Pasternak nodded solemnly. “Can your divorce wait until after the election?”
Vostov shook his head. “Larisa can see right through me that I’m done with her. I had to have a — well — emphatic ‘session’ with her this morning just to hold her off for a week. But she knows. What she’ll trumpet to the press will be devastating. And if I know Larisa, she’ll take off with little Anya and it could be a long time before I see my daughter again. It’s like my first divorce, but with what Larisa will paint as misconduct on my part. She’ll say I’m abusive.”
Pasternak blew out her lips. “She’s the one who’s addicted to rough and violent sex, not you.” She paused. “Sir, you should let me take care of this. I’ve gone through contingency plans for this with Ozols.”
Vostov raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t want to know, sir. You’ll need deniability. But there will be, let’s say, an incident. Larisa will no longer be a problem.”
“Tonya, nothing can happen to Anya. I don’t want her embroiled in any, let’s call it a ‘scenario.’ I don’t want her in any kind of harm’s way. I don’t want her to see anything that will scar her for life.”
“Leave it in my hands, sir. Just do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise me you’ll stay with the staff in Murmansk for at least a week. If we wrap up these tours of the factory and submarines too early, that will cause complications. Try to linger here. Perhaps tour other military facilities in the region.”
“A week?”
“A week, sir. If possible, it will happen sooner. But no later than a week. By the time we fly back, things will be well in hand. And I promise the result will paint you in a sympathetic light. And Anya will be fine. Well, as fine as she can be with her mother, you know.” Her voice trailed off.
Vostov nodded. “Let’s get to the motorcade. I don’t want to keep the boys waiting.”
President Dmitri Vostov felt self-conscious for the first time in five years, but that probably made sense, as he was walking through a world as foreign to him as the surface of the Moon, clad in ridiculous-looking avocado green coveralls, which were a half size too small for him, his girth stretching the fabric at his stomach.
He was in a group with the ship’s commanding officer, a hard-looking tough man with black hair streaked with gray and an eye patch over his right eye, giving him the air of a eighteenth century pirate. With them was the Sevmash Shipyard’s head of the engineering and design directorate, a slender and slight man in blue coveralls who had been introduced as Anatoly Voronin. The Defense Minister had decided to skip the tour, but his deputy, Prokopiy, was with them, as was the FSB deputy, Avdey Ozols. There was no sign of Pasternak, who had asked to do some work in the ship’s crew’s messroom.
They stood in what Captain Alexeyev had described as the first compartment, or the torpedo room. It was dimly lit, despite dozens of overhead LED lamps, which seemed only to cast shadows from all the space’s tightly packed weapons on a triple-deck rack, with piping and cables and valves and junction boxes occupying seemingly every cubic centimeter of the volume of the room.
Alexeyev walked Vostov forward — although by this time, Vostov had lost all sense of direction — to the forward bulkhead of the room. To the left was a wall with an opened door, and inside, the space was jammed with control panels with glowing buttons and blinking lights, one cabinet door opened to reveal a rat’s nest of wires and computer cards. To the right of this tight room were the torpedo tube doors. The tube’s doors were wide enough to allow a man skinnier than Vostov to squeeze in.
Perhaps sensing Vostov was partly overwhelmed and partly bored, his guide, Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev, asked if Vostov were in the mood for the mid-day meal. Normally, on a tour of this kind, Vostov would look at his watch and beg off, citing schedule pressure, but Pasternak’s words about extending the trip still rang in his ears. He smiled with what he hoped looked like genuine happiness and told Alexeyev that he was, indeed, famished. The smell of the meal cooking had been wafting through the entire ship, and if Vostov were honest with himself, it had been making him hungry ever since he’d stepped through the access hatch in the conning tower and descended the steep stairs to the submarine’s central command post.
Alexeyev’s tour of the central command post revealed a bafflingly complex space, looking like what a fighter jet cockpit would look like if it were expanded to the size of a house. Consoles, displays, lights, buttons, valves, switches, cables and panels everywhere. How any sane man could stay in this horrible, incomprehensible environment was beyond Vostov. No doubt, his nation owed these seafaring heroes a deep debt of gratitude.
