“Looks that way. And I told you not to leave where you were staying.”
“They were in the building. I had to run.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I-” Katie stopped. She did not want to tell him that she’d jumped from a window and managed to survive. Unlike Anna. “Through the back. Do you have some sort of plan?”
“I have a goal. To stay alive. The plan is still coming.”
“It’s clear now that Lesnik was working for this third party. They killed him and tried to kill me. For all I know they somehow got the Scribe to hire me and then dropped Lesnik in my lap. I knew it was too good to be true. Damn it!” Katie slapped the seat.
“Did Lesnik say anything that might give us a lead on who hired him?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I checked out his background. That was legit. He seemed like a sincere guy. His father was killed by the Soviets. He probably held a grudge and these people exploited it.”
“But that gets us no closer to the truth.”
“We need to go underground to have any chance of finding out what’s really going on.” She looked at him. “Know anyone who can help with that?”
Shaw already had his phone out. “I might.”
CHAPTER 69
THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN one of the happiest days of Nicolas Creel’s career. After years of work, and one enormous and recently manufactured international crisis, both the governments of Russia and China were about to sign contracts with Ares Corp. and its subsidiaries to the tune of half a trillion dollars with plenty more to come down the road. It was a testament to the centralization of defense contractors in the modern age that countries on either side of a dispute would buy their weaponry to destroy each other from essentially the same outfit. Yet Ares did not pick favorites. It was an equal-opportunity provider of weapons of mass destruction and always would be.
The final catalyst for the successful deal had occurred when President Gorshkov had sent a strongly worded demand for a public apology to Beijing. And the man also wanted money, in the billions, for the damage done to Russia’s international reputation. Beijing, not surprisingly, had not agreed with that position. They sent an equally forcefully worded reply to Moscow stating that the Chinese weren’t involved in the Red Menace machine, and thus owed the Russians nothing. Predictably, international relations between the two behemoths went downhill from there at a remarkably brisk clip.
Other countries had stepped in to try and broker a peaceful resolution to this mess. The United States naturally took the lead role, but since the Chinese government was basically financing America’s consumption by buying its debt, Washington had little recourse when Beijing told it to back off. The Russians accused the Americans of being in China’s pocket for this same reason. Consequently, the U.S. ambassador to Russia was told to stand down or pack his bags when he implored the Russians to do nothing drastic.
France next tried to step in, but Gorshkov would not even return the French president’s phone call. The Germans remained silent. Berlin obviously didn’t want to get dragged back behind either a new Iron Curtain or a Titanium Coffin. Britain was in an extremely delicate situation. If Russia had been behind the massacre and China had been operating the Red Menace campaign from London, the poor Brits didn’t exactly know what their role or response should be. And when initial diplomatic channels had been opened with China over the matter, the communists had been as stern in their denials of culpability as they had been with Russia, and ended by telling Downing Street to keep clear of the dispute.
The entire world was now arming for a third world war. The new amount of business would be the biggest in the history of the world, the vice chairman of Ares Corporation e-mailed to Creel, his glee evident in every word of his message. “What a stroke of luck, this Red Menace thing,” he’d added.
Creel read the message once and then deleted it. What a stroke of luck indeed. He made a mental note to find a new vice chairman to replace that idiot.
The cold war was back and better than ever. With a series of deft moves and remarkable planning he’d reshaped the planet’s power structure to where it should be. The pissants in the Middle East had immediately tried to suck the world back in, doing a version of “Hey, what about me, I’m still bad news,” by cratering another mosque in Baghdad, bombing a market in Anbar, and killing all of eighty civilians and two U.S. grunts. The world’s collective response had been swift and unmistakable: “Don’t bother us, we’ve got real problems. Millions could die!”
Ironically, Creel had made the world far more civilized by getting back to a “real” war mode. That was his plan, after all.
Not a shot fired.
And the money poured.
And the savages without a conscience put in their place.
It is the hat trick. Thank you very much.
It had never been about the money, really. It had been about the world. Nicolas Creel had just saved it.
Yet still, there was something wrong.
He was currently standing on picturesque Italian soil, the beauty of the Mediterranean coast spread out before him. The mother superior was next to him, resplendent in her lovely white robes. She was beaming, as she looked over preliminary plans for the building of a new orphanage to replace the one that had been constructed right after World War II when there had been a large number of orphans.
Speaking in Italian the mother superior said, “It is beautiful. And you are a beautiful man to have done it, Nicolas.”
“Please, Mother Superior. It was the least I could do. And I can assure you I will benefit spiritually to the same degree that the children will by having a new home.” He said all this in fluent Italian.
Creel was proficient in many languages; he’d learned them solely to gain an edge in business. Some of his biggest deals had come about simply because he could say “Please” and “Thank you” in his customers’ own tongues