Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel Read online

  “This is shocking, President Lebed. That you would even think—”

  “Have no fear, Mr. Hamilton. I can assure you that there will not be an investigation about the yacht. But, as for the four murders—”

  “I’m confident my lawyers will handle any issues that Basayev was responsible for,” Hamilton said.

  “Perhaps so,” Lebed replied. “But in the meantime, you can enjoy the generosity of the Russian people. I’ll personally see to it that all of your needs are met.”

  Lebed pressed a button built into his chair, the door swung open, and the sailor reappeared. Lebed snapped a few words to him, and in a moment the Catherine began slowly turning around.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton,” Lebed said, looking at his watch. “I must go to what I call my floating office. Boatswain Ovechkin will see that you safely depart.”

  Hamilton rose, and they shook hands. Lebed hurried to an elevator that took him directly to the bridge. At a door to a small compartment off the bridge, two sailors snapped rifle salutes and one opened the door. Without sitting at the small desk, he made a call on a secure phone. “I want a tap on Hamilton’s phone,” he ordered. “I expect that he will be making a phone call. Tap his phone.”

  “His phone has been tapped since he checked in, sir.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “Mine.”

  “You have exceeded your authority again, Komov,” Lebed said. “As soon as you get a transcript of today’s calls, bring it to my office.”

  When the yacht returned to her berth, Hamilton was taken to the SUV that he had entered less than an hour before and returned to the hotel. He had the feeling of being in a movie that had suddenly begun playing backward.

  The moment he entered his suite he went to the phone in the drawing room and went through the instructions necessary to make a call to the United States. He gave a hotel operator the number for the private landline of Sandra Vanderlang, chief operations officer of the SpaceMine Corporation in Palo Alto, California.

  Hamilton did not trust telephones. He privately admired the Al Qaeda model of secure communications: avoidance of electronic devices and a strict reliance on well-vetted couriers. But that system was impossible in the totally wired commercial world that he inhabited as one of the world’s richest men. He was angry with himself for having left on the plane his encrypted cell phone that had been developed by Dark Circle, a firm in which he had been an angel investor. He’d requested that the airline return the phone to him immediately, but assumed it was now in the hands of Russia’s spymasters.

  And so here he was in a luxurious Moscow hotel, speaking into a dainty, creamy white telephone that was tethered to a wall outlet behind silken drapes. And he realized that his words were almost certainly being monitored by the Russian equivalent of the National Security Agency—and by the NSA, too.

  But his vanity trumped caution.

  “Hamilton here, Dr. Vanderlang,” said Hamilton, who never used hello or goodbye.

  “Mr. Hamilton,” she said. “Where are you? We’ve been worried.”

  “I’m in Moscow. I had hoped to meet Kuri Basayev…”

  “My God, Basayev! You heard what happened…”

  “Please do not take God’s name in vain.”

  “Sorry,” Vanderlang said, angry with herself for forgetting Hamilton’s fundamental Christianity, which ruled his life, including his vocabulary. As founder and CEO of SpaceMine, he insisted that his employees and contractors honor God’s name. He even frowned on responding to a sneeze with “God bless you.”

  Vanderlang tried again: “When we didn’t hear anything from you—”

  “You thought I might be feeding the fish somewhere in the Black Sea?”

  When she did not respond, Hamilton continued, “No. I am very much alive. Bored but alive. I never got to meet Basayev. I sincerely believe it was providential. I was to fly out to his ship … his yacht.… But it blew up and sank.”

  “I saw reports about the sinking on GNN,” Vanderlang said. “No survivors. They believed a boiler exploded.”

  “Whatever. As I said, I’m still alive. And I have some interesting news. I have just come from a meeting with President Lebed himself. He made an interesting proposition, a deal, that I think will take care of all financial matters and give me some leverage in getting a deal with Oxley.”

  Suddenly, Hamilton heard a loud click, and his phone went dead.

  Hamilton tried to call Sandra Vanderlang again from the telephone he was still holding. A woman’s voice said, “I am sorry, Mr. Hamilton. Your phone is out of order.”

