TIME WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I’D NEVER SEE HOW THIS CAME together, but I use the silence in the car to build it into a coherent pattern: a rehearsal for what I’ll say when I get on a phone at the GRU’s field HQ outside Nizhny and cough up my guts to Reuben and Christy.
This is how it plays. Thompson comes to office with an agenda of radical reform. He’s going to make a lot of people really pissed, but he doesn’t care, because fighting injustice is hardwired into him. It always has been.
In his crosshairs is the part of the military-industrial complex that’s been beyond oversight for far too long, which he believes is as much responsible for conflict as it is for defending us against it.
He launches a probe, not knowing at this stage that a large part of the black world of US intelligence operations is funded by a cabal of organized criminals in Moscow, and places it in the hands of a man he trusts, literally, with his life – Special Agent in Charge Jim Lefortz.
At the same time, he opens up a backchannel line of communication with the Pope, a man who hasn’t been beyond ruffling a few feathers himself.
There is a chance, the two men agree, for the world to hit the reset button, especially now that a radical reformer is also in place in Moscow. But it’s going to need all the tact, charm, secrecy and guile that Robert S. Thompson can muster.
In the background, his mentor, Senator Abnarth, has told him about technology the intelligence community has been working on, which, though in its infancy, has the capacity not just to listen in on people, but to see what they’re doing, anywhere in the world, in quasi-real time.
Does the operational technology exist, based on what Abnarth saw in an Army weapons lab almost a decade ago, before the tech was demonstrated and they brought the shutters down?
The President doesn’t know, nobody does. Not even Abnarth, because all trace of it has somehow disappeared off the map.
When the nightmares begin, Reuben contacts me, desperately concerned about the sanity of his boss.
Thompson and I click, and I’m brought on board.
We veer off the ring road toward Moscow.
I glance at my watch. It’s coming up to midnight.
According to the abbot, Danilovsky was nine or ten when he came to the monastery – a single photograph, retrieved from his files, depicts a lanky, raven-haired, blue-eyed boy – one of the very last children, I imagine, to have been recruited under Kalunin’s intuitives program.
He may have been one of the assets Ilitch used to prospect for diamonds and precious metals. He certainly had other gifts.
The abbot had heard how, as a young priest, he used to lay his hands on the sick; that there’d been talk of miracles, even.
Six years after the fall of the USSR, Danilovsky lost both of his parents in fighting between separatist Muslim guerillas – Islamist hardliners invading from neighboring Chechnya – and native Dagestanis defending their homeland from radicalism.
He remained at the monastery, at an orphanage that had been established there after the war, a legacy of the many scientists who’d died of radiation-triggered sicknesses in the ZATO.
The boy went to university locally when he was eighteen, to train as an engineer, and because Sarov, as it is now, does nothing other than design, develop, build and maintain Russia’s nuclear arsenal, for sure this is where his skills lie. He then became a priest – the ultimate cover for an operative in a sleeper cell.
We can arrest Ilitch. We can arrest all of his cronies. But this isn’t going to do any good. All it requires is for one word of the clean-up operation to leak and the Engineer will trigger the bomb.
We can get word to the conference, but we both know that any move to evacuate Jerusalem will also result in him detonating it.
‘So,’ Sergeyev says, ‘we need to get someone into the city who can find this man before it’s too late. There are effectively two candidates for the job: me, and you. And I have to choreograph the arrests of Ilitch and his siloviki network in Moscow.’
I tell him that’s OK. I’d come to the same conclusion.
‘Thanks to their friend Ilitch, the FSB are looking for you at every port, airport and border crossing, Joshua, so we are going to have to smuggle you out. But it is when you get to Jerusalem, my friend, that your troubles will really begin.’
He’s right. We can’t alert the Israelis; they’ll start to evacuate the city. And if the Engineer, the siloviki, or their allies in the US intelligence community get even a hint of this, our story can only have one ending.
This isn’t a negotiation. There will be no warning. There is no deal to be done. The cabal also wants to hit the reset button. It doesn’t like Thompson’s vision of the world. It likes chaos and fear. It needs them to survive and thrive. The Engineer will detonate the bomb, radical Islam will get the blame, the world’s security apparatus will swing into high gear, we’ll build more guns, bullets and bombs instead of schools and hospitals, and a century after two world wars that killed a hundred million people, we will have learned nothing.
So, where is the device?
And when will he trigger it?
Ilitch’s words echo in my head. In two days’ time, nobody is going to miss a doctor, even one as famous as you, who went for a walk in the wrong part of Moscow.
Sergeyev tells me the Pope arrives tomorrow.
‘He lands at Ben Gurion and goes straight to the Hall of the Assembly. His address is scheduled for midday. Thompson speaks directly afterward. This will be the point of maximum impact.’
I look at my watch.
Israel is an hour behind Moscow.
If he is correct, we have a little less than thirteen hours.
‘Between here and our field office,’ Sergeyev says, ‘there’s an old fighter base. Angelskoye. It has not been operational for many years, but it has a long and usable runway.’
He looks at the dash. ‘In approximately forty minutes, a jet under charter by my department is going to land there, and you are going to get on it. The flight plan says you’re a diplomat with data for our conference delegates. Israeli air-traffic control requires we provide them with a code word. Yours, my friend, is Omega.’
Vasiliy has not uttered a word since we came back through the checkpoint. He says something now to Sergeyev.
Sergeyev listens intently. ‘There’s a car behind us. Impossible to know who, but one of the monks may have raised the alarm.’ He speaks again to Vasiliy, then turns back to me. ‘We cannot afford for them to follow us to the airfield. And there may be checkpoints ahead.’
‘How far to the airfield?’
‘Close. Two more exits off the highway.’
We come off at the next ramp and pull onto the curb at the edge of a bend. Trees on both sides of us. A break in the snow. A light mist has descended. The second BMW, with the abbot in it, pulls up behind us. A couple of Vasiliy’s friends emerge from the rear doors, weapons at the ready, and disappear into the forest. Yefim, the driver, flicks off his headlights. Sergeyev gets out, runs over and holds a rapid-fire discussion with him.
‘What now?’ I ask.
‘We wait.’
At this time of night, there is no traffic. As I watch through the rear window, a set of beams appears from the direction of the ramp.
We move slowly through the darkness. There are flashes in the trees. I hear what sounds like fireworks.
Vasiliy rejoins the empty highway and accelerates past a hundred before he switches our lights back on.