by Gayle Lynds
"Why do you hate lawyers?" she asked. There was that throaty voice he found irresistible.
He grinned. "What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of a lake?"
She gave a little shake of her head. " 'A good start.' That's old, Jeff. I expected better of you."
"Okay. Here's another. . . . Two lawyers walking through the woods spot a vicious-looking bear. The first lawyer opens his briefcase, pulls out sneakers, and puts them on. The second lawyer says, 'You're crazy. You'll never outrun that bear.' The first lawyer gives a big smile. 'I don't have to. I only have to outrun you.' "
She gave him a small smile. "We're practical. I admit that."
"So why don't lawyers go to the beach?"
"Dogs and cats keep trying to bury them." Beth's eyes twinkled. "Lawyers know all the jokes. We have to, so we can tell them on ourselves. But you haven't answered my question. You seem to hate us more than most people do. What did we do to you?"
"Married me," he said promptly. "My wife was a lawyer."
"You're married?"
"Sorry. My mistake. I'll rephrase that: My ex-wife is a lawyer."
"Ah, so you're divorced."
"Yes, and happily. Although it made me miserable at the time. But looking back, I can see we weren't suited. When I left the Bureau, she left me. I wasn't who she thought I was . . . or somesuch excuse. She remarried and moved to Minneapolis."
"And?"
"No 'and.' That's it. No children, not that I didn't want them." He glanced at her amused face. "So you think I have as lousy a taste in women as you have in men." He chuckled. "Well, you may have a point."
"Where did you grow up?"
"That's not very interesting either." He shrugged. "Oh, well, now I know something else about you—you're a glutton for boredom."
"I'd hardly call you boring."
"Your problem. Okay, standard childhood. Father in government service. OSS during World War Two, then the CIA when it was formed. He was one of the eggheads, doing analysis. A desk jockey with piles of secret papers posing riddles for him to make sense out of. He was twenty years older than my mother. She was your traditional housewife, except she was wild about Labrador retrievers. She raised them to show. My sister and I grew up on the small Virginia farm my dad bought my mother. It had all the great stuff—a vegetable garden, an old tire swing, and a duck pond ruled over by black swans." He smiled, remembering.
"Where are they now?"
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. "My parents? Dead, seven years ago. Dad had a blood disease. Four months after he passed away, a semi crushed Mom's car on the Beltway."
"How terrible! For all of you. I'm so sorry."
He nodded. "Yeah, it was pretty bad. He'd been sick a year, and Mom just couldn't go on without him. Too many tough changes for her to handle." He hesitated, remembering one of those changes had been their disappointment in him, that he had left the FBI for, in their opinion, the less-honorable profession of journalism. "You could see it in her face. From the police account, my guess is she wasn't paying attention to the traffic. It was probably sheer luck it hadn't happened sooner."
"And your sister?"
"Lives in the Sierras with her family. Haven't talked to her in a while." Again the sense of disappointment in himself. Their father's death had been bad enough, but his sister had blamed him for their mother's. In outrage and hurt, he had lashed back.
They rode in silence. She asked, "So where did you go to school?"
He told her about Harvard and his degree in government, about the master's in area studies at the University of London, where he had focused on the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, and then about how it all had seemed to jell for him when he joined the Bureau. As he talked about his dreams, his love for the United States, for serving it, she had an eerie sense about herself, as if her own life had somehow been lacking.
Finally he said, "I'm tired of me. What about you? You're the one who's interesting."
"I am? Well, you should know. You're the one who dug up my background, Mr. Reporter-man."
He chuckled. "Golden California child. What was that like?"
She smiled neutrally. "A lot of sun. Travels. Disneyland. Great summers on the beach."
"That's all?"
"Pretty much, yes."
"What a liar. Let's see . . . daughter of one of the most ruthless criminal defense attorneys in Los Angeles, and one of the most hard-nosed developers. Some daddy and mommy. Must've been a warm and cozy atmosphere."
