The official swiped a key card through a magnetic reader beside the door and directed them to submit to a retinal scan.
Bennett walked over and looked directly at the small LCD screen. A dim light flickered within as a nearly invisible laser passed over the surface of his eye and back again. Then it was McCoy’s turn.
Finally the huge door opened.
Inside, they walked across a ramp, through an air lock, and through a second door that was covered on both sides with sound-absorbent foam panels. The windowless room known as the Bubble was located in the center of the building and was literally suspended in midair, hanging from the roof by hundreds of steel cables effectively detaching the room from the rest of the embassy. Much like a professional music studio, the room was impenetrable by external sounds or vibrations of any kind. It was also carefully shielded from the prying eyes and listening ears of the Russian security services.
The room itself was octagonal in structure. It featured a low ceiling, recessed lighting, dark wood paneling, thick blue carpeting, and a massive, octagonal mahogany conference table. The Bubble was also equipped with state-of-the-art communications technology. Satellite and fiber-optic lines installed and maintained by the NSA provided direct, encrypted phone, e-mail, and instant-messaging access to all the power centers in Washington, NATO, and U.S. embassies worldwide. A series of cameras and large-screen monitors allowed for videoconferencing. Banks of televisions provided a real-time window on the world, and a half-dozen laptops linked to classified databases run by the State Department, CIA, DIA, and the FBI.
The phone rang. Bennett grabbed it first.
“Jon Bennett.”
“Johnny, it’s Mom. I just heard the news. This is terrible.”
Bennett froze. This couldn’t be happening. Not now.
“Mom, I’m right in the… I can’t… this is not a good time. I’m sorry.”
It was as if she wasn’t listening to a word he was saying.
“I called the White House and made them put me through to you, wherever you are. Are you and Erin OK? Did you ask her? What did she say?”
He glanced at McCoy, but she was consumed with another call. He glanced at the clocks on the wall. “Mom? Listen. I love you. I can’t talk. Not now. I—”
“Just tell me if you—”
“I did. She said yes. We’ll tell you all about it — but not right now. I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.” And he hung up, guilt gnawing at his stomach. She always seemed to pick the worst possible moment to call him.
Was it because he rarely took the time to call her?
Bennett shut that thought down quickly and shifted gears.
He picked the phone back up and called the private cell-phone number of Russian foreign minister Aleksandr Golitsyn.
“Da?” came the voice at the other end.
“Mr. Foreign Minister, it’s Jon Bennett.”
“This is not a good time, Mr. Bennett.”
“I have no doubt, but it’s urgent that I speak with you. President MacPherson is trying to call President Vadim, and we seem to be running into some interference. I know you can help me make this happen.”
There was a long pause.
“I am afraid, Mr. Bennett, that will not be possible.”
Bennett had never heard Aleksandr Golitsyn so much as raise his voice. Even in the most difficult discussions over the Iraq war, the NATO expansion talks, or the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the foreign minister had a gift for being calm, cool, and collected. But the man on the other end of this line was livid. He was controlled, of course — he wasn’t screaming or shouting curses — but Bennett doubted Golitsyn’s message could have been any more clear if the two were standing face-to-face.
“Aleks, talk to me. You and I both know—”
“Mr. Bennett, I do not think you appreciate the gravity of the situation. This is not a simple car accident. The United States of America has just shot down a plane carrying innocent Russian civilians.”
Not all of them were innocent, Bennett wanted to say, but he held his tongue.
“My government sees this as a grave development that threatens to rupture the relations between our two countries.”
Bennett’s mind reeled. He desperately motioned McCoy to slide a notebook and a pen over to him. He began to scribble down Golitsyn’s words. Innocent. Grave. Rupture. This was diplomatspeak for firestorm. And Golitsyn wasn’t done.
The foreign minister went on to tell Bennett that a visit to Moscow by the U.S. secretary of state “would not be helpful at this moment,” and that the Kremlin’s participation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would be “postponed” until further notice.
Bennett expected Golitsyn to be grieving over the loss of his fellow countrymen. But how could Golitsyn be angry? This wasn’t MacPherson’s fault. If an American plane had tried to attack Moscow, Vadim would have done precisely the same thing. Hadn’t the Kremlin once ordered poison gas pumped into a Moscow theater to prevent Chechens from blowing the place up? Nearly fifty terrorists had died, along with 129 hostages. Had the U.S. cut off relations with Moscow? Of course not. How, then, could an act of self-defense threaten to rupture relations now?
More to the point, thought Bennett, how was he supposed to prevent tensions from spinning out of control if Vadim refused even to take MacPherson’s call?
5
Was it possible? Was it time?
Dr. Eliezer Mordechai stared out the window into the darkness, but there was nothing to see. No moon. No diamonds glittering in the night sky.
Inside the luxuriously appointed yet unmarked U.S. State Department executive jet, the cabin lights were dimmed. But there was no way he could sleep.
He wished it were not the dead of night. He wanted to see it for himself. Even in broad daylight there wouldn’t be much to see at thirty thousand feet — just raw, ugly desert stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. But that didn’t make his desire any less intense.
His hands were cold and clammy. He checked his watch, then looked back out the window. In less than two minutes, he’d be entering Iraqi airspace. It wasn’t the first time, of course. Just the first time it was legal.
Eli Mordechai was a man who had seen just about everything in his eight decades on the planet. Wars and rumors of wars. Revolutions and earthquakes. Famines and persecution. And the miraculous rebirth of the modern State of Israel.
But nothing had prepared him for this.
Within the hour he would be on the ground in Iraq. At dawn he would awaken in a state whose army was once the world’s fourth largest, though now it was a mere shadow of its former self. By Thursday afternoon he would be breaking bread with Mustafa Al-Hassani, the new president of Iraq, touring the palace and the new capital, and sharing a helicopter ride over the Kirkuk oil fields that were transforming this nation’s destiny.
All of it defied the imagination.
Yael, God rest her soul, would have loved this trip, he knew. The ninth granddaughter of Iraqi Jews, his wife would have savored the irony of returning to the soil from which her family had been driven. She also would have enjoyed the intrigue of traveling with him for once in his shadowy career, this time from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, then to Cairo, then around the Arabian Peninsula before approaching the birthplace of civilization.
Yael would have enjoyed meandering down aromatic alleyways, and peeking into spice shops, and bargaining for bags of coffee and rice to take back home to her friends, flush with stories that she had actually been to the “old country” and lived to tell about it. What’s more, she would have liked to see where her husband had worked in the early years of his career in the Mossad, Israel’s elite intelligence agency.