was out of sight Katie approached the front desk.
“I’m staying in room 505 with my fiancé,” she began. “I gave him my key when he misplaced his, but he was supposed to put it in a notebook he left for me so I could get back in the room.”
The woman glanced at the wall of slots behind her. She reached into 505’s box and pulled out the notebook.
“This notebook?” she said.
Katie nodded and took it from her. She looked through the notebook and was careful to let the object she’d placed in there earlier fall out on the front desk. The woman picked it up for her. It was Katie’s American driver’s license. The woman looked at the photo and then at Katie, who said, “I’ve been looking all over for that. He must have found it in the room and put it in the notebook for me.”
“And where is your fiancé?” the woman asked pleasantly enough, but with the tone of someone who had a job to do and intended to do it.
“Glasgow.” She flipped through the pages. “He’ll be back tomorrow, but he didn’t leave the key. How can I get in the room?”
“Have you tried calling him?”
“Yes, he doesn’t answer. Service can be a bit spotty.”
“Don’t I know it,” the woman agreed heartily.
She glanced at the driver’s license again.
“Well, we can’t have our guests sleeping on the sidewalk, now can we?” She pulled a spare key from the slot and passed it and the license to Katie.
Katie glanced at the woman’s nametag. “Sara, I can’t thank you enough. I still can’t believe he forgot to leave the damn key.”
“I’ve been married to my Dennis for twenty-six years and the poor bloke can’t remember birthdays, anniversaries, or, on occasion, all the names of our five children. So if it’s just keys your man forgets to leave I’d go ahead with the marriage and count your blessings, ma’am.”
Katie headed to the elevator.
A minute later she was opening the door to 505. She had watched Shaw walk away from the Balmoral so she was reasonably sure he wasn’t in the building. But she still told herself she had just ten minutes to search the place.
Nine minutes later she’d gone over every square inch of the room and the few belongings he’d left behind and come up with a total zero. Well, not exactly. In the pocket of a jacket she’d found a sales receipt for a book purchase in Dublin. But that wasn’t terribly helpful.
She walked along the perimeter of the room and stopped by the desk, her gaze running over the items there, all hotel-issued. That’s when she saw it. She sat and pulled the blotter toward her, took a pencil off the holder, and carefully brushed the pencil point across it. A name slowly emerged from the white paper where Shaw had carved it with such pressure that it had been imprinted on the page underneath the one he’d written on, an amateurish mistake. Katie had no way of knowing he’d committed this blunder while distressed about Anna.
“Anna Fischer,” Katie said. The name was not uncommon, but for some reason Katie thought she recognized it.
And then something clicked in her memory. She looked at the sales receipt she’d found in his jacket pocket.
“An Historical Examination of Police States,” she read. Again, something was percolating in her mind.
She left the room and called the phone number of the bookshop on the receipt. She didn’t expect anyone to answer at this hour, but a woman’s voice came on. Katie asked if they carried that book. They did, she was told, but they only had one copy left. “And the author’s name?” she said. “I can’t remember.”
“Anna Fischer,” answered the woman.
CHAPTER 26
ANNA FISCHER WALKED SLOWLY along the streets of Westminster in London. Many tourists tended to congregate in this area of the city, craning to catch a glimpse of the Queen or other royal at Buckingham Palace or visiting the graves of long-dead monarchs at the famous abbey. The West End theater district was also here, as well as Lord Nelson looking pensive in Trafalgar Square on the giant granite shaft even as the birds crapped all over him.
She entered St. James’s Park, passing foreign nannies and British moms pushing trams and enjoying an evening jaunt under clear skies. Weather such as this was not particularly plentiful on the little isle in the middle of big water, so Londoners leapt to take advantage of the sun when they had the chance.
Anna kept trudging along, passing the King Charles Steps, and then stopped and stared over at Duck Island in the middle of St. James’s Park Lake. Here she chose to sit down, her skirt gathered around her long legs.
