The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  “We’ve only had this facility for eighteen months or so,” Grafton explained. “The idea was to keep it low-profile.”

  “My advice is to get some snake-eaters out here to set up a security perimeter, and have them camp out.”

  “Are the recorders in the house operable?”

  “I checked them out this afternoon. The equipment seems to be working fine.”

  “I want you to record everything said in Korjev’s presence. Everything.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I’ll see about a security detail.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  I have no idea about how one is supposed to start an interrogation of a POW or enemy agent, but Jake Grafton began with an apology after he introduced Bob Tregaskis, whom he said was a colleague. “I’m sorry that we sedated you for your journey, but I thought it would be more comfortable. Glad to see you are awake now.”

  That was a crock. He ordered Yegan Korjev sedated so he couldn’t injure himself, commit suicide, or hurt any of us during the long plane rides. No doubt Korjev knew that too.

  The Russian didn’t want to talk about that. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Utah.”

  “And where is Utah?”

  “In the middle of the United States.”

  “I have never been to the United States before.”

  I wondered if the bastard was lying. The conversation went downhill from there. They chattered away for an hour or so with the professional interrogator, Tregaskis, listening and keeping his own counsel. He didn’t utter a peep. The yacht, Korjev’s early life, the world situation, how one makes money in Russia, the religious fanaticism of the holy warriors—they covered the world from pole to pole.

  I was seriously bored listening to this treacle when Grafton asked, “Have you given any thought to how you are going to live the rest of your life? That assassination attempt aboard your yacht seemed like a serious message to me.”

  “I am waiting for you to make me an offer.”

  I heard Grafton make a noise. That hard-ass wasn’t given to chuckling, but it sounded as if he tried.

  “What we can do for you depends on what you can do for us,” Grafton said. “We can’t make you an offer until we know what you have to sell. We won’t pay much for low-grade bullshit or fiction. Truth is the gold standard, truth we can check.”

  Silence. Apparently Korjev was thinking. After twenty or thirty seconds he said, “I think Putin wants me dead.”

  “Somebody does,” Grafton agreed. “You’re fortunate that Pavlychev wasn’t a very good assassin. Maybe he hadn’t murdered anyone before and it was a sort of spur-of-the moment thing. Anyway, he tried and botched it. You killed the hell out of him. Maybe the next people the Kremlin sends will be better tradesmen, know their business better.”

  “Maybe,” Korjev said. “And if they kill me you won’t ever learn what I know.”

  “And you’ll be dead. Forever. I want you to think about that. Dead forever, or alive with a future that we can give you.”

  I heard the scrapping of chairs. “Are you hungry?” Grafton asked.

  “A little food,” Korjev said. “And some tea. Hot. Please.”

  “I’ll have the nurse come in and help you to a chair. We’ll have some food for you in a few minutes.”

  I heard the door opening, then Jake Grafton came around to the cubbyhole where I sat. The interrogator/translator walked on by without a glance. I gave Grafton a thumbs-up. He walked on, toward the kitchen.

  The nurse went in to see Korjev. Nothing important was said. She was strictly business. The translator or Grafton needed to talk to her, tell her to soften her shell, improve her bedside manner. Korjev was in no condition to make a pass at her and he needed some friends. I made sure the computer was catching every sound and took off the headset.

  The interrogation started for real the next morning after breakfast. Grafton talked to the doctor and the nurse, found out what Korjev’s medical condition was—“Stable, with no infections. He will make a complete recovery.”—and how he slept.

  “Fitfully,” he was told by the nurse. “He was awake for three hours during the night, and asked for a sleeping pill, which I gave him. The doctor had ordered it in case he needed it.”

  Grafton sat down by me with a headset so he could listen and sent Tregaskis into the patient’s room alone.

  “Good morning, Mr. Korjev.”

  “Good morning.”

  “I’m Bob Tregaskis. We met last night.”

  “I remember.”

  “How do you feel? Did you sleep well?”

  Korjev grunted.

  “Admiral Grafton asked me to talk to you this morning. Is that okay with you?”

  “I presume this conversation is being recorded.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  My eyebrows went up when I heard that. Tregaskis was playing it straight, no doubt on orders from Jake Grafton, whose face didn’t register any emotion when he heard that comment. On the other hand, Grafton had the best poker face I have yet encountered: I wouldn’t risk a matchstick in a game with him.

  Bob Tregaskis continued: “If I had said no, you would have thought I was lying. So I told you the truth. Truth is the standard we will use. For you and also for Admiral Grafton and me. We won’t lie to you. You will get the truth as we believe it to be. And that is what we want from you.”

  Korjev grunted again.

  “This morning I wish to discuss the political dynamics inside the Kremlin, to the extent that you know them,” Tregaskis said. “This will give us a chance to explore the ground rules. I wish to know what you know of your personal knowledge, what you know by rumor or second-hand knowledge and believe to be true, and what you speculate might be true. When you give me a fact or opinion, please label it one of those: personal knowledge, hearsay, or speculation. Will you help me with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you don’t want to answer a question, just say so. What we can do for you will be determined by what you can do for us, but evasion or lying will be a waste of your time and mine, and ultimately do neither of us any good.”

