At precisely the same time, and only six hundred miles, or nine hundred sixty or so kilometers, away, another geology team was in the eastern extreme of the Sayan mountain range. Some of the semi-nomadic tribes in the area, who had made their living for centuries by herding reindeer, had brought into a government office some shiny yellow rocks. Few people in the world have been unaware of what such rocks mean, at least for the preceding thirty centuries, and a survey team had been dispatched from Moscow State University, still the nation’s most prestigious school. They had been able to fly in, since their equipment was far lighter, and the last few hundred kilometers had been done on horseback, a wonderful anachronism for the survey team of academics, who were far more used to riding Moscow’s fine subway system.
The first thing they’d found was an eighty-ish man living alone with his herd and a rifle to fend off wolves. This citizen had lived alone since the death of his wife, twenty years before, quite forgotten by the changing governments of his country, known to exist only by a few shopkeepers in a dreary village thirty kilometers to the south, and his mental state reflected his long-term isolation. He managed to shoot three or four wolves every year, and he kept the pelts as any hunter/herdsman might, but with a difference. First he took the pelts and, weighting them down with stones, set them in the small river that ran near his hut.
In Western literature there is the well-known story of Jason and the Argonauts, and their heroic quest for the Golden Fleece. It was not known until recently that the legend of the artifact sought was quite real: The tribesmen of Asia Minor had set the skins of sheep in their streams to catch the gold dust being washed down from deposits higher up, changing the pale wool fibers into something almost magical in appearance.
It was no different here. The wolf pelts the geologists found hanging inside the old soldier’s hut looked on first inspection to be sculptures by Renaissance masters, or even artisans of the Pharaohs of dynastic Egypt, they were so evenly coated, and then the explorers found that each pelt weighed a good sixty kilograms, and there were thirty-four of them! Sitting down with him over the necessary bottle of fine vodka, they learned that his name was Pavel Petrovich Gogol, that he’d fought against the Fascisti in the Great Patriotic War as a sniper, and, remarkably, was twice a Hero of the Soviet Union for his marksmanship, mainly in the battles around Kiev and Warsaw. A somewhat grateful nation had allowed him to return to his ancestral lands—he was, it turned out, descended from the entrepreneurial Russians who’d come to Siberia in the early nineteenth century—where he’d been forgotten by the bureaucrats who never really wondered much where the reindeer meat eaten by the locals came from, or who might be cashing his pension checks to buy ammunition for his old bolt-action rifle. Pavel Petrovich knew the value of the gold he found, but he’d never spent any of it, as he found his solitary life quite satisfactory. The gold deposit a few kilometers upstream from the place where the wolves went for their last swim—as Pavel Petrovich described it with a twinkle in the eye and a snort of vodka—turned out to be noteworthy, perhaps as much as the South African strike of the mid-nineteenth century, and that had turned into the richest gold mine in the history of the world. The local gold had not been discovered for several reasons, mainly relating to the dreadful Siberian climate, which had, first, prevented a detailed exploratory survey, and, second, covered the local streams with ice so much of the time that the gold dust in the streambeds had never been noticed.
Both the oil and rock survey teams had traveled into the field with satellite phones, the more quickly to report what they found. This both teams did, coincidentally on the same day.
The Iridium satellite-communications system they used was a huge breakthrough in global communications. With an easily portable instrument, one could communicate with the low-altitude constellation of dedicated communications satellites which cross-linked their signals at the speed of light (which was almost instantaneous, but not quite) to conventional communications birds, and from there to the ground, which was where most people were most of the time.
The Iridium system was designed to speed communications worldwide. It was not, however, designed to be a secure system. There were ways to do that, but they all required the individual users to make their security arrangements. It was now theoretically possible to get commercially available 128-bit encryption systems, and these were extremely difficult to break even by the most sophisticated of nation-states and their black services ... or so the salesmen said. But the remarkable thing was that few people bothered. Their laziness made life a lot easier for the National Security Agency, located between Baltimore and Washington at Fort Meade, Maryland. There, a computer system called ECHELON was programmed to listen in on every conversation that crossed the ether, and to lock in on certain codewords. Most of those words were nouns with national-security implications, but since the end of the Cold War, NSA and other agencies had paid more attention to economic matters, and so some of the new words were “oil,” “deposit,” “crude,” “mine,” “gold,” and others, all in thirty-eight languages. When such a word crossed ECHELON’S electronic ear, the continuing conversation was recorded onto electronic media and transcribed and, where necessary, translated—all by computer. It was by no means a perfect system, and the nuances of language were still difficult for a computer program to unravel—not to mention the tendency of many people to mutter into the phone—but where a goof occurred, the original conversation would be reviewed by a linguist, of which the National Security Agency employed quite a few.
