The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  “Richard Philbrick? I’m with the FBI.” The woman was holding up a fold and Philbrick got a glimpse of a badge. Other people were surrounding him, and he saw at least one pistol pointed at him.

  “You are under arrest, Mr. Philbrick. Put your hands on the top of the car and spread your legs.”

  I took a tour around the ranch house. I wasn’t about to go traipsing off into the brush to have an up-close and personal encounter with armed Marines, so I stayed close. I went down to the barn to commune with the horses, who ignored me. My favorite cowboy, Alvie Johnson, was there, shoveling manure and savoring a wad of Skoal.

  “Looks like you have a lifetime occupation,” I said.

  “It goes in one end and out the other,” he admitted.

  “I thought this was your week off?”

  “Well, the wife of some guy on the other crew got into a car wreck, so he decided to stay home with her this week. I volunteered to stay. Extra money. I’m saving up for a new pickup. Got it all picked out.”

  I wished my life was as uncluttered and simple as Alvie Johnson’s. Maybe I should give him my pistol and take over the shovel.

  “Gunny ran into some Marines out in the brush,” Alvie informed me, keeping his voice low because this was probably a government secret. “It was like old home week.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Guess they’re out there now, keeping an eye on the place.”

  “Hmm.”

  He was brimming with curiosity but wasn’t going to ask me again who was in the house or what was going on. And I wasn’t about to tell him. “Gunny and the rest of your crew are home now?”

  “Yep. Doing the shopping and chores around their places, you know.”

  And, I thought, running off at the mouth about Marines. Our profile here wasn’t low enough.

  “Our boss this week is a guy named Elijah. Eli Gertner.”

  “So how are the horses today?”

  “Fine. Wanna ride one?”

  “Why not? Got a real bronco that will throw me off?”

  “Yep. You don’t want to get on him. I sure as hell don’t. The one you want is that gray gelding there.” Alvie pointed. “He used to be in a riding stable. Probably ought to go to a dog food factory, but he’s gentle enough.”

  So we hazed the gray in, got him accoutered, lunged him for ten minutes on a lead rope, and your trusty correspondent climbed aboard. The horse just stood there. I whacked him in the ribs with my heels and made giddy-up noises until he got underway. I rode him around enough to ensure he had the idea of me riding and him doing the walking. Then I moseyed off, staying on the dirt road all the way to the main gate at the hard road.

  I liked to mosey and look at the country, smell the sage, watch the puffy clouds and think cowboy thoughts. Just me and my horse and the whole world to ride in. “I should have been a cowboy, just like Gene and Roy…” When we reached the gate at the hard road, we turned back toward the barn. The damn horse began to trot, jolting me viciously up and down. I pulled on the reins and shouted “Whoa,” but he ignored me. Then he broke into a gallop; I hung on for dear life.

  The two of us roared up to the barn, where my charger slammed on the brakes. I almost went over his head. When motion stopped I bailed off.

  Alvie was standing there watching. After he squirted a little brown juice between his lips, he asked, “Nice ride?”

  “Going out, yes. Coming back, no.”

  “He sure likes the home place,” Alvie said philosophically. “Thing is, you can never be sure what a horse is thinking. If they think. Sometimes you get a nasty surprise. Guess you sign up for whatever is coming when you climb aboard.”

  All of which got me thinking. How much of what Yegan Korjev was telling us was true? Was that attempted assassination aboard Catherine the Great real, or only well-orchestrated theater? The blood was real enough, but Korjev could have gunned the supposed gunman, and a pal could have shot him twice, carefully, then waited for the inevitable interception of the yacht by the suspicious Americans, who had been alerted by Janos Ilin about the supposed moneyman. The body and his wounds would be proof of his bona fides.

  I massaged my rump and plopped into a rocker on the porch to think about it. Grafton must have already had these thoughts, I decided. I went inside to make myself a sandwich for a late lunch.

  Sal “Big Tuna” Pizzolli came home after a busy day at his restaurant. His office was a cubbyhole behind the kitchen, and it was there he met customers. The restaurant wouldn’t close until midnight, but he rarely stayed that late.

  He had visited his mistress during the afternoon, gone back to the restaurant accompanied by his two bodyguards, and they were with him now as parked the car in his garage. They parked right beside him. On the wall the security monitor blinked green, indicating all was well within. Pizzolli punched in the code to disarm it. One of the guards went into the empty house to check it out while the other lowered the garage door.

  The man who lowered the door preceded Big Tuna into the house. They walked in through the kitchen, which opened into a large family room that was Big Tuna’s lair, complete with three flat screen televisions and a monster couch that he often used to bed a whore or two.

  There were three men waiting with drawn guns. The first of Pizzolli’s guards was already lying on the floor with a hole in his head. Before the guard with Pizzolli could get his pistol from its holster, he too was shot in the head from behind. The shot came from a fourth man who had been waiting beside the big refrigerator. This pistol wasn’t silenced. As it boomed, blood and brains flew out from the victim’s forehead and the body smacked into the floor.

  The man behind him Pizzoli jabbed him in the back with the gun. “Move. On in.”

  Pizzolli almost didn’t understand the words because the accent was so heavy.

