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  The endless flight to Moscow, aboard a Tu-160 strategic bomber, had been cold, rough, and uncomfortable. Still, he was happy, all things considered. He’d managed to enjoy two exhilarating days at sea observing military exercises. Russia’s reborn Northern Navy had been surprisingly successful in the long-awaited war games. Indeed, the Russian Navy, he would soon report to the GRU, was nearly back to full strength after a decade-long hiatus.

  From the bridge of the Peter the Great, a nuclear cruiser, the president had stood in freezing rain observing night launches of his newest Sukhoi fighters, taking off from the nearby aircraft carrier. Then, at dawn the next morning, had come the true reason for his visit. A new intercontinental ballistic missile was to be launched from the Ekaterinburg, Russia’s latest nuclear submarine.

  The missile, a sea-based version of the Topol-M called Bulava, was Russia’s most powerful offensive weapon to date, at least three years ahead of anything in the American arsenal. It carried ten independently targeted nuclear warheads and had a range of 8,000 kilometers.

  The Bulava launch, to the great relief of all present, had been spectacularly successful. It was believed the Russians now had a weapon fully capable of penetrating America’s missile defense systems.

  At dinner in the fleet admiral’s cabin aboard his flagship that evening, the Bulava Program officers had described how the initial velocity of the new missile would, in fact, make all of America’s missile defense systems obsolete. This was a quantum leap forward, and this was the news President Rostov would be carrying home happily to Moscow.

  All had gone exceedingly well, Rostov thought, settling back against the helicopter’s comfortable rear seat cushion. His report at that morning’s top-secret meeting with Count Ivan Korsakov and members of “the Twelve” would be positive, full of good news. This was a good thing, Rostov knew. Count Korsakov was the most powerful man in the Kremlin, and he had little tolerance for bad news. Rostov had learned early in their relationship that for the count, order was the ultimate priority.

  On that most memorable day, pulling him aside in a darkened Kremlin hallway, Korsakov had whispered into his ear that Putin would soon be gone far, far away. And that then he, Vladimir Rostov, would become the second-most-powerful man in all Russia.

  “Second-most?” the Grey Cardinal had said with his trademark shy grin.

  “Yes. You will be president. But we all know who really rules Russia, don’t we, Volodya?” Count Korsakov had laughed, placing a paternal hand on his shoulder.

  “Of course, Excellency.”

  Korsakov-the Dark Rider, as he was known-secretly ruled Russia with an iron fist. But since he had no official title or position inside the Kremlin, only a handful of people at the highest echelons knew that Korsakov was the real power behind the throne.

  As the president’s army MI8 helo touched down on the rain-swept rooftop, he saw his defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, striding out to meet him. A light December rain was turning to snow, and the rotor’s downdraft was whipping the man’s greatcoat about his slender frame. Nevertheless, Ivanov wore a huge smile. But it was pride in his new HQ, not the sight of the presidential chopper, that gladdened his heart.

  Sergei’s headquarters, built at a cost of some 9.5 billion rubles, was the new home of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. In an exuberant burst of construction, it had been built in just three and a half years, a miracle by Moscow standards. Thus, the minister’s smile was justifiable.

  The two men shook hands and hurried through the rain to the glassed-in arrival portico.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rostov said to his old KGB comrade.

  “Not at all, Mr. President,” Sergei said. “Still time for us to have a quick look around the facility before the Korsakov meeting. I promise not to bore you.”

  Overlooking the old Khodynka airfield on the Khoroshevskiy Highway, the GRU’s new headquarters stood on the site of an old KGB building long laughingly referred to as “the aquarium.” It had been an eyesore, a decrepit reminder of the old Russia. This glass and steel structure was huge, some 670,000 square feet, containing the latest in everything. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov had seen to that. This was, after all, the New Russia!

  Inside the building were a plethora of high-cost secrets and state-of-the-art communications technology. Nevertheless, a large portion of the funds budgeted had been expended toward the construction of the wall that surrounded the building. On their way down to the Situation Room, Sergei assured the president that his new wall could withstand the assault of any tank on earth.

