The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  Joe did. While we were sitting there, an ambulance came and the crew took someone into the hospital on a gurney. After it left, a private car rolled up, parked behind the sedan that had brought our guys, and an elderly man helped a woman into the hospital.

  The rain continued to fall. A gentle breeze off the Baltic stirred the leaves of the trees, which were enjoying the spring after a miserable Baltic winter. I watched the entrance to the emergency room in my side mirror. The bad guys’ ride was still where they left it, with a man at the wheel. We kept our heads on a swivel, watching for cars. Sitting still like this in Indian country made me nervous.

  I called Armanti Hall on his cell. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s things?”

  “Quiet.”

  “Folks asleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re parked outside the emergency entrance to a hospital”—I named it, and since my command of the local lingo wasn’t great, spelled it—“and need your help. Come find us. Call when you get close.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll give him the server, just in case,” I told Joe.

  Another ten minutes went by. The rain was steady. The sea wind caressed the trees.

  Twelve minutes. Fourteen.

  “Let’s get the hell outta here,” Joe said.

  I had the willys terribly bad too. “Go,” I said.

  He fired up the engine and put the car in gear. As we started to move, a van pulled in front of us, facing us, blocking the exit lane. Two men piled out, one on each side. Men with submachine guns.

  “Oh, fuck,” Joe said, and aimed the car for the guy on the passenger side and stood on the gas. As we jumped the curb the windshield exploded. Little pebbles of glass flew everywhere and I slammed my eyes shut. Somehow Joe kept his foot on the gas pedal and the car was accelerating. I opened my eyes in time to see the guy who was in front of us going over the top of the car.

  Joe’s head was a mass of blood. He was leaning back against the headrest and still had the accelerator floored, his lifeless hands on the wheel. The engine was howling.

  The car shot across the street and slammed into a parked vehicle. The air bag deployed; I felt it smack me a good one. I was conscious and miraculously alive. I could hear the engine winding at full screech, tortured metal screaming a banshee wail. Then the little four-banger quit dead. The air bag lay there like a deflated balloon.

  I didn’t have my seat belt on, so in the great silence I shoved hard against the door and was out onto the pavement. On my face. Got the pistol out and started shooting at the guy who was still standing beside the van across the street. He jumped back into the van as I emptied the pistol at it. The van driver shot straight ahead, past the entrance to the hospital and on out into the street. I could see the shooter we had smacked lying flat on the glistening pavement.

  I looked back into our ride. Joe Kitty had stopped four or five bullets with his head. Blood and brains were blasted everywhere. Both shooters had been aiming for the driver, which was the only reason I was still alive.

  The rear door was buckled and wouldn’t open. I leaned in over the passenger seat and grabbed that damned server—it was on the floor—and set off down the sidewalk. The car that had brought the other guys to the hospital was gone. How the driver got that thing out of there I had no idea, nor did I care.

  I was having my troubles walking. Staggering. I had glass pebbles in my hair and clothes and maybe in my eyes. I was trying to clear my vision when a car pulled alongside with Armanti Hall at the wheel.

  I stared at him.

  “Get in, you damn fool.”

  I opened the door, tossed the server in, and managed to cram myself in. I was still trying to get the door closed a block later.

  “Holster that fucking gun.”

  To my amazement, I found that I still had the Beretta in my hand. I managed to jam it under my armpit.

  “What happened?” Armanti Hall demanded.

  “Fuckers killed Joe.”

  “Oh, man…”

  I could hear sirens wailing. I put my head down on Armanti’s shoulder and went to sleep.

  A doctor came to the embassy, wiped Joe Kitty’s blood off my face, and rooted around in my left eye for a little glass shard. With the glass out, I wrote a message for Jake Grafton which Dulcie Del Rio sent over the secure com system, and Armanti Hall took me back to my hotel. My clothes were wet and splotched with Joe’s blood. I took them off and threw them in the trash. Then I showered and fell into bed. Armanti stayed in the hallway, just in case.