Had she been too hard on Shaw? Part of her said yes but the other part held forth with a resounding No! Marriage, at least for Anna, was a commitment for life. Yes, she should have pressed this point before, but now that Shaw had officially proposed, the matter had taken on a greater urgency. He had to see that, and if he didn’t, well, perhaps it would be best if they didn’t stay together.
She’d had other suitors over the years, educated, articulate men who held important positions in the world or had obtained considerable wealth. None of them, she had to admit, not a single one, had stirred in her the tender, far-reaching emotions that Shaw did. Yet would he even go to Wisbach to see her parents?
She rose and sat on a park bench. Next to her was a discarded newspaper. She picked it up. The Guardian was having a good run with the evil Russia story. The headline indeed said it all: “Return of the Red Menace?”
And something called the “Tablet of Tragedies” had just been received by select major news outlets and world leaders. The rudimentary packaging and grainy photos of allegedly murdered Russians, their tragic stories written in simple language, carried a potency a million-copy glossy release could never have inspired. Anna’s brow wrinkled as she skipped across the story’s contents. It regurgitated much that was already known and then built on that. It was like the game of whispering a story in one ear in a group of people and seeing how much the tale had changed when it came out of the last person’s mouth. And yet the murder of Sergei Petrov, the Russian word for traitor inked on his forehead, had been pretty much conclusive proof of Gorshkov’s guilt, at least in the minds of the Western press.
The Russian president had put his military force on full alert as mass demonstrations were breaking out across the country. It seemed like the place was imploding. Anna had even heard scuttlebutt from her old colleagues at the UN that if the Red Menace was not explained soon in a way favorable to Gorshkov, Russia’s seat on the Security Council might be in jeopardy. Whatever had happened to Konstantin and his family, the man was certainly getting his revenge now.
Yet had anyone bothered to verify any of it? Unlike some other people who might have these same questions, Anna had the means to try and get answers. Perhaps to take her mind off her personal troubles, she decided to do something about it right now.
She walked to her office, a 175-year-old row house nestled in a quiet dead-end street near Buckingham Gate. The buildings on either side of hers were empty, but scheduled to be renovated in about six months. She would cherish her peace and solitude for now until it was destroyed by jackhammers and the sounds of sawing. The smell of fresh paint was in the air. Her building had just gotten a face-lift, including a fresh coat on all the windows and doors.
She unlocked the thick front door on which a gold-plated plaque announced the firm’s name: The Phoenix Group Limited. When she’d first starting working here, Anna had been told that the firm was bankrolled by a very reclusive and wealthy gentleman who’d been born in the United States, Arizona specifically. So private was he that no one who worked at The Phoenix Group even knew their benefactor’s name. Nor did he ever visit them. Yet they did receive communiqués from him from time to time and encouraging words about their important work. And representatives of the man had visited from America to meet with them and answer questions. The owner had been described to her as an intellectual interested in the vast questions that continued to befuddle mankind. And he paid people like Ann
a to figure them out. Whoever he was, he gave Anna and the others free rein to follow their passions. There were few jobs anymore that had such latitude. It was the most stimulating work Anna had ever done. Now if she could only get her personal life in such shape.
She locked the door behind her and headed up the stairs. Her cluttered office was at the end of the hall on the top floor. She passed other rooms, all empty save one near hers where a coworker, Avery Chisholm, a crusty old academic, toiled away on a project, his circle of white hair barely topping the piles of books in front of him. He lifted a hand in response to her greeting and she hurried on.
Anna settled behind her large desk crammed with books and stacks of papers. Her job was to try and make sense of the world, one complex factor at a time. She and her colleagues wrote paper after paper, published book after book, gave talk after talk in which they laid out precise, detailed analyses that should have proved a treasure trove for government and business leadership from the United States to Japan. Yet she was painfully aware that hardly anyone in power bothered to read them.
She went online and entered some chat rooms. Whenever she raised any questions about the culpability of the Russians, or the “real” origins of the Red Menace, she was attacked by all sides with people questioning her religious faith and her patriotism, though they didn’t know if she even had a religion or what country she was from. She was also labeled a Gorshkov ass-kisser, a traitor to humanity, and a royal bitch.
