“Maybe,” Gordian said.
They waited some more. The people around them were mostly political staffers, reporters, and lobbyists, with a sprinkling of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of someone important. So far Gordian hadn’t noticed any stargazers looking in his direction. He wondered idly if he was having a bad hair day.
“So,” he said, “how about you tell me about Delacroix’s latest isolationist rants.”
Dan eyed someone eating a corned beef sandwich at the next table.
“I want my food,” he said.
“I know,” Gordian said. “I was hoping to take your mind off it.”
Dan shrugged.
“From what I hear from my colleagues in the Senate, Delacroix’s been pressing the themes you’d expect. Talking about the cost of an aid commitment to Russia, pointing out—correctly, I should mention—that the bill for our peacekeeping mission in Bosnia has wound up being five times higher than the early projections. And that the Russian parliament and banking system are largely controlled by organized crime, which means a percentage of any loans we extend will probably be skimmed by corrupt officials.”
Gordian took another drink of beer. “What else?”
“He’s claiming the President’s offer amounts to appeasement ... the argument being that he’s trying to buy concessions in the next round of START and nuclear testban talks with candy, rather than score points through hardball negotiations.”
Gordian spotted a waiter moving toward them with a serving tray balanced on his arm.
“Our sirloins are here,” he said.
“Thank God,” Dan said, and snapped open his napkin. “How long we been waiting?”
Gordian checked his watch. “A whopping ten minutes.”
They sat in silence as their plates were set in front of them and the waiter zipped off.
Dan reached for his silverware and attacked his steak.
“Gooood,” he growled, mimicking Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein.
Gordian started on his own lunch, giving Dan a chance to come up for air before resuming their conversation.
“You’ve given me Delacroix’s publicly stated objections to the proposal,” he said. “What about his underlying, politically opportunistic ones?”
Dan looked at him and chewed a slice of meat.
“Nice to know you think so lowly of your elected officials.”
“Present company excepted,” Gordian said.
“You remember when Delacroix led the push for social services reductions a few years ago?” Dan asked.
“Hard to forget,” Gordian said. “Didn’t he spear a giant stuffed pig on the Senate floor or something?”
“Actually, that happened during a more recent session. And it was a piñata.” Dan worked at the steak with his knife and fork. “His prop for the cutback debate was a giant mechanical mouth.”
“At least he consistently thinks big.”
Dan grinned. “The point is, nobody’s forgotten his stance, which was considered bullish and hard-hearted even by conservatives. And now he’s afraid it’ll look bad if he keeps quiet about millions of dollars’ worth of food and financial aid going to foreigners ... Russians, no less.”
Gordian shook his head. “The two issues aren’t related. Even if we want to ignore the critical nature of the emergency—”
“Which is being questioned ...”
“It still boils down to a matter of strategic importance for our country,” Gordian said.
Dan drained his martini and signaled for another one. “Look, I don’t like having to defend the Louisiana pit bull. But try to imagine what Delacroix’s political opponents will make of his going along with the aid program. The very same people who are in favor of it will accuse him of hypocrisy, and remind the public that he’s the guy who wanted school lunches taken away from American kids.”
Gordian was silent again. He looked down at his plate. Ever since Ashley had instructed their personal chef to omit the red meat from their meals—he couldn’t quite recall if it was the saturated fat content, carcinogenic antibiotics, or steroidal growth additives that bothered her—his steak lunches at the Palm had taken on a rebellious air, become a respite, even an escape, from the healthful monotony of tossed greens and seafood and grilled chicken breast. And to enhance this forbidden pleasure, to experience it in all its cholesterol-soaked fullness, he had gone from having his steaks served medium-rare to a bare, dripping step from raw. Once a month, he broke free of all dietary shackles to become a wolf, a carnivorous alpha male, sinking his fangs into bloody flesh after a successful hunt.
Today, however, he hadn’t been able to muster much of an appetite. His steak looked so neglected he almost wanted to give it an apology.
“A couple of people from my Russian team were in Kaliningrad the other day,” he said. “You remember Vince Scull? I introduced him to you a while back.”
Parker nodded.
“The scenario-planning expert,” he said. “Sharp guy. Kind of struck me as the, uh, moody type, though.”
“I don’t pay him to be adorable. There’s nobody better than Vince at anticipating big bang problems, and he left that city convinced there’ll be food riots throughout Russia within a month.” Gordian paused a moment, caught the waiter’s eye, and motioned at his empty beer mug. “Twenty years ago, when he was working for a Canadian investment firm in Iran, he advised his employers to get their staff out of the country. The company honchos thought his appraisal of the political climate was overly bleak. Six days later, the Ayatollah assumed power and the U.S. embassy staff was taken hostage. Scull stuck around to smuggle out some of the company’s American workers. When the danger to them was past, he resigned, and I snapped him up.”
“What makes him so certain of disaster this time?”
