“I do not indulge in beliefs, Carl.”
“Point taken. HOLMES, book me some serious bandwidth. Something stinks here.”
HOLES IN THE CHEESE
The US Ambassador to Moscow, Devlin McCarthy, had several firsts to her name but the one she liked best was that she was the first black Irish American to be named Ambassador to a top tier post like Moscow. In fact, Devlin was pretty sure she was the first black Irish American in the State Department, let alone in Moscow. She wasn’t the first ever black Irish American, that she knew for a fact because that honor went to her father, his father, and his father’s father. Further back than that, she hadn’t checked. She loved her Grandfather’s explanation though — he insisted his ancestors were Viking slaves, captured Moors bought in the slave markets of Hedeby and shipped to Ireland to serve in Viking families during the reign of Harold Bluetooth.
It was a great story, and she told it to anyone brave enough to ask her about her family history, which most of the Embassy staffers were too timid to do. She wouldn’t mind if they did — it would give her a chance to break down the Ice Queen reputation she seemed to have brought here with her. Small talk wasn’t something people seemed comfortable trying on her, so luckily she was comfortable with their small awkward silences. She really didn’t think she deserved the rep she had. Sure, she was forty and twice divorced — she never had much of an interest in lifelong attachments — and she spent most of her waking life at work, but she did take two weeks holiday every year to be with her now-adult daughter, always taking her somewhere outdoorsy for at least a week, followed by a week somewhere nice like a beach resort or theme park. When Cindy had hit her adult years she’d been expecting her to find something better to do in the summer than hang with her absentee State Department mother, but Cindy hadn’t missed a holiday yet and these days there was a third guest on their holidays, Cindy’s new daughter Angela. Devlin figured the fact they’d stayed close said something nice about them both.
Apart from her annual family get together then, most of her daily life was polite society and diplomatic doublespeak. So she relished days like today when she was summoned to meet with the Russian Foreign Minister Roman Kelnikov at his State offices inside the Kremlin walls. His Ministry was on the ring road that circled Moscow, but the fact he was meeting her here indicated to her she was in for a bit of diplomatic theatre where frank views might actually be exchanged.
She sat in the back of her two-ton armored limo with two bodyguards up front, one facing forward, one backward and her personal aide beside her. In the days when cars needed a driver, they’d needed a detail of three — one to drive, two to guard. But driverless vehicles had freed up the third spot either for additional protection, guests or in this case, legroom. As they approached the River Gates that led directly into the Russian foreign ministry underground carpark there was the usual ceremony with credentials and Kremlin guards running a sweep of the car and its occupants. They all had to demount and go through biometric scanners before they were allowed back into their car and inside the Kremlin walls.
As their car found its assigned parking bay, Devlin patted the small printed folio on her lap. She never took a tablet or telephone into Russian Government offices because since passive data retrieval had become a thing, it was the work of seconds for a concealed scanner to strip an electronic device of all its data. The great privacy backlash of about 20 years ago when people got sick of their data being stolen, their identities cloned and their secrets sold to the highest bidder had seen a revival in the use of good old-fashioned paper that had to be physically stolen, held and read before it gave up its secrets. All truly sensitive information these days was only held on paper.
And the information in the folio on her lap was about as sensitive as it came.
“Tea?” Kelnikov asked, motioning to the samovar on a silver table next to his desk. His office was big enough to hold a large oak desk which legend said had been gifted to the Russian foreign minister Molotov by Minister of the Reich Ribbentrop. There were also two long sofas both facing in towards a less formal teak coffee table decorated with fresh flowers and fruit.
Devlin had been told her security detail and her aide were welcome to wait in the anteroom today. The meeting she was invited to attend with Kelnikov was to take place under four eyes only. When she’d walked in, he’d been sitting at his desk talking with a secretary and he’d risen to shake Devlin’s hand, then sat back down at his desk again. No fruit for her today then.
“Yes please,” Devlin said to the offer of tea, and the secretary fussed arranging tea and a plate of small dry cakes for them both and then hurried out of the office.
“You look well,” Kelnikov smiled, his bald head glistening in the light of the overhead lamps. He was about sixty, overweight, known to have an occasionally recurring barbiturate habit and a predilection for preying on ballerinas from the Bolshoi, where he had a private box. Devlin found him completely and totally without charm. “I think you have even got a little early summer tan, is that possible?”
Oh, so that’s how you want to start? Devlin thought, immediately shifting herself into cold, minimalist mode. She ignored the poorly disguised barb about her color.
“Why was I summoned I here Mr. Secretary?” she asked.
“Invited,” Kelnikov smiled, thin lips parting over yellow teeth. “As you know, if you had been summoned, there would have been a public press pronouncement to that effect. We are not there yet.”
“Where are we then?” she asked. Fortunately her people had done their work and knew exactly what it was that she had been ‘invited’ to talk about. She had been both forewarned, and forearmed.
Kelnikov reached into his desk and pulled out a small folder tied with a string, which he took his time untying. He pulled out a large photograph and slid it across the table to her.
“The Ozempic Tsar,” he said, pointing at it. “The most advanced autonomous pilotless freight vessel in the world, and valued at more than 250 million of your American dollars. On its most recent voyage, it was carrying a cargo of 1.9 billion US dollars’ worth of processed lithium.”
“Then I sincerely hope it was insured,” she said, immediately playing the ball back at him. “Because my information is that it is now lying at the bottom of the Bering Strait.”
His hands were folded and resting on the desk in front of him, but he fanned them wide now, “Oh please, do tell me what information you have on the demise of this pride of the Russian merchant fleet?”
She had been planning to save her ammunition, but his racist remark, his obsequious manner, his slimy smile, they all conspired to make her want to have this audience over and done with as quickly as possible. From her own folio she pulled Carl Williams’ intel report and placed it so that the cameras which she assumed were in Kelnikov’s office could take a nice clear shot of it. She was about to tell him what was in it anyway.
“We are happy to share the intelligence we have on this tragedy. I’ll give you the short version,” she said. “Thirty minutes before that ship was sunk, a Russian naval communications center at Anadyr sent a message to a Finnish submarine, the FNS Vesikko, sailing 20 miles south-west of the Ozempic Tsar. Six minutes before the Tsar sent out its first mayday, that same vessel reported it had fired its missiles.” She watched with satisfaction as Kelnikov’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his mouth. “Six minutes later, at least two subsonic submarine-launched surface to surface missiles hit the Ozempic Tsar and detonated its hydrogen fuel stores. The explosion was so catastrophic it was registered on one of our thermal imaging satellites as a possible ICBM missile launch bloom, but luckily for you, our AI detected that it had the wrong heat signature and our military alert level was not raised.”