The Prague Ultimatum

by James Silvester

  “I didn’t want you to find out this way,” she lamented sincerely, “this wasn’t the plan; you found me too soon.”

  “Too soon?”

  He held his hands waist high and palms out, his body language open and receptive and his voice as calm as his inner turmoil would allow.

  “What plan? Natalie what’s going on?”

  The name slipped out from habit, inviting a fresh wince from the woman before him who filled her lungs with air and sighed.

  “Professor Natalie Abelard was dead five minutes after she arrived in Prague.”

  The woman’s voice lost in an instant the Welsh infusion which Stone had so enjoyed, and with it all traces of the warmth he had relished in, replaced not with frosty disdain, but with a rigid intransigence alien to the person he knew.

  “Dead?” Stone struggled to adapt to the confessions of his mystery lover, “If you’re not Natalie who the hell are you and what’s going on?”

  “I’m a plant,” the woman answered with sadness in her voice, “a double put in place by The Institute for European Harmony to oversee the final strategy.”

  The breath heaved out from Stone’s lungs, as though her words were a killer punch to his solar plexus, delivered as punishment for his having given in to his feelings for the woman now pointing a gun at him. And though he knew the situation demanded he retain his senses, the temptation to give in to the whirling emotional turmoil in his chest was steadily growing to become too much.

  “I..,” he tried to begin, shaking his head, “I came to save you…”

  “I know,” she nodded, her eyes still damp, “but now I need you to save the world instead.”

  The ludicrousness of the statement brought Stone back into a semblance of rational thought and he laughed; a hoarse, tense laugh, necessarily restrained through the proximity of a man this faux Abelard apparently wished to see dead.

  “Save the world?” he mocked, “you and your Institute friends? From what I’m told of you lot, the only thing you’re interested in saving is your own influence.”

  The jibe seemed to hit home and the sadness in her expression twisted into resentment.

  “We’re not the bad guys Lincoln,” she insisted, “we’re saving the future!”

  Stone was incredulous. “Saving the future?” He laughed, hard and without humour. “Saving it from what, from who?!”

  “From you!”

  She hissed the words at him, her body shaking with emotion and fighting the urge to scream her condemnation for the whole valley to hear, but the gun remained steady in her arms and pointing at the Captain.

  “From you and everyone like you! From the everyday idiots in the street, behind desks, in shops, on buses and a hundred other places who would let it fall without a fight, who don’t understand the realities of what this world is about!”

  Stone remained quiet, absorbing the imposter woman’s outburst and making no attempt to interject.

  “Europe has been fracturing for years, people in every country, in every Member State neglecting the good and the strength of the Union and why? Because there was nothing left to fear anymore. No Cold War, no imminent invasion from dreaded Eastern Forces, no nuclear threat on the horizon. But they were too fucking stupid, to realise that there’s always a threat, always, but sometimes threats don’t come dressed in army fatigues and carrying a gun. Climate change prevention, scientific advancement, intelligence sharing, humanitarian development; without us, all those things go down the shitter never to be seen again! But people are too stupid to realise that by themselves, so we give them a little help. We let them see what would happen if Europe wasn’t there, we give them a small glimpse of the chaos which would engulf the world because we love Europe, we love them enough to do it.”

  She was as passionate as Stone had ever seen her, even more so than their first day together in Old Town, and with her weapon still pointed at his chest, he realised he could best by time by engaging with her philosophy.

  “I get it,” Stone replied honestly, “I really do. You give people a taste of what they think they want; a world where there’s no need for Trident, no need for Europe, and then hit them with what something like that might actually mean in a world where there’s no safety in numbers anymore.”

  “Exactly,” answered the fake Abelard, “but a lesson like that demands a sacrifice.”

  “Czechoslovakia.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “People had grown lazy, without the fear they closed their minds to the bigger picture. The only way to open them was to reintroduce fear into the equation. The loss of Czechoslovakia is to be the catalyst of that fear. That was his masterplan.”

  “Whose, The Child’s?”

  “Jonathan told you about him then? Yes, The Child. He knew that the only way to stop Europe from crumbling apart was to take it as close to the edge as he dare, and he is a particularly daring man…”

  “He loves Europe enough to bring it to the edge of destruction,” Stone mused, remembering their first real conversation and wishing this was still some philosophical debate with a drink in the gentle warmth of the Old Town Square.

  “And build something better from the raw materials,” the fake Abelard concluded.

  “How?”

  “Fear is the easiest thing in the world to spread, particularly in a world that insists on feeding on the poison the media provides; anti-Muslim, anti-foreigner. Add one of the tin-pot populists coming to prominence and the fear multiplies ten-fold.”

  “Myska, or someone in his organisation, uses drugs to brainwash potential terror suspects into blowing up targets, thus boosting his own popularity; but underneath that he’s working with the Russians to lay the groundwork for an invasion that will sweep Svobodova from power and hand the country to him. Only the Russians played him; they tried to shell him.

