Shortly thereafter we were approaching the ship. The shot-up helicopter took up most of the space topside, but our guy hovered over the fantail and we got to try our hand at rappelling down a rope. The crewman in the door made sure we were hooked up right and that there was a SEAL holding the bottom of the rope. Then we each took a deep breath and stepped out into space.
The beat and downwash of the rotors made it almost impossible to breathe. I went down slowly, careful to not let the rope run too fast. Leitz lost control about six feet above the deck and would have broken something if a SEAL hadn’t been there to break his fall. I was slow. Grafton slid down faster and walked away with a SEAL beside him. I shucked the rappelling harness and trotted to catch up. We passed the pool, which was not large and too shallow for diving. The hot tub gave off steam.
“No guns in sight anywhere, sir,” the SEAL beside Grafton said in a familiar voice. I took a good look… yep, the SEAL was Wilt the Stilt.
The interior of the yacht reminded me of a high-end cruise ship, only more so. Overdone, with a garish color scheme that would be hard to take with a hangover. The passageways and compartments were empty. I figured the passengers and crew were still asleep in their staterooms. There was a circular staircase in the center of the ship that gave access to every deck—and guaranteed that the ship would sink quickly if the hull were ever pierced. The bulkheads—walls to you—were decorated with original oil paintings, with sculptures scattered around, all accented by subdued light.
Grafton walked forward until he found the door to the bridge and entered without knocking. Wilt and I were right behind him. Three officers were on duty there, two men and a woman who looked like a Russian babushka, with a lot of lumps and gray hair. All were wearing uniforms with an Italian style and cut. Wilt was the only guy on the bridge with a visible gun, decked out in combat gear and helmet. He certainly impressed these civilians. They kept a wary eye on him.
Grafton walked over to the helm, looked things over, then pulled the engine telegraph or throttles to idle. The deck vibration changed and the yacht began losing speed.
“Mr. Cogsworth, we think you should come look. Dead man in the master suite.”
As Jake and Cogsworth departed behind the SEAL, I pulled my pistol from under my windbreaker and herded the three officers off the bridge at gunpoint. I made them sit in the lounge behind the bridge and deputized a SEAL to watch them. He had a submachine gun in his hands and looked fierce, although his was a pale imitation of the presence of Armanti Hall. We should have brought that great one along to control the crowd.
I trotted along behind the disappearing admiral. Down a ladder, across another lounge into a passageway that ran amidships, with staterooms on both sides. The owner’s cabin, or master suite, was at the stern of the ship. The double door was open. Sure enough, in the large lounge there was a man sprawled out before another double-door, this one closed. He had soaked up some lead, bled some and looked dead. A pistol lay on the deck beside him. Spent cartridges lay scattered around. I looked at the guy’s face: he was not Yegan Korjev. The double-doors had bullet holes in them.
Grafton tried the knob on the doors. Locked. He rattled it, and bang, a bullet punched another hole in the door, missing Grafton by barely an inch.
Cogsworth and I sprawled on the floor beside the dead man. Grafton threw himself to one side and shouted, “Korjev, we are Americans. We are not here to kill you.”
He said to the SEAL, who was also on the floor, “Bring a translator down here. Quickly now.”
The SEAL hotfooted it back the way we had come.
Grafton addressed the door in a loud voice. “Mr. Korjev, we are Americans. This man in the lounge is dead. Please open the door.”
Someone inside said something, unintelligible to me. Grafton repeated, “He’s dead.”
A noise at the lock, then the door opened. It was Yegan Korjev, sure enough, and his shoulder and side were covered in blood. Looked like at least two bullets had nailed him. He swayed, then sank to the deck. Grafton grabbed him and took the pistol from his hand and passed it to me.
“Mr. Cogsworth, we are going to need medical help to stabilize this man and get him to the hospital aboard ship.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Cogsworth headed topside.