The parallel reports of the oil and gold strikes came in only five hours apart, and made their way swiftly up the chain of command, ending in a “flash” priority Special National Intelligence Estimate (called a SNIE, and pronounced “snee”) destined for the President’s desk right after his next breakfast, to be delivered by his National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. Before that, the data would be examined by a team from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, with a big assist from experts on the payroll of the Petroleum Institute in Washington, some of whose members had long enjoyed a cordial relationship with various government agencies. The preliminary evaluation—carefully announced and presented as such, preliminary, lest someone be charged for being wrong if the estimate proved to be incorrect someday—used a few carefully chosen superlatives.
Damn,” the President observed at 8:10 EST. ”Okay, Ben, how big are they really?”
“You don’t trust our technical weenies?” the National Security Advisor asked.
“Ben, as long as I worked on the other side of the river, I never once caught them wrong on something like this, but damned if I didn’t catch them underestimating stuff.” Ryan paused for a moment. “But, Jesus, if these are lowball numbers, the implications are pretty big.”
“Mr. President”—Goodley was not part of Ryan’s inner circle—“we’re talking billions, exactly how many nobody knows, but call it two hundred billion dollars in hard currency earnings over the next five to seven years at minimum. That’s money they can use.”
“And at maximum?”
Goodley leaned back for a second and took a breath. “I had to check. A trillion is a thousand billion. On the sunny side of that number. This is pure speculation, but the guys at the Petroleum Institute that CIA uses, the guys across the river tell me, spent most of their time saying ‘Holy shit!’ ”
“Good news for the Russians,” Jack said, flipping through the printed SNIE.
“Indeed it is, sir.”
“About time they got lucky,” POTUS thought aloud. “Okay, get a copy of this to George Winston. We want his evaluation of what this will mean to our friends in Moscow.”
“I was planning to call some people at Atlantic Richfield. They were in on the exploration. I imagine they’ll share in the proceeds. Their president is a guy named Sam Sherman. Know him?”
Ryan shook his head. “I know the name, but we’ve never met. Think I ought to change that?”
>
“If you want hard information, it can’t hurt.”
Ryan nodded. “Okay, maybe I’ll have Ellen track him down.” Ellen Sumter, his personal secretary, was located fifteen feet away through the sculpted door to his right. “What else?”
“They’re still beating bushes for the people who blew up the pimp in Moscow. Nothing new to report on that, though.”
“Would be nice to know what’s going on in the world, wouldn’t it?”
“Could be worse, sir,” Goodley told his boss.
“Right.” Ryan tossed the paper copy of the morning brief on his desk. “What else?”
Goodley shook his head. “And that’s the way it is this morning, Mr. President.” Goodley got a smile for that.
CHAPTER 4
Knob Rattling
It didn’t matter what city or country you were in, Mike Reilly told himself. Police work was all the same. You talked to possible witnesses, you talked to the people involved, you talked to the victim.
But not the victim this time. Grisha Avseyenko would never speak again. The pathologist assigned to the case commented that he hadn’t seen such a mess since his uniformed service in Afghanistan. But that was to be expected. The RPG was designed to punch holes in armored vehicles and concrete bunkers, which was a more difficult task than destroying a private-passenger automobile, even one so expensive as that stopped in Dzerzhinskiy Square. That meant that the body parts were very difficult to identify. It turned out that half the jaw had enough repaired teeth to say with great certainty that the decedent had indeed been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko, and DNA samples would ultimately confirm this (the blood type also matched). There hadn’t been enough of his body to identify—the face, for example, had been totally removed, and so had the left forearm, which had once borne a tattoo. The decedent’s death had come instantaneously, the pathologist reported, after the processed remains had been packed into a plastic container, which in turn found its way into an oaken box for later cremation, probably—the Moscow Militia had to ascertain whether any family members existed, and what disposition for the body they might wish. Lieutenant Provalov assumed that cremation would be the disposal method of choice. It was, in its way, quick and clean, and it was easier and less expensive to find a resting place for a small box or urn than for a full-sized coffin with a cadaver in it.
Provalov took the pathology report back from his American colleague. He hadn’t expected it to reveal anything of interest, but one of the things he’d learned from his association with the American FBI was that you checked everything thoroughly, since predicting how a criminal case would break was like trying to pick a ten-play football pool two weeks before the games were played. The human minds who committed crimes were simply too random in their operation for any sort of prediction.
