The Outer Circle (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 3)
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Authors: D. R. Bell
The Outer Circle
Book Three of the Counterpoint Trilogy
D. R. Bell
The Outer Circle
is the third book in
The Counterpoint
Trilogy
. The first two books of the trilogy,
The Metronome
and its sequel
The Great Game
, are standalone novels, with only a minor overlap between the characters.
The Outer Circle
brings together the strands and the heroes of the earlier books into a conclusion of their journeys.
The Outer Circle
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2015 by D. R. Bell.
This book is intended for personal use only, and may not be reproduced, transmitted or redistributed in any way without the express written consent of the author. You can contact the author at drbellbooks.com or at
[email protected]
.
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, events or entities is coincidental and not intended by the author.
“Of all passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
C. S. Lewis in
The Weight of Glory
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara
Freedom is participation in power.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Outer Circle
is the last book in the
Counterpoint Trilogy
, following
The Metronome
and
The Great Game
. While
The Metronome
and
The Great Game
were standalone books with little overlap between the characters,
The Outer Circle
brings together the characters of the two earlier novels in the story’s conclusion.
The novel is set in 2024, two years after the conclusion of
The Great Game
. The United States, China, and Russia are locked in a geopolitical struggle, which serves as a backdrop for the U.S. Presidential elections.
What will the world look like in ten years? I can’t tell you with any degree of certainty. We are witnessing simultaneous yet contradictory trends: centralization vs. localization, ever-bigger “too big to fail” institutions vs. individual-empowering sharing services, global interconnection vs. fragmentation, unprecedented access to information vs. a continuing loss of privacy, American supremacy vs. the rise of China. Technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, drones, and cryptocurrencies are disrupting the existing order. Now, these trends coexist. Eventually, they will collide. When, how and with what outcome – that is the question.
Those who read
The Metronome
and
The Great Game
know that they have been intended as more than pure entertainment. What’s shown here is not a dystopian world but one where these trends have been extended even further. How would these trends resolve themselves? What is presented here is one possible scenario. Some parts of it are tongue-in-cheek, most are serious. I am sure the future will not look exactly the way it’s described here. But perhaps some parts of it will.
The trilogy encompasses eighty-four years, from 1941 to 2025, with many different characters carrying difficult names. If you have not read
The Metronome
and/or
The Great Game
and are struggling to make sense of who’s who, there is a brief guide to the main characters at the end of this book.
Los Angeles, USA
Jennifer woke up from a gasping sound on her right. Jeff was fighting for air in his sleep, again.
This crusade is going to kill him
. She moved her hand to shake her husband, but then gently placed it on his chest instead. This has been a frequent occurrence over the past hundreds of nights: shallow breathing, then gasping and desperately sucking the air in. She would wake him up, he’d apologize, won’t be able to go back to sleep, dark circles under his eyes in the morning. Jennifer lightly moved her hand, trying to restart his breathing without interrupting Jeff’s sleep.
It did not use to be like this. Back in 2007, when they met and fell in love, he was a sound sleeper. She would meld herself into his back and take comfort in his calm, measured breathing. It relaxed her and allowed her to fall asleep as well. After her father was killed in 2006, she had suffered from daily nightmares. She never believed the official version of Pavel Rostin committing suicide. And then a stranger appeared out of nowhere and claimed that her father saved him from a life-long imprisonment and likely paid for this with his life. Jeff also did not believe in her father’s suicide. It was that belief that first bound them together.
The nightmares returned with the first threat on Jeff’s life. That’s when his night gasping started as well. As the threats mounted, they sent their teenage daughter to live with Jennifer’s mother and grandfather. Jeff refused bodyguards, so there were only two of them in the house at night. She was scared of him suffering a heart attack during one of these episodes and tried to get Jeff to buy an experimental device that would inject the plasminogen activator when detecting the symptoms. Jeff declined, partly due to the cost, but agreed to wear a basic monitoring bracelet.