  Lying in bed, I felt as if I had really screwed up this assignment. Joe Kitty was dead, which wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t sat outside that hospital for way over an hour while the bad guys summoned help. How stupid can you get? Then there was Audra Rogers… imprisoned… somewhere.

  Tired as I was, I still couldn’t let it go enough to fall asleep. I wandered back and forth around the room, looked out the window… the rain was now a misty fog.

  What should I have done? Sure, the Rogers had lied. If they had told the truth immediately, would that have gotten us to Audra? There was no way to know.

  I laid down on the bed and thrashed around, going over and over it. The kid was dead; I knew it in my bones. Finally, I must have dozed off. When I awoke, the sun was out and the sky had cleared. My left eye bothered me. Felt as if something was still in there, although I wasn’t stupid enough to rub it. It was slightly blurred, but since I had two eyes, I was good to go.

  I showered again, shaved, got dressed, and packed my bag. No doubt the Estonian authorities wanted to talk to me. One had to assume the authorities had been back to see the Rogers after the robbery at the branch bank, and the Rogers had probably told them all about Jim Wilson, U. S. State Department investigator. Then there was Joe Kitty, sitting in a smashed, shot-up car with his head blown off. Any way you looked at it, we had worn out our welcome in lovely Estonia.

  Armanti was indeed waiting in the hall, sitting on stairs coming down from the floor above. He looked as tired as I felt, even with my nap. We rode over to the embassy, were admitted by the gate guard, and went to the basement to see Dulcie.

  She had news. The Estonians said the man outside the bank branch—he had bled out—was a Russian, as was the man who had flown over our car in front of the hospital. “Go to the cafeteria,” she said, “get something to eat. You two are leaving on a plane at noon.” She produced two diplomatic passports. “These will get you through immigration and on to the plane.”

  “Where are we going?” Armanti asked.

  “Berlin. You change planes there for Stockholm.” She produced folders with tickets.

  “What about the Rogers?” I asked Dulcie.

  “They left Estonia this morning on their way to the States.”

  “And the kidnapped kid?”

  “Sit down, Tommy. Armanti.” Dulcie reminded me of my grandmother, plump, with salt-and pepper hair.

  “A body of a child was found last night floating in a canal. The Estonians think it is Audra Rogers. It will take a while to be sure. The child has been dead about ten days, according to the forensic examiner, and in the water for much of that time.”

  “Shit,” Armanti Hall said.

  They killed her after they took the picture to give to her folks, I thought.

  “Have the Rogers been told?” I asked.

  “The ambassador broke the news to them.”

  After some silence, Armanti and I gave her our guns and wandered down to the cafeteria. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate something anyway, and drank some American coffee. Nursing it, I asked Armanti, “Was Joe married?”

  “Once,” he said. “For awhile. He never said much about it.” He shrugged. “It just didn’t work out, I guess.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I liked him.”

  “Served with him in Syria and Afghanistan,” Armanti Hall said slowly. “He saved my life once. If he hadn’t been there, I’d be dead now
.” He growled. “But, shit, Tommy, we all gotta go sometime, and one place is as good as another.”

  Embassy staffers had already been to Armani’s hotel. They brought his suitcase, a carry-on, which was now in Dulcie’s office, and they brought Joe’s stuff too. No doubt the Estonians had Joe’s gun, which meant Dulcie had some paperwork to do for the company to explain why a pistol from her inventory was missing. Maybe the local police would eventually give the gun back, but I doubted State would allow the American government to claim it. Maybe the local cops or the Estonian spooks would slip it to Dulcie under the table; they had their troubles with the Russians too. Or maybe not. The bureaucracies keep grinding along, sure as death and taxes.

  Armanti found an empty couch and stretched out on it.

  We were going to have to move on. Help find the Russian muscle and the mastermind behind the river of money. I was going to need to get my head clear and on straight and do a hell of a lot better job than I had been doing the last few days.

