Zeke Rossen started laughing. He had sweated blood since the Russian money story broke, and now it didn’t mean a thing. The bogeyman was dead.
“Life’s pretty crazy,” he told the lawyer, who agreed with him.
Chapter Sixteen
After supper the doctor gave Yegan Korjev a sedative. The Russian didn’t know it. It was a drug in his coffee, and he went quietly to sleep. Jake Grafton and I were in the room when the doctor administered an injection of the truth serum. Now to wait.
“The sedative will wear off in about an hour,” the doctor said. “The patient will be in a state of semi-consciousness. He can be questioned and he will answer. When the serum wears off, he won’t remember anything.”
Grafton grunted and went back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Tregakis and I fiddled with the recording equipment. There had been some discussion about whether the questions should be asked in Russian. If so, presumably Korjev would answer in Russian. Grafton had put a question to Tregaskis: “Does he know English well enough to answer in English? I want a recording, if we can get it, in English.”
Tregaskis thought so, but then he shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said.
These are the kind of experts I like, the ones who hedge their bets.
An hour later, Grafton and Tregaskis were in the room with Korjev, and I was manning the recorder. The nurse had been sent home. The doctor was in the living room with Doc and Armanti, on call. Mac Kelley and the staff were cleaning up the kitchen and planning future meals.
Grafton started out. “Yegan, can you hear me?”
A muffled yes.
“What is your name?”
“Yegan Ivanovich Korjev.”
“Where are you?”
“In Utah. America.”
So they were off. I listened as carefully as I could. Grafton spent some time on Korjev’s early life, then asked him about Putin, where they had met, how well he knew him. The answers were precisely the same as he had given for the last four days. Korjev’s voice was strong, his answers coherent. Then, abruptly, Grafton switched subjects.
“Tell me about Anton Hunt. When did you first meet him?”
“Anton Hunt? I don’t know him.”
“He was an American hedge fund operator. Did you meet him in Switzerland?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At Davos.”
“Did Hunt suggest flooding America with Russian money?”
“No.”
“The money that went through the branch bank in Estonia? Tell me about that.”
Thirty minutes later Grafton came out of the room with a fierce scowl on his face. Tregaskis was asking the questions. Grafton listened for a minute, then said, “He’s lying.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “The drug…”
“Get the doctor.”
I went to fetch him. Grafton faced him. “I want you to sedate him again, put him under. I think he’s had an antidote to the truth drug.”
“How…” The doctor was mystified.
“I don’t know. We’ll help you strip him, then I want him x-rayed. Head to toe. They can’t have known when we would give him the drug, so it must be in a time-release capsule of some sort, under his skin. I want to find it.”
This time the sedative was an injection. With Armati’s help, Grafton and I stripped the comatose man and began inspecting every square inch of the Russian’s skin. We finally found it on an x-ray, buried under his hair.
“Cut it out,” Grafton told the doctor.
“Now?”
“He’s sedated. Use a scalpel. Cut the damn thing out of him and stitch him up. Let’s get at it.”
The thing was about a half-inch long and a quarter inch in diameter. It looked for all the world like a suppository. The covering looked like some kind of permeable material that allowed the drug to seep out over time.
Grafton was visibly frustrated. He sat in the living room thinking about things while Korjev slept. I asked, “How did you know the truth drug wasn’t working?”
“Every answer,” Grafton said, “was precisely what he said during four days of interrogation. That’s impossible. You know he’s been lying and I know it. Yet he sticks to the story. There had to be a reason. Nobody can talk for four days and tell nothing but the truth. Nobody. Humans aren’t built that way. Little falsehoods inevitably creep in during long interrogations. We put ourselves in the best light, we paper over things we don’t know for a fact, we make assumptions, we just tell lies because we are human. In there tonight, he was merely rehashing the story that he’s spent four days telling us.”
“So what is the truth?”
“I’ll know it when I hear it. You will too.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“The truth will have a lot of Anton Hunt in it,” Grafton said flatly. “Korjev didn’t meet him three years ago at Davos. He met him at least five years ago and we have the photos to prove it. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he met Hunt ten years ago.”
“That assassination attempt aboard his yacht, Catherine the Great?”
“Fake,” was Jake Grafton’s verdict. “There was a shootout in the owner’s suite, and a body is lying right there when we arrive. It supposedly happened hours before. And the captain and crew did nothing? I don’t believe it. Korjev was the moneyman, he owned the yacht! He paid their salaries. He gets shot and is down there bleeding and the scene is undisturbed when we get there?”
“Hmm,” I said.
“And that helicopter. It sat right there on deck until we arrived. After the owner got shot they didn’t bandage him up, load him in it and chopper off to a Greek doctor. Explain that.”
I frowned. “That bothered me too.”
“Remember how fast Korjev pulled the anchor and steamed out of Capri? He said he knew nothing of the murders of our agents in the observatory. Yet as soon as someone shoots at someone on the quay, and misses by the way, Korjev orders the captain to get the yacht underway. Explain that.”
“He panicked.”
“You’ve watched him for four days. Does he strike you as the kind of man who panics?”
“No.”
