A Raging Storm

by Richard Castle

  “Which is why the White House is concerned,” Jones said. “The American public doesn’t give a damn about the private war Petrov and Barkovsky are waging against each other. Who cares if a billionaire oligarch and his former best friend kill each other? But if word leaks out that an American was kidnapped and murdered and a U.S. senator was assassinated by one of them, then we’ll be facing an international shit storm.”

  “How can you hide that fact?” Storm asked.

  “The President is holding a press conference later today. He’ll assure the American public that the attacks were not acts of terrorism. He’ll say the FBI suspects the kidnapping and murders were carried out by a ruthless gang of Eastern European criminals. But there will be no mention of Petrov and certainly no mention of Russian President Barkovsky.”

  “Which man is worse?” Storm asked rhetorically. “Petrov is an egomaniac and Barkovsky is as flaky as Muammar Gaddafi without the high heels and rouge.”

  “The White House is more worried about Barkovsky. We can’t sit still and allow a Russian president to assassinate a U.S. senator. That’s why we have to be discreet.”

  “Discreet?” Storm repeated. “Congress already is scheduling hearings to investigate and the media is going wild.”

  Jones let out a sigh. “Yes, it’s going to be tricky, but not impossible.”

  “With you, nothing ever is,” Storm said. “But I’m curious. How long before someone gets interested in Steve Mason? How long before some pesky reporter asks why you inserted a private eye into the kidnapping? How long before someone discovers that Steve Mason doesn’t exist?”

  “The smart thing,” Jones said, “would be for you to disappear—to go back to Wyoming.”

  “Montana,” Storm said, correcting him.

  Jones shrugged. “Wherever. But the truth is that I need you more now than ever before. I need someone whom I can trust to keep one step ahead of this investigation.”

  “Do you need me because you want to find out the truth? Or do you need me to help you bury the truth?”

  “Probably both.”

  Jones looked exhausted. The pressures from his job were clearly taking a toll. His face was becoming a road map of worry lines. There was little doubt that Jones would have had pure white hair if he weren’t bald. By contrast, Storm was still ruggedly handsome, although his body also was showing the signs of his past. Five scars in his abdomen marked where he’d been shot. There was a knife wound on his back where he’d been slashed from behind. More recently, a bullet had ice-skated across his shoulder, leaving an ugly superficial scar. Of course, the worst wounds had been delivered in Tangiers—physically and mentally.

  One reason why Storm had faked his own death was because he’d quietly begun to question his own abilities after Tangiers. The couple helping him had been shot to death in front of him. He had been left for dead. Doctors couldn’t believe he’d recovered. But with his recovery had come doubts. Had he missed something? Was he somehow to blame? It was only after he had “died”—while he was alone in Montana fishing—that he had considered another possibility. Someone had betrayed him. Someone inside the agency. He had gone over every minute detail of Tangiers, over and over, and he’d reached the same conclusion each time, no matter how he twisted it. He’d walked into a trap. Storm’s first reaction had been to contact Jones and seek vengeance. But he had no proof. In Montana, he had been out of the game. What was the cost of getting back in? Now the landscape had changed. Now they’d let the fox back into the henhouse. Now he could test his hunch and expose the traitor who was responsible for the scars—both physical and mental—that he carried. If there really was a traitor, then Storm needed to unmask him. And he could only find the truth by working from the inside out.

  Jones interrupted his thoughts. “You really don’t have any idea what motive Petrov or Barkovsky might have for wanting Senator Windslow dead?”

  “The senator’s final words were Jedidiah knows and Midas.”

  Storm let his answer hang in the air, begging for an explanation.

  But Jones didn’t immediately bite. Instead, he sat in his squeaky chair and stared blankly at his young protégé. And then, after several awkward seconds, he said: “OK, I agree. It’s time for me to tell you a bit more. Only a handful of government officials here in Washington are familiar with what I am about to say. Senator Windslow was one of them and it cost him his life. It can cost your life, too. Before I go any further, I need to ask: Do you want to take that risk?”

