Politika

Gordian shook his head.

“Then how about sliding it over,” Dan said.

NINE

KALININGRAD REGION NOVEMBER 16, 1999

Gregor Sadov stood in the shadows and watched the fires burn. Over the last four days, he and his team had torched seven different warehouses. The good news was that he hadn’t lost anyone since Andrei. The bad news was that it wasn’t enough.

But then, it never was.

His left hand was pressed to his side, holding a cloth tightly against the minor wound he’d received. He wasn’t sure if he’d caught a piece of shrapnel from when the grain in that last warehouse blew, or if one of the guards had gotten off a lucky shot and creased his side. Either way, it didn’t matter. The wound was painful, but not deep, and Gregor wouldn’t let a little pain slow him down.

No, it wasn’t the wound that was bothering him. It was the message he’d gotten that morning. Short and to the point, as always, the message had said simply, “Warehouse fires effective, but more needed. Prepare your team to target U.S. assets in area.”

That was it. No information on which U.S. assets to target, or when to strike. Gregor knew he’d be given that information when the people he worked for decided to tell him. Which was fine with him. They knew how he worked, and that he wouldn’t attack until he and his team were ready.

Standing there in the shadows, his hand pressed against his side, Gregor looked out on the destruction he had caused, and he smiled.

* * *

Elaine Steiner closed up the toolbox at her feet, dusted her hands, and stood up slowly, arching her back to relieve the strain of kneeling for so long. A wisp of her graying hair had come loose from the kerchief she wore when she worked, and she absently reached up to tuck it back in place. Beside her, Arthur, her husband, closed the door of the service panel and rolled his head left and right, trying to get a knot out of his neck.

They were in one of the smaller buildings on the perimeter of the compound Roger Gordian was having put up here in a sparsely populated area of the Kaliningrad region. The nearest town was over ninety kilometers away, so the compound they were building had to be pretty much self-sustaining, with an apartment complex for the various personnel and various forms of entertainment as well. And security. Lots of security. But that was true wherever they went.

Elaine and Arthur had been with Gordian for the better part of twenty years. He picked the sites for his ground stations, and the Steiners went in and got them up and running. It was a good partnership, and a good life, especially when, as now, they were getting close to bringing a ground station on-line for the first time.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he said, looking over at Elaine.

She smiled softly. Arthur was always looking on the bright side. It was one of the things she admired most about him, perhaps because she was always so pessimistic.

“Not like Turkey,” she said, turning Arthur around and massaging his neck for him. “Remember when we couldn’t get the system to stay on-line for more than ten minutes at a time?”

“Yeah,” he said, letting his head roll forward to make her massage more effective. “Those damn outdated transistors the Afghanis sold us kept overheating. Took us forever to figure out what was going on.”

“And this was just a bad stretch of cable. I told that Russian service crew that they couldn’t run a cable that long without a support, but when have the locals ever listened to us?”

“They will,” Arthur said. “They’ll learn.”

Elaine sighed and shook her head, but there was a tolerant smile on her face as she continued to rub his neck. It was good to know that some things in life would never change.

“Come on,” she said. “There’s one bottle of wine left over from the last shipment. I think we should have it with dinner tonight.”

Arthur turned and put his arms around her. Reaching up and wiping away a smudge of grease from her cheek, he kissed her softly and said, “See? Things are looking up already.”

TEN

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 28, 1999

The floor-to-ceiling mirror occupying an entire wall of Nick Roma’s office was without a speck of dust, without a smudge, nearly without a flaw of any kind on its gleaming silvery surface. Nick would have one of the boys — he liked using that phrase, “the boys”—clean the mirror with Windex two, maybe three, times a day, occasionally more often if he noticed even the slightest blemish marring his reflection. Once there had been a small scratch in the glass and he’d had the panel replaced that same morning.

Nick didn’t think this was being compulsive. He paid close attention to his appearance and the mirror was extremely important to him. Certainly it was the most important thing in his office here at the Platinum Club, more important than his multimedia center, his telephone, or his scratch pad. At least as important as his MP5K.

Now Nicky stood at his mirror making minute adjustments to his clothing — pulling up the collar of his black turtleneck shirt, smoothing the shirt over his chest, being careful that it was tucked into his black designer jeans just right. Every detail had to be perfect.

Outside his window, a truck was backing into the loading area, rumbling out there by the freight door two stories down on Fifteenth Avenue.

He glanced at his Rolex.

11 A.M.

The delivery had arrived exactly on time. He was sure the pickup would, too. The people he was dealing with paid close attention to that sort of thing.

He looked down at his boots and checked that their shine was as flawless as the mirror’s. The boots were black Justins, some kind of lizard skin, and they required special care — much more than leather, anyway. One of the boys would clean and shine them every day, same as they did the mirror. But you had to keep an eye on them, make sure they used neutral wax on the boots instead of black polish. The polish would ruin the skin, and he’d wind up looking like some newly arrived immigrant from Little Odessa. And the mere prospect of that was something that filled him with anger and disgust.

Six months ago, he had been tried for gasoline boot-legging in a federal district court, the specific charge being that he had defrauded the IRS out of three million dollars in income taxes through the use of complicated paper transactions. When they made their closing arguments, prosecutors had told the jury he was vory v. zakone, a godfather in the Eastern European underworld. They had used words like bochya—“big man,” in Russian — to describe him. He had been accused of managing the American arm of a criminal syndicate they had alternately called organizatsiya and mafiya. At one point they had claimed its influence was on the way to becoming as powerful as that of the Cosa Nostra families and Asian gangs.

On the way, he thought with annoyance, pulling his comb from the back pocket of his jeans and sweeping it through his shock of wavy hair.

The trial had lasted two months but he had beaten the indictment, been acquitted of all counts. It had proven somewhat tricky, because the identities of the jurors had been closely guarded. They had been shuttled to and from the courthouse in unmarked vans, escorted by a swarm of cops from the Organized Crime Task Force, and addressed only by number in the courtroom. The blonde with the good legs whom Nick had smiled and winked at throughout the trial was Juror Number One. The fat man who sat with his arms crossed over his belly was Juror Number Nine. Everything top secret. But Nick had sneered at the government’s secrets. Nick had been persistent. His people knew clerks in the U.S. Attorney’s Office with access to what were laughably called “high-security”