A waitress in a short black dress offered her caviar and crème fraîche tartlets on a tray. She shook her head. Didn’t seem like breakfast food, and she didn’t care for caviar anyway.
Then she saw, across the room, a handsome blond woman with a hard face who had to be Olga Kuznetsova, the FSB colonel. Kuznetsova was wearing a navy blazer over a white blouse, a pantsuit. A heavy gold chain necklace. She was talking with the pretty Asian girl, who seemed to be telling her something. Olga was shaking her head, scowling, clearly the boss.
Olga then turned around and moved shark-like through the crowd until she reached a couple of men talking. Juliana saw it was the man himself, talking to Senator Hugh Comstock of Illinois.
Yuri Protasov was surprisingly short, or maybe he just looked short next to Comstock. He was a virile-looking man in his midfifties, rugged. Graying sandy hair, a closely trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, a heavy brow. He wore an elegant dove-gray suit, a crisp white shirt, a maroon tie. He laughed at something the senator said, displaying very white capped teeth.
She saw Olga sidle up to Protasov and whisper something. She looked angry. Protasov nodded, furrowed his heavy brow, whispered something back. It looked like she was dressing him down.
Then his eyes searched the room and landed on Juliana.
Their eyes locked.
Protasov did not smile politely. His eyes were cold.
Juliana stared back. Her “objection overruled” stare. Then she smiled.
Now he was angling through the crowd, heading toward her, she realized.
When he reached her, he said, “Please come with me,” and kept striding. “Certainly,” she said, and fell in behind him. She followed him out of the sitting room and across the entry hall into a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, dimly lit. The air in there was cool. She looked around, scanned the shelves, saw books by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Gogol, Chekhov, Nabokov. Serious Russian literature. These books weren’t props brought in to decorate a room. Protasov was obviously some kind of intellectual.
A bulky young guy in a suit that looked too tight entered the library and approached Protasov. They spoke, quickly and quietly, in Russian. Protasov stood back and folded his arms, watching. The young guy came up to her and said, in a thick Russian accent, “Please stand with arms at side.”
He gave Juliana a long impassive stare, like a zoologist peering at a specimen that might or might not be a new creature to him. “Mr. Protasov will be with you in minute.” Then he produced a metal object somewhat bulkier than a cell phone and proceeded to run it silently over Juliana’s clothing, over her shoulders and arms, and down to her legs.
She was frozen in fear. She was wearing a belt, and a pin, and there was a lipstick in her purse that contained no lipstick but recorded. And her shoes. She had multiple recording devices on her person. Any one of them contained microcircuits and were detectable.
The guy was looking for these devices. If he did find one, or several, what would happen then? The not knowing, the very uncertainty, was terrifying.
Her heart thudded, but her face was composed: calm, triumphant, brassy.
Protasov watched, arms folded.
The guard, or whatever he was, finished running his little device over Juliana; then he looked at it closely. He turned and said something quietly to Protasov in Russian.
She waited. Her heart beat so hard she thought it almost might be audible.
But the young guy just nodded and left the room.
Did that mean the recording devices hadn’t been detected? She wished she hadn’t had so much coffee. On the other hand, she’d needed it to fight the crushing wave of fatigue settling over her from not sleeping.
She could feel her heart dancing in her chest. She had no idea what was about to happen. She didn’t know what to expect.
Yuri Protasov walked slowly up to her. “Judge Brody,” he said boomingly, “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a very busy time. My board is about to meet, and these are not people you keep waiting.” He spoke fluent English, his accent British.
“We have a little business to discuss, you and I,” Juliana said. “Shouldn’t take long at all.”
Protasov offered his hand formally, bowing slightly. “Yuri Protasov.”
“Juliana Brody.”
“So you just show up here uninvited?” He gave a little smile. A flash of white. “And apparently breeze right through my security?”
“If you can’t get in the back door, try the front.” Another Roz Brody pearl of wisdom.
“Well played. Very clever of you, coming at a time when there are a lot of people around. Protection in numbers, right?”
They understood each other. “Something like that.”
“So what do you want?”
“Actually, I’m here to offer you something.”
“Well, that’s a change. I’m all ears.”
“A decision in a case of interest to you. A motion for summary judgment.”
“Oh?”
“Your people have made it clear what you want. You want all documents sealed that might reveal that you’re the owner of Wheelz. So you want to shut down a sexual discrimination lawsuit against a company you own. I get it.”
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.” A tight smile. “This sounds like fake news to me.”
“You want this whole Wheelz sexual discrimination case thrown out. Well, let me make it clear to you: I think the plaintiff’s case is quite strong.”
He tipped his head skeptically. “And?”
She said, “And for me to put my beliefs and my morals up for sale, well—that’s going to cost something. It’s not something I do lightly. That’s going to weigh on me for a long time. I’m going to require some serious consideration.”
He said nothing, waiting.
“So you will wire ten million dollars to my account. Which I think is cheap, frankly, for a woman’s honor.”
