The Russia Account

by Stephen Coonts

  “Why wasn’t the camera system fixed?” the Speaker, Judy Mucci, asked.

  Levy looked at the Speaker as if she were senile, which many people had long suspected was the case. “The ten-bucks-an-hour parking people aren’t qualified to fix the system. They called the security company that installed the system, and they scheduled a repair tech out there a week from this coming Thursday.”

  “So you’re fucked,” Westfall said.

  Levy was patient. “We are interviewing everyone who keeps a car in that garage, everyone we can find. The shooting took place at 7:30 on a workday morning, and someone must have seen the bastard. Given time and good police work, we’ll find someone who did.”

  “Yesterday a Congressman accused me of doing the shooting,” Westfall said.

  Konchina said, “Harlan, you can’t—”

  “And the Conyers’ impeachment bill,” Westfall said. “A Republican congressman said yesterday that if it passes the Democrats are inviting civil war. And he, for one, is for it. He’s got a list of Democrats he’d like to shoot.”

  “Why don’t you arrest him?” Konchina asked Levy. “This country is awash in guns. These Republican racists own arsenals. If the damned crackers start shooting then the whole country will descend into anarchy. This place will look like Damascus.”

  Levy took his time answering. “Congressmen and senators can say anything they wish in their chambers or on the floor of their house. They can’t be held criminally or civilly liable. Surely you know that?” Levy thought Konchina was another ditz, although he only said that in the sacred precincts of the executive suite of the Hoover building. This was more proof.

  “These bastards are pouring gasoline on a raging fire,” Westfall told the FBI director. “Surely something can be done. Something must be done!”

  “If he carries a rifle into the Capitol Building, the federal police will arrest him.” Levy smote the arm of the couch. “You people are just as bad,” he roared. “You think you have a crisis that you can play to sweep into power. Toss out the president, tear up the Constitution, throw him out over some fucking made-up shit that is happening to half the people in this town. Fake Russian money! Bull fucking shit! You are idiots! This country is split right down the goddamn middle, and it will be tomorrow too.”

  He pointed a finger at Westfall. “I seem to recall reading that you got some of this Putin money.” Now at the Speaker. “And you.” The finger went to Konchina. “And you.” The finger came down. “Wouldn’t surprise me to find that I am a recipient of some funny Russian money. God, I hope so. I could sure as hell use a vacation and a new car. I’ll call my bank when I get back to the office to see if the Russian tooth fairy remembered me.”

  Levy maneuvered himself upright, said, “Thanks for wasting my time,” and marched out.

  Sarah used her cell phone to get Jack Norris’ address, then typed it into the map feature. It was a horse property, sure enough, west of Middleburg, with a separate garage, a barn, and a storage shed. Decent wooden fences behind the barn where four horses cropped grass. A blue Honda sports car stood in front of the house, which looked to be about eight or ten rooms. The thing was brick and had two chimneys.

  Sarah kept busy with her phone. Two grown daughters and a grown son. One daughter was married and living in California, another was going through drug rehab for the third or fourth time, and the son was going to be a senior this fall at the University of Tennessee on an athletic scholarship.

  “What’s he athletic of?”

  “Football.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the spouse?”

  “The little wife…” Sarah murmured as she worked that phone. “Dental tech,” she said after a moment.

  We were well past the farm, if that is what they called it, and were at a crossroads festooned with stop signs in every direction. There was a real, genuine, honest-to-God country store on one corner. It was after two in the afternoon and we were hungry. I pulled in.

  As we munched sandwiches, pickles and chips, and sucked down soft drinks in the cab of my ride, Sarah asked, “How sure are you that Norris is our guy?”

  “That he shot Grafton and those two in Ellicott City?” I sipped some diet Sprite. “Just a gut feeling. No evidence at all. That little act this morning… He wanted me to drop whatever I was doing for Grafton and spin my wheels. Justice doesn’t get reports from the CIA, for Pete’s sake. I was appalled that he couldn’t come up with a better excuse.”