  “Well, fix it!” he shouted.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Hamilton,” the robotic voice repeated. “Your phone is out of order.”

  He hung up, waited a minute, and tried again.

  Again, “I am sorry, Mr. Hamilton. Your phone is—”

  He slammed down the phone, grabbed his key card and stormed out of the suite. He slipped it into a slot by the elevator and descended to the lobby, muttering to himself what he was going to say to the manager. But, after calming down enough to realize there were other ways to make a phone call, he strode to a niche, flanked by tall bamboo shoots in blue-and-gold planters. Behind them, seated at his faux Louis XVIII desk, was Sergey Algov, the concierge. When Hamilton asked to use his cell phone, Algov hesitated and Hamilton realized that he had rushed out without his wallet.

  “I will put it on my bill,” he said. “I have no rubles.”

  Algov bowed, smiled, and pointed to a nearby ATM.

  Hamilton, fuming, pulled out the credit card he had placed in with the small embossed keyholder the hotel had given him upon his arrival. He slipped it into the ATM and punched in his pin number. A line in Cyrillic appeared on the screen. “It does not accept your card,” the concierge said with a quick frown.

  Hamilton now had a sense that something was going very wrong. “I will be right back,” he said, rushing to the elevator for a fast round-trip to his suite.

  Hamilton returned, handed Algov a fistful of rubles, and, standing behind one of the planters, dialed Sandra Vanderlang’s cell phone.

  “Mr. Hamilton, we need you back here to…,” she began. “Our investors are—”

  “Divine providence put me here in Moscow, and I’m not coming home unless the FBI Gestapo drops all phony charges against me. I’ve done nothing wrong.… Listen, Sandra, you need to call the Greek.”

  “Who?”

  “Akis Chris … Christakos. C-h-r-i-s-t-a-k-o-s. The Greek lawyer that went with me to see the FBI. Tell him I want immunity from—”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said. “Immunity from what?”

  “Just call the Greek. He’ll handle it.”

  “Handle what? I don’t understand. Why can’t you just—”

  “Here’s the situation, Sandra. I don’t have my passport. They have my credit card number, and so they can keep adding to my hotel bill. But my credit card is being otherwise disallowed for some unexplained reason.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Basayev’s death?”

  “You know me and telephones,” he said, lowering his voice. “We’ll talk about that when I get home. I’m trapped in this hotel. I eat here, sleep here, go crazy here. But I’m staying here until I can enter America without worrying.”

  “Worrying about what?”

  “Never mind about what. Just call the Greek.”

  “And tell the Greek what?”

  “Tell him I want a grant of complete immunity. It has to be signed by Oxley himself. Nothing less.”

  “But.…”

  “Sandra, just call the Greek. Tell him I am staying at the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski.” He ended the call.

  * * *

  Vanderlang immediately checked SpaceMine’s legal files but failed to find any reference to Akis Christakos. She vaguely remembered that some months before Hamilton had mentioned making a trip to Washington in the corporate jet. That must ha
ve been when he hired the Greek, apparently out of his own funds. As usual, he had not discussed the trip with her before he left or after he returned.

  Through Google, she found the Washington website of Super Lawyers, a rating service. And there was the address and phone number of Akis Christakos, described as one of the capital’s leading criminal defense lawyers. The Greek.

  3

  Colonel Nikita Komov was at home when Lebed called him. Komov sometimes sought the solitude of his one-bedroom apartment when he was organizing an important action plan—or preparing a report for President Lebed. Komov had spent most of the night going over what information the FSB (the English initials for Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, Russia’s Federal Security Service) had about Robert Wentworth Hamilton. Knowing what was in that dossier and knowing the corrupt practices of the Lebed administration, Komov assumed that the conversation aboard the presidential yacht would be about a deal in which a Lebed-picked oligarch replaced Basayev.

