Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [80]
“I hope to God you’re right, General. Everything depends on this security accord being signed.”
Brandt sat back, never more sure of the plan he’d outlined to the president days after his taking over the Oval Office. It was crucial, he’d argued, to enlist Russia in the crusade to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. They knew through intelligence and back-channel diplomatic sources precisely what missile parts Russia was selling to Iran. Nothing the previous administration had done had had any effect on Yukin’s business dealings with Iran, a result Brandt had predicted with unerring accuracy. Carson was different, however; he’d listened to reason, had agreed when Brandt had outlined an alternative method of weaning Yukin away from the dangerous Iranian teat.
If the diplomatic rapprochement was the foundation method, then the security accord was the cornerstone to its success. Which was why Brandt was replaying in his mind the disturbing phone call from Harry Martin. Of course he knew about the other faction in the field—that was the whole point of Martin’s mission to intercept Annika Dementieva. Annika was the key to everything. That Martin had not yet been able to find her was unsettling enough, but the fact that he had now gotten wind of the other faction meant that it was far more advanced in its plans than he knew about or had been led to believe. One of two conclusions could be drawn from this: Either the other faction had suddenly gained in power or the sources he’d been relying on had underestimated it. Neither possibility was a happy thought, especially with the accord signing imminent.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and standing up. “I need to make a call.”
Going forward down the wide aisle, he punched in a number that was too secret to keep either on his speed dial or in the cell’s phone book. It was a number he’d committed to memory the moment it had been given to him.
As the connection was going through he reflected on just how much he hated dealing with the Russians. To a man, they were a treacherous lot, the long shadow of Josef Stalin stretching into the present. They were all Stalin’s students, the General thought, whether or not they were aware of it. His viperous double- and triple-dealing became the political template—not to mention the KGB’s modus operandi—set in the kind of monumental stone it was impossible to undermine, let alone destroy.
Brandt himself had become a secret student of Stalin’s, of his history of blood, broken bones, and broken promises, in order to prepare himself for taking on the Soviet Bear. The dissolution of the USSR hadn’t fooled him the way it had others. Russia’s power might have been broken, but he knew it to be temporary; its flinty spine, fortified by Uncle Joe’s vampiric shadow, was still very much intact.
“I have three minutes.”
The voice in Brandt’s ear caused him to bristle inwardly, but he swallowed his outrage because he knew that, in fact, he only had three minutes. “My man in the field has just informed me that the opposition is gaining ground.”
“Even if that’s the case,” Oriel Jovovich Batchuk said, “these people are no match for Trinadtsat. They have neither the manpower nor the resources to take advantage of the situation.”
Batchuk wasn’t denying it! Brandt massaged his forehead with his fingertips while shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand, dispelling the possibility that anyone on board Air Force One might inadvertently see the expression of consternation on his face. “It seems to me that we have to entertain the possibility that the situation on the ground is being rewritten even as we stand here talking to one another.”
“A hiccup, that’s all,” the deputy prime minister said. “We still hold the high ground, that’s all that matters.”
Batchuk had power in spades, that was indisputable, but what they were aiming for was so complex that no one man could guarantee its success. Acknowledging this reality was, after