Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (84 page)

“But without the huge Ukraine uranium strike he won’t have it.”

They all turned as a man entered the room. He was darkly handsome with the rough-hewn features of a Sean Connery or a Clive Owen. His hair was shot through with gray, the color of his eyes, as if he’d trekked through a snowstorm to arrive here. And, who knew, there may have been a number of metaphorical snowstorms in his past.

He turned to Jack. “I’m Mikal Magnussen, I apologize for not being available when you arrived.” He paused now, waiting while an aide appeared at Kharkishvili’s side and whispered briefly in his ear. Kharkishvili shot Annika an involuntary glance, which was so quick, so circumspect, it was possible that only Jack noticed it.

“So Yukin means to steal it,” Magnussen said, “using soldiers who are
Trinadtsat
personnel.”

“It’s my understanding that it takes a decade to get a uranium mine up and running,” Jack said. “I don’t understand how an incursion into Ukrainian territory is going to accomplish anything.”

“Ah, well, here’s the true genius of Batchuk’s plan.” This from Malenko, another of the dissident oligarchs. Burly and bald, making him look like a tenpin, he had the prominent jaw of a carnivore and tiny ears absurdly low on his skull. “The troops will be sent in under the guise of aiding Ukraine, but once they’re in the area they won’t leave. Instead, they’ll set up a perimeter so that Russian tanks can roll in across the border.”

“It’ll be a fucking mini-Czech,” Glazkov, another oligarch, said, referring to the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, “except the Russians will stop at the border to the uranium discovery.”

“They can’t just invade Ukraine on any pretext,” Jack said.

“They will, just as they did in Georgia, where their troops are still deployed,” Kharkishvili said.

“The economic situation in Ukraine, particularly the east, is dire, so much so that riots have broken out in several cities and are gaining
momentum throughout the country.” Magnussen had talked to the table, but remained standing. “Experience tells me that Yukin will use this economic crisis to doubtless claim his troops are there to protect both Russian and Ukrainian interests.”

“But our problem—and yours, Mr. McClure—is not only the Kremlin,” Kharkishvili said, “but one of your own countrymen. Yukin is being aided by an American by the name of Brandt. A general in your military, an advisor to your president.”

“General Brandt is the architect of the current accord being hammered out between Yukin and President Carson,” Jack said. “Carson’s success as president is more or less tied to the accord being ratified by both sides.”

“That security accord is pure poison. Once it’s signed Yukin and Batchuk will send their
Trinadtsat
troops across the border into Ukraine, Russia will take possession of the uranium strike, and because of the accord with the United States no one will dare to stop him.”

“The United States itself—President Carson—will stop him.”

“Do you really think so?” Magnussen said. “You know very well that the prime reason for President Carson agreeing to the accord is to get the Iranian nuclear card off the table. In this particular matter Yukin will be as good as his word. He has decided to throw Iran to the wolves in exchange for this massive uranium strike, which will serve Russia’s burgeoning nuclear power plant needs for decades to come.”

Jack’s mind was working furiously. “If Carson lifts a hand against the Russian incursion into Ukraine, he risks Yukin reinstituting its nuclear commerce with Iran. And of course he doesn’t dare do that; the entire architecture of the accord is to neuter Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “You have it entirely.”

All of a sudden Jack’s mind gave him a different view of the situation. “This is about General Brandt, isn’t it?” he said. “Brandt has a
private deal with Yukin; in return for getting the accord done he’s going to receive a piece of the action here in Ukraine.”

There was absolute silence in the room. Kharkishvili turned to Magnussen and said, “You see, Mikal, I was right to entrust this part of our plan to Annika.” He turned to her. “You found us the perfect person, my dear. Congratulations.”

“So as you can see,” Thomson said, “the problem is Brandt. He has moved beyond our control. We have no power in this administration, but you do.”

Paull took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You recruited Brandt and now you want me to clean up his dirty work, and yours?” He laughed. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t,” Benson said, “your president is going to end up with egg on his face—egg that won’t be easy to scrape off, I can assure you—when the deal Brandt has made with Yukin comes to light.”

