The 14th Colony (Cotton Malone 11)

He then listened as she told him more about Aleksandr Zorin, who supposedly held a grudge against the United States, and a KGB archivist named Vadim Belchenko.

“Cotton was looking into the Belchenko angle.”

The Escape’s little engine packed a surprising punch, and they were making good time down the highway, the Friday-afternoon traffic light.

“Have you heard anything from Cassiopeia?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not a word.”

Which was not good. “You think Cotton’s okay?”

“I’m hoping so.”

He heard the concern, which he echoed.

Her cell phone dinged and they looked at each other. She studied the display and shook her head again. “It’s Osin.”

She took the call, which lasted only a few moments. When it ended she said to him, “Petrova’s on the move.”

She’d already explained that Osin had driven Petrova to Dulles International, handing her a ticket for a KLM flight straight to Moscow. Osin’s men escorted her into the terminal, leaving her as she made her way through the security checks. Of course, there was no doubt that she’d promptly double back and flee, finding a cab, which should take her to a street two blocks away from Anderson House, where her dented rental car remained parked.

“She headed straight for the car,” Stephanie said. “That puts her not far behind us. She’ll come to Annapolis.”

“You always right about people?”

“More so than not.”

“What about those missing nukes?”

“It’s unlikely they still exist and, even if they did, even more unlikely they’re operational. Yet Zorin is definitely focused on them.”

“You okay?”

He knew her well enough to know that she was bothered by what had happened with Bruce Litchfield.

“I never thought my career would end like this,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Thirty-seven years.”

“I was but a twinkle in my daddy’s eye thirty-seven years ago.”

She smiled, and he left her to her thoughts as they rode for a few minutes in silence.

“It was an exciting time back then,” she said, more to herself than him. “Reagan planned to change the world. At first, we all thought he was nuts. But that’s exactly what he did.”

Luke knew little about the 1980s, his life focused more on the here and now. He considered himself dependable, tough, and pragmatic. He took life as it came—daydreams, nostalgia, and the charms of the world held little appeal. History was just that to him—the past—not exactly ignored, but not to be obsessed about, either.

“I was part of that great change,” she said.

He could tell she wanted to talk, which was unusual. But everything about this day fit into that category.

So he kept his mouth shut and listened.

Stephanie followed the pope into a courtyard on this, her twenty-ninth visit to Rome. John Paul had specifically requested the meeting. Much was happening in the United States. Reagan’s two terms as president were drawing to a close. Vice President Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis were engaged in a bitter battle for the White House, the outcome of which remained uncertain. The pope was concerned about the future, so she’d come to alleviate his fears. A marble villa and a two-story loggia surrounded them, the courtyard dotted with statues, empty benches, and a fountain. They were deep inside the Vatican, in a space reserved for residents, of which there were but a precious few.

“President Reagan will soon be out of office,” he said to her. “Will that end your service, too?”

She decided to be straight. “Most likely. Either side will select its own people to carry on.”

To her knowledge Vice President Bush had never been part of Forward Pass, and an open bitterness was festering between the Bush and Reagan camps. At the Republican National Convention, when accepting the party’s nomination, Bush had told the delegates that he wanted a kinder, gentler nation. Which had brought a swift rebuke from the Reagan people of, What the hell are we?

“The new wash away the old,” the pope said. “It is the same here. The same all over the world. And if you are no longer here, what happens to what we’ve done these past six years? Does that end, too?”

A fair question.

“I don’t think what has been started can be stopped,” she said. “It’s too far along. Too many moving parts are in motion. Our people think it will be but two or three years, at the most, until the USSR ends.”

“That was October 1988, the last time John Paul and I spoke,” she said. “But I was right. Bush won and a new team took over at State, one that did not include me, and other people finished what I started. That’s when I moved to Justice. A few years later I was given the Magellan Billet.”

“How friggin’ amazing,” he said. “You were there? Right in the middle of what happened when the Berlin Wall came down?”

“Which Bush got credit for,” she said. “But by the time he was inaugurated, the Soviet end was a foregone conclusion.”

“Didn’t help him get reelected,” he offered, hoping to make her feel better. He wasn’t entirely oblivious to history.

She grinned. “No. It didn’t.”

“How did you do it?” he asked.

