by Val M Karren
“Mr. Turner. I will ask you not to repeat this information to any other police officer or investigator. If what you tell me is true we want to keep this as quiet as possible while I make unofficial inquiries. If any FSB officials hear of this your life could be in further danger. The agents that arrested you and brought you to Moscow, were they the same that we found dead at the museum?” Dobrynin was very serious.
“Yes, at least three of them. The other three I didn’t see until I was in Moscow already,” I confirmed.
“Peter, if I am able to substantiate any part of this story it will be difficult for me to release you to the American Embassy officials as you will be critical to our investigation and apprehension of the criminals,” he explained with an apology.
“I can’t see how I can help any further. I wasn’t involved in the data theft. I have no idea who it was who wanted to buy it. My research and information were about the local mafia boss and what he planned to do with his money, that was evidently to come from selling the information. It was Del that knew somehow that there was somebody looking to sell and buy the weapons data. I didn’t know anything about that until the FSB arrested me,” I pleaded.
“Do you know what type of weapons?” Dobrynin caught every new clue in my explanation.
“It is a very accurate missile guidance program,” I revealed.
Dobrynin closed his notebook, thanked me for this statement, stood and turned to leave. Just before he opened the door he turned to me again and said, “Peter, thank you for telling me this information first. It would have been very bad for you if I had to come back and ask you about it myself. You are now on the right side of the law. In Russia, one does not want to be on the wrong side of the law. The consequences of that get quickly out of control,” and he left without waiting for a response.
That same afternoon I received another visit from the embassy staff. Mr. Richardson did not come this time, but Arkadin the security chief and another embassy officer accompanied him. I invited the men to walk with me on the grounds instead of sitting in the stuffy hospital room. My stamina was improving and I was no longer struggling to catch my breath after short strolls. Once we were out of ear shot, Arkadin started the interrogation while we walked.
“Mr. Turner, we need to better understand your relationship to Santander as we don’t believe you have been forthcoming with the information we asked for,” Arkadin grumbled.
“What is not clear, sir?” I asked with fake deference.
“We believe that you accompanied Santander to the Gallery where you were shot. We don’t believe that your meeting was just a chance meeting in Moscow. We have reason to believe that he was with you and may have been involved in the gun fight in the museum.” Arkadin was probing for information.
“Let me guess, you have more photos?” I remarked offhand.
“There is a term that we use in our business, Mr. Turner, it’s called ‘chatter’, and since Thursday the network has been replete with chatter about what happened at the museum. We know that Santander was there. We believe he was there to turn over data, Russian military data, to a wider terrorist network. Do you have any knowledge about the whereabouts of that data?" Arkadin stopped and looked me in the eyes. He was an open book. He had no shadow agenda and hid nothing. The USA wanted that data and saw me as their only way to get close to it.
“No, sir. I do not know where that data is,” I replied directly.
“Do you know the whereabouts of Santander,” he asked point blank.
“As I told you yesterday, sir, I do not know where the man is or where he was going,” I reiterated.
“How did you arrange your meeting on Wednesday?” he was getting aggressive.
“What’s in the data that the United States wants so badly?” I questioned back.
“We want to prevent this from getting into the wrong hands!” he emphasized.
“How did you find out about it?” I asked naively.
“Mr. Turner, the United States has the most powerful intelligence gathering tools in the entire world. We are professional security and intelligence officers. There is very little in the world that happens that we don’t know about first.” Arkadin was clearly annoyed at my amateur status, “Now tell me, how did you arrange your meeting on Wednesday.”
“By telephone,” I answered with an obvious irony.
“He just called you on the telephone, in Russia, and set up a meeting to hand over highly classified military secrets?” Arkadin was getting frustrated.
“No, for lunch. I met him for lunch on the Arbat, just like you saw. He called and asked me to meet him at twelve-thirty.” I was answering the man truthfully but he thought I was evading an answer.
“Mr. Turner! You are testing my patience and when that runs out the embassy services will be closed to you. Do you understand me?” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry but I am telling you the truth. I can’t make it like in the movies with secret passwords and computer chips in my brain. He called me on the telephone. Told me where to meet him. We had lunch, we talked, we went to the museum. I got shot. Here I am. Here you are. I was not involved in any transfer of military secrets to terrorists. I am a student. Sanning, or Santander was posing as a business man, we got to be friends, he helped me with some school projects, he tried to recruit me for what I thought was CIA work,” I bellowed at Arkadin and finished by looking at his silent colleague with a look of exasperation. He stood as still as a statue without a wince, not a drop of sweat on his brow in the warm afternoon sun and Moscow humidity, and then he spoke.
“Mr. Turner, I am special agent Jones, I have clearance to take you out of Russia today if you can help us contact Mr. Santander. Do you have any contact channels with him?” was the direct, uncluttered offer and question from the secret agent.
Arkadin turned a bit flustered and glared at his colleague for his interruption.
