Tsar (33 page)

“No,” she murmured, “please.”

“It’s a sleep machine,” she heard him say.

“What does it do?”

“Puts people to sleep. Either for a few hours or forever, depending on the strength of the formula. It’s new. I’m testing out different strengths for my company. Your family is helping out with our little experiment.”

“Oh. Strengths of what?”

“Same stuff we used on the Chechens in the Moscow theater siege. Remember that? We pumped it into the theater through the air-conditioning system to disable the Chechen terrorists. Kolokol 1, the stuff is called. An opiate-derived incapacitating agent. What I’m doing, my job here, is testing the various levels of lethality for use in a hostage-rescue situation. At this level, my guess is it takes effect very rapidly. Certainly with children. Probably within ten seconds or so with adults. We’ll see.”

“Oh,” she heard herself say again.

“I’m turning it on now.”

She heard the click of a switch and the whirr of the little fan on the lid.

She fought the restraints, twisting and turning her body on the bed, feeling the thin plastic cuffs cutting into her wrists, her ankles, knowing it was useless but fighting it until she had nothing left.

He watched her, looking down at her struggles with amused detachment.

Exhausted, she let her head fall back against the pillow, felt hot tears running down her cheeks, looking up at the monster looming over her bed, defeated.

“What about my—what about my children?”

“Already sound asleep,” he said, taking a clear plastic nose cone attached to a long hose and placing it over her nose and mouth. She screamed again and twisted her head violently from side to side, holding her breath, knowing she couldn’t allow this stuff down into her lungs, because if she did, she would surely just…

A moment later, she was asleep forever, too.

P
ippa Guinness stuck her pert blonde head inside the door of Hawke’s new office at Blue Water Logistics. The Dockyard offices were nice enough. His own space was bright and airy, a corner office on the top floor, with sunny views on two sides overlooking the open ocean to the north and Hamilton Harbor to the south. On the ramparts, huge cannons stared out to sea. Furniture was a bit
“moderne”
for Hawke’s taste, but it looked appropriate for a start-up enterprise, he supposed. Eventually, he’d fill the empty shelves with books and ship models, and that would help.

“Alex? They’re almost ready for you in the Tank. C says ten minutes?”

Hawke and Harry Brock both looked up and nodded in her direction. She was wearing a short pink linen skirt and a tight-fitting blouse opened at the neck, and Hawke was viscerally aware of Brock’s spiking blood pressure.

“Ten minutes,” Pippa said again, smiling sweetly at the two men seated by the window, and then she pulled the door closed behind her.

“Who the living hell was that?” Harry Brock asked Hawke. Harry was leaning back in the ultramodern leather and steel Eames chair. His feet, shod in wildly inappropriate flip-flops, were propped up on the black leather ottoman covered with newspapers, sailing and motorcycle magazines, a few shipping trade papers, and copies of
Tatler
and
The Spectator.

“That?” Hawke said, affecting an air of boredom. “That, Harry, was Pippa Guinness. Why do you ask?”

“Why do I ask? Are you kidding me? That is the single most gorgeous piece of ass on the big blue planet, and you are asking me
why
?”

“She has her good points.”

“Two at the very least. That is one tasty little creampuff, boss.”

“A creampuff made on a welding machine,” Hawke replied, skimming through his folder for the upcoming meeting.

“What’s she do around here, anyway? And don’t tell me that’s your secretary. I will have you killed, m’lord.”

“She runs the joint, actually.”

“I thought you ran the joint.”

“I do. Off the books. But Pippa is the acting chief of station. I plan to travel a lot, as you know. She’ll mind the store while we’re in Russia. Ambrose, when he recovers enough to leave his wheelchair, will pitch in as well.”

Harry clasped his interlocking fingers behind his head and started singing, “Back in the U.S.S.R., boys, you don’t know how lucky you are, boys,” he said, almost getting the Beatles tune right.

“Yeah. It’s been a while for me. I’m guessing Moscow has changed a bit.”

Harry laughed out loud.

“You will not believe your eyes, comrade. The Communist Party World Headquarters is now a dilapidated two-story dump on a side street. They serve warm champagne in the lobby, trying to get people to come inside. Read all the fascinating Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky FAQ brochures.”

“I wonder what the most frequently asked question about Trotsky might be.”

“As if anyone had any questions at all anymore.” Harry laughed. “Right across the street is the new Ferrari-Maserati dealership. Much better brochures over there, believe me.”

Hawke smiled and got to his feet, glancing at his watch.

“How’s Stoke doing down in Miami, Harry? Happy?”

