SERGEYEV PICKS UP DOCUMENTS TRANSMITTED TO HIM FROM Moscow at a field office outside Nizhny. They identify us as an inspection team with the 12th Chief Directorate, the branch of the military charged with nuclear security. I am a full colonel and Sergeyev is my deputy. FSB at the Sarov checkpoint will challenge us because they won’t have any notification of a visit, but that’s the whole point of a no-notice shock-inspection.
It’s coming up to 6 p.m., but the snow, the low cloud and the smoke from Nizhny’s factories make it feel as if we’re still in the Dark Ages. Sergeyev leafs through the paperwork. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by anything in Russia anymore, but the fact that the GRU transmits things it wants to keep ultra-secure by fax is a good one.
‘What do you know about Senator Abnarth?’ he asks me suddenly.
‘Nothing, except that his fingerprints are all over this.’
‘As part of my job to understand Thompson, we needed to know whether his talk of justice, the desire for peace and his intention to dismantle the excesses of the military economy were real or for show. It was one of the reasons I was told to get close to you. And to try and fathom his relationship with Abnarth.’
I agree Abnarth is key.
Abnarth gave Reuben his first job on the Hill.
Abnarth, the dealmaker and kingmaker, the doyen of Washington’s political scene, anointed Thompson.
Abnarth used to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Abnarth insisted that funds were appropriated from the secretly resurrected remote viewing program into the development of hardware for the exploration of consciousness.
‘Is Abnarth in Jerusalem?’
Sergeyev nods. ‘And it’s unlikely he’d go there knowing somebody would detonate a bomb, don’t you think? But maybe this has something to do with it.’
He passes me his iPad. Onscreen is a typewritten document entitled ‘Toward a Unification of the Abrahamic Faiths’.
‘A paper written by an idealistic twenty-one-year-old trainee lawyer and would-be politician with a master’s degree in theology. It sets out, with some zeal, how the three great monotheistic religions – Islam, Judaism, Christianity – are just marginally different slants on the same faith.
‘I have to say, as a piece of work, it is scarcely original – but embarrassing nonetheless, if you’re running as the Democratic Congressman for the 37th District of the great, Bible-thumping State of Texas.’
I don’t know how Sergeyev came by it, or how he knows it was Abnarth who made it vanish from the archives of Princeton, Thompson’s alma mater, where it had presumably languished until he first ran for public office.
‘Did Sasha voice the suspicion,’ Sergeyev asks, ‘harbored by her father’s military paymasters at the time, that he had withheld certain aspects of his research?’
‘Yes. She said Ilitch had been obsessed with their discovery. Why?’
‘There’s a seminary in New York City. The Church of St Simeon on the Lower East Side. During the Pope’s last trip to the US, he and Thompson met there. You may recall the photos. A paparazzo managed to get shots of the two of them praying together. They were all over the papers.’ He gives me a hint of a smile. ‘Two days later, a call was placed between the Oval Office and the Holy See.’
The person who made the call, he says, wasn’t Thompson.
It was Abnarth.
‘We believe the recipient was Cardinal Rafaello Alonzo, the Pope’s senior adviser. Abnarth said to him: “Do we agree?” Alonzo gave a positive response. We believe this relates to some kind of shared view, or a document, perhaps, that had passed between the Pope and Thompson when they went into that church.’
I think back to my hypnotherapy session with Thompson – the origins of his visceral antipathy to organized religion, his telling me that it was the destructive impact of faith that his administration was finally going to address. Their NYC love-in – that apparently spontaneous decision to pray together – was their second meeting. The first was while Thompson had been on the campaign trail in Dallas.
Did Thompson share his thesis at that point?
Or had this already been done by Abnarth?
‘Here’s something that puzzled both the GRU and the FSB,’ Sergeyev says. He passes me several of the faxed sheets. Photographs, taken with a long lens, of the back of a very gaunt, thin man in a thick coat and fur hat, entering a church.
‘Two years before the USSR collapsed, the Vatican and Moscow re-established diplomatic relations for the first time in nearly seventy years.
‘Shortly before he died, Professor M. M. Kalunin walked into the Church of St. Louis of the French, one of the only Roman Catholic churches in Moscow, during a mass. He took a seat somewhere near the front. He was followed and watched the entire time, of course.
‘Among those in the congregation, sitting a few places from him, was the apostolic nuncio – the new ambassador. Nothing was seen to pass between the two men, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t. Due to the nuncio’s diplomatic status, we were unable to detain him, but Kalunin was taken in for questioning and searched.
