Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  Jake looked at the drink in his hand. What if Tenney slipped his damned stuff into the embassy's water purification system? Spaso House's system? Moscow tap water was heavily polluted and the Americans ran it through a purifier before they made it available for human consumption.

  Perhaps the kitchen staff uses tap water to cook with.

  People brush their teeth with it. Ice cubes are made from it.

  He had had what?-one or two sips?

  Hell, Jake! Quit sweating it. This stuff is safe as holy water until Herb slips you the second half of the cocktail.

  But it was no use. Even if he were dying of thirst he wouldn't touch it. He put the glass with its two ice cubes on the table behind him, on a magazine so it wouldn't leave a ring, and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  There was Yocke now, escorted by Spiro Dalworth. He came wandering over to where Grafton was parked and waggled his eyebrows in greeting.

  "How's the booze?" "Free." "Jack Daniel's and water, a double," the reporter told Dalworth. "And anything you want for yourself." After a glance at Grafton, Dalworth turned and headed for the bar.

  "So what's new on the Soviet Square murders?" "Damn if I know," the reporter replied.

  "They had me chasing human interest today. Tommy Townsend, our senior guy, took over the assassination since it's so hot, but the poor bastard is probably hanging out at the Kremlin waiting for a press release. The cops over here won't tell you diddley squat. I'm going to try to milk them tomorrow." "What human was of interest today?" "Yakov Dynkin, a Jew that these enlightened democrats stuffed into a crack for selling a car for more than he paid for it. Funny thing, the warden of Butyrskaya Prison says he isn't there.

  No Jews are there, according to him. And I can't find Dynkin's wife." "You have her address?" "Yeah. One of our people interviewed her a couple months ago. But the people at her apartment house say they never heard of her. Someone else has her apartment.

  No forwarding address. The people at the post office look at me like I'm a terrorist spy. The concept of giving a Russian's address to a foreigner doesn't compute." Jake Grafton rubbed his eyes.

  Jack Yocke looked around at the expensive furniture and original art on the walls and the cheerful people sipping champagne and Perrier. A sour look crossed his face. "I wish to God I was back in Washington on the cop beat, back looking at street-corner crack dealers shot full of holes and interviewing their parents --- even covering the District Building." "Well, look at all the material standing here tonight.

  Bring your notebook?" "Tommy Townsend's here. Though maybe I can go down to the kitchen and get enough for a Style section piece on how they do the canap6's with a Russian twist.

  Say, isn't that General Yakolev standing over there ogling that broad?" "That's him." "I hear he wants to get rich. He signed a book contract the other day with a New York publisher to write a nonfiction treatise on the former Soviet armed forces. For a cool half a million. Dollars. That ought to keep the old fart in rubles until the middle of the next century." "Hub!" "Yep. They've signed up Yakolev and about six other old Commies. One of them's in the KGB, one in the Politburo, a couple of Gorbachev's old lieutenants, a former ambassador to the United States and an ex-foreign minister.

  This time next year we'll know more about the goings on in the Kremlin than we ever knew about the Reagan White House.

  "Money talks." "It sings, but I don't have any to salt around.

  If I ever paid a nickel for an interview the Post would have my coi6nes.

  "I didn't know reporters had ethics," "Ha ha ha and ha. I ask my little questions and Smile brightlally and these Russians look at me like I'm some sort of low-life slime." "Good luck." "Thanks." Dalworth returned with Yocke's drink, and with the lieutenant at his elbow, the reporter drifted off to mix and mingle.

  Jake Grafton had just greeted the naval attached, Captain Collins, when a face he recognized from Time magazine approached, Senator Wilmoth from Missouri. "I thought I recognized you, Admiral. You're Grafton, aren't you?" "Yessir. I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting You before, Senator." "You testified in front of one of my committees several years ago about the A-12 Avenger attack plane. We were never introduced. You were a captain then, I seem to recall." "Yessir." "Are you permanently assigned here to Moscow?" wilmoth actually seemed interested, which surprised Jake a little' "It's a temporary thing, Senator. I work for the DIA now.

  "Well, what's your slant on fledgling democracy?" "Don't have one, I'm afraid, sir. Is this a working vacation for you or a business trip?" "Business. I'm going to be digging through the KGB files too." He looked at the crowd. "I just wish there was some concrete thing America could do to help the Russian peo pie. Our foreign aid is just a drop in the bucket and it's 91 we can afford." "I've got an idea," Jake Grafton told him, then wished he hadn't.

  "You'll think it's nuts," he added tentatively.

  Wilmoth eyed him speculatively. "Well, I could always use a laugh." Oh, well. What's the harm? "Buy Siberia. Russia could use the money and we could use the resources." Wilmoth looked slightly stunned. He was apparently tryWill ing to decide if Jake was serious when Tarkington appeared at the admiral's elbow.

