Ted Bell - Tsar

“And what was the balance at the time?”

“Five million, I believe. American dollars.”

Hawke pulled his sat phone from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table in front of the Russian.

“You might want to give your Swiss bankers a call, general. Just to confirm your current balance. According to Dr. Halter, it should now be twenty-five million.”

“Twenty million dollars to save the whole world? It hardly seems enough,” Kuragin said, gazing at them from beneath his heavily lidded eyes.

“Shall we say thirty million?”

“Say it and find out.”

“Thirty million.”

“Not enough.”

“All right. We are prepared to pay you forty million dollars for that machine, General Kuragin. And the code that goes with it, of course. Effective immediately. Dr. Halter will call the bank in Geneva with wiring instructions for an additional twenty million dollars.”

“Can you say fifty?”

Hawke glanced at Halter, who nodded his head. Stefan had held the sat phone to his ear, speaking French to an anonymous banker in Geneva as the negotiation progressed.

“Fifty million dollars,” Hawke said. “Final offer.”

“I accept.”

Halter spoke a few more words into the phone, handed it to Kuragin, and said, “This gentleman will confirm that an additional thirty million dollars has been electronically placed in your account, general.”

“This is Kuragin. My account number is 4413789-A. May I have my balance, please? I see. Well, thank you very much. Au revoir, monsieur, et merci.”

He handed the phone back to Halter and pulled a gold pen from inside his uniform jacket.

“Here, I’ll write the code down for you inside this matchbook cover. Now, I must ask you both to leave the room. But first, please bring me some clean towels and a large bowl of ice. Also, that meat cleaver hanging by the stove, if you’d be so kind. It looks reasonably sharp.”

Hawke and Halter looked at each other, stunned, as the Cambridge don pocketed the matchbook with the detonator code printed inside.

“Surely you’re not planning to do anything foolish, general.”

“On the contrary. If it appears in any way that I have given up this damn thing voluntarily, I won’t last five minutes. Every KGB agent in the world will be lining up to assassinate me.”

“Wait,” Hawke said. “I’m sure we can get that damn bracelet off with a hacksaw. We’ll think of some way to make it look as if you were abducted, and then-”

“No. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’ve been drinking vodka all day in anticipation of what’s coming, and I’m damn well ready to do it. It is the only way for me to survive this, I promise you. Even the most cynical Russian would never believe a man capable of doing such a thing to himself!” He laughed at his own notion and filled his glass to the brim.

“You’ll have to explain giving up the code, general,” Hawke said.

“A moment of weakness? A butcher has a meat cleaver poised above your left hand, and he asks you for a number. Few among us could resist the temptation to give it to him, wouldn’t you agree?”

Hawke and Dr. Halter rose from the table and brought him the items he’d requested. Hawke couldn’t resist running his index finger along the edge of the heavy cleaver’s blade. Sharp as a razor, it instantly produced a thin line of bright red blood on the pad of his fingertip.

“Please leave me alone until it’s over and done,” Kuragin said. “When you return, you can bind me to this table in a convincing fashion. There is a length of heavy rope beneath my chair. Then call the emergency medical ambulance. And then you must leave at once. Understood? And never tell a living soul what has happened here. Never.”

“Yes,” Hawke said, holding the swinging kitchen door open for Dr. Halter. “We understand perfectly.”

The two men walked out into the adjacent living room and sat in the two wooden chairs facing the fire. Neither spoke for a few long minutes.

“He’s finishing the vodka,” Hawke finally said, gazing into the flames, “then he’ll do it.”

“Do it? You don’t actually think he’ll go through with this insanity, do you?” Halter said, an incredulous look in his eyes. “No one has that kind of courage. No one.”

“We shall soon see, won’t we?”

A moment later, a horrendous thunk was followed by a howl of animal agony that pierced Hawke’s soul. He leaped from his chair and raced into the kitchen.

Kuragin had done it.

Bright red blood spattered the white stucco wall beside the kitchen table. The bloody left hand, still twitching, was completely severed from the forearm by the blade of the meat cleaver, now buried at least an inch deep into the wooden table. The general had pitched forward in his chair when he passed out, his forehead resting on the table. He wasn’t making a sound. Shock had already set in, and the man was clearly unconscious, blood spurting wildly from the grievous wound at the end of his arm.

Hawke quickly wrapped the man’s bloody stump in a tightly wound towel and plunged it into the bowl of ice, while Halter collected the blood-spattered Beta detonator that had fallen to the floor. That done, Halter picked up the kitchen phone and rang for an ambulance, giving the address of the farmhouse, saying only that a man had been found grievously injured and was losing a lot of blood. A doctor should come as quickly as humanly possible. He hung up without giving his name.

“WHAT TIME IS the Tsar accepting his award tonight?” Hawke asked, as they carefully lifted the general’s body and placed him faceup on the table. Hawke used the heavy hemp rope the general had placed beneath his chair to bind the man in a position required for an amputation. It looked real enough, he decided, stepping back to inspect his efforts. As if a man had been bound and relieved of his hand with a meat cleaver. It might work.

“The banquet is at seven, I believe,” Halter said. “Why?”

“I plan to be there,” Hawke said. “I want to make sure his Imperial Majesty, the new Tsar of all Russia, gets the rousing welcome he so richly deserves.”

“Alex, there’s something you should know right now. Korsakov is threatening to destroy an unspecified Western city with a population of one million if the NATO troops just deployed in Eastern Europe are not pulled back from the borders. He phoned the White House and gave President McAtee twenty-four hours to demonstrate his willingness to back off whilst he regained his lost territories.”

“When was this?”

“Sixteen hours ago.”

“So, we’ve got to move very quickly.”

“I’d say that’s an understatement of a huge order of magnitude.”

“Get into the bloody car, then, man! You’ve got the code? The matchbook?”

“Yes. In my waistcoat pocket.”

“A bunch of random numbers, from the look of it. Mean anything to you, professor?” Hawke turned the key, praying the damn car would turn over. Now that the sun had dropped behind the forest, the temperature had plummeted. The highway back to Stockholm would be treacherous.

“One-seven-ought-seven-one-nine-one-eight. Seventeen July, nineteen hundred and eighteen. The exact date of the night Commandant Yurokovsky and his Chekists herded the Romanovs down into the cellar of the house in Ekaterinberg and murdered Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress Katherine, the heir, their four daughters, and the servants.”

“Why would Korsakov choose that date, do you suppose?” Hawke asked. The motor caught on the second try, and he grabbed first gear, racing out of the farmhouse yard, the old Saab whining in its traces.

“It was the last night of the Tsars, Alex. Perhaps he fancies himself as the dawn of a new era, wouldn’t you suppose?”