  “If he had just shot two men an hour before,” Sarah suggested, “maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly yet.”

  I reached for a pickle. It was crunchy. “That house back there. Jack and Nora did really well swinging that place on the salaries of a dental tech and company spook. How long have they owned it?”

  Sarah licked her fingers and picked up her phone. “That I can check.”

  Two minutes later she said, “They bought it seven years ago. The tax assessment is for fifty-five acres, eight and a half million.”

  I got the last bite of my sandwich down, then said, “About the time he was knocking around Mexico.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “About then.”

  “You want another potato chip?”

  “You finish them.”

  “Maybe one of them inherited money.”

  “Maybe so…”

  She called Callie Grafton. Jake was awake now and she had seen him for five minutes this morning and at noon. She was on her way home for a nap. The doctor was hopeful.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When we cruised by the Norris estate again the blue Honda was gone. I pulled into the drive and stopped in front of the house. “Let’s see if anyone is home,” I said.

  We got out of the truck and I made sure my sport coat was covering my shoulder holster. We went up to the door and rang the bell. Could hear it dinging in the house.

  There was a surveillance camera at each end of the porch. I suspected that the feed was accessible on Jack’s and Nora’s phones, if they took the time to look.

  I rang the bell a couple more times, then we walked around the house. No one in the back yard, which had a little herb garden and some tomato plants. There was also a camera arranged to face the back door.

  “What do you think?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m wondering if that rifle I saw on Facebook is in the house.”

  “Want to look?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried the back door, just in case. And sure enough, the knob turned in my hand. Unlocked. I held it open for Sarah.

  We were in a mud room. Boots on a little shelf, sweaters and jackets on pegs. Three or four hats. We went on through into the kitchen, which was comfortably messy. They weren’t ready for a House Beautiful photographer, but the place was cozy. Family dining around a kitchen table.

  We strolled on, bedrooms, baths, a formal dining room, a family room with a huge television, and finally, a den, a family office with a computer. Sarah Houston sat down in front of it and made herself at home.

  In the den was a gun cabinet with a glass door locked with a flimsy furniture lock. I looked. There was only one scoped bolt-action rifle in there, and it wore a wooden stock. Two shotguns and a little .22 single-shot. There was also an antique muzzle-loader that was missing most of its finish, one perfect for civil war re-enactments.

  I went back to the bedrooms and looked under the beds and in the closets. No more long guns. The attic was accessed by a covered hatch in a hall ceiling, and I looked around for a chair or ladder. Nothing. They had painted the hatch cover and the ceiling at the same time, and the paint didn’t look chipped or flaked.

  I headed for the basement. No gun safe. No guns.

  Out to the barn. I was working quickly now, because I didn’t want Mrs. Norris to come busting in on our party. The loft had some loose hay on the floor, and there was no way to be sure what was under it unless I moved all of it with a hay fork. I looked th
e hay over and decided it looked undisturbed. There were square bales of it stacked against one wall. He could have a rifle wedged behind one, but which one?

  The shed had a farm tractor, a lawn tractor, spray equipment, an ATV… basically an excellent sampling of stuff from Tractor Supply, “the stuff you need out here.” But no guns.

  If he didn’t have another rifle in his car or truck, that one in the den was it. I trooped back to the den and checked the security cameras. There was one in here, but not in the kitchen. I used my picks on the gun cabinet lock and pulled out the rifle. Looked through the scope out the window at a distant tree. Caliber was .270 Winchester.

  Then I took it into the kitchen. The action was empty. I popped out the bolt and looked through the barrel. With modern powders one shot isn’t going to get a barrel very dirty. The few crumbs I saw could have been dust. I smelled the muzzle. Well, maybe.

