by Steven Gore
Gage stabbed a piece of smoked salmon, cut it in two on his plate, and took a bite. He nodded at Slava in approval, then looked back at Ninchenko. “For what?”
Ninchenko raised a forefinger. “One example. Suppose the government is preparing to privatize a state-owned factory. How does Gravilov make sure that his bid is accepted? Say the plant is worth a hundred million Ukrainian hryvnia. He pays the government ten million in hryvnia for the plant domestically and a two-million-dollar bribe offshore.”
“How can he get away with paying a tenth of what it’s worth?”
“What’s ‘worth’?” Ninchenko spread his hands and shrugged. “Even in Soviet times the government calculated depreciation. Five percent a year for twenty years. So, on paper, a plant can be worth exactly zero, even if it is the largest in the world.”
Gage did the calculation. “If Gravilov cleared ten million dollars from SatTek,” Gage said, “he can convert that into a hundred million dollars in Ukrainian assets.”
Ninchenko nodded.
“So who’s he paying off?”
“Makarov, Hadeon Alexandervich. The president’s son.”
“Hadeon. Is that Russian or Ukrainian?”
“Ukrainian. It means ‘destroyer.’”
“Destroyer? What kind of man names a baby Destroyer?”
“Man who plan to make dynasty by crushing everybody,” Slava answered. “But son has bad genes. Hadeon Alexandervich is reckless. No limits.”
“Do you think he got a cut of SatTek?”
“At least indirectly,” Ninchenko answered. “It’s a complicated relationship. Basically, Gravilov provides physical protection and intelligence. Hadeon Alexandervich has lots of enemies, and Gravilov keeps track of what they’re doing, especially the political opposition. He also leans on people if Hadeon Alexandervich takes an interest in a factory or a business. Like his father, Hadeon Alexandervich is insatiable. He has to be fed all the time.”
“The Thais have an expression for corruption,” Gage said. “They call it eating the state.”
“If not for me,” Slava said, “he eat everything. I elbow him once in a while to keep my seat at table—but there is difference.” Slava thumped the table with his forefinger. “I never take from poor. No one freeze in winter because of me.”
Slava opened a vodka bottle, poured three shots, then pushed himself to his feet, rattling the glasses and dishes on the table. Gage and Ninchenko also stood.
“To Hadeon Alexandervich, may he go to hell. Head-first.” Slava paused to let the image complete itself in his mind. “On heels of fucking father.”
Slava clinked his glass against Gage’s and Ninchenko’s, then tossed the vodka to the back of his throat and swallowed. He then noticed that Gage hadn’t emptied his glass.
“I not say I send, just he go.”
Gage downed the vodka, and then the three of them sat down.
A waiter in a tuxedo shirt and black pants knocked, then entered and removed the appetizers and their plates. He returned a minute later with bowls of red beet borscht, a dollop of sour cream centered in each one.
As Gage stirred his soup, his mind looped back through the conversation.
“Matson needs a place to hide his assets where the U.S. can’t reach them,” Gage said. “And Gravilov needs hard currency. It’s a perfect marriage.”
“But first they need to find something for him to invest in,” Ninchenko said. “In a way that allows Gravilov to take a cut.”
“That must be on tomorrow’s agenda.”
“Why not just go to the prosecutor now?” Ninchenko asked. “And tell him what you think Matson is doing over here.”
“I can’t take the chance. For all I know the U.S. Attorney sent him to meet up with Gravilov. He let him travel to London once before.”
“They allow informants to do that?”
“They’ve let them travel to Afghanistan to put heroin deals together and to Colombia to fly cocaine back to the U.S., so sending a financial crook like Matson to Europe isn’t considered much of a risk.”
“Except to him,” Slava said. “Matson may think he buy, but he not keep. Alla poppa and Gravilov take everything.”
Slava went silent as Gage tasted the soup.
“What you think?” Slava asked.
“I think Matson may end up dead.”
