NORTHERN VIRGINIA, TWELVE MONTHS AGO
The senator strolled into his study, a warm, wood-paneled sanctuary with a coffered ceiling and four glass trophy cases mounted into the custom walnut cabinetry. One contained a signed Lionel Messi jersey. Another, Michael Jordan’s iconic 1998 NBA Finals Last Dance jersey, which he’d picked up at auction for a cool $10.1 million. In the third, the Dunlop Maxply Fort tennis racket John McEnroe used to defeat Björn Borg to claim the 1981 Wimbledon Championship was cradled in its stand. A fourth contained the man’s most prized and illicit sports memorabilia—Jack Nicklaus’s first green jacket, size 43 regular, from the Masters. The Golden Bear had won six Masters tournaments at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, but this first winning jacket had slipped into his possession courtesy of a mutual acquaintance who knew of the senator’s admiration for the famous golfer and course architect. And all it had cost him was a series of curried political favors.
He slid the pocket doors of his study closed behind him, shutting out the sounds of ordinary life—if one could call his that—and the boisterous clamor of his five young grandchildren, visiting the country estate in Northern Virginia for the weekend. He padded in stockinged feet across the plush, madder-red silk Persian carpet he had acquired from a black marketeer in Isfahan during one of his clandestine visits there decades ago, a city two hundred miles south of the outskirts of Tehran where he had been touring as a political wannabe. The man’s gang—associates—had liberated the priceless carpet from within the city’s central mosque at an enormous price. The city’s conservatives, who hailed from the more austere section of the metropolis, and therefore controlled access to the mosque north of the Zayandeh River, didn’t sell their antiquities or history cheaply. The senator had paid a suitcase full of cash for the transaction, but it had additionally cost him the Rolex on his wrist to get the carpet smuggled out of Iran and to his home. His Rolex was a small price to pay for a logistical transaction that had been essentially an act of faith, as befitted a treasure stolen from a place of worship.
Such was the nature of alliances, frequently comprised of a mutual desire for guaranteed survival, supported by implied existential threats amid costly and nuanced transactions.
The man lowered himself into a chair and tapped a remote, switching on the large-screen television on the wall. While the anchorman read from his teleprompter, the scrolling chyron covered the latest global sports headlines: Canada defeated Australia in the finals of the Davis Cup. Max Verstappen won the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix. Bayer Leverkusen advanced over Atlético Madrid in the UEFA Champions League group stage. Finland and Denmark had been tied 1–1 at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium when their match was suspended during the first half of play following a nationwide power outage across Finland.
There it was.
The senator unmuted the TV, leaving the volume on low as he waited for the anchor to get around to the news report. While he waited, he removed a Cohiba Behike 56 from the wooden humidor lined with Spanish cedar that sat atop his desk and absent-mindedly rolled the body of the cigar between his thumb and fingers. He drew it under his nose and inhaled deeply, as if he were judging an ultra-scarce glass of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Rare Cask Grande Champagne Cognac.
He popped a hole in the cap and lit it, then swiveled his chair toward the glass door to the garden, opening it to allow the blue smoke to float weightlessly into the cool morning air.
Puffing, puffing, puffing, savoring the pungent chocolate and coffee flavors, feeling the spicy burn in his mouth, spitting the rogue flake of tobacco from the tip of his tongue.
He settled back in his leather chair, legs outstretched and ankles crossed, smoking the cigar that had been hand-rolled at the El Laguito factory in the tree-lined Miramar section of Havana, its importation to America circumventing the laws prohibiting such transactions. Unlike the Cuban workers who labored to make these, the man’s life was blessed with riches beyond measure, and it would only keep getting better for him and his children’s children, even if it meant leaving a little destruction in his wake to ensure that the destiny of his scions could be realized.
Sacrifices would have to be made in the short term, but doing so would yield dividends he could only have dreamed of a few short years ago.
His ears perked up when he heard the anchorman say, “And in Finland tonight…”
He spun his chair around and turned up the volume as the correspondent in Finland came on-screen, a pretty young woman holding a microphone emblazoned with the network’s logo.
“Thanks, Chris.” She was cast in a faint glow from light powered by generators in front of a row of dark buildings. “I’m standing near the waterfront in the Ullanlinna district in central Helsinki, Finland’s capital. Tonight, this city’s residents, along with almost five and a half million of their countrymen, were plunged into darkness just after 9 P.M. while many were still enjoying dinner and drinks in the restaurants, bars, and clubs behind me.” Her English was flawless even though her accent revealed she was obviously a native Finnish speaker. The shot cut to shaky footage that looked as if it had been filmed with a mobile phone. “When it became apparent that the electricity would not come back on right away, people started flowing out into the streets with an almost party-like atmosphere.
“But while some found it entertaining, the impact on emergency services like the nation’s hospitals could be more serious.” The image on-screen cut to a scene inside a hospital. “Though backup power was immediately and seamlessly provided by the hospital’s inline generators, the administrator I spoke with expressed concerns over the scale and possible longevity of the crisis. A spokesperson at FinnPower, the country’s energy regulator, said they do not yet know when the grid will be back online, as they are still trying to determine the cause of the computer glitch that disrupted the distribution system.
“They were quick to add that the five nuclear reactors that account for fully one-third of Finland’s power-generating capacity are all online and functioning normally, thanks in part to the adoption over the past several years of so-called smart grid technology designed to restore systems to full functionality quickly and safely. Chris, back to you in the newsroom.”
The man watching the news from his study took another puff of his cigar.
Everyone seemed rather too cheerful, but that wouldn’t last long.