The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  In less than a minute, the guard heard the distant wail of sirens.

  At five-thirty in the morning my cell phone woke me. I was asleep on Abraham Goldman’s living room couch. The damn thing wouldn’t stop buzzing, and of course I couldn’t find it. After a search, I found it had slipped down between the cushions. The buzzing had stopped by then.

  The call had been from Sarah Houston. I headed for the kitchen to make some coffee and pushed the buttons to call her back.

  “Hey, kiddo.”

  “Tommy, Jake Grafton has been shot outside his condo in Roslyn on his way to work this morning. An ambulance took him to the hospital. He’s in surgery now.”

  I was wide awake. “Tell me about it.”

  “A sniper, apparently, in that garage across the street. I think you had better come back to Washington.”

  “There’s a leak in the company, Sarah. That sprayer in Utah knew where to find the Russian. Now this.”

  “I’m looking. You come back. Better call the EAs and make sure Goldman has some guards.”

  “I’m on it.”

  I put the phone in my pocket and stood looking around. I was a bit baffled to find I was in the kitchen. What did I come in here for?

  Jake Grafton shot.

  Damnation! I went to find Armanti. After I woke him up and dropped the bomb, I called Langley. The two people I knew best were Grafton’s executive assistants, Anastasia Roberts—actually Dr. Roberts, since she had a PhD in foreign policy or something like that—and Max Hurley, intelligence analysist. Roberts went to the University of Chicago to teach a couple years ago, lasted two semesters, then asked Grafton if she could come back to the company. She was freaky smart, like Sarah Houston. Say what you will, smart women are the most fun to be around.

  Hurley wasn’t in Roberts’ class, but he had a severely logical mind and a photographic memory. He was skinny and liked to run marathons. He was the one who answered the phone this morning.

  “Max, this is Tommy. I just heard about the boss.”

  “He’s critical, Tommy. May not make it. His wife is at the hospital.”

  “I think I should probably come back to Washington, but I’m sitting here in San Francisco with Armanti Hall guarding Abe Goldman. We need some more bodies out here.”

  “Got three guys on the way. They actually left last night. ‘Tasia and I think you should get back here, too. I’ll have the travel office see what they can do to get you a reservation on a plane.”

  “I’m on my way to the airport now.”

  I briefed Armanti on the situation, called an Uber, and went outside on the curb to wait for it. A television reporter and her crew were setting up on the sidewalk. Welcome to your new life, Mr. Goldman. The reporter was eyeing me as a possible victim for the morning news when the Uber pulled up. I hopped in and he rolled away before the cameraman could get a shot.

  I stopped by the hotel to rescue my stuff and pay my bill, and then rode out to the airport. Sure enough, I had a reservation, and only had to wait an hour to board. Since I was a federal officer I kept the pistol with me, but I had to have a word with the captain. Even though I had slept in my clothes and hadn’t shaved, they gave me a seat in first class.

  Jake Grafton. Man, the adventures I had with that guy! A sniper! The fact is, I was crabby and depressed. If Grafton died, I was quitting the company. I wasn’t cut out to be a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine. I knew it and Grafton knew it, which was why we got along.

  The Frisco plane landed at Dulles, which is fifteen miles west of the Washington beltway. Used to be Dulles International was way the hell out in the sticks, but now it was just way the hell out in the ‘burbs, surrounded by tech companies no one ever heard of. Dulles was a miserable place, far too small for the number of humans that used it, and it seemed that I had been through that airport a couple of hundred times. The mood I was in, if I never saw the place again in this life that would suit me fine. I retrieved my bag from the carousel and went outside to wait in the taxi line. A Muslim in a sheet with a fat wife wearing a scarf and face rag tried to cut in front of me, but I used my elbows and growled at the SOB, “Wait for your turn, Ahab.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said in perfect British English.

  I had left my pickup in the lot at Langley, so I told the taxi driver to drop me there. On the way I called Sarah. “How is he?”

  “In the ICU.” She named the hospital. “I’m sitting here with Mrs. Grafton.”

  “See you in a bit.”

