The irony was that if Yegan Korjev told the CIA interrogators the real reason the Silvas were on the yacht, there was little the CIA or FBI could do. The United States Constitution protected them: fruit of the poisoned tree and all that. This damned rumor, however, was dynamite that could ultimately kill Silva Capital. Guilty until proven innocent—wasn’t that the Alinsky credo?
“We need to get someone to do the job, and we need to find out where Korjev is.”
So they had two major problems. Most people who suddenly, fervently wish an enemy’s death are stumped by the problem of causing that death, since most people don’t want to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Nor do most people have the contacts to discover the CIA’s most tightly held secrets. Yet most people aren’t worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which Ricardo Silva certainly was.
Among the investors of Silva Capital were some who didn’t want the facts or amounts of their investment bandied about. They ran enterprises that were legal, and some—the most profitable—that weren’t. Silva knew three such men. One was into prostitution and gambling, another reputedly ran the rackets on Philly’s north side, and another was rumored to have made a fortune in political graft. The last had never been caught, not even arrested or prosecuted. Silva kept their names and telephone numbers in a little address book which he kept locked in his office safe. He opened the safe and got the book. The names and telephone numbers were in code, a progression he had memorized many years ago. He picked up his cell phone and started with the man he thought most likely to be able to help.
Meanwhile, Ava Silva was thinking about some of the young men and women she had met in her political science courses through the years. She had made it a point to keep track of the most promising ones. She stood at a French door and looked across the lawn with unseeing eyes as she thought about faces and names.
Ah yes… There was that girl, very progressive, who married a young man rumored to be a CIA agent. What was her name?
I was eating breakfast on the porch of the Utah farmhouse when Jake Grafton came out after an hour on the satellite phone. He motioned with his head as he walked out into the yard, so I abandoned my plate and followed him. The sun was just peeping over the eastern horizon. I don’t know how long Grafton had been up, or if he had even been to bed. He wasn’t getting much sleep these days.
“The pot is really cooking now,” he murmured as we walked down toward the barn. There was a big rock that was perfect for sitting on, so he parked his butt.
“Remember the Silvas?”
“When I get my yacht they’ll be my first guests.”
“They’re talking about killing Korjev. Ricardo apparently got pissed when Senator Westland leaked that story about Toad Hall Capital investing in Conyers’ resort, with money they got from Silva. The implication is that Silva is a conduit for Russian money.”
“Is he?”
“Korjev says he is.” Grafton sighed. “Silva will never admit it, though. An admission like that would destroy him, and one suspects he knows that.”
“How do you know all this?” I confess, I always feel silly asking Grafton where he gets his information. “God whispering in your ear again?”
Jake Grafton made a noise, somewhere between a chuckle and a snort. “Sarah has turned their phones and computers into listening devices. The Silvas, Westfall, some of the others.”
I should have known. Grafton was always two jumps ahead. When John Kerry was negotiating the Iran treaty in Switzerland, Sarah was tasked to figure out a way to listen in to private conversations. She found the Israelis had already been there with a program that captured target cell phones and computers and turned them into microphones. Every sound these devices picked up was transmitted over the hotel’s wifi onto the internet, right to the Mossad’s recorders. Sarah improved on the program and had used it before.
“Ricardo is talking to some mobsters about a hit on Korjev, as soon as he can find out where he is. Ava is talking to some former students, trying to find someone who is ideologically pure or can be bribed big time to tell her about this safe house.”
He scratched himself and smiled at me. “Get out those rifles and ammo and get ready. We may have visitors, sooner rather than later. I’ll talk to the Marines.”
“They’re probably bored silly.”
He nodded in agreement. “This will be like tossing meat to a pack of hungry lions. But you get out those rifles and load ‘em up, just in case.”
“How much longer are you going to dink around with Korjev?”
“I am going to give him the juice tonight. Don’t plan on any sleep.”
The juice he was talking about was a truth drug, a pharmaceutical cocktail that the chemists had spent years perfecting. With a shot of that in your veins, you were going to tell everything you knew. Everything.
“Took you long enough to get around to it,” I remarked.
He gave me the eye. Yeah, I was smarting off again, which he didn’t like. “I wanted to admire the paint job before we looked under the hood,” he said in way of explanation.
Ricardo Silva called his office and told them he wasn’t coming in. “We’re besieged,” his office manager told him. “There are at least two television crews on the street. Look on your television.”
Silva looked. Yep, there was his building behind a talking head, who was reporting that Silva and his wife were on a yacht in the Med with a Russian banker when it was stopped by the U.S. Navy, and that Yegan Korjev was taken off at the request of the Italian government. Then they ran a clip of an Italian official who told of the murders of three Americans in Capri, and Korjev’s yacht’s hasty departure from that port. Yes, the Italian government wanted to question Yegan Korjev.
“Why?” the reporter asked.
“We investigate. I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.” The same old crap, Silva thought. He was being set up for a perp walk.
He hung up his telephone—he had used the landline as a precaution—and saw Ava standing in the doorway.