“That’s a complicated question. But by the late 1980s pressure was coming on Moscow from nearly every angle, both internally and externally. That pressure had been building for a long time. Reagan, to his credit, developed a way to exploit it. He told me once that all we needed to create was the straw that would break the communist back. And that’s what we did. The operation was called Forward Pass.”

Which started with Admiral John Poindexter, a key member of the Reagan National Security Council. Others had postulated the concept before, but Poindexter hammered the idea of a strategic defense initiative into a workable concept. Why match the Soviets bomb for bomb, as had been American policy for decades? That accomplished little to nothing, except mutual assured destruction.

MAD.

An appropriate label.

Instead, America’s advantage was its strong economy and innovative technology. So why not a resource shift—a change from offense to defense. The United States possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads to launch east. Why not develop a way to stop Russian warheads from coming west? Poindexter’s idea was presented to the White House in late 1982 and the president immediately embraced it. Reagan had many times said that he considered MAD immoral, and he liked the idea of shifting to a strategic defense. The whole thing was kept quiet until March 1983 when the president announced the change, on television, to the world.

Initially, the idea had been to actually develop SDI. But technological challenges began to overwhelm the effort. Simultaneous with SDI came a massive defense buildup of conventional weapons and equipment. New aircraft, ships, and submarines. Billions upon billions of new money flooded into the Defense Department in what became the largest peacetime escalation in American military preparedness ever.

Which the Soviets had no choice but to match.

And they did.

The Soviets were genuinely shocked by the concept of strategic defense initiative. Moscow called the plan a bid to disarm the USSR, claiming the United States sought world supremacy. But for the Soviets the true danger of SDI came more from the technological effort itself, one that might lead to new offensive weapons—innovations that they may not be able to counter without a strategic defense initiative of their own.

So they poured billions into development.

Which they could not afford.

Creating the straw that broke the communist back.

“You’re tellin’ me that the U.S. worked a con on the communists?”

“Not so much a con. More we exploited the other side’s clear weakness, using our strengths to maximum advantage.”

He chuckled. “Like I said, a con.”

“It was more complicated than that. The Vatican soot

hed the hearts and minds of the Eastern Bloc, keeping the people motivated, while we applied economic and political pressure. That wreaked havoc on Moscow. Then SDI comes along and throws them a real curve. But once the Soviets believed strategic defense to be a real threat, they had only two choices. Match our effort or circumvent it. They attempted both. The KGB was all over SDI, trying to learn every detail. The CIA stayed a step ahead, feeding them false information, exploiting their overeagerness. Reagan played the hand perfectly. No way Moscow could win.”

He kept an even speed down the highway toward Annapolis while maintaining a watch in the rearview mirror.

“You have to be proud of yourself,” he said. “To have been a big part of that.”

“The history books know little of what really happened. When I first met Reagan in 1982, he told me of his idea to use money and morality as weapons—to engage the Vatican as an active ally. He was obsessed by the fact that both he and John Paul survived assassination attempts. He thought that some sort of divine message. At first, I thought the whole plan far-fetched. But he was determined. I was there when he traveled to Rome, in June 1982, and made the pitch, face-to-face, to John Paul. That took balls.”

That it did.

“Then the pope did what popes do best. He appealed to faith and God and called on the Polish people to not be afraid. And they weren’t. So Solidarity survived. Moscow wrongly thought martial law would quell the Poles, but they were wrong there, too. Instead, a call for freedom spread throughout the Eastern Bloc and slowly weakened every one of those puppet governments. When the collapse finally came, everything fell hard. Together, Reagan and the pope were unbeatable. But it was Reagan who was smart enough to put the deal together.”

“Like I said, a helluva con.”

“Call it what you want. All I know is it worked. The Soviet Union and the Cold War both ended. Thanks to an actor whom many shrugged off as incompetent and ineffectual. But that actor knew the value of a good show. Communism is no longer important. Instead, militant radicals and religious fanatics have taken center stage.”

“None of whom possesses a country or any allegiance to anything beyond their own insanity. Not a Cold War anymore. More a Crazy War.”

“Today,” she said, “one error, one small omission, a single piece of bad luck, and the next step is desperate measures. The bad guys actually act today. Back then it was all posturing.”

He recalled those nukes. “But a remnant from the old days might still be around.” He saw that she agreed. “One last parting shot.”