“After which, he can kiss a second term good-bye.” Thomson was still in professorial mode. “You and Edward Carson have a personal relationship, don’t you? I mean to say you’re friends.”

“‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,’” Benson said, quoting the oft-heard TV ad. “Bottom line, General Brandt is driving the president’s car and he’s very, very drunk.”

Paull ran a hand through his hair, but he kept his expression neutral. He felt as if he were walking on eggshells around these two. Right now he needed to take a step back in order to assess the rapidly shifting situation with a clear eye and a calm mind. It was apparent that these two men made their living feeding off other people’s weaknesses and mistakes, but now they themselves had made a mistake or a miscalculation. Or they had seriously underestimated Brandt. From the evidence they had put forward so far this was a possibility that they had overlooked, and Paull was not about to bring their attention
to it. The two choices as outlined were, one, General Brandt had gone Kurtz, as Benson so colorfully put it, or, two, he had cleverly outmaneuvered them, using their resources to forge his relationship with Yukin only to abandon them as the metaphorical clock ticked close to midnight. Yukin and Carson were about to sign the historic accord that, if Thomson and Benson were telling the truth, would give the world the picture of a high-level American military man, one of the president’s closest advisors, in league with the president of Russia.

There was, of course, the other possibility, standing out as surely as a black swan: that the two of them were working a con on a massive scale in order to get him to stop Carson from signing an accord that would do the very thing the president and everyone in his administration was praying for it to do: pull the plug on Iran’s nuclear program. Without Russia’s imported parts, fuel, and expertise the Iranians would have no choice but to drastically scale back the program, or shut it down entirely.

This was the enigma presented to Dennis Paull, the web from which he needed to extricate both himself and the president without damaging the president’s reputation or jeopardizing the security accord. It reminded him of the classic conundrum of an explorer traveling through a country inhabited by two tribes. The members of one tribe always tell the truth, the members of the other tribe always lie. The tribe that always lies are headhunters and cannibals. The explorer comes across a tribal hunting party, which quickly surrounds him. However, he is unable to distinguish which tribe they represent, and now he understands his dreadful predicament. He needs to ask two questions: the first is, Which tribe are you from? The second is, Will you eat me? But whichever tribe the men belong to they are going to give the same answer: We’re from the tribe that never lies, and we’re not going to eat you. And yet the outcome will be polar opposites, either the explorer will be safe or he will die a horrible death.

Paull was now facing a similar situation, lethal in the political sense with no room to be wrong. Were Thomson and Benson members of the tribe that tells the truth or the tribe that lies? If he acted on their information and they were in fact lying, he would jeopardize not only Edward Carson’s presidency but the future security of America. But if they were telling the truth and he
didn’t
act, out of a belief that they were lying, the same terrible scenario would come about.

“Why did General Brandt order a sanction on Jack McClure?” Paull asked.

“We don’t know,” Thomson said, “except to say that Brandt must feel that McClure presents an immediate danger to his private deal with Yukin.”

Now Paull knew he had to tell the president, get the sanction rescinded before Jack was killed. He wished with very fiber of his being that Jack McClure were with him. Jack would unravel this seemingly no-win situation, because he’d be able to see the sides of it Paull could not. But Jack wasn’t here, and Paull knew he’d have to make the crucial decision as to what to tell Carson himself. He racked his brain to find a way out, or at least to swing the odds from fifty-fifty to a percentage that was more favorable to him and the president.

What was clear, what he had hard evidence proving, was that General Brandt had seriously—terminally—overstepped his authority. This fact—the only one Paull had—argued that Thomson and Benson were telling the truth. That conclusion was far from certain, but what in this life, he asked himself, was ever certain? He had to trust these two, but only as far as he could throw them.

“All right,” he said, breaking the lengthy silence, “I’ll call the president.”

26

Oriel Batchuk sat in the ultrabright, candy-colored confines of the Baskin-Robbins in the Globus shopping center on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, which rose on one side of Kiev’s Independence Square. He was surrounded by bubbling Ukrainians dressed in Tommy Hilfiger or Pierre Cardin, trying their hardest to be American.