She retreated from that world and expanded her search until she focused on one obscure blogger in a far-off galaxy of the cyberworld. He was raising some of the same questions and doubts that Anna had. She sent him a detailed e-mail and hoped she would get an answer back soon.
She would, but not in any way she could have possibly imagined.
CHAPTER 27
ANNA FISCHER WAS a remarkably intelligent woman with multiple degrees from world-class universities. Yet she had just committed a critical mistake. In her defense, the woman would have had no way of knowing it was a mistake. Which are often precisely the sort of errors that come back to haunt you.
The blogger she had e-mailed with her own misgivings was not who he seemed to be. It wasn’t even a person. It was essentially digital smoke and mirrors.
Dick Pender and his people had been monitoring the goings-on within several thousand chat rooms spread across the world. The rapid-fire repartee bounding kilobyte by kilobyte across his massive computer screens rivaled anything the agony columns of late-nineteenth-century British newspapers had ever inspired. The Red Menace was of course the topic on everyone’s mind, and Pender smiled as he toted up those convinced the Russians were behind it as opposed to those who weren’t sure. The tally ran nearly ninety-eight percent in his favor.
He noted with glee that as soon as anyone said something against the “truth” he had established they were electronically “piled on” by armies of chatters. Across thousands of discussion sites, Pender posted prewritten responses spouting fact after fact, which actually had no basis in fact, and grinned as he was hailed as a hero and a speaker of supreme wisdom by the chat hordes.
God, Pender thought, it was so easy to support a popular – if completely wrong – position. It required not a scintilla of courage.
A minute later his smile grew even wider. He had just checked what he termed his online bear traps. One of them was the blogger Anna had sent her query to. Pender’s people had set it up, along with several others, to gauge the interest of anyone who might believe the whole Red Menace campaign was a sham. It was critical to know if there was a reverse wave of doubt about the horrors perpetrated by the Russians.
If Pender detected any such movements he had numerous strategies he could employ to dispel this belief. One of his favorites was crafting an outrageous event that drew everyone’s attention from a problem area. He’d been retained on short notice to do this for administrations in Washington, London, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo over the years. Such things were usually needed around elections, scandals, wars, and budget fights.
Not many people had sent e-mails to the planted Web sites. The vast majority of the world seemingly had accepted on faith that everything being said about the Russians was true. Most people were perfectly fine with being sheep their whole lives, and this suited Pender’s business well. There were, of course, some who wanted to know everything about the R.I.C. and were digging deeply to get there. Thus, Pender was feeding them bits and pieces to appease their hunger. It wasn’t that hard to stay ahead of them, actually. The media had many stories and fronts to cover, whereas Pender had only one agenda to worry about: Nicolas Creel’s. This technique he referred to as “timing the tap,” turning on and off the info tap at the most optimal times. He had the media right where he wanted them – in a purely reactive state.
The limited number of people who had made inquiries on the planted sites had already been checked out by Pender’s folks and deemed to be unimportant. Unlike the basic chat rooms, one had to really search to find these online bear traps. That hinted of a more determined effort than most casual chatters would ever muster. Pender had no idea who Anna Fischer was, but the name on her Web address intrigued him.
“The Phoenix Group,” he said to himself as he sat at his desk in the war room. He’d already electronically run to ground the geographic origin of the message. The Phoenix Group was located in London. He had a file on his desk that he’d quickly assembled. The Phoenix Group was a think tank located in Westminster near Buckingham Palace; its precise ownership was unknown.
Pender had a lot of things on his mind. The Wall Street Journal was running an article soon that would cast a bit of doubt on the tens of thousands of Russian dead. Pender knew the journalist who’d done the piece. He was a good reporter but a bit lazy and had a reputation for not following up on a story if things got tough or his angle became publicly unpopular. Pender instructed his staff to issue four stories on the Web that would strongly imply that while some of the thousands of dead Russians’ past might be incorrect, that was due to faulty government records and should in no way dilute the significance of such an indisputable holocaust against the Russian people. To do so was to besmirch the memories of murdered people. Pender would also arrange for several “experts” to go on national shows and remake this point in the strongest possible terms.