  He was trying to figure out why the light in the alarm had been green. Then the thought occurred to him that the alarm had been disabled. That damned kid who came by yesterday on his monthly visit to check all the window and door sensors and check the camera monitors!

  He didn’t have time to dwell on that.

  “We are friends of the Palestinian,” one of them said, and Pizzolli recognized the accent. Russian.

  Another lifted a burlap bag from the couch and emptied the contents on the floor. Two heads rolled out. Big Tuna recognized the faces. They were the hitters he had sent to do the Palestinian.

  That fucking raghead didn’t just get his money from the Russians—he got it from the Russian mafia.

  “There is a safe. Open it.”

  The Big Tuna took a deep breath and exhaled. The man who first spoke shot him in the right leg with a silenced pistol. Big Tuna fell and grabbed his leg. Blood seeped out between his fingers.

  “You’re gonna kill me anyway,” he said through clenched teeth. “Do it and be damned.”

  The man smiled. He had some kind of gray metal fillings in his teeth. “Ah, but the question is—How long you suffer before you die? We have all night. Open the safe.”

  Sal Pizzolli opened the safe.

  After dinner I had a few minutes with Grafton on the porch. “Are you sure we haven’t been set up with Korjev? Do you believe him?”

  He took his time answering. “I am not sure of anything. Tracing the money will prove if he told the truth… about the money we can trace. Mixing some truth with fiction is the best way to sell a lie. We’ll see what we will see.”

  “All we’re doing is questioning this guy,” I remarked.

  Grafton set his rocker in motion. “Do you boil eggs for breakfast?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. Probably should have kept my trap shut.

  “You put water in a pan, add the eggs, turn on the heat, and wait for the water to boil, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You can stand there looking into the pan telling the water to hurry up and boil, but it doesn’t matter whether you do or not. It will boil when it’s hot enough, and not a moment before.�
��

  I changed the subject. “The hands who work here are probably shooting off their mouths back home about Marines at the ranch. If someone still wants Korjev dead…”

  The admiral rocked back and forth. The damned guy had no nerves.

  “Or somebody may want you dead,” I said.

  “If the Russians try to kill Korjev, again,” Grafton asked, “will you be more inclined to believe his story?”

  “I suppose,” I admitted.

  “The people in the Kremlin may suppose so too.”

  Adam Townsend had an appointment with the president of the Connecticut university that he had donated $400 million to on behalf of the Oklahoma oil widow. They met in the president’s office, a wonderful, large room with a desk, original art, a Persian rug, and big windows. The president greeted him warmly, with a wide smile. Part of his job was to raise money for the university, and he was compensated accordingly. Townsend had given a big chunk on behalf of an anonymous donor; perhaps he would do the trick again. After the usual greetings, Townsend got down to it.

  The money from the anonymous donor had, perhaps, come from Russian sources, Townsend said. He personally suspected that it had. The supposed donor existed, but her attorneys denied she had ever given this university a dime.

  The president took the revelation with poor grace. He lost his temper, then began berating Townsend for being so naive as to let himself be used.

  Adam Townsend couldn’t resist making a few remarks. “My firm charged the donor only for my time. We thought we had a client who wished to preserve her anonymity, and so we told you. You didn’t ask for more. We’ve both been had. And your university is four hundred million dollars richer.”

  “You don’t know that that was Russian money.”

  “I said I didn’t. I said I suspect it was. You read newspapers and watch television. Hundreds of billions of dollars went through that bank in Estonia. Your university might have gotten some of it.”

  “And might not. You don’t know.”

  “No sir, I don’t. I am informing you because I feel I am ethically bound to do so. Even if you wanted to return the money, I have no idea to whom you would return it. That’s the nub of it.”

  The president calmed down. Townsend decided that the prospect of disgorging the funds was what had the president worried. If he did have to direct the school’s endowment treasurer to write a check, he would have to tell the board of trustees why he wanted to return the funds, and he certainly didn’t want to do that.

  After talking it over with Townsend, the president reached a decision. “We’ll continue with business as usual until someone with a better right to the funds than we have demands them.”

  After Townsend left, the president called the university’s lead attorney and made an appointment to see him.

  No one was going to demand the funds be returned, the president decided. The money would be put to good use. He would talk to the attorney, but unless and until someone squawked, the less said about the donation the better.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The pot began to boil the next morning. Senator Harlan Westfall’s favorite reporter had written a story alleging that the FBI was investigating a Toad Hall Capital Management investment in president Vaughn Conyer’s new hotel in Houston. According to the story, a “high-placed official with knowledge of the investigation” said agents were trying to establish if Toad Hall had received Russian money, and if Russian money had gone into the hotel. Another source that the reporter said refused to be identified said the amount involved was about $270 million.

  The newspaper that printed this story was known for its well-placed sources in the bureaucracies, so it had some level of credibility.

  That Saturday morning, Senator Westfall, still in his pajamas, read the story in the kitchen of his Washington townhouse as he waited for his coffee to drip through. He chuckled. This would put some pressure on the White House. Westfall’s FBI source had told him that Ricardo Silva had been on Yegan Korjev’s yacht in the Mediterranean when it was stopped by the Navy, and the senator had slipped that fact to the reporter.