  The cabbie apparently thought he was going to make a funny about dropping me at the Langley gate, but after he looked at my face he decided against it.

  Forty-five minutes after I found my truck in the Langley lot I was walking into the hospital.

  They were in the ICU waiting room. I sat down beside Mrs. Grafton. She and Sarah filled me in. A single shot had struck the admiral as he walked across the sidewalk to the waiting car. The doctor thought the bullet was a hunting round, an expansion bullet, due to the massive internal damage. “Someone wanted him really dead,” Sarah said, “and he should have been. Perhaps a .270 or .30-06. The doctor says it’s touch and go, gives him a fifty-fifty chance.”

  I asked Callie, “Have you been in to see him?”

  “They let me hold his hand for a moment when he came out of surgery. More for my benefit than his, since he was still heavily sedated. He never knew I was there.” Once again, I was impressed with how tough Callie Grafton really was. The ultimate warrior had found a warrior mate.

  “Let’s go to the cafeteria and get some dinner,” I suggested.

  Over meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and vegetables I asked Mrs. Grafton, “Do you have any idea who did this?”

  She shook her head.

  I looked at Sarah. “How is the phone number project coming?” She knew the one I meant, finding the leak who had told someone that Korjev was being held at a safe house in Utah.

  “They’re working on it at the office.”

  “It is someone who knew about the safe house. That really cuts down the possibilities. That information is pretty tightly held.”

  Mrs. Grafton was working on a salad, pretending she didn’t hear us talking shop.

  We were all nursing styrofoam cups of coffee when Jack Norris, the agency vice-director, came into the cafeteria, looked around, saw us, and came walking over. “There’s one of the possibilities now,” Sarah muttered.

  “Callie,” he said, extending his hand. “I have been trying to get away all day. How is he?”

  Mrs. Grafton went into that, the shooting, the operation, the admiral’s critical condition, the fact he hadn’t yet awakened.

  “It sounds like a miracle that he’s still alive,” Norris said.

  Callie nodded slowly. “It’s in God’s hands,” she said.

  Apparently Norris thought that was a good place to change the direction of the conversation, because he looked at me and said, “I hear you had some excitement last night in San Francisco.”

  “Yes, sir. We got Goldman home and someone put a bullet through his window, probably a pistol bullet or a twenty-two. We didn’t hear the report. It came through the glass and just missed me and Hall.”

  “Did you find the bullet?”

  “Didn’t look. Didn’t call the cops either. I figured Mr. and Mrs. Goldman had had more than enough for one day.”

  Norris frowned. By reputation he was a “by-the-book” guy. If so, he had endured a lot of heartburn working for Jake Grafton, who rarely even looked at the book, much less went by it. That thought reminded me that Norris was now running the company, until such time as Grafton could get back to work.

  He hovered over Mrs. Grafton a while, held her hand, looked into her eyes, then said his goodbyes. Told me to stop in and see him in the morning. I said, “Yes, sir,” but I doubt if he heard it. He was already on his way out.

  I watched him go. “Yeah,” I said to Sarah, “he is indeed a possibility.”

  “I think that yo
u know far too much,” Sarah said, “and at this stage of the game, so do I.”

  Callie was watching our faces. “Be careful out there,” she said.

  I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  We had taken our second cups of coffee to the ICU waiting room and checked in again with the nurse, who just shook her head. We were sitting in the little room telling stories about Jake Grafton when the Graftons’ daughter, Amy Carol, arrived. She and Callie went into a clinch.

  A few minutes later Sarah and I left. In the doorway of the hospital, Sarah asked, “Your place or mine?”

  “Neither. A hotel tonight, I think. We’ll put it on the company credit card.”

  She followed me out of the parking lot; we found a hotel near the beltway. The bar was still open, so we stopped in there for a drink before we went up to our room. I was drinking bourbon and she was sipping wine when she said, “I wasn’t kidding. Norris is a real possibility.”

  “I know that. I’ve been thinking about him.”

  “If it is Norris, he’ll want us off the case as soon as possible, before we decide it might be him.”

  “That’s why we’re in a hotel,” I said.

  “You think he might send someone after us?”

