The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  The two lawyers discussed how the donations would be handled: the widow would send checks to Townsend’s firm to deposit in the trust account, and when the check cleared, Townsend would donate the money to a recipient university, get a receipt, and send it to Tulsa. The school would never be told the source of the funds, so the identity of the donor would never leak, nor could the recipient go after the donor for another donation.

  They went to lunch, then returned to the office to discuss how much money each institution would actually receive.

  Townsend had kept every scrap of paper. He had the widow sign documents acknowledging her intent to fund gifts to the schools, copies of checks, letters back and forth to the Tulsa attorney… copies of letters from the presidents of the recipient schools gushing with gratitude, the originals of which he had forwarded along to the widow.

  Still… Adam Townsend felt a chill. He had donated $1,095,000,000 to the designated schools, the largest gift of four hundred million going to a big private university here in Connecticut. The smallest gift on the list was a fifty million donation to a very liberal private women’s college in New Hampshire.

  Rummaging through a file, he found a letterhead for the Tulsa lawyer. He picked up the telephone on his desk and called the office. Got an answering machine. “Adam Townsend, Jerry. Please call me in the morning.”

  He sat there with the files, one for each of the institutional recipients, thinking, as he had for the thousandth time, how wonderful it was that some wealthy people were willing to share their money with institutions that educated young men and women who, without help, might never be able to afford a college education. Yet the worm of worry gnawed at him.

  He had never met the oil widow. He had never been to Tulsa. Hell, he had never been to Oklahoma. Oil wells and farms, flat as a pancake…why in the world would anyone go to Oklahoma? In fact, as he thought about it, he had never checked out that Tulsa attorney, Jerry Kunze, online. He turned on his computer and googled the name.

  The computer found twenty-two men named Jerry Kunze. One was a racecar driver, several were farmers, one had just passed away at the age of 82… He spent several minutes reading about them. Nope, not one of them was a lawyer in or near Tulsa. He typed in the Martindale-Hubbell website which contained listings for every lawyer in America, went to the Oklahoma section, then typed in Jerry Kunze. Nothing. He looked at the firm’s name on the stationary and typed that in. Nothing.

  He typed in the widow’s name to the Google search engine. Yes, there she was. He read her bio. Oklahoma oil money, a deceased husband, grown children… She was a philanthropist, thank God. Yet her charities of choice were Oklahoma hospitals. There was a cancer ward at a hospital in Oklahoma City named after her late husband.

  Who the hell was the lawyer? That Jerry Kunze?

  Adam Townsend knew he would have to contact the donor lady. He rummaged through the file. He had neither her telephone number nor her address. Back to the computer. Yes, there was an address, a law firm. It certainly wasn’t the Kunze and Gadd firm.

  He would have to call them in the morning, but he already knew what the lawyers would say: she hadn’t donated a dime to any charity or college outside the state of Oklahoma.

  Townsend sat stupefied, staring at the ceiling. A billion dollars in real money: the checks all cleared his firm’s trust account. Jesus Christ! A billion dollars!

  At the same time that Adam Townsend was trying to grasp the implications of being a conduit for a billion dollars from God knows where, a group of politicians were meeting in Washington. Two senators, three Congressmen, and two Congresswomen, informally known by the media as the “Dump Conyers” gang.

  They routinely made announcements about impeaching the president, worked the corridors of Congress seeking allies, gave interviews about his many sins, and fought against every proposal he made simply because he made it. They opposed the president because their political supporters in their states and congressional districts—all urban—hated the president, hated his style, hated his money, hated the way he wore his hair, and hated the fact that he had an extraordinarily beautiful wife. And, by the way, they also hated his politics. If they had their way, they would stop the wheels of government dead until Conyers resigned, was impeached, or assassinated. Pure, unadulterated, unreasoning hatred is a beautiful thing, and it filled their hard little political hearts.

  Tonight, alone without aides in an office routinely swept for listening devices, they told each other what they had found out from their various sources and allies in the bureaucracies. Three of them had friends in Justice and two had friends in the FBI. One had a source in the White House. All had reporters they had groomed through the years by feeding them scoops their editors saw fit to print.

  Senator Westfall from New York, the Senate Minority Leader, was the group’s impromptu head. He was often said that the Devil had a higher approval rating in New York City than Vaughn Conyers did. Wags noted that both the Devil and Conyers hailed from New York, but Westfall wasn’t the kind of man who had a sense of humor—not where politics were concerned. He was a true believer in a world without borders, a world government, and unlimited and unchecked immigration: he had even advocated allowing everyone to vote regardless of immigration status or felony convictions. He advocated sending absentee ballots to the prisons.

  His listeners tonight were his political soulmates, united in opposition to the president. On a deeper level, they thought Conyers’ America was an anathema: obsolete, racist, something from a dead past that should be buried and forgotten.

  Tonight, these politicians were in a good mood. An FBI agent had whispered that Russian money had been invested in a hedge fund, and some of that money had gone into a hotel/resort complex that Conyers had started a year before he ran for president. “He couldn’t have built that thing without the two hundred and seventy million the hedge fund brought to the table.”