With my pistol in hand, I went into the compartment, which was the master bedroom. The big round bed was very impressive. The paintings on the walls were of naked women, very well-done, I thought. The large flat-screen television on the bulkhead was running a fuck movie without sound, just humping, licking, and sucking. Two naked teenage whores were huddled against a wall, apparently uninjured. I could see where several bullets had torn sheets and at least one punctured the circular headboard. The large windows that looked out onto the ship’s wake had a couple of bullet holes in them.
I had the whores put on their nighties, then ran them out. The translator met them coming in the lounge and was impressed, I could tell.
Korjev had lost a lot of blood. It was all over the bed, the rug, and him. He was semi-conscious at best. One of the SEALs was a corpsman, and he worked on the Russian, checking his vitals and slapping some bandages on to stop the bleeding, until a medical team with a wire basket arrived. They fussed over Korjev some more, plugged an IV into him, then loaded him into the basket and carted him out. All this time he didn’t say anything for the translator to translate.
When they were all gone, Grafton and I got busy on the corpse. He was wearing a suit and had stopped two bullets—one in the chest and one in the leg—but two more had gone through. From the cut of his clothes, he looked as if he bought his duds in Europe. The metal in his teeth said he was a Russian. We emptied his pockets. He had a cell phone, a wallet, passport and some keys that he wouldn’t need anymore, so we helped ourselves. The passport agreed with his dental work: it too said he was a Russian, so I was beginning to believe it. The pistol was a Beretta, with only one round left in it.
“It looks like this dude shot Korjev,” I said, “who was standing in the doorway of the master suite, or was outside going in. Korjev got inside, locked the door, and then they traded shots through the door.”
“I’ll buy that,” Jake Grafton said.
“Korjev got the best of it.”
“Well, he’s still alive,” Graton mused. “And whoever told this guy to kill him presumably still wants him dead.”
“You just can’t trust the help these days.”
“Get a SEAL in here to stand guard until we can search this compartment.”
The radio room seemed intact. Several computers were still wired up: they would give us the crypto codes and a history of messages sent and received. There was a printer, a couple of radios that one could have used to listen to taxi drivers in Moscow and Cape Town, and a couple of file cabinets. The radio operator was a Russian, and the female translator was working on him when I got there. The Russian was smoking a cigarette that stunk up the place. Bill Leitz was engrossed with the computers and a SEAL was unloading the contents of the file cabinets into boxes.
After a bit, the translator said, “The dead man’s name is Pavlychev. He spent two hours in here early this morning, before dawn. He used an encrypted voice radio.” She pointed at the equipment.
The SEALS herded passengers and crew into the main lounge, which gave us free run of the ship to search. We had more helpers now, more SEALs and a bunch of Marines. Two of the passengers, a man and woman, were Americans, by the sound of their accents, and they weren’t happy. Their Congressman would hear about this, heads would roll, piracy on the high seas, CNN would eat us alive, and so on.
Two Englishmen, a German couple, and one from somewhere in Eastern Europe. An American naval officer was inspecting passports which he had arranged in a pile.
The deck crew seemed to be all Russians. These were the military-age, buff guys. They huddled in one corner, smoking and staring. The chefs, however, were French, and they too were unhappy. There were also several Italian maids sit
ting together with their mouths shut. The Ukranian girls were huddled together in one stuffed chair with blankets around them. Their eyes looked the size of saucers.
“Every compartment,” I told Wilt Cogsworth, who seemed to be in charge here. “Take them apart. We’re looking for computers, cell phones, diaries, anything you can find. And search all these people to the skin. Get some female sailors to do the women.”
The ship’s head chef or purser had a small office that was accessed through the kitchen of the dining room. The wardroom for the passengers looked like a high-class restaurant, with tables that seated four. Indirect lighting, subdued colors, thick carpets. In one corner of the room was a well-stocked bar. The wine and liquor pantry was a sight to behold. Stuffed chairs, big windows, uniformed waiters and waitresses hovering to satisfy your every whim… all in all, going to sea on Catherine the Great looked like a nice break from a Russian apartment or your McMansion in Connecticut.
