“Yes ma’am,” Harrison said. “NSA secondment. He’s attached to IT Support in the Environment, Science, Technology and Health Section.”
“But he’s a spook?”
“Yes ma’am, undeclared. Just arrived in country I believe,” Harrison said. In fact, he knew exactly how long Williams had been in Russia. Forty-two days.
“Get him on the phone,” she said, holding out her hand. “Encrypt.”
Harrison pulled out his phone, and then tapped on the app that gave him an encrypted connection via a US Embassy VPN to other Embassy staff. He looked up and dialed Williams, then handed it to Devlin. “I asked him to stand by his phone, just in case,” Harrison said.
“That’s why I love you,” Devlin smiled and heard the ringtone stop to be replaced by a deep bass voice.
“Hello? Williams speaking.”
“Mr. Williams, this is Devlin McCarthy, I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said.
“No ma’am,” he replied. No fumbling, fawning chit-chat. She liked that.
“When I get back to Spaso House I’d like to see you there, I need your thoughts on something,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” he replied. “But can you come to me instead?”
She blinked, “I beg your pardon?”
“Ma’am, there’s someone you should meet,” he said. “But I can’t bring him to Spaso House. You have to come to my office in the New Annex. Or, under it, actually.”
She put her hand over the telephone and turned to Harrison, “What do you know about this guy?”
Harrison shrugged, “Crack analyst, earned his stripes in China before being sent here, an expert in neural networks…”
“Neural what?”
“Artificial Intelligence,” Harrison explained.
She put the phone back to her ear. “OK Mr. Williams, your office it is. We’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”
“You’d better allow a bit more time ma’am,” Williams said.
She smiled, “Are you going to tell me your computer is showing heavy traffic on the ring road Mr. Williams?”
“No ma’am,” he replied. “For the paperwork. I’m pretty sure you don’t have the code word clearances for what I want to share with you.”
Roman Kelnikov was also finishing a phone call from his car, but it was a much more straightforward one. His call was to the Defense Minister, Andrei Burkhin. They discussed the American threat, and whether it was possible that the words ‘fire and fury’ were meant to convey a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons.
“I can’t rule that out,” Kelnikov said. “But we knew it was a possibility. She mentioned civilian casualties.”
“It won’t be a disaster if they do use tactical nukes,” Burkhin responded. “They would become international pariahs.”
“We could lose thousands of front-line troops, aircraft and ships,” Kelnikov said. “Not to mention the civilian casualties. Surely…”
“Show some spine Kelnikov. The troops on Saint Lawrence are… expendable,” Burkhin said. “And they number in the hundreds, not thousands. The ships are cold war relics, Albatross class corvettes. Aircraft losses would be limited to those directly over Saint Lawrence at the time. Civilian losses are a US matter. I’d almost welcome a nuclear strike. We could probably march into Alaska with the whole of the UN at our backs.”
“All we need is a military response of some sort, preferably conventional,” Kelnikov said, a part of him recoiling at the thought of nuclear weapons being used so close to the Russian mainland. “Could we not just have our ships sink a…”
“There will be a US military response, that is guaranteed now,” Burkhin said. “And it will be executed with the typical American aversion for risking the lives of its troops — a blizzard of cruise missiles is most likely. All we need is for America’s allies in Europe and Asia to baulk at entering the conflict when we announce we are creating a demilitarized zone in Alaska. Two to four weeks, and we will control the entire Bering Land Bridge to the Yukon River basin.”
Kelnikov couldn’t help noticing the uncertainty in his colleague’s timeline. “You said two to four weeks? I thought this was supposed to be a lightning attack, over in days.”
“Relax Roman,” Burkhin said. “You get the United Nations behind us, leave the battle plan to me.”
Williams had been right, Devlin had to admit. Of course there were areas of her own embassy that she was not able to waltz in and out of — high-security communications or intelligence collection areas on the ‘Tophat’ restricted access floors for example. But she hadn’t been aware that an obscure office of the Environment, Technology, Science and Health section in the basement of the New Annex was one of them. Mind you, she’d never had occasion to go there. It had taken Harrison a frustrating two hours on the telephone; first to find out which wheels he needed to grease to secure the necessary above-Top Secret clearances so that Devlin could be briefed directly by Williams, and then to get the clearances approved by Washington where it was still the middle of the night and no one seemed to want to take responsibility for letting a lowly Ambassador into what was apparently a very closed circle of Need To Know.
As she followed Harrison and a security guard through the maze of corridors in the New Annex it struck Devlin that they should find a new nickname for it. Built at the turn of the century, it had the working name ‘New Annex’ when people moved in, before later being officially called the ‘Mueller Wing’, after a former head of the CIA, in a move intended to irk their Russian hosts. The new name came too late though. To everyone working at the Embassy, it would always be the ‘New Annex’, just as the additional secure floors of the Chancery were called the ‘Tophat’.
“In here ma’am,” the security guard said, keying a door. “Mr. Williams’ is the third office on the left.” He held it open to let Harrison and herself through but Harrison stayed in the doorway with a shrug, “I’ll wait here. I could only get clearance for you ma’am.”
She didn’t have to worry about where to go once the door swung shut behind her. A portly, bearded and bespectacled man in his 30s with disheveled salt and pepper hair and a spot on his white shirt which looked distinctly like pasta sauce stepped out into the corridor and gave her a small wave.
She walked down and held out her hand, “You must be Carl Williams?”
“In the flesh, Ambassador,” he said, shaking her hand then turning to open the door behind him.
“Call me Devlin, please,” she said stepping inside and looking around. “OK… disappointed.” It just came out, without her thinking. She had expected to walk into some sort of supercomputer center, huge mainframes in liquid nitrogen cooled towers behind hermetically sealed glass, sucking power from a small nuclear reactor buried under the floor of the New Annex. What else could have required such an effort to get her cleared?
Instead, Williams office was about the size of her walk-in wardrobe in Spaso House, with just enough room for a desk holding a laptop and a coffee cup, a file safe and a chair for one visitor. Looking at the chair, she could see it hadn’t had much use. Although he had a bit of the mad professor look about him, Carl Williams’ office wasn’t as disheveled as his person. There wasn’t a piece of paper, stray paperclip or even a pen on his desk; just a few rings from coffee cups that hadn’t been cleaned off. The only personal item was a photo of a seascape that looked like it had been taken on a Pacific Coast somewhere.
“I know, right?” he said, clearly not offended. “They asked what kind of office I would need and I said as long as it had an encrypted 1.5 terabit fat pipe both up and down, I didn’t care.” He looked up, “At least it has high ceilings. You want a coffee?”