“For me?”
“You’re to head up this new special division, Alex. I’ve thought long and hard on this, and I’m convinced you’re the ideal chap to take this on. You’ve put together quite an outstanding record these last years, you know.”
“I’m honored. Thank you, sir. Of course, I—”
“Alex, you can have some time to think this over. But time is short. I need you to be brutally honest. Do you have any qualms? Reservations?”
“My Russian is nonexistent, for one.”
“But your comrade-in-arms Chief Inspector Congreve is fluent. And you’ll be surrounded with other fluent personnel from the firm.”
“Ambrose knows about this—Red Banner?”
“He’s part of your team. Already signed on. Two other young fellows from the MI-6 Russian division have come over as well. Benjamin Griswold and Fife Symington. First-rate lads, both of them.”
“I see. Well—”
“Listen, Alex. I know this is all quite sudden. You don’t need to respond tonight or even tomorrow. But if your answer is affirmative, the sooner I know, the better, so I might get on to the next candidate.
It’s early days, but we’re at a critical moment in a new duel with these twenty-first-century Chekists.”
“Pistols at dawn?”
“Not quite. But we do need to move with alacrity. Something’s very much up, as I said, and I doubt it will be an extended olive branch. One year ago, I would have put the number of Russian covert operatives working inside Britain at fewer than one hundred. In the last month alone, I’ve seen estimates that put that number at well more than a thousand.”
“Astounding. Any correlation with what our American cousins are seeing?”
“The same, if not worse. Your friend Brick Kelly at CIA is just as concerned as we are. The Kremlin is sitting atop a deeply entrenched criminal enterprise with unlimited wealth and natural resources as yet untapped. The Russian economy is suddenly booming right along with the price of oil. As I say, they could bring Europe to its knees in less than an hour by simply turning off the oil and gas taps. They won’t do that unless pushed, of course. They like the cash flow too much. So, what the devil is going on with the big Russian bear? That, Alex, is what Red Banner is going to find out.”
“I understand. One question, if I may, sir. Why base this new operation in Bermuda, of all places?”
C smiled. “For one thing, it’s almost equidistant from London and Washington. But more important is secrecy. I can’t run this thing out of 85 Vauxhall Cross. Think about it, Alex. The Russians have invaded London. Not only the obscenely wealthy oligarchs buying up Mayfair palaces but the newly reborn KGB, as well. The bloody Russian spooks and tycoons are everywhere you look. Dysfunctional, amoral, and nothing is out of bounds.”
“I’d heard the Russian
mafiya
are buying up casinos and completely taking over London’s prostitution rings. White slavery run out of Eastern Europe and the Gulf States. Londonistan, I hear they’re calling it these days.”
“I’m afraid so, Alex. In the nineties, we were dealing with a kleptocracy, a government in chaos run by competing thieves. These billionaire bandits have stolen Russia blind. Literally, in a few short years, stolen an entire country in what amounts to the greatest theft in history. Now the country is in the hands of the secret police. Putin was first to put former KGB cronies in every possible position of power. The New Russia is the world’s first true police state, ground up. Now, rich beyond measure because of soaring oil revenues, they’re looking around for new worlds to plunder.”
“I’m still not sure I understand your choice of Bermuda for Red Banner, sir.”
“Again, geography. Is there a more isolated, a more pristinely British spot on earth than this tranquil little pastel archipelago? Any Russian setting foot on this island to poke about in our nest will stand out like a sore thumb.”
Hawke was about to mention the exquisitely beautiful sore thumb he’d met on the beach earlier that afternoon, but at that moment, Lady Diana Mars poked her lovely head inside the library door and said, “Gentlemen, dinner is served.”
“After you, comrade,” C said to Hawke with a smile.
“Spasiba,”
Hawke said, thanking him and virtually exhausting his Russian vocabulary.
He’d have to learn some bloody good Russian swear words so he could let Ambrose have it for leading him by the nose into this little trap C had laid for him.