“A lot of things. I can fax you a copy of his report, if you’d like. But his contention’s that Kaliningrad is less reliant on domestic food supplies than other cities, I think because a lot of imported stuff comes through its free trade port. Yet the markets there were dry. If the people in that city are hurting, it’s going to be rougher in places like St. Petersburg, or even the capital.” Gordian’s fresh beer arrived and he took a drink. “I know it’s anecdotal, but Vince even got into a confrontation with some punks who tried running off with an old lady’s grocery bag. This is a half hour after he drove into town.”
“As goes Kaliningrad, so goes the Federation,” Parker said. “That what you’re telling me?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Dan sighed. “Maybe the incident you mentioned clouded up Scull’s crystal ball. Or could be he’s just plain wrong. It happens to the best.”
“So Starinov came here begging for a handout for nothing? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“You ask Bob Delacroix, he’d say the minister’s been exaggerating the severity of the crisis. That he needs a hot-button issue that’ll grab attention away from that Pedachenko character. Make him look like a statesman who can stand among other world leaders.”
Gordian looked at him, his gray eyes firm.
“I’m not talking to Delacroix,” he said. “Dan, I’ve got over a hundred employees in western Russia at this moment. Another eighty or ninety contract workers who’ve been hired to build the ground terminal. Let’s forget my investment a minute. Forget the broader national interest, too. Those people are in vulnerable positions and my main concern is their safety. If the relief agreement is on its way to being scuttled, I’m pulling them out. So tell me how you think it’s going to go.”
Dan listened in silence as Gordian spoke, rotating his martini between his hands, his fingertips leaving faint prints on the chilled surface of the glass. Finally he lifted it to his mouth and drank.
“The President will probably be able to cut a deal, get at least some of the assistance under way,” he said. “With any luck, it’ll be enough.”
“That’s three qualifiers in two sentences,” Gordian said.
Dan looked at him and shrugged. “The toughest thing I learned during my freshman year in Congress was to curb my expectations. It’s also the thing that’s kept me hanging in there.”
“So you’re telling me to sit tight and hope for the best.”
“Yeah.”
Gordian sat back in his chair and sighed, lost in thought.
Dan ogled his plate.
“You gonna finish that steak?” he asked.
Gordian shook his head.
“Then how about sliding it over,” Dan said.
NINE
KALININGRAD REGION NOVEMBER 16, 1999
GREGOR SADOV STOOD IN THE SHADOWS AND watched the fires burn. Over the last four days, he and his team had torched seven different warehouses. The good news was that he hadn’t lost anyone since Andrei. The bad news was that it wasn’t enough.
But then, it never was.
His left hand was pressed to his side, holding a cloth tightly against the minor wound he’d received. He wasn’t sure if he’d caught a piece of shrapnel from when the grain in that last warehouse blew, or if one of the guards had gotten off a lucky shot and creased his side. Either way, it didn’t matter. The wound was painful, but not deep, and Gregor wouldn’t let a little pain slow him down.
No, it wasn’t the wound that was bothering him. It was the message he’d gotten that morning. Short and to the point, as always, the message had said simply, “Warehouse fires effective, but more needed. Prepare your team to target U.S. assets in area.”
That was it. No information on which U.S. assets to target, or when to strike. Gregor knew he’d be given that information when the people he worked for decided to tell him. Which was fine with him. They knew how he worked, and that he wouldn’t attack until he and his team were ready.
Standing there in the shadows, his hand pressed against his side, Gregor looked out on the destruction he had caused, and he smiled.
Elaine Steiner closed up the toolbox at her feet, dusted her hands, and stood up slowly, arching her back to relieve the strain of kneeling for so long. A wisp of her graying hair had come loose from the kerchief she wore when she worked, and she absently reached up to tuck it back in place. Beside her, Arthur, her husband, closed the door of the service panel and rolled his head left and right, trying to get a knot out of his neck.
They were in one of the smaller buildings on the perimeter of the compound Roger Gordian was having put up here in a sparsely populated area of the Kaliningrad region. The nearest town was over ninety kilometers away, so the compound they were building had to be pretty much self-sustaining, with an apartment complex for the various personnel and various forms of entertainment as well. And security. Lots of security. But that was true wherever they went.
Elaine and Arthur had been with Gordian for the better part of twenty years. He picked the sites for his ground stations, and the Steiners went in and got them up and running. It was a good partnership, and a good life, especially when, as now, they were getting close to bringing a ground station on-line for the first time.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said, looking over at Elaine.
She smiled softly. Arthur was always looking on the bright side. It was one of the things she admired most about him, perhaps because she was always so pessimistic.
“Not like Turkey,” she said, turning Arthur around and massaging his neck for him. “Remember when we couldn’t get the system to stay on-line for more than ten minutes at a time?”
“Yeah,” he said, letting his head roll forward to make her massage more effective. “Those damn outdated transistors the Afghanis sold us kept overheating. Took us forever to figure out what was going on.”
“And this was just a bad stretch of cable. I told that Russian service crew that they couldn’t run a cable that long without a support, but when have the locals ever listened to us?”
“They will,” Arthur said. “They’ll learn.”
Elaine sighed and shook her head, but there was a tolerant smile on her face as she continued to rub his neck. It was good to know that some things in life would never change.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s one bottle of wine left over from the last shipment. I think we should have it with dinner tonight.”
