“Bathrooms out there?” Dean asked.
“She’s hitting the road.”
“We’re far enough away?”
Lia shrugged. “She’ll probably go back to the truck stop. She was pretty impressed.”
“That’s OK with you?”
“We’re in Russia. Remember? And I’m not her mother.”
Dean got up and walked out, trying to hold himself back from running. When he got downstairs, Zenya was just getting on her bike. She’d smuggled some food out to the dog, who jumped up and snared it when she threw it to him.
“Hey!” yelled Dean, starting toward her.
Zenya looked at him, waved, then realized he wanted to stop her. She began pedaling away. The dog trotted behind, still chewing.
“Hey! Hey!” Dean took a few steps but saw it was hopeless, worse than hopeless — even the dog had trouble keeping up with her.
“Save the world yet?” asked Lia when he came back. She had her handheld computer out and was tapping on it.
“You just going to let her go back there? She’ll become a prostitute.”
“You think she’s not already?”
“She’s fifteen or sixteen.”
“You don’t know where we are,” said Lia. “It’s different out here. We’re not in Moscow, let alone the States. Think of it as the Wild West.”
“This isn’t hell,” said Dean.
“It’s close.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m glad you’re such an expert. How long have you been here now? It’s not a whole week, is it? Time just drags when we’re together.”
Dean sat back in the chair, curling his arms together in front of his chest.
26
His name was Laci Babinov, and his death clinched it for Rubens. He hated — loathed — admitting the CIA was right on anything, but Babinov’s presence on the airplane that was shot down was a smoking gun.
An obscure one, certainly, but good intelligence was often a matter of making the obscure obvious.
Babinov was the number two man in Moscow’s OMON, or
Assume the Ilyushin had been targeted to get Babinov. Was the strike on the Wave Three plane then a mistake?
Rubens wanted badly to think it was. But he couldn’t let himself reach that conclusion, not yet anyway; he wanted it too badly and there was no supporting evidence. It might just be a coincidence — which happened just enough to keep conspiracy theorists in business.
As soon as he saw the manifest, the NSA deputy director picked up the phone and called Hadash. In the time it took for Hadash’s assistant to run him down, Rubens had retrieved Babinov’s dossier and copied the information Johnny Bib had given him onto a small device the size of a key fob. The flat plastic housing covered a chip of specially designed flash ROM; the chip would flush its memory clean in eight hours, leaving no trace of the information recorded on it.
“Hadash.”
“We need to talk about Russia,” said Rubens. “The CIA’s estimate may be correct.”
“All right,” said Hadash. “How quickly can you get here?”
“I can leave immediately.”
“Yes, wait—” Hadash held his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, checking with someone about a schedule. “Go directly to the White House. The president wants to talk to you as well.”
An hour and a half later, Rubens found himself on the back lawn of the White House trotting alongside one of the staff people as they hustled to board
Like its Air Force equivalent,
The interior of the helicopter was cordoned off into three different spaces. The first included the doorway and bench seat pretty close to the simple slings used on many military aircraft. The next, which was generally occupied by the Secret Service detail and whatever staff people were aboard, had cushioned vinyl seats that could have been pulled from a bus stop and spray-painted a tasteful gray.
The third compartment, the president’s, had a thick though admittedly synthetic Persian carpet and very real leather chairs. These were bolted to the floor and had special three-point seat belts (never used, in Rubens’ experience) and small pockets at the side with splash guards. Of considerably more interest to Rubens were the fold-up panels that flanked the seats; two seventeen-inch TFT screens were tied into a hard-wired LAN that could be connected with all of the government’s secure computer systems. The panels also had keyboard and assorted ports for plug-ins, including the memory device Rubens had loaded with the information he believed pointed to the coup plot.
The stations also included television feeds. Rubens turned his on, cycling among the cable news networks to see what they were reporting on. It was a mistake — all three featured live feeds from a press conference called by the House Judiciary Committee to announce that it was going to hold hearings into Congressman Greene’s death. The head of the committee, an ambitious Democrat from California named James Mason, smiled and stared portentously at the screen as he declared that any elected representative’s demise was a matter of primary concern for the public.
“So you believe it wasn’t an accident?” one of the reporters asked Mason.
The congressman bobbed and weaved, giving hints of his true political potential.
Yesterday morning, Rubens had called one of the FBI agents who had interviewed him to discuss what he called “speculative ideas.” Along the way he suggested how they might go about checking the guitar and the pool to make sure this was a freak thing. The agent not only thanked him but also asked if he happened to know anyone who could do the work.
Naturally, he demurred at first. But within a few minutes an assistant called back with information about a company in Virginia that might be able to help. Coincidentally, the company did not hold a contract with the NSA. Not so coincidentally, its vice president had been one of the midlevel analysts who got a soft landing during the infamous wave of layoffs in the 1990s — a soft landing Rubens had helped arrange.
The findings were already en route to the Bureau:
Purposeful? The lab didn’t say, though the implication was clear.
Rather than short-circuiting the investigation, Rubens had made things worse. The inconclusive report would