“Over the moon. His fiancée just got this big movie deal, but I’m not so sure about the two guys she’s signing with. The fucking Russian oligarchs bought the whole Miramar motion-picture studio with cash and are signing every beauteous babe in Miami, Vegas, and La-La.”

“Have they actually made a movie yet?”

“Hell no. But she’s signed on to do some singing gig on an airship. Flying with a bunch of celebs across the Atlantic. Something to do with the Nobel Prize, I think.”

“Airship?”

“Yeah. Called
Pushkin
. Carries seven hundred passengers. Most amazing damn thing you ever saw.”

Hawke looked at Brock but didn’t say anything.
Airship?

“Let’s go, Harry. Doesn’t pay to keep the king waiting.” Hawke slipped into the grey and white seersucker blazer that he’d hung on the back of the door.

“The king? Is there a problem between you and your boss I should know about?”

“Yeah. Pippa. She’s driving me crazy. Always looking over my shoulder. But I can’t do a damn thing about it right now. C wants her here to keep an eye on things. Which means keep an eye on me, basically.”

“Want me to take her off your hands?”

“How would you do that, Harry?”

“Offer her a glamorous new life as the new Mrs. Harry Brock. Take her away from all this.”

“I thought you were already married.”

“My divorce finally came through. Only took seven years. It’s high time I married somebody else I hate and gave her a house.”

“But you were obviously in love with the Brazilian special forces woman we met in the Amazon. Saladin’s sister, Caparina. Now, there was a woman, Harry.”

“I am in love with her. Love is exponential, Alex. You should know that at your age.”

“Let’s go, Harry.”

T
HE
T
ANK WAS
the secure conference room on the second floor. It was in the very middle of the building, accessible only from the third floor by a single private elevator. The lift had a keypad and required a retinal scan to operate. Outside the secure room were cubby holes for all cell phones and BlackBerrys. There was a metal detector at the door and two Royal Marines standing guard on either side. This single room was probably the most secure place on the Atlantic Ocean, Hawke imagined.

C looked up as Harry and Hawke entered. He smiled, got to his feet, and shook hands, first with Alex, then with Brock. Hawke noticed three other men at the table, plus, of course, Pippa Guinness. He’d also noticed Sir David’s black eye, courtesy of the Jamaicans on Nonsuch Island. It seemed better today but was still visible. Ambrose had been in bed ever since that night, but he was recovering nicely.

“Welcome, gentlemen. Would you like any coffee? Tea?” Sir David said.

Brock and Hawke both declined and took the last two seats available at the round table in the center of the small, completely sound-insulated room.

“I’d like to introduce our friend Professor Stefanovich Halter, just arrived from Moscow,” C said, smiling at a tall, portly man who immediately stood up and shook hands with Hawke and Brock. His face was handsome in a classical way, strong-boned, with sharp, dark eyes. “He’s here to brief you on the current political situation in Moscow and offer further assistance to Red Banner as we redouble our intelligence efforts there.”

“Please, call me Stefan,” the Russian said, in a pitch-perfect rendition of the upper-crust Oxbridge English accent. Hawke found it impossible not to notice his tattered tweed blazer and the old school tie, unusual here on Bermuda.

Professor Halter was known to Hawke only by reputation, but the man was legendary inside the British service. Twice posted to England by the KGB on long, deep-cover assignments in London and, later, teaching at Cambridge University, the elegant Russian spy had been recruited by MI-6 whilst at Cambridge. He was now a double agent on C’s payroll and had been working both sides of the aisle ever since, currently serving as a mole deep inside the KGB. When not operating inside Russia, he was a teaching fellow at Cambridge, with several doctoral candidates in Western studies under his tutelage.

Despite a number of incredibly close scrapes, this large, perfectly urbane and charming fellow had managed not only to survive but to play the most dangerous game at a level even few in it could understand.

He was currently working for President Vladimir Rostov’s new KGB in a far less esteemed job, having been caught in a compromising position with the wife of a high-ranking KGB officer. He’d been temporarily removed from the operational work he so loved and remanded to the analytical division, where he spent long hours developing and refining reports no one ever read.

Still, he was a treasured MI-6 asset inside the Kremlin and had been generous in helping Red Banner as it began to re-build a network in that savage city. Many of the former Russian agents who’d secretly played for England’s side were now dead, either of natural or other causes.

“Can’t help but admire your tie, Professor Halter,” Hawke said with a smile. It had a dark blue background and diagonal light blue stripes with the Eton College heraldic shields between the stripes.