S
leigh bells ring, are you list’nin’? Paddy still got that old tingle. Christmas in New York, you couldn’t beat it with a stick. Something in the air, that’s what they said, and they were right. Fuckin’ magic, that’s what it was. He was leaning on the rail on the Fifty-third Street side, overlooking the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. He still got a kick out of it, just as he did when he was a snot-nosed kid living at the wrong end of Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach. Coming into the city with his dad had been a big deal, especially at Christmastime.
A light snow was falling, like movie snow, it was so fine and sparkly, and it was getting dark fast, making that huge tree glimmer and shine. He squinted his eyes, making the tree go all hazy the way he used to do as a kid. How about that, huh? Beautiful thing to see, even at his age.
Even the skaters were still fun to watch. The babes in their little pleated skating skirts were the best ones. You couldn’t put on an outfit like that and step out onto the ice unless you could skate like an angel. Then you had the guys. Something about a guy lifting one leg and skating along like a friggin’ swan just didn’t sit right with him, never had.
Like guys who took tub baths instead of showers, tough to trust. The really good guy skaters had to be fairies, right? And the really bad ones, like this gangsta character who just took a header and slid butt-first into the wall, should not have been on the ice for any reason whatsoever.
“Hey, Spazmo! Yeah, I’m talking to you, the great one! Nice move, man, look like Wayne friggin’ Gretzky out there!”
He laughed and looked at his watch. The office Christmas party started at six, and here it was now already quarter past. After the endless flight from Fairbanks friggin’ Alaska, he’d gone straight to his room at the Waldorf and gotten a few hours’ sleep, leaving a wake-up call with the operator for four-thirty.
He’d stopped in at P.J.’s for a couple of pops and lost track of the time. But yeah, he was pumped about the party. It would be the first official event at the new corporate offices at the top of the Empire State Building. Somebody said they were having Gladys Knight, but that could have just been the water cooler talking.
He wasn’t sure what time the big boss would show up for this wing-ding, but that was something he definitely didn’t want to miss. Most employees never got the chance to see the man himself. The Queso Grande, the honcho, the muckety-muck, the man behind the curtain. Yeah, tonight was going to be very special. There was even a crazy rumor about the way the old man was going to arrive tonight. He had no idea how, but he was pretty sure the boss man wasn’t going to be stepping off a Fifth Avenue bus.
Better get a move on. He turned away from the skaters and started walking quickly east along the beautifully decorated mall toward Fifth Avenue. Christmas shopping was going full-bore now, and he had to be careful about knocking anybody down who got in his way. People, when they saw his size, normally got out of the way fast. But in a crowd like this, it was tough to move fast without seriously injuring anybody.
Paddy hung a right on Fifth and started walking south down to Thirty-fourth Street. The crowds were amazing, especially the lines across the street forming outside the Saks windows. Something was also going on farther along the avenue, because they had these giant searchlights shooting straight up into the clouds. You could see the beams sweeping back and forth through the snow, lighting up the dark bellies of the low-lying clouds and flashing across the tall spires that lined the street of boyhood dreams.
It took him all of ten minutes to reach the Empire State. The searchlights, on flatbeds, were right outside the main entrance, aimed up at the tower. The tower at the top was always lit up with beautiful lights, sometimes red, white, and blue or red and green like now for Christmas. But the searchlights were crisscrossing the building, and it looked like some kind of Hollywood premiere or something. All kinds of TV trucks with big dish antennas out there, too. Something big was going on, all right.
Walking inside the three-story lobby, Paddy felt a touch of pride. After all, this was his office. Kind of.
He’d come a long way from the Brooklyn dockyards where he was just another punk longshoreman with a thirty-inch neck and a whole lot of attitude. He was now an important part of a multinational organization with a fancy corporate headquarters at one of the most famous buildings in the world. After September 11, 2001, it had become the tallest building in New York again.
