The Red Horseman (18 page)

“Yessir. I don’t believe I’ve had the
pleasure of meeting You before, Senator.”

“You testified in front of one of my committees
several years ago about the A-12 Avenger
attack plane. We were never introduced. You were a
captain then, I seem to recall.”

“Yessir.”

“Are you permanently assigned here to Moscow?”
wilmoth actually seemed interested, which surprised
Jake a little’

“It’s a temporary thing, Senator. I work for the
DIA now.

“Well, what’s your slant on fledgling
democracy?”

“Don’t have one, I’m afraid, sir. Is this
a working vacation for you or a business trip?”

“Business. I’m going to be digging through the KGB
files too.” He looked at the crowd. “I just
wish there was some concrete thing America could do to help
the Russian peo pie. Our foreign aid is just a
drop in the bucket and it’s 91 we can afford.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Jake Grafton
told him, then wished he hadn’t.

“You’ll think it’s nuts,” he added
tentatively.

Wilmoth eyed him speculatively. “Well,
I could always use a laugh.”

Oh, well. What’s the harm? “Buy
Siberia. Russia could use the money and we could
use the resources.”

Wilmoth looked slightly stunned. He was
apparently tryWill ing to decide if Jake was
serious when Tarkington appeared at the admiral’s
elbow.

“You have a telephone call from General Land,
sir,” he whispered. “You can take it upstairs in
the ambassador’s office.”

As Tarkington retrieved Jake’s attache
case from beside the credenza behind him, Jake
said good-bye to the senator, who had decided to be
amused at Jake’s suggestion. The admiral
followed Toad through the crowded room toward the
stairs in the hall.

Three minutes later he picked up the
telephone in the ambassador’s office. The
operator came on. “Admiral Grafton?
Please wait while I connect you with General
Land.”

In seconds he heard Land’s voice. After the
usual greetings, Land asked, “Got your gadget
handy?”

“Yessir, but I don’t have the code set.”

“You can do that afterward.”

“Just a moment, sir.”

The message took about twenty seconds
to tape. The two men said their good-byes, then broke
the connection.

Jake used a pocket calculator to compute the
code, which he set into the device. Then he took it
outside. A small garden in the back of the
structure had some nice trees, some scraggly
grass and flowers. No one was around. After a scan
of the windows above him, he pushed the play button and
held the device up to his ear.

Amazingly enough, the damned thing worked.

The second sentence was the essence of the message.

“Albert Sidney Brown was poisoned.” That
thought was expanded and various chemical compounds were
discussed, but there was no doubt. The corpse contained
lethal amounts of a synthetic compound not found in
nature.

When Jack Yocke got back to the
Metropolitan Hotel that evening, he asked the
desk clerk if he had any messages. Assured
that neither his editor nor his mother had seen fit to invest
in a call halfway around the world this evening, he
strolled for the elevator.

He checked his watch. Only ten-thirty. What
the hey, why not a cup of coffee before bed?

He detoured into the bar, nodded at Dimitri, the
night barman, and ordered.

With his coffee in front of him, he sat
contemplating the painting on the wall opposite the
bar. It looked as if it were old and the varnish had
darkened, but maybe it had been painted to look old.
The wall of the Kremlin was on one side of the
picture and St. Basil’s Cathedral on the
other.

But Red Square wasn’t there-merely
mud and a few shacks and a giant ditch along the
Kremlin wall to make things tough for touring
Mongols and visiting Poles. Just slightly left
of center stood a nobleman listening to a peasant.
Yocke looked at this painting at least three or
four times a week and often wondered what the serf was
saying.

His idle musings were derailed when he realized a
woman had seated herself at the bar with only one stool
between them. She greeted the barman pleasantly and
ordered coffee in American English.

“A fellow Yank, as I live and breathe.
What brings you to Sodom on the Moskva?”

She turned her head toward him and grinned. She
had dark brown eyes, almost black, set wide
apart. Dark brown hair tumbled to her shoulders.

