Читать книгу Blood Play - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Antwerp, Belgium

Evgenii Danilov thanked his valet for bringing him the evening edition of the International Tribune and took the paper to his study, a lavish room that, like much of the small centuries-old castle, had been painstakingly restored to its medieval origins. Through the large stained-glass window he could see night falling over his secluded upscale neighborhood. It had snowed earlier, and downhill from Danilov’s two-acre front lawn there was still a light frosting on Grote Steenweg, the ancient Great Stone Road that had once been the main thoroughfare linking Antwerp and Brussels. This stretch of the road had been historically presevered every bit as much as Danilov’s home and strategically planted trees blocked his view of neighboring homes as well as any other sign of modern civilization.

There were times, like now, when Danilov could stare out the window and imagine himself transported back to the age of his forefathers, specifically Prince Eugene of Savoy-Carignan, one of Europe’s greatest military commanders and mentor to Frederick the Great, whose Prussian Empire included the land upon which this, one of Danilov’s six homes, stood. Over the past fifty years the silver-haired St. Petersburg native had carved out a financial empire of his own that was impressive in its own right. But for all his success, to Danilov the world of commerce, in the end, didn’t hold quite the same allure as military or political conquest. Yes, he’d made a lifetime of negotiating shrewd investments, but how could that compare with the visceral passion his ancestral hero had to have taken with him to the battlefield when crushing Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Zenta? If he had it all to do over, Danilov wouldn’t have bought his way out of military service, because in the years since, in his heart of hearts, he’d come to know that his greatest yearning was to be more like his namesake: a true warrior.

Little wonder, then, that while known to the world as the billionaire founder and CEO of Global Holdings Corporation, Danilov’s preferred renown was that of a covert financial backer of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. It was a position that allowed him, without fanfare, to be a party to decisions geared toward returning his motherland to a state of global prominence surpassing even that of Frederick the Great’s empire or the once-formidable juggernaut that had been the Soviet Union.

It was in this warrior’s state of mind that Danilov turned from the window and eased into his favorite chair facing the fiery hearth that staged a battle of its own, fending off the unseasonal chill outside the castle. The financier read with fervor the Tribune’s front-page headlines, many of them devoted to America’s ongoing preoccupation with the forces of radical Islam. The U.S. was still bogged down in Iraq and was repeating Russia’s grand mistake of thinking it could impose its influence in Afghanistan. And these were just two fronts on which Washington was distracting itself. There were also headlines about threats posed by North Korea, Iran and China. Danilov had to turn to the fourth page before he came across any mention of U.S. concern over Russia, and that was with regards to Moscow targeting missiles at Eastern Europe. As it had been for some time, there was no mention in the entire paper that America so much as considered the idea that its one-time greatest rival might be silently working on the means by which to launch a preemptive strike that would make the horrors of 9/11 seem tame by comparison. And the notion that such a blow might be dealt from within the United States’s own boundaries rather than by way of long-range missiles? Danilov felt certain the powers-that-be in Washington were far more wary such an attack would be instigated by al Qaeda than on orders from Moscow.

Next to Danilov’s chair was a large antique globe resting on a pivot stand that allowed it to be spun or tilted at a variety of angles. When purchasing it, the selling point for the Russian, besides its exacting geographic detail, was the fact that it was not divided into countries in a way that would have made it obsolete every time some fledgling nation won its independence or borders were redrawn by some existing power. As such, when he slowly rotated the globe until the United States came into view, he had to guess as to the exact whereabouts of New Mexico, where he and the SVR had elected to carry out their long-range plan to do what the latest economic downturn had failed to do: bring America to its knees. To some, the desert sprawl of the Southwest may have seemed an unlikely place from which to stage such a grand scheme, but Danilov found the location not only ideal, but fitting. After all, it was in New Mexico that the U.S. had finalized tests for the Manhattan Project and ushered the world into the age of nuclear weapons. What better place for Russia to create a trove of warheads that could be put to use without having to contend with the multibillion-dollar measures the U.S. was committing itself to as a defense against long-range attacks.

The groundwork had already been laid when Danilov, with the help of SVR agents, had fabricated the scandal that had led to the removal of the Rosqui Tribal Council’s previous partners at the Roaming Bison Casino as well as the reservation’s long-running nuclear waste facility. When Global Holdings had subsequently moved in to fill the void, Danilov had taken care to orchestrate things so that it appeared that his corporation was interested primarily in gaming operations and would be taking over the waste facility with some reluctance. In the years since, GHC’s public-relations arm had followed this cue and shone a bright light on the casino and its resort amenities while steering focus away from the storage of spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste. Likewise, the late-night construction of ancillary bunkers in the mountains flanking the waste plant had been every bit as secretive as the intended use of the new structures. The new sites would be completed within the year, at which point all that would be needed was a more viable source of uranium than that coming from the fuel rods to carry out what Danilov had convinced SVR to call Operation Zenta, in honor of the battle in which his famed namesake had lost only five hundred men while slaying thirty thousand Turks.

All had gone well with the project until the past week, when the SVR team in New Mexico had faced a string of setbacks. First had been Taos Pueblo President Walter Upshaw’s refusal to accept a partnership with GHC, thereby foiling—at least temporarily—the SVR’s hope to secure uranium from the tribe’s long-abandoned mines. Then there had been the matter of Alan Orson, the Taos geophysicist they’d been lobbying to help develop a quicker means by which to process mined uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. Orson had been courted with the understanding he would be helping GHC conduct a feasibility study for using the uranium as a nuclear power source, but the inventor had balked, ironically out of fear that his work might somehow fall into the wrong hands.

At the time he turned down GHC’s offer, there had been no indication that he had any suspicions about the organization, but over the past few days it had come to light that he was friends with Roaming Bison security officer Franklin Colt, who had apparently come upon some as-yet-unknown evidence of GHC’s ulterior agenda at the reservation. Colt had gone to Upshaw with his findings and the fear was that Orson had been brought into the loop, as well. Left unchecked, it was a security breach that could well undermine Operation Zenta, but Danilov had been assured by his point man in New Mexico, Frederik Mikhaylov, that all three men—Upshaw, Orson and Colt—were about to be taken out of the equation, with the bonus of the SVR getting its hands on not only Orson’s research data on uranium processing but also a handful of invention prototypes, some of which could be put to good use by the Russian army as well as its intelligentsia. In fact, before retiring for the evening Danilov expected to receive confirmation that the mission had been carried out. Once he got the call, he would breathe a little easier, but, on the whole, he remained optimistic that destiny was on his side and that in the end he and the SVR would prevail.

As he waited for the phone to ring, Danilov stared into the fireplace a moment, then glanced up at the oil portrait of Eugene of Savoy-Carignan hanging over his mantelpiece. In the portrait, the wild-haired military strategist stared out with a look that Danilov normally found to be expressionless. This night, however, he fancied that in his forefather’s eyes he could see a glimmer of approval. Moreover, he wanted to think that if the portrait could talk, Eugene would be telling him, Well done, Evgenii.