  I said a little prayer for Audra Rogers and her parents, then added one for Joe Kitty. Then one for myself and Armanti Hall. We were going to need all the help we could get. Perhaps we too had an appointment in Samarra.

  Chapter Four

  Sweden’s head spook was a clean-shaven guy in his late fifties with blond, close-cropped hair and a fit build. The Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service is a division of the Swedish military. They do everything from providing security to the armed forces to spying. I can’t even pronounce the Swedish name for the service, but it goes by the acronym of MUST.

  I wasn’t sure whether this guy, who was introduced as Hakan Rossander, was the director of MUST or just in charge of espionage and clandestine activities. I didn’t think it mattered.

  He treated Jake Grafton as a professional colleague, but the chill came pretty quickly when Grafton began talking about the Bank of Scandinavia and produced a ream of paper from his leather case. He explained that this was a printout of transactions from the bank’s branch in Estonia for the last two months.

  “What it boils down to is that billions of dollars in a variety of currencies have been passing though that branch every day for at least a year, perhaps longer. This printout is only two-month’s worth. As you can see, most of the inflow is from Russia. Money is transferred all over the world from the branch. A lot of it goes to the United States, the U.K., Europe…”

  He fell silent while Rossander perused the pile, sifting through it.

  I yawned. Armanti and I both slept on the plane, but I was still exhausted. Sleeping on airplanes is not something I would recommend for guys as big as we are. We both woke up feeling like we had recently been in a car wreck, which I had. Jake Grafton was waiting at the airport in Stockholm when Armanti, Bill Leitz, and I came out of customs with our carry-ons. He didn’t say anything, just shook our hands and led the way out of the terminal to a big Chevy SUV parked by the curb with a driver standing by.

  “Any trouble with immigration or customs?” he asked.

  “None.”

  Grafton just nodded. He had other things on his mind. The driver, a black woman, took us straight to the embassy. I didn’t catch her name, although she was young, fit, and well put together. Probably had a great education and a good career in the State Department in her future. “She’ll get you guys checked into a hotel,” Grafton said. “Bill, you and Armanti go with her. Tommy, you come with me.”

  He and I got out and walked into the embassy.

  That evening we were in the MUST stronghold.

  Hakan Rossander cleared his throat. “We will have to take this under advisement, talk to the people at the bank.” He had an excellent command of English, with only a slight accent. Since I didn’t know any Swedish, I was impressed.

  Grafton went into the saga of the Rogers: the kidnapping and the recovery of their Audra’s body yesterday from a canal in Tallinn. “After the kidnapping, Mrs. Rogers said a man who she thought was Russian came into the branch and told her to stop sending memos and letters to the people at the head bank office here in Stockholm if she ever wanted to see her daughter again. It was that kidnapping that caused my agency to be involved.”

  Hakan Rossander looked as if he were constipated.

  Old Mr. Smooth, our very own Jake Grafton, continued without missing a beat. “Our banking and law enforcement agencies are very interested in this branch bank’s activities. I assume the authorities of other nations will be equally interested.” That was probably a gross understatement. If the U.S., British, and European Union banking honchos leaned on Sweden, the pressure would be excruciating. A mess like this could cause seismic tremors throughout Sweden, which is not a big country. If they tried to minimize it, it could blow the government sky high.

  Rossander abandoned the paper pile and looked Grafton in the eyes. “So you came all the way to Stockholm to discuss this matter.” It wasn’t a question.

  Grafton nodded. “I came to you as a matter of professional courtesy. And to possibly sit in when you or your government officials interview the officers of the bank. Our ambassador will visit the foreign ministry in the morning.

  “You see the problem, sir. Many of the American corporations listed as recipients of wire transfers from the branch bank in Estonia are merely paper shells. If these are not legitimate transactions, we are talking about money laundering on a grand scale. Tax evasion. At the very least, repeated, numerous violations of American law. An average of a billion American dollars-worth a week went through that branch. Fifty billion dollars a year. Our guess at first blush, looking at just the last two months-worth of branch records, is that fifty to sixty percent of that amount made its first stop in America. Where it went from there, and where it ultimately came to rest is, at this point, anyone’s guess.”