  Westfall was personally acquainted with Silva, a resident of the great state of New York who had donated generously to his campaign through the years. Yet the senator had no compunction about throwing Silva to the wolves. After all, the financier would never learn how the reporter got his name.

  The reporter quoted his source as saying that Ricardo Silva was being investigated and that the public records of Silva Capital’s business dealings were being examined, although subpoenas had yet to procured. The fact that Silva Capital had indeed invested in Toad Hall Capital Management, and that Toad Hall had in turn invested in the Conyers hotel project two years ago, was a matter of public record; anyone trying to verify the story would learn that when they read the SEC filings.

  Westfall laughed out loud. The story was a classic smear, and yet nothing in it was libelous. Silva could and probably would hotly deny that he had received Russian money. The White House could brand the story fake news. The Silva Capital/Toad Hall paper trail was made to look sleazy, as if everyone involved had something to hide. All the story really said was that the secretive FBI was investigating.

  After his first sip of delicious coffee, Harlan Westfall turned on the small television set on the kitchen counter to see how the networks were handling the paper’s story.

  The immaculately coiffed and made-up talking head holding forth on his favorite network, the Life Network, was reporting another story. She said that the former chief financial officer of the Hinton Foundation—the so-called charity of former president Willy Hinton and his wife, who was also Conyers’ unsuccessful antagonist in the last presidential election—had alleged that the foundation received at least twenty-five million dollars in donations from Russian individuals or entities controlled by the Russians. They even showed a short clip of reporters questioning the guy on a sidewalk somewhere. He looked honest and harassed. His wife clung to his arm. He said that he had resigned from the Hinton Foundation when he realized what was going on. He said he had already talked to the FBI and investigators from the New York attorney general’s office.

  Harland Westfall swore aloud. His cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. The Speaker of the House, Judy Mucci. He took the call. “They’re sliming the Hintons again,” Mucci wailed. “It’s even on CNN. What should we do? My God, what can we do?”

  “I’ll call the New York AG. That nincompoop needs to back off.”

  “Somebody needs to talk to him,” Judy Mucci agreed.

  “Damn that bastard,” Westfall swore. The bastard he was referring to was, of course, the president of the United States. Westfall thought that Conyers had to be behind the former CFO’s public statements, and would never believe he wasn’t, even if he received the sworn affidavits of three angels—which were hard to find in Washington, D.C. Westfall knew how the game was played, or at least he thought he did, because that was how he played the game.

  When the Speaker hung up, Westfall called the attorney general of the state of New York. The guy answered because, of course, he was always available to Harlan Westfall.

  “Have you seen the stuff on television?” Westfall demanded. “The former CFO of the Hinton Foundation talking about his conversations with investigators from your office?”

  “I just got out of bed, Senator, and am just turning on the television—”

  “He says the Russians gave the Hinton Foundation twenty-five million dollars.”

  “Well—”

  “Listen, and listen good. New York is Hinton country. Sure, the Hintons are greedy bastards, but they are our bastards. More than half the people in America voted for that goddamn cunt in the last election. We can’t afford to lose a single one of those votes. She would have been elected if it weren’t for the damned electoral college. Who gives a good goddamn what the shit-kickers in Wyoming and North Dakota think? You better figure out a way to defuse the impact of his inter
views with your people. Got that?”

  “Senator, we—”

  “You want to be the governor of New York when your turn comes, don’t you? We need some loyalty here. Don’t fuck this up, you silly shit.”

  And with that, Harlan Westfall hung up.

  The Silva Capital/Toad Hall story hit Ricardo Silva like a hammer. He knew it was coming because the reporter who wrote the story called his office yesterday afternoon. Silva’s executive assistant took the call, listened to what he had to say, and declined to comment. Then he called Ricardo Silva with the news.

  Neither Ricardo nor Ava had slept more than an hour or two, waiting to see what the morning would bring. As the sun rose in Westchester, they found the networks had the story and were going all out. Would this be the crime that toppled President Conyers?

  Silva’s phone began ringing incessantly. An unlisted number. Ava seemed calmer, more self-assured. She had wanted a socialist revolution in America all her adult life and had worked for it. Now, with the help of Russian fake money spread far and wide, the whole rotten establishment was going to shatter and crumble.

  Yet neither Ricardo nor Ava had thought that when the crisis came, they would be front and center in the crosshairs of the media. “We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise,” Ricardo muttered. “When the CIA kidnapped Korjev…” They hadn’t factored that in when working with the Russian.

  “What is he telling the CIA?” Ricardo demanded of the modern art that decorated his home office. “What has he told them?” he demanded of the commentator, his flapping mouth filling the large flat television screen on the wall. The talking head didn’t answer.

  “Yegan needs to die,” Ava Silva said flatly.

  Ricardo wasn’t going to argue the point. The news that the Toad Hall people had invested money in a Conyers’ hotel-resort had blindsided him. No one had any proof that he knew that Silva Capital had ever taken a dime of Russian money, although of course he did. Yet it was being smeared because he and Ava were on that goddamn yacht when the CIA snatched Korjev.