The quantum solution, p.16
The Quantum Solution, page 16
“Over the last year you and Tribe have developed a … what shall we say … a certain rapport.”
“What of it?” she said a bit too quickly. Defensive. Even she could hear it.
“I simply want to be absolutely certain that you will be able to leverage whatever you have with him to find out if he’s behind this attack.”
“Now it’s your turn to be realistic, Ben. Why on earth would Tribe want to kill the secretary of defense?” But she had already thought of a reason. Maybe Thompson was chosen at random—that’s how field tests were done, wasn’t it? She wondered whether it could be the Russians who were behind this attack. Lyudmila had told her that they were working on advanced quantum theory. But then again she had no reason to think that they knew she and Ben had turned Thompson. As far as the Russians were aware, Thompson was their main mole within the American government. Besides, no one’s research in quantum computers was as advanced as Tribe’s. You couldn’t believe any claim the Russians made. No, she was reasonably sure they weren’t behind the attack.
“No idea, Evan. That’s what you will find out. That’s your new remit.”
“Who else is in this group?”
“George Wilson, chief of the Defense Threat Reaction Agency, and Wes Connerly, head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Of course, they knew I worked for Parachute security.”
“Ben, you’re telling me our new remit is to investigate the man who is paying our salary? At the behest of people you don’t trust?”
“I’m saying Tribe needs to be investigated.”
“Speaking of, Tribe told me a seaplane took off from Istanbul a day or two before he got me out of that warehouse.” She needed to talk over him, even if it was just for the moment. Her head was buzzing with new intel, all of it conflicting. She felt overwhelmed. Dizziness forced her back until her head and neck were cradled by the pillow. Even then the ceiling seemed to be moving above her head. She forced her way through it, forced herself to focus. “According to him it landed here in Palma. I need to know who owns that plane.”
“Okay, I just need to—”
“Do you not know me, Ben?” She also felt the need to assert herself firmly, strongly. But was it only for him, or was it for herself as well? “Do you no longer trust me?”
“Of course I … Hold on.”
He was back three minutes later. “That seaplane is owned by Desiram Ltd.”
“That doesn’t help much.”
“How about this? The chairman of Desiram is Bernhard-Otto von Kleist. Know him?”
“I know of him.” Thank God this wasn’t a Zoom call, otherwise Ben would have seen her flinch. “He’s an international fixer or something, right?” She had of course never told anyone about her meeting with von Kleist last year. Von Kleist was attached to Lyudmila, or more accurately she to him. Either way she couldn’t work out why his seaplane had landed in Palma two days before Tribe brought her here. Experience had taught her not to believe in coincidences.
And now that Ben had told her about Thompson, and their new remit to investigate Tribe, she suddenly didn’t feel safe here with Tribe, even if she wasn’t convinced of his guilt. How many of his people were in the villa and its surrounds? How many guards? How much security? She was gripping the phone so tightly it had grown hot against her ear, and for a moment she took it away. Staring at it, she felt another shiver run down her spine. She had noted when she first picked it up that the phone was at full charge. Did that mean Tribe or someone who worked for him had pawed through its guts, squeezing out whatever was in there? Had her sandbox been strong enough to resist whatever electronic pliers had been employed to crack it open and reveal its secrets—her highly confidential and inflammatory communications with Lyudmila Shokova, a former member of the Russian FSB, of the Politburo? Should anyone find out that Lyudmila was one of her main sources, even Ben would be quits with her, explanation or no explanation.
“Evan?”
She could hear his voice even without the phone against her ear. As she settled it back in place, she noticed with alarm that her hand was trembling, and this time it wasn’t solely from fatigue.
“Still here,” she said.
“Listen to me, Evan. Tribe hasn’t done a SPAC or an IPO.”
“He doesn’t need to. He’s got more money than—”
“The point is Parachute remains a private company, solely in Tribe’s hands. That means he can do anything he wants, he’s got no one to report to, no board oversight, no investors who become disgruntled.”
“Ben—”
“No, hear me out. Tribe could be doing anything with his quantum computers. No one knows what’s going on in his mind. Can even you tell me what his goals are for Parachute?”
