Washington D.C., Early February 2020
O n a misty rainy night in the nation’s capital, the man looks in the car’s rearview mirror and feels a moment of panic. A big black sedan has been following him since the moment he left the grounds of the West Wing and turned his car onto 17th Street. It is close behind, almost right on his bumper. His fear now is real. He has been identified. He feels he is a marked man, possibly a dead man. He glances at the briefcase on the seat next to him. Its contents—if ever released to the media and made public—could topple the government, implicate the secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Advisor, members of the Joint Chiefs, and a handful of White House advisers in a coup attempt. The sitting Republican president, known as The Bad King, has already been impeached, but not convicted in the Senate for trying to solicit dirt from a foreign government on an election opponent. But the contents of the colorfully named Project: Red Dragon file would spark a revolution and bring on the end of our so-called American democracy.
Suddenly the man’s mouth goes dry, and his hands begin to shake on the wheel. The big black sedan slams his rear bumper. He feels the jolt and his heart begins to race. Just that morning he had been in the Oval Office with the president and his chief of staff and the chairman of the RNC. They had discussed the coming 2020 election. The 2018 midterm elections had produced a landslide in favor of the Democrats that precipitated a whole raft of investigations that ultimately brought on the impeachment in the House and the subsequent unsuccessful trial in the Senate.
The president of the United States is besieged. Embarrassingly, his wife Queen Slovia, refuses his attention, pushes his hand away in public appearances; while the Republican party faithful still warmly embrace him to protect their own re-election prospects. Things, though, are coming apart for the president, a former real estate mogul and TV reality star, who thinks of himself and his family as American royalty. His daughter, Princess Glam, and son-in-law, known in the White House environs as the Court Jester, are under investigation for political corruption, tax fraud, and lying to the Congress. The economy is showing signs of slowing. Unemployment is up, stock prices down. Right-wing talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Laura Inghram, and writer Ann Coulter, are slamming The Bad King for abandoning conservative principles. The current Congress, known derisively as the Reichstag, refuses to authorize the money, but his always raucous base still clamors for the promised “Wall” to be built. Kim Jong Un is threatening the west coast of the United States with long-range nuclear missiles. NATO is in chaos, and the European Union in disarray with Brexit. The Republicans have lost their majority in the House, speaker Paul Ryan has been disgraced and replaced. Nancy Pelosi is running the House; and The Bad King’s agenda is stalled, and he is in jeopardy of becoming a one-term president. Right-wing, anti-immigration, nationalistic populism is on the rise across Europe, and the Russian president, hereafter referred to as Tsar Peter, runs the U.S. Congress, the president, and the world.
At the next corner, the man’s car is slammed again from the rear. He stops briefly, and then goes through a red light. He steps on the gas and accelerates. There are pedestrians on the sidewalks, and he weaves the car through the traffic. At the next corner he makes a quick right turn. He goes another block and turns into a narrow alley. The black sedan follows and is right behind. The man steps down hard on the gas. The car races ahead, knocks over trash cans on the sidewalk, and bounces through the intersection of a crossing street into a connecting ally. The black sedan stays right on his bumper. He looks again in the mirror and sees the grimly determined faces of the men who are following him. Again, he looks at the brief case on the seat next to him. The file inside, labeled Project: Red Dragon, could bring down the present U.S. government, destroy the NATO western alliance, undermine the voter’s trust and confidence in our American democracy, and reorder the whole world geopolitical structure. The American president is a morally, ethically, and politically compromised sycophant. The power now resides in the hands of the Russian president, Tsar Peter. If The Bad King is not a Russian agent, then he is as close as you could get without a diploma from the FSB.
The alley comes to an end against the wall of a building. The man curses, slams on the brakes and stops the car. He puts an urgent text message into his cell phone: “Get Out” and hits the SEND button. Then he grabs the briefcase on the seat next to him and scrambles out of the car. But there is no place for him to run in the narrow, enclosed alley so he tosses the briefcase over the top of the eight-foot Cyclone wire mesh fence enclosing the sides of the ally. Frantically, he tries to scale the fence, but the toes of his shoes slip on the wet wire webbing. The black sedan pulls up and makes an abrupt stop right behind his car. Two large men in dark suits, with guns drawn, get out and drag the man down off the fence and pin him to the pavement. He struggles valiantly, tries to resist, but they keep him pinned to the ground. One of the men takes out a syringe from a small black case, pulls off the plastic protective cap, and jabs the long needle into the man’s hip. The man cries out in pain. Again, he briefly struggles—makes one final attempt to resist—and then loses consciousness. The two large men in the dark suits bundle him into the back seat of his own car and one of them gets behind the wheel in the driver’s seat. Then—with the windshield wipers flapping—the two cars back slowly out of the alley.
