‘I’ll be wherever you want me, Mr President.’ Stephanie hoped formality would prevail over emotion.
‘Go to your embassy. Counsel your Prime Minister. I need a strong and unified Europe in the coming hours, its support, its will, its military.’
Prusak stepped into the room. ‘They’re ready for you downstairs, sir. The President-elect says he needs to be with you. Karl Opokin called from the Russian Embassy with condolences and outright condemnation.’
‘The Russian Ambassador?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Then tell Opokin and all of them to go fuck themselves.’
Prusak flinched. Swain rarely used bad language or a raised voice. ‘I have the contacts here of the families, sir,’ he said.
‘I need the families of the helicopter crew, too,’ said Swain.
‘They are included.’
‘Put Holland off for half an hour, but we must keep him onside. I’m announcing Tom as the temporary chair of the Fed,’ said Swain referring to the Treasury Secretary, Thomas Grant. ‘What are the markets doing?’
‘FTSE and DAX down more than four percent,’ said Prusak. ‘We’re ninety minutes from opening.’
‘I suspect there’ll be a brief violent dip, then recovery,’ said Stephanie.
‘Exactly. So how does killing the board of the Fed achieve anything?’
‘The best way to undermine capitalist democracy is to strike at the heart of its financial system,’ said Stephanie.
‘But, a brief dip. Tom moves seamlessly in. No institution crumbles. People keep going to work. Six dead—’
‘Eight, sir,’ said Prusak. ‘Roy’s PA was in the room and a staff member was outside the door.’
‘Eight is not three thousand and the Twin Towers. I can’t believe Lagutov would have authorized this.’
‘Agreed,’ said Prusak.
‘Me, too,’ said Stephanie. ‘I get the Diomede operation. Lagutov calculates we’re not going to go to war over a place that no one’s heard of. It is so peripheral, so remote, so unimportant, that it’s barely a scratch on the complicated relationship between two nuclear powers.’
‘Which reflects in those preliminary opinion polls,’ said Swain.
‘So, what happens?’ continued Stephanie. ‘A few hours of macho insults, and an announcement to discuss the border dispute. That, Mr President, you could have wrapped up before leaving office. You set up a committee that sits for twenty years and decides nothing. Lagutov’s victory is that Russian military muscle achieved what diplomacy didn’t and that opens the door for negotiations on a swathe of other things. That would have been possible even with helicopters shot down on both sides. But now, with this attack on the Fed, you can’t give them anything. Whoever did this wants a big, big fight.’
Prusak looked up from his tablet. ‘The New York Fed says Lucy Faulks was in touch seconds before she died. She wanted to know specifically any movements of money between Russia and China.’
‘Were there?’ asked Swain.
‘Yes. Large renminbi-denominated transfers through Hong Kong and Shanghai. And the FBI’s confirmed that Roy Carrol gave Opokin a tour of the Eccles Building before coming to the White House. Opokin brought six bodyguards from the Russian Federal Security Service with him. They spent ten minutes in the boardroom. Four are clean. Two may not have been fully vetted.’
‘In any international incident of the caliber of the Diomede occupation, the Fed chair will call a crisis meeting,’ said Swain. ‘The Diomede incursion was just after seven last night. Roy called the meeting for seven this morning in time for the nine-thirty opening of the markets here.’
‘More in from the FBI,’ said Prusak, reading from his tablet. ‘Initial forensic investigation points to a Russian military issue plastic explosive known as PVV-5A.’
‘That doesn’t mean Russia’s responsible,’ said Stephanie.
‘Correct. It’s like the AK-47, everyone uses it.’
‘Was it on a timer?’ said Stephanie.
‘They don’t think so. They’re investigating triggers by cellphone within a mile radius.’
‘We work on the presumption that the Diomedes and the Fed are linked.’ Swain lifted his jacket off the back of his chair.
‘We’ll get you a car,’ Prusak said to Stephanie.
‘No,’ said Stephanie. ‘I think it’s better if I can get the Prime Minister back here to the White House.’
Swain began leading them towards the door, but stopped mid-stride. ‘Are we all thinking the same thing?’
The three close friends looked at each other, working out why Russia was carrying out a coordinated assault against America. Or were their imaginations running away with them?
SEVENTEEN
Carrie judged the gaunt, skeletal man vomiting bile on the floor of the gymnasium to be about forty. He had the sunken eyes of an addict. His name was Tommy Tulamuk, and she suspected a mix of alcohol and a synthetic marijuana drug, maybe even heroin. He was just back from Teller, a settlement on the Alaskan mainland. He shivered as palpitations passed through him. He had a fever and stared at Carrie confused. Cold turkey was a horrible state for any human being. She would ask the Russians for methadone, or if not that, morphine.
She turned him over, bending his legs, and laid a plastic sheet under his mouth. ‘Stay here. You’re with friends,’ she said, looking around for the English-speaking Colonel Yumatov. ‘Call me Ruslan,’ he had said after Rake left, oozing charm, but with one of those expressions that could switch between kindness and anger in moments.
Soon, the medical checks would be finished and then this would be exposed as the hostage situation that it really was. The cover of health care would become thinner and thinner minute by minute. The gymnasium was a cocoon. The only windows were too high to see out of. Twice she had heard jet fighters. There hadn’t been a helicopter for almost an hour. Restlessness was creeping through. But, more than that, over the past few minutes a fresh tension had taken hold among the soldiers and medics.
In the sand wars, as her colleagues called the Middle East conflicts, she had learned how to read soldiers’ faces. Something bad had happened. A soldier opened the double doors at the end of the gymnasium. Yumatov walked in, talking on the phone. He ended the call and beckoned Carrie to come over.
‘We need morphine over there,’ she said, pointing to the man curled up on the floor. ‘He’s on narcotic withdrawal.’
Yumatov told a paramedic to handle it and looked at Carrie, his expression angry at first, then it became quizzical and confused. ‘What is it, Colonel?’ she asked amicably, smoothing down her smock, pushing hard on the material as she realized it must be something to do with Rake. Had he tried to escape as she had asked? Was he captured or dead?
‘Is it Rake?’ she stammered as the thoughts crowded in on her, realizing, too late, that she was using his nickname.
She could tell because of the softening of Yumatov’s expression. ‘How well do you know him?’ he asked.
‘He’s a colleague.’
‘Are you lovers?’
‘Just tell me if he’s OK.’
A coldness entered his gaze. ‘Yes and no.’ He turned curtly and walked down the two flights of steps towards the main entrance. Two soldiers took her arms and steered her to follow. She began shaking them off, but their hold was locked. At the school entrance, a dozen troops checked weapons and spoke on radios, tough men about to go out. Off the entrance was the small dining room with three gray steel trestle tables and benches where they had waited with Akna. Sitting on a bench at the middle table was a seven- or eight-year-old boy in a green jacket smeared with dirt from the ice. His eyes were fixed on a school poster about walruses and marine life. He kept still, arms folded, as if in a trance. He had a bruise on his right cheek and a fresh cut on the knuckles of his left hand.