The Hunted, page 2
“Would you care to guess?”
“Okay, the CIA? The Americans always use money.”
Yutskoi shook his head.
Another knuckle cracked. “Stop wasting my time.”
“Right, well, it’s his. All of it.”
Golitsin’s thick eyebrows shot up. “Tell me about that.”
“Turned out he was already in our files. In 1986, Konevitch was caught running a private construction company out of his university dorm room. Quite remarkable. He employed six architects and over a hundred workers of assorted skills.”
“That would be impossible to hide, a criminal operation of such size and scale,” the general noted, accurately it turned out.
“You’re right,” his aide confirmed. “As usual, somebody snitched. A jealous classmate.”
“So this Konevitch was always a greedy criminal deviant.”
“So it seems. We reported this to the dean at Moscow University, with the usual directive that the capitalist thief Konevitch be marched across a stage in front of his fellow students, disgraced, and immediately booted out.”
“Of course.”
“Turns out we did him a big favor. Konevitch dove full-time into construction work, expanded his workforce, and spread his projects all over Moscow. People are willing to pay under the table for quality, and Konevitch established a reputation for reliability and value. Word spread, and customers lined up at his door. When perestroika and free-market reforms were put in place, he cleaned up.”
“From construction work?”
“That was only the start. Do you know what arbitrage is?”
“No, tell me.”
“Well… it’s a tool capitalists employ. When there are price differences for similar goods, an arbitrager can buy low, sell it all off at a higher price, and pocket the difference. Like gambling, he more or less bets on the margins in between. Konevitch’s work gave him intimate familiarity with the market for construction materials, so this was the sector he first concentrated in.”
“And this is… successful?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. A price vacuum was created when Gorbachev encouraged free-market economics. The perfect condition for an arbitrager, and Konevitch swooped in. There’s a lot of construction and no pricing mechanism for anything.”
“Okay.”
That okay aside, Yutskoi suspected this was going over his boss’s head. “Say, for example, a factory manager in Moscow prices a ton of steel nails at a thousand rubles. A different factory manager in Irkutsk might charge ten thousand rubles. They were all pulling numbers out of thin air. Nobody had a clue what a nail was worth.”
“And our friend would buy the cheaper nails?” Golitsin suggested, maybe getting it after all.
“Yes, like that. By the truckload. He would pay one thousand rubles for a ton in Moscow, find a buyer in Irkutsk willing to pay five thousand, then pocket the difference.”
Golitsin scrunched his face with disgust. “So this is about nails?” He snorted.
“Nails, precut timber, steel beams, wall board, concrete, roofing tiles, heavy construction equipment… he gets a piece of everything. A big piece. His business swelled from piddling to gigantic in nothing flat.”
Sergei Golitsin had spent thirty years in the KGB, but not one of those outside the Soviet empire and the impoverishing embrace of communism. Domestic security was his bread and butter, an entire career spent crushing and torturing his fellow citizens. He had barely a clue what arbitrage was, didn’t really care to know, but he nodded anyway and concluded, “So the arbitrager is a cheat.”
“That’s a way of looking at it.”
“He produces nothing.”
“You’re right, absolutely nothing.”
“He sucks the cream from other people’s sweat and labor. A big fat leech.”
“Essentially, he exploits an opening in a free-market system. It’s a common practice in the West. Highly regarded, even. Nobody on Wall Street ever produced a thing. Most of the richest people in America couldn’t build a wheel, much less run a factory if their lives depended on it.”
Golitsin still wasn’t sure how it worked, but he was damned sure he didn’t like it. He asked, “And how much has he… this Konevitch character… how much has he given Yeltsin?”
“Who knows? A lot. In American currency, maybe ten million, maybe twenty million dollars.”
“He had that much?”
“And then some. Perhaps fifty million dollars altogether. But this is merely a rough estimate on our part. Could be more.”
Golitsin stared at Yutskoi in disbelief. “You’re saying at twenty-two, he’s the richest man in the Soviet Union.”
