I came to an intersection of two corridors, a bare landing that held only two small, shabby wooden chairs. The insistent buzzing noise was closer, louder now. It came from somewhere below. I followed it downstairs, turning left, going straight for a few feet, then left again.
Slipping my hand into the front pocket of my overalls, I touched the Sig-Sauer. I felt the reassuring cold of the pistol’s steel.
Now I stood before high oak double doors. The buzzing came, in irregular intervals, from within.
I grabbed the pistol and, crouching as low to the ground as possible, slowly pulled one of the doors open, not knowing what or whom I’d see inside.
It was a large, empty dining room with bare walls and bare floors and an immensely long oak table set for lunch for one person.
Lunch, evidently, had been eaten.
The single diner, who sat at one end of the table, buzzing furiously for a housekeeper who was not able to answer his calls, was a small, bald old man, an innocuous-looking man wearing thick, black-framed glasses. I had seen pictures of the man hundreds of times before, but I had no idea how small Vladimir Orlov actually was.
He was wearing a suit and tie, strangely: who would come to see him, hiding as he was in Tuscany? The suit wasn’t smartly British, as so many modern Russians in positions of power seemed to favor; it was old-style, boxy, of Soviet or Eastern European manufacture, probably several decades old.
Vladimir Orlov: the last head of the KGB, whose likeness, stiff and unsmiling, I had seen countless times in Agency files, in newspaper photographs. Mikhail Gorbachev had brought him in to replace the traitorous KGB chief who had plotted to overthrow Gorbachev’s government, during the last convulsions of Soviet power. We knew little about the man, except that he was deemed “reliable” and “friendly to Gorbachev” and other traits vaporous and unprovable.
Now he sat before me, furled and small. All the power seemed to have been drained out of him.
He looked up at me, scowled, and said in clipped Siberian-accented Russian, “Who are you?”
Not for a few seconds was I able to reply, but when I did, it was with a smoothness that I hadn’t expected. “I’m Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law,” I said in Russian. “I’m married to his daughter, Martha.”
The old man looked as if he’d seen a ghost. His heavy brow lowered, then shot up; his eyes grew narrow, then widened. He seemed to pale at once. “Bozhe moi,” he whispered. Oh, my God. “Bozhe moi.”
I simply stared, my heart hammering, not understanding what he meant, who he thought I was.
He got slowly to his feet, scowling and half pointing at me accusingly.
“How the hell did you get in here?”
I didn’t reply.
“You are foolish to come here.” His words were a whisper, barely audible. “Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.”
THIRTY-FIVE
I walked slowly into the cavernous dining room. My footsteps echoed against the bare walls, the high vaulted ceilings.
Beneath his glacial calm, his imperious demeanor, Vladimir Orlov’s eyes flicked back and forth with great anxiety.
Several seconds of silence passed.
My thoughts raced. Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.
Betrayed him? What did this mean?
Orlov spoke now, his voice clear and resonant and reverberating: “How dare you appear before me.”
The old man reached a hand to the underside of the dining table and depressed a different button. From somewhere in the hallway I heard a long, continuous buzzing noise. Footsteps came from somewhere in the house’s interior. The housekeeper, probably returned to consciousness by now but unable to move or be heard, was not answering his summons. But perhaps one of the guards had heard the noise, suspected that something might be wrong.
I withdrew the Sig from the overalls pocket, leveled it at the KGB chairman. I wondered whether Orlov had ever had a gun pointed at him in earnest before. In the circles of intelligence in which he had always worked, at least according to the career assessments I’d read, one’s weapons were not guns or Uzis or poison darts, but fitness reports and memoranda.
“I want you to know,” I said, now holding the gun under the table, “that I have no intention of harming you. We must have a brief chat, you and I, and then I will be gone. When the guard appears, I want you to assure him everything’s all right now. Otherwise, you’ll most certainly die.”
Before I could elaborate, the door to the dining room flew open, and a guard whom I hadn’t seen before leveled an automatic at me, calling out: “Freeze!”
I smiled casually, gave the old man the briefest glance, and, after the barest moment’s hesitation, he told the guard, “Go on. Thank you, Volodya, but I’m fine. It was a mistake.”
The guard lowered the gun, sized me up—dressed as a workingman as I was, he remained suspicious—untensed slowly, and said, “Sorry.” He withdrew and closed the door quietly behind him.
I approached the table and took a seat next to Orlov. Sweat glistened on his forehead; his face, up close, looked ashen. Glacial and imperious, yes—but deeply frightened at the same time and trying desperately not to show it.
I was sitting a few feet from him, too close for his comfort, and he turned his head away as he spoke. A disgusted expression crossed his face.
“Why are you here?” he croaked out hoarsely.
“Because of an agreement you reached with my father-in-law,” I said. There was a long pause, during which I concentrated, trying to hear that distinct voice, but getting nothing.
“You have been no doubt followed. You endanger both of us.”
Not answering, I compressed my lips in deep concentration, and suddenly heard a noise, a nonsense phrase, something I didn’t understand. A wisp of a thought, surely, but nothing that registered.
“You’re not Russian, are you?” I said.