  “You seem to forget,” Storm said. “I’m already dead.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jedidiah Jones walked to a wall safe with a magnetic strip that had the word “LOCKED” on it slapped across its reinforced steel door. Jones flipped over the strip so that the word “OPEN” was visible in bright red letters and punched a combination into an electronic screen that simultaneously verified his fingerprint. From the safe, he withdrew a thick red envelope marked “PROJECT MIDAS.” He shut the safe’s door, flipped the magnetic strip to “CLOSED” and double-checked to make certain the door was locked.

  Returning to his chair, he wrote the name “STEVE MASON” in quotations on a log attached to the top secret file’s front. He wrote the date, the time, his own name, and then noted that he had authorized Mason to view four photographs from the file. The photos were numbered MIDAS 001, 002, 003, and 004. He asked Storm to sign the log with his pseudonym. After he did, Jones handed Storm three photographs but held one back.

  “Tell me what you see in the pictures,” Jones said.

  He’d played this game before. After Storm had been recruited by Clara Strike, Jones had sent him through a training course at the CIA’s legendary facility called the Farm, outside Williamsburg, Virginia. There he’d been shown a photograph, asked to return it, and then asked about it. What did you see? Why was that important? What did you miss? What does it mean? His private eye experience had made him an expert at it.

  “The three photographs show a kilobar of gold,” he said. “That’s a thousand grams of gold or the equivalent of 2.21 pounds. The markings on the bar show that it is 99.9 percent pure, which means it’s high quality. But the reason why this bar is so unique is because of where it was minted and for whom.”

  Jones nodded approvingly. “And who owned it?”

  “The impression in the lower center of the bar shows a hammer and sickle, which is the seal used by the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic letters under the seal form an acronym, КПСС, which, when translated to English, stands for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The bar in the photo was minted specifically for the Party and belonged in its treasury.”

  “It’s odd really,” Jones said, “how little knowledge most Americans have about the Soviet Union even though they grew up being told that it was an evil empire and its leaders planned on burying them. Just last week, I had to explain to a Senate committee that only a limited number of Russians were permitted to join the Communist Party during the Soviet era and that the Party had its own treasury that was completely separate from the Soviet Union’s governmental holdings.”

  Storm didn’t interrupt. Jones had a reason for this history lesson.

  Jones said, “I couldn’t believe U.S. senators didn’t know that the Communist Party charged its members dues—just like labor unions do here. The Party deducted a portion of each member’s monthly salary for its coffers.”

  Jones stopped talking and began tapping his finger on his desk as if he were marking time.

  Storm knew the drill. It was now his turn to evaluate.

  “There’s another marking in the photograph,” Storm said. “It identified that individual kilobar as being number 951,951. Logic tells us that this means there were 951,950 identical gold bars minted before it was and that those previous 951,950 gold kilobars also belonged to the Communist Party, not to the Soviet government.”

  “Do you know the price of gold?” Jones asked.

  This was more than a simple question
. It was a test. CIA operatives chosen for covert missions were expected to know the worth of precious metals. During wars, local currencies were worthless. But gold and diamonds always could be used to buy information, friends, and supplies.

  “You’re wondering if I still keep track,” Storm replied. “Gold is trading today for $1,770 per troy ounce. That means an individual kilogram bar—like the one in the photograph—would be worth just under $57,000. If you were lucky enough to have the other 951,950 kilo bars that were minted before that bar, you’d have yourself a tidy bit of pocket change.”

  “Nearly five billion dollars’ worth to be exact,” Jones said.

  “No,” said Storm, correcting him. “If you want to be exact, you would have $54,124,326,318. When you’ve been busted and had bill collectors pounding on your office door like I have, you don’t do estimates when it comes to cash. You count it to the penny.”

