The Threat

She said her name was Larissa Fyodorovna. She worked for the Russian government, and her assignment for the next three days was to make the U.S. delegation comfortable, welcome, and happy. Which she sounded determined to make happen come what may. Dan leafed through his welcome packet as they trailed her through an entrance hall.

He caught up to Blair as they climbed a staircase in blond wood and mauve carpeting. Larissa, chattering explanations in English and for some reason French too, took them into a business center. Yet another area held “technical facilities,” library, dining areas.… Only gradually did he realize how huge the complex was.

Behind them the press peeled off to a media lounge. Everything was new but already worn around the edges, and the staff, except for Fyodorovna, didn’t seem all that interested in their guests. The two-room suite a bored escort showed him to was adequate, no more, with a sterile air that made him uncomfortable. It was icy cold, too. He turned the thermostat up and stood before a casement window. It overlooked a cruise passenger terminal, with a small ship flying Dutch colors.

When he turned around, he was alone, though he’d thought Blair was behind him. He went back to the elevators, looking for her blond height. Instead he caught sight of Larissa again, who was waving her clipboard and screaming at a porter.

Somehow they’d been booked in separate rooms. The desk people were uncooperative and belligerent. They insisted the reservations were correct. The Defense people had a separate block from State and the White House. Dan was frustrated, but assumed they’d get it straightened out. They’d talked about getting away together. He wanted to see the Central Naval Museum; she wanted to see the Hermitage, though she’d been before on other jaunts.

He finally found her room. When she said, “Hey, come in,” he rotated, looking up, and whistled. Three big rooms, with a knockout sea view and a curved steel staircase leading up to a loft.

“You should see the bathroom,” she said.

“You live nice up here.”

“Up here?”

“They’ve got me in the other wing. Nothing like this.”

“Well, go back and get your suitcase,” she said, smiling. He held her off to look at her. She was so slim and honed the air around her seemed to glow. She met his lips in a kiss, then kneaded his neck. “How is it today?”

“Not too bad, actually.”

“I have to have dinner with my people. To get our positions straight.”

“Need company?”

“Sorry, honey, this’ll be a working meal. Why don’t you just get some rest?” She gave him another quick kiss and patted his arm. “And I’ll be back, and we can go down to the bar or something before it gets too late.”

* * *

But as it turned out he slept through the afternoon and night, more tired than he’d realized from the stress and long hours. He was vaguely aware of her sliding in next to him, sometime late, but didn’t come fully awake. The next morning she had to shake him into consciousness to make the limo shuttle out to Tsarskoye Selo for the opening ceremonies.

The space was unashamedly opulent: a massive ballroom at the Catherine Palace, half baroque fantasy, half barbaric nightmare; the walls seemed to be made of solid gold. Three speakers kicked off: a UN diplomat from a Geneva-based center, the colonel general in charge of the Twelfth Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and Dr. Sola. The old man still looked wilted, but lectured with messianic fervor on the need to secure both nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.

Dan listened with rapt attention. Probably alone among all those in the magnificent room, he’d experienced a nuclear detonation close up. He could put faces to the dead. Had seen men and women he was responsible for blinded, flesh roasted on their bones by the thermal pulse. He got letters from them every week, telling him about their recurrent nightmares, their white blood cell counts, and most poignant, thanking him for saving the ship.

He wished again he hadn’t taken Horn in so close. No one had told him a nuclear weapon might be aboard the trawler. But he still felt guilty, and figured he always would.

Sola said, “At Princeton I was privileged to work with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. Before he died he said to me, ‘The genie won’t go back into the bottle, for me. But maybe he will in your lifetime.’ And ever since, that is what I have worked toward.

“The theft of one nuclear weapon, or of fifteen kilos of enriched metal, would inflict suffering never seen on the face of the globe since 1945.

“This is not just a problem for the United States, or Russia, or the European Union. It is a problem for every country that harbors a dissatisfied minority, an insurgent group, possibly even one madman with enough resources and helpers.