“Reporters are outside the gate. They have lights rigged and trucks.”
The two went to the window. The gate was forty yards down the drive, a big, wrought iron thing, twelve-feet high. Through it, they could see a mob of people out on the street, which was actually a county road.
“Call the sheriff,” Ricardo told his wife.
“I already have. They are sending an officer.”
Back to the television. On another network, the Silvas saw their house. The reporter was breathless, going on about Yegan Korjev, the Russian banker, his yacht, the interception at sea at the request of the Italian government. Silva turned off the idiot box and sat at his desk, trying to decide what to do.
That goddamn Anton Hunt had got Ricardo and Ava into this. And Hunt was dead, had been dead for seven months. Fell off that building in New York. If there was a hell, Ricardo hoped that Anton Hunt was in it.
Hunt! Perhaps there was some way to blame him for this. At least, send the press off in another direction. Yes, the press would love Hunt, the leftist billionaire financier who had given money to every liberal politician in the nation and funded progressive causes. If his name came into this, some politicians would start sweating.
Perhaps that was the way he should go. Sic the press on the politicians.
Silva went to his bedroom, shaved, and dressed while he thought about trying to turn the press onto the politicians. Before he did anything, he would discuss the move with Ava.
The hard truth was that Silva Capital couldn’t survive if it stayed in the spotlight. Sooner or later the press would learn of the infusions of Russian cash into his hedge fund. When that happened… he could lose everything. Perhaps Senator Westfall or the governor could help him keep the New York attorney general off his back, but if the Justice Department or FBI got involved…
It was time to take to the lifeboats. This ship had sprung a big leak. It was every man for himself.
He talked the situation
over with Ava. “Call Westfall,” she advised. “We need political cover. We need him on our side.”
He picked up his cell phone, then put it down. No, he would use the landline. The damned reporters might be intercepting cell phone calls. That was illegal as hell, but the bastards would do anything for a really big story.
What he learned was that Senator Harlan Westfall was too busy to take his call. The aide apologized.
“He’s pushing you over the side,” Ava said.
“Maybe.”
“You must talk to the press. Let’s figure out what you are going to say.”
Reverend Dr. Zachariah Weston, the president of the Wright Bible College in Nevada, Arkansas, was having a bad morning. Six months ago a foundation had donated ten million dollars to the college, an unsolicited gift that could be used for any purpose. Of course the college’s attorneys had checked on the foundation, which had an office in Dallas, but they hadn’t gotten far. The principals of the foundation were supposedly professional men, bankers, oil men and such, and committed Christians. The director of the foundation assured the attorneys that the check was good.
Dr. Weston had taken their report under advisement and put the check in the bank. The small bible college was tuition-driven and had been struggling for years; it could certainly use the money. That day six months ago ten million bucks had looked like manna from heaven.
This morning, as he watched the television circus, Zach Weston was having second thoughts. What if the ten million was Russian money? He called the college attorneys and asked them to dig deeper into that foundation.
An hour later they called back. The foundation office had been closed. The Texas authorities said they had never heard of it.
It was the tone of the television commentators that worried Weston. The college had accepted an unsolicited gift. What was the harm in that? They had done their due diligence. The bank the check was written on had honored it in the routine course of business. Still, the commentators today were hinting, implying, that Russian money from that branch bank in Estonia was somehow dirty, tainted. They were after President Conyers because of a Russian investment in one of his real estate companies, and they were after the Hinton Foundation for accepting a donation. Accepting a donation—that is just what he did on behalf of the college.
What would the college trustees think?
He turned off the sound on his television and called the chairman of the board. “Have you been watching television?”
“Of course?”
“I’m worried about that ten-million-dollar donation we got in December,” Weston said. “Remember that?”
“Biggest gift the college ever received—of course I remember it. I’ve been thinking about it too.”
“Marshall, we may have a problem on our hands. The foundation that donated the money has closed its doors, and the Texas Secretary of State says she never heard of it.”
“But you checked when we got the money, didn’t you?”
“Our attorneys did. This morning I asked them to check again. I just got off the phone with them.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You see the problem. If we sit tight and it comes out that we accepted Russian money, dirty money, we are going to have a huge problem. The press is after the president and the Hintons.”
They discussed it, and the chairman said he would call the other trustees, have a conference call and get back to Dr. Weston. When the call ended, Weston turned the volume back up on his television and surfed the channels. The Speaker of the House was calling for another investigation into Conyers’ finances, and said that if indeed the Russians had invested in his businesses, the House would bring a bill of impeachment.
It was noon in Utah and I was making a sandwich in the kitchen when I saw Ricardo Silva on television. He was standing outside the driveway gate to his house in Westchester, an 18-room McMansion that resembled a French chateau. He looked reasonably calm, all things considered.
Yes, he said, he and his wife had been guests on Yegan Korjev’s yacht in the Mediterranean when the U.S. Navy, which had removed Korjev from the yacht, stopped it. He hadn’t protested.
“Why not?” the reporter asked.
“During the night someone tried to kill him,” Silva said. “Apparently Korjev killed the assassin, but he was in a coma when the Navy arrived.”
