“We’d love to, but I’m afraid you’ve caught us at a bad time. Can we call you back in a few—”
“No, no, Jonathan, you do not understand. I am in Babylon, and I have struck oil, as it were. Last night, President Al-Hassani gave me a large wrapped box as a present. I was not going to open it. But then I thought…”
“Dr. Mordechai, we’ve got less than a minute.”
“Yes, yes, I am sorry. I will be quick. Inside the box were copies of Saddam Hussein’s personal files on his relationship over the years with Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Sergei Ilyushkin and the entire ultranationalist movement inside Russia. At first I had no idea why he would have given me such files. But I have been up all night studying them and…”
The motorcade was pulling through another heavily guarded gate inside the Kremlin grounds.
Mordechai’s tone suddenly changed. “Jonathan, what if the target wasn’t really Washington at all?”
Bennett shot McCoy a quizzical look. It was obvious she didn’t get it either. Dr. Mordechai was perhaps the most brilliant man he knew. He loved the man like his own father. But he had neither the time for a Socratic dialogue nor the chutzpah to simply hang up on him midsentence.
“I’m not following.”
The motorcade began descending into a secure, underground parking garage.
“What if the real target was Moscow?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let us just assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that the Aeroflot jet was hijacked by Al-Nakbah….” A flash of static garbled the connection. “… they could not possibly have believed the attack on the White House or the capital would be successful, right? They had to have known the president would order the plane shot down, right?”
McCoy took that one. “But if whoever planned the attack knew the plane would get shot down, why do it at all?”
“Ah,” said Dr. Mordechai, “but what if that was the point?”
Bennett was almost out of time. “What if what was the point?” he pressed.
“What if the point of the attack was to prov—”
The call seemed to cut off. Bennett cursed, then shook his head and apologized. The bulletproof sedan came to a halt.
“Hello, hello?”
It was Mordechai’s voice. They were still connected.
“We’re still here, but we can barely hear you. Say that last part again.”
“I said, what if the whole point of the attack was to provoke a political crisis in Moscow?”
“A diversion?” Bennett asked.
“No, a prelude.”
“To what?”
“A coup.”
15
Andrei Zyuganov entered from a side door.
He shook hands with Bennett and McCoy — firm, polite, nothing more — then led them from the waiting area into his spacious, well- appointed office near the center of the Kremlin. His executive assistant had already offered them coffee and been turned down. He did not make the offer again.
Barrel-chested with thick, sturdy legs and a rapid, purposeful gait, Zyuganov was nevertheless a small man, a good six or seven inches shorter than Bennett. Yet his very presence seemed to rearrange the molecules in the room.
At sixty-one, he was a man who possessed raw political power, and everything about him projected that simple reality, from his meticulously tailored clothing to the ubiquitous retinue of aides and security men scurrying around him to the rows of power photos lining his office walls.
Andrei and Vadim meeting in New York with the U.N. secretary general.
Andrei dining with Yeltsin and Clinton during the G8 summit in Denver.
Andrei as a young aide (still with a full head of hair) at Gorbachev’s side at the Reykjavik summit with Reagan.
Andrei and Vadim greeting the Ayatollah Khomeini at a palace in Tehran.
This was a man who both understood the power he possessed and appreciated its trappings. So why, thought Bennett, did Andrei Zyuganov project such bitterness?
The son of Russian elites — his elderly father was once the chancellor of Moscow University, and his mother had been a highly regarded nuclear physicist — Zyuganov had always lived in comfort and had always been politically well connected. He was rumored to be a distant relative of Gennady Zyuganov, the longtime head of the Communist Party of Russia, the country’s third-largest political party, though Andrei had never confirmed that. To the contrary, he insisted that he was a Democrat and had always positioned himself to work for reformers, so long as they were reformers on the rise.
Still, the man’s face was etched with a permanent scowl. He squinted constantly, as though he might own glasses but was too vain to wear them. And, whether he meant to or not, he had a way of making people feel that though he would tolerate their presence, he was, in fact, thoroughly disgusted with them. Bennett had long ago concluded this was no act, and he had no doubt it was no theatrical performance today.
Nevertheless, Bennett had come to respect Andrei Zyuganov. He wasn’t the kind of guy with whom you’d want to go out on the town for a drink. But the man knew what he wanted and pursued it aggressively. He could state his case, argue the fine print, and when necessary — but not a moment before — cut his losses and walk away from even the most important deal with his dignity and reputation intact.
“Andrei, thanks again for providing for the crowd-control forces around the embassy and for the police escort to get us here,” Bennett began as Zyuganov straightened some papers on a desk the size of an aircraft carrier. “I doubt we could have made it here otherwise.”
“The president wanted you here on time. That is how we do business.”
Zyuganov picked up the phone on his desk, whispered something neither Bennett nor McCoy could make out, and then motioned toward French doors on their left. “President Vadim will see you now.”
McCoy entered first.
The sight took her breath away, but it also made her sad. Of all the times she had been to the Kremlin, she had never been in the president’s ceremonial office — the working residence, yes, in what was once the Soviet Council of Ministers Building, and the Great Kremlin Palace as well, built from 1838 to 1849 for Czar Nicholas the First as a monument to Russian history and the glory of the Russian military. But never here.
In the past, Vadim had always tried to keep their meetings relaxed and informal. Often it was just Vadim, Foreign Minister Aleksandr Golitsyn, Bennett, and her. Occasionally Zyuganov would be there as well. Several times E.U. foreign minister Salvador Lucente had joined them. Once Palestinian prime minister Sa’id had come for a two-day visit.
The press conferences and state functions were always held in the fanciest of settings, of course, but never the private meetings. Vadim, in fact, had once told her specially that he wanted to create a warmer, more intimate setting for the peace talks, something easily lost amid the Kremlin’s opulent decor; white colonnades; dark gray marble floors; twenty-foot ceilings; and dozens of mounted swords, pistols, and paintings of the czars and their kin.
But clearly something had changed.
As they entered the elegant, pale green-and-white oval hall of the Senate Palace, adorned with enormous crystal chandeliers, the Russian flag and coat of arms, portraits of great Russian military generals, and one of the largest fireplaces she had ever seen, it became painfully clear to McCoy that all pretense of informality had been swept away.
They were not being ushered in to see an old friend and colleague, but into the presence of a man who suddenly felt a desperate need to reassert his relevance.