No Survivors

21

Kurt Vermulen came away from his meeting with Waylon McCabe asking himself what he was getting into. He knew he was in no position to be choosy. After all those months of being ignored, he could hardly say no to an influential supporter with billions in the bank. But he wasn’t naïve. He presumed McCabe had an agenda of his own, motivated by religion. For Vermulen, the problem of Islamist terrorism was first and foremost a security issue: He’d emphasized the Christian element in his speech because he knew it would play with the Commission for National Values. McCabe, however, had precisely the opposite priorities and sooner or later would want to go public with his views.

Still, Vermulen had to admit McCabe was right about one thing. It wasn’t enough just to tell people about the threat of Islamist terrorism; he somehow had to show it, too. McCabe was proposing what the military called a false-flag operation, designed to provoke a response by means of deception. Vermulen didn’t feel too comfortable about that. Even if the ends could justify the means, he had no idea what form those means would take. For a fortnight he tried to find a solution. And then, quite by chance, it fell right into his lap.

An old acquaintance, Pavel Novak, came into town and insisted on going to a hockey game, the Caps against the Blackhawks. So Vermulen found himself watching what to him just looked like psychos on skates beating the crap out of one another, while Novak punched him on the upper arm and yelled in his ear, “This, my friend, this is real sport!”

Vermulen wasn’t too sure about that. Football was his game, and the Steelers his team. But then Novak was a Czech. He had grown up in the years when hockey was a symbol of national pride, one way the Czechs could defeat their Russian oppressors. In 1968, when Red Army tanks had rumbled into Prague to crush the Czech government’s faltering steps toward democracy and free speech, Novak had been a junior officer in the VZS, the Czech military intelligence service. When he became a double agent, passing secret information to the Americans, he did not for one moment see it as an act of betrayal against his country. It was an act of defiance against Communist dictatorship, just like the hockey.

The first period ended and the two teams skated from the rink. Novak relaxed in his seat and his face took on a more contemplative air. He had short gray hair, gold-framed glasses, and a full gray mustache that drooped around the sides of his mouth, giving him a permanently downcast expression.

“You know,” he said, “life is simpler when it is like a hockey game. There are two sides. They both want to defeat the other. Sometimes they fight. But always they accept that there are rules. Everyone knows where they stand. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Vermulen shrugged. “I guess.”

“What I mean is, when you were on one side of the Wall, and I was on the other, both sides knew the rules. They had weapons that could destroy the whole planet. Many people thought it was crazy, but it was not so crazy. After all, none of those warheads went off. But now there are no rules. Now there are not two sides, but many sides. Now the game is falling apart and now I start to get worried.”

Vermulen’s eyes narrowed in concentration. He had spent several years attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military equivalent to the CIA. Back then he’d been Novak’s handler. A dozen years on, they were both retired, both operating in the private sector. Vermulen was a military lobbyist, a consultant to governments and corporations, an adviser in multinational arms deals. Novak worked out of Prague, a middleman between military, scientific, and intelligence interests in the former Soviet Bloc and the various clients around the world to whom they wanted to sell their respective skills or information.

“Many sides means many clients, Pavel. I’d say that was good for your business.”

“Most of the time, yes,” the Czech agreed. “But sometimes… You know all those stories that the Russians have lost one hundred nuclear weapons. Suppose I told you that those stories are accurate…”

“So Lebed was telling the truth?”

Novak was about to reply when an earsplitting blast of rock music suddenly pounded from the arena’s public-address system. He gave a grimace of discomfort and distaste, shook his head, as if in sorrow at the sullying of his sport, and leaned toward Vermulen.

“Yes, but he was wrong in one respect.” Novak was practically shouting now, but was still inaudible to anyone more than a few inches away. Even Vermulen had to strain to hear him over the music. “He said that no one knew where the bombs were. That is not completely accurate. The information will soon be available, on the open market. There is a printout. It has locations, codes, everything.”

That got Vermulen’s attention.

“Do you have it?”

Novak frowned and cupped a hand to his ear.

“Do… you… have… it?” Vermulen repeated.

The music faded away as suddenly as it had arrived.

“Not yet,” said Novak, with a sigh of relief. “But I have been approached by someone wishing to sell it, someone who knows of my reputation as, you might say, an honest broker.”

“But this printout, if it’s accurate, and it fell into the wrong hands…”

“The consequences would be unthinkable. Which is why I am asking myself, Do I want to be involved? Of course, the financial rewards would be very great. But if I were to help terrorists or drug cartels obtain such power, you know, I am not sure I could live with that. Yet how can I just turn my back and let someone else make this sale? The consequences would be just as bad.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“What you always did-take my information to those who need to hear it. You have many friends still at the Pentagon, even in the White House itself. Explain the situation. Maybe we can come to some arrangement, yes? After all, I must cover my costs.”

“Okay, maybe I can help. But I need more information. These items, on this list, are they all in America?”

“Not all, no… I cannot be certain, but my impression is some are in America, others in Europe, maybe even Asia, too.”

“Just NATO countries and allies?”

Novak raised his eyebrows, apparently amazed by Vermulen’s naïveté.

“Ach, please, my old friend, I do not need to see the list to know the answer to that question. The Russians despised and feared the rest of the Eastern Bloc even more than their enemies in the West. They knew how much we hated them. I can guarantee you, without any doubt, there will be weapons in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary… all the former Warsaw Pact nations. Yugoslavia, too.”

Before Vermulen could take the conversation any further, there was another blast of music and a roar from the crowd. The two teams were reappearing for the second period. Novak’s face lit up again. He leaned forward in his seat, all his attention on the ice, ready to follow every shift in the swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns etched by the skaters and the puck.

Kurt Vermulen, however, sat back, motionless and silent, ignoring the game. An idea had come to him, by no means fully formed, but rich in possibilities. It involved the list that Novak had mentioned and the bombs that it contained. But it had nothing whatever to do with anyone in Washington.

At the end of the game, the two men said their farewells and went their separate ways. Neither had noticed the man sitting a few seats away with a blue nylon knapsack on his lap. Once Vermulen and Novak had left the arena, the man checked the camera whose peephole lens was peering through the shiny blue fabric. The photographs still needed to be printed. But he had every confidence that they would come out just fine.