As they rode north toward Westchester, Ava flipped on the television in the limo. The very first thing that popped up was a commentator on CNBC telling her listeners about the money river that flowed through Estonia from Russia.
As the Super Galaxy flew west chasing the sun through an endless day, Jake Grafton spent hours thinking about Saul Alinsky. His Rules for Radicals had enormously influenced leftist politicians for several generations, whether they actually read his screed or not. Two prominent politicians who had read and approved of Alinsky’s writings were former president Barry Sotero—who had actually worked for Alinsky’s organizations in Chicago during his community-organizer days and taught seminars on Alinsky tactics—and former presidential candidate Cynthia Hinton, who wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky. She even interviewed him.
Sotero was fond of paraphrasing Alinsky. His wife was once quoted as saying that her husband said, “All of us are driven by the simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do—that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”
“The world as it should be…” That Alinsky phrase sounded benign enough, until one realized that Alinsky advocated ammoral means to get there: lying, cheating, election fraud, and character assassination, all of which were the antithesis of the underlying philosophy of democratic, representative government.
As Grafton well knew, the world that Alinsky and his disciples envisioned, the world as it should be, was a socialist dictatorship that jettisoned the right of the governed to choose their rulers. The ruled were to be manipulated by radical visionaries for their own benefit. This prescription had been used with catastrophic effect by revolutionaries during the 20th century. Alinsky merely defined their methods. In effect, he updated Machiavelli’s 16th Century advice to the prince. And, appropriately enough, dedicated his efforts to the Devil.
And yet, Grafton mused, it was certainly possible to overstate Alinsky’s influence. All he did was dress up and present for public consumption a justification of methods used since the dawn of human history by political and religious fanatics to gain and retain power. Fanatics know to an absolute certainty that their view of the world is correct and that their enemies are not merely misguided, but evil. One must fight the devil with any tools at hand. Any tactics are justified. Unfortunately, today, the political scene in America had radicalized many on both the left and right who had never read or even heard of Saul Alinsky. How can one who knows the truth in the depths of his soul compromise with evil?
Grafton suspected Alinsky had nothing to teach the men in the Kremlin. Russia has always been a totalitarian society. The Czars, Communists, and the men who now ruled instinctively understood how to seize and maintain power by censoring the press, silencing their enemies, discrediting them, and if necessary, crushing them using the apparatus of the state. The men in the Kremlin and their predecessors had been doing that for a thousand years. Alinsky’s contribution had been to justify these tactics for American radicals.
Grafton tried to think of something else and get a little sleep, but he failed. He wandered up to the flight deck and watched the crew shepherd the plane toward the afternoon sun. The endless sky, the eternal clouds, the occasional glimpses of dark ocean far below—it had a calming effect. The pilot invited him to sit in the copilot seat, so he did. He asked a few questions of the Air Force crew, smiled, shook hands, and went aft to his seat. Finally he managed to drift off to sleep.
The Super Galaxy eventually returned to earth at Joint Base Andrews on the southeastern side of Washington, D.C., as the sun was setting. Grafton left us there. The Air Force refueled the monster, then another crew flew us to Hill AFB in Utah, where we were loaded into a large helicopter in the wee hours of a dark morning.
The sun was just peeping above the eastern horizon when the twin-rotor chopper settled into a pasture in central Utah. Guys wearing jeans and jackets were waiting with two vans. After a quarter-hour drive over dirt roads, we arrived at a CIA safe house in the middle of the emptiest spot on the American map. I asked where we were. Somewhere between the Canyonlands and the San Rafael Swell. The nearest town was forty miles away, I was told, and didn’t have a stoplight.
Korjev’s gurney was wheeled into a locked hospital room, the medicos checked his vital signs once again, changed the dressings on his wounds, wired him up to a monitor, and he was left to wake up naturally from his drug-induced sleep. Armanti, Doc, and I were introduced to the safe house staff and the resident medical team. I called Grafton at home on an encrypted landline to tell him we had arrived.
