“One other thing you should probably be aware of, sir. I would suggest you and Ms. Hempstead keep this to yourself, not report it to Washington, not discuss it with anyone else on the embassy staff.”
“The ambassador will make that decision,” Agatha Hempstead said tartly.
Jake Grafton shrugged. “Last night my aide and I had a little shooting scrape with a couple armed men near Gorky Park. They were killed. I think they might have been CIA agents.”
“Who were they?” Lancaster asked.
Jake gave him the names.
Owen Lancaster and Agatha Hempstead just looked at each other, then transferred their stunned gaze to the admiral.
“If you’ll excuse me, sir,” Jake said and got to his feet. “I have to go see about those helicopters.” The diplomats watched him go without recovering their voices.
Jack Yocke tapped listlessly on his computer. He had found that having the keyboard under his fingers was therapeutic. When his mind was wandering his fingers merely tapped out disjointed phrases, but when he was thinking about something specific his fingers strung words together into sentences as his thoughts rolled along.
The secret is to think in logical, coherent sentences, which most people don’t do. Yocke did, most of the time. As he witnessed an event or thought about a subject the words scrolled through his mind. If he had a keyboard under his fingers the words became text.
Now he glanced at the screen. “Nigel Keren” was written there.
Ah yes. The headline flashed through his mind and the words appeared on the screen. “British billionaire Nigel Keren murdered by CIA.” That headline could get him a story in every newspaper in the world.
And he couldn’t write the story.
Frustrated, he got up from the computer and went to the window. He was still in Admiral Grafton’s apartment in the embassy complex, and unless he was willing to head straight back to the land of Diet Coke and hot dogs, he was going to have to stay here.
A great end to your first foreign correspondent assignment, Jack! Write one good story that blames a political murder on the wrong crowd, the local secret police, who promptly jump on your case like stink on Limburger.
Maybe he should call his editor. He glanced at the phone and even took a step in that direction, then returned to the window.
Yocke knew his editor. Gatler would pretend to be incredulous, thunderstruck: you’re hiding out and missing the great stories, the big, stupendous, attack-on-Pearl Harbor, war-declared stories — world’s worst nuclear accident kills zillions, democracy collapses in Russia, military dictatorship ousts Yeltsin? If you don’t get a piece of those stories, his editor would shout, you’ll go back on the cop beat for the rest of your natural, miserable life.
Jack Yocke had no intention of informing his editor that he had made a tiny little mistake on the Soviet Square Massacre story. That the KGB were innocent lambs, victims of a foul Israeli plot to besmirch their honor. He wasn’t going to call that one in, even if Grafton gave him permission to print the truth, which he wouldn’t.
The fact is that he had been set up by someone who knew just how much truth he could uncover and how to twist it into the story she wanted told. Now he knew, and he couldn’t tell. Wouldn’t tell, even if he could.
But everyone manipulates the press, don’t they? Politicians and cops, athletes and movie stars do it all the time.
Moscow seemed quiet out there beyond the brick wall topped with two strands of barbed wire. Yocke could see the marine opening the front gate and letting cars go in and out.
As he watched he saw Toad Tarkington, Rita Moravia and Spiro Dalworth pile into a car with a couple of marines armed with M-16s. Two more marines and the other two pilots got into a second car. Away they went, out the gate. His curiosity piqued, Yocke wondered about their errand and destination.
When the second car turned the corner and was out of sight, Yocke turned back to his computer.
No, the story he wasn’t getting was KGB blows up Serdobsk reactor! Zillions Die! Now that would be a story that would make Jack Yocke as famous as Michael Jackson, a story to launch a hell of a career, a story to get him his own column, maybe even an investigative team like Bob Woodward had. And what did Woodward dig out from under his rock? Richard Nixon with a coverup dripping from his fingers — a popcorn fart compared to this little beauty.
But he hadn’t missed it yet. Oh no! Jake Grafton had it and no other reporter was going to get a sniff. Sooner or later Jack Yocke would mine that ore. He could feel it in his bones.
Zillions die. Not zillions, but maybe tens of thousands.
The import of those words struck home as Yocke stared at them on the computer screen. Tens of thousands, men, women, children — the lame, the halt, the blind, the virtuous, the guilty, the oh so very human. All. Everyone in the fallout zone.
And that Mossad killer Judith Farrell told Jake Grafton the KGB did it intentionally. On purpose. Murder. Political murder. The ends justify the means. Kill them all.
Was she lying again?
Suddenly Yocke had had enough of the computer. He turned it off and went to the window and looked out for a while.
Then, since he was tired, he laid down and tried to sleep.
After a while he did.
Jake Grafton was also thinking about the people in the fallout zone, thousands who were already dead or dying or sick as a human could be. If this were America or western Europe there would be no helicopters to steal. Those machines the networks hadn’t commandeered to carry their insta-cams, satellite feed gear and blow-dried reporters would all be in use for evacuation and relief efforts. If this were America or western Europe.
One of the interpreters was watching Russian television and periodically summarizing what she heard, and she had not gotten a single hint that any relief efforts were under way.
“It’s too early,” Captain Collins said uneasily. “It’ll take them a while to figure out what they need to do, then another while for anyone to decide he has the authority to set things in motion, then a third while for anybody to get off his ass and actually do something. The only certainty is whatever they do will be too little, too late, and completely ineffective.”
Jake nodded. He had had only an hour’s sleep last night and was very tired. He tried to concentrate.
“How hot is the fallout zone?” he asked Collins.
The nuclear engineering officer just shrugged. “At one of these Russian nuke facilities a few years ago,” he said, “they didn’t know what to do with the hot waste, so they dumped it into a pond a hundred feet deep. Kept doing that. Then one summer the pond partially dried up and the mud turned to dust and blew away. Contaminated an area of four hundred eleven square miles. Contamination level of six hundred roentgens an hour, which is a fatal dose. Spend one hour anywhere in that area unprotected and you’re history.”
“So what did the Russians do after Chernobyl?”
“They lied about the extent of the accident, they lied about the radiation dosages people got and the number of victims, they ordered in troops to clean up the mess and lied about the dosages they got, they lied about the extent of food contamination, the relief money was stolen by corrupt officials, they misdiagnosed the cancers…they basically fucked it up from end to end.”
Collins searched for words. “Maybe lie is the wrong word. These people have always operated on the premise that no one should ever be told bad news, so they are incapable of effectively dealing with any problem at any level. Bad news doesn’t go up the ladder and doesn’t come down, which means that no one ever knows the truth.”