  Komov accepted corruption, even when it tainted the FSB, as the way power and wealth interlocked in the running of the Russian government. But Hamilton’s asteroid contained the potential for a defense of the Motherland against the United States and its NATO cronies. To Komov, needs of the Motherland transcended the needs of politicians and their rich parasites. He once again had to risk his career—and perhaps his life—to tell truth to power.

  * * *

  Komov lived in an apartment house that once belonged to the elite of the KGB. After the KGB was dissolved, all the officers had been pensioned off and evicted—except Colonel Komov. The spacious, high-ceilinged apartments had been modernized for the new tenants, bright young government officials on their way up the ladder of privilege and corruption.

  Komov walked to his sixth-floor balcony to watch for the car sent from the Kremlin. He saw it stop briefly at the unmanned guard gate, which opened automatically to the driver’s signal. There was a time, Komov remembered, when he would have seen a guard station manned by sentinels who belonged to the same elite KGB regiment that guarded Lenin’s tomb on Red Square. Now, robots.

  He left the balcony, strode across his sparsely furnished living room, and locked his apartment door with the key he had demanded after having been given a key card. Walking down the corridor to the elevator, he turned his mind from remembrance to the real now. At ninety-two years, he still walked like a man who had urgent business to do, and he still had the steely eyes of command.

  As Komov stepped out of the lobby, the driver at the open door of the black ZIL limousine saluted solemnly, acknowledging Komov’s special status as a living relic of the old KGB. The driver was in civilian clothes because the FSB no longer had the military trappings of the KGB. Draped over Komov’s broad shoulders, however, was a khaki greatcoat bearing the epaulets of a colonel. Beneath was the formal uniform of a KGB officer—blue tunic with aiguillette, blue trousers tucked into thigh-high black boots, and a gold-banded, high-crowned hat.

  Komov could look back as far as Stalin, as far back as the Great Patriotic War. On his tunic, next to the Order of Lenin, was the medal for the Defense of Stalingrad. He had served the Motherland every day and every night since he enlisted in the Red Army on his eighteenth birthday.

  * * *

  Unlike other former KGB officers, Komov survived the demise of the KGB. The agency was dissolved in 1991 after its chief was involved in an attempted coup to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. He and subsequent Russian leaders broke up the KGB, converting one of its pieces into the the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Foreign Intelligence Service), an eavesdropping agency analogous to America’s NSA.

  Komov, called Comrade X-ray for his ability to see traitorous hearts, had used his seemingly mystic talent to ferret out the coup plotters. And so he stayed on, hailed as a counterintelligence genius. Four years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the FSB became Russia’s prime counterintelligence agency. In 1998 Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Federation, appointed Vladimir Putin director of the FSB with orders that Komov not be retired. In 2006 the FSB was given the legal power to define, target, and kill “terrorism suspects” under presidential orders.

  The FSB was touted as a modern intelligence agency that would reflect the principles of a democracy. But, as a candid FSB spokesman said, “We have been gradually given other tasks, such as fighting organized crime and gangs, contraband and corruption-fascist elements.” A new law gave the FSB the right to operate its own prison system, infiltrate criminal gangs, create commercial enterprises, and obtain information from private firms without warrants. Komov realized that deep within the new agency the old KGB still managed to exist, especially after Putin succeeded Yeltsin as prime minister.

  The span of Komov’s career included Vladimir Putin’s formative years as a KGB officer. Komov had first met Putin at the KGB counterintelligence school, which Komov presided over. Pupil and professor became mutual admirers. And Putin, as head of the KGB, ordered that Komov not be retired. After becoming prime minister and then president of the Federation, Putin put many of his supporters in high-level FSB posts. One of them was Komov, who was made a special presidential adviser. Komov’s official title was Director Emeritus of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, meaning that he had access to any top-secret document that he wanted to see.

  * * *

  At Pushkin Square, Komov tapped on the glass divider behind the driver and ordered him to stop. He pulled to the curb, serenaded by a chorus of angry horns. Komov stepped from the car and slipped into his greatcoat. The first flakes of the first snow were dancing in the November air and disappearing as they touched the ground.

