The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “I hope you don’t find my questions too intrusive. It’s just that your request is coming from an odd location. Normally, significant purchase requests come from jewelry stores, art galleries, even auction houses. You, sir, are at an airport in the region south of Moscow.”

  “That’s right,” said Gavallan. “The town is called Hulskvoe, if you’re interested.”

  “May I be so bold as to inquire, sir, what you wish to purchase for one million dollars?”

  “A plane. A Mig-25 Foxbat. I’m a pilot myself, and I thought it would be neat to have one to tool around with on weekends.”

  “Is that right?” Notzli didn’t know a Mig Foxbat from a jumbo jet. He was a train man, himself. Antique miniatures. Double-A gauge. “And you’re certain this aircraft is worth one million dollars?”

  “Actually, it’s worth a lot more than that. Production price is around twenty-eight million a copy, but they’re having a fire sale.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious. I must have this plane.”

  Benno Notzli stared at the screen, evaluating the man’s impeccable credit history and the reasonable voice on the other end of the phone. It was his job to see to it his clients were satisfied, that they were able to purchase the baubles, bangles, trinkets, and, well . . . planes that they simply “must have.” One look at the annual salary and credit grade made the decision a snap. If the man wanted to fork over a million dollars for a Mig-25 Foxbat, he could be Notzli’s guest. AmEx would be happy to pocket its customary 2 percent fee on the transaction.

  “There should be no problem, Mr. Gavallan. I’ll be happy to authorize the purchase.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Notzli.”

  “And fly safely.”

  “I intend to,” said Gavallan.

  All in all, a most pleasant man, decided Notzli, already halfway out the door. If he hurried, he just might make the 7:13.

  Cate Magnus took a seat at Colonel Pyotr Grushkin’s desk. Pulling the phone toward her, she dialed information and asked for the number of the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. The mere act made her jumpy. The thought of asking a Russian operator for the phone number of the Main Adversary’s vaunted internal police was hard to fathom.

  Waiting, she watched Jett and Grushkin walk around the Mig, Grushkin pointing out the flaps and ailerons beneath the wing, stooping to inspect the landing gear. Jett looked nervous—fidgeting, nodding frequently, wringing his hands, then brushing them off. Well, she thought, that makes two of us.

  The operator returned with the number. She hung up and dialed. It took her two disconnections and a string of “Would you please holds” before she was connected with her intended party.

  “This is Dodson.”

  “Mr. Dodson, this is Catherine Magnus. I’m sure you know who I am.”

  “Yes, Miss Magnus. I hope you don’t mind my saying I’m a bit surprised to hear from you. How can I be of service?”

  “How can you be of service?” If she snapped at him, it was because she was still incensed at his role in her predicament. Were it not for Dodson, she would be safely in the States as she spoke. There would be no question of Mercury’s opening for trading tomorrow morning and she could still look at herself in the mirror. “I’ll tell you how. First, you can revoke the warrant for Jett Gavallan’s arrest. He didn’t kill Ray Luca. I was there too—I mean in Florida. Yes, he was looking for Luca, but not to kill him. He wanted to know why Luca was trying to spoil the Mercury Broadband IPO Mr. Gavallan’s company was underwriting. Unfortunately, he got there late—we both did, actually. The same people who killed Mr. Luca nearly killed Jett.”

  “Miss Magnus—”

  “If you want to know where to find Luca’s killers, I’ll be happy to tell you. Drive north from Moscow on the Petersburg road. Take a turnoff for a place called Svertloe and go east another—”

  “Miss Magnus, please—”

  “You’ll find them near a dirty cabin in a small pine forest. They’re dead, I’m afraid. We had to kill them. Do you understand, Mr. Dodson? We had to do your job for you!”

  “Miss Magnus, please calm yourself. If you’d like my cooperation, you’ll need to compose yourself. Please, ma’am.”

