Pipeline

by Peter Schechter

  Suddenly, the apartment’s phone rang loudly. The noise jolted both men out of their disquiet. Uggin jumped up. Zhironovsky strode to the phone, muttering only the word “finally, finally” over and over.

  “Rudzhin, where the hell are you?” He didn’t wait for the caller to identify himself.

  “I’m on my way, sir.” Rudzhin’s voice was tense.

  “I expected you here ages ago. I expected a report. What are you doing, you shit.” Zhironovsky was again losing control. His shouting trembled with fury.

  “I am sorry, Chairman Zhironovsky. I’m on my way; you won’t be pleased, sir. But I’m coming to explain. I’ve been to the Kremlin, Mr. Chairman.”

  “What? The Kremlin? You are a fool, Rudzhin,” Zhironovsky screamed. It was clear to him now that the young man from Kursk who had apprenticed at his side for so many years had broken ranks. But what never occurred to Volga Gaz’s chairman was how far Rudzhin had gone.

  Zhironovsky could never have fathomed Rudzhin reaching all the way to the top. And even if he had known of Rudzhin’s meeting with the president, the chairman would have dismissed it as insignificant. Zhironovsky and Tuzhbin were well known in Moscow’s political circles as inseparable alter egos. The chairman would not have been able to bend his mind around the reality that Oskar Tuzhbin had just countermanded the orders of his longest and closest collaborator.

  “I will have you jailed for insubordination.” The rants were still pouring out. “You will spend the rest of your life cold and hungry for this treason. And for what? I will get somebody else who will accomplish the mission. Someone else will finish off the two Americans. But tomorrow, once Ryan and Ruiz are gone, as God is my witness, I will deal with you. Personally.”

  “Ryan isn’t coming, Mr. Zhironovsky. Your plane was turned around midway across the Atlantic. The orders were canceled,” said Rudzhin.

  The phone line went quiet. Silence.

  “Hello?” Zhironovsky screamed into the handset. “Hello?”

  Piotr Rudzhin had hung up on the chairman of Volga Gaz.

  The next few moments were sheer bedlam. Viktor Zhironovsky’s rants were uncontrollable. Uggin, who had until now watched from the chair as his boss rocketed out of control, became infused with worry. He wanted desperately to get out of the apartment. The last thing he needed was to become the next target of Zhironovsky’s rage. But Uggin couldn’t figure out an exit strategy.

  Zhironovsky stormed out to the foyer and strode back in with a dilapidated old address book. Rummaging through its yellowed pages, he finally found what he had been looking for. It was the phone number of a former KGB colonel, a man who could handle difficult jobs with discretion.

  “I will do this myself, damnit. It always comes back to me. Alone. They are all gutless, fearful shits.” His loud shouts were directed at nobody in particular. And at everyone.

  Zhironovsky reached for the phone.

  At the exact moment he started dialing, the apartment’s two-tone chiming doorbell rang through the room. Dressed simply in jeans and sport shirts, the two men outside the penthouse’s door were in an irritable mood. It had taken them far longer than expected to get here. They had walked for twenty minutes to find a car expensive enough to park in Rublevka without attracting attention.

  The fact that the housekeeper was sleeping at this hour meant that Zhironovsky had to open the door himself. This small endeavor only aggravated his angry feelings. The chairman moved slowly to the door, muttering under his breath about how a man of his age and position still had to tackle the big and the small things of life all alone.

  In his confused state, Zhironovsky fully expected to see Rudzhin at the door. Instead, he felt the onset of another wave of irritation upon finding two unknown men outside the penthouse.

  “Who are you? And how the hell did you get into the building’s front door?”

  The shorter of the two men standing in the doorway had an oval, angelic face with a perfectly round patch of baldness in the middle of his head. He looked up at his taller colleague, who nodded imperceptibly.

  The short man raised his hand in one clean, arcing motion. He held an OT-33 Pernach pistol in his hand. Equipped with a one-hole compensator near the muzzle to reduce barrel climb, the Pernach had a cylindrical sound suppresser attached to its end. The gun was standard issue.