  Then I took the caps off the scope adjustment turrets. Used a quarter in my pocket to rotate the vertical adjustment upward to the stop, and the sideways adjustment all the way to the right. Put the caps back on, inserted the bolt, wiped the gun with my handkerchief, and put the gun back in the gun cabinet.

  Sarah was still on the computer. “Any luck?” I asked.

  “The main password is right here on the keyboard in ink. I think his wife uses the computer too. She’s got a lot of emails on here. Then he has some secret files that are double-password protected, and I can’t get into those.”

  “Turn it off. Let’s get out of here.”

  We went outside the way we came in, through the back door. Went around and climbed in the truck. “Let’s explore,” I said. Sarah opened a gate, I drove through, and she closed it behind me while I put the truck in four-wheel drive. Off through the pasture we went, up a wooded hill right to the top, then along it. I found a big rock on the ridge and parked behind it.

  I opened the rear door of the cab and lifted the seat. There was an old blanket rolled up in there. I unrolled it and got out my old Winchester Model 94. There was a box of shells there, caliber .30-30, and I loaded it. Put the rest of the shells in my pocket. Threw the sports coat in the back seat.

  “Let’s climb up on top of the rock.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Jack Norris knows we’re here—those security cameras. If he’s innocent, he calls the police. If he’s a killer, he doesn’t want us talking to the cops because he isn’t sure what we know. That’s the way I figure it.”

  “Okay.”

  “That rifle in the gun cabinet may not have been the one he used to pot Grafton, but perhaps it is. He had to get to work quickly yesterday morning after he made that shot, if he did, and he was at work all day. Then this morning he did Jesse Hughes and friend—if he threw a rifle away he was pressed for time to get to a place where it would never be recovered, like a big river. If he has another rifle in the trunk of his car we have problems. I’m hoping there’s only the one.”

  “I hope so too,” Sarah said with conviction.

  “With only two shotguns and a .22, this guy isn’t a gun collector,” I added, arguing the case, trying to convince myself.

  “If he’s guilty, he’s going to try to kill us,” she said.

  “Yep,” I agreed. “He’s got no other choice.”

  General Leighton Freidenrich was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An Army general, he considered it part of his duty, an unenjoyable part, to talk to politicians. The fact that he was good at stroking huge, fragile egos was one reason—some said the only reason—he was selected as chairman.

  This afternoon he was making the rounds in the senate office building trying to drum up support for the next military appropriation bill. Although the service chiefs were tasked with the job by the Department of Defense, the senators always wanted to personally hear the chairman’s take on the issues, which meant they wanted his opinion on how to divide up the largess since he was supposed to be above the parochial scrum by each branch “as they rooted at the trough,” according to Senator Westfall, in whose office Freidenrich now sat.

  The general didn’t personally like Westfall, whom he thought a bombastic ideologue, but you would have never known it from watching his face and demeanor. There are a lot of people to like, Freidenrich once told his wife, although not many inside the beltway. As Harry Truman once said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

  “Senator,” the general said, “you know we military men are all gentlemen by acts of Congress, and we don’t root. We grab.” He said that with a smile and Westfall chuckled.

  Then the senator lowered his voice. “General, there has been some talk on the floor of Congress about a civil war if the president is impeached. I know we are speculating about an event that may never happen, but what is the chiefs’ mood about that possibility?”

  The smile disappeared from the soldier’s face. “We haven’t discussed that, sir. I am at a loss about what to say.”

  Westfall looked uncomfortable, as if he hated to be even discussing this topic. “But what is your personal feeling on this matter, general?”

  “Sir, I serve my country. I obey orders and I obey the law.”

  Westfall wanted more. “You see the problem. If the senate votes to remove the president and an armed insurrection takes place, perhaps right here in Washington, what will be the military’s role?”

  General Freidenrich wondered if Westfall was taping this conversation, which was improper, he thought.

  “Senator, my answer must be that the uniformed services will obey the law and obey lawful orders from their superiors. From George Washington to the present day, that’s been the case. This is America!”

