The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  On the positive side, the impeachment of Vaughn Conyers seemed to be progressing nicely. The liberal media was sounding the trumpets about Russian money invested in Conyers’ projects. As one talk show host told her audience, “He’s dirty and you know it. This is a good excuse to get rid of the bastard. Let’s do it. No apologies, no second guessing, let’s just do it.”

  One commentator noted that that rant sounded like a buildup to a lynching, but the liberal media ignored that crack.

  Westfall, the Senate Minority Leader, and Judy Mucci, Speaker of the House, couldn’t afford to ignore shots like that, which drew blood. Even if they successfully hung Conyers and left him twisting slowly in the wind, they had to govern afterwards; they had to get a Democrat elected to the White House in the next election, win back the Senate, and keep the House. It was a tall order and required strategic planning. The liberal mouths on television didn’t help their cause. The problem was toning them down without bruising huge, extremely fragile egos.

  One way was to phone them, so Mucci and Westfall divided the list and made the calls. “We appreciate your enthusiasm, but for God’s sake, show a little restraint. Talk about due process and a fair hearing, then after we hang the son of a bitch you can laugh.”

  “We’ve got to impeach and convict him,” Mucci told Westfall at a conference in his office. “Letting Conyers stand in front of cameras ranting to stadiums full of cheering people is a good way for us to lose the next election, and you know it. We’ve got to get him off that podium.”

  One of those huge, extremely fragile egos belonged to the “Squaw,” as Westfall referred to the former Indian and college professor who was running for president in the next election. He didn’t call her that to her face of course, or where anyone but his immediate staff could hear, but Westfall found her self-righteous speeches a bit much. Still, there was a chance, a very small chance, but a chance nonetheless, that she might actually get herself elected to the presidency, so Westfall always took her calls.

  “Harlan, I’ve just been talking to Dr. Barber.” Michael J. Barber was, as everyone knew, the president of the university where the squaw used to teach, the richest, most prestigious private university in the nation. “There’s a damned bible college in Arkansas that claims they got some Russian money, so Barber has had his own staff checking. He says there are gifts to the endowment fund from at least four foundations in the last two years that look very suspicious. They total one hundred sixty-four million dollars.”

  “Why do they look suspicious?” Westfall asked.

  “The staff was checking the W-9s they provided. It seems those foundations no longer exist, if they ever did. The IRS never heard of them.”

  Westfall didn’t know what W-9s were, but assumed, correctly, that they were some obscure IRS form. To keep the squaw talking, he said, “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Harlan, I’ve been publicly hammering Conyers about accepting Russian money. Now it’s my university! Do you see the spot this puts me in?”

  “Liz, I don’t know what to say. Our friends didn’t do this!”

  “Well, by God, somebody did. They did it to make me look like a fool and a hypocrite. If the university goes public with this—and Barber says the board insists upon it—I can’t unsay all the things I’ve said. I can’t denounce the university. The networks will have a field day at my expense.” She blithely ignored the fact that she could have refused to comment until all the facts were known. The squaw and her allies didn’t operate that way.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Sorry? This whole scam has been a debacle from end to end, a damned nigger tar baby, and now we’re stuck to it.”

  She hung up. Hung up on Harlan Westfall!

  As he sat there with the dead receiver in his hand, Harlan Westfall said to himself, but not aloud, You can’t use the N-word, Liz.

  The news that the director of the CIA had been shot in an assassination attempt was front-page news for two whole days, then the story flared again when Jack Norris, the assistant director, was killed in a shoot-out. The police refused to speculate, but someone in the FBI did, so the press linked the stories together on the front pages for another two days. Then the political news and finger-pointing drove the CIA’s troubles into the back pages.

  A prominent nationally syndicated columnist said that it was obvious things weren’t going well with the spooks in Langley, yet he had no facts. He wanted a congressional investigation, but Congress’ attention was elsewhere. The progressives had decided this was the time to slay the dragon in the White House, a quest that made all other matters momentarily irrelevant.

  That week the House of Representatives passed a Bill of Impeachment against the president, Vaughn Conyers. It was political theater that filled the television news channels, devoured train-loads of printer’s ink, and gave radio talk-show hosts their best audiences in years. Advertisers were horrified to see how much they would have to pay to sell their products over the airwaves during this time of national crisis. There hadn’t been a circus like this in America in a generation, not since Willy Hinton was impeached in the House for perjuring himself before a grand jury and obstructing justice (and every Democrat in the Senate had refused to convict him and remove him from office).

  In the midst of all this, FBI special agent Dylan Litzenberg came home late one evening; he was working twelve hours a day supervising a task force of agents attempting to discover how Russian money had been routed and squeezed through the nation’s banks, and where that money ended up.

  His live-in girlfriend, Rhonda Sides, was also putting in twelve-hour days at CIA headquarters at Langley. They had a pact that neither would discuss their work, which was confidential or classified, at home. Sometimes this led to long silences, but usually they discussed the news of the day, gossip about mutual acquaintances, what they had heard from their families, and where they should go on their next vacation.

  One evening, however, Rhonda decided she needed a wee bit of sympathy, and said, “I am so sick of listening to those intercepts.”

