“I repeat, officers down!” The dispatcher’s voice crackled from the radio. “All units respond.”
Mason veered onto West 158th and sped north along the river, following the red-and-blue glow of the emergency lights radiating from underneath the Hudson Parkway, where he found a dirt lot enclosed by rusted girders and a highway on-ramp. It was as dark and concealed as any location on Manhattan.
Two police cruisers were parked diagonally in front of the assassin’s Honda Accord. One of the officers lay in a smoldering heap on the ground; the other had crawled back into his vehicle and called for assistance, his grueling death broadcast over the airwaves.
Mason parked behind the Accord and climbed out. He and Layne switched on their flashlights as they approached the abandoned vehicle, the scent of burned hair hanging in the air. The driver’s-side door stood open, the dirt underneath it scuffed by footprints, which disappeared into the chaos of pedestrian and tire tracks mere feet away. Heat radiated from the interior, presumably from the directed-energy weapon. The woman had fired it through the front windshield at the officers who’d cornered her. They hadn’t even realized they were being irradiated until it was too late to do anything about it.
An ambulance screamed down the road toward them, killing its siren as it pulled up to the police vehicles.
Mason hooked his Bluetooth over his ear and speed-dialed Gunnar, who’d covertly hacked into the satellite feed and the city’s network of traffic cameras.
“Anything?” he asked. “She can’t have just disappeared.”
“Negative,” Gunnar responded through his earpiece. “You’re in something of a blind spot. There are no cameras down there and you’re invisible to satellite. This was a carefully orchestrated escape.”
Mason watched the paramedics surveying the scene. They stood silhouetted against the lights of the incoming cop cars, as helpless as he felt. He heard a click as Layne joined the call on her earpiece.
“Something you said earlier has been eating at me, Gunnar,” she said. A helicopter thundered overhead, its spotlight sweeping the river. “We all know that we invaded Iraq because of the events of nine/eleven and intelligence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction. Are you trying to tell me that we’ve been fed a load of bullshit and the U.S. military was effectively sent to war to defend the petrodollar and enforce America’s financial interests?”
While Mason understood his partner’s skepticism, he’d never known his old friend to be wrong about monetary matters.
“Iraq has the second-largest oil deposit on the planet,” Gunnar said. “In 2000, Saddam decided to start selling its oil in euros, so all of the U.S. dollars his country had accumulated needed to be converted, flooding the global market with greenbacks and raising the value of the euro, which further enriched Saddam and undercut the petrodollar. Worse, it diminished the international demand for the dollar and threatened its status as the reserve currency, the consequences of which would be catastrophic. We risked losing everything if we failed to overthrow Saddam and reinstate the petrodollar as the sole currency of exchange, so with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as a pretext, we launched a shock-and-awe campaign against a country from which not a single one of the hijackers originated.”
“Where does the Dragon fit in?” Mason asked.
“Undoubtedly as part of that shock-and-awe campaign. The Thirteen sit atop of the financial pyramid. No one would be hit harder by the collapse of the dollar’s value than they would.”
Officers erected a barricade along 158th, while forensic investigators donned white jumpsuits, set up portable lights, and started documenting the crime scene. Sirens wailed in the distance. Mason tried not to think about the fact that the assassin could hit them with her DEW from just about anywhere and they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what was happening until their skin started to burn.
“Why the sudden urge to transition away from the dollar anyway?” he asked.
“Our national debt had been slowly creeping upward through the nineties,” Gunnar said. “Five trillion might seem insignificant now, but running up a tab greater than the GDP of most developed nations is a big deal. Without a commodity like gold to back it, the dollar risked becoming hyperinflationary. Iraq’s finances were so inextricably tied to the dollar that if it collapsed, the country would go broke overnight.”
“Why wouldn’t they just use their own currency? Or better yet, join with the other OPEC countries to create a new one? They could use their existing gold stores and force their buyers to do the same.”
Mason shone his light onto the floorboard of the Accord, where a hijab protruded from a duffel bag. The assassin had obviously changed on the fly.
“That’s exactly what Gaddafi tried to do,” Gunnar said. “So he had to be forcibly removed by any and all means necessary. He approached the African Union with the idea of converting the gold stores of its fifty-five-member countries into coins. Golden dinars. If all of the oil-producing countries in Africa suddenly demanded to be paid in this new currency, then buyers using U.S. dollars would be forced to pay the gold equivalent, which is many orders of magnitude larger.”
“Then why not use the oil itself to back the currency? By doing so they’d control both the supply and the market value, creating an … energy-based … economy.…”
As he spoke the words, two pieces of the big picture snapped into place. He remembered the photograph taken at the Twentieth Assembly of the Society for Lasting International Peace in 1994, the same conference the Scarecrow and her brother had attended, a picture that had tipped them off to Royal Nautilus Petroleum’s involvement in the plot to release Novichok from the subway and led them to the realization that Slate Langbroek was a member of the Thirteen. The caption had read: “Leading the charge for the global transition to a new energy-based economy and socialized health care model.”