And that had been the easy part. The pathology report on the driver had essentially been useless. The only data in it of any use at all had been blood and tissue types (which could be checked with his military-service records, if they could be located), since the body had been so thoroughly shredded as to leave not a single identifying mark or characteristic, though, perversely, his identity papers had survived in his wallet, and so, they probably knew who he had been. The same was true of the woman in the car, whose purse had survived virtually intact on the seat to the right of her, along with her ID papers ... which was a lot more than could be said for her face and upper torso. Reilly looked at the photos of the other victims—well, one presumed they matched up, he told himself. The driver was grossly ordinary, perhaps a little fitter than was the average here. The woman, yet another of the pimp’s high-priced hookers with a photo in her police file, had been a dish, worthy of a Hollywood screen test, and certainly pretty enough for a Playboy centerfold. Well, no more.
“So, Mishka, have you handled enough of these crimes that it no longer touches you?” Provalov asked.
“Honest answer?” Reilly asked, then shook his head. “Not really. We don’t handle that many homicides, except the ones that happen on Federal property—Indian reservations or military bases. I have handled some kidnappings, though, and those you never get used to.” Especially, Reilly didn’t add, since kidnapping for money was a dead crime in America. Now children were kidnapped for their sexual utility, and most often killed in five hours, often before the FBI could even respond to the initial request for assistance from the local police department. Of all the crimes which Mike Reilly had worked, those were by far the worst, the sort after which you retired to the local FBI bar—every field division had one—and had a few too many as you sat quietly with equally morose and quiet colleagues, with the occasional oaths that you were going to get this mutt no matter what it took. And, mostly, the mutts were apprehended, indicted, and then convicted, and the lucky ones went to death row. Those convicted in states without a death penalty went into the general prison population, where they discovered what armed robbers thought of the abusers of children. “But I see what you mean, Oleg Gregoriyevich. It’s the one thing you have trouble explaining to an ordinary citizen.” It was that the worst thing about a crime scene or autopsy photo was the sadness of it, how the victim was stripped not merely of life, but of all dignity. And these photos were particularly grisly. Whatever beauty this Maria Ivanovna Sablin had once had was only a memory now, and then mainly memories held by men who’d rented access to her body. Who mourned for a dead whore? Reilly asked himself. Not the johns, who’d move on to a new one with scarcely a thought. Probably not even her own colleagues in the trade of flesh and desire, and whatever family she’d left behind would probably remember her not as the child who’d grown up to follow a bad path, but as a lovely person who’d defiled herself, pretending passion, but feeling no more than the trained physician who’d picked her organs apart on the dented steel table of the city morgue. Is that what prostitutes were, Reilly wondered, pathologists of sex? A victimless crime, some said. Reilly wished that such people could look at these photos and see just how “victimless” it was when women sold their bodies.
“Anything else, Oleg?” Reilly asked.
“We continue to interview people with knowledge of the deceased.” Followed by a shrug.
He offended the wrong people,” an informant said, with a shrug of his own that showed how absurdly obvious the answer to the preceding question was. How else could a person of Avseyenko’s stature turn up dead in so spectacular a way?
“And what people are they?” the militiaman asked, not expecting a meaningful answer, but you asked the question anyway because you didn’t know what the answer was until you did.
“His colleagues from State Security,” the informant suggested.
“Oh?”
“Who else could have killed him in that way? One of his girls would have used a knife. A business rival from the street would have used a pistol or a larger knife, but an RPG ... be serious, where does one get one of those?”
He wasn’t the first to voice that thought, of course, though the local police did have to allow for the fact that all manner of weapons, heavy and light, had escaped one way or another from the coffers of what had once been called the Red Army into the active marketplace of criminal weapons.
“So, do you have any names for us?” the militia sergeant asked.
“Not a name, but I know the face. He’s tall and powerfully built, like a soldier, reddish hair, fair skin, some freckles left over from his youth, green eyes.” The informant paused. “His friends call him ‘the boy,’ because his appearance is so youthful. He was State Security once, but not a spy and not a catcher of spies. He was something else there, but I am not sure what.”
The militia sergeant started taking more precise notes at this point, his pencil marks far more legible and much darker on the yellow page.
“And this man was displeased with Avseyenko?”
“So I have heard.”
“And the reason for his displeasure?”
“That I do not know, but Gregoriy Filipovich had a w
ay of offending men. He was very skilled at handling women, of course. For that he had a true gift, but the gift did not translate into his dealings with men. Many thought him a zhopnik, but he was not one of those, of course. He had a different woman on his arm every night, and none of them were ugly, but for some reason he didn’t get along well with men, even those from State Security, where, he said, he was once a great national asset.”
“Is that a fact,” the militia sergeant observed, bored again. If there was anything criminals liked to do, it was boast. He’d heard it all a thousand times or more.
“Oh, yes. Gregoriy Filipovich claims to have supplied mistresses for all manner of foreigners, including some of ministerial rank, and says that they continue to supply valuable information to Mother Russia. I believe it,” the informer added, editorializing again. “For a week with one of those angels, I would speak much.”