“What do you mean ‘even me’?”
“Come on, Evan. You know exactly what I mean.”
She closed her eyes again. “This isn’t like you—to keep harping on my relationship with Tribe.”
“Look, let’s say you’re right and Tribe isn’t the source of the quantum attack. That leaves the FSB, and if the Russians have somehow broken the barrier and managed to weaponize qubits then we need Tribe’s help.” He sighed. “The truth is I’m feeling a lot of pressure back here. With Thompson’s murder—”
At last she saw it. Her eyes flew open. “The pressure coming from this group that’s trying to recruit you.”
“Evan—”
“Am I right or wrong?”
“Just carry out your new remit, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I get my remits from Tribe, not you.” But seconds later she realized she was talking to dead air.
She put the phone down, knowing she hadn’t told Ben the whole truth. What was of perhaps greater concern to her, however, was that her gut told her he hadn’t been truthful with her either.
* * *
She must have fallen asleep despite her whirling mind, because when she opened her eyes her phone was blinking. She’d missed a call. Rolling over, she reached for the phone. A text from Ben: you’ll know what to do with these.
Four files were waiting for her in the Parachute shared docs folder. They were enormous, high-res files. Curious, she opened one, which on her cell took some time. She stared at the image, mesmerized. Pulse quickening. Heart racing. When she had viewed all of them she could no longer remain in bed. It was time for a serious one-on-one with Marsden Tribe.
25
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
“What are you going to do with Morokovsky’s body,” Rodion said as he followed Korokova into the GRU morgue, “light a pyre under him too?”
Major Korokova strode down the gray cinder-block hallway as if she owned the building. “Not allowed,” she answered, “within the confines of Moscow city limits.”
“That was a joke.”
“Amusing who exactly?”
Rodion struggled to catch her up, at least walk side by side with her. But instinctively he shied away from the walls; it was always winter down here. He was already behind the eight ball with her. Well, what else was new? And yet he knew he had to find some way of not falling into verbal traps he made for himself. Korokova was the most maddening creature he’d ever come across. She drew him like a lodestone. In her presence he felt at once subservient and exalted. Terrifying.
They came to the cold room, stepped in. Morokovsky’s body was on the stainless-steel table, but the dictating microphone normally suspended overhead had been pushed aside. No familiar Y-shaped incision blemished the corpse, which meant the autopsy had not yet been started. The only other person in the room was a young blond woman whom Korokova addressed as Maria Mariskiovna. Beneath her leather apron, she wore the black uniform with gold edging he was seeing more and more of inside the GRU headquarters.
“Morokovsky’s assistant,” she said as an aside to Rodion. And to Maria, “Everything is prepared.” Said as if Maria Mariskiovna’s head would roll if it wasn’t.
“The bone saw is right here,” Maria said, tapping a wide-bladed steel implement with a pistol grip.
“And the container?”
“Just behind me,” Maria said. Though she seemed to remain stone-faced, Rodion got the feeling that she was none too happy. “XLPE—cross-linked polyethylene plastic just as you ordered.”
“Is it full?”
“Three-quarters,” Maria said.
It was only then that Rodion realized that she was standing at attention, as if she were a soldier assembled for dress parade. Well, leather apron aside she was dressed for it. Was it normal to have a forensic pathologist in a soldier’s uniform? He couldn’t imagine so.
The major stepped up to the table, held out her hand. “Bone saw.”
Maria passed it to her handle first. Korokova took it as if she were a forensic pathologist herself, making Rodion wonder at the breadth and depth of her skills. Seriously, sometimes she gave him the willies.
She stood level with Morokovsky’s head. As Maria stepped to the head of the table, Korokova signaled her to move back to where she had been standing. “Rodion,” she said, “take Maria Mariskiovna’s place.” When he gave her a questioning look, she said, “Go on.” With a smile on her face.
He did as she bade.
“Closer,” Korokova said, bone saw in hand.
He stepped forward.
“Closer.” Bone saw raised.