Grafton and the female translator questioned the captain on the bridge. The captain, as it turned out, was the Russian grandmother. I listened in. She spoke some English, so the translator only had to help with unfamiliar words. She had a low, deep voice that carried and an air of command. It was obvious the two men on the bridge took their orders from her, and she took no nonsense from anyone. I decided I liked her.
Under questioning, it became clear that the decision to leave Capri had been made suddenly. Korjev had been on the bridge, scanning with binoculars, and it was he who suddenly told the captain to raise the anchor and get underway. She protested—two crewmen were still ashore. Korjev insisted, giving no reasons. He was obeyed; after all, he was the owner. He paid the crews’ salaries, which were at least twice what they could earn in Russia.
The dead man in the passageway, Arkady Pavlychev, had come rushing to the bridge when he felt the ship moving. He and Korjev had held a heated discussion that the captain, Olga Something, claimed she did not overhear. Korjev’s orders stood. Captain Olga was to take the yacht to Sevastopol after dropping the passengers who wished to disembark in Istanbul.
Korjev went below. The yacht steamed through the night, all the next day, and into the night. An hour before the Americans stopped the vessel, Captain Olga claimed that a crewman had rushed to the bridge, claiming that he had heard shots. She had investigated, found Arkady Pavlychev sprawled dead in the owner’s lounge and Korjev barricaded in the suite’s bedroom.
Unsure of what to do, she reported the situation to the authorities in Sevastopol, Catherine’s home port, and was awaiting a message from them when the Americans stopped the ship. She reported the boarding to Sevastopol.
Grafton went back to the conversation between Korjev and Pavlychev.
“I did not hear it,” Olga said flatly.
“This bridge is not that large,” Grafton said, the soul of reason. “Surely you could make out part of what was said.”
“I heard enough to know that it was owner’s business, and maybe political, and I don’t hear owner’s business or political things.”
And that, by golly, was that, as Grafton found out.
I wandered on, inspecting the ship. Yegan Korjev had an office with a computer, printer and drawers full of stuff. The door had been locked, but I picked it. I wasn’t optimistic about our chances of finding anything in the office that gave a clue about his activities: after all, with all these crewmen aboard, he shouldn’t have even bothered locking the door.
I went to the engine room to eyeball it up. Ran into a naval officer there who obviously knew a lot more about ships’ engines and fuel systems than I ever would.
The crew compartments were bunk rooms without portholes, just above the waterline, I thought. And they were not very neat. I doubted if the Italian maids ever got this far down in the ship—nor, I suspected, did Korjev. The crew head hadn’t been cleaned since the ship was launched, apparently.
The crew’s messhall was composed of two long tables just off the galley where the grub was prepared. There were large, well-stocked walk-in refrigerators and a pantry the size of my apartment in Virginia. Two chefs were busy preparing food in a kitchen that would have done credit to a New York restaurant. They glanced at me and went on with their work. A third person, a baker, was working on a cake. No one was going hungry on Catherine the Great.
Prepared food was lifted on dumbwaiters the two decks to the main dining room. I looked in the dumbwaiters and pushed the buttons to run them up and down. Every multistory house should have one of these.
I ran into Jake Grafton in one of the passenger staterooms. He was searching. He was taking luggage from under the bed and dumping it on the bed to paw through the contents. “The Americans were in this stateroom.”
“What kind of folks go cruising with Yegan Korjev?” I asked.
“People who are on his Christmas card list, or want to be. The FBI will check them out.”
His handheld radio squawked and he listened a moment. I couldn’t understand the words.
When that conversation was over, he put the radio back on its belt-holder and turned to the pile on the bed.
“Korjev is sedated,” he told me over his shoulder. “Over on the Hornet they’re giving him whole blood. Still has one bullet in him that will have to come out when his vitals stabilize. The SEALs will finish up the staterooms. You supervise the transfer of every computer on this ship—all of them, regardless of whom they belong to.” He pointed at a laptop on a stand by the bed. “That one too. All of them.”
