Politika pp-1 Read online

  Slipping out into the night, Gregor tried not to think too much about the mistakes they had made as, behind them, the first orange flames leaped toward the night sky, and the first stores of grain exploded.

  SIX

  KHABAROVSK TERRITORY NEAR THE RUSSIA-CHINA BORDER OCTOBER 27, 1999

  Dotting the banks of a waterway the Russians call the Amur, and the Chinese refer to as Heilongjiang, or the Black Dragon River, the handful of dwellings that compose the village of Sikachi-Alyan housed a population of indigenous Nanai tribesmen too small to be measured on any census, and more than glad to remain overlooked. Without a single hotel or restaurant, the settlement lay well off the major shipping routes, and drew few outsiders besides the scholars who occasionally arrived to inspect the thousand-year-old petroglyphs carved into the boulders scattered along its muddy shoreline.

  This very isolation — and its proximity to the border — had made it an ideal place for the group to meet in secrecy.

  Their rented wooden fishing trawler had left Khabarovsk at sunset and cruised some forty kilometers down-river through the gathering dusk, its half-century-old Kermath engines clanking and wheezing, the running lights at its bow gleaming like tiny red eyes in the mist and drizzle. It had been stripped to the handrails of all gear. There was no crew aboard. Its cubbyhole cockpit had room enough for just a single occupant, a Nanai wheelman who spoke little Russian and had been told to remain on deck as a strict condition of his payment.

  Now, moored in the black offshore waters flowing past the village landings, the stout little vessel’s engine was silent. Behind the clamped door of the hold, its passengers sat on transom seats that had been set down along the bulkhead, bracing uncomfortably against the heave and sway of the boat.

  All but one of them were men. The Russians, Romual Possad and Yuri Vostov, had arrived on separate commercial flights from Moscow earlier that day. Teng Chou had traveled a slower, more exhausting route, flying from Beijing to the airfield in Harbin, then riding through the night in the backseat of a military jeep. Having reached Fuyuan at 7 A.M., he’d gone directly to the river station and taken the hydrofoil to Khabarovsk on the Russian side of the Amur, where he had been met by members of the Chinese consulate three hours later. The little sleep he’d gotten in their guest quarters had hardly refreshed him.

  Seated opposite him, Gilea Nastik, the only woman in the group, silently cursed the chill and dampness. In this part of the world, she thought with disgust, there were no seasonal transitions — it was summer one day, and winter the next. Her wiry, desert-tanned body had not been bred for such a miserable climate.

  “Well, it’s up to you,” she said in Russian, tiring of Possad’s indecisiveness. He hadn’t uttered a word in almost ten minutes. “Will you obtain the approval of your superiors in the ministry, or are we wasting our time?”

  He gnawed on his bottom lip.

  “It depends,” he said. “Make no mistake, I see how it could work, providing we have the money. And a reliable network of contacts.”

  She stared at him, the skin tightening over her cheekbones, giving her face a sharp, almost predatory appearance. Then she looked down at her hands, shaking her head.

  “I have already guaranteed unlimited funding. And the necessary materials,” Teng Chou said in a clipped tone. “You should know I am as good as my word.”

  Possad swung his gaze over his shoulder to Vostov.

  “Your people in the United States… you’re certain they can be trusted?”

  Vostov struggled to conceal his irritation; Possad’s thinly veiled superiority filled him with a dislike bordering on hatred. From the lowliest bureaucrats to the most highly ranked officials, government men were all hypocritical bastards, never looking in the mirror, as if they knew nothing of self-interest, greed, and betrayal.

  “If everyone sticks to the bargain, there won’t be any problems,” he said. “Pure and simple.”

  Possad worried his lip some more, tasting his own blood. The moment he’d met these three, he had felt as if he’d gone plunging off a bridge into a bottomless chasm. But he’d been given his instructions. What choice did he have except to follow them?

