FOREWORD Read online

  “A lot can happen in six months.” Rosenberg warned. Aware that he was close to overstepping the mark, he decided to change the subject. His lip curled into a sly grin. “You know, Dr Foster has a real crush on you.”

  She cocked her head to one side, smiling in bemusement. “Oh, please.”

  “Hey, what’s so strange about that? He’s a good-looking boy, lots of money, a nice house. And,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, saving the best until last, “he’s Jewish.” He wondered what kind of reaction that would provoke. Jo’s ex-husband was also Jewish.

  She responded by laughing for the first time that day. “Yeah, and he’s also slept with just about every nurse on his staff.”

  “Well,” Rosenberg conceded with a sly shrug, “nobody’s perfect.”

  Jo finished her coffee and stood. “Right now, Ivan, men are the last of my priorities. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some notes to finish up.”

  Within an hour, Doctor Joanne Miller had surrendered to a fitful, lonely sleep.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON D.C.

  Margaret Mitchell had never seen her husband look so tired. The ordeal of having to fire Bert Aldick had really drained him, perhaps more so than any other single task he’d had to perform since taking office. He hadn’t spoken to her about it, and after twenty-five years of marriage, Margaret knew better than to press him. He would talk about it once he was ready. Until then, Bert Aldick was a taboo subject.

  It was well past 1am when the First Couple finally retired to the Lincoln bedroom. The President would be allowed no more than four hours’ sleep before his first meeting of the next day, as had been the case almost every day since the Mitchells had moved into the White House.

  To think that men would willingly spill blood for this job, Margaret thought incredulously. Why? After three and a half years of his Presidency, she had watched her husband age by as many decades; an observation that had been cruelly noted by several reporters. Indeed, she was beginning to doubt whether he had the stamina to last for the remainder ofthis term, never mind another. Part of her would be relieved if he were defeated in the upcoming election. She suspected that even her husband might be privately thankful to be rid of the burden of office, regardless of how much he denied it.

  As the President climbed into bed, Margaret glanced bitterly at the door behind which the Secret Service would be standing guard, periodically checking on the First Couple through a tiny peephole. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the room was bugged. No aspect of their lives was sacred, nothing subject to privacy. For all intents and purposes, the Mitchells had become elected slaves of the American people.

  The President was staring blankly at the ceiling, unready to yield to his tiredness. To the rest of the world, he was a statesman; an abstract figure both ridiculed and respected. A man with the power to destroy worlds and replace them with new ones. An almost godlike entity. But to Margaret Mitchell, he was still plain old Eddie, the same man she’d met so many years before when both had been young teachers fresh out of Harvard. Despite his lofty position, he still had the same doubts and fears as the next man, and perhaps that was what distinguished him from so many of his predecessors. When he said he cared, hemeant it, and it was purely because the American people had believed him that the Mitchell residence was now 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., and not a suburban house in Sacramento, California.

  He hadn’t ever really harbored ambitions to high office, especially notthis high. In fact, the Mitchell Presidency had come about almost by accident. During the first round of primaries in the last election, his party’s leading contender had been ruined by a catastrophic money-laundering scandal that would ultimately result in a five-year prison sentence. The party leadership, stunned as it watched its electoral prospects disappear into a vacuum created by the lack of a viable candidate, had approached Mitchell out of desperation. Despite his relative inexperience, Mitchell - then Governor of California - possessed all the necessary qualities for a Presidential candidate. He was honest, photogenic, a brilliant debater and, best of all, had no trace of a shady past. So, with some reluctance, he’d accepted the invitation to revive the electoral prospects of the party. By the time of the convention in San Diego, he had almost single handedly converted a ten point poll deficit into a twenty point lead over the opposition. His opponent, despite having attempted to make capital of Mitchell’s inexperience, had been seen by the voters as a dull reactionary with nothing to offer a forward looking nation, whereas Mitchell had come across as witty, positive and natural; the kind of guy to whom Joe Six-Pack could relate. The result was one of the biggest landslides in living memory.

  In January of the following year, Edward Mitchell had assumed office with typical modesty, his inaugural speech characterized by a promise to do his best for the American people and an acknowledgment that although he would sometimes make mistakes - as what mortal man wouldn’t? - he would match his errors with the courage to admit to them.

  Those closest to the President knew that his biggest weakness was pride. He had made a promise to the American people, and Edward Mitchell was a man who prided himself on never breaking a promise to anybody. So every decision he took as President - every action made in his name - had to reconcile to that very promise. There would be no hint of corruption or scandal. He had decided that it was time to restore some honor to the Presidency. Inevitably, that had made him enemies both on Capitol Hill and amongst special interest groups alike.

  As she watched him lay beside her, his mind still too active for sleep, Margaret was both proud of what her husband had achieved and disappointed in what he had become. Proud because of what he stood for; proud because he was perhaps one of the few men to have inhabited this office in recent years who understood what it was really all about. Yet she was disappointed that he would not allow himself the weaknesses of other men. He had no desire to carve himself a place in history, only to be true to himself and to know at the end of his term that he had done his utmost for those he served.