  But Cate had no more words. She was crying, her breath coming in great big drafts, as if she’d been drowning and needed air. She’d killed someone. She’d ended a life. It didn’t matter that the man was trying to kill her. Even now, after everything, she could not summon any enmity toward him. She saw him dodging round the nose of the Suburban, running at the house, his eyes so ambitious, focused, blazing with mission. She had aimed the gun and pulled the trigger and he had fallen dead without uttering so much as a whimper. She could feel her finger tight against the trigger, the gentle, even pleasant bucking of the gun, the dull fireworks as the casings ejected and tinkled onto the cabin floor. The bullets struck him in the chest, in a neat diagonal from spleen to shoulder, and down he went. She was expecting more drama, more blood, a shout, the acknowledgment of his wounds . . . something to punctuate the loss of a life. But he just fell and stopped moving and his eyes were still open and that was it.

  “It was Kirov,” she said, gathering herself. “He sent two of his killers to do the job. Check the flights in and out of Florida. You must have the tail number of his plane somewhere. Look for a late Thursday or early Friday arrival and a Friday evening departure.” Cate mentioned Boris and Tatiana and offered descriptions of them.

  “Konstantin Kirov? You mean Mr. Gavallan’s partner?”

  “No, I mean Konstantin Kirov, the man that tried to kill us and is hoping to defraud the investing public out of two billion dollars.”

  “Let me get this straight. Are you saying that Jett Gavallan does not want the Mercury deal to happen?”

  “Of course he doesn’t want it to come to market. What Ray Luca was saying about Mercury was true, more or less. Jett looked into it and discovered some serious accounting discrepancies. He would never represent a company that wasn’t exactly as advertised. Contrary to your screwed-up line of thought, he is not a dishonest man.”

  Dodson cleared his throat. “I appreciate the information, Miss Magnus. You can be sure we’ll look into it. But if you’d like any cooperation from our side, I’m afraid you’ll have to come back to the United States. I take it you are in Moscow now?”

  “South of it. Hulskvoe. It’s a former Red Air Force base.” Drumming her nails on the desktop, she managed to slow her breathing and get a grip on herself. “Actually, Mr. Dodson, I want to help you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. That is, if you’re still interested in jailing Konstantin Kirov for skimming two hundred million dollars from Novastar Airlines?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am, we’re still very interested in Mr. Kirov. But I think you’re mistaken on your figures. Kirov stole a hundred twenty-five million from Novastar.”

  “No, Mr. Dodson, it’s you who are mistaken. I have in my possession Novastar’s banking records for the past three years. Every transfer into and out of the company. They’re all there. I also have the complete banking history of a company called Andara, and one called Futura. I even have a couple of numbered accounts nobody’s ever heard of. I guarantee you, it’s enough evidence to see Konstantin Kirov convicted in any court in the world.”

  “And you’re willing to turn this over to the government?”

  “I am.”

  A palm muffled the mouthpiece and Cate could hear Dodson’s heated voice summoning someone named Roy. Waiting, she watched Jett climb into the Mig’s cockpit and Grushkin take his place next to him. Jett looked more comfortable now, and she found her own nerves settling too. Then she reminded herself that in a little while she would have to take Grushkin’s place, and her hard-won repose vanished. Suddenly, the Mig looked very big and very dangerous.

  “Miss Magnus, you’ve piqued my interest,” she heard Dodson’s voice say. “What is it you want?” />
  “Just a little help getting home.”

  “Oh?”

  Cate outlined Jett’s plan for the next twenty-four hours and how the FBI could help.

  “Anything else?” Dodson asked. “Dinner with the President? An audience with the Pope?”

  “No, thank you,” Cate replied, all business. “That’s all.” Her sense of humor had deserted her sometime back, probably in a dusky pine clearing in the plains north of Moscow. “Is that a yes?”

  It took Dodson a long time to answer.

  She had one call yet to make. As usual, she’d saved the hardest for last. Half a dozen times already, she’d picked up the handset only to slam it right back down. Grushkin had brought her a flight suit and draped it over the door. A helmet with a dark sunshield sat on the desk in front of her, and she could see her reflection in it. She asked herself who she really was, Cate Magnus or Katya Kirov. And who, after all was said and done, she would choose to remain. The answers came more easily than she expected. As Jett said, there was only one direction: straight ahead.

  Picking up the phone, she dialed the nine-digit number that she recognized as belonging to the north side of Moscow. It was a hard part of town, and the voice that answered the phone matched it perfectly. “Da?”