  No fool, Westfall saw that he wasn’t going to get any more out of this general. He changed the subject to the Navy’s request for another aircraft carrier.

  From the top of the rock we could see the road, house, and barn. The horses were still eating grass. In one end and out the other. Somehow it was comforting to think of Jack Norris in the barn shoveling horse shit at least once a day.

  It was just a few minutes after four o’clock. The summer sun was still high in the sky. I gave the pistol to Sarah and set out with the rifle to check out the ridge. I certainly didn’t want Norris surprising us from behind. He knew the terrain well, I assumed, as well as all the neighbors.

  I also assumed he was busy as blazes at Langley, and couldn’t, or wouldn’t get here before six, at the earliest.

  That’s the problem with ambushes. They rested on a shaky pile of assumptions, and any one could be wrong. Life is like that, I suppose.

  The ridge was a long one that ran off both ends of the property, wooded, brushy. In some places, the summer brush was so thick you couldn’t see ten feet. I jumped a deer that left in a pounding hurry—I caught a glimpse of a white tail going away. It took a moment for my heart to slow down after that surprise. Heard some squirrels in the leaves, saw a couple in the trees.

  Why was I wasting my life in the CIA?

  I worked my way along the back fence, which was on the west side of the ridge, and came back along the ridge toward the big rock. Sarah was sitting on the rock watching the house. I made some noise to be sure she heard me coming along.

  When I got to the foot of the rock I asked, “Are we still alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “After this, if we don’t go to jail, I was thinking about you and me in Idaho,” I told her. “Find a real job, buy a cabin, settle in.”

  “I thought you were interested in a post-spook career in burglary.”

  “I’m rethinking that.”

  It was six o’clock and I was rubbing my hands over the old lever-action Winchester when the fact that something was wrong finally soaked into my pea-sized brain. I looked at the rifle, really looked. The rear-sight elevation wedge was gone!

  The main sight housing was in a dovetail groove in the barrel, and the actual sight was on a flexible steel spring that was held in position by a wedge wit
h notches. The wedge was gone, so the rear sight was lying flat on the barrel.

  Oh, man. Without that wedge, the bullet would go low, very low, probably right into the dirt a hundred feet from me. I seemed to recall that I had the wedge set on the second notch, which put the bullet three inches high at a hundred yards, but it had been three or four years since I shot this thing.

  Maybe I should shoot it right now and see where the bullet goes.

  Even as that thought crossed my small mind, a car pulled up in front of the Norris house. Jack Norris climbed out. At least, I thought it was him, but at four hundred or so yards, I couldn’t be sure.

  I went over to Sarah and showed her the sight. “We’re in trouble,” I said.

  “You’ve been in trouble since you got out of diapers,” she shot back.

  “Get over there behind a tree and stay there,” I told her. “I’m going to have to get this guy to come up here. Maybe we can do something.”

  “Like die,” she said.

  Women are such pessimists. At least she did trot over to a tree and got behind it, just to the south of the big rock.

  I hunkered down behind a bush and kept an eye on the guy in the yard. He went into the house. Must be Norris or the guy who was servicing his wife.

  Three minutes later he came out with the scoped rifle. Stood looking around. Walked toward the gate looking at the ground. No doubt my pickup tracks were plain, right through the gate and out across the pasture toward the ridge.

  He thought so too. He stood there looking up toward the ridge. Rested the rifle on the gate and used the scope to look. I eased down out of sight.

  I wondered if the wedge for the rear sight was in the blanket in the truck. I slipped over, keeping low, and opened the rear door. Got busy rummaging in the blanket on the rear seat, then eased the seat up and looked underneath. Didn’t see the damn wedge, which was about the thickness of a dime and an inch long.

  Well, I was just going to have to pretend it was there. Fake it. I threw the rifle to my shoulder and pointed it where it felt right. Ah me… The sights of his rifle were screwed up and he didn’t know it. Mine were screwed up and I did know.