Thirty minutes later both cars pull into the driveway of a fashionable brownstone townhouse in suburban Arlington. It is dark now with only the streetlight on the corner offering a dim halo of light. There is still a light mist of rain coming down. The garage door goes up and the lead car—the one carrying the man’s body—pulls inside. The door comes down and the two men unload their unconscious victim from the car. They take the man up the stairs into the house and put him into a chair in the den. One of the men checks the unconscious man’s pulse. There is no reading. The other man takes a book down from the book shelve: William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He opens it to the middle and carefully places it in the man’s lap. Satisfied that the man is dead, the two men make a quick but thorough search of the house and then quietly leave.
The Kremlin
It is early morning in Moscow. Deep in the bowels of the Kremlin, in an office richly and ornately decorated in antique French furniture and original paintings—pilfered from the Winter Palace after the 1917 revolution—a man sits at a carved mahogany desk in the middle of a large office. There is a phone, a leather desk pad, and a single lamp. A light on the phone starts to blink and the man picks up the receiver. He thinks of himself, nostalgically, as Peter the Great. He is the current president of Russia and a former KGB officer.
“Yes,” he answers, speaking in Russian.
“It is done,” the man on the other end says, speaking as well in Russian. “The man is dead, victim of an apparent heart attack—as planned. But the brief case and its contents were not recovered. We conducted a thorough search of the man’s house but found nothing of significance.”
The president of Russia, known hereafter as Tsar Peter, is curt. “That is most unfortunate,” he says, and hangs up the phone. Then he pushes another button. It is red, denoting a specific and important address. He lets it ring three times, then:
The Oval Office
“Yes,” a wary voice answers, “This is the president.” It is late—11:00 PM. His White House staff have all left for the day. As he is most nights, the president has been on the phone for almost two hours with Sean Hannity at Fox News. The president of the United States is in his 2nd floor private residence. His personal cell phone is on a secure line—a backchannel link-up with the Kremlin—that goes first through the Russian embassy in Washington and then comes directly to the phone on the president’s desk in the Oval Office. This has been set up by the president’s son-in-law, known behind his back as The Court Jester, who serves—without proper security clearances—as a special adviser to the president on foreign affairs. The U.S. Department of State has no knowledge of the link-up, neither does the Secret Service or the National Park Service that is provisionally responsible for most of the equipment and infrastructure servicing the White House. The equipment has been installed at the insistence of Tsar Peter by Russian operatives of the GRU—the Russian military intelligence service—right after The Bad King’s inauguration.
The Bad King sees it as a compromising fact of life. Everything the two men discuss—even the most sensitive national intelligence—is, he is sure, being recorded. This, of course, makes him vulnerable to blackmail. But then he is already being blackmailed for past indiscretions committed during an earlier 2013 visit to Moscow—at a time when he was trying to curry favor with the Russian president to build a Moscow hotel tower—well before he himself ever decided to run for president. He remembers with some chagrin the late-night party and the girls that the Russians had sent up to his room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel for his personal enjoyment—two of whom, being just twelve and thirteen years old at the time, were decidedly underage. He also frowns when he thinks of the graphic and compromising pictures that the Russian president now maintains in his blackmail arsenal.
Tsar Peter smiles to himself. He has a low tolerance for morons and an equally low tolerance for ineptitude in the people with whom he is forced to deal. He has a particularly low opinion, and a decided distaste, for the man on the other end of the line, the president of the United States. Tsar Peter finds the man morally repugnant and has a stern message to deliver, but first he will have a little fun with his Western counterpart.
Then, in almost perfectly accented American English, the Russian president says, “Are you there, Baby Bear?” This is followed by a derisive little chuckle.
The Bad King frowns. “Yes,” he replies obsequiously. The “Baby Bear” moniker had started out as simply a good natured but unfortunate joke between the two most powerful men in the world. But it has taken a malicious and sardonic twist. The president of the United States no longer sees the humor—the implication being that Tsar Peter, the president of Russia, is the “Papa Bear” in the relationship.
