He said, “Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Norris. I’m going to designate you as my official liaison for this matter. You’ll have full authority to access any aspect of the inquiry. I’ll give you a contact number for my chief of staff, Arnie van Damm. If you hit any roadblocks, he’ll be your bulldozer.”
“I understand, Mr. President.”
Mary Pat rose and walked to the main hall door.
The NTSB man recognized this as his cue to leave. She shook Norris’s hand as he exited and closed the door when he was gone.
Ryan wasted no time. “Aside from Secretary Moore, who else was on board?”
“There were fifteen others,” Mary Pat answered. “Six were Air Force crew members. Monica Smith, Moore’s longtime aide, was traveling with him, as were three staffers from the CommerceDepartment. One of them was Tom Huddle, who I think some of you might have known.”
Grim nods around the room.
“There was also a Navy commander on board. He was a lawyer, a JAG attached to ONI, who was traveling to finalize an intelligence-sharing agreement with the Turks. The other four were businessmen who’d boarded in Tangier. Moore had been in Morocco for two days to discuss export licenses and the sale of trainer aircraft to the Moroccan air force. He met with these individuals for various reasons and offered to fly them to the conference. It’s a discretionary privilege we give all cabinet secretaries, fairly common.”
“Were all those passengers vetted?” wondered Stephens.
“That would be standard protocol, but we haven’t had time to verify it yet.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “All that’s helpful, but it’s time to tackle the elephant in the room. We need to talk about Fulcrum.”
4
Penal Colony 18
Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
Russia
0712 Local Time
Andrei Malenkov strode toward the warden’s office with low expectations.
He moved down the hall quickly, frozen grit crunching beneath his boots. The overhead lights flickered as if someone was being electrocuted. He wrote it off to a dodgy power supply.A place like this doesn’t need such appliances when it comes to killing men.
The prison’s administrative corridor was filthy and malodorous, an ominous precursor of what surely existed in the blockhouses. Thankfully, Malenkov’s time here would be brief. Penal Colony 18 was one of seven “special regime” labor colonies in Russia, the equivalent of an American supermax prison. It housed the worst of the worst: murderers, serial rapists, the criminally insane, all of whom were serving life sentences.
Malenkov had made forays into many prisons, some of them in equally far-flung regions. The special regime colonies, however,were the bottom of the barrel. Recruiting manpower for his pursuits had become surprisingly arduous in recent years. The Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia had been largely emptied of volunteers—the “special military operation” in Ukraine had seen to that. The front lines had degraded quickly in the opening months of that conflict, becoming a meat grinder on a scale that hadn’t been seen since the Great Patriotic War. And much as Stalin had done then, President Yermilov turned to Russia’s prisons as a bottomless well for cannon fodder. It worked for a time, but bottomless it was not. As the incarcerated herds thinned, the recruiters moved on, switching to lucrative signing bonuses to lure middle-aged men to Ukraine.
Malenkov could only weed through what little remained.
He arrived at the door of the warden’s office and entered without knocking.
The warden, whose name was Borzov, was seated behind his desk. A horseshoe of close-shorn black hair looked more a nuisance than a style, and there was an aloof cruelness in his gaze. In the weak light an ebony reflection from the top of his head reminded Malenkov of shoe polish. Borzov’s desk was covered with files, no doubt to project an industrious image. He had surely been forewarned of Malenkov’s arrival.
“It is good to see you, General,” the warden lied.
Malenkov said nothing. His former rank was rarely mentioned anymore, and its use told him two things. Borzov had tried to research who was coming to visit his facility on short notice. And the feedback he’d gotten was dated and inaccurate. A year ago, Malenkov had indeed been a general, the head of the SSD—a secretive new GRU offshoot that orchestrated mayhem on foreign soil, up to and including assassinations.
Today, however, Malenkov was something else entirely.
“You have assembled the men,” the ex-general said, not inflecting the words as a question.
“They are being mustered as we speak,” the warden replied. “I did not expect you quite so early.”
“Did you receive the paperwork for the releases?”
“Yes, everything is in order. You need only to make your selections, and the prisoners will be placed in your custody. It has been some time since we’ve seen such authorizations,” he said leadingly. “I am curious what enticements you might offer…and what these men will be getting into.”