  The 9-millimeter Markov high-impact bullet entered cleanly through Viktor Zhironovsky’s nose and expanded precariously in the chairman’s brain. He was dead instantly.

  The two men were about to turn around when they heard a yelp from inside the home. Standing in the library’s open doorway, Daniel Uggin’s hand was covering his mouth in terror.

  The larger man shrugged mindlessly. He raised his own pistol. And fired. Once, right through the heart.

  MOSCOW

  SEPTEMBER 5, 10:00 A.M.

  VOLGA GAZ HEADQUARTERS

  After the next day’s breakfast, the American delegation filed into the Volga conference room. By now, they felt at home in its wood-paneled officiousness. Two days of ten-hour meetings had accustomed the American guests to the room’s offerings. The visitors went straight to the coffee and pastries, set up—as usual—on the marble sideboard along the far wall.

  Somewhat surprised to see the room empty of their hosts, Martha Packard and Stuart Altman took their respective seats. The CIA director’s assistant, Betty, sat in her customary place along the back wall, directly behind her boss. Tony Ruiz instinctively took a new seat; three chairs of distance now separated him from the intelligence officials.

  Ruiz, dressed in a blue suit and with his familiar yellow tie firmly under his collar, felt butterflies roaming through his stomach. He saw Packard rereading again the same document she had been carefully studying in the car on the way over. In large block letters, the words MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING were spread across the cover of the four-page document.

  Tony Ruiz glanced at Volga Gaz’s daily meeting agenda, which, like in each of the past two days, had been meticulously placed in front of each setting. He found the entry he was seeking. The agenda slated the signing ceremony for midday.

  Tony saw Packard looking up and smiling wanly in his direction. She looked at her watch just as the group heard a rustle outside the conference room’s private entrance. He watched as his colleagues shuffled their papers in quiet certitude. Only Tony Ruiz was unsure of what would happen next.

  Dressed in an elegant gray pin-striped suit, Piotr Rudzhin strode purposefully into the boardroom. He walked around the table to shake each participant’s hand. The slightly longer pause with Tony Ruiz’s handshake was imperceptible.

  Rudzhin sat down across from the Americans. The visitors exchanged some trite pleasantries with Rudzhin. Over the past two days, they had become accustomed to the Russians flowing one by one into the room at the start of each day. But their hosts had never before dared begin the formal meetings without Viktor Zhironovsky in the room.

  It was therefore no surprise to see the American delegation’s stunned reaction when Piotr Rudzhin cleared his throat to address the group. He rapped a pencil on the table.

  “General Packard, may I have your attention? As you know, my job is at the ministry of the interior. It is why I have attended your meetings sporadically. I have not had the pleasure of working with you as closely as others on Volga Gaz’s team. Yet it falls to me to be the bearer of bad news.

  “I am afraid that one of my country’s great luminaries was killed last night. Chairman Viktor Zhironovsky and Daniel Uggin were in the chairman’s apartment yesterday evening preparing for today’s meeting when hoodlums entered the building. Both men—both dear friends of mine—were shot dead.”

  The Americans all sucked in air. A murmur went through the four-person delegation from the United States.

  “This morning I spoke to President Oskar Tuzhbin and he has asked me to deliver a few messages. First and foremost, he wants you to know that while Russia has lost a leader, the president has lost a f
riend. This morning, President Tuzhbin posthumously conferred the Order of Merit for the Country on our chairman.

  “Second, he has asked me to communicate to you my appointment as acting chairman of Volga Gaz. I will now be in charge of Russia’s role in our continuing efforts to use our mutual interest in gas to improve bilateral relations. Third, the president has requested that I beg your understanding for our need to request a temporary suspension of our negotiations. We need to bury our chairman. We need to reflect and consider.”

  Martha Packard jumped to her feet. She knew the Russians. She had studied them, followed them, and eavesdropped on them all her adult life. Things never happened by accident in this country. Things were never as they seemed. How had Churchill said it? Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

  Somewhere, somehow, Martha Packard’s instincts, honed by twenty-five years in the intelligence business, were telling her that she had been had. Duped. Somebody had derailed the tunnel, at the cost of Zhironovsky’s life. But who? How did it happen? A man as powerful as Zhironovsky was nearly impossible to kill.