Pender was certain that the Journal reporter, not wanting to be branded a cynical, dictator-loving pig, would never go near the story again. He’d also gotten wind of the BBC doing a piece but the producer being unsure what angle to take. Pender had an anonymous note and three “published” articles penned by his ghostwriters sent to the harried producer, giving the woman an inspired take on how to do her show that dovetailed nicely with Pender’s and Creel’s goals. He looked forward to watching the program.
Yet Pender instinctively knew that this “Phoenix Group” might be precisely what Creel had instructed him to keep a lookout for. Thus he electronically forwarded all this information to his client.
Then he went back to doing what he did best: selling the truth to a gullible world.
There was no more exhilarating game ever invented.
CHAPTER 28
NICOLAS CREEL SAT in the lavish home movie theater in his estate on the French Riviera, watching the end of Saving Private Ryan. He loved this film, not because of the first-rate acting and directing or the moral message inherent in this classic war story. No, he loved seeing the world at war because it made dying so noble.
Creel had made his fortune building and selling machines that could kill thousands, even millions of people, and yet he was a peaceful man. He’d never struck anyone in anger; never even fired a weapon of any kind. He detested violence. He made the most money while the world was at peace – a very specific type of peace. It was really only a sense of peace laced with fear that at any moment war could break out. For Creel a peace based on lurking terror was the best kind of all.
Creel loved Saving Private Ryan for another
reason. World War II was the classic conflict of good versus evil, a noble war that had enabled a deserving generation of Americans to fulfill their destiny and become the “greatest” generation. Whether the world was aware of it or not, such a conflict was occurring now. And Creel was positioning unsuspecting global players to rise to the occasion, to crush the evil and make the world safer than it had been in decades. The short term would be a bit bumpy of course, but there were always casualities. In the long run it would all be worth it.
He rose, went to his bedroom, and gave Miss Hottie a peck on the cheek as she lay passed out on the bed after performing her usual service for him.
Even as he gazed down at her, he knew it was coming to an end. Hottie liked her newfound wealth, social status, and also her drink a little too much. She routinely screamed at the servants, put on airs she had no business going near, and managed to terrorize Creel’s grown children from his previous marriages whenever they stopped by to visit. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Creel wasn’t overly enamored with any of his children. Still, the rages could be awkward.
Indeed, his dear wife could be the poster child for insecurity. She had barely a high school education tucked inside a supermodel shell. Yet when he’d seen her flounce down that runway in New York he knew he just had to have her, because everybody else so desperately wanted the lady. Creel always wanted to be first.
As was his custom at night, he went to his office to work. The space was probably not as large as one would expect a man of his net worth to have, but it was efficient. He sat down at his desk, flicked on his computer, and saw the e-mail and attached files from Pender.
He read through them thoroughly, coming away considerably interested.
The Phoenix Group? It didn’t ring any bells.
He made a call with one request. “Find out exactly who’s behind The Phoenix Group, a think tank based in London, and do it as fast as possible.”
Every instinct Creel had was telling him this might turn out to be one more missing piece he needed to complete his grand puzzle. It would perhaps take a bit of luck, but even billionaire merchants of death were entitled to good fortune sometimes.
Several hours later his wish came true. His people were very good. They’d ripped through several façades set up to hide the true ownership of The Phoenix Group. And when people went to all that trouble to deceive, it was usually for a good reason. Now Creel could hardly believe his luck.
The Phoenix Group ownership had no ties to Arizona. The phoenix was mostly thought to be of Egyptian origin. But it also hailed from another part of the world. In that ancient land it symbolized power sent from the heavens. It also stood for loyalty and honesty. It could not have been more perfect.
Into the phone he said, “Keep The Phoenix Group building under twenty-four-hour surveillance. And I want complete files on everyone who works there. And the plans for every nook and cranny of that building. No detail is too small.”
Creel then called Caesar. It was very nearly time for his boots on the ground to go to work.