  "You have a telephone call from General Land, sir," he whispered. "You can take it upstairs in the ambassador's office." As Tarkington retrieved Jake's attache case from beside the credenza behind him, Jake said good-bye to the senator, who had decided to be amused at Jake's suggestion. The admiral followed Toad through the crowded room toward the stairs in the hall.

  Three minutes later he picked up the telephone in the ambassador's office. The operator came on. "Admiral Grafton?

  Please wait while I connect you with General Land." In seconds he heard Land's voice. After the usual greetings, Land asked, "Got your gadget handy?" "Yessir, but I don't have the code set." "You can do that afterward." "Just a moment, sir." The message took about twenty seconds to tape. The two men said their good-byes, then broke the connection.

  Jake used a pocket calculator to compute the code, which he set into the device. Then he took it outside. A small garden in the back of the structure had some nice trees, some scraggly grass and flowers. No one was around. After a scan of the windows above him, he pushed the play button and held the device up to his ear.

  Amazingly enough, the damned thing worked.

  The second sentence was the essence of the message.

  "Albert Sidney Brown was poisoned." That thought was expanded and various chemical compounds were discussed, but there was no doubt. The corpse contained lethal amounts of a synthetic compound not found in nature.

  When Jack Yocke got back to the Metropolitan Hotel that evening, he asked the desk clerk if he had any messages. Assured that neither his editor nor his mother had seen fit to invest in a call halfway around the world this evening, he strolled for the elevator.

  He checked his watch. Only ten-thirty. What the hey, why not a cup of coffee before bed?

  He detoured into the bar, nodded at Dimitri, the night barman, and ordered.

  With his coffee in front of him, he sat contemplating the painting on the wall opposite the bar. It looked as if it were old and the varnish had darkened, but maybe it had been painted to look old.

  The wall of the Kremlin was on one side of the picture and St. Basil's Cathedral on the other.

  But Red Square wasn't there-merely mud and a few shacks and a giant ditch along the Kremlin wall to make things tough for touring Mongols and visiting Poles. Just slightly left of center stood a nobleman listening to a peasant.

  Yocke looked at this painting at least three or four times a week and often wondered what the serf was saying.

  His idle musings were derailed when he realized a woman had seated herself at the bar with only one stool between them. She greeted the barman pleasantly and ordered coffee in American English.

  "A fellow Yank, as I live and breathe.

  What brings you to Sodom on the Moskva?" She turned her head toward him and grinne
d. She had dark brown eyes, almost black, set wide apart. Dark brown hair tumbled to her shoulders.

  Her chin was the perfect size, her lips just right.

  With the exception of one prostitute who visited the hotel occasionally, she was the prettiest woman Yocke had yet seen in Russia, which was saying something since Russia had its fair share of beautiful women. Best of all, she was about his age and wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Or any ring.

  "I live in Moscow," she told him.

  "Is that a Boston accent?" "Actually Vermont, but four years at Brandeis ruined me, I'm afraid." "Name's Jake Yocke." "Shirley Ross." She wasn't cover girl Cosmo gorgeous, Yocke concluded, but she had perfect bones: the forehead, the cheekbones, the chin. Her face was a feast for the eyes.

  She had been here over a year, she told Yocke, first as an interpreter for an American telecommunications company, then as a journalist for an English-language month y magazine published here.

  11 small world. I scribble for a living too.

  Washington Post." "The Post?" "The one and only." "Do you know Sally Quinn?" Sally was a Post reporter, columnist and all-around original character.

  She had even written a novel or two.

  "Uh-huh." Shirley Ross grinned.

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the corner sipping Bailey's.

  "So how is this borsch batch going to come out?" Yocke asked her.

  "You want a prediction?" He nodded.

  "Yeltsin, democracy and where to place your bets for the coming civil war." Yocke tasted his drink again. She was working on her second but he was still nursing his first. After the whiskey at the embassy and the coffee here the liqueur was too sweet. And he was feeling the alcohol.

  This woman in front of him was also stimulating his hormones.

  Her discussion of the political situation struck Jack Yocke as enlightened and well informed. She got her tongue around the names of these Russian politicians without a single slip. Jack Yocke felt slightly deflated. Shirley Ross knew more about Russian politics than he ever hoped to know. When she fell silent he told her that.

  She grinned again. "Not really. It's my job.

  You'll pick it up. Wow your friends back home when they get tired of talking about TV shows and movies. People will avoid you at cocktail parties." She mugged with a suspicious glance out of the corner of her eyes, then joined him in laughter.

  He looked into those deep brown eyes and felt completely at ease.

  American women are the very best. "This Soviet Square killing-what are people saying about that?" Her eyes flicked around the room and came to rest on him. "Do you want Sunday op-ed bullshit or do you want the truth?" Dimitri was loading the German-made dishwasher and making the usual noises. Jack and the woman were the only people in the bar. "Without surrendering my right to later argue that op-ed pieces are an attempt to write the truth, I choose the second alternative What truth do you know?" She toyed with her swizzle stick while he studied her face. At last the eyes came up to meet his. "The truth will never come out," Perhaps," he said, and relaxed. He looked at his watch.