Jeff’s gasping subsided and he resumed a semblance of normal breathing. Jennifer waited a few minutes, her hand still on his chest, then got up. No point in lying in bed with her eyes wide open. The clock guiltily reminded her it was past one in the morning. She went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and peeked through the blinds. A familiar dark silhouette of an older Jeep was visible thirty yards away. A few months ago they noticed a suspicious car with two men parked across the street late at night. Jennifer called the police. To everyone’s embarrassment, the men turned out to be Jeff’s followers that voluntarily decided to watch the house. Jeff tried protesting, to no avail. Jennifer became used to people watching after them, trying to ensure their safety.
Having detected her presence, the refrigerator annoyingly beeped and said in a stern female voice:
“The milk is past its due date. You are down to three eggs and one apple. Would you like to place a delivery order with the Vons supermarket? Eggs at Vons are on sale...”
“No!” whispered Jennifer angrily and the fridge shut up.
I have to figure out how to re-program the damn thing
.
As she often did in times of insomnia, Jennifer reached for her grandfather’s war diary, the one that father brought from St. Petersburg eighteen years ago, just before his death. She had copies made, in Russian and in English. Jennifer knew every word by heart, but she still found strength and comfort in turning to the diary. She went to the
31 December, 1941
entry. “Hope is everything,” she read out loud.
Peredelkino, 13 miles southwest of Moscow, Russia
General Yuriy Shelkov threw more cold water on the hot stones, gently lashed himself with a
venik
of birch branches, and contentedly relaxed in the wet steam of his private
banya
. As the Chief of General Staff and the First Deputy Minister of Defense, he enjoyed the status and privileges commensurate with his position but without the pressure of being the Minister. At 67, this suited him just fine. On weekends, he escaped to this luxurious
dacha
that he purchased four years ago. The General loved pleasant solitary walks in the surrounding pine forest, with his bodyguards keeping a respectful but safe distance. He left his wife at home so that a bodyguard could drive back to Moscow and fetch the General’s thirty-something mistress, Zinaida.
He heard a noise from the dressing room – Zinaida must be here early. In a minute, her naked contour would show up in a dense steam. The door opened and a figure appeared. Shelkov smiled, his groin tightening in anticipation.
“
Dobryi den, General,
” a decidedly male voice greeted him.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?” jumped up Shelkov.
A tall, balding man in his 40s with a towel wrapped around his waist parted the cloud of steam and sat on the bench.
“Please sit down, General. No need to call the bodyguard, he is the one who let me in. I just want to talk.”
“Who are you?” demanded Shelkov again. He was used to commanding people and having them answer his questions.
“You can call me Arkady, but my name is not relevant. What is relevant is who I work for, what I know and what I can do with that knowledge. Please, sit down, you are making me nervous hovering like this.”
Shelkov became aware of his nakedness, grabbed the towel he’d been sitting on, wrapped it around his waist and sat as far away from the tall man as the bench allowed.
“Thank you,” continued the man. “To quickly put aside any doubts, we know exactly how much money you made in the 2019 financial crisis. I can tell you the account number in the Commersant bank you used under your nephew’s name, the transactions in your sister’s account, and many more. Even after purchasing this
dacha
, you still ended up stashing away a very nice amount in a couple of Swiss banks.”
“So what? Everyone was doing this. Get out!”
“Yes, but when the story of the 2019 profiteering broke out in 2022 and caused a lot of popular anger, President Mosin made a point of going after some high-level speculators that were using the inside information. You were fortunate that your name never came up then. And, of course, you have never paid a penny in taxes and have funneled money out of the country. That should be sufficient to land you in jail for some time.”
Shelkov bit his lower lip, hands in his lap, sweating profusely from more than the banya’s steam.
“But of course, that’s minor stuff,” continued the tall man. “Remember that girl that was found floating face down in Moscow River seven years ago? Her colleague, another working girl, saw her leaving with your grandson, Valeriy. You know, the one that has a history of hiring prostitutes and beating them up? That time he went too far. Except that the witness suddenly disappeared and has never been seen again. But perhaps the mystery will be solved when the recording appears of you meeting with a hired killer and giving him $50,000 to solve the problem. That’s what you called it, ‘solve the problem and make sure the body is not found,' right?”