  Communiques from the delegation in Washington indicated that Starinov had struck a quick agreement with the President, and that a majority of congressmen seemed inclined to give it their support. A hunger relief effort spearheaded by America would be under way before too long. And the Moscow press was already hailing Starinov as a political savior. He had used precious food aid to enhance his image and shuffle his critics into the background. And soon he would use it to sell the Russian people on more of his never-ending concessions to the West.

  Only a drastic action would change the course that events had taken, Possad thought. And if his allies in plotting that action were to be a thug who had made his fortune through narcotics, theft, and vice; an Indonesian arms dealer fronting for Beijing; and a soulless woman who dealt in blood and carnage… well, having been driven into hell by necessity, what choice was there, indeed, but to consort with demons?

  “All right,” he said at last. “The plan has teeth, and I’m prepared to advise the minister to go ahead with it. But there’s one other thing—”

  “I know the game we are playing, as my team’s action in Kaliningrad last night should prove,” Gilea said. She stared at him, her eyes dark and bright as chips of polished onyx. “Rest assured, blame will be assigned to the right party. Mr. Chou and I have already exchanged some thoughts as to how that might be done.”

  Chou bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment, but said nothing.

  They were silent awhile in the cramped, unheated hold. The boat rocked, water sloshing rhythmically against the bottom of the hull. Rusty fastenings creaked and squealed.

  “Too bad this rattletrap is without creature comforts,” Vostov said. “Right now, we should be opening a bottle of champagne, and drinking a toast to our shared fortunes.”

  “And the coming of the new year,” Gilea said.

  A grin crept across Vostov’s fleshy lips.

  “Yes,” he said. “That would be most appropriate.”

  Possad glanced at them and felt his stomach tense. There was, he supposed, still very much for him to learn about human cruelty.

  After a moment he shifted his eyes to the smeared circle of glass that was the compartment’s single porthole, needing to look away, to remind himself that the world he had always known was still out there, that he had not entirely left it behind…

  But he saw nothing outside the window except blackness.

  SEVEN

  KALININGRAD, RUSSIA NOVEMBER 2, 1999

  “Listen, Vince, not to bust balls, but you want to explain again why we had to come all the way into the city?”

  “My job title’s risk assessment manager, isn’t it?”

  “Well, obviously…”

  “There’s the first part of your answer. I’m here assessing risks. That’s my bailiwick. It’s what Roger Gordian pays me the big bucks to do. Now, you want the second part of the answer?”

  “Well, I suppose I did ask for it…”

  “That’s right, you did, and I’m happy to give it to you.” Keeping both hands on the steering wheel, Vince Scull glanced over at the man sitting beside him in the Range Rover. “The second part is that you also work for Gordian. And that your job as a member of our cracker-jack Sword team is to provide security. Which you are doing by making sure nothing happens to me.”

  “Right.” Neil Perry gestured out his window. “I think I see a parking space…”

  “Forget it, there’s plenty to choose from, we’ll find a better one up ahead,” Scull said. “Now, to finish answering y—”

  Cutting himself off midsentence, he stomped his foot down on the brake, jolting the Rover to a halt behind a battered Volga taxi that had stopped in the middle of the road to discharge its passengers.

  Scull counted to ten under his breath, staring balefully at the idling cab as a soo
t-black cloud of exhaust fumes chuffed from its tailpipe and came rolling over his windshield. Then he opened his power window and leaned his head outside.

  “C’mon, tovarishch, you wanna get that stinking pile of shit out of my way, or what?” he shouted, grinding his palm down on the horn. “Skahryeh!”

  “Vince, you really ought to try and stay cool when you’re driving. This is a foreign country.”

  “Don’t remind me. I’m still jet-lagged after flying twelve hours from the States to St. Petersburg, and then another three to this godforsaken oblast,” Scull said. “And being jet-lagged makes me cranky.”