“No, probably not. A lot of people are making a ton of money right now.” Yutskoi looked down and toyed with his fingers a moment. “It would be fair to say, though, he’s in the top ten.”
The two men stared down at their shoes and shared the same depressing thought neither felt the slightest desire to verbalize. If communism went up in flames, their beloved KGB would be the first thing tossed onto the bonfire. In a vast nation with more than forty languages and dialects, and nearly as many different ethnic groups, there was only one unifying factor, one common thread—nearly every citizen in the Soviet Union had been scorched by their bureau in one way or another. Not directly, perhaps. But somebody dear, or at least close: grandfathers purged by Stalin; fathers who had disappeared and rotted in the camps under Brezhnev; aunts and uncles brought in for a little rough questioning under Andropov. Something. Nearly every family tree had at least one branch crippled or lopped off by the boys from the Lubyanka. The list of grudges was endless and bitter.
Yutskoi was tempted to smile at his boss and say: I hope it all does fall apart. Five years being your bootlicker, I’ve hated every minute of it. You’ll be totally screwed, you nasty old relic.
Golitsin knew exactly what the younger man was thinking, and was ready to reply: You’re a replaceable, third-rate lackey today, and you’ll be a starving lackey tomorrow. Only in this system could a suck-up loser like you survive. The only thing you’re good at is plucking fingernails from helpless victims. And you’re not even that good at that.
Yutskoi: I’m young and frisky; I’ll adapt. You’re a starched lizard, a wrinkled old toad, an icy anachronism. Your own grandchildren fill their diapers at the sight of you. I’ll hire you to shine my shoes.
Golitsin: I cheated and backstabbed and ass-kissed my way up to three-star general in this system, and I’ll find a way in the next one, whatever that turns out to be. You, on the other hand, will always be a suck-up loser.
“Why?” asked Golitsin. As in, why would Alex Konevitch give Yeltsin that much money?
“Revenge could be a factor, I suppose.”
“To get back at the system that tried to ruin him. How pedestrian.”
“But, I think,” Yutskoi continued, trying to look thoughtful, “mostly influence. If the union disintegrates, Yeltsin will wind up president of the newly independent Russia. He’ll owe this guy a boatload of favors. A lot of state enterprises are going to be privatized and put on the auction block. Konevitch will have his pick—oil, gas, airlines, banks, car companies—whatever his greedy heart desires. He could end up as rich as Bill Gates. Probably richer.”
Golitsin leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. It was too horrible to contemplate. Seventy years of blood, strain, and sweat was about to be ladled out, first come, first served—the biggest estate sale the world had ever witnessed. The carcass of the world’s largest empire carved up and bitterly fought over. The winners would end up rich beyond all imagination. What an ugly, chaotic scramble that was going to be.
“So why didn’t we find out about this Alex Konevitch sooner?” Golitsin snapped. Good question. When, three years before, Boris Yeltsin first began openly shooting the bird at Gorbachev and the Communist Party, the KGB hadn’t worried overly much. Yeltsin was back then just another windbag malcontent: enough of those around to be sure.
But Yeltsin was a whiner with a big difference; he had once been a Politburo member, so he understood firsthand exactly how decrepit, dim-witted, incompetent, and scared the old boys at the top were.
That alone made him more dangerous than the typical blowhard.
And when he announced he was running for the presidency of Russia—the largest, most powerful republic in the union—the KGB instantly changed its mind and decided to take him dreadfully seriously indeed.
His offices and home were watched by an elite squad of nosy agents 24/7. His phones were tapped, his offices and home stuffed with enough bugs and listening gadgets to hear a fly fart. Several agents insinuated themselves inside his campaign organization and kept the boys at the center up to date on every scrap and rumor they overheard. Anybody who entered or left Yeltsin’s offices was shadowed and, later, approached by a team of thugs who looked fierce and talked even fiercer. Give Boris a single ruble, they were warned, and you’ll win the national lotto—a one-way ticket to the most barren, isolated, ice-laden camp in Siberia.