“I had a number to call. It’s a Swedish telephone number. I no longer have that number. If I can get my bag from the museum, that was checked there in the wardrobe, I could possibly supply you with that number. Can you get me that bag, sir? It was checked under number 375,” I replied calmly and businesslike.
“We trust we will find you here again later tonight?” the special agent asked.
“They have me under guard. I’m not going anywhere,” I confirmed.
They both turned and walked away to the exit, leaving me in the garden alone. I sat down on a bench and sighed a huge relief when they were out of sight. I felt my shoulder ache from the deep breath. I felt a twinge of anger at Del for getting me shot, but also a twinge of relief that he did what he did to get me out of the hands of the FSB. Was I ready to turn him in? Did I even have the ability to turn him in? I figured he would already be two steps ahead of me, the Americans and the Russians, and wouldn’t reply again to a call to his Swedish answering machine. With that, I resolved to turn over everything I had to Arkadin and Jones and use the get-out-of-jail-free-card that they were offering.
34. Jailbreak
Just after finishing my dinner alone in my room, listening to a classical music radio station, Nelya, who should have been off duty, entered my room in a hurried manner and started quickly emptying my drawer with an urgency I hadn’t before seen in her. For the few days that she had been caring for me she was always very deliberate, never rash.
“Nelya! What are you doing? What’s going on?” I asked in a growing sense of panic. I watched the door as she demanded I get dressed. She would help me put on shoes and socks. I obeyed. Once I had my blue jeans on she quickly slid my socks over my feet and wiggled my shoes on to my feet and tied the laces.
“You’ll need a shirt!” she noticed I still had on surgical scrubs with my right arm immobilized under the loose-fitting top. She ran out of the room and ten seconds later came back with a light jacket, put my left arm through a sleeve, draped it over the right shoulder and zipped it up for me, leaving me looking like an amputee, rig
ht sleeve hanging empty and limp.
“Will you please tell me what is going on?" I demanded as she walked me down the corridor to the elevators.
“Dobrynin phoned me. He is coming to collect you now.” She was out of breath and had to inhale quick breaths before finishing her message. “Somebody just made an attempt on his life and he is afraid that they will be coming for you next. He will take you someplace safe.”
“I thought I was safe here!” I protested running my left hand through my short hair and looking instinctively for a hiding place in the hospital department. The doors to the elevator opened before I was able to decide on any alternate course. I followed the nurse instead into the elevator with my heart in my throat pounding with a refreshed burst of adrenaline that I seemed to have become used to after the last two weeks.
When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, to my surprise Nelya did not rush us out into the lobby and out the front doors. She calmly brushed her hair into place, took me by the arm to give an appearance of a nurse aiding a patient to take a walk. We did not try to leave the secured zone but lingered inside by the exit to the gardens and patios. We found a bench in the relief of the corridor, just out of sight from the elevators and the security check point at the entrance to the hospital.
“We must wait here for Major Dobrynin. So now we just wait,” she whispered and patted my good arm that she was still holding.
After a few minutes of restless sitting and shifting my backside on the hard marble bench, I tried to stand up, but Nelya pulled me back to the bench.
She hissed in a whisper. “Do not stand up. If you stand they can see you from the elevator and the doors!” I sat down again.
“Who? Who can see me?” I asked in dismay, seeing nobody paying us any attention.
Before Nelya could answer, three cars pulled into the circular drive. Screeching tires were heard coming to sudden stops from high speed. The troika took up defensive positions in front of the main entrance-exit of the hospital, parking at angles to block a possible pursuit of the lead, or maybe a getaway car, parked a length ahead of the other two.
The cars were black, late model Mercedes sedans with all the windows blacked out. Blue lights flickered from the front and back windows and grills from all three cars. This was an official convoy. Had they come for me? One of the sedans had the passenger door dented and the wing mirror hanging like a lame appendage. The damage looked recent, the mirror hanging by wires.
Nobody at the security station seemed to stir. They seemed to be used to seeing high-speed convoys pull in and out of this complex carrying VIPs, heads of State and ministers of government. There seemed to be no alarm in the security staff.
A door on each car opened simultaneously, and from the protection of the bulletproof steel and glass three men stood and trained their handguns on the guards over the roofs of their cars and demanded that they drop their service weapons. Having been drawn on unsuspectingly the guards put their hands on their heads and followed orders to lay down on the paving stones of the walkway leading to the hospital entrance. With the first guards neutralized and covered, Major Dobrynin stepped out of the passenger’s door of the last car with the collision damage, that was closest to the entrance doors of the facility. Two guards from the other cars followed closely behind him acting as his rearguard. With weapons drawn and plenty of shouting the three men moved in precision to disarm the guards at the metal detector. From that position, a call was heard in English.
“Peter Turner, please come to me now!” Dobrynin shouted, “Quickly!”
