Although this immediately set in motion a frantic chain of events in the Novaya Rossiya building, it was something akin to controlled chaos, because the Evening News staff had dealt with nearly two dozen impromptu drop-in interviews in the year Valeri Volodin had been in power, and by now they had their procedures planned like a choreographed dance.
Once they learned the chief of state was on his way to the studio, the first order of business for the producers was to call Volodin’s favorite on-air personality and let her know that even though she had the evening off, regardless of where she was and what she was doing at that moment, she would be on the set performing a live interview with the president in roughly half an hour.
Tatiana Molchanova was a thirty-three-year-old reporter and newscaster, and though he had never said it outright, it was clear to everyone that the married Volodin was smitten with the raven-haired, well-educated journalist. The producers learned the hard way that interviews conducted by any newscaster other than Tatiana Molchanova would be met with displeasure by the president.
As much as her beauty surely attracted him, many secretly thought it was the fawning gaze Molchanova bestowed on Volodin while she feigned impartiality. She clearly found Volodin to be the sex symbol that he made himself out to be, and their own on-air chemistry was undeniable, even if it shattered respectable boundaries of journalistic acceptance.
As soon as Molchanova was reached by phone and notified, one of the station’s traffic helicopters was dispatched to pick her up at her Leningradskaya apartment.
With the chopper on its way, the show’s producers got to work writing the questions for the interview, pulling together graphics, and preparing the involved procedure used to make the president’s always dramatic arrival appear smooth and seamless for the tens of millions of viewers who would be watching live.
Everyone in the building knew that Volodin did not take direction from anyone, so they had to be ready to go on-air with his interview the instant he arrived. To facilitate this, the halls of Novaya Rossiya were lined with young men and women with walkie-talkies. As soon as Volodin entered the building after bolting out of his limousine, the walkie-talkie brigade began reporting his entourage’s progress through the lobby, directing him into an elevator that had been held for him, then up to the sixth-floor studio he had visited more than twenty times since he became president of Russia.
The brigade worked well this evening, and by the time Volodin strode confidently into the sixth-floor studio at 6:17 p.m., the floor director was ready for him. Volodin was a small man, only five-eight, but fit and energetic, like a coiled spring ready to burst through his dark brown suit. He walked past the cameras and right onto the set without hesitation or prompting from the floor staff. Any issue involving catching him in a camera shot or disrupting what was happening on live television was clearly the studio’s problem and not the problem of the president.
The producer of the news program stopped a story in the middle of a remote broadcast and went to commercial the instant Valeri Volodin appeared in the wings of the set. Although this would look unprofessional to all those watching, it was the lesser of two evils, because it also meant Volodin’s segment would begin in a smooth and uninterrupted fashion.
Tatiana Molchanova had arrived just two minutes before her guest, but she was a pro, especially at this part of her job. She’d done her makeup in the helicopter, had listened to a producer read the questions three times en route to the station so she could be prepared for them, and she went through some practice follow-up questions she would use if President Volodin showed an interest in conducting a real interview.
She had to be prepared for any eventuality.
Sometimes Volodin sat down for his segment, did little more than make a statement, and then took off, leaving the station staff scrambling to fill the time they’d allotted for him. Other times he seemed as though he had no place to be; he would answer all of Molchanova’s questions, engage in lengthy discussions about Russian life and culture, and even the weather and hockey scores. The producers didn’t dare cut to commercial, nor did they move on with their regularly scheduled program if the “Valeri Volodin Hour” ran past seven o’clock.
They had no idea which of his two extreme moods would strike him tonight, but Tatiana and her producers were ready in either case.
While Volodin greeted Tatiana Molchanova, an audio engineer clipped a microphone to his lapel. He shook his interviewer’s hand warmly; he had known Molchanova for several years, there were even rumors of affairs in the subversive blogs of Moscow, but these rumors were derived more from a few photographs of the two of them sharing innocuous hugs at parties and other public events and the impressions given by her dreamy eyes and wide smiles while he spoke.
As soon as Volodin was in his seat, the producer of Evening News cut the commercial that was playing, and the cameras were back live on the set.
Molchanova appeared poised and ready; she spoke to her viewers about the bombing death of Stanislav Biryukov, and she asked President Volodin for his reaction.
With his hands on the desk in front of him, and a forlorn expression, Valeri Volodin spoke in his trademark voice: soft but self-assured, vaguely arrogant. “This looks very much like a Western-backed assassination. Stanislav Arkadyevich did not have real enemies in organized crime here in Russia. His work was abroad, he held no great interest to the criminal scum of the Caucasus and the near abroad.”
He looked away from the camera and toward Tatiana Molchanova. “Stanislav Arkadyevich worked tirelessly to protect the Motherland from the pervasive threats coming from the West. Fortunately, thanks to the impressive efforts of our Interior Ministry police, we learn the perpetrator of Stanislav Arkadyevich’s assassination was none other than a known agent of the West. A Croatian employee of the CIA. I do not think one must search very hard to determine who is culpable for this heinous crime against the Motherland.”
