Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (6 page)

Chapter Four

Very little about him
was immediately apparent. Beyond the simple statistics that appeared on most of his driver's licenses and at least one of his passports, listing him as six feet one inch tall, weighing eighty-one kilograms or 178 pounds, having blue eyes and light brown hair, Philip Frost's exact nationality, background and profession ordinarily eluded those observing him, which was as he preferred it. Whether he was about to enter Europe or the United States, for example, he was seldom offered an immigration form by flight attendants. Isabella Cavill, whom he had been seeing for almost a year, knew, in addition to his moods, that he was a Sagittarius, but even she had not been able to disentangle the multiple strains of DNA that made him such a fierce but cool lover, so generous yet distant, so incisive yet detached. In his erect carriage and the forward thrust of his walk there was something Prussian, yet when he let himself go he could bellow with the unforced, ingratiating laugh of an American schoolboy, tease with the subtlety of a cultivated Englishman—and take a joke, too, but only one that went so far and no further.

He had been born in New York to a Swiss-German father and a half-Danish, half-American mother but as a child had not been educated there. Instead, for reasons put down to his father's job in the UN Secretariat and the constant and far-flung travel it necessitated, Philip had been sent to a minor English prep school then, at thirteen, to an elite institution just outside Geneva where he had numbered among his classmates one African and two Arab princes as well as the scions of at least a dozen well-known, worldwide industrial fortunes.

His four years at MIT had given him his first taste of life in the country of his birth. Why, after graduating, he had chosen the City of London rather than Wall Street in which to begin his quest had had more to do with fate than planning. At a seminar during his senior year, he'd paid rapt attention to a guest speaker who had latterly turned from the analysis of particles to that of markets: a quirky, donnish man with the arms of a stevedore. Ian Santal had come out of nowhere to Cambridge University a generation before and there made a name for himself as a man of science. “A man of the Left, then of the Right and, both those passions having flagged, now of the moment” was how he had described himself to the students, and it was the fact that such range was possible that had intrigued Philip. He had pursued Santal and Santal had hired him. It was—or at least at the time it had seemed—as simple as that. The firm's trading rooms were in London, so that was where he'd gone, not because it was an agreeable city but because from it he could discern the clearest path to the future he coveted.

Could all of that—the firm's rise, then decline following Santal's departure, his own abandonment of finance for diplomacy, strangely at Ian's instigation—really have been as long ago as it was? All but a decade now? On the ides of March (aware he was the only one among present company who would recognize the date), Philip asked himself that question as he looked westward upon the Sea of Azov, with the Crimea in the distance. It was the shallowest sea in the world, forty-six feet at its deepest point, a northern recess of the Black Sea near Europe's winding border with Asia, accessible only through the narrow, gatelike Strait of Kerch that lay before him. It was not the season to be here, he thought, not the time of year when any but the most intrepid tourists would book into the new resort that in due course would replace the nuclear-missile installation that had once threatened Turkey and much of Western Europe. No, the tourists would come after the thaw and before the first frost, when the east wind no longer stung and the flat farmland was no longer winter white but a patchwork of mown green and yellow rectangles. They would pay top ruble, dollar, euro—whatever—in order to pass time at a seaside so pristine, in a venue haunted by the alternate history it had by a hairsbreadth escaped.