  “It wasn’t just the Russians playing Myska,” she said, shaking her head, “we were playing them both. We knew Russia wouldn’t just stop once they got to the Ukraine, not with this President in charge. And as we had little hope of preventing an invasion we decided the next best thing would be to encourage once; one on our own terms which we could control. As far as our late friend Mr Myska was concerned, this was all about pushing out Svobodova and getting the Far Right into power throughout the continent; Czechoslovakia out of the Union, out of NATO and under Russian occupation, all because of those naughty Muslim immigrants blowing everything up. It was Europe’s worst nightmare and the Right’s dream come true all at the same time.”

  “You wanted to draw the fascists out, make them play their hand,” Stone picked up, quickly analysing his mystery lover’s tale.

  “Precisely,” she confirmed. “The extremists have been poisoning the EU for as long as most people can remember; the populists and the press have always been keen for the bombs to start falling on other countries, but none too keen to clear up the mess afterwards, even if having refugees to scapegoat has given them a useful political tool to strengthen their position across the continent. People’s fear of cultural change, of overpopulation, their resentment of cuts to services, low wages and rising inflation; it’s so easy to blame it all on the immigrants instead of the governments who failed Europe’s people for generations.”

  Stone nodded his understanding, “And it got to the point where ordinary people were so unhappy, so angry that they started to believe the lies and the Far Right started growing, winning elections, deciding referenda.”

  “Instead of an annoyance they became a problem, a challenge,” the faux Abelard conceded. “And when faced with a challenge one can either bury one’s head in the sand or stand and fight.”

  “The Institute stood and fought.”

  “What other choice did we have? We couldn’t lose the continent to the likes of these people; Europe was beginning to splinter, we’d tried for years to hold it together until we came up with a new strategy: let it fall.”

  The beautiful simplicity almost brought a smile of admiration to
Stone’s face and he recalled again their conversation in the Square on their first day together.

  “Or bring it as close to collapse as you dare.”

  A small smile of recognition flashed across her own features as she continued.

  “In the old days, we paid the likes of Gaddafi to hold back a migrant surge across the EU for fear of how people would react to an influx, for fear of how the extremists would take advantage of a new wave of immigration to fuel their own agenda. But no matter what we did they kept on spreading their poison and more and more people started to believe it, or use it as an excuse. And so we had to call their bluff, and to do that we had to sacrifice some pieces to find out the full strength of their attack, and then we could wipe them off the board for good. And as it turned out, it was considerably easier, not to mention cheaper, to pay a wannabe Nazi to take advantage of a migrant crisis than it was to pay a dictator to prevent one.”

  “The Institute gets Myska involved in what he thinks is a Russian put up job and starts bombing key targets in the country, weakening Svobodova’s support and antagonising the Americans. Europe and NATO make good on their threat to withdraw membership, Russia, thanks to a certain well-timed film production, occupies the country by stealth under the guise of ‘restoring order’ and… what? Svobodova is swept from power to be replaced with Myska who negotiates a Russian withdrawal and emerges as the strong leader of a cowed country, hostile to all outsiders and galvanises a Far Right resurgence across the Union?”

  “That was the plan,” the woman smiled, “at least as far as Myska understood it. What we didn’t tell him was that following a swift and unexpected ‘regime change’ in Russia, his own links to the bombings were about to be exposed and the extreme Right’s credibility throughout Europe torn to shreds.”

  “Nice plan,” Stone commented, “the only drawback being Myska’s dead and from where I’m standing, and if the Ukraine is anything to go by, Russia doesn’t much look like being in the mood to withdraw.”

  “Well that’s where you come in Captain,” she acknowledged, brushing away the last of her tears, “you’re about to become an assassin. Go pick up the rifle.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Pick it up I said!” she hissed her command through gritted teeth. “You’re right, the only way to get Russia out of Czechoslovakia is to replace the President. He’s become unpredictable, vainglorious; he has to be stopped.”

  She gestured at him with the gun and Stone didn’t believe for a moment that she wouldn’t kill him if she had to, but neither did he want to kill the President, despite seeing the logic of her argument. He had to keep her talking until he could find some way out of this.

  He knelt to where the rifle had fallen and picked it up, the sensation akin to shaking the hand of an old friend; snake crawling on the ground to a comfortable position on the ridge. His emotions were still rattling inside and he felt a peculiar dizziness taunting his vision and nausea in his gut.

  “It was all a lie, wasn’t it?” he asked, surprised by the hollow sensation her betrayal had left within him; a biological reminder of an emptiness he didn’t wish to return to. “I dreamed about bringing you home, introducing you to my boy, of maybe trying to be a family.”

  He felt a lump rising in his throat as his disappointment gave way to bleakness.

  “But it was all just bollocks, wasn’t it? You, me, us; every wild night and makeshift breakfast, each cross word and awkward apology. Every casual display of affection to every utterance of love, it was all just more Spook bullshit.”

  She was silent for a moment, her body delicately shaking though her gun arm remained strong, until finally she answered him.

  “The only lie I told was my identity,” she quietly stated, “every thought and every emotion were mine, just spoken through someone else’s lips, that’s all. And I wasn’t under orders to seduce you.”