  “The Silvas were looking for an assassin to kill Korjev. Then there was the telephone trail from the ag pilot to Harlan Westfall. Someone sent that ag pilot to the safe house in Utah. If organized crime was involved, we will probably never be able to make the connections to prove them in court. Yet I keep coming back to the fact that only a handful of company employees knew that Yegan Korjev was at the safe house in Utah. That was the critical piece of information.”

  I thought about it some more. “Last night, Abe Goldman confessed on national television. Somebody’s getting really worried, or a bunch of somebodies are. This morning, Jake Grafton was shot. It’s got to be cause and effect. Anything is possible.”

  Up in the room Sarah and I began listing possibilities. Jack Norris was at the head of the list, just above Max Hurley and Anastasia Roberts, who knew everything there was to know about the company, its activities and its secrets. There was the department head in charge of safe houses, Albert “Kid” Baisi. Of course Baisi’s staffers knew all about the safe house or ranch since they had helped design, supervise, and fund the construction, but they probably didn’t know that Korjev was being sent there. After all, the company ran a bunch of safe houses all over the planet; the number was constantly changing.

  Norris, Hurley, Roberts, Baisi… who else? Well, Sarah and me, of course, and Armanti Hall and Doc Gordon, plus the staff of the ranch, Mac Kelly, and the doctor and nurse. The maids, doubtful. The cowboys? Naw. I also scratched Sarah and myself from the list.

  “Nanya Friend,” Sarah suggested. Of course. She was the head of the Russian department, spoke the language, and had a PhD in Russian studies from… I forget. I didn’t know Nanya well, but I liked her… at a distance. Some people think that because women are plumbed for kids they have better personalities and more scruples than men, but I am not one of them. I have found women just as petty, conniving, brilliant, mean, and vengeful as men.

  I knew Max Hurley and Anastasia Roberts well. We had worked in the same office for years. Traitors?—I didn’t believe it. Hall or Gordon? Man, we had been shot at together. And calling an ag plane down on your own head spraying jet fuel? You would have to show me. Kelley, the doctor, or nurse? Possible, but not probable.

  In truth, too many people at the company knew about the safe house and Korjev… we were only guessing. The leaker might be someone we didn’t even know.

  But if it was someone we did know, we were left with Kid Baisi, Nanya Friend, and Jack Norris. I tried to envision Friend huddled over a rifle ready to murder her boss, and found it difficult. I also couldn’t see her haggling over the job with a thug. Baisi was an okay guy as far as I knew—yet certainly cold-blooded enough to give someone the chop, if he had a reason.

  My thoughts congealed on Jack Norris. I confess, I had never liked him. I sorta hoped it was him. I wondered if he did his own shooting or had it done for him.

  The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn, checked out of the hotel, and took Sarah’s car to her place. It was a typical apartment house, with a parking lot that wrapped around the thing, plus trees and other apartment houses sprawled all over. The best place for a sniper was on a nearby roof, so I cruised slowly into the lot, looking.

  If there was a sniper, he had either been up all night waiting for Sarah and me, or he was a really early bird, out to get two worms. Grafton was predictable; we certainly weren’t.

  I parked right under the overhang in front of the main entrance in the No Parking Fire Zone. Sarah used her code on the door and we went inside.

  She fired up her computer for me, then headed for the shower. I logged onto Facebook. Typed in Kid Baisi. The jerk wasn’t on Facebook! Where were you during the tech revolution, Daddy?

  My telephone dinged. I had a text message… from Callie Grafton. Her husband was awake in the ICU. I wrote back, thanking her for the information.

  Nanya Friend was on Facebook. She was a grandmother, and a proud one. Lots of photos of her grandbabies… and son and daughter. She also had a dog that got photographed a lot. No man in her life that I could see. Wrong. A husband named Rod. Athletic, fit, with a good grin.

  Jack Norris was also on Facebook. He had a wife named Nora… Nora Norris. Ugh. Two kids… no wait, three. They lived someplace rural, with a lawn and barn and tractor and… horses. I wondered which of them had the money. Career civil servants don’t earn that kind of bucks. I got into the old photos of Jack. He was a diligent Facebooker. No doubt Zuckerberg knew everything there was to know about him and had sold the information to every ad company on the planet.