  Catherine Elizabeth Magnus did not hang up.

  You ready?” Gavallan asked Cate.

  “Yeah,” she said, then more certainly, “Yes, I’m ready. Jesus, Jett, what am I supposed to say—hee-hah, let’s git? I’m scared, that’s what I am. Are you?”

  Glancing to his right, he caught sight of her beneath the Perspex bubble next to him. Wearing the oversized helmet, she looked thin and vulnerable. He could see that she was trying to smile and having a hard time of it. Shifting his eyes to the fore, he gazed down the slim strip of asphalt rolling to the horizon. He waited for his heart to beat faster, for the prickly fingers to scratch at the back of his neck, but his heart was calm, and so was his psyche. In the final analysis, he was just flying a plane. Besides, it wasn’t takeoffs that frightened him. It was what he’d find up there.

  “Am I what?” he asked, a half second later.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, fingering the throttle, inching it ever so slightly forward. Immediately, the engine roared. The aircraft begin to rumble. “Let’s go to Germany.”

  Colonel Pyotr Grushkin watched his beloved Mig taxi to the end of the runway, turn slowly, then barrel down the asphalt and take off over the golden fields of wheat swaying in the warm evening breeze. Wings sweeping back toward the fuselage, the aircraft climbed higher and higher into the azure sky. The American rocked the fighter port and starboard, a gentleman’s good-bye, and Grushkin’s heart went with it.

  When the Mig was barely a speck in the sky, he walked into his office and made a phone call.

  “Jerzy, this is Pyotr. Listen, I have a student taking the jet out for a long run toward the border. Nothing to worry about—just a training exercise. But in case anything funny happens, maybe you could keep your eyes closed.”

  “What do you mean, ‘keep my eyes closed’?” Jerzy asked.

  “Take a short break. Forget you saw anything. If any tough guys ask, say everything’s quiet as the grave.”

  “This is a serious matter you are talking about, Colonel. A question of the motherland’s security.”

  “I think it is more a question of a thousand American dollars, nyet?” There was a pause, and Grushkin pictured his old crew chief seated at his obsolete radar array, a cigarette burning between his fingers, a tepid cup of coffee on his desk. “Please, Jerzy. A favor.”

  “It is a very quiet evening. I would be surprised if anything of interest appeared on our screens. Good-bye, Pyotr.”

  When Grushkin returned to the hangar, he was confronted by a pageant of disappointed faces. He stared back, then slowly allowed a broad, shit-eating grin to crack his stoic face.

  “Hey, don’t look so glum, you dirty bastards,” he shouted. “Somebody break out the vodka! We’re fucking millionaires!”

  62

  The safe course was to keep the plane low, respect a two-hundred-foot ceiling, bleed the speed to five hundred miles per hour, well under supersonic, and take the Mig for a sunset cruise over the rooftops of Eastern Europe. A check of the instruments showed what Gavallan thought of the safe course. Speed: 650 knots. Altitude: 30,000 feet and climbing. Screw the safe course. It was long gone anyway. He’d thrown safety to the wind when he’d busted into Ray Luca’s home in Delray Beach Friday afternoon. No, he decided, he’d chucked it earlier than that. He even had the date: January 10, somewhere around three o’clock, when after a boozy lunch at Alfred’s in the financial district, he’d signed Konstantin Kirov as a client and pledged Black Jet Securities’ every effort to make the Mercury offering a grand slam.

  Rolling his shoulders, Gavallan tried to get comfortable in the scooped-out seat. One hand fought the stick. He was holding it too rigidly, nudging the aircraft left every few seconds to compensate for a slight oversteer. The other hand rested on the throttle like a leaden weight, keeping his airspeed steady.

  A click of his thumb activated the intercom. “How ya doin’?”

  Cate sat beside him in her own self-enclosed turret, his airsick RIO, or radar intercept officer, in her sky blue flight suit and pearl white helmet. “Alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”

  “We’re about eleven hundred miles out,” he said. “Another two hours and we’ll be on friendly soil.”

  “Just hurry, Jett.”