Arthur turned and put his arms around her. Reaching up and wiping away a smudge of grease from her cheek, he kissed her softly and said, “See? Things are looking up already.”
TEN
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 28, 1999
THE FLOOR-TO-CEILING MIRROR OCCUPYING AN ENTIRE wall of Nick Roma’s office was without a speck of dust, without a smudge, nearly without a flaw of any kind on its gleaming silvery surface. Nick would have one of the boys—he liked using that phrase, “the boys”—clean the mirror with Windex two, maybe three, times a day, occasionally more often if he noticed even the slightest blemish marring his reflection. Once there had been a small scratch in the glass and he’d had the panel replaced that same morning.
Nick didn’t think this was being compulsive. He paid close attention to his appearance and the mirror was extremely important to him. Certainly it was the most important thing in his office here at the Platinum Club, more important than his multimedia center, his telephone, or his scratch pad. At least as important as his MP5K.
Now Nicky stood at his mirror making minute adjustments to his clothing—pulling up the collar of his black turtleneck shirt, smoothing the shirt over his chest, being careful that it was tucked into his black designer jeans just right. Every detail had to be perfect.
Outside his window, a truck was backing into the loading area, rumbling out there by the freight door two stories down on Fifteenth Avenue.
He glanced at his Rolex.
11 A.M.
The delivery had arrived exactly on time. He was sure the pickup would, too. The people he was dealing with paid close attention to that sort of thing.
He looked down at his boots and checked that their shine was as flawless as the mirror’s. The boots were black Justins, some kind of lizard skin, and they required special care—much more than leather, anyway. One of the boys would clean and shine them every day, same as they did the mirror. But you had to keep an eye on them, make sure they used neutral wax on the boots instead of black polish. The polish would ruin the skin, and he’d wind up looking like some newly arrived immigrant from Little Odessa. And the mere prospect of that was something that filled him with anger and disgust.
Six months ago, he had been tried for gasoline boot-legging in a federal district court, the specific charge being that he had defrauded the IRS out of three million dollars in income taxes through the use of complicated paper transactions. When they made their closing arguments, prosecutors had told the jury he was vory v. zakone, a godfather in the Eastern European underworld. They had used words like bochya—“big man,” in Russian—to describe him. He had been accused of managing the American arm of a criminal syndicate they had alternately called organizatsiya and mafiya. At one point they had claimed its influence was on the way to becoming as powerful as that of the Cosa Nostra families and Asian gangs.
On the way, he thought with annoyance, pulling his comb from the back pocket of his jeans and sweeping it through his shock of wavy hair.
The trial had lasted two months but he had beaten the indictment, been acquitted of all counts. It had proven somewhat tricky, because the identities of the jurors had been closely guarded. They had been shuttled to and from the courthouse in unmarked vans, escorted by a swarm of cops from the Organized Crime Task Force, and addressed only by number in the courtroom. The blonde with the good legs whom Nick had smiled and winked at throughout the trial was Juror Number One. The fat man who sat with his arms crossed over his belly was Juror Number Nine. Everything top secret. But Nick had sneered at the government’s secrets. Nick had been persistent. His people knew clerks in the U.S. Attorney’s Office with access to what were laughably called “high-security” databases, and had gotten the information the
y needed to reach two members of the panel.
Fifty thousand dollars—along with guarantees that the jurors’ families would be protected from sudden accidents and disappearances—had bought Nick Roma an acquittal. He had thought that a fair deal. In fact, he considered himself primarily a dealmaker. At thirty-five years old, he had already forged reciprocal arrangements with the Italians, the Chinese triads, the Colombian cartels, even the Yakuza. He’d built steadily and creatively upon street-level enterprises such as prostitution and narcotics trafficking, gaining footholds in the banking system, launching elaborate financial schemes, cracking open new markets wherever he’d seen a dollar. He had made contacts in the legitimate corporate and political communities, and set up clearinghouses for his activities in over a dozen states ... which was why he’d taken personal affront at the government attorneys’ characterization of him as a greenhorn thug, the leader of a ring of ethnic wannabes.
In his mind, nothing could have been further from the truth.
He had immigrated from Russia with his parents when he was six years old and since then had never been out of the country, never even been away from New York City. When he was twelve, his mother had successfully gone through naturalization proceedings, gaining citizenship for him as well. He had worked on his pronunciation until he spoke without any trace of an accent. At twenty-one he had altered the spelling of his first name and dropped the last syllable from his surname. Thus, Nikita Romanov had become Nick Roma.
He was as solidly American as anyone in that courtroom. And every time he thought of the prosecutors he promised himself that their insult would be repaid with interest. He was nobody’s joke. He—
Nicky heard a knock on his door, put the finishing touch to his hair, and returned the comb to his back pocket.
“What is it?” He turned to look out the window. The truck downstairs was empty now, its small load wheeled into the nightclub on a handcart. He watched the driver lower the rear panel, hop back into his cab, and then start pulling out into the street.
Politika (1997) Page 5