Taking another step brought him up against the icy steel of the table.
Korokova nodded to him with the air of someone rewarding a good boy who knew how to take orders. “Now take hold of the corpse’s head, one hand over each ear.”
He looked at her, could not help the blood draining from his face. She was still smiling sweetly, as if they were having a coffee at a pleasant café. His arms seemed to move on their own. His palms closed over Morokovsky’s ears. Rodion flinched. The skin was almost as cold as the table pressed against his hips.
“Hold on tight now, Rodion.” Korokova was still smiling, or was it now a smirk? “You are about to get the answer to your facetious question. No pyre, as I told you. But this.” Her eyes flashed as she brought the bone saw down on the base of Morokovsky’s neck and began the pull-push motion, the large teeth sinking through flesh, tendon, cartilage, and bone as if they were a tenderized flank steak.
Rodion felt the vibrations, soft, smooth, rhythmic, and thought of silk scarves fluttering. That was until bile rose into his throat, the acid making him cough.
“Swallow, Rodion,” Korokova said. “Calm yourself and swallow.”
Shamed before her and Maria Mariskiovna, he struggled to speak. “I’m perfectly … fine.” But, sadly for him, he released the head, crossed to one of the large stainless-steel sinks, and, bending over it, turned the spigot, the splash of water covering the awful sound of his retching. Not that Korokova and Maria didn’t know what he was doing, but at least they couldn’t hear him emptying his stomach of half-digested food.
After rinsing the foul taste out of his mouth, he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Then, horrified, realized what he had just been using his hands to do. His palms seemed contaminated and felt numb. He wondered if he’d ever be able to warm them up.
As he was reaching for the soap dispenser on the wall over the sink, Korokova said, “Don’t bother, Rodion. There’s more to do.” With a dropping sensation in his belly he returned to where the two women stood.
“Splendid.” Finished, Korokova raised the bone saw and Maria took it out of her hand. The three of them looked down at the head severed from Morokovsky’s body. “Interesting,” she went on, “we could be looking at an art piece worth millions—who is that decadent Western artist—ah, yes, Damien Hirst. Yes, we ship the two parts of Morokovsky’s body to Hirst, he’ll preserve them in formaldehyde, but not before he studs the head with diamonds.” She looked up. “What do you think Morokovsky would be worth then, Rodion? Twelve million dollars? Twenty? How high the moon?” She laughed, the sound oddly delicate, like the ringing of chimes.
She shrugged. “But of course we cannot do that. Shipping this body into the West. Impractical at best, no?”
“Not to mention illegal,” Maria Mariskiovna said archly.
“Well, of course,” Korokova said. “No matter. Profit is not our aim today, isn’t that right, Rodion.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, his belly still roiling.
“Well, now, since I’ve taken on the part of Judith in Caravaggio’s painting of Holofernes’s beheading, I should complete the role of female assassin—sexually charged and deadly.” Her smile broadened. “Sex and death, hand in hand, even you have heard of the little death, Rodion.”
So saying, she took up Morokovsky’s head by the hair and, holding it as if she were Aeneas lifting his lantern high to light his way into the underworld, she stepped toward the XLPE container.
“With me, Rodion.”
He followed her like someone in a dream. Part of his mind denied that any of this had happened, that he had taken part in—
“Open the lid, Rodion.”
Korokova had snapped the command. At once, as if obeying a force of nature, he gripped the handles on either side of the lid.
“Major.” Maria Mariskiovna had come up behind Rodion. “Gloves are required—”
“Ah, no,” Korokova replied, “where is the fun in that?”
“Please be careful,” Maria said to Rodion. “Open it slowly. Very slowly. No, counterclockwise. It’s a built-in precaution against opening it inadvertently.”
“What’s inside,” he asked, as he began to turn the lid.
Maria supplied the answer. “Hydrochloric acid.”
Rodion felt himself floating. He saw himself as if from above going through the ordered motions as if he were an automaton, as if this weren’t him at all, rather someone masquerading as him.
Korokova held the head over the now-open container. “The opposite of formaldehyde, eh, Rodion.”
