Politika

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 soot-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