She refused to let him goad her. "It had its moments."
He frowned. "You don't want to talk about it." It was a statement.
"Clever fellow. I think we have enough on our minds to think about, don't you?"
He took his gaze from the traffic and studied her. She was staring out her side window, supposedly watching the scenery. Her face was stone.
He said, "It's your parents, isn't it?"
She seemed to stiffen.
He said quietly, "He killed her. The papers said it was an accident, and that he was so distraught that, a couple of days later, he shot and killed himself. Was it an abusive relationship? Is that another reason you don't like to talk about it?" He glanced at her again.
"You're thorough, I'll give you that. But it was a long time ago. I survived."
"Just survived?"
She blinked slowly, thinking. She sighed and nodded to herself. "All right, I'll tell you. It's not terribly exciting or mysterious. My parents didn't have an abusive relationship at all. In fact, they were deeply in love the whole time they were married. Jack-the-Knife and Queen Janet, a glittering couple who seemed straight out of central casting. When they weren't working, they were always together. I was the third wheel."
"Nannies raised you."
"Yes, and they were very good nannies, the best money could buy. Dad did teach me to shoot, and he'd take me to his office occasionally as I got older, and then into court. I loved to watch him in action. Mom made certain I had everything a girl or boy could need, including plenty of dolls, a toolbox, skateboard lessons, and a new bicycle every year. It really was an accident that she died." She paused and pressed her lips together, grief in her eyes. "They'd been out to a party . . . they both drank a lot. Mom said it was all the pressure they were under all the time. Dad was driving that night. When they got home, Mom got out of the car and walked behind it to go into the house. Dad was so drunk that he threw the gear shift into reverse and hit the gas pedal. He ran into her and crushed her against the brick wall that ran alongside the drive. She lived only a few minutes." She folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head.
"It must've been horrible. I'm sorry, Beth. Really. I shouldn't have made you talk about it."
She shrugged and looked up as she wiped shaky fingers across her eyes. "The first I knew something was wrong was when I heard the horrible sound of a howl. It was him. I heard him even though I was sound asleep in my bedroom on the other side of the house. He'd come unhinged, a madman with grief and guilt. Of course, the police arrived. They tested him, and he had triple the legal amount of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was blind drunk. They were planning to charge him with manslaughter. Instead, he committed suicide. He couldn't live . . . without her."
"How old were you?"
"Eighteen. Everything changed for me after that. I changed. I didn't like the frivolous way I'd been living, so I quit running around to parties all the time, started studying, and decided to make something of myself."
"Make them proud."
She nodded mutely.
He thought about her and how difficult it must have been for her to lose her parents in such a violent way when she was still just a teenager. He, at least, had been fully grown when his had died.
"They'd both be very proud of you." He hesitated and cast her a tentative grin. "Despite my low opinion of lawyers, I'd say you're probably a pretty good one." He paused again, watching her face for a sign he was going too far. "Maybe even decent. Dar
e I say . . . honest? Well, perhaps that's too extreme. An honest lawyer . . . isn't there some law against that?"
She gave a low chuckle. "Lawyers make the laws, so I'm sure you're wrong." She took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose loudly. "But I've heard that 'honest lawyer' is an oxymoron." She looked at him and smiled. "Sort of like 'objective newsman.' "
He chuckled. "Touché again."
"Thanks, Jeff. We've both had bad times. You do know how to cheer a woman up though."
She settled in beside him, and they resumed their careful watch of the congested highway. As they fled north, the road seemed an obstacle course of danger. She tried to shake off tension. Time passed slowly as they approached the Catoctin Mountains.
She cleared her throat and frowned at him. "I've been wondering. . . . What made you suspicious of Berianov, Yurimengri, and Ogust when you debriefed them?"