“Me either. It’s too damn pat. It was a play put on for our benefit. Korjev took a couple of bullets, which did him no serious harm, lost some blood… did you see how much blood was in that stateroom?”
“A lot.”
“Too damned much. Must have been a pint or two.”
“The dead man. What about him?”
“Oh, he was dead, all right. Someone shot him. But we have no idea who. Bet it wasn’t Korjev. That poor fool was probably the most surprised man in town when the pistol was turned in his direction and someone plugged him four times. By the way, at least three of those bullets that hit him should have been fatal. He was flat on the deck when the last two were fired—I’ll bet my pension on that. Almost no blood around the entry wounds. And the crew of that yacht left him lying there for us to see. Thoughtful of them.”
He sighed.
“They didn’t know we were going to stop that yacht.”
“No, they didn’t. But they played for it, acted suspiciously. We obliged them.”
“What about Janos Ilin’s tip? He put the finger on Korjev.”
“That he did. Korjev may indeed be the man who arranged the river of money. That’s possible. Ilin may have believed that. Or he may have been fed a lie in the hope he would pass it on. If the latter is the case, Ilin’s days are numbered: he’s going to be dead soon. However, the most likely scenario is that Ilin was given the name and told to pass it on, which he did.”
“What about the computers we took off that ship?”
“Sarah says they are full of treacle. Nothing important.”
“Even Silva’s?”
“His and his wife’s are the only ones that have something to tell us. One suspects the Silvas were pawns to be sacrificed. The irony is those two didn’t know it. Ricardo did indeed get Russian money a
nd was spreading it around. And putting some of it to work in his hedge fund.”
“So what do you want from Korjev?”
“Names. American names.” Grafton stretched in the chair and put his hands in his pockets. “Here’s the way I suspect it went down. Some American came up with the idea for this op, perhaps Anton Hunt, and took it to Korjev, who took it to Putin. The key was having Americans who could and would salt the money around to eventually cause a major political meltdown. The other side of the coin could be true: Putin thought it up and took it to some Americans who liked the idea a lot. Whichever way it went down, the people involved here wanted America to collapse, to fail. They wanted to drive a stake through the heart of representative democracy by showing the whole establishment is rotten from top to bottom. After Hunt died, I think the Kremlin kept going. The opportunity to cause a stupendous political crisis in the United States, to make America turn inward and surrender their foreign policy influence in Europe and the Middle East, was just too good to pass up. That’s what I think happened, and Korjev knows. Damn it, he knows! He knows the names. Those are what I want from him.”
“The FBI will eventually get them,” I ventured.
“The damage is being done now.” He gestured at the television, which was off. “We can’t wait three or four years for the FBI to do pretty little investigations all tied up with bows to pass to Justice to take to Grand Juries.”
“Already congressmen and senators are talking about impeaching the president.”
Grafton frowned. “With the country divided down the middle into two warring camps, removal of a president from office for political reasons might touch off a civil war. Wouldn’t the guys in the Kremlin love that?”
He cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead. “Is there any bourbon around this dump?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Pour three fingers over ice, and I’ll take it to bed. We’ll sweat that son of a bitch tomorrow and get the truth out of him.”
“We’ll know it when we hear it,” I said dubiously.
“You’re goddamn right,” the admiral said, and pushed himself upright. I went to get the whiskey bottle.
When the admiral tottered off to bed, I sat there looking out the window. I had a MP-5 right beside me and a Beretta under my armpit. What we were going to get out of Korjev was the truth as he believed it to be. That was an important qualifier.
No doubt Jake Grafton knew that. Hell, he knew everything.
I was up early, just as the day was getting gray. I turned on the television. After all, it was two hours later on the east coast. Sure enough, the politicians were fulminating. Greed, lies, treason—all were being talked about. At the bottom of the screen, the news ticker rolled by. Two more colleges had reported questionable donations in the last two years, for amounts in the tens of millions of dollars.
Then came the bombshell: one of the Federal Reserve governors opined that all the money that flowed through the branch of the Bank of Scandinavia in Estonia was fake money. Not counterfeit, which implies printing fake bills, but fake money, with nothing to back it up. It disappeared into the world’s financial system and thereby became real money. “Created money,” was her phrase.
The host jumped right on that. “But isn’t creating money what the Fed does?”
“Yes, but—”
I killed the savage beast and got busy fixing myself a couple of eggs. Ah yes, the Fed creates American dollars, but the rotten evil Russians aren’t supposed to. Create American dollars, that is. They can create all the damn rubles they want, if they want, but not American dollars. Those swine.
I watched the water heat up in the pot with my two eggs. Yep, Grafton was right. Watching didn’t make the water boil faster.
I was sipping coffee and finishing my eggs when Grafton came in. “It’s on the news,” I said. “Some Fed governor says the Russian money was ‘created.’ Not in Washington, but somewhere in the bowels of the evil empire.”
The admiral grunted at me, poured himself a mug of coffee and said, “Let’s get the doc, check on our patient, and get after it.”
“Think that antidote to the truth serum is out of Korjev’s system?”
“We’ll find out.”
