Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

By this time, the American’s Secret Service people had surrounded him and were trying to hustle him down the temporary viewing stand. Other statesmen were being protected by clumps of their own bodyguards, causing a twenty-leader pileup that resembled rush hour on the Outer Ring.

Inside the truck, Suslov had been momentarily off-balance when he’d ripped off the door, and his gun had gone clattering under the console. Chernuchin, scrambling in right behind, saw a military man over by the controls. Was that… Maltsev, from Intelligence? He delayed before lifting his gun to fire and Suslov, trying to get up, knocked his comrade sideways, making him miss.

Just then, Grigoriy Gerasimov returned with the program’s director and a borrowed set of now-useless keys. Before he could stop him, Pyotr Tamnov hurried up from behind and swung his clipboard with all his might, catching the big man above his right ear and knocking him back down to the floor, unconscious. Chernuchin, seeing what happened, whirled and took out the TV director with his second slug.

Viktor had his own gun in his hand by now. Army training had made him an expert shot, but now he hesitated, unwilling to risk hitting Gerasimov. Chernuchin, whirling back around, had no such qualms, and his third bullet was a through-and-through, hitting Viktor in the non-shooting arm. It kept going, shattering the mixer board controlling the light show and putting it, finally, out of action. Then the shooter took one in the gut himself—as the inquest would later show—from the wounded officer working security in the truck, identified as Major Vassily Bondarenko, Commander of the Sakhalin Island barracks, and he fell on his longtime comrade.

Two down, but not the third. Gerasimov was in the truck, trying to reach the wounded Army major. Before he could, the kid stepped out from behind a panel of machines and calmly stabbed him in the neck, sending him down behind the console. Which gave Viktor a clear shot at the boy, and he didn’t miss.

When the security guards reached the scene, they began administering first aid to the dying thugs and the Army major, not knowing good guy from bad. No one saw or heard the head of state broadcasting on the far side of the console as he lay bleeding out from his wound.

It was all over but the shouting. The screams from what was left of the crowd of fleeing people echoed off the bricks and cobblestones of Red Square. Lara desperately tried to get to Viktor and Grisha, but was among those being physically manhandled by a formed-up cordon of security people. The fireworks were still going off in the night sky above the darkened battlements of the Kremlin. So when she was shoved sideways by one of the guards, Lara was able to catch sight behind her of a man slowly, deliberately moving toward the risers from the rear of the Square.

Only now, with no one in charge and everyone jostling to get their own VIPs to the cars that were revving up behind the Square, had the American president made it down from his place of honor on the viewing stand. He’d caught one of his shoes in the corrugated metal planking of the bleachers as he was being frog-marched by his people, twisting his foot, and was now the last foreign leader to be led away, limping in obvious pain.

Had he been shot? The knot of American reporters on the trip had been gathered together below, hemming them in around the now-useless microphone as the First Lady, her press aides, and the Secret Service all tried to get through.

So no one could see what Lara saw: a well-built young man of twenty-five or so, with longish hair, holding a heavy leather book up in front of him.

Nikki!

The young man’s eyes were fixed on the politician in the middle of the maelstrom. His lips were moving, muttering something Lara was too far away to hear. As he was the only person actually walking toward the viewing stand in front of the Kremlin instead of running away, the TV cameramen who didn’t have a good angle on the truck now turned their lights and cameras and mikes on him.

In the TV truck, the monitors with the live feeds were still working. Weakened by the loss of blood and with no one to attend him, Gerasimov looked up and saw who it was on the screen. He tried to rasp out, “Nikki, stop! No!!” but no one could hear him.

Nikki didn’t stop. He looked neither left nor right, but kept walking. The directional microphones from the camera positions were picking up his words now. “I don’t need a video, I don’t need a script! Here’s the proof, absolute proof, of the perfidy of the West! Of the so-called democrats, the ones with the blood of twenty-five million on their hands! More!”

And he was still coming on. “Throw out the foreigners! This is our country, made with our hands, with our blood. Nashi!! Ours!”

And then they saw yet one more gun.

Reporters and security people alike were tripping over each other and the maze of wires at the foot of the viewing stand to get away. Nikki raised his pistol. For a moment, the assassin had a clear shot at his target and, before anyone could stop him, he uttered the words “Russia for the Russians!” and fired, straight at the American’s heart.

Miraculously, the bullet bounced off the slender steel microphone stand. He aimed again. Lara, hurrying toward him but still twenty meters away to his left, knew she had one chance. “Nikki! Over here!”

When he turned to look at her, she stopped and aimed her uncapped laser pen, the one she used on the maps in class, directly into his eyes. With the red dot on its target she pressed the button, blinding him with three hundred megawatts of amplified light.

Afterward the judges, whose eventual verdict was insanity, were able to reconstruct from the din picked up by the microphones Nikki’s last words, even as he blindly emptied his gun toward the podium and injured three of the guards. “In the name of God, I defy you and your godless democracy and your Finns and your Armenians and your Tajiks and your Jews!”

Nearly simultaneously, automatic fire from several directions—no one could be certain later which of the bodyguards had fired first—mowed down the would-be assassin, who fell onto the cobblestones in front of millions of horrified TV viewers.

Her mobile rang. It was the “Hunters’ Theme” from Peter and the Wolf . Grisha! By the time Lara could get to the truck, the wounded man behind the console had dropped his phone. Its clatter brought the medics, but by now there was little they could do.

Gerasimov smiled at Lara and, with a great effort, raised a hand up to touch her face. He seemed surprised to see his hand was covered in blood. “Larashka…”

She took his hand in both of hers. “Don’t try to talk.”

His words were little more than a hoarse whisper. “So much blood. Is Nikki all right?”

Behind her, Lara could hear someone clattering up the stairs of the truck. She bent closer to Grisha. His lips were moving and she tried to catch his words. “…if only I was… a better referee…”

The woman named Tatiana Ivanova Gerasimova tapped Lara on the shoulder. “Let me be with him. He’s all I have left.”

Lara, reluctantly, turned away. She understood something about loss.

When she joined him outside the truck, Viktor’s arm was done up expertly in a sling. She took his good hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed her back. There was an ambulance across the Square to take him to the hospital.

Together they walked across Red Square, coming to the place where Nikki’s body lay. His hair was fanned out behind him, and medics, no longer in a hurry, were unzipping a black body bag.