  “I’ll have to ask our tank commanders about that,” Rostov said. Long experience had made him skeptical of Russian military claims.

  But during the brief tour, Rostov found himself deeply impressed with the new Situation Center. As was his habit, he chose not to show it.

  He casually asked one of the nearby officers, a young colonel, exactly what situations the Situation Center had been designed for.

  “Why, practically any situation at all, Mr. President,” the man replied, beaming proudly.

  “So, did you follow the American Senate hearings on arms appropriations on C-SPAN last night?” Rostov asked, matching the underling’s toothy smile tooth for tooth. “That was a situation worth following!”

  “Well, not a lot, sir,” the man said, fumbling for words. “Some situations are-”

  A general stepped forward to cover the younger man’s embarrassment. “That’s more the job of the SVR, Mr. President.”

  SVR was the External Intelligence Service. Of course, Rostov knew it well. When Rostov had been head of the KGB, he had been personally responsible for that service’s complete overhaul.

  “Really?” Rostov said, eyeing the general with some amusement, “The SVR’s job, is it? Isn’t that fascinating? One learns something every day.”

  Embarrassed eyes were averted as Rostov smiled his shy, enigmatic smile, nodded briefly to everyone in the room, and took his leave. Korsakov was waiting upstairs.

  “The man’s a fool,” Sergei Ivanov said in the elevator. “My apologies, sir.”

  “That ridiculous little general? Yes. Somebody’s son or nephew, isn’t he?”

  “He is. Putin’s nephew.”

  “Get rid of him, Sergei. Energetika.”

  Energetika was a maximum-security prison on a desolate island off the Kronstadt naval base at St. Petersburg. The facility was unique in the history of Russian prisons. It had been deliberately built atop a massive radioactive-waste site. Prisoners who entered those walls had a death sentence on their heads whether they knew it or not.

  Rostov’s predecessor, the steely-eyed prime minister who’d overstayed his welcome, was a guest there even now. Rostov wondered briefly if his old comrade Putin had any hair left at all now.

  The elevator came to a stop, and they stepped off.

  “We’ve come a long way, Sergei Ivanovich. Eight years ago, we had more important things to do, even in the military sphere, than build fancy administrative buildings. But the GRU is the eyes and ears of the Russian Army, the entire Russian state to a significant degree. Its workers deserve such modern conditions.”

  It was true. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet intelligence services had embarked on a decade of serious decline. The much-feared KGB, where Rostov had spent his former life, had been an institution in free fall. A great many Soviet spies had defected and sold their secrets to Western intelligence agencies. Communism was dead. MI-6, the formidable British intelligence service, had simply declared its mission accomplished, packed up, and headed home.

  Better dead than red, the Brits and Americans used to say.

  That era was clearly over.

  The Dark Rider, Count Ivan Korsakov, had appeared to save Mother Russia.

  With Rostov at his side, Korsakov would now restore Russia to her rightful place in the world.

  On top.

  4

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Count Ivan
Ivanovich Korsakov, KGB code-named Dark Rider, said from behind his crimson curtain.

  His bottom-of-the-barrel voice, amplified, had a disembodied quality that added to the anxiety of everyone within earshot. He could see them, but they could not see him. Few people, beyond his closest confidants in the Kremlin, were ever privileged to gaze upon Korsakov’s countenance. He moved and worked in the shadows.

  Never interviewed by the media, never photographed, he was rich beyond measure. The most powerful man in Russia was a very private man.

  But everyone in the New Russia and, to some extent, nearly everyone on the planet felt the emanations of that vastly powerful intellect. In the dark, secret chambers at the heart of the Kremlin, Count Korsakov reigned as a virtual Tsar. Inside those thick, red brick walls, erected in the fifteenth century, it was even whispered that one day Korsakov might lose the “virtual” part of that title.

