I CAN SMELL DISINFECTANT AND BOILED MEAT.
I close my eyes and open them again. I didn’t imagine it. I’m in the bedroom of what looks like a moth-eaten ski chalet, and Dmitri Sergeyev has put a mug of coffee on the table beside me. He says something to a man with a shotgun, who nods and leaves.
He reverses a chair and sits, arms folded on the backrest. He’s holding an iPad. ‘This dacha belongs to a buddy of mine from way back – old-school guy.’
I remember his English from our meeting at the embassy – precise and quaintly idiomatic.
‘Far enough from Moscow, I hope, to keep the siloviki at a safe distance.’
‘Siloviki?’ I rub the back of my head.
‘Corrupt politicians who have navigated their way to extreme wealth, often via the security services. Vladimir Ilitch has acted as banker for most of them – which is why you were on your way to an FSB cell at Lefortovo, and why, fortunately, we’ve been keeping a very close eye on him.’
‘What do you want, Dmitri?’
‘A little honesty.’
I prop myself up on the pillow and reach for the coffee.
‘Five weeks ago,’ he says, ‘we intercepted a call to a cellphone tagged to the White House Chief of Staff, your friend, Reuben Kantner. From a business jet over the Southern Rockies, owned and operated by the US Secret Service.
‘It reported a very recent raid, and instructed him to assemble the key players at Camp David. The caller, of course, was you.
‘Approximately three hours later, you talked again, via your personal cell, from Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling. You referred to something called the Grid, which you claimed had been part-funded by Ilitch. You also mentioned Professor M. M. Kalunin, his institute, the program he’d worked on during the Soviet era, and Thompson’s refusal to cancel the Jerusalem conference.’
He taps his iPad and hands it to me.
Cyrillic letters are interspersed among the telemetry running across the top of the screen. The shot is familiar. I can see the lenticular curve of the NSA’s Bluffdale facility, the salt-white sand and, in the bottom right corner, the Canyon. A curl of black smoke drifts from a vent at the top of the bunker toward Salt Lake City.
‘If you look very carefully,’ Sergeyev says, ‘you’ll spot two helicopters on the ground, between the perimeter and the bunker.’
I’ve always been amazed at what you can see from space.
‘Most notably,’ he adds, ‘this is the first instance we can identify during the modern era of one US federal agency taking down another.’
He lets me absorb this.
‘Let us now cut to our presidents’ scheduled meeting in Moscow – the trip that you and I were busy planning. The trip that was canceled the day after your unfortunate accident in the V-22.
‘Your president spoke with mine on the telephone about this. He was polite and apologetic and explained his reasoning: that his priority now was to focus on the Jerusalem peace conference, where they should jointly make the announcement they would have made in Moscow.’
‘What announcement?’
‘I’m not sure if you knew this, Joshua, but Christy Byford and I liaised regularly on the WMD search-and-destroy mission.’
I did know. In the Sit Room, before we launched the Bluffdale mission, in response to Thompson’s plea that the revelation of a Russian link to the Grid should not disrupt his developing relationship with his opposite number, Christy had told me she and Reuben were going to collaborate on a narrative for Sergeyev’s benefit.
‘What announcement?’ I repeat.
‘Judging by the call you made to Kantner, Joshua, you are already aware that Ilitch used every trick in the book to launder his and the silovikis’ money. Donations to bogus charitable causes are just the tip of the iceberg. But he knew that even Sledkom – our generally toothless anti-corruption agency – would catch up with him at some point.
‘So, six years ago, he began to invest his money in American tech. He and his friends didn’t mind the risk, because they were confident of the protection your intelligence community gives to its top-secret programs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Russian mafia funding helps them avoid the scrutiny of your congressional oversight system.
‘In Moscow, your president and mine were going to expose these strategies by the military-industrial complex to control a sizeable portion of your trillion-dollar defense and security budget, and thus maintain the cycle of threat, not just between our two countries, but globally.’
