by Larry Bond
The door crumpled, torn off at the hinges, and they poured inside.
At the same time, others broke in through the groundfloor windows.
More commandos armed with night scopes and sniper rifles swept their weapons through tight firing arcs — looking for targets on the upper floor.
The area fell silent again.
Suddenly, Koniev’s radio crackled with a hurried report from inside the dacha. His face fell. He stood up.
Thorn stood with him. “What’s wrong, Major?”
“They found Captain Grushtin,” Koniev said heavily.
Helen joined them. “Good.”
The Russian MVD officer shook his head tiredly. “No, not good. Come with me.”
Thorn and Helen exchanged a troubled look before following Koniev inside.
The dacha’s front room was packed with evidence of Grushtin’s illicit activities. A Japanese-made television set, VCR, and high-end stereo system filled an imported Scandinavian entertainment center on one wall. Personal computer components sat atop a handsome oak desk in the opposite corner. An expensive Persian carpet covered the hardwood floor.
A stepladder lay on its side on the carpet, next to a high-peaked officer’s cap and two empty vodka bottles.
Four SOBR commandos were inside the room, cradling their weapons in their gloved hands. All of them were staring up at the ceiling.
Thorn turned his own gaze upward.
Wearing his full Russian Air Force dress uniform — right down to his polished brown boots — Captain Nikolai Grushtin dangled from the rafters of his own ceiling. His face bulged out over the noose tied tight around his neck. Dark stains down the back of his uniform trousers showed where he had voided his bowels in death.
Thorn sighed. “Oh, hell.”
“Hell, indeed,” Koniev echoed him. He turned away and snapped out a question to the ranking SOBR trooper in the room. The commando stiffened to attention, hurriedly replied, and then carefully handed him a folded piece of paper.
“A suicide note?” Helen asked grimly, turning away from the body dangling above them.
“So it seems,” the MVD major said cautiously. “The assault team found it on the desk over there. Right by the computer.”
Holding it by the edges, he carefully unfolded the piece of paper.
Thorn looked over his shoulder. Scrawled Cyrillic characters filled the page above a signature. The writing looked shaky, uneven.
There were splotches where the ink had run. Were they tear stains? Or sweat?
Koniev frowned. “It’s dated yesterday.” Still holding the note, he began translating. ““I, Nikolai Grushtin, write this last testament and confession in great turmoil of soul and mind. Once a loyal officer in our noble Air Force, I end my days as a murderer, a drunkard, and a peddler of drugs. I accuse Colonel Anatoly Gasparov of leading me down this evil path. It was he who played on my weaknesses until at last I succumbed — selling my honor for money and the things money could buy.
Together, we conspired to smuggle heroin into our beloved motherland — auctioning it off to the highest bidder among Moscow’s many criminal gangs.
““But then the devil named Gasparov played me false,’” Koniev continued reading out loud. He could not hide the contempt in his voice. ““He told me he no longer needed me. That he had other men who would do what I had done — and for less.
Enraged, I resolved to take my revenge. So I sabotaged his aircraft by installing contaminated fuel filters and by ensuring the fuel itself was impure. I cared nothing for the others whose lives I took.
““Now, however, I am haunted by their ghosts and by the knowledge that my crimes must soon come to light. I am ashamed of what I have done, and of what I have become. I cannot live with that shame … ”” Koniev’s voice tapered off. He looked up. “It ends there.”
Thorn swung away and stared up at the corpse suspended from the rafters. Was this it? Had John Avery and all the others died simply because of a falling out between two greedy drug smugglers?
He’d seen enough combat to know how thin the line between life and death really was — and how often survival depended more on sheer luck than on skill or virtue. But the deaths of the O.S.I.A arms inspection team members now seemed especially meaningless.
He tore his eyes away from Grushtin’s body and turned to Helen. “What do you think?”