‘He admitted to nothing beyond a desire to feel close to God. If something had passed between Kalunin and the nuncio, I invite you to speculate on what that might have been. I also invite you to think about the circumstances we find ourselves in. We have three enlightened men in power – your president, my own and the Pope – who will come together for the first time in Jerusalem. What might that mean, do you suppose?’
I don’t know.
But I do know something.
As I’d sat in a cell several levels below ground questioning Cal Offutt, he’d asked me when the President’s nightmares began. Because, he said, the Grid keyed in on events that were beyond the oversight of regular assets at the disposal of our intelligence agencies.
When the Pope and Thompson had disappeared into that church to pray, the intel community had no means of knowing what had passed between them.
Except for the Grid. The meeting had taken place in April. The President’s nightmares had started a few days later.
My thoughts are interrupted by Vasiliy slowing to take a turn. I ask Sergeyev what’s happening.
‘I need a cigarette. And you need some air. The guards at the Sarov checkpoint work in eight-hour shifts. On a night such as this, even the best of them get a little careless at the end of a shift.’ He glances at his watch. ‘We’ll stop here for a half-hour and arrive just before the handover.’
We pull onto the side of the road.
‘You are my boss, remember, Joshua. And I need you to act like him. We only get one shot at this. Let us take a walk. There’s something else I want to tell you.’
The forest is so dense that, a few meters in, there’s barely any snow on the ground. The headlights of the two BMWs have all but vanished. In the glow of Sergeyev’s cigarette, I see anxiety on his face.
‘When you came to see me in the embassy, you asked about the photograph of me on the tank. Do you remember?’
‘Yes. Taken in Chechnya.’
‘In 2006 – the year you were fighting the insurgency in Iraq.’
He looks up as a few flakes manage to fall through the canopy.
‘I fought that war, first as a lieutenant, then as a captain, fueled by a belief that what we were doing was right. Because the Chechens had violated our land and killed our people.’
He inhales deeply and exhales as he speaks. ‘In September 1999, they hit four apartment buildings – two in Moscow, two in provincial cities. More than three hundred civilians died. Over a thousand more were wounded.
‘Within a fortnight, President Yeltsin had ordered an all-out assault on Grozny, the Chechen capital. The slaughter was unbelievable. But I was high on anger. So were most of my countrymen. Half a decade later, approval ratings for the war were still through the roof.’
He grinds the stub of his cigarette underfoot and lights another. ‘It wasn’t until afterward that I was better acquainted with the facts. I began asking questions. About why we’d fought. Who had really gained from it. I even wrote a paper, but it didn’t go very far up the chain. Or so I thought.
‘A year ago, soon after the election of our new president, I was called to the Kremlin and asked if I would join a commission tasked with analyzing our defense-industrial complex and its value to the economy. I did. I was also able to look deeper into the origins of the Chechen wars.
‘The answer to the questions I’d asked was now clear. It had been for a number of years to some journalists who are now dead. The person who stood to gain most was Vladimir Putin. Putin was in charge of the FSB when the apartment bombings took place. All the evidence points to the fact that they were authorized and financed by the FSB. Three months later, Yeltsin resigned and Putin was sworn in.
‘Why am I telling you this, Joshua? For two reasons. First, your country doesn’t come out of this well either. The origins of the Chechen wars go back to the end of our war in Afghanistan and the many active programs instituted by the CIA to foment unrest in the North Caucasus. To kick us when we were down. They helped to inspire the militancy that gave Putin the excuse he needed to start his war.
‘But it doesn’t end there. The people who carried out his orders – the people who still do – are a cadre of young colonels you never see. The cogs in the machine. You have them, too. Ours are drunk on corruption, yours are drunk on winning; at beating the enemy, whoever he is, at any cost.
‘Along the way, they have both lost sight of the fact that millions of people are paying the price. Along the way, too, some of them evidently decided that the greatest threat came from their own democratically elected leaders. My guess is when Thompson pulled in the heads of your agencies and they told him they had no knowledge of the Grid, some of them were telling the truth. This is the essence of the secret states our two leaders are committed to exposing. The essence of what has led us here.’
He gestures to the trees that surround us, digs into his pocket and hands me a pair of mirrored Aviators to cover the bruises around my eyes when we get to the perimeter. He flicks his final cigarette into the forest and starts to walk back toward the cars.
‘Dmitri?’
He stops and turns.
‘Excellent speech. Was it for my benefit, or yours?’
His eyes narrow. ‘A little pep talk before we do what we now have to do.’
‘You said there were two reasons.’
‘The second is a little more personal.’ His expression darkens. ‘My family. The family you had the kindness to remark upon the day we met. They were killed in the second apartment bombing.’