“Of course.” Slava pointed at Gage’s bowl. “But I mean about soup.”
“Perfect.”
“It proves the rule about borscht,” Ninchenko said. “There’s no in-between. It’s either good or bad.”
Slava smiled. “Not like Ukraine. Everything here is in-between.”
Gage smiled back. “Maybe you should’ve been a philosopher or a food critic, instead of a…”
“Gangster?” Slava finished the sentence.
“I was trying to think of a euphemism.”
Slava looked uncertainly at Ninchenko.
“It’s a word that means the same thing,” Ninchenko explained, “but doesn’t sound quite so derogatory.”
Slava’s puzzlement didn’t fade.
“Bad. Derogatory sort of means bad.”
Slava grinned. “Just like gangster.”
The waiter returned, removed their soup bowls and replaced them with plates bearing wild partridge in juniper sauce, potatoes, and sauerkraut salad with carrots and apples.
Ninchenko’s cell phone rang. He answered it, but didn’t speak until the waiter left the room.
“Matson and his lady have retired for the evening,” Ninchenko said, after hanging up. “They ordered room service breakfast for eight o’clock.”
Gage looked at Slava, then back at Ninchenko. “I wonder if he’ll live long enough to digest it.”
CHAPTER 63
At 9 A.M. Gage and Ninchenko entered a battered Volkswagen van in the courtyard of his apartment building. Two boxy Russian-made Lada chase cars, one white and one light blue, were already stationed along Shevchenko Boulevard outside the Lesya Palace Hotel, ready to follow Matson whichever direction he traveled.
Ninchenko’s cell phone rang like a starter pistol.
“Matson just got in the car,” Ninchenko reported five seconds later. “Alla isn’t with him. Black Mercedes 430. Four-digit plate, 0087. Government. The police aren’t allowed to stop it. Whoever is inside has immunity.”
“A get-out-of-jail-free card,” Gage said.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Ninchenko glanced over at Gage. “Do you have those in the States?”
“No, it’s a card in a game called Monopoly.”
“A monopoly I’ve heard of.” Ninchenko grinned. “That’s what we were told the great Soviet struggle was against.”
“Now you have your own,” Gage said.
Ninchenko made a call to check the plate while his driver sped from the courtyard onto Pushkinskaya, and then right onto Shevchenko, following 0087 from a block behind. The low clouds that had released a steady flow of mist overnight turned Kiev’s streets into black ice. The van’s defroster struggled against the condensation on the windshield while the wipers swept away light raindrops. The other windows were scummed with dirty water that the driver had splashed on to provide cover for Ninchenko and Gage in the rear seat.
“We’ll find out who it is in an hour,” Ninchenko said, after disconnecting. “My guess is that it is a representative of the State Property Fund. They handle privatizations of government-owned assets.”
“You’d think somebody like him would be more discreet. Wouldn’t anyone who saw him with a foreigner like Matson assume that he’ll be getting an offshore kickback for setting up a deal?”
“Discretion isn’t much of an issue because there are no secrets in Ukraine. Everything gets found out in the end. The president knows everyone’s schemes.”
“And he doesn’t stop them?”
Ninchenko signaled their driver to drop back and allow the blue Lada to take over close surveillance. They then followed it onto Oleny Telihy,
heading toward the northern part of Kiev.
“You need to ask yourself how the president keeps power,” Ninchenko said. “But don’t think like a Westerner. He’s violent. He’s corrupt. He’s universally hated. He was elected through fraud.”
“He stays in power the way other corrupt leaders do,” Gage said. “Through fear.”
Ninchenko looked over. “Fear of what?”
“Illegal arrest, imprisonment, execution. The same things people in dictatorial regimes all over the world are afraid of.”