  Packard’s eyes careened toward her right, seeking out Tony Ruiz. She couldn’t see his eyes; they were locked on Rudzhin. Things had been going swimmingly until he had come in and confessed his sins. Hints of the tunnel’s unraveling had begun afterward. Packard recalled his absence at last night’s strange dinner. For an instant, she weighed the possibility that Ruiz had subverted her negotiations. No, it wasn’t possible. This little Latino boy was too young, too inexperienced.

  Standing, she struggled for words to bring the tunnel back on track. But what could she say? It was impossible to lodge formal protests at a time of mourning. The tunnel’s potential as a major coup—a single, unique mechanism to solve America’s energy deficit for years to come—was evaporating before her very eyes.

  She cleared her throat. “Mr. Rudzhin, umm…Chairman Rudzhin, I can speak for all of us in telling you that the deaths of Chairman Zhironovsky and Daniel Uggin come as a shock to our delegation. It is a great loss. We offer the profoundest of condolences to you, to President Tuzhbin, and to the Volga Gaz family.

  “However, your decision to postpone our negotiations is, frankly, disappointing. The future has a way of dissipating momentum. I am fearful that we will lose the progress made as each of us is forced to return to our daily grind. But I am hopeful that we will be back at this table again. It is in both of our nations’ interests.”

  She was about to sit down. A last thought seemed to occur to her. Her question appeared designed to test Rudzhin’s reactions. Glaring at him from across the room, she locked his eyes in a stare.

  “Pardon me, one last thing. It is the express hope of the United States government that justice is done in the sinful killing of Messrs. Zhironovsky and Uggin. We want to see the killers brought to trial and punished.”

  Rudzhin thanked her and responded. But while his words were directed at her, there was no doubting the barely disguised shifting of his eyes. He was looking at Tony Ruiz. Packard noticed, as she struggled to understand the hidden meaning of his tortured phraseology.

  “I could not have said it better myself. Our hope is the same as yours. And may I say that it is the Russian government’s aspiration that Americans such as yourself, General Packard, continue to prosper and multiply. There are many people in your country who still believe that Russia can be manipulated and trifled with. We were hopeful that this great tunnel project would have encouraged more people like you, more leaders with opinions such as your own, to come forward. This brilliant dream would have provided new voices in the United States strong enough to counter the continuous anti-Russian propaganda of your press and your elites. That this will not happen is surely one of the most unfortunate consequences of our project’s postponement.”

  The realization seemed to hit her like a brick. It was clear that Rudzhin was talking to Ruiz. The Russian knew exactly who had forced his hand. And now, reading between his lines, he was telling her.

  Tony Ruiz had done this.

  Overcome with anger, General Martha Packard closed her eyes momentarily. Everyone on her side was waiting for a signal that the meeting was over. She would have to get up soon. There was little else here for her.

  But General Martha Packard stood still for just one moment. A tiny second. She needed to calm her fury. Revenge was a dish best eaten cold. She still had an ace up her sleeve; only she knew about Ruiz’s one-night stand with the beautiful Russian spy.

  Martha Packard didn’t know how the young man from Washington State had sabotaged her mission, but she would find out. And when that happened, she would bury Tony Ruiz.

  UNITED STATES

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  OCTOBER 7, 7:37 P.M.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  The sound was muted on Isaiah J. Tolberg’s television set as Tony Ruiz sat in front of his customarily cluttered desk. A plate of Mary Jane’s Southern-style chocolate chip cookies was set between them. Tony hadn’t touched them. The Senator was on his third.

  A month had come and gone since Ruiz’s return from Russia. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival, Tony had sat Tolberg down and told him everything. Throughout the hour-long narrative, Tolberg had remained impassive. Silent. He had let Tony speak, uninterrupted, not asking a single question.

  As the young advisor wound up the details of his harrowing trip, Tolberg had been able to foresee where Tony was going. He had been in Washington too long not to recognize the telltale signs. Tony Ruiz was succumbing to the capital’s sad, unwritten personnel rule. When good people make mistakes, they become shaken, unsure of themselves. They resign honorably, believing they must pay a price. When bad people make mistakes, they dig in. They scrap and battle. Hang on. And never leave.