Her chin was the perfect size, her lips just right.
With the exception of one prostitute who visited the
hotel occasionally, she was the prettiest woman
Yocke had yet seen in Russia, which was saying
something since Russia had its fair share of
beautiful women. Best of all, she was about his age
and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Or any ring.

“I live in Moscow,” she told him.

“Is that a Boston accent?”

“Actually Vermont, but four years at
Brandeis ruined me, I’m afraid.”

“Name’s Jake Yocke.”

“Shirley Ross.”

She wasn’t cover girl Cosmo gorgeous,
Yocke concluded, but she had perfect bones: the
forehead, the cheekbones, the chin. Her face was a
feast for the eyes.

She had been here over a year, she told
Yocke, first as an interpreter for an American
telecommunications company, then as a journalist for
an English-language month y magazine
published here.

11 small world. I scribble for a living too.
Washington Post.”

“The Post?”

“The one and only.”

“Do you know Sally Quinn?” Sally was a Post
reporter, columnist and all-around original character.
She had even written a novel or two.

“Uh-huh.”

Shirley Ross grinned.

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the
corner sipping Bailey’s.

“So how is this borsch batch going to come
out?” Yocke asked her.

“You want a prediction?”

He nodded.

“Yeltsin, democracy and where to place your
bets for the coming civil war.”

Yocke tasted his drink again. She was working on her
second but he was still nursing his first. After the whiskey
at the embassy and the coffee here the liqueur was too
sweet. And he was feeling the alcohol.

This woman in front of him was also stimulating his
hormones.

Her discussion of the political situation struck
Jack Yocke as enlightened and well informed. She
got her tongue around the names of these Russian
politicians without a single slip. Jack
Yocke felt slightly deflated. Shirley
Ross knew more about Russian politics than he
ever hoped to know. When she fell silent he told
her that.

She grinned again. “Not really. It’s my job.
You’ll pick it up. Wow your friends back home when
they get tired of talking about TV shows and
movies. People will avoid you at cocktail parties.”
She mugged with a suspicious glance out of the corner of
her eyes, then joined him in laughter.

He looked into those deep brown eyes and felt
completely at ease.

American women are the very best. “This Soviet
Square killing-what are people saying about that?”

Her eyes flicked around the room and came to rest
on him. “Do you want Sunday op-ed bullshit or
do you want the truth?”

Dimitri was loading the German-made dishwasher
and making the usual noises. Jack and the woman were
the only people in the bar. “Without surrendering my right
to later argue that op-ed pieces are an attempt
to write the truth, I choose the second
alternative What truth do you know?”

She toyed with her swizzle stick while he
studied her face. At last the eyes came up
to meet his. “The truth will never come out,”

Perhaps,” he said, and relaxed. He looked at his
watch.

Tomorrow was going to be a long day hunting for cops
willing to talk while he listened to Gregor’s
tales of Brooklyn. He took a deep breath,
exhaled and scooted his chair back. “Do you come here
often, Shirley?”

“The KGB is setting up Yeltsin.”

con”How do you know that?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Yocke squared off to face her. “What can you
tell me?”

“Nothing that you can print.” She lay down the
swizzle stick and hunted in her purse. She
extracted a pack of Marlboros and a pack of
matches.

After she lit one she examined Yocke’s face
through the smoke.

“You came here tonight to meet me, didn’t you?”

Her eyes stayed on his face. She smoked the
cigarette in silence. The dishwasher behind the bar lit
off with a rumble.

“Anything you tell me I have to confirm. Someone
else must confirm every fact or I can’t print it.”

“If you ever tell anyone where you got this or who
I am you will ruin me.”

“We never reveal sources who request
anonymity.”

“This is Russia.”

She didn’t know anything. Perhaps she thought she
knew something, but what the hell could it be? She’s
an American, for Chrissake!

“Three KGB officers She stubbed out the
cigarette and looked at Dimitril who
was working on receipts on an IBM computer
terminal. Her eyes came back to Yocke.