  President Rostov, and his siloviki, the twelve most powerful men in Russia, filed into Korsakov’s private conference room. This splendid gallery, with its huge gilded chandeliers, had been allocated to the count by presidential fiat. It was for Korsakov’s personal use whenever matters of state security needed to be discussed at the new GRU headquarters.

  The gilt-framed pictures adorning the paneled walls depicted the count’s great passion, airships. From an engraving of the first hot-air balloon ever to fly, the one that soared above Paris in 1783, to oil paintings of the great Nazi zeppelins, they were all there. One huge painting, Korsakov’s favorite, depicted the German ZR-1 on its infamous night raid over London, its gleaming silver hull glowing red from fires raging in the streets below.

  The room was dominated by a table Rostov himself had ordered built from his own design. It was long and could easily accommodate up to twenty-five people on all three sides. It was the shape that was so unusual. The table was a great equilateral triangle, fashioned in gleaming French-polished cherry wood. At the triangle’s point, of course, stood the count’s large leather armchair, now occupied by Rostov. It was the president’s idea of a small joke: there could be only one head at this table.

  Behind Rostov’s chair hung the very same red velvet curtain made famous during Stalin’s reign of terror. At the Kremlin during certain kinds of gatherings, Stalin would sit behind this very curtain, listening carefully to conversations, words of which could often come back to haunt those who uttered them. At the end of the room opposite Stalin’s red curtain hung a beautifully carved and gilded two-headed eagle, the ancient symbol of Imperial Russia.

  Now, behind the old worn curtain sat Count Korsakov. Like Stalin before him, he was the wizard who pulled the strings of true power.

  The Twelve seated themselves along the three sides of the brilliantly polished table. Place cards identified their seating assignments, and the solid gold flatware and elegant red china permanently “borrowed” from the palace of Peterhof meant breakfast would be served. At that moment, a troupe of waiters, resplendent in white jackets with golden epaulets, appeared and began serving.

  Rostov entered only when they were all seated, taking his place at the “point.” He smiled as a servant seated him, warmly at some, coolly at a few, pointedly ignoring others completely. The tension increased dramatically when one of the Twelve who’d been ignored accidentally elbowed his goblet, spilling water across the table. A waiter quickly mopped up the mess, but Rostov’s icy stare sent the man even lower in his chair.

  Beside each golden water goblet on the table was a small gift, presumably from the count. Rostov picked up his present and examined it: a small gold cloisonné snuffbox bearing the image of Ivan the Terrible. Rostov got the joke. This was clearly to be a very special occasion. It was even Fabergé, he saw, turning it over in his hand.

  “Good morning, comrades,” the familiar disembodied voice boomed from hidden speakers. It sounded as if a subwoofer somewhere needed adjusting. But the count’s tone was unmistakable. Heads will roll today, Rostov thought, smiling to himself, heads will roll.

  “Good morning, Excellency!” the Twelve replied, nearly in unison and perhaps a bit stridently.

  Of the thirteen men assembled at the table, only the Russian president was utterly silent. He smiled indulgently at the others, a smile of almost paternal amusement. The good news he carried allowed him to seem relaxed and in good fettle. The others at the table all exhibited a greyish pallor and seemed unable to control their darting eyes, nervous tics, and trembling limbs. This was despite the fact that many of them were wearing both the Hero of the Soviet Union and the Hero of Russia stars on their uniforms. Such was the enormous power of the one known within the Kremlin walls as the Dark Rider.

  “Everyone enjoy the tour, I trust?” Korsakov said.

  Heads bobbed and a number of Da, da, da’s could be heard. The president’s head was one of the few not to bob. He’d learned a trick early on, a way of not automatically agreeing with everything Korsakov said. He planted his right elbow squarely on the table and made a fist of his right hand, placing it firmly under his chin and keeping it there for the duration of any meeting. No mindlessly bobbing head for the president of Russia!