“Why are you here?” Orlov said, twisting in his chair. His elbow caught a serving plate and shoved it, clatteringly, against other dishes. His voice gradually gathered strength, grew louder. “You fool!”
I heard another floating phrase as he spoke, something I didn’t understand, something in a foreign language. What was it? It wasn’t Russian, it couldn’t be, it sounded unfamiliar. I grimaced, closed my eyes, listened, heard a stream of vowels, words I couldn’t decode.
“What is it?” he asked. “Why are you here? What are you doing?” He moved his high-backed carved oak chair back. It squealed loudly against the terra-cotta floor.
“You were born in Kiev,” I said. “Is that right?”
“Leave!”
“You’re not Russian-born, are you? You’re Ukrainian.”
He got up and started backing out of the room slowly.
I got to my feet, too, and pulled the Sig out again, reluctant to threaten him again. “Stay there, please.”
He froze.
“Your Russian has a slight Ukrainian accent. Your Gs give you away.”
“What are you here for?”
“Your native language is Ukrainian. You think in Ukrainian, don’t you?”
“You know that,” he snapped. “You didn’t need to come here, to endanger me, to learn something that Harrison Sinclair must have told you.” He took a step toward me, as if to menace, a clumsy attempt to regain the psychological advantage. His old Stalinist suit hung on his frame like a scarecrow’s. “If you have something to say to me, or to give to me, it had better be of earthshaking consequence.”
Another step. He resumed: “I will assume it is, and I will give you five minutes to explain yourself, and then you had better be gone.”
“Sit, please,” I said, gesturing with the barrel of the gun to his chair. “This will not take long. My name is Benjamin Ellison. As I said, I am married to Martha Sinclair, the daughter of Harrison Sinclair. Martha inherited the entirety of her father’s estate. Your contacts—I am sure you have extensive contacts—can confirm
I am who I say I am.”
He seemed to relax—and then he lunged, seeming to lose his footing as he vaulted toward me, hands outstretched. With a loud, almost subhuman, guttural sound—a choked, twisted aaaghgh!—he threw himself at me, grabbing my knees, trying to throw me off balance. I twisted, then grabbed his shoulder and forced him to the ground.
He sprawled on the floor at the base of the oak table, gasping, his face crimson. “No,” he gasped. His eyeglasses clattered to the ground a foot or so from his head.
Keeping the gun trained on him, I reached to retrieve his glasses, and with my free arm I somewhat awkwardly helped him up. “Please,” I said, “please don’t try that again.”
Orlov sagged into the nearest dining chair like a marionette, exhausted yet wary. It has always fascinated me that world leaders, once out of power, are so palpably diminished in an almost physical sense. I remember once meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kennedy School in Boston, shaking his hand after a lecture he gave a few years after he was so unceremoniously booted out of the Kremlin by Boris Yeltsin. And Gorbachev struck me as a small, very mortal, very ordinary person. I felt a pang of sympathy for the man.
A Russian phrase.
I heard it, heard his thoughts: a recognizable phrase, in Russian, amid a stream of Ukrainian, like a slug of uranium embedded in graphite.
Yes; he was born in Kiev. At the age of five his family moved to Moscow. Like the physician in Rome, he, too, was bilingual, though he thought mainly in Ukrainian, with the occasional bit of Russian interspersed.
The phrase he thought translated as wise men.
“You know very little,” I said, feigning great assurance, “about the Wise Men.”
Orlov laughed. His teeth were bad, gapped and uneven and stained. “I know everything, Mr.… Ellison.”
I watched his face closely, concentrating, seeing what I could pick up. Again, most of it seemed to be in Ukrainian. Here and there I could pick up cognates, words that sounded similar to those in Russian, or English, or German. I heard Tsyurikh, which had to be Zurich. I heard Sinclair, and something that sounded like bank, although I couldn’t be sure.
“We must talk,” I said. “About Harrison Sinclair. About the deal you struck with him.”
Again I leaned close to him, as if thinking deeply. A stream of strange words came at me now, low and fuzzy and indistinct, but of them one word screamed out at me. It was, again, Zurich, or something that sounded like it.
“Deal!” he scoffed. The old spymaster gave a loud, dry laugh. “He stole billions of dollars from me and from my country—billions of dollars!—and you dare to call this a deal!”
THIRTY-SIX
So it was true. Alex Truslow was right.
But … billions of dollars?
Was this all about money? Was that it? Money, throughout history, has motivated most of the great acts of evil, when you come right down to it. Was money why Sinclair and the others were killed, why the Agency was, as Edmund Moore warned me, being torn apart?
Billions of dollars.
He regarded me arrogantly, almost superciliously, and attempted to straighten his glasses.
“And now,” he said with a sigh, switching to English, “it is only a matter of time before my own people find me. Of that I have no doubt. I’m not entirely surprised that you people tracked me down. There is no place on earth—no place on earth one would bear to live—where one can’t eventually be found. But what I don’t know is why—why you decided to endanger my life by coming here, whatever your reasons. That was enormously foolish.” His English was excellent, apparently fluent, and British-accented.