We were walking across the living room when I heard a plane. Sounded like a turboprop, low. It flew right over the house washing us with a crescendo of noise.
“Outside,” Grafton roared. “Shoot it down.”
I grabbed my MP-5 and raced out the front door. Something like a shower was raining down. I knew what it was by the smell. Kerosene.
The plane was pulling up steeply, the pilot using the rudder to push the nose over, a cropduster turn. I was right by the house, so after he made the turn, he was coming right toward me. I flipped the rifle’s selector switch to full automatic and went down on one knee to get steady. I began shooting when he was about a hundred yards out, leading him.
I had no idea how much to lead him, and I didn’t have tracer bullets to help me get it right. I swung a little ahead to a lot as he came over me. It was actually a pretty easy shot, with almost no deflection. The gun hammered and the sound of his engine rose. It was a Pawnee or some such, a single-seat ag plane. I could see the kerosene spewing from pipes under his wings. I held the trigger down.
He was right above me when my magazine went dry. The extra mags were in the house. Shit!
But I had scored. The engine was screaming now, the sound of tortured metal. I closed my eyes and lowered my head as the kerosene came down like a shower. When I looked again, the plane was just above the ground, the left wing down, over a hundred yards away. Then it kissed the ground, skipped once, then hit the dirt, raising a great cloud, and slid to a stop. Miraculously, there was no fire. Silence.
I dropped the empty MP-5 and ran toward the wreck, which was about two hundred or so yards away now.
I was scared silly. Kerosene, which was jet fuel, plus a hot engine—the whole wreck could go up like a firecracker. But it didn’t. The plane was on the ground and the left wing was partially broken off. The ends of the prop were bent back along the fuselage, so the prop had been still turning when it hit. The smell of kerosene was pungent.
I was about thirty yards away when the pilot got the canopy open and came scrambling out of the cockpit. I jerked the Beretta from my shoulder holster.
The guy ran directly away from the airplane. Then he saw me, holding the pistol in both hands, pointing it at him. He stopped, raised his hands. “No,” he said loudly. He couldn’t stop his feet, which kept moving him away from the plane in tiny steps.
Behind me I could hear shouting. People were bailing out of the house as fast as they could. That damn kerosene ran down from my hair into my eyes.
“No!” the guy said, almost a prayer. He skittered a few more steps away from the airplane, still holding his hands up.
The kerosene was making my eyes burn.
I shot him.
The bullet didn’t knock him down. Hit him in the stomach, I think, and he bent over some, screaming, “No, no, no…”
My vision was blurry. I blinked mightily and shot him again. This time he went over backwards into the dirt.
I walked toward him wiping my eyes.
His eyes tracked me, so he wasn’t dead.
I felt his pockets. Got his phone and wallet.
Jake Grafton was beside me. “That asshole Silva,” I said. “You said he was hunting for an assassin.”
“None of the conspirators figured on us grabbing Korjev,” Grafton replied. “The Russians double-crossed them.”
The slick, slimy kerosene stank to high heaven. I was slightly nauseated.
We left the pilot lying on the ground and walked back toward the house. Mac Kelly, the doctor, Doc Gordon, Armanti Hall, and the Filipino cook were all in the yard watching as we approached. Doc and Armanti had their MP-5s in hand.
“You guys get some hoses,” Grafton said, “wash down a corridor between the house and that wreck.
If that thing catches fire, the whole house could go.”
He had just finished the sentence when the plane lit off. Whumpf! We ran for the hoses. When I looked up I saw that a ribbon of fire had reached the pilot lying on the ground and he was burning. He raised one hand, then was engulfed in fire.
Two hours later we were sure we had saved the house. The Marines had come to help and Alvie Johnson, my favorite cowboy, had fired up the backhoe and bulldozed a strip to keep the fire from spreading. I made a mental note to send him some Skoal.
The plane burned fiercely after the flames reached and ignited the flares the pilot had with him in the cockpit, flares he was going to throw out to ignite the kerosene he had sprayed on the house.
“I know that plane,” Alvie Johnson said as he stood watching the wreck being consumed. “Outta some place near Salt Lake. The guy flew it down to the Hanksville airport occasionally, kept a few drums of fuel there just for his use. Ain’t no terminal there, no fuel for sale, none of that. Just the drums for this guy. I saw him there a couple of times, and he kinda ignored us clod-hoppers standing around watching.”
When the fire finally burned out most of the airplane had been reduced to ashes and the pilot cremated.
I looked at the guy’s wallet and got his name and address. His phone was locked with a password, so I didn’t fool with it. Sarah and her minions could crack that thing like an egg and get all the nourishment from it.
“Somebody in the company leaked,” I said to Grafton, who didn’t reply.
I went to the bedroom, stripped and got into the shower. Getting that crap out of my hair was almost a career. When I was in clean duds, I took the stuff stinking of kerosene to the garbage and threw it in.
Armanti Hall had a few words after dinner. “Kinda sorry you shot that guy, Tommy.”
I wasn’t in the mood, but he continued. “Been my experience that it’s better to shoot people after they tell you everything you want to know, rather than before.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
The Russia Account Page 18
