Deadly Waters (24 page)
Authors: Theodore Judson
5/9/09 20:34 EDT
Vladimir Petrovski had endured six straight hours of interrogation in the Camden, New Jersey, office of the FBI and was getting tired of the florescent lights overhead and needed to go to the bathroom.
“I am getting old,” he said to his tormentors. “Once I was tortured three weeks by KGB in labor camp, and it was nothing.”
“You want to tell us about the KGB?” asked one of his interrogators.
“Certainly. Charming gentlemen,” said Petrovski. “I hear they run new Russian petroleum companies now. I further need to tell you I need to visit the levorotary. I am seventy-eight years old. I can listen to stupid questions for only so long.”
“Aren’t you the clever old smart ass?” said the FBI man playing the bad cop. “You can make all the jokes you want, pal, but you’re going to talk.”
“Oh, that will not do, my young friend,” laughed Petrovski as he wiped his bald forehead. “Words do not break a man. In Soviet Union, where they were experts in such matters, they cut off fingers to ask the first question. You see?”
He held up his left hand to show the missing little finger. “Here in America,” said Vladimir, “you take off your suit jackets and show me your suspenders while you circle around me, and I am supposed to be frightened of you. You have seen too many productions at the cinema, gentlemen; you are not frightening. You look like graduate students who have been to a barber and tailor. In Soviet Union there were school teachers able to beat you up. The female ones teaching the little children. I am, alas, an old man in possession of a bad bladder and knowing nothing of this tragedy in Arizona."
“We were talking about more places than Arizona, mister,” said the aggressive agent.
“Arizona, New Mexico, wherever,” declared Petrovski, throwing up his hands. “I don’t know American geography. I know Camden, New Jersey. Get on a train and go to New York. Get on an airplane and go to California. That’s what I know. I will tell you this: in the twenty-nine years I have been in this country I have never been anywhere I have not been spied upon by one of your people. I do not have the money to travel. I could not have traveled to Venezuela.”
“What do you know about Venezuela?” asked the good cop interrogator.
“You told me of Venezuela several hours ago,” said Petrovski. “Or was it yesterday. I have an old man’s mind to go with the bladder. You were speaking of a secret base you had discovered in the jungle.”
“Then, Bladameer,” said the aggressive one, “where do you claim to have been for the last two years?”
This man had in his hands a copy the fantastic tale Mr. Petrovski had told two years earlier. He had referred to this story several times already, and Vladimir, ever a good reader of questioners, was learning that the few times he pleased these men occurred when his answers touched upon the wild stories he had told the other FBI man in 2007. Vladimir recalled that giving his interrogator what he wanted had worked back then.
“Do you gentlemen want another story?” he asked them.
“We want the truth,” said the pleasant one.
Vladimir thought back on what he could remember of the lies he had told the other agent two years before and realized he had forgotten most of them. No problem, he thought, I will give them bigger lies, and these idiots will be happier.
“Let me go to the levorotary,” said Vladimir, “and I will tell you everything you want.”
The two agents conferred among themselves, and reluctantly allowed Vladimir five minutes in the restroom. After he had finished his business, the old Russian defector eased back onto his chair and asked for a cigarette, and not some filtered domestic brand but a smelly Galois, the sort of cigarette one used to buy on the black market in Moscow. Then, relaxed and blowing smoke, both literally and figuratively at the two agents, Vladimir Petrovski began a fantastic narrative that included a beautiful woman named Sophia and Boris Yeltsin as well as the Kennedy family, Armand Hammer, the war time network of Soviet spies in Nazi Germany, and forty-one of the most expensive of Faberge eggs.
“Beria was the first to bridge the notion to Stalin to make a double for each of our operatives,” said Vladimir.
“The plot goes back that far?” asked the aggressive agent.
I could make it go back to Babylon, you simpleton, thought Vladimir. “Yes,” he said aloud. “Stalin and Beria hatched the whole plot.”
“Do you have a double?” asked the nice interrogator.
“I was in position of command,” said Vladimir, exaggerating his importance in the Soviet hierarchy. “I had many doubles.”
The two interrogators looked at each other meaningfully. Right now you two idiots are thinking that is why there is a false Petrovski, thought Vladimir, and exhaled a blue smoke cloud that made both agents cough.
“I of course have been out of loop since I defected, nonetheless it is clear to Vladimir what has unfolded,” said Petrovski. “Oh, the things I could tell you of their plans to destroy the American dams.”
The aggressive agent, who had transformed himself into an intense, highly interested agent, looked at the one-way mirror to his right and hoped all of this was being recorded.