She opened her purse and located the card that Venkovsky had given her. The business card of an assistant general manager at a Cayman Islands bank. On the other side of the card she’d written out the nine digits of a bank account. She handed it to him.
He looked at it for a few seconds, and then he slipped the card into his front shirt pocket. Did that mean he agreed? She couldn’t tell. She was confident that Protasov’s people—or maybe the FSB?—had monitored the conversation she and Duncan had had in her lobby.
“After what you put me through—put my family through—I call this compensatory damages.”
He blinked a few times, his expression stoic.
“If it comes out that your fund was illegally underwritten by a banned, sanctioned entity, I think it could be ruinous to you. All those fancy board members out there will flee.” She waited. Saw his cold hard stare.
Finally he smiled grimly. “Your justice is expensive.”
Protasov was no longer pretending to be unaware of what she was talking about. They were past that. And he had just surrendered.
“Well, I hope you’re right. I also want it made explicit—and I want to hear you say it, right here—that my family will always be protected. That nothing will ever happen to them.”
Protasov lifted his chin. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said. But his eyes said something different. They were cold and gray and steely. Her stomach turned over.
“You’re going to have to be more explicit,” she said.
“Your family, your husband and your two lovely children, nothing will ever happen to them; you have my word on that.” He spoke gently. “I would never do that.”
“Okay, then,” she said softly. “So tell me something. Why didn’t you try the carrot first, before the stick?”
“You mean why didn’t my people offer you a bribe?”
She nodded.
�
�We didn’t attempt a bribe, because your reputation preceded you.”
“My reputation?”
“For fierce probity,” Protasov said with a tart smile. “But as it turns out, you are full of surprises. So we will do business, you and I. Ten million dollars into your Caymans account. We have an understanding.”
She smiled, maybe a little too broadly. She didn’t want him to see what she was feeling.
“I think maybe people, maybe they underestimate you, is that right?”
“Occasionally,” she said, and shrugged.
She thought of the lipstick in her purse that wasn’t really a lipstick, and the belt buckle, and the soles of her shoes. No one had taken anything away from her, patted her down. She was recording him, and if any single device malfunctioned, there were plenty of backups.
Had he been explicit enough? Should she press him harder, try to get him to say more?
She couldn’t risk it, she decided. She had enough.
He said, “You know, Catherine the Great was far more ruthless than her husband. First she forced him to abdicate the throne; then she arranged to have one of his guards strangle him to death one night. So then she took over as czarina. She had tens of thousands of her people put to death for daring to rebel against her. Maybe hundreds of thousands. She even executed noblemen. But you know, it’s like they say—you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Fabergé eggs.”
“Very clever,” she said drily.
“I’m actually in negotiations with the Kremlin to buy her crown, the Great Imperial Crown, the crown of all the Romanovs. But a lot of people don’t want it leaving the Kremlin. Whereas I say, everything has a price. So we have a deal?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, have you tried the caviar canapés? They’re to die for.”
79
She steered the Tesla over to the side of the road about a half mile outside Protasov’s estate. A black Suburban pulled in right behind her. The front passenger’s-side door opened, and Alex Venkovsky got in. He sat down and opened a Dell laptop.
“How’d it go?” he said.
“No problem.” She unbuckled the skinny black belt and handed it to him. “They didn’t detect a thing.”
“Because we’re good,” he said with a grin.
“As long as this one worked right, we’re all set.”
Venkovsky took the belt and began to work the silver buckle, finally taking out a pin from his pocket and using it to pop out what looked like a SIM card. He seated it into a port on the side of the laptop with a click.
A minute later, he’d opened an audio program on his laptop and clicked a green play button.
The sound came through clear and loud. A woman saying, “Welcome. The board members are gathering in the sitting room for some coffee before the meeting.”
Then, much louder, her own voice: “Thank you.”
“Great,” Venkovsky said.
“We got it?”
“Good quality too,” he said. “I mean, you can’t tell with these tinny laptop speakers, but the sound gradient is excellent.”
He clicked some buttons on his laptop, forwarding and clicked play again.
“Please stand with arms at side.” The voice of the young guard who had wanded her. The device seemed to have recorded just fine.
“Mr. Protasov will be with—”
All of a sudden the sound became a loud white-noise static roar, like an airplane taking off. She saw the oscillating green sound-wave icon on Venkovsky’s laptop twitch and dance on the screen.
And all they could hear was that white-noise roar.
“Shit,” Venkovsky said. “When they wanded you, they disabled the recording devices.”
“What about the—the key fob?” She pulled the Tesla key fob from her purse. Venkovsky extracted a small black chip-like thing from the back of the Tesla logo and inserted it into his laptop.
He clicked a Play button on his laptop, and a male voice came out. “Mr. Protasov will be with—”
A staticky roar broke in.
“Shit,” Venkovsky said again.
“Is it even worth trying the shoes?” she asked.
“Why not.”
She took off her left shoe and handed it to him. He located the slot on the side of the wedge heel and pressed a little button, and the black chip popped out. He inserted it into the computer and played, fast-forwarding until they heard “Mr. Protasov will be with you shortly.”