Concern, not worry, was the prevailing mood among the big boys in the KGB. This was their game. After seventy years of undermining democracy around the world, they knew exactly how to squeeze and strangle Yeltsin. An election takes money, lots of it; cash for travel and aides and people to carry and spread the message across the bulging, diverse breadth of a nation nearly three times the size of America.
Boris wasn’t getting a ruble. Not a single ruble. He would rail and flail to his heart’s content in empty halls and be roundly ignored. After being thoroughly shellacked in the polls, he would crawl under a rock and drink himself into the grave. So long, Boris, you idiot.
It was the inside boys who first raised the alarm. Hard cash was being ladled out by the fistful to campaign employees, to travel agencies, to advertisers, to political organizers. The conclusion was disquieting and inescapable: somewhere in the shadows a white knight was shoveling money at Yeltsin, gobs of it. Boris was spending a fortune flying across Russia in a rented jet, staying in high-class hotels, and to be taken more seriously, he had even traveled overseas to America, to introduce himself to the American president; Gorby was forced to call in a big favor, but he got Boris stiffed by a low-level White House flunky before he got within sniffing distance of the Oval Office. Boris’s liquor bills alone were staggering.
Millions were being spent, tens of millions. Where was the mysterious cash coming from?
A task force was hastily formed, experts in finance and banking who peeked and prodded under all the usual rocks.
Nothing.
A team of computer forensics experts burgled Boris’s campaign offices and combed the deepest crevices of every hard drive.
Not a trace.
Long, raucous meetings were held about what to do, with the usual backbiting, finger-pointing, and evasion of responsibility. This sneaky white knight, whoever he was, knew how to hide his fingerprints. Whatever he was doing to evade their most advanced techniques of snooping and detection had to be enormously clever. That level of sophistication raised interesting questions and dark misgivings. After much heated discussion, inevitably the preponderance of suspicion fell on foreign intelligence agencies. Surveillance of selected foreign embassies and known intelligence operatives was kicked up a notch and the squad of watchers increased threefold. Most of the foreign embassies were wired for sound anyway. And after seventy years of foreign spies lurking and sneaking around its capital, the KGB had a tight grip on every drop site and clandestine meeting place in Moscow.
More nada.
As Yeltsin’s poll numbers climbed, frustration grew. The KGB was averse to mysteries—unsolved too long they turned into career problems. So the KGB chief of residency in Washington was ordered to kick the tires of his vast web of moles, leakers, and traitors in the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and any other alphabet-soup agency he had his devious fingers in. Money, cash, lucre—that was America’s preferred weapon. And even if America wasn’t the culprit, the CIA or NSA, with their massive, sophisticated arsenals of electronic snoops, probably knew who was.
More nada, nada, nada. More wasted time, more wasted effort, more millions of dollars flooding out of nowhere, with more supporters flocking to Yeltsin’s banner.
Yutskoi observed, “Actually, it’s a miracle we found out at all. Konevitch is very, very clever.”
“How clever?”
“In the private construction business, nearly everything’s done in cash. And nearly all of it under the table. Compounding matters, right now, we’re a mix of two economies: communist and free-market. The free-market guys know we don’t have a good handle on them. They’re inventing all kinds of fancy new games we don’t know how to play yet. It’s—”
“And what game did he play?” Golitsin interrupted in a nasty tone, tired of excuses.
“Everything was done offshore. It was smuggled out in cash, laundered under phony names at Caribbean banks, and from there turned electronic. He moved it around through a lot of banks—Swiss, African, American—divided it up, brought it back together, and just kept it moving until it became untraceable and impossible to follow.”
“And how did he hand it over to Yeltsin’s people?”
“That’s the beauty of it. Not a single ruble ever touched the Soviet banking system. That’s why we never saw it.” He smiled and tried to appear confident. “What we now hypothesize was that he smuggled it back in as cash and handed it over in large suitcases.” The truth was, they still had no idea, though he wasn’t about to confess to that.
