‘Miss Dunn, how wonderful to hear your breathing’
Kate felt her skin crawl. ‘Mr… Kartsev?’ she asked, almost whispering.
‘Yes, and I’m alive and well contrary to all rumors.’
Kate was stunned. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, suddenly unsettled, insecure… as if he were there with her.
‘Staying out of harm’s way, mostly. Doing a lot of writing as well. I have greatly enjoyed watching events on the world scene develop, as you can imagine.’
Kate finally came out of her trance when Woody handed her a small rubber ring. A wire with a jack at the end was attached to the ring. It was a microphone. She plugged the jack into a tape recorder and placed the ring around the earpiece of the phone. The red light indicated the recorder was taping. ‘I’ve made substantial progress on my manuscript,’ he continued. ‘I hope it’s going to be a work of some importance. It should spell out my thoughts and conclusions about what’s happening currently.’
‘And so you’ve concluded what?’ she asked.
‘That it’s difficult to control things as complex as world events. But it’s surprisingly easy to “get the ball rolling”, I believe the expression is. To be a catalyst. A bullet here, a bomb there, a computer virus or two and… voila! It’s analogous to plate tectonics theory. Only the forces are not geological, they’re social. They lie pent up. All they need is a triggering event to release them.’
Kate checked the red ‘Taping’ light. She held her hand out to Woody for a ‘high five.’ She was already composing the story she would do. Her report might even make it on before the first commercial.
‘May I ask why you called me, Mr Kartsev?’
‘Two reasons, I missed your company. It’s the middle of the night, and I was having a bout of writer’s block.’ Kate looked at her watch and wrote the time on a notepad. Quickly doing the calculations, she realized that he was somewhere in Siberia. ‘But secondly, I had thought you might want a story, and so I thought I would do you the courtesy of giving you one.’ Her heart was pounding in anticipation. ‘What story?’ Kartsev cleared his throat. ‘Very well. Are you ready?’
A dozen people were clustered around the television in Gordon Davis’s hotel suite.
‘… at precisely fourteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time tomorrow,’ came the voice of Valentin Kartsev, ‘all units of the Russian Army on both sides of the current Civil War will lay down their arms. All soldiers and officers of the armed forces of Russia will immediately, as of that time, be discharged from further service and be free to return to their homes. No authority or other privileges will, after such time, be afforded any citizen of the Russian Republic by virtue of his former service in or rank with the armed forces.’
‘What will happen with the army’s weapons?’ the female correspondent with NBC News asked.
‘They will be left in place.’
‘What about nuclear weapons?’
‘They too will be left in place. We are relying upon the presence of U.N. forces to monitor the safekeeping of all weapons of mass destruction.’
‘Why is this happening? Why is the army disbanding like this?’
‘It was by agreement of the warring parties. Both sides were suffering terribly from battle losses, and even worse from desertions. Furthermore, as you are quite aware, I am sure, from your news reports, supply problems are so extreme in many parts of our country that military units have been reduced to marauding bands, terrorizing the populace in search of food. And military production has come to a complete standstill. It was in that state of exhaustion that the two sides met and agreed to desist from further hostilities.’
‘Will there be an amnesty granted to soldiers of the White Army?’
There was a laugh. ‘Miss Dunn. You seem to be missing the point. There will be no amnesty, because there is no one to grant that amnesty. Government in Russia in any form will, as of fourteen hundred hours GMT tomorrow, simply cease to exist.’
‘Ho-o-oly shit!’ someone in the crowd gathered around Gordon Davis exclaimed.
The NBC News anchorman began his interview of the female reporter who had broken the Kartsev story.
‘It was definitely Valentin Kartsev. There was one recorded interview with him by a Dutch independent film crew, and NBC had the voiceprints compared and found them to be an exact match. In addition, I asked the man several questions about details of our previous meetings which I believe could only have been known by Mr Kartsev, and all were answered correctly.’
‘Then the next question, Kate, is — was Kartsev telling the truth? Will the Russian army just up and disband at nine o’clock Eastern Time tomorrow morning — election day in this country?’
‘There is no way of knowing the answer until that time, but I found in my earlier dealings with Mr Kartsev that he was totally candid and straightforward. He wasn’t given to bluffing or grandstanding.’
‘Thank you, Kate,’ the anchorman said. The camera zoomed in on him as he stacked a sheaf of papers. ‘Well then, in a little over fourteen hours we’ll learn whether the anarchist revolution that has swept over Russia will achieve its final victory and leave that massive country completely ungoverned. To repeat this breaking news, what is known is that Valentin Kartsev — long claimed by unnamed White House sources to have been killed in bombing raids ordered by President Marshall — has surfaced and dropped what can only be described as a bombshell of his own on President Marshall.’
There were cheers in Gordon’s suite which he quickly hushed. The anchorman turned and the camera zoomed out to reveal a guest seated beside him. Behind them was a map of the United States. The studio was all set for election night coverage. ‘I have with me Bill Luck, our political commentator. Bill, it looks like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight on Pennsylvania Avenue has managed to wing their collective feet once again. Will there be any fallout to this, or is the election pretty much decided by now one way or the other?’
‘It definitely does not appear to have been decided yet. The election eve polls are almost evenly split, and all of those polls are well within the margins of error inherent in the polling methods used. What the numbers do tell us, however, is that this election is going to be decided by which way a very small percentage of swing voters break between now and about twenty-eight hours from now when the last polls close in Hawaii.’
‘Almost a year of campaigning and billions of dollars of campaign spending,’ the anchorman commented with a grin and a shake of his head. ‘After all the debates and speeches and position statements, this country’s president is going to be chosen by a very tiny fraction of the electorate which hasn’t yet made up its mind.’
‘Well, it has been a very newsworthy year, to say the least,’ the analyst added. ‘With all the fumbling and bumbling that contributed to President Marshall’s slide in the polls, we in my business couldn’t have been any busier if Congress had enacted a Political Commentator Full Employment Act. So it’s probably fitting, I suppose, that this election go right down to the wire just to keep people like me talking.’
‘If you had to call it, Bill, which way do you think it will go?’
The commentator shrugged. ‘If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say this last bit of news from Kartsev was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’d have to guess that the Republicans are going to be moving back into the White House come next January.’