  That was something Jones had always admired in his wunderkind operative. Even though Storm had been rough around the edges when Clara Strike recruited him, Jones had recognized that Storm had a lightning-quick mind and an amazing ability to remember the smallest details—especially when it came to money and instructions.

  “Any idea where this fifty-four billion dollars in gold came from?”

  Jones didn’t throw many softballs. But this was one of them.

  “The failed ‘bathhouse’ coup in 1991.”

  “Exactly.”

  Storm knew the story well. It had been a defining moment in history. On August 17, 1991, a Saturday, the head of the KGB, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, summoned five senior Soviet officials to a Moscow bathhouse to discuss how they could overthrow Soviet president and party boss Mikhail Gorbachev. Kryuchkov often held meetings in steam rooms because it was one way he could insure that his colleagues were not secretly recording his conversations. While sitting naked, they decided to put Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, under house arrest and then use KGB troops and the Soviet military to seize control of Moscow. At first, the diehards seemed to be winning. But that had changed when Russian soldiers refused to fire at a huge crowd of Muscovites assembled outside the White House—the home of Russia’s parliament. Kryuchkov and the others were arrested. Only after they were in jail did the Kremlin discover that the KGB had secretly moved out of Moscow several billion dollars of rubles and precious metals that belonged to the Communist Party. They hadn’t wanted it to fall into the hands of Gorbachev and other reformers if the coup failed. Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and all of the presidents who had followed them had searched for the missing billions. But none of them had succeeded in finding them. Stories began sweeping through Russia. The gold bars had been transported by Vympel soldiers—KGB special forces—to a hidden bunker. The Vympel were much like the U.S. Navy SEALs and were used by the KGB for clandestine missions. They first gained notoriety in 1979 when a team of Vympel operatives assassinated Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin while he was sleeping in his bed inside the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and being protected by some five hundred guards. Legend had it that the Vympel officer in charge of hiding the gold had killed all of his men and then committed suicide so that none of them would be tempted to reveal where the billions in bullion had been hidden.

  “When was the photograph taken?” Storm asked. “Was it while the gold was still in Moscow or after it disappeared?”

  “Ah, you’ve just asked the key question,” Jones replied.

  He passed the fourth photograph, the one he had held back, across his desk to Storm. It showed three men standing together. They were Jedidiah Jones, Senator Thurston Windslow, and oligarch Oleg Petrov. They were holding the gold bar that Storm had just seen.

  “Somehow,” Jones explained, “Petrov found out where the Party’s missing fortune is hidden. He brought a gold bar with him to the U.S. as proof and showed it to Senator Windslow because he was head of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence. Windslow brought Petrov to me.”

  “How’d he find it?”

  Jones threw up his hands in exasperation. “I wish I knew. Petrov wouldn’t tell us, but he claimed that he could take us to where the rest of the gold bullion was hidden.”

  “All of the gold bars?”

  “Actually, Petrov claimed the treasure consisted of one million kilogram bars hidden by the KGB, plus other precious metals. The total worth is about sixty billion dollars.”

  “Sixty billion!” Storm repeated. “As in B?”

  “Yes,” Jones said. “Now that’s a treasure worth finding, wouldn’t you say?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jones collected the four photographs from Storm and placed them back into the thick file, which he inserted back into his wall safe.

  “Why did he ask you for help?” Storm said. “Petrov’s a billionaire. Why not hire a private army of mercenaries? For sixty billion, he could buy a country.”

  “If only it were that easy,” Jones answered. “Who would you trust to help you recover sixty billion in gold bars and precious metals? Guns for hire? Mercenaries?”

  “Good point,” Storm said. “I remember a PI case I had. A couple murdered their parents for five grand in life insurance. Imagine what people would do when sixty billion is at stake.”

