cushions.
“You two want war with America, do you?” he said. “Ha! You know her submarines encircle us, like wolves underwater. With missiles aimed straight at our mothers’ hearts. You provoke whom you should appease, comrades. At least, until…until…”
He made a harsh choking sound and could not continue. His head fell back, and he stared at his two tormentors, glassy-eyed. The empty glass in his hand fell to the floor, smashing to bits on the stone.
“Are you all right?” Korsakov asked, looking at him carefully.
“Agh. A horrible headache. I feel…”
“Volodya. My dear old friend and comrade. I’m afraid it’s time you took your leave from this mortal coil,” Korsakov said, crossing his legs at the knee. “Your passing is premature, I’ll grant you. I was going to bid you farewell in the morning when the helicopter arrived to ferry you back to the Kremlin. But now-”
“Tomorrow?” the man croaked.
“Yes. A doomed flight. Tragic. A crash in the Urals. A state tragedy. A world tragedy. But my dear Volodya, such things happen. Life goes on.”
“Doomed?”
“You are dying, old friend. Poisoned. Not slowly and painfully like our erstwhile friend Litvinenko in London some years ago. This method shouldn’t take long. Perhaps, what do you think, Nikolai? Twenty minutes?”
“Cyanide prevents the body’s cells from using oxygen so death should arrive in short order.”
“Time enough, then, to show him the future?”
“The future belongs to us, sir. We have more than enough to share.” Kuragin smiled.
“Ivan?” the dying Rostov repeated, his eyelids fluttering. “Are you there?”
“Volodya, can you still hear me? You see the case General Kuragin carries? Do you wonder at it? Our very own nuclear football, as the Americans would have it. I call it the Beta machine, or simply the Black Box.”
“Yes, Ivan, I see it,” Rostov said weakly, peering at the case Kuragin carried.
“You’ve been drinking cyanide, Volodya. Call me old-fashioned, but sophisticated nuclear poisons like polonium I find unnecessarily messy. Unless one wants to send a message. There is no message here tonight, Volodya. Only the future burying the past.”
“The Americans, I tell you.” Rostov gasped. “Will annihilate us.”
“Let me assuage you in your final moments. Nikolai, open your case. Show it to our dying friend.”
“Yes, sir,” Nikolai Kuragin said. He detached the leather case from his wrist and placed it on the low table, where Rostov could see its contents. When he entered a code into the keypad, the case popped open, and then the lid rose automatically. Inside the lid was a vivid CRT screen displaying a real-time satellite map of the world in three dimensions. Pinpoints of light, hundreds of them, thousands, millions, flashed on every continent.
“These lights represent countless Zeta machines, each broadcasting its precise GPS location and a unique identification number,” Korsakov said. “As you can see, they are everywhere on earth. Numberless millions of them, in every city, town, village. And inside each of them is eight ounces of Hexagon, Volodya, a powerful bomb waiting for my detonation signal.”
“Bombs everywhere,” Rostov mumbled.
“Everywhere on the planet. Many are controlled by my agents in the field on a strictly limited, as-needed basis. But on a worldwide basis, the millions are controlled by this single unit. Here, let me zoom in on a city. Which one? Paris? Honolulu? Bombay? No. L.A.”
Korsakov manipulated the controls to bring the city of Los Angeles forward to full screen. It was a solid mass of tiny blinking lights.
“This number here in the corner of the screen represents the number of Zeta machines within the Los Angeles city limits. As you can see, there are exactly three-point-four million units in this one city alone. Should I choose to, now, I could detonate any one of them in an instant. Or, more dramatically,
Nikolai Kuragin laughed. “We could, at this very moment, do exactly to L.A. what we did to Salina.”
“Or London, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, or Beijing,” Korsakov said, scrolling rapidly through those cities, their skyline images coming up on the screen.
“You’re insane,” Rostov whispered, and they would be the last words he would utter in this earthly realm.
“Do you want me to remove him?” Nikolai asked, staring blankly at the corpse.
“Later. But have him incinerated tonight. And his remains placed aboard the helicopter as soon as it arrives in the morning. Along with his luggage, where I have already packed a Zeta. They’ll find his ashes and tiny shards of bones in the mountains with the burned-out wreckage.”
“Yes, sire.”
“Sire. I like the sound of that. So, Rostov is finally no concern of ours. Good. Now, tell me about the mood at the Duma. I plan to go before them tomorrow evening, as you know.”
“I don’t anticipate any problems with your succession to president. In fact, I anticipate unanimous support. Rostov is now gone; it’s the obvious thing to do. You’re revered throughout the country. Most of the embittered Communists, members of the Other Russia, and other parties who would be opposed have already had their minds changed with offers of money, property, or positions in your new government. Those who refused, or balked, have already gone far away.”
“Never far enough. Dispose of them.”
“It will be done.”
“And how is our old friend Putin these days? Enjoying his forced retirement to Energetika Prison?”
“Glowing with enthusiasm, I should say.” Nikolai laughed. “Still, I wonder why you don’t simply introduce him to the tree with no limbs.”
“Impale him? No, too quick an exit. I want him to sit in that cell and rot slowly, lose his hair, his teeth, and finally, when he’s fried from within, then he can wither and die and never trouble us again.”
46
Stoke flew commercial from Miami to Topeka, connecting through Charlotte. There was a young FBI guy waiting at the end of the jetway when he landed at Topeka airport. Navy-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, buzz-cut sandy-colored hair. Spit-shined black lace-up shoes. Stoke liked him on sight. He had a solid Midwestern smile, and even better, he looked as if he could have made the Olympic wrestling team if he hadn’t chosen law enforcement. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.
“Stokely Jones?” the kid said, extending his hand.
“Yep,” Stoke said, giving him five of the best.
“Special Agent John Henry Flood, sir,” he said, flashing his badge. “I’ve got a chopper waiting right here at the airport to take us up to what used to be Salina.”
“Let’s go get ’em, John Henry Flood,” Stoke said. All he had was a carry-on with one change of clothes, his shaving stuff, and his SIG Sauer nine with two extra mags of ammunition. Special Agent Flood was already moving like a running back through the crowded concourse, and Stoke had to hustle to catch up. Kid was on a mission. Good.
They came to an unmarked exit off the concourse, and Agent Flood hung a left. A uniformed airport security guy was watching the door, and he opened it for them, right out onto the tarmac. The jet-black whirlybird was sitting right there, all warmed up, rotors spinning at flat pitch.
“Only way to fly,” Stoke said, smiling at Agent Flood. “Unmarked black choppers.”
Stoke ducked under the whirling rotors and followed the special agent around behind the tail. They scrambled aboard through the starboard-side hatch. The pilot nodded at them, shaking hands with each man as he climbed aboard. John Henry folded himself into a rear seat, and Stoke sat up front on the right. Both men donned their headsets and quickly got strapped in.
“Morning, gentlemen,” they heard the pilot say in their headsets.
