Matthew Dunn - Slingshot

Dmitriev shook his head. “History shows that it is very imaginable.”

The prosecutor wrote down notes. “Please clarify how the protocols can be enacted.”

Dmitriev looked at each court official and saw fear and confusion in their eyes. “If China becomes a threat, the Russian and American premiers speak. They instruct their generals to dust off the protocols. Within four days of that, Russian submarines will be in the Philippine Sea. Above them will be U.S. destroyers. Russian biological warheads will be deployed to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other cities. American interceptor missiles will shoot down any Chinese resistance. Simple.” Dmitriev read the end of his statement. “For the record, and to be absolutely clear on this, the American president had no knowledge of the agreement to use biological weapons. There is no reference to them in the protocols, they merely state that Russia will use conventional weapons. Subsequent U.S. presidents and generals who picked up the protocols would assume the same: America would be helping Russia to conduct a surgical, conventional strike against select military targets, not collude in genocide.”

The prosecutor was writing notes. He stopped and looked up. “What about the Russian president of the day? Did he know that secretly Russia would be deploying biological warheads?”

Dmitriev nodded. “Yes, but you have to understand that this was our final solution, one that we all hoped would never be used. And the only reason he never mentioned it to his American counterpart is that we told him that if he did so, the Americans would tear up their copy of the protocols. But. .”-Dmitriev rubbed his wet eyes-“. . things have changed. Dugan is now a senator, has the ear of the president, and has been put in charge of a political think tank-independent of Congress, the military, and other agencies-with the remit to analyze current strategic threats to the United States and provide creative solutions to combat those threats. He’s employed his former colleagues Joe Ballinger and Thomas Scott. The three of them will persuade the U.S. president that China is our biggest long-term threat and propose the protocols drawn up at the Berlin meeting should be enacted.”

“Do the protocols have a name?”

Dmitriev nodded, feeling like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “The protocols are called Slingshot.”

Alistair clapped his hands, turned off the television, and spun around to face Will. “Excellent! Your starting point was merely a scrap of paper and you pursued it to this. Bloody brilliant.” He pulled out his cell phone. “The prime minister will have watched the hearing, and I’m getting you in front of him. You’ll get a knighthood.”

Will shook his head, pushed himself off the seat, and put the crutches in place. “If it’s okay with you, I’d rather not.”

“You have better things to do with your time?”

“Actually, yes.”

Alistair looked furious. “God, you’re an obstinate so-and-so.” The MI6 Controller suddenly burst out laughing and pointed a finger toward Will. “But you’ve given the section a future. No one’s going to dare to touch us now.”

Will hobbled away from the coheads, then stopped and turned. “What will happen to Dugan and the others?”

Patrick answered, “Could be life imprisonment, but I’m guessing this will be a death penalty situation.” The CIA officer looked solemn. “They’ve duped numerous American presidents and could have sucked us into a world war.”

“It would have been war, and China would have had the moral high ground.” Will tried to imagine the devastation caused by the biological attack against China, and the hundreds of millions of innocent people who would have suffered agonizing deaths. “China’s a problem, but not on this scale. Idiots keep trying to identify the bad guys and start wars. It undoes everything we do.” He lifted one of his crutches and pointed it at his coheads. “Are you making progress on locating Schreiber?”

“He’s a marked man now. Every Western intelligence agency and law enforcement unit is on alert.”

“Are you closing in on him?”

Alistair sighed. “He’s vanished. Any leads we had to him are now dead.”

Will lowered his crutch, shook his head, and felt like shit. “Schreiber’s got to be found.” He thought about everything Schreiber had done, his cold and brilliant brutality, his threats against Will’s people, his success. “Every fucking Western intelligence and law enforcement agency is out of its depth.”

“Without you we. .”

“Without me you should be better.”

“William, don’t take that tone with your superiors.”

“My superiors?” Will thought about Betty. “Fuck you. Fuck it.” He turned, hobbled away, and said, “Why is it always up to me?”

Suzy sat at her desk in Langley and switched on her computer. Around her were hundreds of other CIA analysts; the place resembled the trading floor of a large investment bank rather than the brains of the Agency. She felt tired, knew that it was merely due to a stage in her pregnancy, and wondered if the boy or girl in her womb felt the same way. Boy or girl? It mattered to the section’s men, because money was resting on the outcome. Damn fools. She picked up the book Will had bought her: Work amp; Pregnancy: Have a Life, Have a Kid .

For the first time, she opened it and started flicking through the pages. She frowned as she saw that most of the pages had pencil notes in the margins; passages of text were underlined or circled.

She recognized Adam’s handwriting. Herbal teas with antioxidant properties are great in the second trimester.

And Roger’s. Iron-rich foods can be found in unexpected places like kids’ cereals.

In one section, Mark had written, Check this out-good exercise routine for Suzy .

And at the back of the book, Laith had written a shopping list of baby items, each exactly priced. The total cost was twelve hundred dollars, the value of the sweepstakes.

She closed the book, deep in thought. Why did her pregnancy matter so much to the operatives? They were killers, not gentle men. She turned to her screen and began trawling through the titles of dozens of telegrams, many from the Agency’s overseas stations. She stopped on one and opened it up.

MI6 OFFICER FOUND FROZEN TO DEATH, CAUSE OF DEATH NOT SUSPICIOUS

Oh dear God. Peter Rhodes. Should she tell Will? She supposed he’d find out soon enough. But she didn’t need to be the one to tell him that his act of kindness had turned out to be a death sentence. Anyway, she didn’t know if she’d be able to break the news to him without shedding a tear, and she made it a personal rule to never cry in front of colleagues, especially men. They always misunderstood what it meant.

She placed a hand over the book and sighed. The team didn’t mind if her baby was a boy or a girl. What did matter to them was that a new life was coming into the world, and they had to support her with that process.

Maybe because the men believed that in some small way they were giving something back to humanity.

That evening, Will entered the ground-floor communal entrance to his West Square home, looked at the stairs, and wondered how he’d manage the two flights to reach his third-floor apartment. The crutches were severely pissing him off; he hadn’t even been able to buy groceries for his dinner, as he had no way to carry them.

The door to the ground-floor apartment opened. Retired major Dickie Mountjoy stepped into the corridor. The former Coldstream Guards officer was about to make a brisk walk to the Army amp; Navy Club in central London’s Pall Mall. He did so at precisely the same time every weekday evening, and once at the club would socialize with other ex-guardsmen. Never former infantry officers, and heaven forbid anyone who’d spent their career at sea. It was Wednesday, so this evening he’d partake in a drop of sherry, then lamb hotpot with vegetables, followed by a glass of port. Then he’d march home so that he was back in time for the ten o’clock news and a cup of cocoa while completing the Telegraph crossword.