“How do you know this?”
“My dear General, we have a full dossier on you, starting from 1980 when you were a fresh out-of-college lieutenant serving in East Germany. Quite a few indiscretions in that file of yours.”
“What do you want?” Shelkov’s whisper was dull, defeated.
“Nothing yet. As a matter of fact, we want to help your career. Soon, you will become the Minister of Defense. We’ll just suggest certain courses of action when the time is right. I won’t be making such dramatic entrances, but once in a while your bodyguards will have a message from ‘Arkady.’ Well, it’s time for me to go. Zinaida should be here soon, enjoy the affair.”
The tall man got up and left the
banya
without looking back, leaving Shelkov slouched on the bench.
Beijing, China
General Wu Cao, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, was hosting a monthly luncheon with the commanders of key branches of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA): Admiral Kaiping Li of the PLA Navy (PLAN), General Yuan Chen of the Air Force and General Jian Liang of the Second Artillery Corps. The conversation topics were the usual ones: military tactics, projection of the PLA strength, Taiwan, achieving energy independence, securing resources. But everything was permeated by anxiety about the recent protests.
The unrest started in May of 2022 when the extent of the ruling elite’s massive profiteering from the 2019 dollar crisis became known. Demonstrations had been brutally suppressed and some of the party and army leaders had been sacrificed to the charges of corruption. There were even a few public executions, all of lesser figures. But the protests continued to simmer and jelled into a public pro-democracy movement. It did not help matters that the orchestrated appreciation of the Chinese currency back in 2019 turned out to be not all that it promised: imported goods became cheaper, but exports declined and the Chinese population was not quite in a position to fully support a consumption-driven economy. Unemployment rose and with that anger and desperation. The Party was looking for solutions, but consensus remained elusive.
There was no agreement around the table either. The Admiral was the most aggressive in arguing that the situation called for expansionary policies, to both secure new markets and create nationalistic support within the country. The other two commanders were more reserved, concerned about taking on a powerful US Navy. General Cao was mostly listening. As the senior officer, he did not feel the need to offer his opinion yet. But he was in agreement with the commanders of the Air Force and the Artillery Corps: while they had hurt the U.S. economically, taking on the U.S. militarily was still too dangerous. Perhaps if the American states had separated, similar to what happened to the Soviet Union thirty years ago. It looked like a likely outcome back in 2022, but then some two nobodies managed to uncover Jonathan Schulmann’s research into the events surrounding the 2019 crisis and all hell broke loose. Thankfully, Cao’s name did not come up. The luck of the draw: Schulmann did not finish his analysis before he was assassinated, some names ended up on the list and some did not.
The commanders politely filed away, leaving Wu Cao with his thoughts. Soon he would be meeting with the General Secretary of the Party – what recommendations would he bring? The status quo was no longer feasible.
Cao’s private phone rang. He looked at the screen of the mobile phone. It was his wife, probably with some request. “She should know to call my secretary,” Cao irritably pushed the answer button.
“Good afternoon, General,” said man’s voice in English.
“What?” involuntary responded Cao.
“Don’t worry, your wife is perfectly fine, we are just spoofing her number. We’d like to talk to you about certain trading accounts registered to a French citizen that are in reality controlled by you.”
“What are you talking about?” But in the pit of his stomach he knew.
“General, let’s make it quick. We have the account numbers, the transactions. We also know about the bribes you’ve been taking since 2009, first as the commissar of the 16
th
Group Army, then of the Jihan Military Region. We’ll send you a detailed list if you like. Tens of millions of dollars. The scope of your, how shall I put it, transgressions, will likely result in more than a dishonorable dismissal. Especially since Chairman Liu is in the midst of yet another anti-corruption campaign.”
“What do you want?”
“We’d like for you to give a stronger consideration to the views of Admiral Kaiping Li,” came the reply. “He’ll contact you for a private meeting to explain them in greater detail. We’ll be happy to keep all the information secret in the meantime.”