5/10/09 21:18 PDT
The real Charles Corello did not enjoy his FBI interrogation nearly as much as Vladimir Petrovski did his. The bureau had taken him into custody an hour after
the first Colombian suspect had blabbed his name. The FBI had grilled him as thoroughly as they had Petrovski, but they could get no wild stories from the younger man.
“Look,” Corello kept telling them, “I’m telling you for the ten thousandth time: I went through this same thing a couple years ago. A deputy sheriff out in Arizona told me there was somebody out there using my name. I have the deputy’s name in my files. You won’t let me go get it.”
“Why do you think that had anything to do with these incidents?” asked one of his interrogators.
“You can talk to anyone at work,” said the exhausted Corello. “Talk to my neighbors, my family. Look at my credit cards. I haven’t been outside California since I was a teenager. How could I have gone to South America?”
“You’re very sensitive about this South American connection,” said another of his questioners. “Why do you have six separate bank accounts in six different states?”
“Have you seen my apartment?” asked Corello. “Does that look like a place I would live if I had six different bank accounts? I drive an ‘86 Camry for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t get snippy, Charles,” they warned him.
They ran through the list of the names of the forty arrested Colombians and threw in that of Earnest Gusman and Vladimir Petrovski for good measure. “I don’t know him,” Corello repeated again and again. Petrovski’s name, coming at the end of the list of Spanish surnames, made him chuckle despite the situation he found himself in.
“Not very Colombian-sounding,” said Charles. “Wasn’t his name in the papers a while back?”
The FBI agents jumped on this tiny semi-admission of knowledge.
“You do know him then?” said Agent Landon, the chief interrogator.
“You know I was in prison,” said Charles. “Do you know what I did in there? I worked for the library. Every day I had to sort all the newspapers and put them in the racks. This Petrovski was a Russian spy or something.”
“A defector, as if you didn’t know,” said Landon.
“He never spoke to me about what he did,” joked Charles, which was a rash thing to do in front of Agent Landon, for the FBI man took everything literally.
“Earnest Gusman was in prison with you at Solano,” said Landon. “You knew him well enough, I suppose.”
“I
did
know him,” said Charles. “I can’t tell you a lot about him. He was in for drugs. A real coward. He spoke very little English. He was an outsider, being neither American nor Mexican. I protected him. I mean to say, I saw to it that the others left him alone. I told the other men Earnest worked for a powerful organized crime syndicate.”
“Did he?” asked Landon.
“He was a mule,” said Charles, “a nobody paid to carry drugs into this country. He wasn’t connected to anybody. A funny thing about him, and I don’t know if this is important, but he turned on his bosses, testified for the state. He got a reduced sentence. I think he got transferred out with that Indian guy the deputy in Arizona asked me about.”
“Tell us about this Indian,” said Landon. “What was he in for?”
“Can’t say. Couldn’t have been serious. The only thing I recall about him was he was taken to Boron. He couldn’t have done anything serious if the authorities sent him there.”
The three agents in the room conferred among themselves. Because of reports Sheriff Witherston in Wasatch County and Bob Mathers of Page had filed two years ago, the name of one Wayland Zah had turned up on their computer files. They also knew that Zah had turned up missing, unavailable for questioning. The three agents and the entire FBI were further aware that the Petrovski and the Charles Corello they had were not the men involved in the dam plot, yet both men seemed to know something of this case, so perhaps the affair was deeper than one might think. They would have to keep the two men in custody until the facts became clearer. At any rate, the agents agreed that when one did not know what to do, the best course of action was to do whatever one was already doing and hope that someone else got the blame if everything went bad.
5/11/09 20:00 EDT
The President looked steadfastly into the Teleprompter and thus into the eyes of the watching nation. He had already addressed the leaders of Congress, and that afternoon had made final preparations with the Joints Chiefs of Staff. The news media had broadcast the final death toll that Monday morning. Everyone was speaking of the eighty-four thousand people lost in the deluge, nearly all of whom had been killed south of Lake Powell. Such news could lead to general despair. General despair could lead to further losses in the markets, and that could lead to defeat in 2012. Now, the National Security Advisor had urged him, was the time to act.
“My fellow Americans,” he began when the red light atop the camera came on, “I come to you tonight with a heavy heart. No man sitting in this chair would welcome the opportunity to speak to you as I must this evening. Now, my friends, I, like all of you, have learned of the deaths of some eighty-four thousand of our fellow countrymen on one terrible afternoon. Six days ago, more Americans died than on any one day in our history. My economic advisors tell me we will spend upwards of a trillion dollars in public and private monies just to repair the damage we have suffered on the Colorado River. In the great southwest, some of our cities must ration electricity and water and may have to do so for years to come.
“But never, my friends, never doubt that we will survive this blow. Indeed, we shall triumph and soon see the sunny uplands of a better day.