She looked equally troubled. “It seems plausible. At least on the surface.” She glanced at Koniev. “We need other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting, Alexei. And an autopsy. As soon as possible.”’ The MVD officer nodded rapidly. “I will arrange it.” He snapped out another string of orders to the senior SOBR trooper and then rejoined them.
“The commandos will touch nothing until a crime scene unit arrives.”
Thorn nodded toward the personal computer on Grushtin’s desk. “You should also have somebody take a close look at the files on that machine, Major. If we’re lucky, this bastard may have been keeping track of their suppliers and maybe even their customers.”
“Good idea, Peter,” Helen said quietly. Her hand rubbed at her left leg, unconsciously tracing the faint scar left by the bullet that had severed her femoral artery two years before.
He knew what she was thinking and remembering. A partially wrecked laptop computer had been the only real prize they’d netted from the raid where she’d been so badly wounded. But her sacrifice had not been in vain. The captured computer had yielded encryption software that had allowed them to tap into a deadly terrorist group’s e-mail communications network.
Almost against his will, Thorn found himself staring back up at the grotesquely bloated face of Captain Nikolai Grushtin. Had the dead man told them the truth in his apparent suicide note?
Or had he taken other, darker secrets with him to the grave?
JUNE 2
Criminal Investigation Morgue, Militia Headquarters, Moscow
Helen Gray took a shallow breath and looked away from the stainless steel autopsy table — refocusing her attention on cracks in the room’s green wall tiles and then on the bright fluorescent lights overhead.
She had witnessed many autopsies in her years with the FBI — first as a student at the academy and later as a field agent. But she’d never been able to get used to the cold, clinical butcher’s work required to extract useful information and evidence from a corpse.
The attitude of the doctor conducting this autopsy, a bored and cynical militia coroner named Rachinsky, only reinforced her dislike of the whole procedure. Right from the start, he’d made it clear that he regarded the process as a colossal waste of time and effort — and that he intended going through the motions only to keep them off his back.
Helen was also aware that outside observers might reasonably conclude that Peter, Koniev, and she were doing much the same thing — going through the motions. So far all the evidence supported the conclusion the Russian government was eagerly drawing: that Nikolai Grushtin had single-handedly caused the An-32 to crash as an act of vengeance directed at his fellow drug smuggler, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov.
Certainly the story fit all the known facts.
The MVD’s experts had compared the suicide note with other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting found in his dacha. It matched. They judged the shaky, uneven nature of the writing to be the result of severe emotional distress — probably compounded by the massive amount of alcohol he had apparently imbibed just before hanging himself.
And nothing other experts had found in the dead Air Force captain’s personal computer files shed much more light on his dealings with Gasparov. There was no list of heroin suppliers or buyers — no day-to-day journal revealing any more details of their freelance smuggling network. Only a slim file containing his financial records had proved to be of interest. It showed four separate wire transfers of $250,000 each to a Swiss bank account in his name. The first payment had been made in early April, the last on May 24.
Unfortunately, none of the file ent
ries indicated the ultimate source of Grushtin’s funds.
Helen looked back toward the table in time to see the coroner step back with a disgusted look on his thin, unshaven face. The overhead lights glittered off his wire-rim spectacles.
Rachinsky snapped off the overhead microphone and snorted.
“As I knew all along, this man was a genuine suicide.” He stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them toward a waste bin in one corner of the room. “You should not have wasted my time. For God’s sake, there are three thousand murders a year in Moscow now. That’s eight a day! I have better work to do than confirming what should have been blindingly obvious to any police cadet!”
Helen kept a tight grip on her temper. “Nevertheless, we’d all appreciate a more detailed explanation of your findings, Doctor.”
She glanced across the table at Peter Thorn and Alexei Koniev.
“Right, gentlemen?”
They both nodded.
Koniev added an explicit warning. “This is a matter of the highest importance to the government, Rachinsky. I’m sure you would not want any hint that you had done anything less than your best work to reach the wrong ears in the Kremlin …”
“Oh, very well,” the Russian coroner groused. Moving with an ill grace, he yanked on a new pair of surgical gloves and motioned them closer.