  Those he served were, of course, the American People; an abstract collective that Margaret was beginning to resent, if for no other reason than because they had stolen her husband without showing any gratitude for the personal sacrifices he had made for them.

  “Time to sleep, honey,” she whispered, turning off the bedside lamp in the knowledge that her husband would continue to lay awake in the darkness, wondering if anything he’d done that day could have been done better. She gave him a reassuring peck on the forehead and held his hand beneath the silk sheets.

  Within minutes, he was asleep. It would not last for long.

  Margaret was wrenched from slumber when the bedroom door swung open. She jerked upright, instinctively knowing that something was wrong. A quick check of the bedroom clock told her it was barely 3am. The President was still sleeping soundly into his pillow.

  The White House Chief of Staff, Jim Reynolds, raced to her husband’s side of the bed, brandishing a piece of paper. Wearing only a silk dressing gown, he muttered something reminiscent of an apology to the First Lady as he entered the room.

  Reynolds was part of the White House furniture. So obsessive was he about controlling access to the President that nobody got near Mitchell without his express permission. He had cast a constant shadow over the White House ever since masterminding the brilliant campaign that had swept Mitchell into office, and he’d quickly carved himself a reputation as a ruthless political operator to whom voters were considered mere abstractions, identified only in terms of focus groups and opinion polls. Some referred to him as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ or ‘The King Of Spin’, although some of the other terms applied to him – particularly by the President’s political enemies – were somewhat less elegant He knew what people said about him, of course. There wasn’t much that Jim Reynolds didn’t know when it came to who was saying what to whom. Few people even farted in Washington without Reynolds knowing about it, and fewer still did so wit
hout his formal consent. Accordingly, the former native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana had quickly become one of the most reviled men in the capital, or one of the most respected, depending on one’s political leanings. That didn’t bother him, so long as he remained one of the most powerful. And the key to power in this town, he knew, was controlling access to the President. That was the reason that he, instead of a junior aide, was delivering a message to Edward Mitchell at 3am. Margaret wondered if the man ever slept. Probably not, she thought.

  “Jim,” she began to protest, “what the hell…”

  Reynolds’ voice was clipped with urgency. “We need the President downstairs, right now, Ma’am. I’m sorry,” he added as an afterthought.

  Almost as if his subconscious mind had registered the words, the President’s eyes snapped open, taking a moment to adjust to a day that wasn’t supposed to begin for at least another three hours.

  “What is it?” he asked Reynolds, a horrible taste in his mouth as an unwelcome wave of consciousness swept over him.

  “Flashtraffic from Moscow, sir. Levelcritic .” He handed the piece of paper to the President, who switched on the bedside lamp and squinted against the light as he groped for his reading spectacles. Squinting against the light, he needed to read the message twice to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. As comprehension dawned, he bit his lip so hard that it nearly bled.

  “What gives?” Margaret asked anxiously, sensing the anxiety emanating from her husband as he took in the contents of the message.

  “Godonov’s dead,” he told her in a matter-of-fact monotone.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Within minutes of the succinct Kremlin press release, telephone lines around the world were buzzing with the news of the Russian President’s sudden death. Special Bulletins interrupted late night shows. Newspaper editors were awoken and duly issued orders to hold front pages that had already been reserved to accommodate news of the Aldick scandal. It was a difficult choice for many newspapermen and women to make; should they award the front page to a potential crisis in Russia or a sex scandal in the American Government? The answer to this dilemma inevitably depended on the nature of the publication and, accordingly, the preferences of its readership. The only thing that mattered was that whichever story was given priority, circulation figures would generally be better than on a normal news day.

  In an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, however, both Bert Aldick and Mikhail Godonov were the last things on the mind of the New York Post’s chief foreign correspondent.

  “Faster! Faster!” the woman beneath him was panting when the shrill ring of the telephone broke his firm, rhythmic thrust.

  “Oh, dammit,” Richard Gellis snarled. “What now?”

  “Let it ring,” she pleaded, squirming against his pelvis. “Don’t stop.”

  “I have to. Could be important.”

  Gellis reached for the receiver and picked it up, perspiring and breathless from his exertions. He thought that whoever it was had better have a damn good reason for interrupting what until now had been a rather pleasant evening with a woman he’d met only two hours earlier in a Soho bar.

  “Gellis.”

  The woman sulked when he withdrew from her and turned his back. She didn’t see the shocked expression on his face as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

  “This’d better not be a joke, Alec,” he warned. Gellis’s companion couldn’t imagine what could possibly be more important than humping her brains out. All she could tell from the tone of the muffled voice on the other end of the line was that it sounded excited about something.

  “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  She kicked Gellis in the back of the leg, causing him to yelp. He looked over at her, first with puzzlement, then with a leer. Oh, what the hell? The crisis in Russia could wait, right?

  “Make it an hour.”