This was a big revelation, and the three reporters spent fifteen minutes getting every detail from Ricardo Silva, who hadn’t actually seen the shootings, he said. He and his wife had been asleep.
Finally a reporter asked the question Silva had been waiting for. “Why were you and your wife on that yacht?”
“We were invited by Yegan Korjev. We had been introduced to him about three years ago by Anton Hunt.”
“Hunt the financier?”
“Yes. It was merely a social thing. Ava and I needed a break, so when Korjev invited us, we accepted and joined the yacht in Naples.”
“Why did Anton Hunt introduce you to Korjev?”
“We were at a meeting in Switzerland, and of course we knew Anton, and he introduced us.”
“Did you ever discuss money with Mr. Korjev?”
Here Silva smiled. “Gentlemen, I run a hedge fund. I discuss investments with almost everyone I meet who is also in the business. Of course Mr. Korjev and I discussed the world economy, business conditions in America, Brazil, Europe, Russia, the Middle East… I can’t even remember all the subjects that we touched upon.”
“And Mr. Hunt?”
“He and I both ran hedge funds,” Silva said with another smile. “We talked at least weekly, about many things.” So now the recently departed Anton Hunt, who had tried and failed to fix the 2016 presidential election—Jake Grafton and I knew that, although the general public certainly didn’t—was linked to Korjev and Russian money.
I went to find Grafton and learned that he was napping.
After I ate my sandwich and Doc and Armanti had gobbled theirs, we got busy cleaning the assault rifles. Disassembled them, swabbed out the barrels, and used solvent on every part, then reassembled them and oiled them lightly. Began loading cartridges into magazines.
Anton Hunt.
We took our new toys outside and went off to find the Marines. Jake Grafton had given me directions, so we commandeered a pickup and went looking. Found them too.
They were happy to watch us bang away at some tin cans I had rescued from the garbage.
Then the jarheads emptied a magazine apiece. They were better shots than we were.
It was a pleasant two hours.
As we put away our rifles, I took the officer in charge, a Marine captain, aside and told him that Grafton thought we might have company in a few days. Or anytime.
“It will be a shooting matter,” I said. “The target is our guest in the house.”
“Any ideas on who or how many?”
“No. Maybe they’ll come through the gate, maybe by helicopter, maybe overland, day or night, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll try to bomb the house or burn it down. When I know more, if I learn more, I’ll come give you a heads up. Just be on your toes.”
“We’re always on our toes,” the captain said curtly.
“Semper Fi, Mac,” I told him and mounted the passenger seat of the pickup. Doc was behind the wheel and got us rolling.
“Tommy, you owe me four dollars and eighty cents,” Armanti said from the back seat, “and you owe Doc seven bucks even.”
“You guys were cheating,” I said. “I don’t know how, but you must have been to beat me. I’m not paying a cent.”
The evening news was full of politicians running their mouths. They were promising hell fire and damnation, and prosecutions, for anyone who took dirty Russian money. It was quite a spectacle. Near the end of the newscast, the network we were watching aired an interview with the president of a bible college in Arkansas, a Dr. Zachariah Weston, with a reporter from an Arkansas television station. The college had accepted a ten-million-dol
lar donation in December from a Texas foundation that had since disappeared. The president had no further information beyond that, but there was a possibility the money was tainted somehow.
“From Russia?”
“We have no way of knowing. We did our due diligence and the donation appeared legitimate when we accepted it. Now, in light of the news we see on television, we are not so sure.”
“Is the college going to return the money?” The reporter asked. Proof, if any were needed, that some reporters are not too bright.
“To whom?” the president asked.
The whole interview lasted less than sixty seconds. Back in the network studio, the host said, “If a small bible college in Arkansas received a questionable donation, perhaps of Russian money—although there is no proof that the money came from that source—I wonder if other institutions of higher learning also received questionable donations. The American Association of Colleges and Universities reported that 2018 was a great year for donations to their members. We’ll follow up on this story.”
There was another Russian money story that day, although the press didn’t label it as such. The Southside Mall filed for bankruptcy. Zeke Rossen had finally faced the hard truth that the changing shopping habits of the American public made huge malls like his obsolete.
He was reluctant to tell his attorney about the Russian money, which was undoubtedly invested in his mall, but he had to list the owners. He gave the lawyer the address of the nominal investor and sheepishly admitted how crooked the whole deal was.
The attorney didn’t seem impressed. “The nice thing about bankruptcy,” he told Rossen, “is that it is like the last rites of the Church. Are you a Catholic?”
“No.”
“Well, a priest gives the dying person absolution for all his sins, and voila, he zips off to heaven clean as a whistle for whatever comes next. Bankruptcy is like that. The owners of your mall, including yourself, are going to get wiped out, the secured creditors will get first priority, and the unsecured creditors will get what’s left, if anything. Even the IRS will have to take what there is to get, which is damned little. It’s kinda like you get your virginity back. You walk away naked and clean.”
The Russia Account Page 17