  Dylan Litzenberg raised his eyebrows but held his tongue. He was intensely curious but was afraid to ask a single question.

  “There’s just so much of it,” Rhonda said as she poured herself a glass of wine. By God, after the day she had had, she deserved a glass of wine!

  Litzenberg poured himself a vodka on the rocks and added a twist as he tried to decide how to squeeze a little more from Rhonda. He raised the glass and took a sip as he studied her face. She looked exhausted.

  “Must be listening to a lot of people,” he said casually.

  Then Rhonda did what she had told herself she would never do, which was reveal company secrets to people without clearances. “They’re listening to everyone who’s anyone. Half of Washington. You’d be amazed. They’re using cell phones and computers as listening devices, then the transcripts must be spot-checked.” She snorted. She took her wine and headed for the bedroom to change out of her work clothes.

  Dylan Litzenberg stood frozen. He had just glimpsed white-hot fire through a partially open furnace door, a door that had immediately closed. The director and assistant director of the CIA had been shot: the director was in critical condition and the assistant director was dead. The Congress was becoming a self-sustaining chain reaction.

  He felt slightly nauseous. He had talked to Westfall on the phone just last week. Maybe the spooks already had him by the balls. What if the spooks were listening to Harlan Westfall? What if the spooks had overheard him leaking FBI information to Westfall? What if they had it in a computer?

  Dylan Litzenberg was ambitious. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his career in Waco or Boise doing background checks or chasing bank stick-up artists through trailer parks. He knew how one got promoted in the FBI: by making friends with powerful people, like the big weenies in the Hoover Building or in Congress… people like the Senate Minority Leader.

  If the CIA were listening to anyone in Washington,
they were certainly listening to Westfall, who was the driving force in the Senate behind the attempt to remove President Conyers.

  One thing was certain: he had to warn Westfall, and telephoning him wouldn’t get it done. Nor texting. Nor emails. No, he was going to have to deliver a written note.

  While Rhonda was in the shower he sat down to write it. Litzenberg was so nervous his hands shook. He took a healthy swig of vodka and began.

  At CIA headquarters in Langley, Sarah Houston and her colleagues sorted through hundreds of transcripts of cell phone and computer-captured conversations. The more interesting ones were set aside, the audio put on a master thumb drive and checked against the written transcript.

  Sarah gave Jack Norris’ home computer to her brightest protégé to crack. Sarah just didn’t have the time.

  The Bill of Impeachment passed the House of Representatives on a Friday, and on Monday, Jake Grafton was moved from the ICU to a regular hospital room, a single. He sat up in bed with a box of conversation transcripts and read them when he felt like it. Callie helped him sort them, then they both read the piles.

  On Tuesday Harlan Westfall went dark. Sarah didn’t find out about it until late that evening, when she told me. “Westfall’s stopped using his cell phone. Doesn’t use his office or home landline, and his computer is disconnected from his office Wifi. In fact, I think it’s unplugged.”

  “He’s wise to what’s going on,” I said.

  “He was worried about his cell phone battery life,” she remarked, “but he’s shut off everything. There’s a leak somewhere.”

  “Here.”

  “Probably.” She was gloomy. The fact that the massive eavesdropping campaign against Americans was illegal meant that the more people who knew about it, the more difficult the secret was to keep. She had pointed that out repeatedly to Jake Grafton, who had used the capability sparingly and only as necessary, usually overseas. Never like it was being used now, to monitor the conversations of over two dozen Americans… twenty-nine, to be exact.

  I began to fret. If Harlan Westfall knew we were listening, he might pass it on. Sarah gave me Westfall’s transcripts and I dug in. What a slime-ball!

  On Wednesday morning, I read the conversation that Westfall had had on his cellphone before the Norris shooting. The man didn’t identify himself and Westfall didn’t call him by name, but the man knew all about the FBI’s investigation of the money trail, and he was tattling to Westfall, who already knew more than the FBI would ever learn.

  I decided it could be, and went back to the beginning of the surveillance of Westfall to see if I could find another conversation with this guy. I found two that I thought had to be him, talking about the money trail. I was convinced this guy was an FBI agent. I got one of Sarah’s minions to help me find the conversations in the computer archives so I could listen to the raw audio.

  I discussed it with Sarah. “Westfall has a source in the FBI. He might have gotten a tip from him that we’re eavesdropping, although I have no clue how the agency found out.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and tapped one with a pencil eraser. “One of the women on this project lives with an FBI agent. I heard her talking to a co-worker.”

  “Which woman?”

  “Rhonda Sides.”

  Maybe she was the leak, maybe she wasn’t. It was something to know.

  Something began nagging at me. “Do you think Westfall had anything to do with the Korjev attempt, or Jack Norris?”

  “I’ve seen no indication,” she said.

  Friday afternoon, Jake Grafton called Sarah and asked her to bring me and the latest intercepts to the hospital. A CIA security man was on duty in the hallway, one I didn’t know. We found Jack Yocke and Callie in the room with the admiral.