  “Petrov hinted that the gold is in a remote, difficult-to-reach location. He needs the kind of manpower and machinery that we can get him. And there’s another problem: Petrov is not as wealthy as everyone has been led to believe. Barkovsky froze the oligarch’s assets in Russia after they had a falling out and he fled from Moscow. Our analysts believe he only has access to seven to ten million.”

  “Only seven or ten million,” Storm grunted. “Boo hoo. Makes me want to cry.”

  “It doesn’t last long if you have a palatial estate in England, an Embassy Row mansion here in Washington, D.C., and a billion-dollar yacht sitting idle in the Mediterranean.”

  “So what’s in it for you?” Storm asked.

  “If we help him get the sixty billion, Petrov will use it to launch an insurgency against President Barkovsky.”

  “A war?”

  “No, but he’d finance protest rallies, bribe officials, plant news stories, and make Barkovsky’s life and presidency a living hell.”

  “Is getting rid of Barkovsky worth going to bed with Petrov?” Storm asked. “Why not just have him killed if you want to get rid of him?”

  “We don’t really do that anymore.”

  “Sure you don’t,” Storm said in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “Does that mean you turned down Petrov?”

  “Absolutely, we turned him down,” Jones replied. “We can’t kill foreign leaders anymore and we can’t topple foreign governments either. Congress has passed laws that specifically forbid us from doing that sort of thing. This isn’t the 1950s and 1960s when you could put poison in one of Fidel Castro’s cigars.”

  “Yeah, but if I recall, that cigar stunt didn’t work.”

  “It could have,” Jones said. “Creative thinking on our part. That’s something I’ve always admired. But back to the gold. There are other reasons why we can’t get involved in searching for the gold. One reason is that it still belongs to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Communist Party in Russia still does. It’s the second largest political party in that nation. All those little Commie bastards didn’t just disappear overnight. By international law, that money still belongs to them.

  “Here’s another reason,” Jones said. “President Barkovsky has made it clear to the White House that any cooperation our government extends to Petrov will be seen as a hostile act against him and his nation. The guy might be nuts, but he still has his finger on a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and most of them are pointed at us. We don’t want to encourage his paranoid hatred of the U.S.”

  “And finally,” Jones continued, “we’ve got an internal problem. The day after that photograph of the kilobar was taken inside my office, the Russian ambassador paid an unan
nounced visit on the secretary of state and specifically stated that any attempt by the U.S. to recover the missing gold would be considered an act of international piracy.”

  “You got a leak. Someone tipped off the Russians.”

  “Exactly,” Jones said. “Barkovsky knew about our private meeting in my office—this office—within twenty-four hours.”

  “A mole?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think the mole is on our side. I think it’s in Petrov’s camp. Only I can’t be sure.”

  Despite Jones’s litany of reasons, Storm could read between the lines. Clearly, Jones wanted to help Petrov, because Barkovsky was a dangerous loony tune. What better way to get rid of him than to have one of his former friends bring him down? Et tu, Brutus? Using the Communist Party’s own wealth to destroy a pro-Communist president only made the entire scheme sweeter.

  “If you aren’t going to help Petrov,” Storm said, “then why tell me about the gold?”

  “Because you’re dead, remember? No one can be held responsible for the actions of a dead man, can they?”

  “But I’m only one man.”

  Jones gave him a sly look and asked, “Are you sure? Do you really believe you’re the only man who has gone off the grid? Do you think you’re the only man who has disappeared?”

  “Project Midas,” Storm said, putting two and two together. “That thick file locked in your safe—it has the names of other ‘dead’ operatives just like me, doesn’t it? You want me and the other ‘dead’ operatives to help Petrov because our country can’t afford to leave any fingerprints behind.”

  “No fingerprints, no footprints,” Jones said. “No prints at all.”

  Jones pulled a large envelope from a desk drawer and said, “I need you to go to London and talk to Petrov. First, try to find out who killed Windslow and why. Second, tell him that I’ve assembled a team to help him. All we need to learn is where the gold is hidden.”