None of that was his business. As leader of the American team assigned to assist the Russian military in the decommissioning of its surplus nuclear weapons, he was here to make this particular dream possible, not to realize it. His own dream was elsewhere, allied to that of the developers only tangentially. For the time being, it was his job to erase the past, safely and to the satisfaction of everyone, even as it was his intention to shift a piece of it, assets that were literally priceless, onto his own account. No scion of industry possessed such assets; nor did any African or Arab prince, though several were said to have sought them. No academic had ever controlled nor trader dealt in such commodities. He had to smile, even allow himself a laugh. As with all the most brilliant plans, the genius of Ian's lay in its simplicity and patience. He had seduced the necessary parties long ago, had recruited Philip when Philip thought the reverse was taking place. Most of all he had guessed right: that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's demise, Russia would require both practical help and geopolitical cover as it dismantled weapons systems that had become burdensome and superfluous. The task force at the top of which a man of Philip's personal and academic pedigree fit so naturally had been named after the American senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, who had sponsored the legislation authorizing it. To Philip's surprise it had survived myriad recurring strains in relations between Moscow and Washington to continue its work without major impediment. And now, as it oversaw the dismantling of this remote and redundant warehouse and launching site, the last piece of Ian's puzzle appeared about to be set into place. What a puzzle it was! He had to hand Ian infinite credit even if it was he, Philip, who had refined it to his own advantage, given it a final twist, disguised it so cleverly that it could now be hidden, without fear of detection, in plain sight.

Andrej, who was his counter, exhaled deliberately, as though performing an actor's trick he had long practiced. After a pause he sighed and said, “I miss smoking.”

Philip nodded.

“Did you ever smoke?” Andrej asked him idly.

Philip remained expressionless, hesitated, then said, “At school, for effect.”

Andrej laughed.

But rather than join in, Philip froze.

“You cannot be serious,” Andrej replied, notes of fear and pleading in his gruff voice. “It was an innocuous question. That's all.”

“Be that as it may,” Philip said.

“The man said
no
questions, and he meant
no
questions,” Andrej muttered, not quite under his breath.

“I am glad we understand each other.”

“Oh, we do indeed,” Andrej answered. “After all, you are my retirement, my very comfortable, very early retirement. That, as I am sure you realize, is what this whole thing means to me. The South of France, or maybe Majorca! Only a fool would question a prospect so sweet.”

“Where are we, then, Andrej? Beyond the point of no return?”

“For this stage the answer is yes.”

“Excellent.”

“You have a way with words.”

“Not at all,” Philip told him. “So twenty-one minus three still equals twenty-one?”

Andrej smiled. “And with numbers, too,” he said.

“And three times thirty equals . . . what?”

“That, one supposes, would depend on the currency.”

Philip smiled. “What those figures do add up to is a lot to move. Of course, one is only speaking hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically, it should be well nigh impossible.”

“But not
impossible,
” Philip pressed.

“Timing is everything.”

“Do you know what astonishes me?” Philip asked.

“I could guess, but no, I don't.”

“In that case, Andrej, I'll tell you: The world's simply not paying attention. It's asleep.”

“It does that from time to time. It all comes down to the economy, if you want my opinion. When things are going along pretty well, people don't want to worry. When things are going poorly, they're caught up in their own difficulties. They're not inclined to look about for more.”

“Still, it's more luck than we deserve. We have to be careful not to take it for granted.”

In the distance one squad of a larger team was in motion. As he turned to remind himself of its presence, what Philip saw were no more than stick figures, determined but undifferentiated, hard at work for their generous hazardous-duty pay, aware of what they were doing on only the most obvious of levels, like most of humanity if unlike him or Andrej and the few others Andrej had had no difficulty compromising. Lacking the instinct to connect the dots of life's affairs, they went about their business in workmanlike fashion, focusing only as much concentration as was required upon their jobs and reserving all the rest for the mix of joy and disappointment, anxiety and satisfaction they called their personal lives. For this, Philip was grateful. It made his task easier.

The few buildings nearby were low, roofed with shallow inverted saucers painted in splotches of green, brown and yellow in the traditional pattern of overland camouflage. Only the largest, a depot through which a graded roadbed dipped then rose, stood a single story high. And even it appeared less a structure entire unto itself than the partial eruption of an underground complex.