Nelya pushed me up and without a word of goodbye or even turning to thank her for the risk she had taken, I walked calmly but quickly to Dobrynin who was covering a guard with his pistol. He motioned for me to walk through the metal detector and outside. As I passed him he followed me, walking backward and very deliberately keeping his weapon trained on the hall guards. As he passed his colleagues, he tapped each on the shoulder and they too started to fall back, guns still trained on the sentries who looked stunned and confused. As the other two guards covered his back again, Dobrynin grabbed me firmly by the left arm and walked me directly to the lead car and put me in the backseat on the passenger’s side. He climbed in on the other side. After a three second delay to wait for all the agents to return to their cars, the troika sped away with the renewed screeching of tires and strained motors as they sped for the main road.
As the troika reached the main boulevard, the Rubleskoye highway, the car Dobyrinin and I were riding in turned right and was followed closely by one of the cars. The third car turned left and accelerated in the opposite direction with great speed. We sped past a highway patrol station of the MVD on the left but they paid us no attention and had no hope of catching this high-performance cavalcade in their standard Lada patrol cars. The patrol officers standing on the side of the road with their striped batons watched helplessly as our cars ripped past them already at one-hundred kilometers per hour. I started searching for a seat belt with my left arm. Dobrynin had to lean across and help me fasten it.
“Good idea!” he said as he reached for his as well.
“Major, can you tell me what is happening, please?” I asked trying to sound as calm as possible.
“I’m very sorry to have to make such a dramatic scene, but I believe that the FSB would soon be at the hospital to try to assassinate you,” he said with more than a twinge of stress in his voice. “I started an unofficial inquiry into the details that you told me about stolen military plans and the FSB’s involvement.”
Dobrynin broke off his story to give instructions to the driver and the car behind him with the radio phone. “Pull in front of us!” he hollered into the radio. On that instruction, a burst of speed could be heard behind us and passing on the left side of the car, an identical Mercedes passed us at two hundred km/h and pulled in front of us. Both cars continued their trajectory at one hundred sixty km/h.
“Do we have to go so fast?” I appealed.
“It’s standard procedure! Anybody else driving this fast to keep up with us will be seen immediately and be assessed as a risk!” Dobrynin replied looking over his shoulder out the back window. He continued his explanation:
“I spoke with only one man, my direct superior about the details you provided yesterday. He listened carefully and then told me to drop it and not take it any further. He told me that the official investigation of the shooting had concluded it was a terrorist action from the Chechen army, and the FSB had been tailing them, and then as you say…all hell broke loose,” he recounted as he watched in three directions at once for any pursuit vehicles.
He spoke into the radiophone again “Vnukovo!” and said to our driver, “American embassy!”.
As the cars neared the interchange of the Kutuzovsky Avenue our driver pulled again in front of our twin escort and sped off under the overpass of the crossing highway, while the other car, now suddenly behind us, took an unexpected right turn to exit and head southwest to the Vnukovo Airport. My head was spinning at the speed with which we were passing other cars and trucks on the road.
“I sent my car to Sheremetyevo Airport and the other car is now heading to the Vvukovo Airport to act as decoys while I deliver you to the American embassy. I can’t trust any Russian security services with your safety,” he said much more calmly just as our car took a hard right as well on the highway exit to change direction and merge with the Kutuzovsky Avenue that would take us directly into central Moscow, and almost to the doorstep of the American embassy. The driver did not temper his speed as he flashed his headlights at slower cars in the far-left lane to move right, with several near misses.
“On my way back from the Tretyakov, after having told my superior officer about your theory, I was chased by two cars from the FSB. They rammed my car and shot at my driver, to no effect. One of them wound up in the Moscow river, right off the ring road bridge, by the Sparrow Hills and the other driver we were able to out manoeuvre and lose. They were o
bviously alerted by somebody in the FSO, which means that you were not safe in the TsKB.”
Our driver was starting to slow down now that we were approaching the city and had crossed the third ring road. We could see the pearly white Supreme Soviet out the left window slowly passing by across the river. Just behind that was the US embassy. Between us and safety, though, was another ubiquitous bend of the Moscow river that first had to be crossed.
Dobrynin continued, “There are so many criminal elements inside the law enforcement agencies, that entire cases are kept in the shadows. With so many profiteers busy inside the government itself, our central command isn’t even able to assess the risks and threats before state assets are stolen and sold. Russia is short of patriots! If what you have told me is true, Russia will need your help to recover the data that is going to market, but Russia’s traitors that are now in charge of our security services are not willing to help you. Can I count on you to follow through with your contacts at the embassy to try to recover this? Either destroy it or bring it back to us.”
I sat silently listening to this man, risking his career and life to ask me to help him help his country. I was overwhelmed. My look back was fearful and uncertain.
“Do what you can!” Dobrynin replied and from his suit pocket he produced my address book and handed it to me across the backseat. I was stunned.
“How did you find it?” I asked with my jaw slack from surprise!
Before he could answer me, the driver indicated that a car had just fallen in behind us as we crossed the bridge and was keeping pace on the bumper.
“Hold the course, Major?” he asked for confirmation.
“Hold the course, Dima!” the Major replied with confidence in his capable brother in arms as he checked his service weapon and removed the safety. I held my breath and felt my legs go slightly numb.