Parker nodded.
“The scenario-planning expert,” he said. “Sharp guy. Kind of struck me as the, uh, moody type, though.”
“I don’t pay him to be adorable. There’s nobody better than Vince at anticipating big bang problems, and he left that city convinced there’ll be food riots throughout Russia within a month.” Gordian paused a moment, caught the waiter’s eye, and motioned at his empty beer mug. “Twenty years ago, when he was working for a Canadian investment firm in Iran, he advised his employers to get their staff out of the country. The company honchos thought his appraisal of the political climate was overly bleak. Six days later, the Ayatollah assumed power and the U.S. embassy staff was taken hostage. Scull stuck around to smuggle out some of the company’s American workers. When the danger to them was past, he resigned, and I snapped him up.”
“What makes him so certain of disaster this time?”
“A lot of things. I can fax you a copy of his report, if you’d like. But his contention’s that Kaliningrad is less reliant on domestic food supplies than other cities, I think because a lot of imported stuff comes through its free trade port. Yet the markets there were dry. If the people in that city are hurting, it’s going to be rougher in places like St. Petersburg, or even the capital.” Gordian’s fresh beer arrived and he took a drink. “I know it’s anecdotal, but Vince even got into a confrontation with some punks who tried running off with an old lady’s grocery bag. This is a half hour after he drove into town.”
“As goes Kaliningrad, so goes the Federation,” Parker said. “That what you’re telling me?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Dan sighed. “Maybe the incident you mentioned clouded up Scull’s crystal ball. Or could be he’s just plain wrong. It happens to the best.”
“So Starinov came here begging for a handout for nothing? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“You ask Bob Delacroix, he’d say the minister’s been exaggerating the severity of the crisis. That he needs a hot-button issue that’ll grab attention away from that Pedachenko character. Make him look like a statesman who can stand among other world leaders.”
Gordian looked at him, his gray eyes firm.
“I’m not talking to Delacroix,” he said. “Dan, I’ve got over a hundred employees in western Russia at this moment. Another eighty or ninety contract workers who’ve been hired to build the ground terminal. Let’s forget my investment a minute. Forget the broader national interest, too. Those people are in vulnerable positions and my main concern is their safety. If the relief agreement is on its way to being scuttled, I’m pulling them out. So tell me how you think it’s going to go.”
Dan listened in silence as Gordian spoke, rotating his martini between his hands, his fingertips leaving faint prints on the chilled surface of the glass. Finally he lifted it to his mouth and drank.
“The President will probably be able to cut a deal, get at least some of the assistance under way,” he said. “With any luck, it’ll be enough.”
“That’s three qualifiers in two sentences,” Gordian said.
Dan looked at him and shrugged. “The toughest thing I learned during my freshman year in Congress was to curb my expectations. It’s also the thing that’s kept me hanging in there.”
“So you’re telling me to sit tight and hope for the best.”
“Yeah.”
Gordian sat back in his chair and sighed, lost in thought.
Dan ogled his plate.
“You gonna finish that steak?” he asked.
Gordian shook his head.
“Then how about sliding it over,” Dan said.
NINE
Gregor Sadov stood in the shadows and watched the fires burn. Over the last four days, he and his team had torched seven different warehouses. The good news was that he hadn’t lost anyone since Andrei. The bad news was that it wasn’t enough.
But then, it never was.
His left hand was pressed to his side, holding a cloth tightly against the minor wound he’d received. He wasn’t sure if he’d caught a piece of shrapnel from when the grain in that last warehouse blew, or if one of the guards had gotten off a lucky shot and creased his side. Either way, it didn’t matter. The wound was painful, but not deep, and Gregor wouldn’t let a little pain slow him down.
No, it wasn’t the wound that was bothering him. It was the message he’d gotten that morning. Short and to the point, as always, the message had said simply, “Warehouse fires effective, but more needed. Prepare your team to target U.S. assets in area.”
That was it. No information on which U.S. assets to target, or when to strike. Gregor knew he’d be given that information when the people he worked for decided to tell him. Which was fine with him. They knew how he worked, and that he wouldn’t attack until he and his team were ready.
Standing there in the shadows, his hand pressed against his side, Gregor looked out on the destruction he had caused, and he smiled.
Elaine Steiner closed up the toolbox at her feet, dusted her hands, and stood up slowly, arching her back to relieve the strain of kneeling for so long. A wisp of her graying hair had come loose from the kerchief she wore when she worked, and she absently reached up to tuck it back in place. Beside her, Arthur, her husband, closed the door of the service panel and rolled his head left and right, trying to get a knot out of his neck.
They were in one of the smaller buildings on the perimeter of the compound Roger Gordian was having put up here in a sparsely populated area of the Kaliningrad region. The nearest town was over ninety kilometers away, so the compound they were building had to be pretty much self-sustaining, with an apartment complex for the various personnel and various forms of entertainment as well. And security. Lots of security. But that was true wherever they went.
Elaine and Arthur had been with Gordian for the better part of twenty years. He picked the sites for his ground stations, and the Steiners went in and got them up and running. It was a good partnership, and a good life, especially when, as now, they were getting close to bringing a ground station on-line for the first time.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said, looking over at Elaine.
She smiled softly. Arthur was always looking on the bright side. It was one of the things she admired most about him, perhaps because she was always so pessimistic.
“Not like Turkey,” she said, turning Arthur around and massaging his neck for him. “Remember when we couldn’t get the system to stay on-line for more than ten minutes at a time?”
“Yeah,” he said, letting his head roll forward to make her massage more effective. “Those damn outdated transistors the Afghanis sold us kept overheating. Took us forever to figure out what was going on.”
“And this was just a bad stretch of cable. I told that Russian service crew that they couldn’t run a cable that long without a support, but when have the locals ever listened to us?”
“They will,” Arthur said. “They’ll learn.”
Elaine sighed and shook her head, but there was a tolerant smile on her face as she continued to rub his neck. It was good to know that some things in life would never change.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s one bottle of wine left over from the last shipment. I think we should have it with dinner tonight.”
Arthur turned and put his arms around her. Reaching up and wiping away a smudge of grease from her cheek, he kissed her softly and said, “See? Things are looking up already.”
TEN