agency had trained her to charm any man she wanted, but Marchand seemed resolutely immune to what was left of her old powers. He was the clinic’s finance director. His sole concern was the bottom line.
“Could you spare me a moment, Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said, managing to combine an obsequious, oily politeness with an unmistakable hint of menace. He waited until she had followed him out into the corridor, out of Carver’s hearing, then spoke again.
“It’s about Monsieur Carver’s account. The payment for last month will soon be overdue. I trust there is not a problem. You should be aware that if patients are unable to settle their accounts, it is the clinic’s policy to terminate their treatment.”
“I quite understand,” said Alix. “There is no problem. The account will be settled.”
Marchand gave a curt nod of acknowledgment and farewell. Alix watched him walk away down the corridor. Only when he had turned the corner and was out of sight did she go back into Carver’s room and slump down in the visitor’s chair, holding her head in her hands.
Somewhere Carver had a fortune, the profits of his deadly trade, banked in an anonymous offshore account, or stashed in safe-deposit boxes and private hiding places. The money would keep Marchand satisfied for years, but only Carver had ever known where it was. And now he had no clue that it even existed.
He had at least been blessed by one benefactor. Thor Larsson, the tall, skinny, dreadlocked Norwegian who was Carver’s technician, computer expert, and closest friend, had given Alix access to Carver’s flat. Using money paid to him by Carver, he had done his best to meet the sanatorium bills. But now that money was running out and Larsson had nothing more to give.
Alix would happily have paid her share, but she had no formal identification papers and no work or residency permits, and thus no way of getting a respectable job. In any case, she spent every day at Carver’s side. All she’d been able to find was a late-night waitress gig in a sleazy bierkeller, whose owner was only too happy to turn a blind eye to Swiss employment law if he could hire pliable, immigrant women on the cheap. As he liked to remind his girls, Switzerland had no minimum wage. Alix just about made ends meet from her tips, but she couldn’t hope to pay Carver’s bills as well. Not if she stuck to waitressing.
6
Lev Yusov was fifty-two years old, though to Western eyes he would have seemed at least a decade older. He smoked too many coarse, unfiltered cigarettes. He drank too much cheap vodka. His single-room apartment lacked ventilation in the summer and heating in the winter. The walls were peeling and the window frames were rotting. But Yusov was no worse off than anyone else in the 12th GUMO.
The workers of Russia ’s 12th Glavnoye Upravleniye Ministerstvo Oborony, or Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, were just like every other employee of the once-mighty state. Their wages were pitiful, when they were paid at all. Their living conditions got worse by the day. The staff at one 12th GUMO base had recently gone on a hunger strike, demanding to be paid the money and benefits that they had been owed for months. Even officers had started protesting that they couldn’t get by without taking a second job.
This dissatisfaction was significant for one very simple reason. The 12th GUMO was the organization responsible for the administration, storage, security, and safety of Russia ’s nuclear weapons. When its people became angry and resentful, they were in a position to cause serious trouble. And for Lev Yusov, anger and resentment were his default states of mind.
A lifetime spent in the service of the Motherland had left him little more than a glorified filing clerk, sitting behind a counter in a provincial depot, checking papers in and out, taking orders from officers no better than him, or-which was even worse-their stuck-up personal secretaries. He knew he was just an anonymous old drudge in their eyes, an insignificant functionary whose only means of exercising power lay in his ability to be unhelpful. Yusov exercised that power to the full.
Woe betide the request that was not made exactly as the regulations required, or the form that was incorrectly filled in. His capacity for nit-picking, obstruction, and sheer bloody-mindedness, honed by decades of experience, had become legendary. No one went down to Yusov’s grim, windowless basement kingdom if they could possibly avoid it. No one socialized with him or passed the time of day. And so, when Alexander Lebed went on American TV, talking about missing nukes, and set off a frenzy of backside-covering within the 12th GUMO, as senior officers desperately strove to find out whether these bombs existed and, if so, what had actually happened to them (before passing the buck as far and as fast as they possibly could), no one thought to ask Lev Yusov whether he had any files on the subject, tucked away on the rows of shelves that stretched into the darkness behind him.
This exclusion was just one more drop in the acidic lake of Yusov ’s bitterness. The more he was ignored, the more he sat and pondered about all the documents that had passed before his eyes, documents that he cherished as his most precious, meticulously cared-for possessions. Something was nagging at the corner of his mind, an uncertain memory of a computer printout handed to him many years before, when half the ambitious young whippersnappers who now bossed him around were still in short trousers. It had contained a stream of numbers, and had been folded up and put in a cardboard envelope. This file had no name, just a reference number. Nor had there been any description of its contents. The man who had handed it to him had insisted he had no idea what it might be-just another piece of bureaucratic flotsam that had washed up in his department.
Four months of furtive but infinitely patient rummaging passed by before Yusov found the envelope. It was marked TOP SECRET and date-stamped with the 12th GUMO insignia.
He took out the computer printout. The paper was flimsy, the dot-matrix printer ink fading to pale gray, but he could still make out 127 entries arranged vertically over six pages. Each entry consisted of three number groups. The first two groups contained either ten or eleven digits, divided into three subgroups, of degrees, minutes, and seconds. The third group contained eight digits in a single sequence. One complete entry read: 49°24’29.0160”94°21’31.047”99875495.
Lev Yusov had spent his entire working life in the 12th GUMO. The first two number groups were easily understood: He knew a set of map coordinates when he saw them. Normally, such coordinates would describe a weapon’s target: either the location at which it was aimed or the one it had actually hit. But what if these numbers referred not to targets, but locations? The missing weapons described by Alexander Lebed were portable. They must have been taken somewhere. Perhaps these numbers revealed where.
As for the last eight digits, Yusov assumed they referred to some sort of arming code. He knew that no nuclear weapon, be it an intercontinental missile or a single artillery shell, could be detonated without specific instructions. These numbers would provide the correct combination for each individual bomb.
Late at night, his hand clutching a half-empty bottle, Yusov considered the significance of what he had found. If