“Say you’re right and the only reason we entered into any of these conflicts was to enforce the use of the petrodollar,” Layne said. “Why would we not have simply taken the oil and used it to back our own currency?”
“Because we would have been viewed as the aggressors, not the liberators,” Mason said.
“And we needed the petrodollar to remain unbound to any commodity so we could continue printing it at will,” Gunnar said.
A string of police cruisers descended the off-ramp. They passed the turnoff without slowing and fanned out into the city, their sirens joining the chorus.
“So who benefitted from overthrowing Saddam and Gaddafi?” Mason asked.
“Every country that traded in petrodollars and, in doing so, tied its financial fortunes to the U.S. economy.”
“Which is pretty much everybody, so what’s the link to the Thirteen? Who’s responsible for unleashing the Dragon and instigating the nuclear threat?”
Layne’s federal phone vibrated in the pocket of her jacket. She glanced at the screen, tapped her earpiece to connect, and walked away from the chaos to better hear the call.
“Syria has to be the key,” Gunnar said. “Its civil war marks a dramatic escalation and appears to be where everything comes to a head. It began accepting limited quantities of euros in 2008, well before the Arab Spring, which set the stage for civil unrest. The people demanded democracy, but Bashar al-Assad violently quashed their protests, earning international condemnation and charges of human rights abuses. The resultant isolation pushed Syria into an increasingly hostile alliance with China, Iran, and Russia, who vetoed a UN Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions and seeking Assad’s resignation, threats that only hastened the transition from the petrodollar.”
“So we invaded,” Mason said.
“Without the UN’s support, we would have been seen as the instigators, so instead we chose to arm factions of, quote, unquote, ‘moderate rebels’ to overthrow Assad from within. While our efforts in Iraq and Libya had been met with little resistance from external forces, we found ourselves fighting a proxy war against Russia, using the rebels we’d trained and the government they’d propped up.”
“If we were so concerned about Syria accepting ‘limited quantities’ of euros, why’d we wait so long to do something about it?”
“Because by then it wasn’t just the euro. They’d entered into a deal for the direct sale of oil in a third currency that we simply couldn’t abide.”
“The Russian ruble,” Mason said.
Layne terminated the call and ran back to the car. Police radios crackled and the helicopter hovering over the river abruptly shot across the sky.
“Chris’s team picked her up on a traffic cam three blocks from here,” Layne shouted. “They tracked her across the island in a silver CR-V, but they lost her near Harlem River Drive.”
Mason jumped behind the wheel of the Crown Victoria and brought the engine to life with a roar.
“She’s expanding her lead on us, buying herself time to get to her ultimate destination,” he said.
“And where is that?”
“I don’t know, but the last thing we want is for her to get there.”
Mason stomped the gas and blew past the paramedics and forensic investigators. He took a sharp left and sped up the on-ramp, the Crown Vic drifting as he made a hard right onto 158th and rocketed underneath the Riverside Drive overpass, weaving through traffic, streaking eastward across the city.
“Look at the big picture,” Gunnar said through his earpiece. “When you think oil, you think Middle East, but Russia is the second-leading oil-exporting country in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia. It’s already begun selling its own proprietary Russian Urals blend in rubles and fully intends to make a wholesale change when the time is right, which will not only strengthen the ruble, but utterly destroy the dollar, shifting the balance of power inexorably in the federation’s favor.”
Mason blew through a red light on Broadway and headed south. He swerved to avoid a cab, skidded sideways through traffic, and accelerated onto 155th Street.
Layne made a humming sound from deep in her chest. Her knuckles whitened on the handle of the door as the city roared past.
“So the Russians are literally poised to destroy the petrodollar and wipe out the economies of the entire Western world,” Mason said.
“And we’re fighting a war against them in Syria in hopes of preventing them from doing just that,” Gunnar said. “Meanwhile, we’ve launched a global propaganda assault, demonizing them in the media, alleging collusion and meddling in our elections in what amounts to a trumped-up version of McCarthy’s Red Scare. There’s no doubt that Russia is our enemy, but if we were to reveal the full extent of its ambitions, we would expose our own in the process.”
Towering redbrick housing complexes rose to the left; a greenbelt stretched away to the right. The white arches of the Macombs Dam Bridge materialized directly ahead, crossing the Harlem River.
“Take a hard right here,” Layne said. “Then another quick right and drive around the block. She ditched the CR-V underneath the overpass.”
Mason thought about the terrorist attack that had justified the invasion of Iraq and the allegations of human rights abuses that had brought the United States into the armed conflicts in Libya and Syria. And he thought about the map of Moscow hanging on the wall at the Konets Mira meeting and the nuclear bomb somewhere out there on American soil.
Everything suddenly made sense.
“The real question isn’t who benefitted from the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria,” he said, “but who benefits from starting a war with Russia.”