  Gellis’s SAAB Turbo convertible pulled up outside the Post’s offices precisely fifty-six minutes later. The journey from Upper Manhattan had taken twenty minutes in traffic that was relatively clear at this time of night. That had allowed him ample time to catch up with unfolding events on the car radio. Although Godonov’s death provided the lead headline, its impact had been slightly blunted by the shock resignation of the President’s well-respected National Security Advisor, Bert Aldick.

  Damn! Gellis thought. I take a day off work and the world goes nuts. Go figure.

  Even as the thought occurred to him, the analytical part of his mind was somewhat disturbed that the President would have to deal with a potentially volatile situation in Russia without a National Security Advisor who was widely thought to be the most able for many years. He briefly wondered whether there was any connection between the two events, but quickly discarded the thought. How could there be?

  Gellis was better qualified than most to understand how potentially volatile the situation in Russia might be. The son of an American diplomat and a Russian doctor, he was born in St Petersburg back in the days when it had still been known as Leningrad. Although Richard and his parents had moved to the United States when he was five years’ old, he was - thanks to his mother - fluent in the language, and had spent several years in Moscow since the collapse of Communism, both as a student and as a reporter. Not only did he understand the mentality of the Russian people far better than they did his but, thanks to his ancestry and supreme language skills, he had found it easier than many of his fellow American reporters to get an inside line to the heart of Russia’s chaotic government. All of this combined to give him an acute awareness of the implications of Godonov’s death.

  This knowledge and experience didn’t make him feel any easier.

  “Sorry to interrupt your vacation, Richie,” his editor remarked as soon as Gellis entered his office.

  That was the first lie of the evening, Gellis knew. Alec Potter was one of the new breed of managing editors; a corporate man to the death. With an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in journalism from Columbia, he certainly hadn’t needed to prove his journalistic talents in the real world in order to land his own corner office at the Post. He understood that circulation figures were the only reality that mattered, and the best way to boost those figures was to scare the living crap out of as many people as possible. Potter often wished he’d been an editor during the Cold War, when the odd front page scare story about a Superpower crisis had been guaranteed to add another couple of percent to the circulation figures. Nowadays, such incidents were extremely rare, so a crisis in Russia provided an exceptional opportunity that he was determined not to waste.

  “No problem, boss,” came the equally dishonest response.

  “So, Richie,” the editor smiled, chewing on a blunt pencil. It was a habit he’d developed since quitting cigarettes a few months’ ago. He often joked that he was a twenty-pencil-a-day man now. “You’re our resident Russian expert. How do you read this?”

  “Extremely dangerous,” Gellis stated, slumping into a convenient chair. “Godonovis Russia. Has been for the best part of a decade. Most of the men around him are old-style technocrats. None of them have the charisma or support to stand out as an obvious contender.”

  “We’re holding the front page. I want to do something that’ll really grab people’s attention. Any radicals in the running to succeed him?”

  Gellis ran a hand through his thick blonde hair and scratched his head. “Aren’t there always? Hell, this is Russia we’re talking about. According to their constitution, the Prime Minister will succeed him, but Pushkin is considered too staid by most experts, and that’s saying something for Russia. He’ll assume the Presidency in the short term, but I don’t expect him to last long. Their biggest priority right now will be to find someone who can lead them through the Ukrainian conflict. Pushkin just won’t cut it. I would be surprised if the political maneuvering hasn’t already begun.”

  “Okay, so we can write off Pushkin. Talk to me about radicals.”

  That wasn’t hard. Russi
a’s parliament, the Duma, was full of them, representing as it did every extreme of that vast nation’s political spectrum. “Well, there’s Ninchenko, leader of the nationalist bloc. He’s got widespread support in the armed forces, makes a lot of threats about restoring what he callsGreater Russia and nuking anybody who gets in his way. And then there’s always…”

  Before Gellis could say anything else, Potter snapped his fingers and pointed at the reporter. “That’s our guy. That’s the sort of bad guy we need.” The front-page headline formed in his head: CHAOS IN RUSSIA THREATENS WORLD PEACE.

  “Alec,” Gellis reasoned, “I don’t honestly think they’ll allow a lunatic like Ninchenko to become President. They need stability, not fanaticism.”

  “Well, who decides what happens next?”

  It was like explaining the alphabet to an infant, Gellis thought. “Initially, the constitution allows for these circumstances. Like it or not, Pushkin is now President. But the Duma has the power to impeach him. If that happens – which it could but probably won’t – it’s an open field.” As a bleak afterthought, he added, “Actually, I don’t think we need worry ourselves about radical politicians.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the balance of power lies with the military. They tolerated Godonov purely because ousting him would’ve caused too much upheaval. Now he’s gone, they might decide they’re tired with being killed in pointless wars without getting paid for it. If they decide to make a move on the Presidency, I don’t see there’s a whole lot anybody could do about it. All you need is a high-profile General with enough charisma to swing popular opinion his way, and - hey presto - you’ve got an instant dictator. Hell, the Russians love strong leaders. Everybody knows that. They’ve never known any different until recently. If you listen to what ordinary people say, then…”