The Bad King sees this as demeaning—both for him personally as well as for the office of the president—an insulting, omnipresent reminder of their relative positions of power. He is used to being treated with respect, even if it is often grudging. The sad fact is that the Russian president is in possession of information (secrets) of a sexual and financial nature which, if revealed to the world, would destroy The Bad King’s tarnished presidency—destroy not only his political career and most likely his marriage—but destroy him professionally and financially as well.
“The problem of the leak has been resolved,” Tsar Peter finally says, “but the file is still missing. This must not happen again, Mr. President. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the president of the United States replies in a nervous voice. He has gone downstairs, is in the Oval Office. He relishes the sense of awesome worldly power he feels seated behind the stately Resolute Desk. “Don’t worry. I will see that it never happens again.” Again, The Bad King frowns. He is—in terms of his relationship with the powerful Russian president—the “Baby Bear.”
The president of Russia is sharp. “No one in the West must ever learn of Project: Red Dragon,” he says in perfect English. “I will see to it myself that the file is recovered, but never bother me with matters like this again.” He puts down the receiver and abruptly ends the call.
Despite his and his foreign minister’s bellicose public statements, Tsar Peter knows that Russia does not have a sufficient first-strike capability to be determinative in a military engagement with the U.S. and her Western partners. Russia’s economy is smaller than that of Texas in the United States, dependent almost exclusively on energy exports to Europe, and no match for the combined wealth of the West. Still, Tsar Peter comforts himself. Even though The Bad King’s offish incompetence is a troubling irritation, he knows that a morally and financially compromised U.S. president is worth ten fully armored battlefield battalions and a half dozen multi-billion-dollar Typhoon Class ballistic missile submarines.
In Washington, the president of the United States turns away from his desk. He is in his pajamas and robe, looks despondently out the window of the Oval Office, across the street to Lafayette Park. He is irked. He is not used to being spoken to in such a peremptory manner. He is a billionaire—at least on paper, according to his grossly exaggerated estimates—and a powerful man even though his money pales to insignificance compared to that of the president of Russia whose fortune is estimated close to two hundred billion dollars. The Bad King frowns. He is a New York real estate tycoon, former reality TV star, and a celebrity who can sexually assault women and make powerful senators and congressmen kowtow to him; but he knows he has no leverage with the president of Russia who has all the leverage he needs on the president of the United States.
The Bad King turns away from the window and looks at the TV where Lawrence O’Donnell, the nightly host of The Last Word on MSNBC, is again impugning him for his political corruption and ineptitude. Again, he frowns. He hates the media and their Fake News. And he resents their attacks on him and their claims that he is not the legitimate president because of Russian meddling in the 2016 election in his favor. The Mueller investigation has ended with indictments of his closest associates—Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. The special prosecutor, however, stopped short of indicting a sitting president. Mueller dutifully presented his report to the Attorney General, mocked in the media as the DOJ’s “Consigliere” who, before its actual release, characterized it to the media as exonerating the president, claiming “no collusion” and “no obstruction” in the AG’s words. The Bad King later in that same year 2019, just before Christmas, would be impeached by the House for trying to extort the president of Ukraine to provide dirt on his anticipated 2020 opponent, Joe Biden. The Republican Senate in the Congress, known jokingly as the “Reichstag” in polite Washington circles, declined to convict and, so far, The Bad King has been able to keep the loyalty of his base—those hard-core MAGA hat supporters—and convince them that he is innocent of any Russian collusion or obstruction of justice.
Tsar Peter, of course, knows better. He knows full well the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the extent of the cooperation by The Bad King’s campaign, and he has all the dirt—financial irregularities (money laundering through The Bad King’s real estate properties in New York and Florida, and the UK—Scotland) and flagrant moral indiscretions (video tapes showing the president of the United States in sexual frolics with prostitutes and underage girls)—that he needs to fully compromise the current occupant of the Oval Office. And he intends to use it to the full effect to promote his private agenda.
The Bad King frowns, changes the TV channel, switches to Fox News, his favorite cable station. Six thousand miles away, in his Kremlin office, Tsar Peter picks up the receiver on the phone and punches in a number. He waits merely seconds before a man’s voice comes on the line.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” the man says in Russian.
“Find the girl, that White House TV reporter,” Tsar Peter says back in Russian. “She must be the contact. Kill her. Recover the file and be sure not to leave any loose ends.”
“I understand, Mr. President,” the man replies in Russian. “It shall be done.”