The Kingmaker (24 page)

She replied, “Colonel Jack Branson, the deputy attaché. They did a lot of work together.”

“And how do we get hold of him?”

“You walk into his office. It’s right next to Morrison’s.”

Branson was Air Force, mid-forties, balding, thin-faced, very tall, and quite skinny, with a nondescript face, but intelligent eyes, and at the moment we walked into his office he was hunched over his desk, studying something with a magnifying glass. He looked up and took whatever it was off his desktop and stuffed it in a drawer. Intell guys are such a riot.

“Hi,” he said, trying to look friendly. “Can I help you?”

I made the introductions, and he pointed at a pair of chairs. We chitchatted about him, wife, kids, life in Moscow, and so on.

After we exhausted the phony pleasantries, I said, “So, how long did you know General Morrison?”

“The whole two years he was here. I’ve been here three years, so I was in place when he arrived.”

“Miss Allison said you were friends.”

“Friends? Well, no, we weren’t friends. We worked closely together, we were generally amicable, but we were hardly friends.”

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“I respected him,” he replied.

That’s military doublespeak for “No, he was a miserable asshole to work for.”

“Why did you respect him?” Katrina asked.

“He knew his job and worked damned hard at it. I won’t say he had the best leadership style I’ve seen, but as an intell officer he was as good as any I’ve met.”

Katrina bent forward. “What makes a good intell officer?”

“Good question.” Branson paused and then explained, “In intell, you’re always flooded with information. You’re always getting lots of reports from lots of sources, and frequently those reports and sources conflict. It gets to be a morass. Most intell guys just shove it all upstream and let someone else try to figure it out. Morrison wasn’t like that. He had a nose for what it all meant.”

I said, “He could interpret it?”

“Exactly. He always seemed to know the story behind the story. It was uncanny sometimes. He just figured it out.”

Big mystery there, right? Having the number two guy in the SVR feeding him explanations surely didn’t hurt.

Katrina said, “I hate to pry into sensitive things, but how was his marriage?”

Branson sucked his lower lip into his mouth. Like any military officer, loyalty to his boss was bred into his being, but at the same time he had to be weighing his caution against how much we already knew. Being indiscreet was one thing; it was worse to be caught as a liar.

“Don’t sweat it,” Katrina prodded. “We know he cheated on her.”

The lower lip popped back out, and he began shaking his head. “Well, you know then. That dumbass screwed everything he could get his hands on. Ordinarily I don’t care what other people do . . . but, look, I like Mary, and I didn’t appreciate it. I felt bad telling her he was at lunch when he was with some whore.”

Katrina nodded and said, “Did you ever talk to him about it?”

“I tried. He’s not a very approachable guy.”

“Did he ever explain his affairs?”

“I don’t think he knew why he did it. There was no good reason. You ever see his wife?” We both nodded. “What sane guy married to Mary would cheat, right?”

Katrina said, “Why didn’t they get divorced? Did he ever talk about it?”

“I suggested it once.”

“And . . . ?”

“He said it would harm the children. I didn’t believe him, though. Do you want to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“His career. You can’t believe how ambitious he was, and a divorce wouldn’t have looked good. The military frowns on that.”

I asked him, “Did everybody in the office know about his affairs?”

“I don’t know. None of us ever talked about it. What’s funny was, he and his wife worked together real well. They worked everything together.”

So the prosecutors had been saying, but just to be sure I asked, “Then he was seeing everything she was working on?”

He began chuckling. “The other way around, I’d say. Look, there’s a natural competition between the CIA, whom she worked for, and DIA, whom we report back to. We field hands are like little dogs. We please our masters by bringing back bigger bones and we get stroked behind the ears. Mary stole stuff from us all the time. Our sources would tell us about some crooked general over in the Russian Defense Ministry who looked like he could be blinkered into recruitment, and even before we could get a message off, Mary’s people were already flogging the general. Happened all the time.”

We’d heard more than we needed to hear, so Katrina thanked the colonel for his candor, told him we’d be back if we had more questions, and we departed in mutual misery.

