Tsar

by Ted Bell

  “I want to thank you for Red Banner’s leadership on that one. Your man Alex Hawke did one hell of a job. Especially considering the fact that no one on earth had ever done anything like it before. And this woman-what is her name? The passenger who managed to get the hatch open for our boys?”

  “Fancha is the name I was given by my chief of station. Not one of the passengers, apparently, a shipboard entertainer.”

  “That’s it. Must be quite an amazing woman. Took enormous courage to do what she did. Well done all around.”

  “Mr. President, I think the lion’s share of credit has to go to your young SEAL teams. Magnificent job, from what I understand. Very few casualties at our end. If transoceanic airships are the coming thing, and they may well be, we now have a textbook scenario for any future hostage crisis.”

  “David, I called about another urgent matter. Now that we’ve taken the airship out of play, I’m determined to remove these damn Zeta machines from the table as well. You’re aware of these things I assume?”

  “Indeed, I am. The FBI shared all of that information with MI-5, MI-6, and New Scotland Yard during the night. Tens of millions of bombs, all connected? It’s frankly unbelievable but apparently quite true. This new Kremlin fellow is absolutely mad. My chaps are hard at it as we speak. It’s a bloody nightmare, all right, but there has to be some way to take out those things.”

  “I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. We have to assume Korsakov, or someone close to him, has to have some kind of detonator. A nuclear football, for want of a better term. Agree?”

  “I certainly do. A unified way to trigger countless small bombs simultaneously. Like Salina but on a grander scale.”

  “Exactly. So, we need to find and neutralize that damn detonator before Korsakov or someone else can use it. He gave us twenty-four hours before he takes out a Western city of one million souls.”

  “Good God. Well, best luck on that. So far, we’re absolutely stumped around here. I’ve got a crisis team on this specifically as well. We just have to crack it, that’s all there is to it.”

  “David, bear with me a moment. You had an asset inside the Kremlin during the eighties. I can’t remember his name, but-”

  “Stefanovich Halter? A don at Cambridge?”

  “No, no. I know Professor Halter. This man I’m thinking of was ex-military. KGB. Tough, smart, Teutonic bastard, a German-Russian, almost neo-Nazi, as I recall, but if you threw enough money at him, he’d play ball. Helped us with that Korean airliner they shot down, the one that strayed into Soviet airspace. I dealt with him directly through the CIA. Greedy bastard, but he delivered the goods.”

  “Sounds like most of the chaps Ivan Korsakov surrounds himself with. You’re looking for someone extremely close to the Tsar, I take it. A trusted confidant of long standing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I see where you’re going with this. Good thought. I’ll get on this immediately. See if we can’t sort out your man. Determine if he’s still alive, and if so, if he’s any kind of key player in the Tsar’s new regime.”

  “How quickly can you get back to me, David?”

  “As you will remember, we had more than a few KGB doubles on MI-6 books for a while way back when. We had numbered accounts for them in Zurich or Geneva, some offshore in the Caymans and elsewhere. Shouldn’t take me too long to get someone onto this, see if there are still some active accounts on the books.”

  “One minute sounds good to me.”

  “We’ll do our best. I warn you, though, we haven’t used these fellows since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As I say, I’m not even sure if any of them are still alive. Red Banner’s charge is to rebuild the old Moscow network. Just begun scratching the surface there, I’m afraid.”

  “Is there anyone at all on your side who could find out quickly? Every second counts from here on in.”

  “Stefan Halter might actually recall the fellow you’re after. He’s deep cover in Moscow right now, but he’s spent time in Bermuda recently, briefing Hawke and Red Banner on dormant Moscow assets. I’ll ring him post haste.”

  “Do that. Sir David, I don’t need to stress how vitally important this is. I need a reliable asset deep inside the Kremlin, and I need him now. Someone who can help us get close enough to Korsakov to neutralize his goddamn worldwide web of death machines. The CIA says Korsakov’s private airship arrives in Stockholm in twelve hours. He shows up at the Stockholm Concert Hall two hours later to accept his Nobel. I’d like your Red Banner boys on him the second he lands. Got any ideas? Hawke would be ideal.”