  He paused, and I heard no audible response. Maybe Korjev was nodding. Or frowning.

  “When did you first meet Vladimir Putin?”

  Away they went. Korjev and Putin were colleagues in the old KGB. They attended KGB training courses together, became social friends, political friends, professional friends. Korjev actually became talkative, reliving the old days, volunteering anecdotes, assignments, personal facts of their relationship. To hear him tell it, they became good friends.

  Tregaskis eventually steered the conversation around to the immediate past. Putin was in the driver’s seat in Russia, but he had rivals in the Kremlin. Some wanted him out; some had different agendas, some just disagreed on how to get to where Putin and his colleagues wanted to go. They differed on every policy choice imaginable: NATO, America, the Middle East, Europe, the export of oil and natural gas, the Ukraine, the Crimea, and Russia’s relationship with China. Sometimes the lieutenants were on one side, sometimes the other. Putin got high marks from Korjev for keeping the team pulling together.

  The interrogator was careful to always get a label on Korjev’s musings and stories: personal knowledge, hearsay, or speculation. It sounded to me as if the doings in the Kremlin were the subject of as much popular discussion in the upper echelons in Russia as the melodrama of the royals were in Britain. Who said this, who did that, who got snubbed at a party, who was screwing or stroking whom, who was on the rise and who was on the way out. Who is gaining power, who is losing it. It reminded me of American morning talk show hosts gossiping about the personalities in the White House.

  Grafton seemed at ease listening to all this background, which he did with his eyes closed most of the time. No doubt he wanted to know about the money river just as much as I did, but he had more faith in the roundabout approach. I was ready to get to
the heart of the matter.

  Tregaskis moved the conversation on to how Korjev survived the collapse of Communism in 1991 and the transformation of the Soviet Union into Republics. He started by quitting his job at the KGB and using his connections to buy state-owned assets. Suddenly the whole damned country was for sale. Factories, military equipment, airplanes, airlines, banks, everything. You signed promissory notes and you were the new owner, a capitalist. You paid off the bureaucrats and became one of those blood-suckers that Karl Marx hated. The law was whatever you could pay for. You owned the means of production and profited by the labor of the proletariat. Marx probably rolled over in his grave.

  I was appalled. Even the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists understood that the key to political power was ensuring that prosperity spread, that education and hard work paid off for a great many people. The Russians had only two kinds of people: billionaires who owned everything, and everyone else, the working poor. No wonder Russia was finding itself left behind in a world of free enterprise and rising prosperity.

  It was obvious Yegan Korjev was smart, ruthless, and had connections. He got filthy rich. He acquired arms factories because in our unstable world, guns would always be valuable, and he bought or founded banks because he believed, like Willie Sutton, that that was where the money was.

  Tregaskis developed the banking theme and asked about Korjev’s banking exploits in the last five or six years, specifically the settlement banks. Who told him what they wanted done or suggested how to do it? He named names. None of the names were Putin.

  “Did you believe the president had given his permission?”

  “Yes. That is my personal belief. This is what I thought Putin wanted me to do. Find a way for Russia to facilitate the purchase of goods and services by the break-away provinces in Ukraine and Georgia.”

  “So you did it.”

  “Of course. I owed Vladimir Vladimirovich too much to refuse. And I thought he was right. Russia needs friends, a buffer between itself and the West. Facilitating honest trade with these provinces full of Russian patriots, in a way that evaded the sanctions of Russia’s enemies, was the patriotic thing to do, the right thing to do. So I did it. I have no regrets, nothing to apologize for.”

  Apparently he felt that statement insufficient, so he added, “I am a Russian. I am a patriot.”

  “Too bad someone in Russia wants you dead,” Grafton murmured.

  I looked at my watch. They had been at it for over two hours. In a few minutes, Korjev announced he was tired. Tregaskis ended the interview, said they would talk later, after lunch. He came out of the room and the doctor went in. I went to the restroom while Tregaskis and Grafton conferred.

  The afternoon session was when Tregaskis mined the richest ore. Yegan Korjev admitted, or stated, that the Kremlin was looking for a way to destabilize the West, Europe and America, which were punishing Russia with sanctions for helping the ethnic Russians in Georgia and Ukraine—and, incidentally, for grabbing the Crimea. Korjev didn’t know where the idea of flooding the West with phony money came from, but he heard it about four years ago from Putin’s Number Two at an all-night drinking session.