He looked around the lobby, his lobby, taking it all in. Art deco, he thought they called it. Looked good to him. Glitzy, but old-fashioned glitz. He’d never been upstairs to the corporate offices before, so he went over to the fancy marble info desk and spoke to the nice little Jewish lady who looked as if she’d been behind that counter her whole life. Her nameplate said “MURIEL ESB.” Esb? Esb didn’t sound like any Jewish name he’d heard of, and then he realized maybe it was the initials of the building? Yeah.
“Welcome to the Empire State Building! How may I help you?”
“How you doing, Muriel?” Paddy asked her, showing her his employee ID card, “I’m looking for the TSAR Christmas party?”
“Oh! Aren’t you the lucky one, Mr. Strelnikov? That’s going to be something to see. Especially from up top where you’ll be.”
“Something to see? You mean Gladys Knight?” He could give a flying crap about Gladys Knight, but hey, it was Christmas, stick with the spirit.
Muriel smiled. “Didn’t you see all the searchlights out there? And the TV cameras? It’s not Santy Claus they’re waiting for, you know.”
“Yeah? Who they waiting for?”
“Your famous boss! He’s supposed to arrive at seven o’clock. That’s one half-hour from now, so you’d better get up there.”
“What’s he doing, flying in on Air Reindeer or something?”
“Something like that,” she said, and they both laughed, and he asked her again where he was supposed to go.
“Your cocktail reception is on the very top floor, where the 102nd Floor Observatory used to be. A lot of people aren’t too happy about losing that observation deck, you know, Mr. Strelnikov. Even though we still have the one on the 86th floor, the 102nd was the best.”
“Well, what are you going to do? That’s progress for you. You take care of yourself, huh, Muriel? And Merry Christmas to you and all the other little Essbees.”
The company had bought the whole top third of the Empire State two years ago, all the way from the 70th floor up to the 102nd floor. They’d spent a cool hundred mil or so gutting the place and outfitting it as befits the North American headquarters of Technology, Science, and Applied Research, Inc.
TSAR. Like the old Russian rulers. It was just more of the boss’s sense of humor to call his huge company that. You had to hand it to the guy. For a bona fide genius and one of the top ten richest billionaires on the planet, the guy had a lot of style. But what he did that Paddy admired most, he took care of his people. All the way down to the little guys like Paddy himself. If you could call him a
little
guy, he thought, laughing at his own joke.
Paddy stepped into an empty elevator and hit the express button for the top floor. It shot up like a friggin’ rocket, and he stepped out a couple of minutes later. It was like landing on another planet.
A marble-floored glass room now took up the whole top floor of the Empire State. The ceiling and walls, all glass and steel, had to be seventy-five feet above the heads of all of the people milling around drinking and schmoozing. He made his way over to the windows on the Fifth Avenue side. All around him were the tops of the towers of Manhattan and, overhead, the snow clouds lit up by the searchlights on the streets below. In the center of the room was a square glass elevator tower that went right through the ceiling and up to some kind of radio tower or something that rose another twenty stories or so above where he was standing.
There was a big covered platform about halfway up the tower and a lot of activity going on. He walked around a little, trying to see what the deal was, but it was impossible to see from down here.
“King Kong supposed to show up again tonight?” he asked the bartender at one of the many bars around the edges of the room. Most of them had lines, people waiting for a drink, but, for some reason, not this one.
The guy laughed and said, “You’d think, huh? No, just the world’s richest man, is what they tell me.”
“Gimme a vodka rocks, will you?”
“Vitamin V, coming right up.”
“Thanks.”
“You work for this guy?” the barkeep said, filling a tumbler with the bar hooch and sliding it over.
“Yeah. Long time.”
“You in sales? I’ll tell you why. I’d like to get one of those new Zeta machines for my kid. You know, the little computer that looks like a brain? I tried every CompWorld in town, but they’re all like back-ordered forever.”
“I ain’t in sales. Sorry.”
“Hey, no problem. You want another?”
“With a name like Smirnoff, it’s got to be good, right?”