  “Alex Hawke? May need a bit of a rest-up after Energetika and this Bermuda operation, I’m afraid.”

  “No time for rest-ups, David. I’d appreciate it if you could get your man Hawke on the next thing smoking to Stockholm. That’s where Korsakov is headed, and that’s where we need him. We’ll provide transportation. Agreed?”

  “I’ll ring him now.”

  “And David, tell your Mr. Hawke one thing directly from the American president’s lips to his ears, will you, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Everything is riding on this. Everything.”

  “Got it. I’ll ring you back as soon as I have something definite on your Kremlin question. Cheerio.”

  Cheerio?

  Did they still say that over there?

  64

  KUNGSHOLM, SWEDEN

  The tiny village of Kungsholm was roughly one hour by car from the center of Stockholm. As it was nearly buried within a deep, dark wood, Hawke had found it rather difficult to locate. The limbs of gnarled old trees on either side of the lane were laden with freshly fallen December snow and threw long black arms across the scene. The quaint cottages glimpsed now and then on either side of the narrow thoroughfare seemed supernaturally quiet.

  No movement, save a delicate mist wafting across the road and into the thrusting, yearning tangle of the woodland fringe. Perfect stillness. It was as if some evil wizard had recently waved his wand above all the rooftops, sprinkling fairy dust that put the village’s few inhabitants to sleep for an eternity.

  Hawke motored slowly through the town. Smoke curled from a few chimneys, rising through spindly black tree limbs sharply etched against the rose-gold afternoon sky. But these few wispy smoke trails were the sole signs of human life. On the outskirts of town, he had seen three magnificent reindeer staring at him from the safety of the woods, frozen in place, nostrils quivering, their huge black eyes glistening.

  Hawke was shivering behind the wheel of an ancient Saab in which both the heater and the windscreen wipers were woefully inadequate. Despite this deliberately inconspicuous vehicle, he’d somehow picked up a tail leaving the airport, a blacked-out late-model Audi. After a bit of cat and mouse in the narrow cobbled lanes of the Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s Old Town, he’d finally managed to lose them, whoever they were. Russian secret police, he supposed, the Tsar’s men. Korsakov would no doubt have his Third Department operatives watching the airports and rail stations.

  Having made it safely out of Stockholm and driving south through the Swedish countryside to Kungsholm, he was now looking for any road signs not completely frosted over with snow. He was struggling a bit with the map unfolded on his knee. He wasn’t fluent in Swedish, and the damn thing was no help at all.

  He was not yet prepared to admit that he was lost, but he was considering getting out his mobile and calling Stefan Halter, his contact, when he finally saw the snow-filled lane he was probably meant to take. He put the wheel hard over and skidded into it, careening harmlessly off the snowbanks on either side. The trees above him intersected to form a long dark tunnel snaking through the wood.

  Stefan would be waiting for him at the end of this lane. An Interpol safe house here in Kungsholm had been chosen for Hawke’s rendezvous with the Russian double agent Halter had identified for the White House. All he knew was that the agent, whose name Hawke had not been told, was a man President McAtee ha
d dealt with in the past and that Hawke’s meeting with him had apparently been specifically ordered by the president.

  Hawke’s brief on this new mission had been straightforward enough:

  Get to Kungsholm, Sweden, as fast as he possibly could without attracting undue attention. Find Halter.

  The simple two-story farmhouse appeared through his frosted windscreen. It was built of roughhewn stone and had a sharply pitched roof of slate and two large chimneys at either end made of brick. It had a storybook quality, Hawke thought, which seemed to be the norm in this neck of the woods.

  He parked the Saab next to a battered Mercedes sedan in a small yard just outside the entryway, climbed out, and rapped thrice, then twice, on the heavy wooden door, just as he’d been instructed.

  The Russian mole, Dr. Stefanovich Halter, just as tweedy and natty as Hawke remembered him from Bermuda, pulled the door open. The smell of wood smoke inside was pleasant, and the weary British spy was pleased to come in from the cold.