  And there it was, the photo that froze me. Jack posing with a dead deer, one whose demise he had presumably just caused. He wore a camo outfit and a big grin, and held a scoped bolt-action rifle in his hands.

  I looked up Nora Norris. Photos of her on horses, with dogs, with the kids, at a birthday party… Maybe that was New Year’s.

  That rifle…

  Senator Harlan Westfall had a breakfast meeting at the Willard Hotel with Cheney G. Kopp, who was the chairman of the board of Life Network, which was an ally of liberal causes across the spectrum. After they ordered, they discussed the news and issues of the day, from Russian funny money to Abe Goldman’s confession to the possible impeachment of Vaughn Conyers.

  Westfall had his phone on the tablecloth beside his coffee cup. He checked the battery charge again. The damn battery seemed to be losing juice quickly these days. The phone probably needed a new battery, he thought. He abandoned the phone and captured Kopp’s eyes. “Cheney, I thought you and I had an understanding.”

  Kopp raised an eyebrow and took another sip of the superb coffee. “About what?”

  “That your people were going to ignore news stories that made us look bad.” The ‘us’ that Westfall was referring to were, of course, the liberals.

  “We do, to the extent we can.”

  “Last night and this morning the news people on Life are beating the hell out of that Goldman story. Can’t they lighten up on that a little?”

  “Harlan, we’re in the advertising business. We sell ads to corporate America to run on our shows. They look at our demographics and decide if the people they will reach are worth the cost of the ads. News shows are a different animal than talk shows, which have the personalities people like to follow, the talent. If a story is being covered nationwide as news, then we must give it some air time. Have to, to maintain our credibility and those demographics the advertisers want. If our audience just up and changes the channel on us, we’re screwed. You see that?”

  The senator said, “It’s the amount of coverage and emphasis on each story that I am interested in.”

  “That’s left up to the producer of each show. They try to juggle the day’s events, keep
ing our liberal slant yet not losing the audience. Actually, they try to expand it if possible. The size of the audience determines their paycheck.”

  “Maybe they need more guidance. This Russian money thing, the upcoming impeachment…”

  Their breakfasts came, so they stopped talking while the food was served and their coffee cups refilled from a thermos pot on the table.

  When they were again alone, Cheney Kopp said, “Harland, I just run the damn company. I can’t and don’t call the news show producers and tell them what to run, how long to make the segments, and I certainly don’t edit the anchors’ remarks. There aren’t that many hours in the day.”

  “I am not asking you to do that, Cheney. I just want you to understand that we have reached a critical moment in the life of our country. What people think about the events of the next few weeks that will determine our future will be, in some small part, determined by how television handles the news. I want you, your producers and news anchors to keep that firmly in mind.”

  The two men ate breakfast while discussing the nuances of television news. Then Kopp asked a question that had been on his mind for months. “Harland, you, Judy Mucci, Franky Konchina, Cynthia Hinton, Barry Soetoro, all you heavy-hitter Democrats used to be for clamping down on illegal immigration. We’ve got days of footage of speeches you people made assuring the voters you were against illegal immigration, railing against the parasites from south of the border who soak up welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid money. Then you changed. All of you, like flipping a switch. Now you’re not only against controlling it, you’re for it. What happened?”

  Harland Westfall frowned. He wouldn’t discuss this subject unless it were with a liberal Democrat he trusted completely. He didn’t know if he would put Cheney Kopp in that category, but he needed the man. Trust him and find out. If Kopp ever quoted Westfall, the senator could deny the conversation ever took place.

  “What happened,” Westfall said, “was a political earthquake. Vaughn Conyers won the 2016 election. He captured the white middle class. Captured is the wrong word. He seized it. Baldly put, the future of the Democratic party is with blacks and Hispanics. We need every Hispanic vote we can get, and we need to expand the franchise to get them, as California is doing. Citizens, illegals, felons, welfare people, we need them all. If we don’t get them, you’ve seen the last Democrat in the White House.”