Page 105 of The Collector
His wife...
Things had turned out rather well for Magnus. And to think that twenty years ago he was sitting in a room in Lubyanka watching a video of himself with a naked Russian girl less than half his age. He had never raged, never wept, never begged to be let off the hook. Instead, he had done everything they asked of him, no matter how demeaning or dirty—including the little errand he had run in South Africa. Petrov had to hand it to Magnus; he had played a rotten hand with considerable skill. And look at him now. A palace in Rublyovka, a beautiful young fiancée.
And two and half billion dollars of Nikolai Petrov’s money...
A remarkable twist of fate, that. Still, Petrov was confident he held the upper hand. The woman was his insurance policy. Magnus would never do anything to place her life in danger.
Petrov took a long pull at the whisky, then, perhaps unwisely, poured the rest down his throat. He placed the empty glass on the drop leaf table next to his reading chair and checked the combination dial on his safe. It was set to the number forty-nine, which is how Petrov had left it that morning. The heavy-duty locks on his attaché case were likewise set to the proper numbers. These never varied. The left was set to 9-3-4, the right to 8-0-6.
He dialed in the correct combinations—2-7-1 on the left, 1-5-5 on the right—and popped the latches. He was about to lift the lidbut stopped when his secure phone rattled. It was Semenov, one of his senior aides, calling from the Kremlin with the nightly casualty figures from Ukraine. The real numbers, not the pulp they fed to the Russian people through the likes of Dmitry Budanov. Today’s fighting had been particularly costly. Another six hundred dead and wounded, most of them conscripts and convicts who had been cut to pieces by Ukrainian machine gunners in Bakhmut and Soledar.
It couldn’t continue for much longer, thought Petrov as he hung up the phone. And if all went according to plan, it wouldn’t. It was spelled out in granular detail in the document in his briefcase. The false-flag provocation, the measured tactical reprisal, the likely American and NATO response, the inevitable escalation that would push the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis.
Petrov had war-gamed every scenario, calculated the mathematical probability of every potential outcome. He was confident the Americans would never use their nuclear weapons against Russia and risk the destruction of their cities and the loss of millions of innocent lives. Not in defense of a country most American citizens couldn’t find on a map. The outcome of the crisis, therefore, would be a Russian victory in Ukraine, which would in turn lead to widespread civil and political disorder in the West and the collapse of NATO. The end result of this epochal upheaval would be a new global order, one with Russia, not the Americans, in charge.
And it would begin, thought Petrov as he extinguished the lamp in his office, in a few hours’ time, with a single word. It wasn’t until he was stretched out in his bed that he realized he had neglected to lock the Security Council directive in his safe. It was no matter; his home was located in the most secure gated compound in Russia and was surrounded by a small army of trained killers. The document wasn’t going anywhere. Or so Nikolai Petrov assured himself,at 12:38 p.m. Moscow time, as he closed his eyes and slept the sleep of the dead.
The first photograph arrived at the op center at PET headquarters with the impact of an errant Russian ballistic missile. The Cyrillic numerals and letters 37-23\VZ were clearly visible; it was almost certainly the cover page of the Russian Security Council directive. But for reasons that were not yet clear, the document appeared to be resting on the knees of the woman who had photographed it. Even more troubling was her current location and heading, as depicted by the winking blue light on Eli Lavon’s laptop computer.
“Please tell me she didn’t,” he said gravely.
“It certainly appears she did,” replied Gabriel. “But maybe you should check the GPS data just to be sure.”
Lavon extracted the coordinates embedded in the image. “She did,” he said. “She definitely did.”
Gabriel swore softly. Ingrid had removed the Security Council directive from Nikolai Petrov’s mansion in Rublyovka. “How long do you suppose we have until he discovers it’s missing?”
“Who says he doesn’t know already?”
“She must have had a good reason.”
“Like what?”
“We’ll know in a minute, Eli.”
Just then the next photograph hit their screens. It was the directive’s opening page, a brief summary of what was to come. Lavon and Mikhail translated the material for Gabriel and Lars Mortensen.
“Dear God,” said the Danish intelligence chief.
“And we haven’t got to the good part yet,” added Gabriel gloomily.
“No,” said Lavon as the next page appeared on his computer. “But we’re definitely getting warmer.”
“What does it say?”
“It says that Ingrid needs to send us the rest of the document before Petrov finds her.”
The images began arriving at regular intervals, one page of the directive every ten or fifteen seconds. Gabriel fired them securely to Langley, where they were set upon by the analysts and translators of the Russia House. Within a few minutes, Adrian Carter’s remaining hair was officially on fire. And with good reason; the directive left nothing to the imagination. It was a meticulously detailed blueprint for waging nuclear war in Ukraine, a war that would begin with a false-flag provocation code-named Plan Aurora. The hands of the Doomsday Clock, thought Gabriel, read one minute to midnight. Maybe less than that.
Nine minutes after they received the first photograph, they received the last. By then the winking blue light on Eli Lavon’s computer screen had reached the Moscow Ring Road. Five minutes later, at twelve thirty local time, it was headed north on the M11, the Moscow–Saint Petersburg Motorway. Google Maps estimated the driving time to Pulkovo Airport to be seven hours. The chance of encountering snowfall along the way, according to the latest forecast, was one hundred percent. The odds that Ingrid and Magnus Larsen would make it out of Russia alive, calculated Gabriel, were somewhere around zero.
And they were about to get worse.
“What now?” asked Eli Lavon.
“Adrian wants me to get over to the American Embassy so we can have a word in private over Langley’s network.”
“About what?”