  Listening to the young former Washington State cop tell his story, Tolberg had sat behind his desk, waiting for the predictable sequence of events to unfold. Right on cue, during the inevitable long pause following the end of Tony’s chronicle, Tolberg had watched Ruiz reach down to open the red folder resting on his lap. Ruiz had taken out a piece of paper and handed it across the desk.

  Tolberg had known what it was without looking at it.

  “Senator, I’m handing you my resignation. It’s effective immediately,” Tony had said, his words choked with emotion.

  “Thanks but no thanks.” Tolberg had been prepared for this.

  Tony had insisted. Tolberg had rejected. So it had gone. Back and forth. For over an hour. In the end, Tony had kept his letter, with the promise that Tolberg would discuss it with President Gene Laurence.

  In the ensuing weeks, Tony had tried to resign two more times. Each time, he had argued passionately that the story would eventually leak. Each time he had been rebuffed. He was now about to undertake the conversation again; Tolberg could see it coming and tried to head it off by offering Ruiz one of the cookies.

  “Senator, I don’t want one of the damn cookies. I want you to reconsider my offer,” Tony sputtered, glancing at the clock on the bookshelf. “You have twenty-three minutes left to do it safely before all this hits the airwaves.”

  A voice from the doorway interrupted the conversation. Both men stood up as President Eugene Laurence walked into Tolberg’s office.

  “Ruiz, learn how to take no for an answer.” Laurence smiled, patting Tony on the shoulder as he walked by.

  Tony had seen the president a few times since his return. Each time he had considered bringing up the matter of his resignation, but had held his tongue in the end. Tony wasn’t the most experienced Washington insider, but he understood the rule of plausible deniability. If you didn’t actually talk to the president about a delicate subject, you left him the option of saying that nobody had told him. All White House administrations functioned under this rule. It ensured that others took the heat for the president.

  “Tony, seriously, Isaiah has talked to me about it. I know your thoughts. I appreciate them. But I’m not accepting your res
ignation.” The president’s bifocals were perched on the edge of his nose. He looked his usual New England preppie chic. Penny loafers, buttoned-collar oxford shirt, and a simple blue suit.

  “Mr. President, with all due respect. This will come out. She is a fighter. I cost her the project. And her job. She will not let go.”

  President Eugene Laurence sat down and crossed his legs. He pointed to the chair in front of him as an order for Tony to also sit.

  “Look, I asked Packard to resign because she had become blinded by her single-minded belief that the tunnel was worth any price. She had, umm, a case of tunnel vision.” Eugene Laurence smiled at his silly pun before continuing.

  “Tony, she should have packed it up the minute she found out the Russians were trying to blackmail you. Instead, she thought she could use it to force your adherence. It was bad judgment at its worst.”

  “Yes, I know. But then again, I should have told her what I had learned about Volga Gaz’s meddling in Peru. She might have made the right decision at that point.”

  “Possibly,” Tolberg interjected. “But I wouldn’t bet on it. And you sure didn’t believe that you could trust her, right?”

  Tony was silent.

  “Young man,” Tolberg addressed him, looking him straight in the eye, “can you search your mind and remember what we discussed when you asked why you were being chosen to go to Moscow?”

  “You said the president believed that it would be beneficial to have a young person along. Somebody not contaminated by the fifty years of Cold War antagonism.”

  “That is correct. I also said that your presence was necessary because you had no agenda. Your loyalties were to the president. To this man alone,” Tolberg said, pointing to President Eugene Laurence. “Well, you learned some nasty things on the trip and I think you acted courageously to protect the president of the United States.”

  “I appreciate that vote of confidence, sir. I really do,” Tony answered, switching his view to directly address Laurence. “But you both know as well as I do that to continue protecting the president, I should resign. You can’t keep this bottled up. A White House official fell into a Russian trap. It is destined to come out. This office needs to inoculate itself. The only way to do that is to let me go.”