  Her words struck a tiny match in the darkness of Stone’s mind and he turned towards her, all anger gone from his face.

  “Then please,” he said, gently, “for the sake of everything we went through, however brief it was, whoever you were pretending to be and whoever I thought you were; please just tell me your name.”

  The veneer began to crack before Stone’s eyes, if only slightly; her face which she had frozen into professional intransigence beginning to thaw into the beginnings of a smile.

  “I meant it when I said I loved you,” she began, her features warming with every word, “my name is…”

  No name came, only the loud crack of a neck broken with breathtaking alacrity, followed by the soft impact of her body as it crumpled and fell inelegantly to the ground.

  Shouting his defiance, Stone dropped the weapon and scrambled clumsily over the grass to where she lay, shaking his head and repeating his question in anguished insistence, even as tears began to leak from his disbelieving eyes. There was no response she could make and she lay there, silent and un-moving, her own eyes wide with indignant surprise and her mouth open, revealing white teeth and the tip of a pink tongue, upon which rested the name that Stone would never now hear.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE GRAND COUNTRY HOUSE, once home to one of the ancient families of Bohemia, sat beautifully a few short miles from the border and Miroslava Svobodova waited impatiently in it for her counterpart to arrive, though she was in no way eager for the violence which must surely follow to begin.

  She had heard, as had the world, of the Russian attack on Prague, the so-called ‘Velvet Occupation’, and every second she waited for negotiations to begin was another dagger in her soul. She stood in the opulence of the drawing room, the windows of which offered what would typically be spectacular views of the greenery stretching over the border, but which were now marred by the mechanical build-up of war.

  Without warning, the double doors opened with swift and unceremonious efficiency, the slow but unmistakeable tap of well-soled shoes on ancient stone echoing around the building‘s spacious chamber until they stopped several paces away from her. Her wait had not helped her nerves but neither had it weakened her resolve and she straightened herself, ready to face the Number Two Man to the President who had held Russia in his palm for so many years.

  Spinning confidently on her heel, her hand outstretched in a gesture of friendship, she started at the sight of the person before her. The figure’s eyes burned with the same ferocity as those of the one she had expected, but this man was neither balding nor stocky, though his visage projected an even more sinister nature. He stood tall, though a little too forcfully stretched as though straining to resist the natural culmination of the decades on his back, while his hair was as white as the Tatra mountains in the dead of winter and the wide brimmed trilby which sat on top of it, along with the voluminous overcoat hanging on his shoulders, as black as the clear spring nights of her youth.

  He removed the hat in her presence, revealing in full his deeply lined and distressingly thin features, and stood silently for a moment across from her, withered yet imperious, as though some macabre artist had painted flesh on a skeleton and dressed it in expensive finery; a spectral portent of doom.

  She knew at once who it was, though she had never seen him before and more than once she caught herself from stuttering an opening, as though all other meetings in her career had been but rehearsals and she had now forgotten her lines on the opening night.

  “It’s you,” she said finally, her voice still confident but unable to mask her surprise, “the one Peter told me about. You’re The Child.”

  The slightest suggestion of a wince crossed the wrinkled face, disappearing almost as soon as it arrived.

  “Really, Madam Prime Minister,” the elderly voice replied, the strength of its inflection as strong as ever it was, but its delivery undermined by the wheeze of a chest devoid of the hardiness of youth, “you must learn not to believe everything people tell you; my childhood days are, alas, too far behind me to remember.”

  “The Lost Child of
Lidice,” she pressed, unwilling to concede to him the dominance of the conversation his demeanour expected, “torn from your mother’s arms in 1942 and taken to be raised by Aryans until the day you killed them after learning the truth and fled to the West in fear of your life.”

  Personal cruelty was not how Svobodova operated and she took no pleasure in giving in to it now, but she recognised the necessity of displaying her strength to the twisted creature confronting her, for she knew he would respect little else and she held her stare defiantly as his eyes drilled into her own.

  “I came to you today out of courtesy,” the old man responded after an eerie silence stretching what seemed like an eternity. “I would hope in return to receive the same.”

  “Of course,” she nodded sincerely.

  “You will know of course by now that Prague is already occupied by Russian forces, and you are intelligent enough to have realised that the terrorist attacks your country has suffered recently were simply the ruse required to get them there. I understand as well that President Černý has suffered a gunshot wound and is gravely ill. This was not anticipated and is deeply regretted.”

  He delivered his words as though he were a newsreader dispassionately commentating on the affairs of the day, Svobodova almost bemused by his coldly factual pronunciations.

  “Shortly, your own Deputy Prime Minister, who incidentally is the one who betrayed your efforts to bring in Professor Abelard and Captain Stone, will announce an invitation to the Russian Armies whom you see through the window to enter the country and assist in restoring order. I come to you to advise against the issuing of any counter order for your forces to engage; to do so would only invite needless deaths and a prolonged conflict which would benefit no-one.”

  Svobodova gave a cynical and quiet laugh at the state of play and the issuing of yet another ultimatum against her.

  “And then we all go back to normal?” she sarcastically replied.