Pinnacle Event

41

“I think we just turned back north. Why would we do that?” Jonathan Kinder asked Sergey Rogozin. They were flying in from London aboard one of Kinder Industries’ corporate jets. This one was an aircraft that could carry 189 people in coach, or 12 in this Boeing Business Jet configuration. On this flight the passenger total was 3.

“I’ll find out what’s going on,” Rogozin said, unbuckling his seat belt and walking forward to the flight deck.

“What time is your speech?” Kinder asked his daughter, Victoria. “Not that things at the UN are ever on time.”

“It’s in the afternoon. I’ll be fine, besides it’s just to an IPCC Working Group,” she replied.

“I don’t know all the UN jargon, Vicki, but I know it’s important that they hear from you the results of your work,” he insisted. “And when you are done, we’ll blast it out to all the media, all the blogs, e-mail it to everyone on our lists. I have paid for full-page ads about it in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times. We have to insure that when they think of you, of us, that they think of the good work we did. We will be the last people they think of as the culprits.”

“Air Traffic Control is keeping us circling for the next twenty minutes. Morning density over New York, normal,” Rogozin explained as he walked back from the cockpit.

“Teterboro is always crowded now. They park the Gulfstreams, BBJs, and Falcons three and four deep. Billionaires’ row. You have to wait for them to rearrange all the planes to get yours out. It’s like some damn valeted parking garage,” Kinder complained.

“It’s a nice problem to have, yes?” Rogozin asked. “To be a billionaire?”

Kinder muttered something unintelligible. Rogozin leaned toward him. “Have you thought anymore about what I said? Montana will not be the safest place for you after it happens.”

“Sergey, we are going to Montana. I have three hundred and fifty thousand acres, that’s almost five hundred square miles. Boston is less than fifty square miles. I have enough room for ten cities that size. I have enough former Special Forces and Delta guys to secure it, my own sources of electricity, water, food.”

“And stockpiles of everything in warehouses and storage tanks,” Victoria added. “Sergey, he’s thought of everything out there.”

“With respect,” Rogozin pushed back, “I am not sure you have thought of what will happen if they do figure out you are among the, what did you call them, ‘the culprits’? Everybody knows it’s you that owns that ranch. You may need to be somewhere where no one knows you are there. We have places like that. Very nice places.”

Kinder shifted in his seat. “You said no one will ever know who did it. Or if they do, it will be a false trail, what did you call it, ah, a legend.”

“That American, Bowman, and the black woman from South Africa are getting closer to us. Somehow they found the Potgeiters. Then the woman sent someone to the Comoros,” Rogozin said softly.

“The Comoros? We have to stop her,” Kinder insisted.

“Don’t worry. We got the guy she sent to Comoros before he learned anything. We got there in time.”

“I told you to kill Bowman a long time ago,” Victoria Kinder interjected. “Why is he still alive?”

“We’ve tried to kill him twice. We’ll get him. In any event, it’s almost impossible to connect you two to the bombs,” Rogozin replied.

“I don’t like the word ‘almost,’ Sergey,” Kinder said slowly. “I do not like it at all.”

A bell rang. The voice from the speakers said, “We are cleared for landing. Coming in to New York.”

“The Luna isn’t frozen yet,” Konstantin Kuznetzov said to his sons, looking down on the river from his estate on the hill ridge outside of Yakutsk. “It’s later every year.” Behind him one of the world’s largest forests spread out to the west. He owned most of it and enormous deposits of natural gas under it, as well as the Sakha Arctic Shipping Company, which kept Yakutsk and other remote cities in the northeast supplied, even when it meant having to break the ice. Just within the Sakha Republic and neighboring Krasnoyarsk Krai, Kuznetzov’s land holdings were bigger than dozens of countries, including good-sized ones like Argentina.

He was one of seven Russian oligarchs the Financial Times had profiled, contending that each of them was worth more than two hundred billion dollars. Together their corporations controlled three-quarters of Russia’s gross domestic product.

Of course, they did not own 100 percent of their corporations. Some of them were traded on the Moscow stock market, but few shares ever moved. There were also the silent partners, those in the government, including the Czar who made this all possible.

Sitting in front of him were his two children, young men now, boys aged eighteen and twenty. He had flown them back from universities in Paris and Oxford, had them tell their friends that their mother was ill. He had told them not to worry, she was fine, but he needed to see them both quickly. “It is an emergency,” were his words. He had preceded them to the Sakha Luna Dashas by forty-eight hours. They had landed, each in his own plane, at the family’s airstrip and had each been helicoptered to the compound.

After they had briefly recovered from their flights, their father asked them to join him in his library, a room with a wall of glass looking east, across a cleared field, to the river below. Konstantin Kuznetzov withdrew a squat, clear-glass bottle from a mound of ice. In the center of the bottle was a metal rod. The bottle cap was a strange perforated metal plug. “It’s Heavy Water,” he announced proudly.

“Like what they use in nukes?” his older son asked. “That rod in there, that bottle looks like part of a miniature reactor.”

“Don’t worry, it’s just the name the Norwegians gave it. It’s a historical pun, yes? Not radioactive. Is vodka, better even than the Kauffman. Made with water they found under the ice in Sweden, from the last ice age. Very pure.”

The young men looked at the strange bottle and then joined in with their father, all three simultaneously taking down a full shot in one gulp. “Za tvoyo zdorovie!” they all said and clinked their shot glasses.

“Now, my sons, let me tell you about real nuclear bombs and what is going to happen soon, why we are here in Yakutsk.” They were stunned, silent. They could not look at one another. They stared instead at their father.

Finally Yuri, the younger boy, spoke. “This sounds like a line out of Tolstoy, Father, but does the Czar know?”

Kuznetzov walked away, toward the window. With his back to the boys he said, “This is not an act being carried out by any government. The Czar will condemn it. He will call for an investigation. Russian security services will help uncover perpetrators. It will be a difficult two or three years before things begin to settle down, before, what did the old man Bush call it, the New World Order takes hold.”

“But, Father, millions will die,” Yuri replied.

“Yuri, there are almost seven billion people on this planet. Too many for the systems to sustain. Too many who are just a drag on the systems. Even when we are done there will be over six billion people, Yuri, think of the size of those masses,” Kuznetzov said, walking back toward his sons.

“Will you be safe, Father?” Vladimir, the older boy, asked.

“We will all be safe, Vlady,” he said, putting his hand of the boy’s shoulder. “Here, in our forest kingdom, we will all be safe. Well supplied and comfortable. That is why I sent for you, so you will be safe, here with me.”

For the first time, the boys looked at each other, the horror showing in their expressions. “But, Father, I have to go back to Oxford in two days. I have a very important meeting with my tutor.”

“I am afraid that won’t be possible, Vladimir,” Kuznetzov said.

“How long do we have to stay out here?” Yuri asked, with panic in his voice.

“As I said, it should all settle down in two or three years, maybe sooner, maybe,” Kuznetzov said, pulling the bottle out of the ice surrounding it, pouring another round of shots.

The boys looked at each other again, as their father had his back to them. “He’s crazy,” Yuri mouthed.

Kuznetzov turned and walked toward his sons, carrying three shots of the Heavy Water Vodka. He handed one to each boy. “To the New World Order. It will all be yours.”