“Old Etonian, are you?” Halter replied.

“Not me, my father. But I’m delighted to meet you. My father, in his unfinished memoir, speaks very highly of you.”

“Thank you, Alex,” the Russian said. “As it happens, I was deeply involved in one of your father’s rather ticklish adventures. That single-handed raid of his on the Arctic Soviet SOFAR installation during the Cuban missile crisis. It is still the stuff of legend, you know. How he survived that dreadful business, no one knows to this day.”

Hawke smiled, trying hard to remember his father as he had lived and not how he had died, murdered at the hands of drug-smuggling pirates aboard his boat in the Caribbean.

The Russian spy seemed to pick up on the younger man’s feelings and said brightly, “Well, Alex, Sir David thinks I might be of some help to you when you arrive in Moscow.”

“Any assistance will be most appreciated,” Hawke said.

“Yes, Alex,” C said. “I thought we’d just give Stefan the floor this morning, let him give us a bit of an update, and then I’m sure he’d be happy to take any questions. Does that suit everyone? And let’s keep it informal, shall we? If you have a question, pipe up.”

They all nodded, and Halter picked up a slender remote from the table. Suddenly, a slide appeared on a heretofore invisible wall-sized screen at the far end of the room. An old photograph of Vladimir Putin filled the wall.

“Dear Volodya,” Halter began. “Now wasting away at a hideous island prison off St. Petersburg called Energetika. A very bad business, indeed. A sad end, I must say, for a man who did do an enormous service for his country, despite his many flaws.”

“What service?” Brock said, somewhat aggressively. Putin, in his book anyway, was an ex-KGB tough busy building a police state when he’d been disappeared. Shutting down the free press, arresting dissidents like Kasparov, and throwing them into Lubyanka with no access to attorneys. Among other things.

“You have to look at it from the Russian perspective. Is he pro-democracy? Not exactly. But—the country was in free fall. A kleptocracy, run by criminals throughout the nineties, thieves who shipped countless billions offshore, bankrupting the country. Humiliated by the loss of the Cold War and what was seen as American arrogance. Putin restored order, gave the people back their pride, put the oligarchs in prison or at least out of the way. That’s a service.”

“If I may add to that,” Sir David said, “it was Putin who put the final nails into the Communist Party’s coffin as well.”

“Still, democracy never had a chance,” Pippa said, looking at Stefan for confirmation.

“Yes, actually, it did, Pippa. But there was no infrastructure to support it, and so, sadly, it led to chaos. And at any rate, as I say, Putin was never a Western-style democrat at heart. He was a professional KGB officer. You must remember the KGB, wherein he grew up, isn’t remotely interested in ideology. It’s interested in power. And law and order. And that, frankly, is what the Russians craved after all those years of drunken disorder inside the Kremlin and blood in the streets. They were shamed and humiliated. That’s why the country has now reunited so strongly against the West.”

Another slide appeared. The current president, Vladimir Rostov.

“Our fearless leader,” Halter said. “He’s basically pursuing Putin’s goals but with a much more aggressive anti-Western posture. I assume you’re all familiar with the term
irredentism
?”

Hawke, Trulove, and Brock came up with blank stares.

“Irredentism,” Pippa Guinness said in a sing-song schoolgirl manner Hawke found especially irritating, “the annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity and/or prior historical possession, actual or alleged.”

“I was going to say that,” Harry Brock said, and Hawke smiled at him across the table.

“Can you use
irredentism
in a sentence, Harry?” Hawke asked.

“No. And you can’t make me.”

Both men laughed out loud, earning a stern look from C, who continued.

“Miss Guinness is quite correct. I believe Rostov is a determined imperialist who won’t stop until the old borders of the former Soviet empire are restored. Eastern Europe, the Baltics, et cetera. He, too, grew up as a KGB man in the Cold War. All he understands is conflict, the clash of two systems. He doesn’t give a bloody fuck about personal ethics, it’s all about the conflict. You’re either with us or against us.”

“Precisely right,” Professor Halter said, nodding vigorously.

“Revanchist Russia wants a fight, any fight,” Sir David Trulove said. “Witness their recent bullying of independent Ukraine and Georgia, two former vassal states, both desperately hopeful of joining NATO. Rostov also wants to take on the West now, because he sees it as weakened. Win, lose, or draw, Russia is back on stage as a world power. And, because of their vast energy holdings, and the price of oil, they’ve got enormous cash reserves. They can also shut off the flow of energy to Europe at the slightest provocation. They won’t be bullied, I daresay.”