  The more Korjev thought about it, the better he liked the idea. It took several months to set up the operation. The cooperation of a foreign bank would be required, and they settled on the Bank of Scandinavia—the Tallinn branch was just a few hundred kilometers over the Russian border. It was convenient: Russians could appear in person at the branch on little notice, open accounts, sign checks, whatever the bankers required. And people in Stockholm high up in the bank were quite willing to go along. The more money that went through the Tallinn branch, the more money the bank made. Even without bribery, the bank officials understood that the greater the quantity of money that went through the bank, the larger the bank’s profits and the larger their bonuses. But a little graft under the table, just gifts really, helped cement the deal. The powers that be in Stockholm soon decided that allowing Russians to open online accounts would encourage more people to deposit money in their bank.

  When the money river became a raging torrent, it was necessary to actually bribe the nervous Swedes, who were convinced that they were witnessing a money laundering operation. They weren’t. They were watching money being created, but they didn’t know that.

  Friends had to be recruited in Europe and America to spread the wealth around. It was essential that when the storm broke, the maximum number of people would have dirty hands.

  “So you recruited people like Ricardo Silva.”

  “Yes. Ricardo ran a hedge fund. We sent him money that he could label as investments or profits and report to his supervising ministry, and that in turn would cause more people to invest in his fund. And he could use the shell companies that sent him money to transfer money back to Russia. Of course the people in the Kremlin wanted theirs, and they insisted that some of the money be used to counteract the Western sanctions. That led to even more money flowing outward through the Tallinn branch bank.”

  I took off my headset and stared at Grafton, who kept his headset on. The friggin’ Russians were out to destroy the American and European banking systems! And when the poop ultimately hit the fan, they wanted to bring down governments and tip the big economies into recession. All so they could play their games around the Black Sea and in the middle east. According to Korjev. This was hearsay and personal knowledge, plus some speculation to connect all the dots.

  I put the headset back on.

  Tregaskis got into the names of the people who helped spread the money where it would do the most good in Europe and the United States. Korjev had only a few names, but those were key personnel in the scheme.

  “They had to know the shape of the scam,” Tregaskis remarked.

  Korjev agreed that they did. They were carefully briefed, usually by SVR officers.

  “Why did they do it?”

  Here Korjev balked. “There are probably as many reasons as there were people recruited. They all got a cut of the money, but for some of them the payoff would be to see people or companies they hated humiliated or criminally convicted of financial crimes. Disclosure of their greed or stupidity would ruin them.”

  “And disclosure was always Moscow’s game plan, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know that of my personal knowledge, but I suspect so,” Korjev said in his flavorful, accented English. “That much money… the secret could not be kept indefinitely. People are people.”

  “Why now?”

  “I didn’t make that decision. It came, I suspect, from the Kremlin. The political conditions in Europe and America are ripe. The liberals and conservatives hate each other; each considers the other subhuman. They are ready for war to the death. Given weapons, they will destroy each other. It is in Russia’s best interest that they do so. Why not now?”

  “Why the shoot-out in Capri?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why were you targeted for assassination?”

  “I don’t know,” Korjev said slowly. “Perhaps someone wants a sacrificial goat. Perhaps they have convinced my friends that I am a thief or traitor. I just don’t know.”

  Why not now? I mused that question as I stood on the porch of the ranch house looking at the distant mountains to the east, which still had snow on the peaks. The La Sals, Mac Kelly said. I wished I were there.

  The guys had the television on in the little living room. More on the money river flowing from Russia through Estonia. People in the FBI were leaking—that was obvious—and the news was that over fifty shell companies had been identified that received cash from somewhere. They had no assets and the money was gone from the companies’ bank accounts. The question of the evening was: Where is the money?

  Also watching television that evening was an attorney with a dozen-lawyer firm in Connecticut, Stone, Muren, and Fumero. Adam Townsend was a junior partner specializing in non-profit law. For the last three years he had been a busy man. He was donating money to coll
eges and universities in the Northeastern United States on behalf of an anonymous donor, the widow of an Oklahoma oil man who had left her about two billion dollars in liquid investments and interests in hundreds of Sooner Trend wells.

  Townsend knew her name, of course, although he had never met the lady. She was in her late seventies. Watching the news, hearing about the combination of Russian money and untraceable funds flowing around in the United States, made something click in his head. Even though it was eight in the evening in Connecticut, he told his wife he was going to the office. He jumped in his car, drove the ten minutes to the office, unlocked the door, and turned on lights.

  He dove into the files. In April three years ago, he had had an appointment with an Oklahoma attorney. The Tulsa widow wanted to donate roughly a billion dollars to twelve institutions of higher learning in the Northeast, and do it in such a way that no one would ever know where the money came from.

  “She does not wish to have her name on buildings or be touted in fundraising efforts,” the Oklahoma attorney told him. He was with a two-man firm with an office in a Tulsa suburb. Jerry Kunze was his name, the Kunze of Kunze and Gadd. Tall, wearing a gray wool suit, a gorgeous tie, Lucchese alligator boots, and a hand-wrought silver belt buckle under the small overhang of a sagging tummy, his sartorial splendor had impressed Townsend. A lawyer couldn’t get away with dressing like that in Connecticut unless he represented rich defendants accused of murdering their wives or mistresses or screwing teenage babysitters.