  Someone asked how the FBI knew that Russian money was invested in the hotel. “Money is money,” the Speaker of the House, Judy Mucci, answered. “Russian bucks went into the hedge fund and hedge fund money went into Conyers’ hotel. That investment is making Conyers money now. We can use this. This is the Russian connection that idiot special counsel spent two years searching for and never found. Here it is!”

  “Did Conyers know this was dirty money?”

  “Who cares?” Mucci was curt. “We’ll slather him with this and some of it will stick. You work the cloakroom and aisles every day—you know that we can get votes if we can just make something dirty stick to the bastard. This is it.”

  “My friends in Justice think the FBI is being too careful. They say the bureau has money trails and names.”

  Westfall was in no mood to wait for anything. “The FBI needs to sweat these people, threaten them with prosecution, Justice needs to drag them in front of Grand Juries, and get on with the program. If they work these crooks right, they’ll get the stories we need. We need to make this happen, people.”

  He got nods all around the table. This little group had been searching for a crisis to weaponize; this one seemed rife with possibilities.

  “We’ve got to get our reporters involved,” one of the women representatives said. “Feed them some facts and spin it the way we want it spun, so they can make some impact.”

  Her listeners nodded their concurrence. A news story, even a false one, had life. Once a story was out there, it became a gravitational force field that changed the political landscape, warping space and time like a black hole. This was a rule for radicals right out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook. The Hinton campaign had commissioned a fictitious dossier on Vaughn Conyers for the last election based on this same principle.

  “We must seize the initiative,” Senator Westfall said, clenching his fist and shaking it, “and never let it go.”

  They began discussing journalists: who could they use, who had credibility, who didn’t. That some journalists had surrendered their professional reputations t
o their past ambitions bothered them not a whit. In war there are casualties; it’s sad but inevitable.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The interrogation of Yegan Korjev at the ranch in Utah settled into a routine. Either Grafton or Tregaskis questioned him, guided the discussion, and the one who wasn’t on duty manned the computer that recorded the conversation. Sometimes I was there with them, but I skipped hours of it. Those two wanted details, but I ran out of juice occasionally and took to wandering off to watch the spectacle unfold on television.

  And what a show it was. The political circus ran from MSNBC and CNN on the left, to ABC, CBS, and NBC, which made pretensions of objectivity, somewhere in the middle, to Fox on the right. I surfed the networks, switching channels every half hour or so to see how the story was shaping up. Badly, I decided.

  Meanwhile Jake Grafton’s snake-eaters arrived. Actually they were Marines, a force recon platoon. The officer in charge had a tête-à-tête with the admiral, then the jarheads disappeared into the brush, never to be seen again. Marines are into dirt and sweat, so presumably they were having a blast doing a big campout. I was delighted they were doing it and I wasn’t. I had good food, a comfortable bed, a shower, clean clothes, access to a ceramic convenience, and all the toilet paper I could ever want. Doc and Armanti were obviously enjoying the amenities too, both mellowing somewhat. Yet, unlike me, they weren’t listening to the filth coming from our Russian.

  Korjev was gaining strength and taking little walks inside the building. He often sat at the table outside the hospital room beside the computer for his sessions with the interrogators. He was talking freely, holding nothing back, or so it appeared to me. What Grafton thought he didn’t tell me.

  The ten guests that were aboard Catherine when we snatched Korjev were discussed one by one. Inevitably, the people distributing money, the legmen, would go as far as it was safe for them to go until they decided they had had enough. Every person or entity to whom they gave money increased their risk. Free money was not a secret that could be kept indefinitely; the legmen were advised to give off an odor of corruption, which guaranteed that recipients would keep their lips sealed, at least for a while. Still, people whispered, and new people had to be constantly recruited. Korjev’s yacht guests were a relatively new batch, he said. Korjev had been briefing them, instructing them on how to avoid detection by the law and evade, deflect, or defeat investigations by suspicious law enforcement agencies. His KGB training and experience proved invaluable.

  Some of the Russian’s revelations shook me to the core. His lieutenants had been busy boys. The problem was the amount of money that they wished to distribute. The recipients could only absorb so much, no matter how greedy they were, without a fire alarm sounding. For example, he had five attorneys in various places in the United States distributing money to colleges and universities, hospitals, and charities. None of the five knew about the others. It was classic spycraft. If one agent were discovered, he knew nothing of the others, so he could tell nothing.

  It seemed that research for every disease and a whole host of other humanitarian causes were getting anonymous money, large donations from shell outfits or organizations, private persons if donations were not too large. The beauty of the scheme was that all these charities were being infected with fake money. When the bubble ultimately burst and the money trails were uncovered, the charities would probably writhe and squirm and press the authorities for non-disclosure to the public, for fear that future, real donations would be curtailed. The donees were being slowly poisoned, and the poison would spread to the bureaucracies, law enforcement agencies, and prosecutors—some of whom had received Russian money themselves.