“Then who helped him?” Golitsin immediately barked, with a sizzling stare. Another good, unanswerable question. Soviet citizens knew zilch about international banking, money laundering, electronic transactions, or how to elude detection. The Soviet banking system was backward and shockingly unsophisticated. Besides, nobody had enough money to dream of getting fancy.
Or almost nobody—the Mafiya had money by the boatload. And they were masterminds at financial shenanigans; they had tried and perfected all kinds of underhanded tricks and scams. In the most oppressive state on earth, their survival depended on keeping their cash invisible. Golitsin waved a finger at his aide’s folder. “Any evidence of that?”
“None. Not yet, anyway. It doesn’t mean their crooked fingers aren’t in it, just that we haven’t found it.”
“Keep looking. It has to be there.”
After a moment, and totally out of the blue, Yutskoi mentioned, “I read a term paper he wrote as a freshman, something to do with Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
His boss had moved back to the window, restlessly watching the loud, angry crowd down on the street. Only a few years before the whole lot would already be in windowless wagons, trembling with fear on their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. They’d be worked over for a while, then shipped off to a uranium mine in the Urals where their hair and teeth would fall out.
The old days: he missed them already.
Yutskoi interrupted the pleasant reverie. “At least I tried to read his paper, I should say. I barely understood a word,” he mumbled. “And all those complicated equations…” He trailed off, sounding a little stunned.
“What about it?” Golitsin asked absently. The crowd below was now dancing and chanting and growing larger by the minute. He felt weary.
“I sent it off to the director of the thermonuclear laboratory at the Kurchatov Institute. He said it was one of the most brilliant treatises he had read in years. Wanted to get it published in a few very prestigious international journals. You know, show the international community Soviet science still has what it takes. When I told him an eighteen-year-old college sophomore wrote it, he called me a liar.”
His boss glanced back over his shoulder. “You already told me he’s smart.”
“I know I did. Now I’m saying he’s more than smart.”
They stared at each other a moment. Golitsin said, “He’s only twenty-two.”
“Yes, and that’s the whole point. He’s not hamstrung by old ideas. Nor has he lived long enough to have his brains and ambitions squeezed into radish pulp like everybody over thirty in this country.”
Lost on neither of them was the ugly irony that they and their thuggish organ had done that squeezing. The average Russian could barely haul himself out of bed in the morning. The only social superlatives their nation boasted were the world’s highest rate of alcoholism and the shortest life span of any developed nation. What a fitting tribute.
Yutskoi cleared his throat and asked, “So what will you advise Gorbachev?” He began stuffing documents and photos back into his expandable file.
Golitsin acted preoccupied and pretended he didn’t hear that question. Yutskoi was an inveterate snoop and world-class gossip; if he let the cat out of the bag now, the news would be roaring around Moscow by midnight. Then again, Golitsin thought, so what? This news was too big to contain anyway. One way or another, it would be on the tip of every tongue in the world by morning. What difference would a few hours make?
He moved away from the window and ambled back in the direction of his aide. “On Gorbachev’s desk is a document abolishing the Soviet Union. That jerk Yeltsin had the Congress vote on it this afternoon.”
“And it passed?”
“By a landslide. If Gorbachev signs it, the Soviet Union is toast. History. Kaput.”
“And if he doesn’t?” asked Yutskoi, fully enlightened now about the cause of Yeltsin’s drunken celebration that night: this was bound to be a bender of historic proportions. His tenders would have to pour Boris into bed. “What then?” he asked.
“What do you think will happen, idiot? We’ll disband the mutinous Congress and crack down.” He pointed a crooked, veiny finger through the window in the direction of the unruly crowd below. “We’ll collect a few million malcontents and dissidents. Throw a million or so into the gulags. Shoot or hang a hundred or two hundred thousand to get everybody’s attention.”