Graham’s reveal about the encrypted Ilitch file on Lefortz’s classified server suddenly makes sense. Lefortz, the most trusted guy in the White House, had been conducting the President’s probe into this snake pit. And even Reuben hadn’t known about it. Why not Reuben?
‘The GRU and the FSB are engaged in a turf war also – have been for decades. Regrettably, not everyone in my agency takes seriously the oath they swore to protect our new leader. But I do. And he takes very seriously the relationship he has begun to forge with yours.’
‘Who do you really work for, Dmitri?’
‘My president, Joshua. My job is to watch his back. Which is why you and I find ourselves here. Because I’m struggling to completely understand the sequence of events we have already touched upon: the Utah raid, you of all people talking about the threat this place presented, the leaders of every US intel agency assembling at Camp David, and your V-22 crash. Then your president changing his mind about Moscow and unveiling the Jerusalem event.’
He pauses for a moment, and chews on his lower lip.
‘Last night, Joshua, we tracked another of your calls to Kantner. You drew his attention to Patriarch Nikolai not showing up in Jerusalem, and to the blast radius from a church on the Mount of Olives. The blast radius of what? I suspect Ilitch and the FSB know, because they took the trouble to pick you up last night.’
He pauses again.
‘So, if we’re going to stop what you fear is about to happen, Joshua, you are going to need to tell me everything you know.’
The Soviet psi program left ours at the starting gate, Sergeyev says. While the CIA and INSCOM invested around $20 million on psi, his fellow countrymen spent around a billion.
All those schools, universities and academies scoured by the KGB for intuitives? All that money lavished on M. M. Kalunin’s institute? Though multi-faceted, the institute’s mission was dominated by one over-arching Cold War objective: the psychokinetic detonation of a US nuclear weapon on US soil.
We pull onto a two-lane stretch of road skirting the city of Nizhny Novgorod, and head into the leading edge of an east–west front that will take at least a day to blow over.
Sergeyev sits up front. Vasiliy, his shotgun-toting sidekick, drives. Between snow flurries, I get a fleeting impression of impenetrable forest, grime-stained ribbon settlements, faded road signs and the occasional skeleton of an abandoned Soviet-era vehicle. Behind us, there’s a second BMW with Vasiliy’s friends in it – the three other heavies responsible for springing me on the Moscow ring road.
We’re heading for a place that used to be known as Arzamas-16. Its purpose was to design, develop and build nuclear weapons. The road signs now call it Sarov, but little else seems to have changed. It continues to be known as a ZATO: a zakrytoe administrativno-territorial’noe obrazovanie; in essence, a closed military city. During the Soviet era, there were more than fifty ZATOs dedicated to the development and production of strategic weapons systems. Thirty years on, forty or so still remain.
Ilitch, Sergeyev says, made his first billion from Russia’s vast mineral resources: titanium, magnesium, nickel, gold, copper, iron ore, platinum and diamonds. He had assets that could cut the costly upstream phase of the mining process from years to weeks. He sold his former sponsors in the KGB and the GRU – men who rubbed shoulders with Vladimir Putin and went on to share his investment strategies – on the idea of using the intuitives to pinpoint where to dig and drill.
The siloviki became his protectors – along with the upper echelons of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, in Putin’s time, morphed into a de facto arm of the state, united in the suppression of unseemly non-Russian tendencies such as protest, liberalism and homosexuality.
Sergeyev’s team is sifting through historic communications traffic between St Alexei’s and Ilitch’s foundation, as well as the files held by the GRU on M. M. Kalunin’s institute. They are looking for pointers to, and connections between, the foundation and the monastery of St Alexei.
The monastery lies between the edge of the city and its northwest perimeter. Sergeyev shows me photos of thick, fortified walls, a moat, a drawbridge, towers at each of its four corners and cloisters where the monks live and worship.
I am about to go behind the lines in a country that is still at war with mine.