Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [60]
Premier Belov smiled once again. He had placed a blue packet of Austrian cigarettes in front of himself. “Yes, Margarita, please bring us a bottle of spirits. Some Georgian white lightning would be appropriate.”
Belov laughed now and his chins shook, giving everyone the impression that his face was about to slip through layers of his neck and vanish into his body.
General Raskov smiled. It was always politic to smile, at least, whenever Premier Belov took it upon himself to laugh. “We now believe we know the reason for the bombings in America,” he said, finally dropping his bombshell on the group.
General Raskov silently gazed around the breakfast parlor. The then sitting at the table had stopped lighting cigars, stopped taking sips of Russian coffee.
“This Green Band group has made a frightening proposal to us. Through Francois Monserrat’s terrorist cell, actually. The offer was made last evening…. This is why I’ve called all of you here so early in the morning.”
General Raskov lightly drummed his fingers on the dining table as he spoke the next words. “Comrades, the Green Band group has requested a payment. A total of one hundred twenty million dollars in gold bullion. This sum is in exchange for securities and bonds stolen during the December fourth bombings on Wall Street.
“The securities were apparently removed during the seven-hour evacuation itself…. Comrades, the net worth of the stolen goods offered to us… is in excess of two billion dollars!”
The men, the elite who ruled Soviet Russia, were silent; they were reeling at the massive numbers they had just heard.
There was no way anyone could have been prepared for such an announcement.
At first, no word at all from Green Band. And now this. Two billion dollars to be ransomed.
“They plan to sell to buyers other than ourselves as well. The total amount would be enough to cripple the Western economic system.” General Raskov went on. “This could mean a cataclysmic panic for the American Stock Market.”
Less than ten miles away from Zavidavo, a delivery truck marked flour fishtailed, then regained control. It was barreling down a narrow country road which seemed little more than an ice-slicked toboggan track.
The truck finally plowed to a stop in front of a cottage in the country village of Staritsa. The driver leaped out and ran crunching through bright new snow up to his knees.
The cottage door opened, and a woman’s arm, in a drab gray bathrobe, took an envelope.
The driver then high-stepped back to his truck, and hurriedly drove away into the snow.
From the village of Staritsa, the contents of the envelope were relayed in telephone code to a young woman working at the GUM Department Store in Moscow.
The GUM clerk used a special telephone, and another complex code, to make an urgent transatlantic call to the United States, specifically to the city of Langley, Virginia.
The original message had been sent by Margarita Kupchuck, the housekeeper at Zavidavo. For eleven years Margarita had been one of the most important operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency working inside Russia.
The message provided the American team with their first break in the Green Band investigation.
It consisted of just fifteen words:
Ritz Hotel, London. Thursday morning. Two billion dollars. Stolen securities to be exchanged… Green Band.
Chapter 42
IT WAS PROBABLY A DREAM, and a very bad one.
He was standing in an unfamiliar room whose walls met the ceiling at angles that would have been impossible in anything other than dream geometry. There was a door halfway open and a pale light, the color of pearl, created a slat of dull color.
A shadow moved into the pearl-colored light and stood there just beyond the door. He knew, without even having to look, that the figure was Nora.
He wanted to move forward, to step out of the room, he wanted to see Nora and hold her but something held him in place, something kept him rooted to the floor.
He cried her name aloud.
And then—
A bell was ringing.