The President’s Dossier

by James A. Scott

  Sherri had left her tool kit with the Glocks on the floor near my feet. I put it on my lap. While the Russians were scanning the route for threats, I eased one of the guns out of its hiding place and held it on my lap, under the kit.

  Tony-D approached the traffic light we wanted. There was one car behind, between us and the Russian truck. The light was turning amber. Tony-D slowed our SUV as though he would stop, and then floored the gas pedal as the light turned red. The large truck we had hired was just around the corner. Tony-D made a sharp right turn in front of it, drove into an alley, and stopped abruptly. As he did, a decoy SUV identical to ours—including WorldCorp Bank logo and passengers—pulled away from the curb and continued down the street. The Russian chase truck must have gone around the car at the light, onto the sidewalk, and turned down the street we had entered. The truck driver followed the decoy SUV that had stopped down the block to wait for him. Then, the two vehicles took off, with the Russians three car lengths behind—too far back to see that the occupants in the decoy SUV were not us.

  Meanwhile, our SUV sat in the alley. I covered the money guards with the Glock. “Don’t worry, gentlemen. This isn’t a rip-off. You’re going to get what you paid for and I’m going to get rich. No offense, but I don’t trust your friends in the truck. I don’t intend to end this day drugged and strapped to a gurney on a diplomatic flight to Moscow. Bowen, relieve your guards of their guns.”

  He gave me the guns and Tony-D drove us to our rented house outside of Geneva.

  I gave Tony-D one of the Glocks to help me cover our guests and told Bowen, “Have your Russians bring the money inside.” Unhappily, they trudged in with the suitcases.

  “Is the product here?” asked Bowen.

  I didn’t answer.

  We went into the living room where the protective dust covers had been pulled off some chairs and a long table. I said, “Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. This won’t take long. Tony?”

  Tony-D left the room and returned a short time later with a large briefcase. He put it on the table and went outside to provide perimeter security.

  I told Bowen, “Check out your product.”

  Bowen went to the case and popped the locks with trembling hands. He took out a package and tore it open carefully. Inside, there were several smaller envelopes numbered consecutively. They contained compromising information in the order I had collected it.

  The first envelope held the digital recording I made of my conversation with Bogdanovich in Scotland. I had it keyed to the part where Bogdanovich told me about the contents of the KGB dossier on Walldrum, the compromising sex activities and money laundering. There was also a transcription of the entire interview with Bogdanovich. Certain pages were tabbed and their ten-million-dollar passages underlined in red ink. The next envelope contained another recording and transcript. These were of my one-hour session with the late Boris Kulik, formerly of the Russian Embassy in London. Kulik’s information verified the existence of a Kremlin dossier on Walldrum.

  Bowen was too excited to listen to either recording or read the complete transcripts. He returned those items to the package and took out the St. Petersburg whore’s diary and john book, Tatyana Kedrova’s testament to Walldrum’s debauchery. Bowen flipped to the juicy parts, guided by bookmarks I’d inserted. He looked up at me and smiled.

  The Tula man’s pictures of Walldrum and the prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz were next. Bowen didn’t linger over them. I had shown him a teaser at Lenny’s two days ago.

  The next items were copies of the thumb drives Arkady gave his life to pass on to me. I had taped them to a one-page description of the counterfeiting operation at the Moscow branch of the Allgemeine Volksbank. That captured Bowen’s attention. He read it carefully. When he finished, he looked concerned. Apparently, I had uncovered an operation even he didn’t know about.

  Bowen reviewed everything in the package, but everything wasn’t in the package. I neglected to include contacts with Pavel and the Omega Group, the plot to get Walldrum the Nobel Peace Prize, and videos of the empty concrete boxes selling as multimillion-dollar condos at the Panama Walldrum Tower. It pays to have a few aces in the hole.

  Bowen rummaged through the contents of the briefcase and looked at me, puzzled. “I don’t see a list of your sources.”

  “You didn’t pay for a list of sources. My contract calls for me to find the original sources and get firsthand evidence that proves or refutes the allegations against Ted Walldrum as stated in the Ironside Dossier. What you have in that package is proof of the allegations.”

