Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

07:33 P.M._

The journalists didn’t notice the Lawyer. He was nimble and skilled enough to avoid drawing attention to himself. Opening a non-descript grey door, the Lawyer stepped quickly through it and appeared in a small room with a big table in the middle place in such a way that you could only get to other door on the opposite side of the room sideways, squeezing along the wall.

A poker-faced person in the uniform of the airport security police was sitting at the table. The Lawyer showed his ID card and the policeman nodded and pressed the button. The door behind him opened with a quiet buzz.

The Lawyer squeezed past the table, walked through the door and found himself in a space strikingly different from the hi-tech style of one of the world’s most modern airports.

Instead of plastic, polished stone, glass and metal, here the tree was king. Heavy oak panels covered the walls and ceiling. The parquet, velvet drapery, leather sofas and floor lamps bearing the coat of arms of the vanished empire helped transport this small hall back into the time when the foundation stone for the Aswan dam was laid upon the Nile, when Soviet rockets in Cuba were put on standby, and Khruschev banged his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly in a protest against the Philippines delegate.

The person on duty here had the uniform of an officer of the Federal Guard Service. He double-checked the Lawyer’s documents and opened an elevator door in front of him. Here too everything was from the Soviet period with brass buttons with digits for the floors, an ebonite phone and an ashtray wired into the elevator wall. The Lawyer pressed the button with the digit ‘7’ and the elevator plummeted as if into an underworld.

Of course, Joshua Kold was a key player in the global geopolitical game conducted from time immemorial between the largest states of the world. So it would be absurd to assume he’d be simply left to the mercy of fate in the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport. He could not be left as prey to journalists, and, above all to the agents of interested intelligence agencies who might try anything from banal elimination – after all, nobody hurried to hand over umbrellas with poisoned needles to the museums – to no less banal kidnapping (Mossad had great experience in this kind of thing).

So, as soon as Kold got off the plane from Hong Kong he was taken at once if not under protection then at least under intense guardianship, and smoothly but persistently forwarded to that oak hall with floor lamps from where the elevator carried him away into the top secret destination of Bunker A.

The history of this shelter thirty metres down is fascinating and deserves a separate novel. It is closely connected with the history of the creation of Sheremetyevo airport and the destiny of the Soviet leader of that time, Nikita Khrushchev, who intended to catch up and overtake America and complete the triumph of communism no later than 1980.

Awed by the scale of London’s Heathrow airport, Khrushchev gazed at the surrounding coppices and woods as he paused on the ladder of the Tu-104 after landing at the drab airfield of the Air Force of the USSR not far from Sheremetyevo village, and muttered: “It will be necessary for us to build something like in London.”

Those who needed to heard the phrase, remembered it and took it as a guide to action. The first Soviet international airport quickly accepted Boeings and Caravels, but for the convenience of official government delegations one extra but rather essential trifle was needed – ensuring the safety of the top officials of the state.

Maybe their enemies would rattle the saber, the USSR wouldn’t yield, and nuclear warfare could find the country leaders anywhere. Fuel was added to the fire by messages from the USA provided by ‘moles’ working for the Soviets who had dug into the earthy depths of the Yankee state apparatus. It became clear that under Denver International Airport – the biggest in the world, by the way – the Americans had constructed a huge bunker capable of housing all the heads of the country and members of their families in case of a nuclear attack.

Thus, the need to construct Bunker A under Sheremetyevo airport was determined, and the goal achieved, as well as possible in the country of developed socialism, ‘in a short time, ahead of schedule’.

For decades, the bunker stood on ‘alert’ with all its rooms ready to receive high-ranking guests at any second, with all life support systems checked and ready and every safety system in perfect order.

Of course, one might assume that perestroika, and especially that post-perestroika time in which hundreds of similar useless objects were destroyed, would not have spared Bunker A. But the democratic leaders of Russia cared as much for their safety as their totalitarian predecessors, and so the bunker continued to serve, hidden under the new terminals of Sheremetyevo as a relic being, a theromorph of another ancient reptile that conjured horror by the mere fact of its existence.

For all these years, none of the highest dignitaries of the Soviet empire ever visited Bunker A – fortunately, there was no need. The same was true of the leaders of new Russia. And so Joshua Kold became the first – and the only – inhabitant of the bunker.

The Lawyer sometimes wondered: how does he sleep thirty metres down? Don’t ghosts of the past eras disturb him in this place where six workers died, according to hearsay, in the lift mine of the bunker during a construction glitch?

It is much better to ask such questions over a glass of fine cognac or vintage wine, in a nice, friendly chat. But Kold, it seemed, wasn’t willing to be on friendly terms with anybody, and kept himself closed and detached, justifying his surname. Perhaps some positive news might perk him up, or bring him out of his stupor, but the message the Lawyer was carrying to the inhabitant of Bunker A hardly promoted a positive spirit.