Rachinsky roughly pulled Grushtin’s head to one side, exposing a deep groove across his neck where the noose had been. He spread the gouge apart with two fingers. “You see these marks?
The black-and-blue speckling along this line?”
Helen studied the groove carefully — noting the tiny marks the coroner had indicated. “What are they?”
“Minute areas of bleeding caused by the rupture of small blood vessels in the skin.” Rachinsky shrugged. “They show this man was alive when the noose tightened.”
“What else?” Koniev asked.
“These areas of postmortem lividity.” The coroner pointed to purplish areas on Grushtin’s face, above the neck, and then to others on his arms and legs. “Again, the areas where the blood has pooled and settled are consistent with a death by hanging.”
Helen shook her head. “I’m not questioning the fact that Grushtin died that way, Doctor. I’m asking you what makes you so sure he inflicted that death on himself?”
“What makes me sure of that?” Rachinsky stared at her in disbelief.
“The man was drunk beyond description. He must have known he would be arrested soon. There are no signs of other injuries. More to the point, he left a note in his own handwriting! So what else could it be but suicide?”
Helen frowned. Everything the militia coroner said made sense, but something still nagged her about Grushtin’s apparent suicide. It seemed so convenient — almost too convenient. It was like being handed a perfectly wrapped package — one the Russian government was only too ready to accept.
She summoned up a mental image of the Russian captain’s body dangling from the rafters of his dacha. Something about that image seemed wrong, or incomplete, somehow. Something about the stains on the dead man’s uniform trousers … She looked up at Rachinsky. “Captain Grushtin lost control over his bowels while dying, didn’t he, Doctor?”
The coroner’s thin face registered his distaste. “Yes. He expelled feces. What of it? That’s quite common — especially in a death of this kind.”
Helen pressed further. “Were there any signs of urine? Any evidence that he lost control over his bladder at the same time?”
“No.” Rachinsky shook his head. “But the two things do not always occur together. Usually, but not always.”
“Usually …” Helen repeated. She let that sink in before going on.
Maybe the inconsistency meant nothing, but she wanted to make absolutely certain. “Then I would like you to examine that area again, Doctor — more thoroughly this time.”
“I will do no such thing!” Rachinsky said flatly. “Nothing in the facts of this case warrants such an absurd, even ghoulish reexamination. I’ve given you my medical finding, and that should be enough!”
“No, Doctor.” Koniev moved closer to the coroner, his mouth tight with barely suppressed anger. “Your finding is not sufficient. Not in this case. Not when it is now clear that your initial examination was incomplete.” He stabbed a finger repeatedly into at Rachinsky’s chest, emphasizing each point. “You will do as Special Agent Gray requests. Is that clear?”
The militia doctor stepped back-away from the MVD officer’s prodding finger. He licked his lips nervously, glanced briefly at the three grim faces in front of him, and then shrugged. “Very well, Major. If it will convince you of the perfectly obvious — so be it.”
“Rachinsky picked up a scalpel and moved slowly down the autopsy table to stand poised over Grushtin’s pelvic cavity.
Helen was sure she heard him mutter something about “a crazy, sex-starved American bitch” in Russian before he started cutting, but she chose to ignore it.
After making several short, swift incisions, the coroner leaned forward to take a closer look at his handiwork. Suddenly, he turned deathly pale. “Mother of God!”
“What is it, Doctor?” Helen asked sharply.
Rachinsky stared up at her, still horror-stricken. “There are massive burns and major scarring inside this man’s urethra. It’s completely obstructed.”
Helen fought down a sudden sense of triumph. Her instincts had been on target. “What might cause injuries like that?”
The militia doctor shook his head slowly in dismay. “I have not seen such things for a long time.” He stopped, and quickly checked the overhead mike to make sure it was still switched off before going on.