He thought back. "I guess it was just a gut feeling at first. They seemed legitimate, I have to admit that. God knows they gave us good intelligence. But they were never all that worried the way most defectors are. You have to understand, defectors spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders. There are those in Russian intelligence who might want one or more of their skins even today. Plus the KGB has always hated traitors, and their institutional memory is long. Then you add in the fact that there are private contract killers who still travel here chasing émigrés to settle old scores. For all those reasons and more, a lot of defectors took on assumed names and identities because they were afraid of retaliation."
"So our three didn't seem worried. What else?"
"There was the issue of timing. Do you know much about the coup attempt in ninety-one?"
"Just what I read in the newspaper."
He nodded, his gaze surveying the traffic. "As I told you, Berianov was chief of the FCD, the KGB's elite foreign espionage arm. Around him, everything was crumbling—the KGB's sword-and-shield empire, authority throughout the country, and very visibly the state itself. Meanwhile, the leader back then, Mikhail Gorbachev, seemed to be just letting the Soviet Union fall apart. Berianov knew he had to make changes in the FCD because his officers were being recruited away by the West. So he tried to improve morale. He told his people they were no longer fighting just for Marxism-Leninism, but for Mother Russia—"
"He was instilling patriotism."
"Exactly. But things kept getting worse. Finally a group of Communist hardliners, including Vladimir Kryuchkov, who headed the entire KGB, contacted Berianov. Geography came into play at this point. See, FCD was headquartered on the outskirts of Moscow in a little town called Yasenevo. Kryuchkov and his cronies secretly asked Berianov to put his FCD forces at their disposal near the Kremlin to help with the military coup they were planning to take back the country."
"Did Berianov agree?"
"Yes, enthusiastically. He sent his agents into Moscow to spy, and he reported their findings to Kryuchkov. He also ordered the FCD's paramilitary unit to go to the KGB's club in Moscow and hold themselves ready to act. He expected to use them to crush the reformers who were rallying around a new political force—Boris Yeltsin. When the hardliners captured Gorbachev, the coup began, and Berianov was excited. He waited. And waited. But Kryuchkov stopped calling. No directions ever came. Finally, Berianov made a tough decision—he told his people to stand down, because he figured the coup was collapsing."
She asked, "Why? How did it fall apart?"
"He said the committee—even Kryuchkov—lacked will. They had no strong sense of direction. There was no single figure who had the guts or vision to shoulder responsibility and use the force of his personality to make events happen. The chilling part is, Berianov openly admitted to us that if the orders for aggressive action had come, he would've obeyed. If the coup's committee had used the levers of power at their disposal, they would've succeeded. The result would've been to hurl the Soviet Union back into Communist rule, and the Cold War would've resumed in a big way."
"Wow. Thank God that didn't happen. So Berianov's a real patriot of the old Soviet Union."
"Right. And then there was the swift success of all three men afterwards in the United States."
She nodded. "It does seem as if they must've had some kind of organization in place here."
"Or in Moscow. Maybe both places. But Berianov threw the FBI and the CIA off the scent by a remarkable revelation that would've hurt him if he'd been planning a comeback."
"And that was?"
"Aldrich Ames. He told us Rick Ames was a deeply buried double agent who'd seriously compromised American intelligence."
"But I thought—"
"Yes, I know. No one knows the tip came from a defector. No one in the Bureau or the Company wanted that particular embarrassment aired. Much better John Q. Public believed we discovered him on our own. Of course, Berianov was happy to keep the whole thing quiet, because with that single revelation, he bought freedom for himself and his two pals. I've waited a decade to find out what they were really up to. Now I may be getting close. What I didn't figure on was you."
She shrugged. "My specialty—throwing monkey wrenches into other people's plans. Do you know any of their associates here? Surely someone must've been close to them."
"If they were grooming any successors, I don't know who they are. And if we're right that Berianov was responsible for both Ogust's and Yurimengri's deaths, then that tells me he eliminated them because he was taking over completely, for whatever it was he was planning. I'm hoping we're going to find some clue to that at the dairy farm in Pennsylvania." He hesitated. "That reminds me of Caleb Bates. I keep wondering what that's all about. Why would Bates's bills for his hunt club in little Stone Point, West Virginia, be hidden in Berianov's Washington house?"