We sat down to a breakfast of bacon, sausage, eggs, potatoes, and toast. The three of us were jet lagged to the max. I had had almost no sleep on the planes and helicopter and didn’t have much appetite. Armanti and Doc ate like they hadn’t seen food in a year. I had a drink, took a laxative, and crashed in a two-man bunkroom, hoping to feel better when I awoke.
Jake Grafton was escorted to Reem Kiddus’ office at nine o’clock that morning. He had with him the transcript of his conversations with Yegan Korjev, the message giving the particulars of Korjev’s passengers on his yacht, and the photos of Korjev and the late Anton Hunt.
Kiddus was in a better mood than Grafton expected. The admiral had watched some of the morning news shows, which reported breathlessly on the rumors circulating inside the Beltway about recipients of Russian largess. He had read the front-page stories in both the Washington Times and the Washington Post. He hadn’t yet been to Langley to look at the pile of paper on his desk awaiting his arrival.
“You seem happy,” he told Kiddus.
The chief of staff smiled. “Breaking news. The former CFO of the Hinton Foundation says the Foundation was the recipient of at least ten million dollars of Russian money. I don’t know how he got that figure, since Putin probably didn’t send a check, but that’s the number he gave reporters ten minutes ago. Gonna be a bad day for Democrats.”
“Oh, their day will come,” Grafton said flatly. “One suspects the Kremlin sent gifts to everyone. Wouldn’t surprise me to hear that your checking or savings account has several more thousand dollars than you can recall depositing. When was the last time you balanced your account statements?”
Kiddus frowned.
Grafton continued, “Vaughn Conyers is about as vulnerable as a man could possibly be. Forty plus years of doing business all over the world? Hundreds of companies, probably a thousand or more accounts?”
Kiddus sighed.
“Got some things I want you to see,” Grafton said. He handed Kiddus the documents.
When Reem Kiddus laid the documents on his desk, Jake broke the news: Yegan Korjev was in a CIA safe house in the United States. The chief of staff turned pale.
“Reem, we must find out what the hell went on in Russia. Until we know that, you are just running around dodging bullets.”
“You think Korjev knows the big picture?”
“We’ll find out. At the least, he knows who he talked to in Moscow, what they wanted done, what he did, what they hope to accomplish. We need to get that out of him any way we can.”
“If you use drugs, we can’t prosecute.”
Grafton snorted. “He’ll never be prosecuted. Not a snowball’s chance in hell. I suspect that when we empty him out, we will find most of what he knows is inadmissible hearsay. But we need a road map.”
“Where are you holding him?”
“You don’t want to know that, the president doesn’t, and you certainly don’t want the White House staff to know. People can’t leak what they don’t know.”
Kiddus started to speak, but Grafton held up his hand. “If there’s any blowback on this that you can’t handle, you can blame me, an out-of-control spook. You’re going to have enough troubles to keep you busy.”
“Well,” the chief of staff said. “What’s done is done. What’s your take on all this… crap?”
“It isn’t about money,” Jake Grafton said heavily. “It’s about politics. I
think the Kremlin is out to destabilize the United States government and the governments of Europe. That was Yegan Korjev’s big hint. The Kremlin wants us at each other’s throats. I brought Korjev to America so we can learn everything he knows. Everything he even suspects.”
“Abe, Ricardo Silva. Thanks for returning my call.”
Abe was Abraham Cohen, the senior partner at the firm Silva used for his personal matters. Cohen was a Jew, but he was also a diehard Democrat, even though many prominent Democrats considered Israel the aggressor in the Middle East and supported the Muslims, who loudly, publicly, and repeatedly declared their desire to kill all Jews. Silva had always wondered about that irony, but had never asked his Jewish friends why they thought as they did. He merely assumed they didn’t give a damn about their fellow Jewish believers. Ricardo Silva didn’t condemn them for that: after all, he didn’t give a damn about Israel either.
Today, without getting into the details of the mess in which he found himself, he laid out the bare facts of CIA officers boarding a yacht on the high seas and confiscating his laptop computer. “They had no warrant,” he told his attorney. “They stole the computer. They’ll get into the memory of that thing and read my emails, plus some records that may be problematic for me. Can they pass that information on to law enforcement or prosecutors?”
