David D. Castle looked at Ripley Forte coolly. “Good day, Mr. Forte,” he said, and returned to his papers.
When the door closed behind Forte, Castle abandoned his pretense of work and leaned back in his chair to review the situation.
Could Forte actually sabotage the Salvation as he had promised? Very unlikely. Every man connected with the operation would be run through the security sieve, and besides, the project was too big. It would be like trying to sabotage the Great Wall of China.
There was another danger: Could Forte cry foul when the award went to Raynes Oceanic Resources?
No, again. It could easily be demonstrated that Forte, despite his vast familiarity with icebergs, was a bad business risk. He had gone under in his first contracting business. He had been so inept that he was dismissed from Forte Oceanic Resources, accepting a mere $5 million in settlement for stock worth twenty times that sum. Only months previously, Joe Mansour, the Lebanese tycoon, had taken over Forte’s mismanaged, debt-laden Yellow Rose Oil Company. And now this perennial failure wanted to take charge of the biggest engineering operation in the history of mankind! Nobody would listen to him, that was certain.
But what about the award of the contract to Jennifer Red Cloud’s company, in competition with the various immense consortia that had been formed for the specific purpose of bringing Salvation into port?
Well, as she had pointed out, Raynes Oceanic Resources
was the leading established ocean engineering firm in the world. It had formidable cash reserves and borrowing power, which she was willing to commit to the project. As for any breath of scandal, she had cleverly deflected that possibility by insisting that they have as little to do with each other, publicly and privately, as possible while the operation was under way. There would be no paparazzi shooting pictures of them snuggling together, simply because they would never snuggle. Her personal fortune would finance a multitude of political action committees to work for his candidacy, so they would have no ostensible personal relationship. Their names would never be linked romantically until, as the result of their collaboration in bringing the Salvation home, they found that they shared a community of interests, especially in public service, and decided to marry, a very natural development. And with a running mate like Jennifer Red Cloud, wed at the crest of a tidal wave of national euphoria after the Salvation was docked and after sweeping away the opposition at the Democratic national convention in July 2008, how could he possibly lose? Never in the history of presidential elections would the American people be offered such a candidate–a man of proven ability, good looks, and accomplishment that included their literal salvation. Never in history would the people have such a capable, successful, and beautiful First Lady.
Only one cloud–a very small and insubstantial red cloud–hovered on the horizon: the possibility that Jennifer might double-cross him as she had unquestionably double-crossed Ripley Forte. He dismissed it from his mind. Every thought, every action, every dream of Jennifer Red Cloud was fired by a single ambition: the lust for power.
She thought she had convinced him that being First Lady would be her ultimate satisfaction. But Castle knew that a woman as ruthless and greedy for domination as Jennifer Red Cloud would never be content to walk in a man’s shadow. What she really wanted was to run the United States of America, using him as her puppet on a string, just as she had run Raynes Oceanic Resources through her husband, Ned. Well, let her indulge her fantasies, he mused: time enough to wake her up once he became President.
12. ROOM 101
10 APRIL 2005
MAJOR GENERAL GRIGORIY ALEKSANDREVICH PIATAkov was, as befitted a senior officer of the Raketnye Voiska Srategicheskogo Nazacheniya–Rocket Troops of Strategic Designation–a man on his way up. But on the morning of 10 April 2005, he found himself moving in the opposite direction, via elevator 340 meters straight down to Room 101, the subterranean headquarters of the RGB’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate beneath the Kremlin.
Room 101 was a child of the 1950s’ cold war, when Russia’s leaders lived in dread of an American nuclear strike. A 200-meter shaft had been sunk beneath the ancient fortress on Red Square, then a horizontal passageway 50 meters to another shaft, extending a further 140 meters down to Room 101. At each end of the passageway were steel blast doors two meters thick. It took only eight minutes to reach Room 101 from the surface, so that top political and military leaders had sufficient time to find sanctuary underground in the event incoming nuclear missiles were detected. There they could survive attack even by megaton H-bombs.
