‘Incredible.’ Stephanie was unable to help herself asking, ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Please, Steph, don’t get cute and manipulative in getting me to tell you.’ Harry gave her a sideways smile. ‘I have two other things, and then we work out what Russia is up to.’
He showed a photograph of Vitruk in Syria after breaking the 2016 siege of Aleppo. With him was a Spetsnaz explosives specialist for whom Harry had an identity. Facial imaging matched him, under another name, to one of the four Russian bodyguards who had accompanied Karl Opokin to the Federal Reserve’s Eccles Building. ‘I’m checking how he was recruited and how he got onto that detail.’
‘Even then, how did he plant the bomb?’
‘We don’t know exactly, but he had expertise, and he and Opikin are now hunkered down in the Russian Embassy refusing to talk to the FBI.’
Stephanie took a long drink of her coffee, relieved that Vitruk, not Grizlov, was reflecting Russia’s dark side. The feel-good moment didn’t last long because she didn’t know to what extent Grizlov was working with Lagutov and how far Lagutov was backing Vitruk. Had he ordered or known about the Fed attack? Grizlov too?
‘One final thing on Vitruk…’ Harry pushed his chair back and waved his hand dismissively at the screen. ‘I won’t show you because it’s too bitty. A year ago, Vitruk invited a Chinese general by the name of Bu Zishan to his headquarters in Khabarovsk. Bu had just been appointed commander of Shenyang Military District, which adjoins Vitruk’s Military Far East region. Vitruk laid out the red carpet, sent a plane to pick Bu up, hosted a big banquet, caviar, vodka, women, the works.’
‘Not that unusual…’
‘No. But I checked anyway. Breaking through a near-impenetrable web of business activities, I found that after the meeting Bu and Vitruk set up a company in Panama that doesn’t do very much at all. Now people only tend to do that when they expect a shed load of money to be coming their way.’
That too wasn’t unusual either, thought Stephanie. After the Chinese and Russian state-run command economies unraveled, private-sector business arrangements became the default of government institutions. They needed to make money simply to pay salaries and pensions.
‘Bu has a track record of being hawkish,’ said Harry. ‘Before moving to Shenyang he spent years masterminding the South China Sea dispute.’
Stephanie stood up, sipped more coffee, and paced the length of the room. ‘This is great, Harry—’
‘But you still think it’s something else.’
‘Yes.’
Harry, suddenly distracted, looked up at a television running silently on the wall. It showed Vitruk in an Arctic combat uniform, on Little Diomede island, standing by a pole where Russian troops were raising their white, red, and blue national flag on conquered American soil.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Vitruk came across as the exact older version of the man Stephanie had just been looking at in Chechnya, with a leathered face and a smile for the camera that wasn’t enough to cover the hard cruelty in those photographs. The framing went to a wide shot of Vitruk with a Russian reporter. In the hazy distance was Big Diomede island. A logo said the interview was live, but Stephanie couldn’t be sure because Fox was taking it straight off the Russian channel. Harry turned up the volume.
‘Yes, of course, without doubt, Russia utterly condemns the attack on the Federal Reserve, as do I,’ said Vitruk.
‘Then why raise your fucking flag now?’ muttered Harry.
‘That was an act of horror that has nothing to do with my government,’ Vitruk went on. ‘America has many enemies, including among its own people, as we know. Everything I am doing here is being conducted under international law.’
Vitruk spoke about the medical evacuation and the new border, and Stephanie ran scenarios through her mind. What was his endgame? The presenter even pressed him on the hostages in the school, and Vitruk insisted the villagers were there voluntarily. What exactly was he doing and why? She repeated the question to herself until it echoed like a chant. The screen split, with Vitruk on one side and shots of Carrie on the other working with paramedics in the gymnasium, blunt but effective propaganda. It switched again to the corpses on the plateau at the top of the island with both the presenter and Vitruk expressing shock and outrage. Harry’s face creased with curiosity.
‘We’ve got someone out there,’ explained Stephanie. As she outlined the barest details, she realized now how crucial Ozenna would be to what unfolded next. She told Harry of the decision for him to cross to the Russian base.
‘Tough one,’ Harry said after a pause, thinking. ‘My guess is that Vitruk will fly back to the base as soon as he’s done with the TV and he’ll have worked out a way to protect his aircraft from us taking it out.’
‘If we could kill him, would that end it?’
‘What do you think, Steph? You said you had something else in mind.’
She poured herself more coffee, mixing the hot with the tepid, and kept pacing. ‘When did we last have a showdown like this with Moscow?’
‘Ukraine 2014.’
‘That wasn’t a direct confrontation.’
‘The cold war—’
‘Yes, but I mean a head-to-head challenge.’
Harry took a moment. ‘Way back. 1962. The Cuban missile crisis.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘The communists wanted to put missiles in Cuba, a hundred miles from our coastline. We came to the brink of nuclear war. Then Moscow backed down.’
‘That’s the point, Harry. It didn’t “back down”. Moscow withdrew only when we promised to take our missiles out of Italy and Turkey.’
Harry looked at her quizzically. She had piqued his interest. Even if she were going off on a crazy track, he wanted to hear it. That was how it had always worked between them. Stephanie stopped, put down the cup, and folded her arms. ‘No one’s putting missiles on Little Diomede. There’s no need. But Moscow does need to create leverage to get us away from its borders in Europe.’
‘Breaking NATO’s ring of steel.’
‘Correct. It needs a bargaining chip to achieve that. The only other time Moscow directly threatened American territory was Cuba, and it won concessions. Lagutov begins the crisis now because Swain is on his way out and Holland is raw and new. Holland will step straight into this with a team that has no experience of working together. Bush had more than six months in office before Nine-Eleven; Kennedy had more than eighteen months before Cuba.’
‘And your point?’
‘If this is Russia’s game plan, then it’s not Vitruk going rogue. It’s Lagutov, Grizlov, the whole Russian government.’
There was a quiet knock on the door. Harry’s gaze drifted over as it opened enough to reveal a young woman, dark hair loose on her shoulders, wearing a red silk robe. She could have been taken from a magazine cover. Harry held up his hand with splayed fingers as if to say five more minutes. She flashed Stephanie a silent smile, and the door closed. Stephanie unfolded her arms and reached for her coat. Harry shrugged as if to say, You threw me out when I was a loser; now I’m recovered and I’ve gone for someone younger and less complicated.
‘I’ll get back to the White House, run stuff past them,’ Stephanie said, fighting an urge to ask who the woman was. Was it serious? For how long had he been seeing her? Was it better? She pursed her lips to hide conflicting feelings. If she asked, they would start circling each other and it would get scrappy; it always had and there was no luxury of time for that now. Harry had helped her tonight. A lot.
‘Hold on. What’s this?’ Harry’s concentration returned to the TV screen. Fox News was interviewing Carrie directly inside the school gymnasium. Carrie was angrily gesticulating. Harry turned up the volume. The anchor had a reputation for aggressive questioning. ‘So, you agree then with the Russian assessment that the people of Little Diomede have been neglected?’