  Hakan Rossander looked as tired as I felt. “May I ask how the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency came by transaction records for a Swedish bank?”

  “You may certainly ask, sir, but I must reserve that. I assure you we believe those records are legitimate and accurate, as far as they go.”

  Rossander knew a closed door when he saw one. He dropped that subject with good grace and said, “I’ll have to talk to the banking people in the government. No doubt they will want to interview the bank officers as soon as possible. I can reach you at your embassy? I’ll keep you advised.”

  Grafton picked up his leather briefcase and stood. “Thank you,” he said. He motioned toward the pile of paper on Rossander’s desk. “You may keep those.”

  The spook didn’t thank him. He pushed a button, a man appeared, and we were ushered out.

  The embassy car we had arrived in was waiting, with the driver leaning nonchalantly on a fender. “Shouldn’t he be wiping the car or something,” I muttered.

  “Let’s go get a decent dinner and a drink,” Jake Grafton said. “Maybe this guy knows a place.”

  As we munched our dinner and swilled a couple of drinks each at a white-tablecloth restaurant, the president of the Bank of Scandinavia, Isak Dahlberg, was busy dying. Apparently, he got into his car in his garage with a bottle of Aquavit and started the engine as he sipped. He didn’t raise the garage door. They found him the following morning.

  I found out about Dahlberg from Grafton when I strolled into the embassy at 10 o’clock, after a wonderful night’s sleep. The admiral was in the SCIF and broke the news to me. “It’s all over the television,” he said.

  “Anything about the bank?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “Heard anything from MUST?”

  “No.”

  “So the Swedes are sitting on the dynamite, hoping it doesn’t explode.”

  “Probably trying to figure out the size of the mess before they go public,” Grafton said. Then he got busy on messages.

  I sat for a while, in case the boss needed me to break into the Swedish capitol and plant bugs, but apparently he hadn’t gotten that far. I left the SCIF and called Armanti a
nd Bill Leitz. They were having breakfast with three covert operators Grafton had brought with him. I knew a couple of them: we had been in trouble together before.

  When I got back around noon, Grafton said, “Get lost, Tommy. Find something to amuse yourself.”

  So I did. Ate lunch at a nice little spot in the downtown, and bought a new raincoat and a brimmed hat that I thought I might need in these climes. Then I bought a ticket on the Hop-On Hop-Off bus, where I mixed and mingled with the passengers of a cruise ship. A couple from Iowa said they were doing all the Baltic ports. St. Petersburg and Tallinn were next.

  Fortunately, I was not on the open top of the bus, so when it started raining I was homesteading a dry seat. In front of the Abba Museum, two guys I knew, Armanti Hall and Doc Gordon, climbed on the bus. They ignored me and I ignored them. However, I decided to brave the weather at the Vasa Museum, and queued up to get off. Out on the sidewalk, I found them behind me.

  Pretending we didn’t know each other, we went into the museum. The Vasa was a huge wooden man-of-war that overturned and sank in the Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage in 1628: a tip-top, first-rate naval disaster. It was a good thing the old sailor Grafton wasn’t with us. We three spooks wandered around, watched the tourists snap photos.

  We’d been in there about an hour when Doc said, “We have friends following us.”

  “Swedes, you think?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “Let’s get back on the bus and see if they come along.”

  There were two of them, and they jumped in a car that followed the bus.

  “Should we make their day and split up?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Rendezvous for dinner at the hotel,” Armanti said. He and Doc got off at the next stop. The car stayed behind the bus. It was me they were tailing.

  It was still drizzling when the bus got back to its starting place. I got off and walked to the embassy. So that Swede spook, Rossander, had put a tail on me—or someone had. It was a thing to think about.