  “Sure, I understand. But your wallet’s already lost enough weight thanks to those GAI robber barons on the highway—”

  “Don’t remind me about that, either,” Scull said without easing off the horn. Scowling, he thought back a while to when they’d been stopped near the city line by a squad of the Gosavtoinspektsia, or State Automobile Inspectorate, for allegedly doing 100 kilometers per hour in a 60 km/h zone. The bastards had come shooting up from behind in a Ford Escort patrol car, the blue gumball light on its roof whirling, its siren whooping like crazy as they signaled him to pull over. He had done so immediately, passing his driver’s license, corporate registration, U.S. passport, and triple-entry visa to an officer who’d demanded in broken English to see them. Then he had sat there fuming while the one cop scrutinized his documents, and two others pointed Kalashnikovs at his head, which was pretty much SOP at Russian traffic stops. After twenty minutes, Scull was informed of the offense he was supposed to have committed, made to pay an exorbitant cash fine on the spot — also typical — and sent on his way with a warning that he could have his driving privileges revoked, or even be hauled into the station on criminal charges, if he disregarded the speed limit again.

  Now, the taxi in front of him finally having rejoined the sluggish flow of traffic, he gave the horn a rest… much to Perry’s relief.

  “Anyway, Neil, getting back to my answer,” he said, and shifted his foot to the gas pedal, “the third and next-to-last reason we came into town is so I can buy some smoked herring, which the stores here mainly stock for our neighbors from Krautland, and is one of the few things I find appetizing in this country, and is also impossible to find out in the boonies, where our ground-station-in-the-making happens to be located.”

  Perry grunted vaguely, figuring he might as well get it all over with. “And the last reason?”

  “Two, three blocks up, there’s a nice little watering hole where some Americans who work for Xerox hang out,” Scull replied. “And I thought maybe we could get soused.”

  Perry grinned and settled back in his seat.

  Now that had been an answer worth waiting for.

  * * *

  As Scull viewed it, the specs that accompanied his fancy job title were simple and straightforward: he’d been hired to help his employer plan for the future by making plausible guesses about what that future would be. What wasn’t so simple was actually isolating the factors that were key to an analysis. Say Gordian wanted his predictions about how an agricultural crisis in Russia would turn out, what effect that outcome would have on the nation’s sociopolitical climate, and what bearing it all would have on completion of UpLink’s European low earth orbit satellite communications gateway. The usual way to do that was to rely on news summaries, historical precedents, and dry statistical reviews, which Scull believed was a lazy man’s cop-out. There were limits to how much troubleshooting could be done from behind a desk; inevitably, forces that couldn’t be quantified on paper would come into play and drive events along one course or another. To detect them you had to use your personal radar, read subtle wind changes, keep your eyes and ears open for anything that might be important. The more you got around, the better.

  Which was what he’d meant when he told Perry he was in Kaliningrad “assessing risks.” It had been twelve weeks since he’d flown back to the States, and all the information he’d gotten while he was there suggested the Russian food shortage was rapidly worsening. Alarmed by the reports, and wanting to see for himself how serious it was, he had decided to make a trip to the nearest population center his immediate priority upon returning to the region. And from where he stood right now, the situation looked a lot like the divorce settlement a judge had handed down to him a couple of weeks ago, formally dissolving his third marriage and sticking him with whopping alimony payments: pretty damned grim.

  The grocery in front of him was locked up tight, its window displays bare of merchandise. The plate glass was pocked with starry fractures of the sort that would have been made by rocks or blunt-ended sticks. A cardboard sign in the doorway read “NYETU PISCHA”—“NO FOOD”—in handscrawled Cyrillic characters. It was similar to the sign he’d seen in the bakery down the block, which had said, “NO BREAD.” Or the one above the empty market stand that said, “NO FRUITS OR VEGETABLES.”

  Scull thought it significant that none of the signs merely had “CLOSED” written on them. Obviously, the absent storekeepers had wanted to discourage property damage from break-ins, making it clear nothing had been left behind for potential looters.

  He moved up to the storefront, shaded his eyes with his hand, and peered in at the vacant shelves.

  “Shit,” he said in a rueful tone. “So much for my smoked-fucking-herring.”

  “Hope it’s easier to get drunk than fed around here,” Perry said.