He tried, but he could not turn away, as if his neck, his eyes were trapped in amber. Breathless, he watched as slowly, ever so slowly, Morokovsky’s head vanished into the contents of the container, liquefying like lard in a smoking skillet.
26
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Once upon a time, many hundreds of years ago, the Kremlin was a wooden fortress protecting the town that grew up around it. Over the centuries it had grown into a city unto itself, but the fact remained that it was still a fortress, created as its forebear was for war. And war had come. That it was of the Sovereign’s own design made no difference. None at all. The Kremlin was on war footing.
The original fortress lacked many things the Kremlin now had. One of them, the most secret of secrets, was an elevator that descended from a hidden compartment in the Sovereign’s quarters. It had a unique design—a layer of lead sandwiched between two layers of titanium. The elevator had only one stop as it descended from the Sovereign’s quarters—a level below the basement and a trio of subbasements, the deepest of which contained the Sovereign’s war room. Few people had ever been there. None but the Sovereign had been lower. The architects, engineers, miners, mechanics, and laborers who had designed and built the secret conveyance and what was attached to it were no longer alive, having been summarily dispatched with extreme prejudice the moment their services were no longer required. Therefore, it was accurate to say that no one but the Sovereign knew about it. Until today.
Today, Minister Darko Vladimirovich Kusnetsov, director of the FSB, stood in the elevator alongside the Sovereign. Were he a lesser person, someone with a less highly developed mind and, therefore, a less heightened sense of self-preservation, he would have been honored, not to say delighted, to be gifted with such preferential treatment. However, even before he had been summoned to the Kremlin this morning, when in the Sovereign’s presence in recent days Kusnetsov’s sensitive antennae had detected a change in the weather in the Moscow he lived and worked in. Storm clouds had arisen, piled higher than he could see; the wind had changed direction, picking up strength. There was a decided darkness at noon, and when the summons arrived at his doorstep in the crepuscular hour before dawn Kusnetsov was sure that he was about to be given a glimpse of what was behind those thick and threatening thunderheads. Either that or he would be disappeared in the same fashion as Comrade Director Stanislav Budimirovich Baev, his subordinate, head of the SVR. Former head, he’d corrected himself as he had showered, shaved, and dressed. He had already been up when the knock on the door sounded. He did not have to open the door to know what was about to transpire.
He had been driven through the city. Night was waning but daybreak was still a weak dribble in the east. Kusnetsov had initially felt a building sense of unease as he struggled to reconcile his mind to a new and unknown reality. His mind sensed a clear demarcation between the world that existed when he had fallen asleep last night and the world into which he had awakened.
Dawn light, pinkish gray, illuminated the walls of the Kremlin, setting them apart from everything around it, which, he thought, was entirely apropos of the occasion as well as of the hour.
He was expected, so admitted through three security checkpoints with a wave of a hand or a nod of the head. He was accompanied as far as the entrance to the Sovereign’s private suite, then he was on his own. He passed through one room after another festooned with the Sovereign’s mind-bogglingly precious collection that according to rumor he never looked at but nevertheless needed to possess: antique Persian rugs; gold samovars from the time of the tsars; paintings by Matisse, taken off the walls of the Hermitage Museum in St. Peterburg; a bishop’s cloth-of-gold miter, the cross encrusted with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, beaded with pearls. Kusnetsov, feeling suffocated, hurried on.
There were very few things in this life that caused him fear. He had gone through trial by fire when he was a teenager under the terrible pressure of his cruel uncle’s apelike thumb. His uncle had reminded him every day what a coward Kusnetsov’s father—his brother—had been for putting a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger, and that Kusnetsov was no better. Never would be. But when Kusnetsov became a young man, after the old man was felled by a fatal heart attack, whatever fears his uncle had instilled in him lost their grip. Kusnetsov knew he was no coward. But now, in this fearsome place he had never known existed, at this time of a sea change in the Kremlin—and therefore in the Russian Federation—standing beside the absolute ruler of the Motherland, he felt a tiny worm of fear crawl through his insides like the devil made flesh.