“This isn’t everywhere else. This is Ukraine. It is a new kind of political order. Ukrainians are afraid of everything all of the time, so they don’t suffer particular fears. There’s almost nothing they do that isn’t in violation of some law. You want to license a car, pay a bribe. You want to get your child into school, bribe the principal. You want a passing grade, bribe the teacher. You need over sixty separate permits to open a business in Kiev. You think there’s a single business in Kiev that has them all? No. They couldn’t afford all the bribes. Sure, officials occasionally get arrested for corruption. And while those arrests might seem random from the outside looking in, they’re strategic from the inside looking out.”
Gage shook his head. “That’s no different than any other corrupt government in the world.”
“It’s fundamentally different—and it’s invisible unless you’ve been here awhile. The president of Ukraine rules not by fear, but by blackmail.”
Ninchenko let his words sink in as they gazed out at the storefront pharmacies and markets and cafés along the four-lane street. Rising above them were apartments privatized after independence and, in the distance, an office tower under construction. Each an opportunity for graft.
Gage’s mind marched along behind Ninchenko’s logic, until he reached what seemed to be an impossible conclusion. He looked at Ninchenko. “You mean that the president actually encourages corruption?”
“Exactly. Because it creates leverage. That’s the real function of State Security and the Intelligence Directorate. Leverage. It’s information gathering for the sake of blackmail.”
“And the opposition?”
“Opposition politicians gather their own intelligence to try to control the president and his entourage. I provide it to them. So does Slava.”
Gage felt slightly off balance, as on his first day in Bulgaria ten years earlier, where people nodded when saying no, and shook their heads when saying yes.
Ninchenko smiled, watching his words impact Gage, then pushed on. “And Slava gives the opposition more than just intelligence. I suspect he put the equivalent of ten or fifteen million dollars into the opposition presidential campaign.”
“Ten or fifteen million?”
“Like he said yesterday. Politics is business. It’s an investment. He’ll get it back twenty-fold.”
“But only if the opposition wins.”
“Of course.”
In the silence that followed, Gage found himself viewing Ninchenko as larger than the role Slava had put him in.
“Pardon my saying so,” Gage said, “but you don’t seem like the kind of guy who works for a man like Slava.”
“And you don’t seem like a guy who works with a man like Slava.”
“Touché. But you know what I mean.”
Ninchenko looked over at Gage, appraising him. “You and I aren’t that different. We grew up reading Mark Twain and Jack London and Tennessee Williams. You studied philosophy in college. Me, Marxist theory. We both went into law enforcement. You left to attend graduate school and didn’t go back. I left to attend law school, and did go back. We both work in the gray area. You, light gray. Me, dark gray.”
“I see you’ve done a little research.”
“Just made a call. You’ve been in Ukraine three times before. Once in a money laundering case, once to locate a Russian fugitive from the States, and once as part of a delegation from the International Association of Fraud Investigators. State Security has a file.”
“You know why I’m here this time, but you haven’t answered why you’re with me.”
Ninchenko wiped away condensation from his window.
“You know what that is?” He pointed with his thumb toward the northeast as they turned left onto a broad boulevard crosshatched by trolley lines.
Gage looked over at the desolate expanse of dead grass, leafless trees, and a stark television tower piercing the gray sky.
“That’s Babiy Yar,” Ninchenko said. “Grandmother’s Ravine. We’re still in Kiev. Thirty-three thousand Jews were murdered here by the Nazis in two days. A million people heard the shots and the screams of victims being buried alive. There was no secret, but Ukraine denied it to the world for fifty years. Why? Because they wanted them dead. And some still do.”
“Like who?”
“The OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. It’s a terrorist group that wants to drive everyone out of the country who doesn’t meet their criteria of Ukrainians. Russians, Poles, Jews.”
“You say that like you’re Jewish.”
“Literally, I’m not. Figuratively, all Ukrainians are Jews, they just don’t recognize it. Stalin intentionally starved to death six million Ukrainians during the Great Famine in the thirties. But now forty percent of Ukrainians believe life was better back then. They still don’t understand that Ukrainians were the Jews of the Soviet Union. And those forty percent are most of the people who support the president.”
