“The Americans, I tell you.” Rostov gasped. “Will annihilate us.”
“Let me assuage you in your final moments. Nikolai, open your case. Show it to our dying friend.”
“Yes, sir,” Nikolai Kuragin said. He detached the leather case from his wrist and placed it on the low table, where Rostov could see its contents. When he entered a code into the keypad, the case popped open, and then the lid rose automatically. Inside the lid was a vivid CRT screen displaying a real-time satellite map of the world in three dimensions. Pinpoints of light, hundreds of them, thousands, millions, flashed on every continent.
“These lights represent countless Zeta machines, each broadcasting its precise GPS location and a unique identification number,” Korsakov said. “As you can see, they are everywhere on earth. Numberless millions of them, in every city, town, village. And inside each of them is eight ounces of Hexagon, Volodya, a powerful bomb waiting for my detonation signal.”
“Bombs everywhere,” Rostov mumbled.
“Everywhere on the planet. Many are controlled by my agents in the field on a strictly limited, as-needed basis. But on a worldwide basis, the millions are controlled by this single unit. Here, let me zoom in on a city. Which one? Paris? Honolulu? Bombay? No. L.A.”
Korsakov manipulated the controls to bring the city of Los Angeles forward to full screen. It was a solid mass of tiny blinking lights.
“This number here in the corner of the screen represents the number of Zeta machines within the Los Angeles city limits. As you can see, there are exactly three-point-four million units in this one city alone. Should I choose to, now, I could detonate any one of them in an instant. Or, more dramatically, every one of them in the same instant.”
Nikolai Kuragin laughed. “We could, at this very moment, do exactly to L.A. what we did to Salina.”
“Or London, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, or Beijing,” Korsakov said, scrolling rapidly through those cities, their skyline images coming up on the screen.
“You’re insane,” Rostov whispered, and they would be the last words he would utter in this earthly realm.
“Do you want me to remove him?” Nikolai asked, staring blankly at the corpse.
“Later. But have him incinerated tonight. And his remains placed aboard the helicopter as soon as it arrives in the morning. Along with his luggage, where I have already packed a Zeta. They’ll find his ashes and tiny shards of bones in the mountains with the burned-out wreckage.”
“Yes, sire.”
“Sire. I like the sound of that. So, Rostov is finally no concern of ours. Good. Now, tell me about the mood at the Duma. I plan to go before them tomorrow evening, as you know.”
“I don’t anticipate any problems with your succession to president. In fact, I anticipate unanimous support. Rostov is now gone; it’s the obvious thing to do. You’re revered throughout the country. Most of the embittered Communists, members of the Other Russia, and other parties who would be opposed have already had their minds changed with offers of money, property, or positions in your new government. Those who refused, or balked, have already gone far away.”
“Never far enough. Dispose of them.”
“It will be done.”
“And how is our old friend Putin these days? Enjoying his forced retirement to Energetika Prison?”
“Glowing with enthusiasm, I should say.” Nikolai laughed. “Still, I wonder why you don’t simply introduce him to the tree with no limbs.”
“Impale him? No, too quick an exit. I want him to sit in that cell and rot slowly, lose his hair, his teeth, and finally, when he’s fried from within, then he can wither and die and never trouble us again.”
46
Stoke flew commercial from Miami to Topeka, connecting through Charlotte. There was a young FBI guy waiting at the end of the jetway when he landed at Topeka airport. Navy-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, buzz-cut sandy-colored hair. Spit-shined black lace-up shoes. Stoke liked him on sight. He had a solid Midwestern smile, and even better, he looked as if he could have made the Olympic wrestling team if he hadn’t chosen law enforcement. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.
“Stokely Jones?” the kid said, extending his hand.
“Yep,” Stoke said, giving him five of the best.
“Special Agent John Henry Flood, sir,” he said, flashing his badge. “I’ve got a chopper waiting right here at the airport to take us up to what used to be Salina.”
“Let’s go get ’em, John Henry Flood,” Stoke said. All he had was a carry-on with one change of clothes, his shaving stuff, and his SIG Sauer nine with two extra mags of ammunition. Special Agent Flood was already moving like a running back through the crowded concourse, and Stoke had to hustle to catch up. Kid was on a mission. Good.
They came to an unmarked exit off the concourse, and Agent Flood hung a left. A uniformed airport security guy was watching the door, and he opened it for them, right out onto the tarmac. The jet-black whirlybird was sitting right there, all warmed up, rotors spinning at flat pitch.
“Only way to fly,” Stoke said, smiling at Agent Flood. “Unmarked black choppers.”
Stoke ducked under the whirling rotors and followed the special agent around behind the tail. They scrambled aboard through the starboard-side hatch. The pilot nodded at them, shaking hands with each man as he climbed aboard. John Henry folded himself into a rear seat, and Stoke sat up front on the right. Both men donned their headsets and quickly got strapped in.
“Morning, gentlemen,” they heard the pilot say in their headsets.
“Morning,” they replied.
“Short trip, here we go.”
The pilot smiled at the two men, gave them a thumbs-up, and increased the collective pitch. The little bird lifted off the tarmac, climbed quickly, and took a northerly course, fast and low, skimming over a group of hangars and climbing rapidly en route to Salina.
Stoke turned in his seat and smiled at the FBI kid.
“You go by John or John Henry?” he said into his mike.
“My mother named me John Henry, sir.”
“No need to ‘sir’ me, John Henry. Call me Stoke.”
“Deal. Glad to have you aboard here. You’re Langley, right, you’re CIA?”
“Nope. I got a small private security operation in Miami called Tactics International. Work with the Agency, Pentagon, on special assignments. Mostly for a guy named Harry Brock. Heard of him?”
“Oh, yeah, we’ve heard of him, all right. Kinda legendary. He’s the one asked the Bureau to bring you in.”
“What have we got up there, John Henry? How do you see this thing?”
“A mess, sir. A quadruple homicide, the town mayor and her family murdered in bed, and a town wiped off the map.”
“Any leads?”
“A cell phone left on one of the victims. Had a message in Arabic to vacate the town by six A.M. yesterday. We traced the call to a cell tower in Tehran. Group called Arm of God claiming responsibility.”
“Verified?”
“No, sir.”
“Any idea why the Iranians would want to provoke us? I mean, they’re already walking a fine line, building nukes and threatening Israel with extinction. The ayatollahs giving us a perfect excuse to take them out doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now.”
“No, sir, it does not. We’re hoping you can shed some light on this. Harry Brock told my boss you might have a whole different angle on this Salina situation.”
Stoke nodded but didn’t reply. He wanted to see and hear what the FBI knew before he told them about the baker. He was thinking about the last time he’d seen Happy, when he was delivering his surprise birthday cake. The explosion had been huge. And Harry Brock had said the baker was a Russian-American assassin. Maybe KGB. What the hell was the KGB up to in Salina, Kansas?