Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Bixby blew out a long sigh.

Clark thought the man was disappointed in the intel Clark had passed on. “I wish I could be more help.”

“No, you’ve helped a great deal. You’ve given me some things to think about.”

“Hope you can do more than think about them.”

Bixby chuffed into the phone. “As I’m sure you can imagine, Kiev has turned into a hotbed of intelligence activity in the past few months, with all the issues brewing between the Kremlin and Ukraine. Gleb the Scar is a person of interest, but really only a curiosity at this point, because I’m short on resources. He is going to have to do something really impressive to make himself a high-value target.”

“I understand,” said Clark, but he found himself damn curious about what a high-ranking Russian mobster was doing working in Kiev, apparently slumming as an order-taker for someone else.

“Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime at all, Bixby. Keep your head down over there. If the news reports are right, you are right in the middle of the next world flash point.”

“I wish I could say the media is exaggerating, but things at ground level look pretty bleak.”

Russian television was not officially state-controlled, as it had been during the time of the Soviet Union, but it was effectively state-controlled, as the largest networks were all owned by Gazprom, which not coincidentally happened to be partly owned by President Volodin and other members of the siloviki .

Those stations and newspapers that were not owned by the powers in the Kremlin were subject to constant harassment, scurrilous lawsuits, and absurd tax bills that took years to contest. More ominous than these measures to keep the media outlets in line, physical threats and acts of violence against journalists who broke ranks from the official propaganda were commonplace. Beatings, kidnappings, and even assassinations had greatly stifled the notion of a free press in Russia.

On the rare occasion when someone was arrested for a crime against a journalist, the accused was discovered to be a thug in a pro-Kremlin youth group, or a foreign-born henchman for a low-level mobster. In other words, no crimes against the fourth estate were ever linked back to the FSB or the Kremlin.

The vanguard of the Kremlin’s public-relations posture was Channel Seven, Novaya Rossiya, or New Russia. Broadcast in Russia and around the globe in seventeen languages, it served effectively as the Kremlin’s mouthpiece.

This was not to say Novaya Rossiya was always pro-Kremlin in its reporting. To create an air of impartiality, the network ran news pieces that were somewhat critical of the government. But these were mostly trifling matters. “Hit pieces” on corrupt politicians, but only those who’d fallen out of favor with Volodin, or on niggling municipal and state matters, such as garbage collection, union rallies, and other less consequential matters where the network could portray itself as objective.

But when it came to matters of national importance, especially revolving around Valeri Volodin and policies in which he personally intervened, New Russia’s prejudices showed through. Almost every night there were long “investigative journalism” reports concerning the conflict in Georgia and the potential for conflict in Ukraine. The Estonian government, which was staunchly pro-Western and a NATO member state, was a near-constant target of the station; seemingly every possible innuendo of financial, criminal, or sexual impropriety had been ascribed to the leadership in Tallinn. A poorly educated but faithful viewer of New Russia’s evening broadcast could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the Estonians were nothing more than a nation of thieves and deviants.

Although the moniker “Volodin’s megaphone” had been given to the network as a pejorative, on occasion this became an especially relevant description, because Volodin himself often appeared live on set during the Evening News .

And tonight was one of those evenings. With no hint that it would be coming, the producers of the six p.m. news broadcast received a call from the Kremlin at five-thirty in the afternoon, announcing that President Valeri Volodin was, at that moment, climbing into his car at the Kremlin and would be arriving shortly to conduct an interview live on the Evening News . The topic, the producers were informed by the Kremlin, would be the assassination of Stanislav Biryukov by the CIA, and the just-announced alleged polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko in the United States.

Although this immediately set in motion a frantic chain of events in the Novaya Rossiya building, it was something akin to controlled chaos, because the Evening News staff had dealt with nearly two dozen impromptu drop-in interviews in the year Valeri Volodin had been in power, and by now they had their procedures planned like a choreographed dance.

Once they learned the chief of state was on his way to the studio, the first order of business for the producers was to call Volodin’s favorite on-air personality and let her know that even though she had the evening off, regardless of where she was and what she was doing at that moment, she would be on the set performing a live interview with the president in roughly half an hour.

Tatiana Molchanova was a thirty-three-year-old reporter and newscaster, and though he had never said it outright, it was clear to everyone that the married Volodin was smitten with the raven-haired, well-educated journalist. The producers learned the hard way that interviews conducted by any newscaster other than Tatiana Molchanova would be met with displeasure by the president.

As much as her beauty surely attracted him, many secretly thought it was the fawning gaze Molchanova bestowed on Volodin while she feigned impartiality. She clearly found Volodin to be the sex symbol that he made himself out to be, and their own on-air chemistry was undeniable, even if it shattered respectable boundaries of journalistic acceptance.

As soon as Molchanova was reached by phone and notified, one of the station’s traffic helicopters was dispatched to pick her up at her Leningradskaya apartment.

With the chopper on its way, the show’s producers got to work writing the questions for the interview, pulling together graphics, and preparing the involved procedure used to make the president’s always dramatic arrival appear smooth and seamless for the tens of millions of viewers who would be watching live.

Everyone in the building knew that Volodin did not take direction from anyone, so they had to be ready to go on-air with his interview the instant he arrived. To facilitate this, the halls of Novaya Rossiya were lined with young men and women with walkie-talkies. As soon as Volodin entered the building after bolting out of his limousine, the walkie-talkie brigade began reporting his entourage’s progress through the lobby, directing him into an elevator that had been held for him, then up to the sixth-floor studio he had visited more than twenty times since he became president of Russia.

The brigade worked well this evening, and by the time Volodin strode confidently into the sixth-floor studio at 6:17 p.m., the floor director was ready for him. Volodin was a small man, only five-eight, but fit and energetic, like a coiled spring ready to burst through his dark brown suit. He walked past the cameras and right onto the set without hesitation or prompting from the floor staff. Any issue involving catching him in a camera shot or disrupting what was happening on live television was clearly the studio’s problem and not the problem of the president.

The producer of the news program stopped a story in the middle of a remote broadcast and went to commercial the instant Valeri Volodin appeared in the wings of the set. Although this would look unprofessional to all those watching, it was the lesser of two evils, because it also meant Volodin’s segment would begin in a smooth and uninterrupted fashion.