A passport photo of Dino Kadic appeared on the television screen, across which the words “Central Intelligence Agency,” in English, were superimposed in red in a font very similar to the rest of the passport’s typeface, giving the impression the document was some sort of official CIA identity card. It was a simple trick good for fooling the low end of the station’s viewers, of which there were tens of millions.
Molchanova fed Volodin his next talking point. “And now, Mr. President, on the heels of Director Biryukov’s assassination comes word from America of the radiation poisoning of Sergey Golovko, Biryukov’s predecessor at SVR.”
“Da. The case of Sergey Golovko is also very interesting. Although I had my differences with the man, I can forgive him for some of the ludicrous things he has said. After all, he is quite old and he comes from an earlier time. Still, I find his proven ties to financial corruption very unpalatable. He is a darling of the Americans, of course, a friend of Jack Ryan’s, until which time the Americans poisoned him.”
“Why would they do this, Mr. President?”
“To blame Russia, of course. Clearly they intended for him to show the effects of his poisoning only after he returned to the United Kingdom. Their scientist assassins made an error in their math. Perhaps they need new calculators or scales or something like that.” Volodin chuckled at himself, and the interviewer smiled right along with him. Laughter could be heard off camera in the studio. Volodin continued, “I don’t know if the scientists used too much polonium, or if the assassins poisoned him at the wrong time. Imagine, though, if their plan had worked. He would have returned to the United Kingdom, and he would have become sick there. America would have been held blameless, and Russia would appear to be culpable. That was their intention.” He waved an angry finger in the air.
“Since the necessary police action we took in Estonia in January, where our small and lightly equipped expeditionary force met a NATO force much larger, and ground them into the dirt, the Americans have seen Russia as an existential threat. They feel that if they can implicate Russia, blaming
us for crimes in which we had no culpability, they can marginalize us to the world.”
Volodin looked at the camera. “It will not work.”
On cue, Tatiana Molchanova asked her next softball question: “What measures will our government take to keep order and security in this time of heightened foreign threats?”
“I have decided, after careful consideration and consultation with key members of the security services, to make some important changes. It has been said that Stanislav Arkadyevich Biryukov was irreplaceable in his post as director of SVR, and I agree with this. It is for this reason that I have decided not to replace him. As evidenced by the domestic terrorism that led to the death of Biryukov, and several completely innocent civilians, as well as the international terroristic nature of the poisoning of Golovko, it is clear to see our nation’s threats, from within and from without, are one and the same.
“The threats against our nation are such that we cannot diffuse the two intelligence organizations any longer. We need cohesion in all aspects of our security services, and to this end I have ordered the reintegration between the SVR and the FSB. The organization will retain the name Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, but the FSB will now take over responsibility for all foreign intelligence collection.
“FSB director Roman Talanov will continue in his present duties and assume responsibility for the foreign component as well. He is highly capable, and he has my full confidence.”
Even Tatiana Molchanova seemed surprised; she certainly had no follow-up questions prepared in advance that were relevant, but she covered well. “This news will be very interesting to all our viewers, both here in Russia and the near abroad, where Director Talanov has protected Russia from foreign threats, and internationally, where Russian interests have been so ably protected by the late Director Biryukov.”
Volodin agreed, of course, and he began a twelve-minute impromptu speech that delved into past conflicts in Georgia, the current disputes with Ukraine, and other nations in what Volodin referred to as Russia’s privileged interests.
His speech expanded to rail against NATO, Europe, and the United States. It mentioned commodity prices for natural gas and oil, and there was even a brief Russo-centric history lesson involving Russia saving Western Europe from fascism during the Second World War.
When the president finished, after the lights dimmed and a commercial for Ford began running on the studio monitors, Volodin removed his own microphone and stood up. He shook Molchanova’s hand with a smile. She was the same height as the president, and she had the good manners to always wear flats when he came to the studio.
“Thank you so much for your time,” she said.
“It is always a pleasure to see you.”
He did not immediately let go of her hand, so the thirty-three-year-old newscaster decided to take the opportunity to press her luck. “Mr. President, your news today was very exciting, and I am sure it will be received well. I wonder if it might not be a good idea for Director Talanov to also come on my show sometime. We have not seen him in the news at all to this point. In light of his new promotion, this might be a perfect opportunity for him to introduce himself to the citizenry of Russia.”
Volodin’s smile did not waver, his deep, lustful look into Tatiana’s eyes did not diminish, but his words seemed darker somehow. “My dear lady, Roman Romanovich will not be appearing on television. He is very much a man of the shadows. That is why he does what he does, that is where he works best, and, just between you and me . . . that is where I want to keep him.”
Volodin winked.