On the drive back to the hotel, Katrina said, “You know that adultery charge?”

“I know.” I added, “But let me remind you, you were the one who thought it was possible to prove him innocent.”

She thought about this, then said, “You can’t be sure it led to treason.”

“You know the old Army saying about the three Bs?”

“No.”

“ ‘Booze, bucks, and broads will get you every time.’ Usually because they lead to the fourth B—blackmail.”

P
ut two and two together and we had a king-size problem. Those transcripted telephone taps Imelda was slogging through no doubt proved that Bill Morrison had a dick instead of a brain. Nothing else explained how the investigators learned Morrison was a flagrant philanderer. Or why Eddie included the comparatively minor imputation of wife cheating among the litany of other charges.

Motive, motive, motive. Damned hard to prove with traitors, and Eddie now had two golden-oldie classics—the proverbial favorites lust and greed. My client had screwed his way through an opponent’s capital, and there was that fat wad of inheritance passed down from his father, and through his mother, a manner of money laundering that was both cunning and tax free.

I hate to sound like a whiny complainer, but it had been an all-around crappy day: an ambush, a dead American officer, an operation performed by a doctor named Josef Mengele, and now this. I thought it couldn’t get worse until I recognized the guy loitering beside the elevator—the same detective who had
unlocked my cuffs back in the police station. And beside him stood a slick-haired putz in a well-cut Western suit, looking smugly self-important.

They marched up to Katrina and me; the putz impudently shoved a business card in my face and announced, “I am Boris Ashinakov of the Foreign Ministry. I must have a word with you. In private.”

We stepped away from the elevator and he led us to a quiet corner of the lobby. He began, “On behalf of my ministry I extend our deepest apologies for the shooting incident this morning. Moscow is a very peaceful city and we find it very distressing. And of course embarrassing.”

Moscow was anything but peaceful, his politeness was phony, and I wondered what this was about. I smiled back, however, and very nicely replied, “Thank you. It’s very kind of you to stop by. And, well, we’d love to stay and chat but we have to get upstairs to pack. A late flight . . . I’m sure you understand.”

“Actually, Major, there’s no hurry.”

“And why would that be?”

He scratched an eyebrow, pointed at his partner, and said, “Detective Turpekov and his colleagues are continuing their investigation into this terrible incident. There are procedures that must be followed before this case can be closed. You two are the only living witnesses.”

“Fine. I’ll give you the number back in the States where we can be reached.”

He shook his oily head. “I think not. We must request you to remain here.”

“No.”

He was grinning, and really enjoying himself, and it struck me I was becoming tired of power-hungry little bullycrats. He said, “I insist. Our customs officials have already been instructed not to let you out of the country. As long as nothing unexpected turns up, it shouldn’t take longer than forty-eight hours.”

“I don’t have forty-eight hours.”

“You do now.” He smiled and stuck a pudgy finger on my chest. “Moscow is a lovely city filled with wonderful places to visit. What is it you say in America? Stop and smell the roses.”

Moscow was anything but a lovely city, and the only odors I’d smelled so far were cordite and the stench of homeless people needing showers. I said, “I intend to lodge a protest with the embassy.”

“Please do.” He picked a piece of lint off his jacket sleeve and added, “But I perhaps forgot to mention that this matter was already discussed with your embassy’s political officer. He understood perfectly.”

He awarded me another unctuous smile, tipped his chin at Katrina, and said, “Enjoy your stay,” before he and the detective walked away.

As I cursed, Katrina said, “We don’t need this, Sean. We really can’t afford it.”

“That might not be the worst of our problems.” I turned and looked her in the eye. “Have you considered that somebody might be trying to keep us in Moscow to kill us?”

“You think?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

And truthfully, I didn’t. Police departments spell bureaucracy better than most institutions, and allowing material witnesses to flee beyond Russia’s jurisdiction before the case is closed would be stupider than dirt. So there was that. Then there was this: That very morning, somebody tried to kill us and suddenly we were being ordered to stay within the spider’s web.

