murmansk for an international conference at the new tanker terminals. Air Force helicopters are currently in the search area but no wreckage has yet been found, and we have no information on the cause of the crash. Because of the classified nature of the mission, the Air Force will not be releasing the names of any of their own personnel.
"Families of the deceased executives and politicians are currently being informed. The government and the military authorities are treating the incident as an accident that occurred in flight, though there will of course be a thorough investigation into the possible reasons for the jet to have gone down."
"Excellent," said Boris Patrushov, with the clear relief of a man who had just ordered and masterminded a dozen cold-blooded murders of innocent Russian civilians. "It'll take a few days and a few awkward questions. But we'll alert the military media authorities on the procedures we expect them to adopt.
"And we'll make it known that the government would prefer this very sad incident to be treated with care and sensitivity. Sensationalizing the death of such men will incur the anger of the authorities. It might also be a good idea to bestow some kind of decorations or medals on these men who died in the service of their country."
"Very good idea," said the President. "Perhaps the Cross of the Russian Federation for the civilians, and regular combat medals for the pilots."
"Perfect," offered Boris. "And of course in the end we'll blame the appalling weather and the impossibility of landing the aircraft after an instrument failure, and an apparent problem with the hydraulics."
"Yes, I think that will see our little problem off very nicely," said Prime Minister Kravchenko. "Very nicely indeed."
"Meanwhile," continued the President, "I think we should discuss the heart of the problem."
"Which is?" asked Kravchenko.
The President looked concerned. He glanced up and said, "What would become of Mother Russia if ever the Siberians were to succeed in going their own way? They certainly would not be the first of our satellites to do so. But they would be, by a long way, the most dangerous.
"And even if they demanded or took a far greater license in deciding the destination of their own oil and gas…well, that could prove nearly fatal for us. Because they would almost certainly turn to China, and a close, cozy relationship between those two, right down at the ass end of the fucking Asian continent, would not be great…"
"Neither financially, geographically, nor diplomatically," mused Kravchenko
. "World sympathy would immediately swing to Siberia, the poor freezing underclass of the old Soviet Union…never had anything, never been fairly treated by Moscow…struggled with the world's cruelest climate for centuries…and now the bullies of the Kremlin want to suppress them yet again—"
"Yes," interrupted the President. "I think that was quite sufficiently graphic. And I think I speak for everyone when I say we might one day simply lose control of that Siberian oil. We won't be ruined…there'll still be riches and reward for the Russian government. But it won't be like now. The goose's golden eggs will become a bit more…well, brassy."
The Russian President stood up and pressed a bell for the Senate butler to come through and bring them coffee and sweet pastries. He stood before a gigantic portrait of the elderly Catherine the Great, accompanied by her brown-and-white whippet, and specified the precise texture of thick dark coffee he required, and the precise sweetness of the pastries.
Then he sat down and began to outline a plan of such terrifying wickedness and subversiveness, each of the four officials who were listening were stunned into silence.
"We are going to need a new supply of oil," he said. "From somewhere in the world where there are ample reserves, billions of barrels of crude, which we can seize control of. I know it's not going to be easy, and that anyone who has it wants to keep it. But there is a new and very serious player in the game…China. And within a few short years they are going to want every last barrel they can lay their hands on."
He hesitated for a moment as the door opened and the butler came in with their coffee. He nodded respectfully and set the large silver tray down on an antique sideboard beneath a gigantic nineteenth-century painting of the Battle of Balaklava fought in the Crimea in 1854.
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