Ninchenko’s window clouded over as he spoke.
“So why Slava?” Gage asked.
“Why Slava?” Ninchenko paused as if preparing to explain something that he’d thought through. “Because he provides a real service. He doesn’t deceive himself about who he is. He’s a man of his word. He has a sense of fairness.”
Ninchenko glanced at Gage. “Why is he helping you? He’s pretty sure you can get Gravilov indicted in the States without him. He probably could simply wait, then make his move. But he did you wrong by not trusting you in the natural gas deal, so he owes you.”
Gage had seen Slava’s rage and had looked up the barrel of his 9mm. Both had impaired his view of Slava as a dispassionate public servant.
“He’s not what anyone would call a saint,” Gage said.
“Of course not. Has he killed? Who knows how many times.”
Gage didn’t ask the question that came to his mind: What about you?
“Slava lives in the same kind of a parallel universe you’ve seen all over the world,” Ninchenko continued. “The rules are the same, they’re just applied differently. You and I are just visitors there. Would I kill for Slava just so he can grab somebody else’s money? No. And he knows it. Would I kill because it must be done? Of course. You have and you will. That’s why he brought me in on this job and why he’s willing to work with you even though you’re an outsider. He says you have heart.”
Gage wasn’t sure how to take that kind of compliment from a man like Slava—but he didn’t have time to consider it.
Ninchenko pointed ahead toward the wrought-iron gate and guardhouse of a fenced pine forest.
“Puscha Voditsa. A military sanatorium. They’ve already turned in.”
Gage’s head snapped toward Ninchenko.
“Military?”
His mind raced ahead before Ninchenko could respond: If Matson was willing to betray SatTek shareholders by selling SatTek’s intellectual property to Mr. Green, would he be willing to betray his country by—
Gage knew the answer before he had even fully formed the question. He felt his body tense in self-reproach. He should’ve guessed it weeks ago.
“Matson didn’t come to Kiev to hide,” Gage said. “The punk is here to sell missile and anti-terror technology to Ukraine.”
“That’s insane.” Ninchenko shook his head in disgust. “Transferring that kind of expertise to Ukraine is the same as releasing it to Iran and Syria.”
“Can you get us inside?” Gage said, eyes fixed on the
sanatorium entrance.
Ninchenko nodded. “We can use my old SBU identification. They’d be afraid to look too closely at a major’s documents.”
Ninchenko’s cell phone rang after the guard had waved them through the gate. He engaged in a quick conversation, then said, “They’re headed toward the medical center.”
They drove past an iced-over lake surrounded by tennis, volleyball, and badminton courts. They passed an empty swimming pool and a dining hall, finally arriving at a white stucco building, where the driver parked in a lot filled with black Mercedes and BMWs and a scattering of camouflaged Morozov personnel carriers.
“They give medical-sounding names to things soldiers simply like to do,” Ninchenko said. “A steam bath is called climate therapy. A hot tub is called balneotherapy. A sanatorium is really just a place to hide out from the family—”
“And buy the technology to build radar and missile targeting devices.”
“No better place.” Ninchenko opened his door. “Let me take a look.”
Ninchenko blended in with the men entering the medical center. The driver assumed his waiting position: seat back lowered, window a crack open, cap over his eyes. Gage pulled his coat up around his neck, then slid down in his seat as the cold air seeped into the van.
Ninchenko returned ten minutes later and Gage rolled down the window.
“You’re right,” Ninchenko said, leaning down toward Gage and glancing back toward the entrance, “Matson met with two air force generals in the bar, then they headed off to the sauna. They must be pretty far along in the deal. They wouldn’t have taken Matson with them unless they considered him part of the team.”
“Who are they?”
“Traitors. They raided their own squadron and sold off a dozen MIG fighters to Iraq, then tried to keep all the money for themselves. They must’ve kicked back a lot of it to Hadeon Alexandervich after they were caught in order to stay out of jail.”