  Komov gazed up at the statue of Pushkin, who looked as if he had stopped for a moment on a Moscow street, a line for a poem forming in his mind. Now Komov stood before the statue and thought of the glory of the Moscow winter, whose white curtain was rising this morning. The weather had changed suddenly, the warmth of autumn disappearing overnight. Soon would come the cold, the snow, the whiteness everywhere. Pushkin and winter entered Komov’s mind:

  The storm covers skies with darkness,

  Spinning snowy whirlwinds tight …

  Komov looked at his watch, calculated the timing of a two-kilometer walk, and determined that he would be on time for his meeting in the Kremlin. The car crawled alongside him until he waved it away. Snowflakes swirling around him, details of his report taking form in his mind, he quickened his step. A tall man stepped out of the park and caught up with Komov, who turned and stopped, looking up at the man and frowning.

  “I do not need to be followed, Lieutenant,” Komov said. “I am going to the Kremlin and do not believe I will be attacked.”

  Lieutenant Pavel Shumeyko, a former champion hockey center and Honored Master of Sports, looked down and, smiling, said, “I will grant you twenty meters.” He was six feet three inches tall and had the sport’s iconic missing-one-tooth smile. He served as Komov’s bodyguard, a duty unacknowledged by Komov but imposed by Lebed himself, citing Komov’s age and host of enemies.

  “Very well,” Komov grumbled. He paced off twenty meters and Shumeyko resumed walking.

  4

  The Kremlin office of Boris Lebed, the president of the Russian Federation, could have belonged to a minor official. The walls were oak-paneled and unadorned, the carpeting was gray. His barren desk was the size of a restaurant table for four. The nearest wall had a two-shelf bookcase containing books that had the pristine appearance of being displayed rather than read. In front of the desk were two chairs with spindly legs and thin golden cushions. Behind his similar chair was the tricolor flag of the Federation, its bands of white, blue, and red adding the room’s only touch of color.

  The office was a stage set for Lebed, who projected an image that was at once confident but humble, and often reminded Russians that power had not changed him and that he governed in the same plain way that he had during his four years as the earnest young mayor of Volgograd. A
fter Vladimir Putin died of what was officially described as “a rare blood disease,” Russian kingmakers had found Putin’s potential successor in the telegenic Lebed. He had run a tumultuous election campaign, promising voters that he could lead Russia out of the doldrums and into a prosperous economy worthy of a great nation. And he had convinced most of the outside world that he was not another Putin.

  When he and Komov first met, Lebed recognized Komov’s Defense of Stalingrad medal and noted a link between them. As mayor of Volgograd, Lebed had proclaimed that each year the city would revert to its previous name, Stalingrad, on six commemorative days, including February 2, the day that the Nazi invaders of the city surrendered to the Red Army. The Stalingrad proclamation was well known because Lebed had frequently mentioned it during his election campaign, reminding voters how he venerated the supreme victory of the Great Patriotic War.

  Komov had infuriated Lebed by presenting him with the fact that Basayev, Lebed’s trusted moneyman, was running a Russian-American criminal gang—and was a homosexual, the worst accusation that could be made about a Lebed associate. Then came the Komov report that Basayev was aiding billionaire Robert Hamilton in his plan to mine asteroids, which have great concentrations of such precious metals as platinum and palladium. Basayev was a powerful enough oligarch to arrange for SpaceMine to secretly launch an asteroid-bound spacecraft from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome. A massive publicity campaign orchestrated by Hamilton extolled the potential value of “Asteroid USA,” drawing investors.

  Lebed knew more about that asteroid than Komov did. Several months ago, President Blake Oxley of the United States had learned that the asteroid SpaceMine chose for mining was on a collision orbit and would strike the Earth in 2037. Oxley had informed Lebed and Chinese President Zhang Xing. The three leaders had agreed to keep the probable collision secret until three selected scientists, working together in secrecy, could devise a way to defend the Earth. Hamilton, a believer in what he called God’s Plan, chose to ignore the collision prediction, apparently because he believed it might be divinely ordained.