  Cate had greeted the initial rush of speed with an exhilarated “Wow!” and then, a few seconds later, as they’d slowed dramatically, a less enthusiastic “Uh-oh.” She’d used two of Grushkin’s doggy bags, and Gavallan didn’t think there was anything left in her tummy for a third.

  “I am,” he said. “You can count on it.”

  Gavallan released his thumb and turned his eyes back to the bank of instruments. He’d expected it to be easier than this. He’d expected it all to come right back, as if sliding into the cockpit after an eleven-year break were the same thing as slipping on an old jacket and finding that it still fit. Instead, the seat felt tight on his bottom. The cockpit was much too small, the stick unresponsive. It wasn’t a question of whether he could still fly. He could. The Mig was not especially challenging in that regard. The cockpit configuration was similar to that of the A-10 he’d piloted prior to going into the Stealth program. Aircraft design dictated that form follow function and the throttle, stick, and navigation systems were all in similar places. The gauges and the heads-up display, or HUD, with their Cyrillic lettering might be difficult to read and the airspeed indicator was in kilometers, not knots per hour, but when it came down to it, the Mig was just another jet. All the same, he was flying poorly, stiffly, with no grace, no feel for the aircraft. Even the familiar tightness of the G suit around his thighs and across his stomach, the shoulder harness’s stiff bite, failed to comfort him.

  Relax, he told himself. You were born to do this. Born to fly.

  The words set him on a slingshot journey back through time in which he reviewed his every accomplishment as a pilot. Baghdad. Tonopah. Colorado Springs. The images shot past his mind’s eye with increasing speed, faster and faster, one on top of the other, blurred, ill-focused, until just as quickly they froze and he saw himself at age fifteen, lying on the hood of his father’s Chevy on a hot summer night in Texas. The car was a hot rod, a fire engine red ‘68 Camaro with a 454 engine, twin chrome exhausts, and a white racing stripe painted down the hood. After spending all afternoon washing and waxing it, he’d driven twenty miles outside of town and parked in the middle of the open plain where alone in the gathering dusk, he could watch the jets from Beeville Air Station, fifty miles to the north, screech across the sky. He would lie there for an hour, looking up at their gleaming silver bodies, listening to their engines shake the very pillars of the sky, dreaming upon the white contrails they left behin
d. He was born to fly. It had come to him with a certainty that was raw and cold and frightening. Shivering in the ninety-nine-degree dusk, he’d known he belonged up there.

  So, fly, he told himself now. Relax and fly, goddamn it.

  He gazed at the countryside below. The sun had fallen below the horizon, and its waning rays burnt the Earth’s cusp a flaming ochre. The sky above was dark and supple and inviting.

  Gavallan’s eyes fell to the radar array, a square black screen six inches by six inches located on the instrument console. The screen was dark except for his own orange blip and a flashing triangle that was a passenger jet ninety miles to the north. He’d been flying for an hour, and so far he had detected no sign of Russian air patrols. Either Grushkin was a man of his word or Russian air defenses were perilously lax.

  Checking his coordinates on the heads-up satellite navigation system, he put the plane into a seventy-degree roll and brought his heading to west-southwest. Doing some quick math, he figured he’d put the bird down at Ramstein Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt at around 10 P.M. local time. From then on, they’d be living on the good graces of others.

  Five minutes passed. Gavallan checked his coordinates against a map on his knee and decided he was somewhere just south of Kraców, Poland, safely out of Russian airspace. “We’re going to start looking mighty suspicious to our flyboys anytime now,” he said to Cate. “Time to call ahead and give the boys in blue our arrival time.” He checked his radio log and dialed in Ramstein Air Force Base, home to the 86th Airlift Wing. As he keyed the mike a second time, a steady howl sounded outside his earphones. At the same time, a red square blinked on his console. Fire. Starboard engine. His eyes kicked right. The gauge showing the exhaust gas temperature was maxed out, full in the red. He pulled the handle to activate the fire extinguisher and cut fuel flow to the engine. At the same time, he cut back on the throttle, shut down the engine, and put the plane into a steep dive. A check over his shoulder revealed nothing. But the gauge didn’t lie.