“No,” Cohen said. “Information obtained illegally cannot be used in court, nor can it be used as a basis of investigation. The judges call that ‘fruit of the poisoned tree.’ Just the fact that the government stole your computer with confidential information on it, assuming the information is germane to whatever crimes they are investigating, would probably prevent a successful prosecution.”
After that telephone conversation, Ricardo Silva felt better. He would just stonewall the bastards if they came around. Refuse to talk to investigators, FBI agents, anyone, and if they subpoenaed him into court or before a Grand Jury, take the Fifth Amendment. That wouldn’t do his business any good, but he could publicly proclaim his innocence and they couldn’t charge him. Any unpleasantness would eventually blow over.
The Utah safe house—it’s a vast, sprawling ranch, actually—got its television signal from a satellite. When I staggered out into the common area in mid-afternoon, Armanti was there watching Fox News. I flopped down on the couch.
“Get any sleep?” I asked.
“Some.” He gestured at the television. “Man, you won’t believe what’s happening in Washington. The politicians are going nuts. The Democrats are certain they’ve got a scandal that will force the president out of office, and the Republicans are certain the scandal will shatter what’s left of the Democrat party. Both groups are ready to take to the barricades and start burning tires.”
“Is Korjev awake?”
“The nurse went by a little bit ago. She’s says he’s fine but groggy.”
“That phrase describes me too,” I said. “Any coffee around here?”
Armanti gestured toward the kitchen and changed channels, apparently hoping the news might be better on another network.
I got a cup of joe and dumped my dirty clothes, which were all of them, in a washing machine with some detergent. Then I went outside. The air was clear as glass, the temp in the 80s. The sun felt good.
The house was the center of a ranch complex. A garage with vehicles sat fifty yards to the south. There were several sheds and a barn with associated corrals. Four horses were visible cropping grass. I walked that way to see what I could see.
In the barn was a guy who looked like a real, honest-to-God cowboy, with cowboy boots that had never seen polish, ratty, stained jeans, a western shirt that had once been nice, and a battered Stetson. And he was doing a cowboy chore: shoveling manure out of the stalls and installing new straw.
I leaned against frame of the big open door. “Hey there,” I said.
“Hey.”
“I’m Tommy Carmellini.”
“Alvie Johnson.”
I looked at the empty stalls and sipped coffee.
Alvie eyed the holstered pistol under my left armpit and asked, “You wear that all the time?”
“Except when I’m in the shower.”
“Ever shoot anybody with that?”
“It’s just a fashion accessory, strictly for social purposes.”
“Don’t see many guns around here,” Alvie said, and threw another shovel-full in a wheelbarrow. “We bring our rifles out here in the fall and get a deer apiece, but we have to take them home afterward. Guy who runs the place—have you met him, Mac Kelly?” I nodded. “Mac says he doesn’t want us banging away at stuff, making noise. Likes it quiet and serene.”
Alvie leaned on his shovel handle. “Gonna be here long?”
“Damn if I know.”
“So who is that guy you brought with you?”
I finished the now-cold coffee before I spoke. “You a full-time employee?”
“Yep.” He went back to shoveling. “Got out of the army and the company recruited me to work here. Grew up over in Hanksville.”
“Un-huh.”
“Been here a year in September.”
“You’ve been around long enough to know not to ask questions.”
“Pretty dull here,” he said in way of explanation, not apology.
“Peaceful,” I said, turning for a gander at the local flora, rolling terrain, and distant mountains on the horizon. I turned around and walked into the barn, leaned on the top of a stall gate.
Alvie leaned on the gate of the stall he was cleaning and got out his round can of Skoal. He placed a pinch between his gum and lower lip, spit, and sighed. He had all day, so he chinned with me.
During his hitch in the army, Alvie was an infantryman with the 4th Infantry Division and had been deployed in Afghanistan. Here at the “ranch,” as he called it, he was the junior man on a five-man crew, hence the shoveling. The men lived in the bunkhouse and got every other week off while another five-man crew took over. Got paid well, ate well, and were earning a government retirement.