  Tomorrow was going to be a long day hunting for cops willing to talk while he listened to Gregor's tales of Brooklyn. He took a deep breath, exhaled and scooted his chair back. "Do you come here often, Shirley?" "The KGB is setting up Yeltsin." con"How do you know that?" "I can't tell you." Yocke squared off to face her. "What can you tell me?" "Nothing that you can print." She lay down the swizzle stick and hunted in her purse. She extracted a pack of Marlboros and a pack of matches.

  After she lit one she examined Yocke's face through the smoke.

  "You came here tonight to meet me, didn't you?" Her eyes stayed on his face. She smoked the cigarette in silence. The dishwasher behind the bar lit off with a rumble.

  "Anything you tell me I have to confirm. Someone else must confirm every fact or I can't print it." "If you ever tell anyone where you got this or who I am you will ruin me." "We never reveal sources who request anonymity." "This is Russia." She didn't know anything. Perhaps she thought she knew something, but what the hell could it be? She's an American, for Chrissake!

  "Three KGB officers She stubbed out the cigarette and looked at Dimitril who was working on receipts on an IBM computer terminal. Her eyes came back to Yocke.

  "Three KGB officers He had to lean forward across the table to hear her voice above the noise of the dishwasher.

  She swallowed and fumbled for another cigarette.

  "Three KGB officers went to police headquarters a half hour before the assassination. They ordered the police away from Soviet Square." "How do you know this?" A whisper: "The order was transmitted over the radio.

  The police in the square heard it on their little radios.

  You've seen those little radios they wear, haven't you?" "I've seen them." The police here were wired up just like the cops in Washington and Detroit.

  "Kolokoltsev was a pawn sacrifice. It's the king they want.

  "Who's they?" To his chagrin, Yocke's voice came out a whisper. He raised it a notch and repeated the question.

  "Who's they?" She just shook her head.

  "I need some names." She leaned back and sucked fiercely on the cigarette. Her eyes went to Dimitri and stayed there.

  "He can't hear us." "He's KGB. All these hard-currency hotel people are." "He can't hear us over that dishwasher," Yocke insisted. "You're going to have to point me in the right direction. Give me a name. One name.

  Any of them. Any one of them." She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and drained her drink.

  "I have to have someplace to start looking, Shirley, or your trip down here was a waste of time. You must know how goddamn tough it is to get Russians to open up to an American reporter. It's like asking a dope dealer if he's got a load coming in anytime soon." Her lips twisted into an attempt at a grin as she stood up. Now the lips straightened. Gripping her purse tightly she leaned across the table and whispered, "Nikolai Demodov." "Was he one of the three?" But she was walking out. She went through the door and turned left and was gone.

  Up in his room Jack Yocke wrote the name on his computer screen and sat staring at it.

  Nikolai Demodov.

  Well, it was a pretty story. No getting around that. A pretty story.

  He didn't know enough to even guess how much truth there might be to the tale, if any, but his instinct told him some truth was there. You develop that instinct in this business after you have listened to a lot of stories.

  Maybe it's their eyes, the body language.

  He tapped aimlessly on the keyboard for a few moments, then turned the computer off.

  He brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands and stared at his reflection in the mirror over the sink while he thought about Shirley Ross and the three KGB agents.

  If only he could have gotten more out of her. How should he have handled it? She must have known all three of the names. At the minimum she knew how the hell Nikolai Demodov fits in. Where had he lost her?

  And where did she get her information?

  Aaagh! To be tantalized so and have the door slammed in your face!

  Infuriating.

  Most people are poor liars. Oh, every now and then you meet a good one, but most people have not had the practice it takes to tell a lie properly. Cops can smell a lie. So can some lawyers and preachers. And all good reporters. Even if you can't put your finger on why it plays right, you know truth when you find it.

  Just now Jack Yocke decided he had seen some of it.

  And the glimpse excited him.

  SERGI PAVLENKO WAS DOZING IN THE GUARD SHACK when the noise of a helicopter brought him awake. He was nineteen years old, a conscript from a collective farm, and he was not used to helicopters. He came immediately awake and went outside where he could see better.

  It was one in the morning, the middle of the summer night, which was still short here three hundred miles southeast of Moscow at the Serdobsk Nuclear Power Plant.

  The
lights of the helicopter were curious, a red, a white and a light that flashed and made the machine look like some unearthly thing, some vision from a vodka-drenched nightmare. When it became obvious that the machine was going to land here, Sergi Pavlenko straightened his uniform tunic and resettled his hat on his head at the correct angle.

  He eased the strap that held his rifle into the correct position and stood erect with his heels together, as a proper soldier should.

  Now the helicopter's landing light came on, a spotlight that shone downward and slightly ahead.

  Pavlenko started.

  He had never before seen a helicopter flying at night and the landing light was unexpected.