07:21 P.M._
If any of the journalists had paid attention to this person, the real Babel in the transit area would have begun. The fact is that the owner of the leather briefcase was none other than the Lawyer, who fortune had made the intermediary between the Russian authorities and Joshua Kold, and who would thus gain international fame through no efforts of his own, a fame very rare for representatives of the Russian legal profession.
As it happens, the Lawyer was rather blessed by luck. From the very beginning of his law career, his mandators – for some reason this is what he called his clients – had been celebrities engaged in improbable adventures. There was the successful media magnate caught trying to walk out of a government residence with a box containing one million dollars taken from under the copying machine. There was the former Minister of Justice whose photos in a sauna in the company of naked girls once filled the Russian tabloids. There was the wife of the opposition leader – a deputy of the Russian parliament – who accidentally, according to investigators, shot her husband on the eve of his carefully planned military coup. There were enough plots in his mandators’ list for ten thrillers. And though the possibility of writing them up had sometimes crossed the Lawyer’s mind, he’d never had the time to get round to it.
The Lawyer had already met Kold – and nearly all the world media had reported it. Just exactly what these two very different people talked about remained secret, of course, but the international public learned that the Lawyer had given Kold as a gift a Russian abc-book, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, a small volume of stories by Anton Chekhov, the ‘History of the Russian State’ by court historian Karamzin, and, in a makeweight, several words of encouragement transmitted by the Lawyer from the highest Kremlin offices.
Meanwhile, the nervous tension among the representatives of the second most ancient profession reached its apogee. The correspondent of one of the alternative internet portals, a gloomy young man with a bony face – there is a saying about such people: ‘not strong, but nervous’ – bleated provocatively:
“He’s probably under the wing of intelligence agencies in Lubyanka. There ‘gutting’ gets extreme.”
“Well, maybe not ‘gutting’,” the robust guy from Gazety.ru pompously responded, “It’s not ’37 now. Now it’s called ‘debriefing’. But on the intelligence agencies you are bang on, colleague.”
The Lawyer grinned to himself because he, unlike these knights of quill and keypad, knew that the one they were waiting for in hope of snapping in a photo, getting a quick quote from, or even a sensational interview, wasn’t in Lubyanka. And there was certainly no notorious ‘gutting’ – the stakes were too high.
“And in the USA, there are no transit areas at all,” the grey-haired gentleman from Reuters declared.
“Yes, that’s so right!” the gloomy young man added. “There they have such a highly developed transportation system that all eventualities are considered in advance!
“Well – it’s the most free country in the world,” the blonde girl said, tapping her shoulder.
The photographer smiled sadly, but decided not risk pursuing this unpromising discussion.
07:33 P.M._
The journalists didn’t notice the Lawyer. He was nimble and skilled enough to avoid drawing attention to himself. Opening a non-descript grey door, the Lawyer stepped quickly through it and appeared in a small room with a big table in the middle place in such a way that you could only get to other door on the opposite side of the room sideways, squeezing along the wall.
A poker-faced person in the uniform of the airport security police was sitting at the table. The Lawyer showed his ID card and the policeman nodded and pressed the button. The door behind him opened with a quiet buzz.
The Lawyer squeezed past the table, walked through the door and found himself in a space strikingly different from the hi-tech style of one of the world’s most modern airports.
Instead of plastic, polished stone, glass and metal, here the tree was king. Heavy oak panels covered the walls and ceiling. The parquet, velvet drapery, leather sofas and floor lamps bearing the coat of arms of the vanished empire helped transport this small hall back into the time when the foundation stone for the Aswan dam was laid upon the Nile, when Soviet rockets in Cuba were put on standby, and Khruschev banged his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly in a protest against the Philippines delegate.
The person on duty here had the uniform of an officer of the Federal Guard Service. He double-checked the Lawyer’s documents and opened an elevator door in front of him. Here too everything was from the Soviet period with brass buttons with digits for the floors, an ebonite phone and an ashtray wired into the elevator wall. The Lawyer pressed the button with the digit ‘7’ and the elevator plummeted as if into an underworld.
Of course, Joshua Kold was a key player in the global geopolitical game conducted from time immemorial between the largest states of the world. So it would be absurd to assume he’d be simply left to the mercy of fate in the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport. He could not be left as prey to journalists, and, above all to the agents of interested intelligence agencies who might try anything from banal elimination – after all, nobody hurried to hand over umbrellas with poisoned needles to the museums – to no less banal kidnapping (Mossad had great experience in this kind of thing).
So, as soon as Kold got off the plane from Hong Kong he was taken at once if not under protection then at least under intense guardianship, and smoothly but persistently forwarded to that oak hall with floor lamps from where the elevator carried him away into the top secret destination of Bunker A.
The history of this shelter thirty metres down is fascinating and deserves a separate novel. It is closely connected with the history of the creation of Sheremetyevo airport and the destiny of the Soviet leader of that time, Nikita Khrushchev, who intended to catch up and overtake America and complete the triumph of communism no later than 1980.
Awed by the scale of London’s Heathrow airport, Khrushchev gazed at the surrounding coppices and woods as he paused on the ladder of the Tu-104 after landing at the drab airfield of the Air Force of the USSR not far from Sheremetyevo village, and muttered: “It will be necessary for us to build something like in London.”
Those who needed to heard the phrase, remembered it and took it as a guide to action. The first Soviet international airport quickly accepted Boeings and Caravels, but for the convenience of official government delegations one extra but rather essential trifle was needed – ensuring the safety of the top officials of the state.
Maybe their enemies would rattle the saber, the USSR wouldn’t yield, and nuclear warfare could find the country leaders anywhere. Fuel was added to the fire by messages from the USA provided by ‘moles’ working for the Soviets who had dug into the earthy depths of the Yankee state apparatus. It became clear that under Denver International Airport – the biggest in the world, by the way – the Americans had constructed a huge bunker capable of housing all the heads of the country and members of their families in case of a nuclear attack.
Thus, the need to construct Bunker A under Sheremetyevo airport was determined, and the goal achieved, as well as possible in the country of developed socialism, ‘in a short time, ahead of schedule’.
For decades, the bunker stood on ‘alert’ with all its rooms ready to receive high-ranking guests at any second, with all life support systems checked and ready and every safety system in perfect order.