Inhaling sharply, I said: “I was extremely cautious in getting here. You have little to worry about.” His expression did not waver. His nostrils flared slightly; his eyes, steady, betrayed nothing.
“I am here,” I continued, “to put things right. To rectify the wrong my father-in-law did to you. I am prepared to offer you a great deal of money for your assistance in locating the money.”
He pursed his lips. “At the risk of being vulgar, Mr. Ellison, I would be extremely interested to know your definition of ‘a great deal.’”
I nodded and got up. Replacing the gun in my pocket, and backing up just beyond his range, I reached down and raised the legs of my overalls, easing the canvas up to expose the banded wads of American dollars strapped to my calves. I released the Velcro restraints that I had purchased at a sporting goods store in Siena, and the money came off each leg in two segments.
Those I placed on the table.
It was a great deal of money—probably more than Orlov had ever seen, and certainly more than I had ever seen—and it had its persuasive effect.
He scanned the wads, rifled through them, apparently satisfying himself cursorily that it was real. He looked up and said, “There is—what?—perhaps three-quarters of a million dollars here?”
“An even million,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, his eyes wide. And then he laughed, a harsh, derisive caw. Theatrically, he pushed the bundles toward me. “Mr. Ellison, I am in very difficult financial straits. But as much as this is—it is nothing compared to what I was supposed to receive.”
“Yes,” I said. “With your help, I can locate the money. But we must first talk.”
He smiled. “I will accept your money as a good-faith payment. That proud I am not. And, yes, we will talk. And then we will come to an agreement.”
“Fine,” I said. “In that case, let me put my first question to you: Who killed Harrison Sinclair?”
“I had hoped you would be able to tell me that, Mr. Ellison.”
“But it was Stasi agents,” I said, “who carried out the order.”
“Quite likely, yes. But whether it was Stasi or Securitate, it had nothing to do with me. Certainly it would not have been in my interest to eliminate Harrison Sinclair.”
I cocked a brow questioningly.
“When Harrison Sinclair was killed,” Orlov said, “I and my country were cheated out of over ten billion dollars.”
I felt my face flush, hot and prickly. From everything I could tell, he was speaking the truth. My heart thudded slowly and evenly.
Certainly there was nothing modest about Orlov’s Tuscan villa, but neither was he living in great wealth, as some of those high-level Nazis did in Brazil and Argentina in the years after the Second World War. A great sum of money would purchase not only a life of luxury but, far more important, protection for a lifetime.
But ten billion dollars!
Orlov continued: “What was that memoir written by the CIA Director under Nixon, William Colby? Honorable Men, isn’t that what it was called?”
I nodded warily. I didn’t much like Orlov, though for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or the bitter rivalry people used to imagine existed between the KGB and the CIA. Hal Sinclair once confided to me that when he was station chief in various world capitals, some of his best buddies were his opposite numbers in KGB station. We are—I should say were—far more alike than different.
No, I found Orlov’s smugness repellent. Moments ago he had been lunging at me like an old woman; now he sat there like a pasha—and thinking mostly in Ukrainian, for God’s sake.
“Well,” Orlov continued, “Bill Colby was, is, an honorable man. Perhaps too honorable for his profession. And until he betrayed me, I thought Harrison Sinclair was, too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How much of this did he tell you?”
“Very little,” I admitted.
“Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he said, “I secretly contacted Harrison Sinclair, using back channels that had not been used in many years. There are—were, rather—ways. And I asked his help.”
“To do what?”
“To remove from my country most of its gold reserves,” he said.
I was astonished, even overwhelmed … but it made a certain sense. It gibed with what I knew, what I had read in the press as we
ll as heard from spook friends of mine.
The Central Intelligence Agency had always calculated that the Soviet Union had tens of billions of dollars in gold reserves, in their central vaults in and around Moscow. But then suddenly, immediately after the hard-line Communist coup d’état failed in August 1991, the Soviet government announced that it had a mere three billion dollars in gold.
This news had sent shock waves throughout the world financial community. Where on earth could all that gold have disappeared to? There were all manner of reports. One reliable one had it that the Soviet Communist Party had ordered 150 tons of silver, eight tons of platinum, and at least 60 tons of gold to be hidden abroad. It was alleged that Communist Party officials may have hidden as much as fifty billion dollars in Western banks, in Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg, Panama, Liechtenstein, and a whole array of offshore banks, such as the Cayman Islands.
The Soviet Communist Party, it was reported, laundered money furiously in its last years of existence. Heads of Soviet enterprises were creating fake joint ventures and shell companies to spirit money out of the country.
In fact, the Yeltsin government even went so far as to hire an American investigating firm, Kroll Associates—one of Alex Truslow’s chief competitors, by the way—to track down the money, but nothing ever turned up. It was even reported that one massive transfer to Swiss banks was ordered by the Party’s business manager, who committed suicide—or was murdered—a day or so after the coup collapsed.
Might it have been Orlov’s former comrades, seeking to stop me from tracking down the gold, who killed the CIA man Charles Van Aver in Rome?
* * *
I listened in dull amazement.
“Russia,” he said, “was falling apart.”
“You mean the Soviet Union was falling apart.”
Extraordinary Powers Page 24