  “Without a complete list of your sources, evidence is meaningless.”

  The Russians were giving Bowen disappointed looks and he was sweating.

  I said, “Define complete. You have the names of Vasili Bogdanovich, Boris Kulik, and Tatyana Kedrova. They confirmed the major allegations against Walldrum.”

  “I need a list of all your sources, everyone you contacted in Russia.”

  “That was your goal all along, wasn’t it? You were working for the Russians when you hired me. Moscow already knew what kompromat they had on Ted Walldrum. What they didn’t have was the names of the people who gave Ironside the allegations he made in his dossier on Walldrum. You and Rodney set me up to find the sources so the Russians could kill them. The Russians were able to do that in England by tracking the location of my sat phone signal. They didn’t kill my sources in Russia because I didn’t take the sat phone to St. Petersburg and Moscow. So, you don’t know who my Russian sources were. Well, that’s your problem, not mine.”

  Bowen opened his mouth to protest as the sound of a suppressed shot ripped the air. He dropped to the floor with a bullet in his head.

  In Russian, a voice behind me said, “Don’t move and you may live.” The man reached around me and took the Glock from my hand. “Sit facing the guards.”

  Another armed man moved into my field of vision. He was carrying a Russian pistol with silencer attached. He went to Bowen, checked for a neck pulse, and shook his head at the man behind me.

  Behind me, the man—who spoke in Russian for most of this encounter—said, “The decoy bank vehicle was a very sophisticated ruse, but here I am. You’re wondering how I found you.” He chuckled. “You discovered all of my transmitters, except the one in the heel of Bowen’s shoe. I’m surprised at you, Maxwell Geller, an old Russia hand, as you Americans say. The shoe transmitter is Cold War technology. A serious oversight on your part, maybe even fatal.” He prodded me with his silencer.

  In my peripheral vision, the man crouched behind my chair. Then, in my ear, Pop! Pop! Pop! went the silencer. I watched the two money guards as their heads snapped back and they pitched forward out of their chairs, blood streaming down their faces.

  A couple of minutes passed while I watched Bowen and the guards bleed out and waited for my bullet. My only thought was, This is a hell of a way for an intelligence officer to end his life: outfoxed by the competition.

  That final bullet didn’t come. Instead, I heard the familiar rasp of metal-on-metal as a clip was being removed from an automatic pistol and the slide being pushed back to eject a round from the chamber.

  The Russian behind me said, “Give me your right hand.”

  Okay, they’re going to make this look like murder and suicide. My mind started to spin through the possible defensive moves I could make with one Russian standing in front of me with a gun and another behind.

  I raised my right hand. The Russian behind me grabbed my wrist and put the automatic in my hand and forced me to grip it. Then, he gently opened my fingers and took the gun from my hand. He said to the man in front of me, “Ipatyev, check them.”

  Ipatyev went to the bodies of Bowen and the two guards and checked for life signs. After each check, he gave the man behind me a grave nod. All three were dead.

  Konstantin Zabluda came from behind my chair and looked into my face. He had sharp features, brown hair, and brown eyes. There was a barely visible scar
down his left cheek, probably from some long-ago battle. He wore a good suit and his tight silk shirt betrayed a lean, muscular body. There was an air of bottled-up energy about him, a vibe that I often got from certain soldiers and FBI agents. His partner, Ipatyev, had a similar build, but appeared more relaxed. I guessed they were chosen for their jobs, in part, because, absent a close inspection, they were unremarkable as they presented their fake passports and crossed international borders.

  Somewhat amused, Zabluda said, “You were right on all counts in your analysis of our little scheme to find the sources for the Ironside Dossier, but a little late to your conclusions.” He nodded to the dead men on the floor.

  He added, “Still, you were a difficult man to catch.”

  “Why did you try to kidnap me in London? If you had killed me there, I wouldn’t have led you to Ironside’s sources in Russia.”

  “If I had tried to kill you in London, you would have been dead. We had you in our crosshairs when you visited Bogdanovich.”

