He heard a faint tap on the door to the right-side bedroom, then the click of a latch being dropped, the creak of a door opening a few inches in the darkness.
“Ilya?” The voice was a whisper, barely heard.
“Masha?” He kept his voice to a whisper as well.
“I … I can’t sleep. Can I come in … can I stay with you?”
“Of course! Come in!”
He tucked the pistol back into its hiding place. He felt rather than saw her standing next to the bed. He heard a rustle of clothing, and then she was slipping in beside him under the quilt.
He gathered her into his arms. She wasn’t wearing anything, and she was crying.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Will you … will you take me back to America? Back
“I can’t promise anything,” he told her, “but I’ll do my very best. At least we can get you away from
“Away from here would be very, very good.”
“You probably shouldn’t stay here,” he told her after a long, close embrace. “Mrs. Konovalova strikes me as the conservative type. I don’t think she would approve …”
“Mrs. Konovalova is a fussy old babushka,” Masha whispered in his ear. “She won’t ever know.”
“For a little while, then …”
Charlie Dean was very nearly asleep when a sound brought him wideawake. His hand found his Makarov PM beneath his pillow. A careless foot on a loose floorboard?
It took him long minutes to identify the sound. It was too regular, too rhythmic to be footsteps on squeaky floorboards. As he shifted in the bed, however, and the bed frame gave a mournful squeak with the movement, he realized what it must be.
Hiding the pistol again, he rolled over, his back to the gentle sounds from the bedroom next door.
Soon he was asleep himself.
Jeff Rockman looked up, startled. The sound was coming over Ilya’s line. He’d thought Akulinin had taken off his clothes — including his belt-antenna — and left them out of range of his communicator implants when he’d gone to bed earlier. Apparently, his trousers were
“What
“Interference on the tactical channel?” she asked.
Rockman exchanged a glance with the tech. He didn’t speak Russian, but it was the
Every word coming in over the communications channels of officers in the field was recorded, of course, for later analysis. Rockman had a feeling the analysts were going to enjoy this one.
The Old Man, however, was going to hit the roof.
7
Rubens stood and walked to the podium. The briefing session had been going on now for over an hour without a break. The meeting was supposed to end at one o’clock, and Rubens was the last scheduled speaker. These things were always carefully choreographed.
Now it was Rubens’ turn.
“We have a solid lead on twelve of the Lebed nukes,” he told the room, with no preamble.
His announcement created a buzz of background conversation. Several of the attendees looked puzzled, but he was prepared for that.
“I’ll keep this very brief,” he said. “On September 7, 1997, the CBS newsmagazine
Rubens touched the audiovisual controls on the lectern, and the screen behind him lit up with Lebed’s bland Slavic face.
“… I’m saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of two hundred and fifty are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen, I don’t know.”
“Is it possible that the authorities know where all the weapons are, and simply don’t want to tell you?”
“No,” Lebed said, his voice flat.
He went on to describe the devices, which he claimed could fit inside large suitcases. The nuclear weapons inside measured sixty by forty by twenty centimeters — about two feet long — and could be detonated, he claimed, by one person with less than a half hour’s preparation. They had been distributed among special covert operations units belonging to the
Rubens let the
“Mr. Lebed was national security advisor to Boris Yeltsin from June to October of 1996,” Rubens told them. “He was fired during the period of intensive political maneuvering surrounding the hospitalization of Yeltsin for surgery. Two years later, he went on to become the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia’s second-largest region. In 2002, he was killed in a helicopter crash … under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”
“Mr. Rubens,” Representative Mullins said from the far end of the table, “we in Congress carefully evaluated Mr. Lebed’s claims and determined that they were without merit. The Russian government also categorically denied that there was anything whatsoever to Mr. Lebed’s rather melodramatic claims.”
Rubens considered the congressman for a moment. The man had been intrusive and arrogant all morning, with an attitude indicating that he thought the NSC meeting was purely for his benefit.
Well, perhaps it was. General James’ expression suggested that the briefing was largely a waste of time. A dog-and-pony show indeed.