"Doesn't make a lot of sense, unless Berianov paid the bills. After all, you said he'd become a legitimate businessman." She stopped. "Oh, my God! This might be relevant. It seems like a decade ago, but this happened recently: I received a message from a friend about HanTech Industries." She described the contract Michelle wanted so much, which HanTech had wrested from her company. "According to my friend, Caleb Bates is one of HanTech's new secret owners. In fact, he owns the largest interest. All the rest have Russian names, and one is the son of the director of Minatom. Others also have close ties to Minatom."
"The Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy?" He whistled. "Nuclear weapons. That's huge."
She nodded. "My friend says HanTech has been secretly buying up weapons-grade uranium from Third World countries and returning it to Russia." She felt a chill. "I wondered at the time why Russia wanted back that kind of uranium while at the same time it was selling the same grade to us, supposedly to make certain it was never used for war. But now I'm beginning to rethink it all. If Berianov had some kind of plot in mind . . . maybe it had to do with the terrorist act your boss told you about."
"Go on." His voice was tense.
"Caleb Bates has effective controlling interest in HanTech. So he's calling the shots over a group of Russians who have a lot of shares, too. Maybe that's the missing organization you've been looking for."
"Do you remember the names?"
"Some of them." She reeled off six then added the ones she knew to be connected to Minatom and Uridium.
He blanched. "I recognize four. Two are related to oligarchs, one's the brother of General Kripinski, and the fourth's father-in-law is in charge of what's left of the Russian navy."
She was silent. "But Bates is an American name. Or British. Why would a Yank or a Brit head a Russian-owned business? Unless . . . maybe Caleb Bates is a Soviet defector, too, but he decided he'd better take on a fake identity to protect himself from the past. Ergo, 'Caleb Bates,' an American with serious interests in Russia."
"It's possible." His stomach was suddenly tight as he remembered. . . . "Decades ago, the KGB set up a clandestine training camp in the Ural Mountains outside Moscow. That's where it sent its most talented espionage recruits. Apparently, it
looked like a typical American city—a tree-line main street, library, courthouse, and everything else—new and used cars, the latest food, clothes, music, and movies. Newspapers like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post delivered weekly but handed out one day at a time, just as if everyone was really living in the United States. The only language was a Midwestern-accented English. The students were steeped in everything from our table habits to how to shop in a super market. There were other training sites for spies who were going to be assigned to France and Britain, too. Sometimes students would live in these fake towns for a year or more, as long as it took, until they could pass as a native in every way."
"Good heavens, I'd never heard that."
"You weren't supposed to. Remember, it was the Cold War, so we didn't want what was going on to get out and create panic. People would've started looking at their neighbors, their kid's teacher, even the town mayor and wonder . . . Is he a red? Is she?"
She grimaced. "You're right. A big 'red scare.' That easily could've happened. Did we have secret camps like that, too, to train people to spy in the Soviet Union?"
"You bet. And to spy in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Iron Curtain countries as well. Our agents were effective, and they delivered a lot of first-rate intelligence."
She shivered. "All part of the Cold War, I suppose."
"Right."
He pulled the Ferrari off onto the shoulder and turned to face her. He inhaled, disgusted with himself. He should have seen the linkages earlier, and now that he did, he was alternately furious with himself and afraid for what it meant.
"There's more." His voice was hard. "Point one: When I was in that West Virginia town asking around for Berianov, I described him as having a Russian accent. All three—Berianov, Yurimengri, and Ogust—had thick accents when we debriefed them. Afterwards, when I interviewed them for the Post, they spoke better English, but still with noticeable Russian inflections. I always assumed it was because their English was improving from living here. That was probably true of Yurimengri andOgust, but not necessarily of Berianov. Now that I really think about it, I recall other defectors had told us he'd worked undercover here. Which seems to me to indicate he must've trained in the American camp the Soviets built."