  I thought Grafton looked better. The color in his face was back, he had fewer IVs in him, and he had shaved within the last day or two. The cannula was still taped in place. His voice was stronger than it had been the last two times I saw him, and they had his bed cranked up a bit so he could read. He had his glasses on.

  “You must be perking along pretty well,” I told him. “The glint is back in your eye, and you look mean as ever.”

  He snorted, then said to me, “Get more chairs.” Yep, there were only two in the room.

  When that was attended to, he told me to close the door, and I did.

  He shot the breeze a bit with Yocke, sizing him up. I knew what he was doing. Grafton was going to sell the reporter something that he probably wouldn’t want, but he was going to buy it anyway.

  After a few moments of idle chatter, Grafton said to Yocke, “I am going to tell you a story off the record, then make a proposal. We won’t do any negotiating. If you agree to my proposal, you get to use the story. If you don’t, you can never tell a soul about this conversation or anything you learned.”

  Yocke’s eyes left Grafton and he looked around from face to face. His gaze ended up where it had began, on the admiral. Yocke shrugged. “I’m willing to listen.”

  “With the proviso as stated. You must listen to the whole story. If you don’t like the deal your lips are eternally sealed.”

  “Your choice of words implies that I’m going to be dead. Assuming you don’t mean to kill me if I don’t like your proposal, I will keep it to myself.”

  Grafton nodded once. “Good,” he said. “Tommy?”

  That was my cue. Grafton wasn’t strong enough to talk for an hour, so I was supposed to set the stage. I began with the senator’s visit to the director’s office to ask for our help rescuing a kidnapped kid in Tallinn, Estonia. I finished with our capture of Yegan Korjev and the interrogation in Utah. “Someone sent an assassin to try to murder Korjev, and we think we know who that was. That will all become apparent,” I said.

  “Sarah,” Jake Grafton said.

  Sarah cleared her throat. “Admiral Grafton asked me if I could use some secret programs we have developed through the years to turn various cell phones, laptop computers, and desktops into listening devices. He gave me the names and in some cases, telephone numbers.

  “We have intercepted and recorded a bit over a hundred hours of conversations, so far, and—”

  “Americans?” Yocke demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Jack Yocke exclaimed. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Felonies?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to hear this. Christ, I could be prosecuted as a co-conspirator.” He closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears.

  I laughed. He must have heard me, because he pulled his fingers out of his head, opened his eyes and looked at me sourly. “You asshole,” he said.

  “You ball-less bastard,” I shot back, and leaned toward him. “Your country is awash with fake Russian money, reputations are being ruined, we are seeing the worst political crisis of our lifetime, Jake Grafton is lying there in that bed with a hole in him that damn near killed him, and you are worried about putting your shriveled little weenie on the line. Reporters can print things obtained illegally, and you know that. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Kiss my ass.”

  “That’s enough, Tommy,” Grafton said. He waited until Yocke shifted his gaze from me to him. “Our deal was you listen to all of it, then decide.”

  “I can tell you now I don’t like it.” Yocke was defiant, petulant. Personally, I always thought the guy lacked guts. He wanted to be at the top of his profession without doing any sweating or bleeding to get there.

  “You can tell me that when we’re done too,” Grafton said. “Your decision.”

  Yocke shrugged, then nodded.

  “Callie, give him the transcripts in the order that we arranged them.” To Yocke he said, “We will start with Senate Minority Leader Harland Westfall and House Speaker Judy Mucci. Then we will move on to other players. These are merely computer-generated transcripts of oral conversations, and we have the conversations in digital form if you want to lis
ten to the raw audio.”

  He nodded and Callie handed him the first pile.

  I stood, and Sarah did too. Jake Grafton winked at me.

  We went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

  “What do you think?” Sarah asked me.

  “I think Yocke’s crazy if he doesn’t go for it. This is the story of the century; it will make his career. Shows, books, he’s being handed the gold ring. Grafton may go to prison, but Yocke will come out smelling like a rose.”

  We had coffee, decided that an early dinner would sit well, so we went back through the cafeteria line with trays and plates.

  Sitting at a table eating, we talked about Idaho. Maybe a cabin in the woods, near a town where we could get jobs. I knew a guy whose family were fishing and hunting outfitters—maybe something along those lines would keep me occupied.

  “I could always do computer consulting,” Sarah said tentatively.

  “When you aren’t hiking, fishing, camping, skiing, all that important stuff?”

  She smiled. “We can give it a try, Tommy, but I think you’re going to miss the action. Teaching some guy to fly-fish isn’t the same as bugging an embassy in the middle of the night or rappelling down a rope with the SEALs to snatch a Russian mogul.”

  “I’m really tired of shooting people, Sarah.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “It really bothers me that Harlan Westfall got a tip about our eavesdropping,” Sarah said.

  “People are people,” I responded. “If you can figure out how to stop wagging tongues your fortune is made.”

  She rested her elbow on the table and used her hand as a chin rest. “Westfall knew about the fake Russian money scramble,” she mused. “He knew that Anton Hunt organized it, he knew how and why and when, and now he and his friends have everything on the table betting they can use Russian money to drive a stake through Vaughn Conyers’ heart.”