There was a long pause and then Protasov’s voice. “Judge Brody, I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a very busy time.”
Venkovsky smiled.
“Got it?” she asked.
“So far so good.”
They listened for a few seconds longer.
“Good thing they didn’t wand your shoes. This is excellent,” Venkovsky said. “This is how we get him to play ball with us. This is our pressure point. Because I’d wager that he’d rather spend the next twenty years of his life in some kind of witness protection program in America than face the kind of . . . ‘debriefing’ process he’d be put through back in Moscow.”
She nodded, took out her phone, and texted Duncan. All systems go.
80
She flew home that afternoon on Cape Air, which was a bit of a comedown after Giles McNamer’s Gulfstream G650.
Duncan got home from New York much later, looking rumpled and bleary-eyed, and made them both espressos. He had drunk a lot of Scotch at lunch, he said. But he’d accomplished exactly what he’d set out to do, which was the second phase of Juliana’s plan.
He had had lunch in New York with his old friend, Professor Arnold Coren, at the Metropolitan Club. What he and Juliana called his “disinformation” lunch.
He and Arnold had been in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, when Duncan was a junior fellow and Arnold a senior. Coren, an old Russia hand, later moved to the Columbia University faculty and had appeared on Russian TV. He wrote a lot for The Nation. He’d interviewed Putin, was said to be friendly with him. He defended the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said that Crimea belongs to Russia anyway. He harped on American anti-Russian attitudes, insisting that powerful, greedy, sinister forces wanted, needed Russia to be our enemy. A recent article on him was headlined, “Putin’s Favorite Professor.”
Arnold Coren made no bones about the fact that he had sources in the Kremlin, what he called his Kremlin drinking buddies.
“We talked a lot about Pale Moth,” Duncan said, as they sat at the kitchen table that evening.
“Pale Moth?”
“That’s Putin’s nickname.”
“Putin has a nickname?”
“Apparently. Among Arnie’s Kremlin drinking buddies. After our third whiskey, I became indiscreet.”
“Sounds about right.” She smiled.
“Sure, I told him in the strictest confidence about how you’d been brought in to consult with the CIA’s new cooperating asset, the oligarch Yuri Protasov. Told him about how Protasov wanted to cut the cord with his Kremlin masters. How he was now spilling all kinds of secrets to the CIA.”
“But I’m sure that’s not leaking to Moscow any time soon.”
She remembered seeing at a distance the heated conversation at the board meeting between Protasov and Olga. How she seemed to be berating the oligarch. Juliana’s unexpected arrival, which so clearly dismayed Olga, would cause questions about Protasov to be asked in Moscow. Or so Paul Ashmont of the CIA believed. Olga would report back about the meeting between Protasov and an American judge. Then there was the ten million dollars Protasov was about to transfer to an offshore account the Treasury Department had set up, which would look suspiciously like a bribe.
That, in combination with Arnold Coren’s well-known ability to circulate rumors that would reach all the way to the Kremlin. Protasov would be summoned ba
ck to Moscow, questioned, maybe even arrested. He would no longer be a threat.
It was only a matter of time.
They had no idea how soon.
* * *
—
The next morning, as Duncan was watching Meet the Press Daily and she was putting away groceries, he suddenly called out, “Jules?”
He pointed, and she looked at the TV. She hadn’t been paying attention to the news, but then she heard “philanthropist and investor Yuri Protasov.” They were showing video of what looked like a downed helicopter. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: BREAKING NEWS—BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPIST KILLED IN HELICOPTER CRASH.
“—are telling us that Protasov’s helicopter experienced a mechanical malfunction of some kind and crashed upon takeoff on the island of Nantucket. We are hearing reports of wind conditions and structural fatigue.”
“My God,” she said, stunned, sinking into a chair. “My God.”
She stared at the television. This she hadn’t planned on. The most she’d dared hope for was that Protasov would be summoned back to Moscow and arrested. But not this.
Her phone rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She saw a 202 area code, meaning the Washington, DC, area. She picked it up.
“Well, you’re safe now.”
It took her a moment to recognize Alex Venkovsky’s voice. The FinCEN guy.
“But the Kremlin—”
“No,” Venkovsky said. “The Kremlin has been suspicious of Protasov for a while. They thought maybe he’d gone native. Gone soft. That he’d been so lionized in America and the UK, so deified, that he probably imagined he could slip the Kremlin’s strings.”
“But why kill the man?”
“Apparently the Kremlin got intelligence that he’d been cooperating with the CIA. And to the Russians, that’s betrayal of the Motherland. And turncoats get assassinated.”
She thought about Pale Moth and went silent for a beat. Then she said, “Must have been persuasive intelligence.”
“And the Russians know that the US Government is moving in on Protasov’s empire. Which means that, even if he isn’t working for the CIA yet, he could. Meanwhile Olga, Protasov’s minder, sees this judge, who may be working with the feds, swan right into this highly secure enclave. That itself was highly suspicious.”
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