  “Alex,” Halter said, wasting no time on amenities, “prepare yourself.”

  “Tell me, Stefan.”

  “The man you’re about to meet is General Kuragin, the head of the Third Department, the Tsar’s private secret police. He’s waiting at a table in the kitchen. He’s a bit tight, I’m afraid.”

  “Nikolai Kuragin?” Hawke said.

  “Indeed. Know him?”

  “I met him briefly at the winter palace. He’s the Tsar’s oldest and closest friend, is he not?”

  “Well, let’s just say the general’s loyalty has never been above reproach and leave it at that.”

  “Drunk, is he?”

  “Not yet, but he’s working on it.”

  “Take the bottle away.”

  “Good cop, bad cop, as you Yanks say. I’m the good one. Listen, he’s got the Beta detonator with him. It’s one of only two in existence. It’s manacled permanently to his left wrist. He bloody sleeps with the damn thing.”

  “Beta detonator? What the hell does it detonate?”

  “Everything.”

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  “The whole bloody world, basically.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m deadly serious, Alex. Look, there’s no time to explain now, but Korsakov has basically hardwired the whole world with explosives inside computers. Zeta machines.”

  “The Wizards? I own one.”

  “Yes. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but it’s not. It’s bloody reality. Witness the demise of Salina, Kansas.”

  “You said two detonators. Where is the other one?”

  “Always with the Tsar. Kuragin’s is the fail-safe backup in case something untoward should happen to Korsakov.”

  “Is our general feeling cooperative?”

  “He will be when he learns how much we’re prepared to pay for the Beta detonator.”

  “Am I doing the negotiating?” Hawke asked.

  “We’ll double-team him. He wouldn’t have agreed to come here if he weren’t for sale, that I can promise you.”

  “What’s our ceiling?”

  “Fifty million U.S. dollars. But we’ll start the bidding at twenty. I’ve already transferred that amount to his account in Geneva.”

  “I knew I’d gone into the wrong business,” Hawke said with a wry smile. “The kitchen is back this way, I assume?”

  “LORD HAWKE, WELCOME,” General Kuragin said, getting somewhat shakily to his feet and extending his hand. “We met briefly under slightly grander circumstances a week ago in the country. The Tsar’s winter palace.”

  “Indeed we did, general,” Hawke said, shaking the Russian’s skeletal hand and taking a seat at the old butcher-block table. The man’s splendid black uniform, heavy, deep-set dark eyes, and pale yellow skin gave him an uncanny resemblance to Himmler, if Hawke’s mental picture of the old Nazi was accurate. Halter joined them at the table, and Kuragin ceremoniously filled the glasses at each man’s seat from a half-empty carafe of vodka. Kuragin spoke first, and what he said brought Hawke upright in his chair.

  “I understand you spent some time sharing a cell with my old friend at Energetika, Lord Hawke.”

  “Putin is your friend? But you helped overthrow him.”

  “Things in Russia are not always what they seem. There are wheels within wheels, Lord Hawke, believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you, general. Absolutely Byzantine.”

  The general nodded, a fleeting smile on his lips. He’d actually taken the word as a compliment. Then he covered Hawke’s hand with his own, patting it as one would a child’s. The bony fingers were trembling, cold as ice.

  “Putin was most impressed in his appraisal of you. In fact, it was Putin himself who insisted I meet with you today.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Why do you think? Surely he brought you into his confidence. Made his future plans known to you that night in his wretched cell.”

  “He did, indeed,” Hawke said, replaying bits of the long conversation in his mind.

  “And?”

  “Eliminate the Tsar and return to power,” Hawke said slowly, sitting back in his chair. This entire Russian affair was suddenly clicking into place like the encryption rotors inside an Enigma machine.

  A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Churchill had said of Russia, and truer words were never spoken. Hawke sat back, sipped his vodka, and studied the man.

  General Kuragin was the one secretly protecting Putin inside the prison. And it was Kuragin who would orchestrate Putin’s return to power once the Tsar was safely out of the way. And it was Kuragin who would emerge from this latest coup even more powerful than from the last two or three.