“Three KGB officers He had to lean forward
across the table to hear her voice above the noise of the
dishwasher.

She swallowed and fumbled for another cigarette.

“Three KGB officers went to police
headquarters a half hour before the assassination. They
ordered the police away from Soviet Square.”

“How do you know this?”

A whisper: “The order was transmitted over the
radio.

The police in the square heard it on their little
radios.

You’ve seen those little radios they wear, haven’t
you?”

“I’ve seen them.” The police here were wired up
just like the cops in Washington and Detroit.

“Kolokoltsev was a pawn sacrifice. It’s
the king they want.

“Who’s they?” To his chagrin, Yocke’s
voice came out a whisper. He raised it a notch
and repeated the question.

“Who’s they?”

She just shook her head.

“I need some names.”

She leaned back and sucked fiercely on the
cigarette. Her eyes went to Dimitri and stayed
there.

“He can’t hear us.”

“He’s KGB. All these hard-currency
hotel people are.”

“He can’t hear us over that dishwasher,” Yocke
insisted. “You’re going to have to point me in the right
direction. Give me a name. One name.

Any of them. Any one of them.”

She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and
drained her drink.

“I have to have someplace to start looking, Shirley,
or your trip down here was a waste of time. You must
know how goddamn tough it is to get Russians
to open up to an American reporter. It’s like
asking a dope dealer if he’s got a load coming in
anytime soon.”

Her lips twisted into an attempt at a grin as
she stood up. Now the lips straightened. Gripping
her purse tightly she leaned across the table and
whispered, “Nikolai Demodov.”

“Was he one of the three?”

But she was walking out. She went through the
door and turned left and was gone.

Up in his room Jack Yocke wrote the name
on his computer screen and sat staring at it.
Nikolai Demodov.

Well, it was a pretty story. No getting
around that. A pretty story.

He didn’t know enough to even guess how much truth
there might be to the tale, if any, but his instinct
told him some truth was there. You develop that instinct
in this business after you have listened to a lot of stories.

Maybe it’s their eyes, the body language.

He tapped aimlessly on the keyboard for a few
moments, then turned the computer off.

He brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands and
stared at his reflection in the mirror over the sink
while he thought about Shirley Ross and the three
KGB agents.

If only he could have gotten more out of her. How
should he have handled it? She must have known all three of the
names. At the minimum she knew how the hell
Nikolai Demodov fits in. Where had he lost
her?

And where did she get her information?

Aaagh! To be tantalized so and have the door
slammed in your face!

Infuriating …

Most people are poor liars. Oh, every now and then you
meet a good one, but most people have not had the practice
it takes to tell a lie properly. Cops can
smell a lie. So can some lawyers and preachers. And
all good reporters. Even if you can’t put your
finger on why it plays right, you know truth when you find
it.

Just now Jack Yocke decided he had seen some
of it.

And the glimpse excited him.

SERGI PAVLENKO WAS DOZING IN THE
GUARD SHACK when the noise of a helicopter
brought him awake. He was nineteen years old, a
conscript from a collective farm, and he was not used
to helicopters. He came immediately awake and went
outside where he could see better.

It was one in the morning, the middle of the summer
night, which was still short here three hundred miles
southeast of Moscow at the Serdobsk Nuclear
Power Plant.

The lights of the helicopter were curious, a red,
a white and a light that flashed and made the machine
look like some unearthly thing, some vision from a
vodka-drenched nightmare. When it became
obvious that the machine was going to land here, Sergi
Pavlenko straightened his uniform tunic and
resettled his hat on his head at the correct
angle.

He eased the strap that held his rifle into the
correct position and stood erect with his heels
together, as a proper soldier should.

Now the helicopter’s landing light came on, a
spotlight that shone downward and slightly ahead.
Pavlenko started.

He had never before seen a helicopter flying at
night and the landing light was unexpected.

As the light moved toward him, the thought suddenly
occurred to him that he might be in the place where the
descending machine was going to alight. Galvanized,
he scurried back toward the guardhouse at the
entrance to the power plant.