They spent their days looking after the 500 or so cattle that roamed the 80,000-acre spread—only a few thousand deeded acres and the rest leased BLM land—patrolled the ranch perimeter in pickups and on ATVs, kept up the fences, and cleaned out water holes. The senior man on his crew was a guy named Butch, a retired Marine.
“We call him Gunny,” Alvie said, “but not to his face. He wants to be called Butch.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice, as if to confide a secret. “I don’t think he ever made it all the way up to gunnery sergeant. He’s all Marine, though. I think he wishes he was still in.”
“You got any cameras or sensors on the perimeter fence?”
“Naw. We’re way the hell out here in the middle of Utah. Ain’t nothin’ out here but Mormons and Mexicans, and they’re sparse. Afghanistan was more thickly settled, what I saw of it. This is a dry country. Gotta irrigate to raise hay. Cattle gotta scratch hard for a living.” He shrugged. “So do the people.”
“Tell me about your horses,” I said. “If I get feeling frisky I might want to straddle one and go look at a cow.”
Alvie shifted his gaze through the door to the nags in the adjacent corral or paddock, whatever they called it. “They don’t get ridden enough. Unless you know horses, I suggest you ride an ATV out to see the cows.”
We visited some more and he told me about the gasoline-drinking mounts that never bite you, kick you, step on your feet, or shit all over a stall. Progress is wonderful, isn’t it? We march on.
I finally parted company with Alvie and walked down to the bunkhouse, visited the vehicle garage and looked at the workbench, the storage sheds, inspected the big tank that held propane for the main house and powered the generator. Some of the sheds and the bunkhouse were new, the rest looked like they had been around for decades. Some repair work had been done. I looked the main house over carefully. Contractors had expanded it in the recent past. Some of the paint didn’t match.
All in all, a nice facility.
Chapter Thirteen
Jake Grafton arrived late that afternoon on a two-rotor helicopter, perhaps the same one that brought us from Hill. Armanti Hall and I had finished dinner and were sitting with Mac Kelly in rockers on the porch when Grafton and another fellow got out of a van that had picked them up from the pasture where the chopper dropped them. As the van drove away, they came walking up the gentle incline toward the house carrying overnight bags. “Hello, Tommy, Armanti, Mr. Kelly.”
“Evenin’, Admiral.”
He gestured to the guy behind him, “Bob Tregaskis. Bob’s an interrogator who speaks Russian, one of his five languages.”
We arose, shook hands with Bob while Grafton pumped Kelly’s hand, and Grafton said, “You guys go in. Let me talk to Tommy.”
When we were alone he asked, “How’s security here?”
“Nonexistent. Armanti, Doc, and I have the only guns in reach, as far as I know. Mac says he has some assault rifles and ammo locked in a closet. He has the key. Kelly used to run a dude ranch in Wyoming before the company hired him to run this place. He did a hitch in the Navy when he was a kid. He says the sign on the padlocked gate at the hard road says this is a dude ranch. The gate is two miles from where we are standing and I suspect everyone who works here has a key to the padlock. On the ranch are four pickups, a van, and a flatbed truck. Two women live in the house, both maids who keep the place clean, and they get weekends off. The cook is retired Navy, a Filipino, now a naturalized citizen: he lives here and comes and goes as he pleases. Those are their cars over there.” I pointed. “Kelly’s is the green Chevy pickup. He has an elderly mother in Hanksville, forty miles from here: he says he took this job so he can keep an eye on her. He visits her at least once a week.”
I paused for air, then continued, “The doctor and nurse live near town and come here only when summoned: They are both former army officers and I’m sure they have security clearances up the wazoo. Five ranch hands live in the bunkhouse, and they are just that, ranch hands. Two crews of five each, and they rotate so each crew can spend every other week at home, wherever that is. Their private rides are at the bunkhouse, which is a quarter mile over that little rise to the east, just out of sight of this house. They’re well paid, drive newer pickups. The ranch has never had any dude vacationers, and no doubt the locals know too much.”
The Russia Account Page 13