Paddy shoved his glass over for a refill, and the guy said, “So, your boss must be pretty smart, huh? Invent the Zeta and all that shit. He’s what, a Russian, right? What’s his name again?”
“Only name I’ve ever heard is somebody calling him Tsar Ivan. Tonight’s my first shot at actually seeing the guy up close and personal.”
“Well, guess what?” the bartender said, backing away from the bar and looking straight up, “I think you’re about to get your shot. Holy shit. Will you look at that?”
Paddy backed away from the bar and looked up, too. He was so startled and amazed at what he saw that he dropped his glass, and it shattered on the marble floor. In the roar of the crowd, he never heard it hit.
W
HAT
P
ADDY SAW
floating high above the glass ceiling was nothing less than a flying miracle. It was not an airplane. And it was not a blimp, exactly, though it moved like one. It had to be some new kind of airship. But it was like nothing he or anybody else had ever seen before. It was this four-hundred-foot-long zeppelinlike thing, its hull a gleaming silver. On its flank, forward, was the huge word
TSAR
illuminated in bright red. On her tail section, the great Russian red star, restored to respectability by President Putin before he’d mysteriously disappeared off the face of the map.
But the thing wasn’t shaped like any blimp he’d ever seen before, either. For one thing, there was a big opening at the nose, huge, and then the thing tapered back to a much smaller section at the tail. It didn’t look like a Goodyear blimp at all, not in the slightest.
It was a strange shape, weird, but it reminded him of something. The only thing Paddy could compare it to, what it actually looked like, was one huge flying jet engine. As if a giant jet engine had fallen off some giant jumbo jet’s wing and was just flying along all by itself. There were triple rows of windows along the side, and you could see all of the people in there, looking down at the party below.
Yeah, that was it, an enormous silver jet engine, moving very slowly toward the big aerial at the very top of the Empire State Building.
He kept backing up, trying to see more of the thing, and he backed right into somebody, knocking him to the floor.
“Hey, jeez, I’m sorry,” Paddy said, turning around and offering the guy a hand, pulling him to his feet. He was a little guy, and Paddy almost jerked him off his feet into the air.
He’d been wearing thick black glasses, and they were tilted sideways on his face. Paddy adjusted them for him and tried to brush whatever he’d been drinking off the front of his thick wool sportcoat. Bloody Mary, it looked like from the stalk of celery balanced on his shoulder. Not good.
“Never mind,” the man said. “It’s all right. It was an accident.”
Paddy thought the little guy was pissed off, but maybe he wasn’t, so Paddy stuck out his hand and said, “Paddy Strelnikov, nice to meet you.”
“Dr. Sergei Shumayev,” the guy said in a thick Russian accent, readjusting his coke bottle glasses.
“Hell of a deal, huh? That thing up there?”
“Yes. What exactly do you do for us, Mr. Strelnikov?”
“Me? I’m in the, uh, ‘analytical department.’”
Shumayev smiled at the egregious euphemism. Every large Russian corporation created its own mini-KGB, usually known as the “analytical department.” It was staffed with people good at collecting information, eavesdropping on rival companies, and stealing documents. They also performed other, less sanitary services, what the American thriller writers referred to as wet work.
“What’s your specific role in the department, Mr. Strelnikov?”
“Well, special assignments. Security, mostly. My section deals with industrial espionage, stuff like that. Here in the U.S., I also provide personal security to some of our high-level executives when they’re traveling here and abroad.”
“Ah, very good. A bodyguard.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“That’s a very unusual ring you are wearing. Does it have some special significance to your job?”
Paddy laughed. He loved it when people noticed his ring. “No, sir. This ring here I bought in a pawn shop in Hoboken for fifty dollars. Nobody knew what it was. See the lightning bolt? And the letters TCB? Well, that stands for Taking Care of Business. It’s the exact ring that Elvis Presley gave to everyone in his posse. Back in the sixties. That was their motto, TCB, and I made it mine, too.”