  “LET US BEGIN, comrades,” Korsakov said. “We welcome President Rostov home from the Barents Sea, and we anxiously await his report on the sea trials of our new Bulava missile systems. But our first order of business will be to clean up a little untidiness. At a Kremlin meeting one year ago today, I gave this group two very simple things to remember. I insisted that you pay your taxes. To the last ruble. And I insisted that you engage in no political activity that could in any way be construed as harmful to our beloved president. Does everyone here recall that?”

  An uncomfortable silence descended upon the room. Even the waiters were aware of the tension and stepped away from the table. The president’s two security officers, a pair of bulky Ukrainians who’d remained by the door, now moved along one wall.

  “Apparently, not everyone remembers. I would like for General Ivan Alexandrovich Serov please to stand.”

  The general, old, bald, and gone to fat, managed to get to his feet, knocking over his water goblet again as he did so. His face had gone a deathly shade of pale, and his right hand, holding the snuffbox he’d been inspecting, trembled uncontrollably.

  “Thank you, General. Now you, Alexei Nemerov. Stand up, please.”

  Nemerov, a thin, waxy figure with wispy blond hair, stood, his eyes blazing behind his round steel-rimmed spectacles. He realized he’d been deliberately seated next to the general, and they now stood side by side. Both were visibly shaken, one with fear, the other with rage.

  “Excellency, there has been some mistake,” Nemerov said, glaring at the red curtain as if his eyes could pierce it, as if his hands could reach the man behind it, strangle the life out of him before he could-

  Korsakov’s voice was low and full of menace. “There certainly has been a mistake, Alexei! Both of you seem to have forgotten why you have risen to such exalted stations in our glorious New Russia. Sitting atop your billions, lounging in your villas at Cap d’Antibes. You are here today only because I trusted you. And you will be gone today because I no longer do.”

  Rostov’s two bodyguards, who had entered the room unnoticed, now edged along the wall until they stood directly behind the two traitors. Each took a step forward, silent and unseen by their intended victims. The other eleven averted their eyes from the bloody drama sure to come.

  Serov and Nemerov staggered against the table. Both felt the sudden press of cold steel at the bases of their skulls, and both closed their eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

  “Where chaos reigns, order retreats,” Korsakov said. “Let order reign once more.”

  It was a signal. The two gunmen fired simultaneously, the hollow-point Parabellum rounds spattering bits of skull and a fine mist of pinkish-grey brain matter into the air above the table, gobs of cerebral tissue spattering the shocked faces of the men seated directly across the table from the victims.

&
nbsp; Before the two dead men could collapse to the floor, the president’s bodyguards had grabbed each corpse under the arms and quickly pulled them away from the table, dragging them toward the door now being opened by one of the waiters.

  “Close the door, please,” Korsakov said when the bodies had been removed and the waiters had removed their unsightly broken china and cleaned up a bit of the mess. The bloody napkins used by the men most affected by the carnage were replaced with crisp white linen.

  “And let’s continue. Please, gentlemen, enjoy your breakfast. I have a few more comments to make before the president gives us a report on the Barents Sea naval exercises. Anyone have any questions? No? Good. Let me tell you what this meeting is really all about. I promise you will find it most interesting.”

  Here, Korsakov paused, giving the Twelve, now the Ten, a chance to compose themselves. When he saw that they were following Rostov’s lead and had begun to sip their short glasses of “little water,” what Russians called their beloved vodka, and push around the eggs and pickles and sausages on their plates, he continued.

  “First, regarding our own internal issues, particularly the recent Chechen atrocities, I would say that we must learn to look at all problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results, and a good thing can lead to bad results. The massive loss of civilian life at Novgorod was regrettable, but we shall turn it to our advantage, believe me.

  “The world is once more in chaos, gentlemen. That’s because it has no bipolar symmetry. Since the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been only one superpower, the United States of America. There is no longer any global counterbalance to enforce a sense of symmetric order on our planet. The Europeans try and predictably fail miserably. The Chinese would gladly try, but their nuclear arsenal is woefully inadequate, at least as of the moment. Everyone agree?”