For virtually the first time in her professional life, Tatiana Molchanova found herself unable to respond. She merely nodded meekly.
17
The Campus had been created by President Jack Ryan during his first term in office, as a small but hard-hitting outfit tasked with furthering the aims of the United States in an off-the-books fashion.
Jack Ryan put Gerry Hendley in charge. Hendley was a former senator from Kentucky who had retired from public life in disgrace in a staged case of financial impropriety, purely for the purpose of getting out of politics to begin the difficult and crucial work of establishing a sub-rosa spy shop.
To ensure the men and women of The Campus were protected in case any of their operations were revealed, before leaving office during his first elected term, President Ryan signed one hundred blank presidential pardons in secret, and he handed them over to Hendley.
With access to the intelligence feeds between the CIA and the NSA, but free of the bureaucracy and oversight of a government intelligence organization, The Campus had considerably more latitude to conduct their operations, and this had given them a power and a reach that had led to incredible successes in the past several years.
When President Ryan established The Campus, however, he had no way of knowing that one day the operational arm of the organization would be staffed by his longtime friends and associates John Clark and Domingo Chavez; his nephews Dominic and Brian Caruso; and even his own son, Jack Ryan, Jr.
Brian had been killed in action in Libya two years earlier, and he had been replaced by former Army Ranger Sam Driscoll.
Months earlier, Chinese computer hackers had broken into the Hendley Associates network, and a kill team of Chinese operatives had hit the West Odenton headquarters of Hendley Associates in the dead of night in an attempt to wipe out the organization. The Chinese attack had been thwarted, but Hendley and his team knew their operation could not continue in the same location now that the Chinese knew where they were, and perhaps even what they were.
Losing the West Odenton location created a bigger nuisance than just having to find a new building. The Campus had obtained much of its actionable intelligence by means of an antenna farm on the roof of the five-story building that intercepted classified intel traveling back and forth between the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.
That method of pulling classified data was lost to them now that the Hendley Associates building was serving the white side only.
But there was hope for The Campus and its future by means of a fifty-five-year-old paunchy and pale computer geek named Gavin Biery. Biery had spent the months since the Chinese attack working on a method to obtain intelligence via the CIA’s Intelink-TS, its top-secret network. He had taken the advanced hacking code used by the Chinese against the CIA’s computers, and then, after making sure the CIA had patched their vulnerabilities, he began to search for new threat vectors into Intelink-TS.
So far his work held much promise but little payoff.
While Gavin worked the intelligence-collection angle and Gerry Hendley worked on obtaining a new base of operations, the Campus operators, minus Jack Ryan, Jr., had been using John Clark’s expansive farm in Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a training ground.
John Clark’s rustic farm was perhaps not the most suitable location on earth for a unit of covert paramilitary and clandestine services operators to train, but for the time being, at least, it served its purpose.
Until recently, the operators had trained in secret locations all over the country, but they were vulnerable now, so they retreated to the farm and ran drills to keep themselves sharp. They’d even taken over a guest bedroom and turned it into a small op center and mini-schoolhouse. The men spent an hour a day or more using foreign-language training software on their laptops and reading the latest open-source information about the world’s major trouble spots.
And to a man they hoped like hell their training and study would be put to use with the call to return to operational status.
—
Gerry Hendley took the afternoon off from his tour of the D.C. area’s hundreds of available office buildings to drive out to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he now sat at the kitchen table in John Clark’s farmhouse. Around him were assembled the operators of The Campus, as well as Gavin Biery. They had been getting together here once a week, though these meeti
ngs had turned out to be non-affairs, really. Each week Gerry talked about his hunt for a suitable location for the organization, Clark and the operations arm discussed the training they had been undergoing, and Biery used highly technical jargon to let everyone know about the work he was doing to get the information stream from the CIA up and running again.
Though the meetings were polite enough, the truth was that everyone was eager to do something other than sit in Clark’s kitchen.
Gerry was prepared to start the meeting with a rundown of a couple of properties he’d been looking at near Bethesda, but Clark said he’d like to discuss something else.
“What’s up?” Gerry asked.
“A situation has presented itself.”
Clark told Hendley and the others about his call with Keith Bixby, CIA chief of station in Kiev, and how the CIA was interested in a Russian crime boss known as Gleb the Scar.
Domingo Chavez had spent the past few days making calls to some friends in both Russia and Ukraine, mostly men he had served with in Rainbow. Through them, he’d learned more about the Scar and his organization. No one knew what he was doing in Ukraine associating with Chechens, and both Chavez and Clark found this very suspicious, especially since it seemed war was on the horizon over there.
Hendley said, “So all you know is this guy is Russian mob, and he’s working in Kiev.”
Clark said, “I also know CIA doesn’t have the manpower to run a surveillance package on him. They are, quite reasonably, focusing on the professional intelligence officers in Kiev, and not organized crime.”