“Before that day arrives, my fellow Americans, we will have to pass through the dread night of danger. Intelligence reports given to me by the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation show without doubt that this heinous assault was carried out by criminal elements within the Colombian underworld, elements financed by leftist narco-terrorists native to Colombia, and by rogue agents of the old Soviet Empire.
In the beleaguered South American nation where these forty thieves came from, President Ruiz’s enfant government has inherited a war that has waned and waxed for some fifty years in the remote Colombian countryside and in the impoverished barrios of her suffering cities. Like his predecessors, President Ruiz has fought the FARC and the ELN, the two Marxist groups that claim to be Colombia’s legitimate rulers and try each day to prove their legitimacy at the point of a gun.
Now these terrorists have joined forces with the drug dealers that have also plagued that benighted nation for decades. We know the names of the cities where these drug cartels have operated: Calle, Medellin, Cartagena; these are names that have come to mean crime everywhere in the world. Together, the Marxist terrorists and the drug cartels have brought their war to us.
“These,” he said, holding up a large photograph of the forty Colombian suspects, “are the men who destroyed our dams. All of them had been arrested before, for smuggling drugs in this and other countries.”
He held up a second large photograph, this one a copy of Earnest Guzman’s prison mug shot. “This is Earnest Guzman,” said the president. “He was an associate of the Colombian drug cartels and served time for smuggling in California. He was the man who recruited the forty terrorists for their dastardly mission. Loyalty being non-existent among murderers, Guzman himself was killed by his one-time friends only two days after our dams were destroyed.”
He next showed the nation an aerial picture of the destroyed base in Montecual, Venezuela. “Here is a picture of the secret base, hidden deep in the Venezuelan rainforest, where the forty terrorists were trained by former agents of the old Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi,” he explained. “Our intelligence gathering organizations have found at this site the remnants of electronic equipment and tools that made the explosive devices used against our dams in the west.
“We have also found FARC and ELN propaganda literature inside the burned out buildings. This,” he said, holding up a crude, eight-page booklet that in fact had been composed by Erin Mondragon, “is one of the pamphlets found inside what seems to have been the barracks building in Montecual. It is the published speech of a mysterious Commander Zero, a leader of the FARC faction, urging a terrorist attack on the United States.
“We have long known, from evidence dating back to the Cold War, that our former
enemies in the Kremlin had once considered a similar attack on our Colorado dam system. The Soviet Union passed into the wastebasket of history long before this plot reached fruition. Now these old Soviet agents have found a new home among the Colombian narco-terrorists and have assisted their new friends in this vile operation. Out of power at home, these would-be rulers of the world have rejected the new democracy in their native land and have committed crimes that not even the Soviet communists dared commit during the Cold War.
“You may be confident, my friends, that neither these rogue agents nor the narco-terrorists will get away with these murders. Those who have sewn the wind shall now reap the whirlwind. At this very moment the irresistible force of America has been awakened and is winging southward to extract a swift and terrible vengeance. When we strike, it will only be done as a righteous response to the harm done to us and our precious land. Our retaliation will give pause to our enemies abroad, and friend and foe alike will judge our actions just. When the perpetrators of these crimes have felt the edge of the American sword, they never shall again bring their wars onto American soil.
“I ask you, my fellow Americans, to remember this: we are already rebuilding what has been lost. The great Hoover Dam, the pride of our grandparents, will soon again hold back the lawless Colorado River. The other dams will likewise be rebuilt, and the southwestern portion of our nation will again blossom when her irrigation, her drinking water, and her electricity are restored. I also ask the managers of the nation’s finance, her bankers, her stockbrokers, and investors, not to lose faith in our economy. We have seen the Dow Jones Index reach sixteen thousand points, and I tonight promise you we will soon see it surpass that dizzying height and reach twenty or twenty-five thousand before my term is done. For we are still Americans, and nothing is to be denied us.
“I lastly ask each of you to pray in your diverse ways for this great country, and especially for those brave service men and women who are tonight carrying freedom’s torch to lands darkened by injustice.
“God bless those men and women, and God bless the United States of America. Good night.”
The commentators appearing after the president’s speech on the nation’s airways and cable channels were of one mind, as they usually were. The various talking heads agreed the president had never seemed more forceful and that he had kept good eye contact with the camera. The experts among them asserted that this crisis had been overblown in the nation’s heartland; the country was too prosperous to be hurt much. Besides, the new global economy was too big to be affected by the loss of a handful of dams. One of the most learned commentators pointed out that the influenza epidemic of 1918 had killed nearly seven times as many Americans as this recent flooding had, so what, he asked, was the big deal?
The television stations then returned to their normally scheduled programs.