Across this barren landscape, the wind gusted, combing back the indolent grass, strewing twigs from distant forests. It was desolate, yet it was this very desolation, Philip knew, that would have given away the place's purpose to a practiced eye. Early in the Cold War, just after the Americans had deployed Polaris across their fleet of nuclear submarines, these silos had been buried underground, withdrawn from sight if not from readiness. Designed to house only intermediate-range missiles aimed at neutralizing their American opposite numbers in Turkey and the Shah's imposing military in Iran, they had been considered too close to the nation's natural border to be a fit site for intercontinental missiles. Such sites, like the weapons labs that produced the warheads, were typically far inland, such as Arzamas in the Nizhny Novgorod
region and Snezhinsk in the Urals. Yet in the years of frenzy and jockeying that had preceded the old order's demise, and especially in the aftermath of that convulsion when Ukraine had broken away, the installation they were now decertifying had unexpectedly come to house warheads meant to sit atop intercontinental missiles, weapons that contained as many as thirty independently targeted reentry vehicles each. Many of these had been withdrawn from the Ukraine before its independence; fewer had arrived in port from nuclear attack subs in the Black Sea Fleet. Those had been days of escalating tension and little clarity in the evolving relationship between Russia and Ukraine. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea, home to the fleet's principal ports, had quickly become the target of pro-Russian separatists, many of them seamen. Ukraine's new government had rushed to establish its own nonnuclear navy from remnants of the old fleet. Across the region, flux had prevailed. Weapons and decoys were moved as if props in a shell game, under diminished scrutiny and sometimes haphazardly, a turn of events that had captured Ian Santal's interest.

As they proceeded toward their work, Andrej said, “I take nothing for granted. With our past we'd be fools to do so.”

“Agreed,” Philip said.

“When I was a boy, certain things seemed immutable. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was one of them. Now look what's happened. Probably there are soldiers on this base who were born after Russia and our near abroad went their separate ways. Czechs and Poles and Hungarians are Westerners today, practically, but where you feel it is when you're this close to Ukraine, because they are not only Slavs, they are our brothers and sisters. That is why we trusted them with so many of our weapons, not just because of their fortunate geographical position.”

“There are no differences so profound as those between very similar peoples,” Philip said. “Who is more like an Englishman than an Irishman or more like a Jew than an Arab?”

Andrej laughed, but only for an instant.

Ten minutes later, in the tiled depot, Philip kept careful watch as Andrej, witnessed by two others—one young and gaunt, high-cheeked, an officer in the Russian army, the other less erect, approaching middle age in an at-ease slouch that suggested bureaucratic rather than military training—certified the conveyance of each warhead as it rose from the cool, cavernous, stainless-steel armory one level below. Attuned to the moment he had been planning for, Philip remained silent, his emotions both hyper and subdued as the Russian and American representatives from the Nunn-Lugar task force and Nuclear Threat Initiative proceeded with their work.

Andrej stood next to him, his high Slavic forehead spotlighted by the soft blue-white glow of his laptop's screen. The computer was brand-new, ultrathin, as close to futureproof as any he'd ever held. He caressed it with protective pride even as it rested on the drop-down easel of his workstation. The protocol now under way was meant to be double-blind. As each crate was conveyed to him, he would check its details with the attentiveness of a librarian to its original label, then to the yellowing loose-leaf pages on which the same information had long ago been recorded by hand in fine strokes of blue-black ink. The holes of the narrowly ruled pages had been reinforced and each warhead indexed with a brightly colored transparent tab so that the inventory resembled a schoolchild's notebook. Only once these records had been matched and rematched did he scan in the bar codes affixed to the seals applied during the recent digitization of such information. Of these there were three: for the cross-barred pinewood crate that could have contained a grand piano but was in this case merely an attention-deflecting outer shell; for the lead liner just within; and, most crucially, for the warhead that had been inserted inside the liner. Having completed this task without error (and he knew that even a single misplaced character would start the process over from the beginning), Andrej would enter the codes' corresponding numbers by hand into his secure computer, following which, if the entries matched the computer's database, he would be presented with yet another series of figures, an eleven-digit composite of numerals, letters and symbols, one for each independently targeted reentry vehicle. Highlighting each of these in turn, he would enter first the installation code for their point of departure, second the code for the convoy in which they were to be transported, and finally the code for the destination facility at which the weapons were to be deactivated, disassembled and destroyed.