The fretful look on her face indicated the full import had just struck home. She said, “To get the Foreign Ministry to do their dirty work, it would have to be somebody very powerful, wouldn’t it?” I nodded, and she added, “Such as your new friend Arbatov?”

“He’s not my friend,” I clarified. “But I don’t see it.”

“You don’t?”

“If the man wanted to kill us, why the visit to my room? Why that story about this secret plot? It doesn’t fit, does it?”

“Then you trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone in his line of work. I just don’t think he’s trying to kill us.”

“Then who?”

“Look, I don’t even know if somebody is trying to kill us. Maybe the ambush really was about Mel.”

She somewhat skeptically replied, “Maybe.”

“But you see my point? If it wasn’t Arbatov, who else had a reason to kill us?”

“With your penchant for making friends, the line of suspects is staggering.”

I chuckled to let her know I thought that was very funny. She remained poker-faced, but surely she was laughing inside.

Then I thought of big, bad Eddie, and my chuckling stopped. Apropos of that, Katrina and I began batting around ideas for something productive to do. There actually was something I had wanted to do before somebody used us for target practice and getting the hell out of Russia loomed as the only sane course of action. Of course circumstances had changed once again and so perhaps . . .

But my new plan required Katrina’s enthusiastic involvement. The problem was I hadn’t done much to inspire her confidence, and as already noted, the ambush that morning had given her cause to doubt my credibility and competence, which meant I had to soft-shoe my way into this.

So I kept our game of verbal badminton going until Katrina finally suggested, “Why don’t you meet with Arbatov again? If Morrison was reporting on this organization he told you about, maybe there’s something there.”

I replied, quite innocently, “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

“Well, let me see. The idea is that somebody framed Morrison, right?”

“So he claims. But why?”

“That’s why I wanted to speak with Arbatov in the first place. He was my number one suspect.”

“How intriguing. Why would he do that?”

“Well, I don’t think that anymore.”

“Then why
did
you suspect that in the first place?”

“Because when it comes to spies, what you see is never what’s there. Cloaks and daggers . . . their whole world is about lies, betrayals, and backstabbing.”

“Okay.”

“Everything is counterintuitive. You’ve got to pull back the curtains. Truth is never really the whole truth. It could be the opposite or anywhere on the spectrum in between.”

“Sean . . . this is so educational . . . really. Could you
please
tell me why you suspected Arbatov?”

“I’m just warning that—”

“I’ve got it. I’m a street lawyer. All my clients lied.”

“Okay, Bill Morrison said he was Arbatov’s controller, right?” She nodded and I continued, “Say it was really the other way around. Say all those years when they were meeting, it was a subterfuge so that Morrison could turn over things to Arbatov, who was actually
his
controller.”

“That would be devious. But why would Arbatov turn him in?”

“What I thought was maybe they had a falling out, or that Morrison had asked for something the Russians weren’t willing to provide. Or maybe somebody else in Arbatov’s organization did it.”

“But you don’t believe that anymore?”

“Arbatov says if they wanted to get rid of Morrison, we’d never find a trace of his corpse.”

“What about if it was the other way around? Maybe Arbatov wanted to stop betraying his country and thought this was a way to get Morrison out of his hair?”

“Wouldn’t work. Too many other CIA people know about Arbatov.”

“Of course.”

“So that’s what I thought before I spoke with Arbatov.”

“And now you’re thinking something else?”

“You mean, aside from the fact Morrison looks guilty?”

“I think we can rely on Golden to make that argument.”

“Okay, here’s the other possibility. Say Morrison was reporting something very important back to the CIA, something that somebody here in Moscow didn’t want exposed.”

“Like about this secret organization Arbatov was talking about?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Wouldn’t Mary be reporting the same thing?”

I nodded. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s a twofer. He goes to the chair, and her career goes into the toilet. Because he was a traitor, everything either Morrison ever reported loses credibility.”

“But Arbatov’s still around. The secret’s not safe as long as he’s alive.”