  “Why did you come after me at the London warehouse?”

  Zabluda looked puzzled. Then, he smiled. “You flatter yourself. We didn’t come after you. My orders were to eliminate the MI6 cell that serviced Bogdanovich.”

  I grunted. “You were a couple of years late if you were trying to keep what Bogdanovich knew about Walldrum off the streets.”

  “I don’t question the clocks in Moscow, Maxwell Geller. They seem to be a few decades behind these days, more Atomic Age than Digital. Anyway, I believe the killings were supposed to send a message, not affect the flow of information.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “It was by chance that you were in the warehouse. One of my men must have recognized you from your visit to Bogdanovich. We were watching his house, you know. I guess my man decided to take you away for interrogation. He’s dead. So, we will never know why he spared you.”

  Needlessly, I reminded Zabluda, “And then my crew rescued me from your team.”

  “They were good shots, too, all except the one who shot at me.”

  I couldn’t tell him Jill Rucker had orders to miss.

  Zabluda gestured to the carnage around us. “You think you know what happened here. Let me give you what your White House calls the alternative facts. He smiled at his gunman, Ipatyev. “l’ll give you the facts according to Zabluda.” They laughed.

  “What I think happened is that you, a disgraced former CIA agent, collected some damaging information about your President Walldrum and you offered to sell it to a Russian government intermediary—William Bowen—in exchange for ten million dollars. Five million was deposited to your account when you showed Bowen proof that your information was credible. The second five million was to be paid in cash to you here in Switzerland upon delivery of the kompromat. When Bowen showed you all that cash, you got greedy. You killed him and disappeared with the cash and the kompromat.”

  Turning to his wingman, Zabluda asked, “Is that how our report will read when we submit it to Moscow, Ipatyev?”

  “Word-for-word, Colonel.” Ipatyev said it with a five-million-watt grin. He picked up one of my suitcases full of money and left the house.

  Zabluda came to me and said, in a low voice, “Suppose an officer in the Russian security services offered to defect to the CIA and brought with him intimate knowledge of Kremlin assassination squads and five million dollars of his own money. What would you think about that?”

  “I would think that Ipatyev is dead.”

  Zabluda threw his head back and enjoyed a belly laugh. “I haven’t known you long, Maxwell Geller, but I’m going to miss you … if you’re lucky.” He laughed again.

  Then, he turned somber. “We intelligence professionals are in a morally ambiguous business. Sometimes, we must do bad things—like killing Bowen—to prevent worse things from happening. For example, what bad things would Bowen have done with the kompromat? Buried it? Burned it? Sent it to Moscow? The Americans would never know the truth about Walldrum.”

  Zabluda went over to the table and picked up the package containing Tatyana Kedrova’s diary and the Tula man’s photographs from the Ritz. He hefted the package and studied it as if trying to make a decision.

  He came back to me. “But we don’t have to wonder what Bowen would do with this. Maxwell Geller escaped with it.” He slammed the package against my chest and held it there until I took it. “And who knows what Maxwell Geller will do with it? Maybe he will sell it to the newspapers, as he threatened to do.”

  Zabluda picked up the last suitcase. “Or maybe,” he speculated, “Maxwell Geller will take the kompromat to the prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice.”

  He gave me a serious stare. “But whatever happens, Moscow will know that Maxwell Geller escaped with the Walldrum kompromat and ten million dollars that belongs to the Russian government. That means that I—or someone like me—will be looking for Maxwell Geller for a long, long time, even in Atomic Age years.”

  Zabluda hesitated at the door and spoke to me in English. “As a former CIA officer, I’m sure you have committed many sins for which you should atone.”

  The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had heard it until he added, “When they least expect it, sinners can find absolution and sometimes salvation in the confessional. Have you ever had that experience, Maxwell?”

  Zabluda smiled and left, carrying a suitcase with my two-point-five million dollars.