His mind, drifting, returned to the past, to his confrontation with Dyadya Gourdjiev, an encounter he had hoped never to have, but that he saw now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, was inevitable. Their relationship was bound to end in tears, as the British were wont to say, because it was all artifice, meticulously constructed by the two of them out of lies, fabrications, disavowals, and obfuscation. The truth was they had both made compromises and, yes, sacrifices—not so very difficult for men who lacked a moral compass—in order to live in the world with one another, in order not to tear the other limb from limb. The emotions that ran between them, that bound them together in a private arena, were both lava hot and
ice cold, how could it be otherwise, considering the hideous stroke of fate that had befallen them?

But of course now that he looked around the Technicolor store with blind eyes he realized that it was no coincidence that he had ordered the rendezvous here at this particular place, because it was on this very spot, long before Globus was even an idea in the mind of its developer, that he had first seen Nikki. She had been walking with Gourdjiev, he remembered the moment as if it had been transferred from his retinas, seared into his brain, an image that could neither fade nor crumble. That first sight of Nikki transcended time, existed outside it, as if he had caught a glimpse of a creature beyond human ken. For Batchuk, who had never before allowed himself an emotional connection with another human being, the response to Nikki was galvanizing. In fact, he was forced to sit down, though it was not yet time for his meeting with Gourdjiev. He watched, transfixed, as Nikki, arm in arm with Gourdjiev, floated at his side. Then she detached herself and, running past startled shoppers, flew into the arms of a tall, regal-looking man with black hair and hazel eyes. The man, laughing, lifted her up, whirling her around while Gourdjiev stood by, a fatuous grin on his face.

When Nikki planted a kiss on the man’s lips a tiny, involuntary noise escaped Batchuk’s mouth, terrifying him. It was as if an ice pick had been shoved into his belly. He felt sick and dizzy, and was thus at a disadvantage when Gourdjiev left the blissful couple and came to where Batchuk was slumped over in his chair.

“Are you ill?” Gourdjiev said as he slid onto a chair opposite Batchuk. “You’re sweating like a pig.”

“An excess of vodka last night,” Batchuk improvised, “or I should say this morning.”

Gourdjiev laughed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Your partying will be the death of you, Oriel Jovovich, of that there can be no doubt.”

This was in the days before Batchuk had been named deputy prime minister, before Yukin has ascended to his self-styled throne, but the two were already close, stars rising in tandem through the perilous firmament of the Russian political chop shop. In fact, it was Batchuk who had introduced Yukin to Gourdjiev, who was then already the éminence grise in the power politics of Ukraine, in all of Eastern Europe, in fact. At that time it was essential to have Gourdjiev’s backing and influence in order to rise to the first tier of power. Batchuk, who loved Roman history, thought of his friend as Claudius, a man who had decided to step away from the bloody turbulence at the center of Eastern European politics, but not from the corridors of power, where he manipulated people and events from deep within its shadowed recesses. Like Claudius he was an unprepossessing man, a man you assumed to be in the twilight of his life, who, like the generals of antiquity, was content to gaze out over the Palatine hill to the magnificent centurion cypresses, dreaming of past glories. Until you came in contact, or perhaps conflict was the correct word, with his astonishing intellect.

For many years Batchuk had stood in awe of Gourdjiev, dealing with Yukin and others as the older man did, with discretion, shrewdness, and diabolical foresight, but try as he might Gourdjiev’s mind was always six or seven steps ahead of him, and in denying the lack in himself he began to envy Gourdjiev, and this malice slowly and inexorably curdled their friendship.

“Who is that man with Nikki?” he said almost as soon as Gourdjiev sat down. He had not meant to, but to his dismay—or, more accurately, horror—he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev,” Gourdjiev said.

It disgusted Batchuk that he could not take his eyes off her. He’d heard about her, of course, but until this moment Gourdjiev had kept her away from him. Was it by design, he wondered. He watched Nikki and Alexsei, absurdly jealous that they seemed to fit together like two
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, as if their births were also the birth of a shared destiny. They cleaved to one another, so blissful only a cataclysm, he was certain, could separate them. He said naively, stupidly, “They’re seeing one another?” and immediately despised himself for it.