Bennett’s BlackBerry beeped again. McCoy looked over his shoulder as they read the latest flash traffic from the Situation Room.
U.S. military forces and embassies worldwide were at THREATCON DELTA, the highest state of readiness, lest more attacks were coming.
Local fire crews in Maryland were battling more than two dozen blazes caused by falling debris from the Russian jet. FBI agents and investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were surveying the wreckage, strewn out over mile after mile of the Potomac River. The FAA had imposed a full ground stop across the eastern seaboard, forcing hundreds of planes to reroute to the Midwest and Canada. The National Security Council, meanwhile, had been meeting behind closed doors for the last forty-five minutes, and White House Press Secretary Chuck Murray had just announced that the president would address the nation within the hour.
“Jon? That you?”
“It is, Mr. President. Erin’s right next to me.”
“You guys OK?”
“We’re fine, sir. And you?”
“We may not be through the worst of it,” said MacPherson, his voice a bit husky.
“You had no choice, Mr. President. People will see that.”
“I hope you’re right, Jon.”
Bennett hoped so too. From what Kirkpatrick had told them, there was no question the Russian jet had to be shot down. The alternative was unthinkable. But he worried that Pandora’s box had just been opened.
Americans were in no mood for another war.
The country had been badly divided over Iraq. To Bennett, Saddam Hussein and his sons had represented a real and rising threat to U.S. national security and to world peace. They’d invaded Iran and Kuwait. They’d attacked Israel and Saudi Arabia. They’d variously threatened Jordan, Turkey, and the Gulf states. They’d funded Palestinian suicide bombers. They’d harbored, trained, or conspired with terrorists like Abu Nidal and the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. They’d used weapons of mass destruction on their own people and had filled scores of mass graves. They’d tortured political prisoners by the tens of thousands. They’d defied the international community for years and had vowed to wage jihad against the West. Yet fewer than half of Americans now believed the war against Iraq had been just.
NATO, too, was a house divided. The governments of Germany and France, for example, certainly hadn’t seen Iraq as part of an “Axis of Evil.” Nor had most Europeans. To the contrary, they increasingly saw Americans as the aggressors. Even more disturbing was a poll taken by the European Union that found that a stunning 60 percent of Europeans believed that Israel was the greatest threat to world peace, with the United States and North Korea tied for second.
Such trends struck many of his colleagues as bizarre, but to Bennett they were beginning to make sense. The world was experiencing what he called “global schizophrenia.” People were increasingly divided not so much along geographical lines as along moral and cultural lines, by how they defined right and wrong, good and evil.
As Europe grew more secular, Judeo-Christian concepts of morality were evaporating, and with them, the essential ideological underpinnings of the NATO alliance. What troubled Bennett was not whether NATO could hold together in its present form but when Brussels would make a formal break with the U.S.
McCoy said it was the pessimist in him, his dark side. Maybe she was right. Her faith was stronger than his. She had a confidence about the future he simply didn’t possess. Not yet, anyway.
To her, the glass was half full. The Middle East was moving toward peace and prosperity. Why be so pessimistic about the Socialist and pacifist forces rising throughout the E.U.?
But Bennett felt the glass was not only half empty but about to be ripped from their hands. He considered himself a strategic optimist but a tactical pessimist. Sure, in the long run everything would turn out fine, in his life and in the world. But tomorrow could be a disaster. The breaking news from Washington just proved his point.
“Where are you right now?” MacPherson asked.
Bennett used his sleeve to wipe fog off his window and peered out to get his bearings. They were coming around the corner toward the American Embassy, a postmodern, concrete-and-glass, ten-story structure overlooking the river and the Russian White House. A Marine guard saluted and opened the massive steel gate leading to an underground parking garage.
“We’re pulling into the embassy right now, sir.”
“Good. Put me on speaker. I want to talk to McCoy as well.”
When Bennett did, the president greeted McCoy and got down to business. He assigned Bennett to be the primary liaison to the Russian government in opening up a joint investigation into the hijacking and in making sure the tensions between Moscow and Washington weren’t allowed to spin out of control. He tasked McCoy with ensuring close cooperation between Langley’s Moscow Station, the FBI’s local field office, and Britain’s MI6.
“What about Ambassador Richardson?” Bennett asked.
“Stan’s a good man, Jon, but he’s only been there for, what, six months?”
“Eight, actually.”
“Even still. Look, you’re the highest-ranking American official there right now. I want you running the show until we can get the secretary of state in there.”
Bennett was flattered but not convinced the president was right. “The secretary’s still in Beijing?”
“He is. I just talked to him. He can fly to Moscow if President Vadim will receive him. But so far Vadim won’t take my calls.”
Bennett was stunned. “What are you talking about? Why not?”
“Good question. I’ve called twice. They wouldn’t put me through.”
“Who’d you talk to?”
“Andrei,” said MacPherson, referring to Andrei Zyuganov, the Russian president’s chief of staff and someone with whom Bennett and McCoy had worked closely for the past few years. “They’re rushing Vadim back from the Black Sea,” MacPherson continued. “Andrei said they’d be at the Kremlin by midnight, Moscow time.”
McCoy looked at her watch. “That was half an hour ago.”
“No kidding,” said the president. “CIA says Vadim’s plane landed forty minutes ago. The motorcade got him back to his office twenty minutes ago. I just called back. Andrei wouldn’t put me through. He said Vadim was in an emergency meeting.”
“Have you tried the foreign minister?”
“Not yet. The SecState is trying from Beijing. But you should try, too.”
“I will. Erin and I are supposed to meet him for dinner Thursday night.”
“Let me know what happens. And you two watch your backs over there.”
4
An embassy official greeted Bennett and McCoy.
“Mr. Bennett, Ms. McCoy, you’re cleared for access to the Bubble.”
Part boardroom, part war room, “the Bubble” was one of the most expensive rooms in the Moscow embassy compound — and the most exclusive. It could be accessed by only a handful of senior officials with top-secret clearance, and only after undergoing a rigorous security protocol.
The embassy official used a key to operate a special elevator that ferried them to the building’s top floor. In the elevator, the official gave each of them a security access card with a strap attached. “Show this to the guard up top,” he said. “Then it goes around your neck. You’ll need to wear it at all times.”
As they came off the elevator, they showed their passes to the armed Marine guard who stopped them. After scrutinizing their passes and consulting a database, the guard escorted them to a two-foot-thick vault door and asked them to hand over all electronic devices.