He went up to the main lounge to interrogate each of the passengers. I picked up the laptop and its charging cable and took them up to Wilt Cogsworth, who was making a pile. I borrowed a magic marker and wrote the owner’s name on the lid. The Stilt and I discussed the computers—in true executive fashion, I relayed Grafton’s orders on down the line for the little people to execute—then went up on deck to commune with nature.
Visibility was five or six miles and there was a long, gentle, low swell. Three U.S. Navy ships were in sight lying dead in the water or moving very slowly, just enough to maintain steerageway. The sun shone down on the glistening sea from that misty sky. It was a nice morning.
Chapter Ten
The Americans onboard were Mr. and Mrs. Ricardo Silva, from Westchester, New York. I knew that from glancing at their passports before I sat down with them in a little reading nook beside the main bar.
“My name is James Wilson,” I said, and smiled. “Tough morning, huh! Would you folks like a Bloody Mary or screwdriver to perk you up? I’ll make it.”
They both shook their heads. “Water, perhaps?”
“Yes, water would be nice.” I looted the fridge under the bar and brought them each bottles of water and took one for myself. French bottled water, no less. Evian. I opened the cap and sipped. It tasted okay.
The wife jumped right in. “So who do you work for, Mr. Wilson?”
“Call me Jim. I’m a civil servant.” I produced my bogus passport and State Department ID. The lady merely glanced at the stuff and handed it back.
“And how about you,” I asked. “Are you retired or still working?”
“I’m a college professor, and Ricardo is a capitalist.”
“Really!” I said. Addressing myself to Ricardo, I said, “You are the very first person I’ve ever met who was willing to wear the ‘capitalist’ label. Most folks just call themselves businessmen.”
“I’m an investor,” Silva said with no warmth. “Some would call me a venture capitalist. I invest in start-ups run by great people with great ideas.”
“Tough racket, I’ve heard,” was my response. “I suppose in his own way Yegan Korjev is a venture capitalist too. Have you known him long?”
“Years.”
“Un-huh. Is this your first cruise aboard Korjev’s yacht?”
“No. This is our third cruise. We did one last year and one the year before. Yegan called me up and said he’d love to see us both. Ava and I looked at the calendar, she took some l
eave, and here we are, damn it.”
“Really,” I responded.
“We were going to Corfu,” Ava said, jumping right in. “Yegan said he had to get back to Russia for urgent business, and we certainly understand that.” Her husband nodded. She got busy telling me about past vacations ruined by unexpected trouble with an investment. I sympathized. Making big money is apparently a lot more hassle than I thought it would be, but I didn’t make that remark.
I addressed Ricardo. “Have you ever done business with Yegan Korjev in the past?”
He simply stared. His wife spit out, “I don’t think our private business is any of yours.”
I did a soft back-pedal, which is hard to do sitting down. “As I said, I’m just a civil servant. Last night Yegan Korjev was shot in the master bedroom in an apparent murder attempt. We’re doing a little preliminary investigation—attempted murder is a very bad crime, as you know, whether it happens in the States or in international waters. Everyone aboard this ship is going to get a hard look by law enforcement —that’s inevitable.”
They apparently had heard about Korjev’s narrow escape from the grim reaper and had stopped weeping about his injuries and near demise. In any event, they had no questions. Ricardo Silva’s short answer to me was, “We make all our SEC filings. Read ‘em.”
“Thank you for your time,” I said, and sent them back to the lounge with the others.
The two Englishmen willingly gave me the information they knew I had from their passports, and that was about it. Oh, they were pleasant and polite about it, but they knew nothing about Korjev’s businesses and were simply social guests. They were vague on when they received their invitations to this cruise, although they did remember they had joined her in Monaco. Asked why they thought they had been invited, one said he didn’t know Korjev’s thinking, and the other said he couldn’t imagine.
The Russia Account Page 10