  The Russian agents donated to politicians of every stripe. If one were in public office, or even running for office, regardless of party or prospects, he or she got a check. Most donations were small, in obedience of legal limits on donations, but some politicos were pigs and got wads of cash under the table. Candidates for president, Congress, governorships, attorney general, statehouse offices, county offices, district attorneys, state legislators, city councilmen, of whatever race or sex—all were fed with fake Russian cash via political action committees, corporations, and private donors. Politicians always had their hands out. Many of them desperately wanted plane rides to campaign stops, vacation spas, or funds for “fact-finding” missions to tourist destinations. The greedier they were, the more they got. Yegan Korjev named names. He didn’t know them all, of course, but he remembered and named the more prominent politicians, as well as some of the more spectacular hogs. His favorite was an Alabama politician who realized that he had stumbled upon the mother lode… but I digress.

  The corruption campaign wasn’t limited to the United States. Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain… they were all targets. The interrogators tried to wring the highlights from Korjev on those countries too, but they concentrated on America.

  Jake Grafton spent hours on the scrambled satellite phone to Langley. I thought he was talking to his deputy, Jack Norris, his department heads, and my sweetie Sarah Houston, who was trying to follow the money trail. I knew he had a couple of conversations with Robert Levy, the director of the FBI, and probably got little comfort there. His sessions with Reem Kiddus at the White House left him in a black mood. I knew because I could listen to his side of the conversations and watch how he reacted to whatever he was being told.

  When Grafton wasn’t on the phone, sitting in on interrogations, or asking the Russian questions himself, he was moody. Days passed, Yegan Korjev talked and talked, and Jake Grafton became more and more withdrawn.

  In Washington, the leaks continued. Senator Westfall was on television at least twice a day, and stories began appearing that contained dollops of truth larded with buckets of fiction. These were dutifully reported and commented upon by the networks, each of which spun the stories according to their political slant. I surfed the channels, as did my colleagues, and we agreed that none of the networks had yet tumbled to the fact that the river of money was manufactured money, Monopoly money, created from thin cyberspace.

  On a Friday afternoon, Richard Philbrick, Atlanta investment genius, decided this was the day he needed to grab the money and run. His accountant and office manager had left at noon to play golf. The banks were still open, so he could transfer the money to that account he had opened two years ago in the Cayman Islands, and on Monday he could arrange to have it transferred to Argentina, where Philbrick had long ago decided to retire. Learn to Tango, find a young dolly, buy a ranch on the pampas. He already had his airline tickets—first class, one way—to Buenos Aires.

  The stories on television had him worried. Washington was heating up, Russian money had been spread around, and no doubt the FBI and SEC were bestirring themselves.

  He turned on his computer, ignored the hundred or so emails that were waiting unread, and went to the first bank site. Got out his secret notebook that he kept locked in a safe, and began typing the account number and password. This account contained about fifty million dollars.

  The bank’s server took a moment to process the password and let him into the account. That’s when Richard Philbrick’s life changed forever. The account contained just a few thousand dollars!

  He stared at the screen, unable to believe his eyes. $2,312.32. That was the balance.

  Where had all that money gone?

  He pushed the icon to transfers… Fifty-one million dollars had been transferred this morning from this account.

  He said a curse word as he stared at the screen, letting it sink in.

  His accountant and office manager—the bastards had cleaned out the account this morning!

  He switched to another bank’s website, a bank in Florida, did the drill about account number and secret password, and voila! He was in.

  He leaned back in his chair and swore viciously. This account too contained merely enough money to keep it open. A transfer this morning…

 
; Three more accounts… all empty… and Richard Philbrick gave up.

  It was over! He was finished! He had been robbed.

  He went over the events of the morning, how either the accountant or office manager had been with him every minute discussing some facet of the business. He had trouble breaking away to the restroom. Those bastards! While one was smoozing him, making sure he stayed off the computer, the other was transferring the money, cleaning out the firm’s accounts.

  He sat frozen, unable to envision the future that stretched before him as a fugitive with no money. His fellow thieves had double-crossed him, precisely what he intended to do to them. And there was nothing he could do about it. He stared into the abyss.

  My God, what am I going to do?

  The ringing telephone eventually brought him out of his trance. He didn’t answer it, of course. Still, it rang a while, stopped, perhaps the caller left a message, then after a moment, began ringing again.

  Philbrick looked around at his office one last time. Unconsciously, he put his notebook with account numbers and passwords in his pocket. His suitcase, ten grand in cash, and his passport and airline tickets were in his car in the garage. He wandered out of the suite. Didn’t turn off the lights or even his computer. Pulled the door shut behind him, didn’t check to see if it locked.

  Still in a trance, he waited for the elevator and entered when it stopped. Pushed the button for the parking garage.

  My God, what am I going to do?

  What?

  God damn those two thieves!

  When the elevator opened in the second parking level, which was below ground, he walked toward his car. There were some other people getting out of cars. Men and women.

  He ignored them, walked over to his sports car, and unlocked the door with an audible click.

  One of the women nearby said hello.

  He reached for the car door.