In the more relaxed 1980s, Room 101 had been converted into an unbreachable repository for the master files of the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate going back to the days of the czarist Okhrana. For this purpose, the “room” was greatly enlarged to accommodate uncounted tons of dossiers and hundreds of clerks and custodians. Vast dank caverns illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from dripping concrete ceilings housed whole regiments of filing cabinets containing information on the basis of which the Soviet Union waged its relentless struggle against the imperalist West.
But in the 1990s, as Russia’s iron shadow fell across the greater part of the world, the Kremlin’s interests had gradually shifted. To keep the peoples of the new territorial conquests in line absorbed an ever greater share of Russia’s energies. Whole cadres of former KGB field agents were transferred to the task of maintaining order and suppressing dissent in Russian satellites whose land area constituted well over half the earth’s surface. Happily, the agents could be spared, for the KGB’s target areas had meanwhile shrunk commensurately. The United States, Japan, and South Africa were now the only enemies who really mattered, and even they were no longer an active menace.
Room 101 became something of a backwater. Its Foreign Intelligence Directorate still went through the motions, but the sense of urgency had gone. Bright young men and women quietly transferred to the domestic KGB apparatus, and Room 101 slid grudgingly into obscurity, an elephant’s graveyard for party hacks, a Siberia-in-Moscow for officials in disgrace. Once assigned to 101, staffers found their careers at a dead end.
Nevertheless, the masters of the Kremlin recognized that Room 101 ‘s neglected files contained information that, if properly exploited, would vastly accelerate the collapse of the United States and its puppets, Canada, South Africa, Japan, and Australia. It was to shake the dust off Room 101 that Major General Piatakov had been summoned.
As a management and systems expert, he was to suggest remedial action to improve the alarming drop in intelligence productivity in Room 101. Piatakov had been trained in America, receiving an MBA from Harvard and both a B.S. and an M.S. in systems engineering from MIT, avoiding the taint of contamination with capitalism by a sincere and committed membership in the Communist Party. His meteoric rise through the ranks of the Raketnye Voiska had been likened to the blasting into the stratosphere of an SS-27. Reaching the rank of major general at the age of thirty-six, handsome and outgoing, he was also fortunate in his personal life. He had recently wed the handsome and articulate Nadezhda Voznesenska Muravieva, outspoken assistant political editor for Literaturnaya Gazeta.
Piatakov’s ears popped as he began his descent to Room 101. Eight minutes later, the doors whooshed open, and he was greeted by the senior officer present, Lieutenant General Ivan Vissarionovich Ogarov, a relaxed, sunlamptanned, jolly soul who pumped his hand and bade him welcome.
Piatakov looked about him. Everything seemed homey and informal, most unlike the KGB of his experience. General Ogarov was clad in white shorts, a rainbow-hued Hawaiian sport shirt, and run-down carpet slippers. Piles of tattered files littered tables and cabinets, the floor was cluttered with waste paper, cigarette butts, and crushed Pepsi Cola cans; coffee cups were balanced on stacks of reference books; and a thick haze of tobacco smoke like a low-hanging cloud partially obscured the banks of overhead fluorescent lights. The workers lounged at their desks, languidly leafing through documents or reading books with feet propped up on chairs, staring vacantly out into space, or, in at least two cases, sleeping stretched out full length on their desks. One was snoring fitfully.
General Ogarov noticed his visitor’s narrowed eyes. He laughed.
“Socialist discipline is difficult to maintain in 101,” he explained with a shrug.
“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” admitted General Piatakov. “But somehow we must increase your productivity. The current Five-Year Plan calls for a six percent increase, and you are running at a negative one-and-a-half percent.”
“Can’t be helped, I’m afraid, short of a miracle. We get all the worn-out equipment because nothing down here is on public display where the authorities can be shocked by its obsolescence. And we keep getting new responsibilities heaped on us before we can train men to handle them. Case in point: Presidium Directive 1/337/4 of 2 February 2001, transferring all Pentagon/State Department radio traffic decoding operations from Kiev Station to our section. Since that directive was issued, as you know, the state of the art in encipherment has gone into orbit. One of the simplest low-security State Department codes averages 3 million nulls per character of text. We don’t have anything like the computer capacity to filter out all that