  Yes, it was all quite clear now. He’d finally found him. The man MI-6 had long ago dubbed the Third Man, the unseen power behind the Kremlin throne.

  It was never Ivan Korsakov, as Hawke had gradually come to believe.

  It was General Nikolai Kuragin.

  Palace intrigue was a noble tradition in ancient Russia, and Hawke had managed to get himself tangled up in this bloody intrigue without even knowing it. He’d come to Russia suffused with confidence, ready to practice his craft, to spy on them, only to learn that he was merely a tiny pawn on their great board. And the Third Man, the grandest chess master of them all, had been using him all along.

  Using the pawn to take out the king?

  Kuragin smiled, his eyes like black slits behind the thick lenses, and Hawke had the disconcerting sensation that the man had been reading his thoughts.

  “It was you, wasn’t it, general? You had me arrested and thrown into Energetika Prison for a bloody job interview!” Hawke said.

  “Hmm. Let’s say I may have put the notion into the Tsar’s head. Of course, Korsakov had no idea you would live long enough to speak privately with our beloved former prime minister. No, Ivan the Terrible assumed you’d be impaled shortly after your arrival inside those forbidding black walls.”

  “Ivan the Terrible,” Hawke said, smiling at the wily old spy. “Surprising you, of all people, would call him that. Your dear friend.”

  “He’s a fucking monster,” Kuragin said with sudden ferocity.

  “Impaling his enemies by the thousands is child’s play for him. Bringing about the total destruction of my beloved homeland by incurring America’s nuclear wrath is much more difficult. And yet that is precisely what he is about to do.”

  “Unless you stop him.”

  “Unless you stop him, Lord Hawke. I can never be seen as having anything to do with this, this…whatever you intend to do, for obvious reasons. I believe the current American expression is plausible deniability. I intend to have very plausible deniability, I assure you. Excruciatingly plausible.”

  Hawke glanced at Halter, wondering how much he already knew of all this. Had Stefanovich Halter traveled all the way to Bermuda to take Hawke’s measure for Kuragin? It was surely possible they’d been planning a role for him even then. But Ha
lter was giving nothing away. Men who’d spent their lives playing both sides of the scrimmage line were good at that kind of thing, else they paid in blood.

  “I think perhaps we understand each other, general,” Hawke said, making his decision even as he said the words, raising his glass. Putin was far from perfect, but he was vastly preferable to the vainglorious psychopath who represented the status quo.

  The pawn now saw the whole board as if from above and found he was more than willing to make the next move.

  “To world peace,” Kuragin said, raising his own glass.

  “To world peace,” the other two echoed, and then all three of them downed their drinks in a single draught.

  “General,” Hawke said, glancing at his watch, “tell me more about your lovely bracelet and the object attached to it.”

  “Certainly,” Kuragin said, pushing the detonator closer to Hawke. “What do you wish to know?”

  “How does it work, for starters?” Hawke asked, picking it up and turning it over in his hands. He eyed the detonator carefully, contemplating the enormous power of it. It was simply a smaller version of the brain-shaped Zeta computer but without the brain-stem stalk to support it. Polished to a mirror finish. Quite heavy, with a hairline crack around the exterior, where it opened.

  “The two extant detonators, called Beta machines, are connected by Bluetooth and other sophisticated wireless servers to every Zeta machine on the planet. I can easily program this Beta to blow up a single Zeta or, say, a hundred million of them. Individually or simultaneously. Only at the Tsar’s command, of course.”

  “You actually can blow up the whole world with this thing,” Hawke said, eyeing Halter again. “Right here. Right now.”

  “Basically, yes, I can, but I won’t. I am not insane. Not yet, anyway. The Tsar, on the other hand, would be perfectly happy to do so if someone on the other side either miscalculates or underestimates and gets in his way.”

  “Amazing,” Hawke said, placing the Beta machine carefully on the table. He took the carafe from where it stood in front of Kuragin, poured himself a fresh drink, and looked at the two men with something akin to admiration.