  He stood with his back to Scull, his gaze wandering up and down the street. It seemed somehow appropriate to him that Kaliningrad had taken its name from one of Vladimir Lenin’s less distinguished cronies; on its best days, it was a drab and cheerless place. The cars looked old. The people looked shabby. The streets were a blockish grid of factories, commercial warehouses, and precast concrete apartment buildings. Shoehorned between Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic States, the region — which had been part of Germany until after World War I — was separated from the rest of Russia by several borders, and valuable primarily for its strategic position as a territorial buffer and port city. Even its attraction to German tourists was unromantic, based not on sightseeing or other leisure activities, but its status as a duty-free import-export zone.

  “Might as well head for the bar,” Scull said, turning from the window.

  “Hold on, I think we might be in luck.” Perry nodded his head toward the corner, where a street vender had begun unloading crates from the rear hatch of his van. There were fifteen or twenty people clotting the sidewalk around him, most of them women in shapeless gray clothing with big canvas grocery sacks on their arms.

  Scull frowned and smoothed down a wisp of his thinning hair. It instantly sprang back out of place. His frown deepened.

  “Forget it, I’m not waiting in any goddamn line,” he said, becoming surly. “Let’s go.”

  Perry continued to hesitate. A pair of young men in ugly leather jackets — he guessed they were in their twenties — had sidled up to an old woman as she left the entrance to the shop. One of them was very tall, the other about average height. The shorter one was drinking out of a brown paper bag and walking slightly off balance.

  Wrapped in a dark, well-worn winter shawl, her grocery bag weighted with goods, the woman tried to brush past them, but they quickly flanked her on both sides, keeping pace with her.

  Perry felt a little jolt in the pit of his stomach. It was a sensation he’d experienced often in his days as a New York City detective.

  His pale blue eyes locked on the three of them, he tapped Scull on the shoulder and motioned in their direction.

  “Tell me, Vince, what’s wrong with that picture?” he said.

  Scull stood beside him and looked blank. He was thinking exclusively about getting a drink now.

  “Looks to me like a couple black marketeers making a pitch, is all.” He grunted. “Maybe they’ve got herring.”

  Perry was shaking his head. “Black marketeers go after tourist cash. You ever see any of them stick
to a babushka like that?”

  Scull was silent. The old woman had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and pulled her satchel closer against her body. The two guys in cheap leather were still crowding her. The taller of them had slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket and was pointing at the satchel with the other.

  “Those punks are gonna boost her,” Perry said.

  “It’s none of our business. Let the locals handle it.”

  “You see anybody about to do that?” Perry made a sweeping gesture with his hand that encompassed both sides of the street. The pedestrians moving past the old lady didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Or maybe they did and just weren’t getting involved.

  What the hell am I waiting for? he thought, and hustled down the block.

  “Goddamn it, Neil,” Scull said, trotting along at his heels, “this is a foreign country!”

  Ignoring him, Perry reached the two men and put his hand on the taller one’s left shoulder.

  “All right, that’s enough, leave her alone,” he said, waving him on.

  The tall guy stiffened a little but remained where he was. The shorter guy glared at Perry and took a slug of whatever was in the brown paper bag. Scull moved up next to him and waited. In the center of the group, the old woman had raised her hand to her mouth and was looking around uncertainly, her face nervous and fearful.

  “I said to take a hike,” Perry said, conscious that the guy still had his right hand in his pocket. “Pahkah!”

  The guy glanced at him sideways and jerked his shoulder, trying to shake him off. He had small, close-set eyes and needed a shave. Perry tightened his grip.

  The guy looked at him another moment, then suddenly rounded on him and spat in his face, his hand coming out of his pocket, something metallic flashing in his fist. A knife.

  As the blade slashed up at him, Perry shifted his body to avoid the attack, clamping his left hand around the guy’s wrist in mid-thrust and then pushing it downward. The punk struggled to bring the knife back up, but Perry slammed the back of his right hand with the outer edge of his palm in a crisp chopping motion. He felt the snap of bone, and then the guy groaned in pain as his hand went limp, hanging from his arm at an unnatural angle, his weapon clattering to the pavement.