“Not since the Chekists … you understand?”
Helen nodded, knowing Rachinsky was making a coy reference to KGB torture during the Soviet era. Russia had still not come to terms with the atrocities routinely committed under its abolished communist government. Too many of the same people were still employed by the KGB’s successor agencies. “We need specifics, Doctor.”
The coroner nodded rapidly, now apparently eager to make up for his earlier intransigence. “Of course.” He flipped on the mike again, dictating his new findings onto tape. “Upon closer scrutiny, it is now clear that the subject, Nikolai Grushtin, was tortured for a prolonged period of time. Perhaps by means of severe electrical shocks applied to the inside of his genitals. Or possibly by a superheated wire inserted into the same region.”
Helen winced at the gruesome images evoked by Rachinsky’s dry, matter-of-fact evaluation. Grushtin’s involvement in the downing of the An-32 certainly warranted punishment, and probably even the death penalty. But no one deserved the kind of agony the Russian Air Force captain had apparently suffered before dying.
Moving with more energy and interest than he’d shown before, the coroner examined Groshtin’s legs and arms more carefully, turning them first one way and then another under the bright lights. He reddened.
“Find anything else, Doctor?” Koniev asked dryly.
“Perhaps,” Rachinsky admitted reluctantly. “It is difficult to tell with the postmortem lividity, the pooled blood, but there may be faint traces of bruising around the wrists and ankles. Very faint. As though whoever bound him took great pains to avoid leaving evidence.”
Helen motioned Peter and Koniev off into the corner, leaving the now thoroughly embarrassed militia coroner to continue his work. She lowered her voice. “Well, now we know why Captain Grushtin wrote and signed that suicide note.”
Koniev nodded grimly. “Somebody is covering their tracks.
Somebody capable of great evil. Somebody with enormous resources.
Somebody who found out we were interested in Grushtin almost as soon as we knew ourselves.”
“But is that somebody here in Moscow? Or back at Kandalaksha?” Helen asked.
Koniev’s mouth turned downward. “Who can say? All we know now is that this affair is far more than a murderous quarr
el between two heroin smugglers.” His shoulders slumped.
“Grushtin was our only solid suspect. Even now that we know he was murdered, I don’t know where to begin looking. There are more than two hundred Mafiya syndicates in Moscow alone — any one of which might be involved in this matter.”
“Kandalaksha,” Peter said suddenly.
“Kandalaksha?” The MVD officer looked curiously at him.
“You seem very certain. Explain that, please, Colonel.”
“Gladly.” Peter ticked his reasons off one by one. “Okay. Kandalaksha is at the center of everything we’ve investigated. First, the O.S.I.A inspection team plane takes off from there — and it crashes.
Second, one of the men killed aboard that plane is carrying two kilos of pure heroin — which he apparently picked up somewhere on the base.
Third, the man who sabotaged the plane was stationed at Kandalaksha.”
“But not as a regular maintenance officer,” Helen chimed in abruptly, remembering their interrogation of Lieutenant Chernavin.
“Grushtin was supposed to be working on some kind of secret project, right, Peter?”
He nodded, smiling crookedly at her. “Exactly. A special engine project. One Chernavin seemed to believe an American military officer should know about. But General Serov’s aide certainly seemed mighty pissed when the kid mentioned it to us.”
“You think there is a connection?” Koniev asked. “That this project is somehow tied in to Gasparov’s heroin smuggling?”
“I really don’t know, Major,” Peter admitted. “Not for sure.
What I do know for sure is that something big and nasty is going down at that air base. Something Grushtin was willing to kill to conceal …”
“Something that meant he had to die once we started zeroing in on him,” Helen finished for him.
“Yep.”
Koniev nodded slowly. “It makes sense.” He sighed. “I will file another request with the Ministry of Defense this evening. We will need its authorization to conduct an in-depth investigation on the air base.”