  CHAPTER 31

  TWO KREMLIN HITMEN had just walked out, each carrying two-point-five-million dollars of my money. Three dead bodies were bleeding out on the floor of my rented villa, and I’d have a Russian target on my back as soon as Zabluda made his report to Moscow. What else could go wrong?

  Tony!

  I’d last seen him when he went outside to provide security. That was just before Zabluda and his sidekick arrived. Tony-D was probably dead, but I ran out to look for him anyway.

  The house sat on a little knoll. The front was level with the road. On the other three sides, the terrain dropped off abruptly and was supported by a semicircular brick retaining wall overlooking a garden five feet below. As I walked the wall searching for Tony-D, I looked down and saw him facedown in a flowerbed. I dashed to the front of the house, scrambled down the slope, and ran to him. When I turned Tony-D over, he was pointing his gun at my beltline.

  “It’s me, Tony!”

  Tony-D grimaced in pain as he eased his gun into his belt holster. “I was hoping it was Zabluda coming to see if I was dead. Where is he?”

  “Gone. Are you okay?”

  “No,” Tony-D hissed through clenched teeth. “Zabluda put a couple of rounds into my body armor. No penetration, but they knocked me off the wall and cracked some ribs, I think.” Tony-D gave me an appraising glance. “How come you’re still alive?” He sounded disappointed.

  As I helped Tony-D up the slope, I told him about my encounter with Zabluda and Ipatyev. I wasn’t sure why, but I omitted the fact that Zabluda left the Walldrum kompromat with me. The SUV’s first-aid kit had what I needed to tape Tony-D’s ribs while he sat in the luggage compartment with his legs dangling over the back bumper.

  When I finished, he asked, “What now?”

  “We need to get rid of the bodies. The police can’t trace the SUV to us. Sherri used a fake ID to rent it and she’s on a plane to the States by now. So, we load the bodies into the SUV, wait until dark, and leave it on a quiet street.”

  Tony-D gave me a skeptical look.

  “What?”

  He shook his head slowly and made a face. “I don’t know. An abandoned SUV with two dead Russians and a dead American in Geneva, Switzerland … That’s gonna to be a headline read around the world.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah. Milan is a three-hour drive south. We could abandon the SUV there. By morning, the bodies will have disappeared and the SUV will have a new paint job and a proud new owner. That’s Italy. No questions. No headlines.”
>
  “You can guarantee that, right?”

  “I have cousins in Milan.”

  * * *

  Forty hours later, I arrived in D.C.’s Union Station, after flights from Rome to Atlanta and Atlanta to Philly followed by a brief train ride. No point in making it easy for the Russians, MI6, or the Agency to know I was back. I couldn’t go home. That was the first place they would wait for me. I couldn’t bunk with Sherri or Tony-D. Jill Rucker knew they were my teammates. I took a hotel room near the D.C. Beltway, close to a Metro line, had a meal in my room, and slept, off and on, for twenty hours.

  I woke up with a clear head and the realization that I might not have long to live with the Russians gunning for me and MI6 a bit peeved by the results of my actions in London. It was time to set some things straight.

  At a computer café, I emailed my banker in Belize instructions to make two wire transfers. One went to Sherri for what I owed her and her crew. The other sent seventy thousand Swiss francs to the account of the FSB agent from Tula, payment for the Moscow photographs of Walldrum with the prostitutes. I took an ad in the International Times to give the Tula agent his coded account and access numbers. Promise kept.

  When I first met Jill Rucker in London, I had memorized her cell number. I dialed it from a pay phone.

  “This is Jill.” Her voice came through throaty and sexy.

  “Ms. Rucker, you applied for an internship with my organization. Can we discuss that on this line?”

  Her “yes” came back at me with surprise and enthusiasm.

  “Good. You forgot the recording of our interview. I thought you might like to have it.” I was referring to my recording of Jill revealing her undercover assignment to me. It could destroy her career. I knew damned well she wanted it.

  “That’s very kind of you. Would you like to send it to me or should we meet?”

  “Let’s meet. Can you be at the Farragut Square Metro Station, north platform, at seven this evening? I’d prefer you came alone. We have private matters to discuss.”