The Red Horseman (29 page)

“I don’t know what happened to those weapons. I
was as surprised as you were when I saw those empty
transporters and the bodies.”

“The story I heard that got me over to this country
was that the Iraqis were trying to buy some nuke
weapons. I I heard they had three
billion to spend for the right toys.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Jack Yocke scratched his nose, then rubbed his
face good. It went against the grain to reveal a
source but he didn’t see any way out of it.
Finally he said, “One of the ICB executives
told me, off the record. He was sitting in a
New York jail awaiting trial when I
interviewed him.”

The International Commerce Bank had recently
been shut down worldwide for money laundering on a
stupendous scale, that and a garden variety of other
financial crimes.

“Did you believe him?”

This was the crucial question. A professional
reporter hears a lot of stories, every now and then a
true one. The good reporters can smell a lie a
block away. “I thought he was telling the truth,”
Yocke told the admiral. “Or what he
believed to be the truth. It had the right feel.”

“I don’t mean to insult you, but did you get that
feel when Judith Farrell told you her Soviet
Square tale?”

“Yeah, I did. I’ve been thinking about that. In
the first place she was a professional liar
and damn good, and second, most of the story was true,
in fact all of it except who was ultimately
responsible. So it played well. There was nothing
fancy or hyped. I bought it.” He shrugged.

Jake Grafton visibly relaxed. “Don’t
feel like the Lone Ranger. I bought one of her
stories one time too.”

Jack Yocke got the feeling he had just passed
some kind of test. “Well, the ICB tip didn’t
pan out over here. I had the names of two former
lCB execs who had run to earth in Moscow that my
source swore knew the ins and outsif they could be
persuaded to talk. These two birds supposedly
shuffled the money every which way to Sunday to make it
impossible to trace. That made sense, so I
looked for them for four straight days but couldn’t get
a sniff. Not that I’m any great shakes at finding
people in Moscow, but still . . .”

“I heard about the money going through ICB too,”
Jake said softly.

“Maybe from Iraq. Maybe from an Iraqi
working for Iran.”

“Heard any names? Which Russian might have
gotten the dough?”

“A name or two. That much money, it’s
impossible to keep it secret. Oh, they’ve
tried. But that much money. . . was He had repeated
the rumors to Richard Harper in the hope that he could
find the trail. Did he?

He heard the power being reduced. “I’d better
go talk to Rita,” Jake said. “We’ll land at
another airport and Toad can call Aeroflot.
No use letting the manager see who was on his
chartered airplane.” Yocke got out of his seat,
then Jake maneuvered himself into the aisle and walked
forward to the cockpit.

Three billion dollars. That wasn’t pocket
change anywhere, but in Russia it was a stupendous
amount of money.

Too much, really. Jack Yocke moved to the
window seat and sat staring out, wondering where the money
could be, what a Russian could use it for. In
Russia there were no stocks to buy, no bonds, no
office buildings to invest in, no art masterpieces
for sale, no private oil syndicates setting
out to drill up Siberia or the Gulf of
Mexico. It was amazing, really. Here was a whole
nation with not a goddamn thing to invest money in, unless
you were looking to throw your bucks into worn-out
factories producing obsolete, shoddy
goods that no one on the planet except starving,
penniless Russians wanted.

However, one possibility did come to mind. He
looked toward the cockpit, started to get out of the seat
and go that way, then decided against it. If he thought of
it, the idea must have already occurred to Jake
Grafton.

He sighed and scratched himself and turned his
attention back to the window.

It was dark when the Tupolev 154 landed at
Dornodedovo, a huge field for domestic
airliners thirty miles southeast of Moscow.
Rita taxied to the corner of the air-port most
remote from the terminal and shut down the engines.

Jake went back to find Captain Collins.
He wiggled a finger at Iron Mike
McElroy, the marine captain, who came over.

“I want this airplane washed before we call
Aeroflot. I don’t want any
radioactivity overdoses on my conscience.”

McElroy agreed to use his people to find some tank
trucks and hoses and to do the washing, and Collins
agreed to use his equipment to ensure they got the hot
spots and diluted the runoff as much as possible.

“Do the best you can,” Jake told them,
and left it at that.

An hour later Jake was in Ambassador
Lancaster’s office in the embassy complex.
His. Hempstead sat on the couch with a notepad
on her lap.

“Yeltsin refused to resign,” Lancaster said.
“The antiallyeltsin forces have forced a no-confidence
vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies.

The best Yeltsin could do was get it delayed
until Friday.”

This was Monday evening. Jake glanced at the
calendar on the ambassador’s desk to make
sure. Three days.

“Yakolev and Shmarov have been on television,”
the ambassador continued.

“They and the rest of the junta seem to have a lot of
support. People are hungry, unemployed, the
factories don’t have raw materials or
markets, this Serdobsk disaster may have been the last
straw.”

“Yeltsin was popularly elected. I didn’t
know the legislature could throw him out.”

“Technically they can’t. But over here they’re still
making up the rules as they go along. If he
loses on the noconfidence vote he can
either call for a new election of deputies or
resign and let the congress choose a successor.

The problem is that his support is melting
away.”

“What’s the American position?”

“We’ve got to let the Russians sort it out
for themselves.

We’ll recognize any government that gets in
without resort to violence.”

“How about blowing up the Serdobsk reactor?
Would Washington classify that as a violent act?”

Lancaster goggled. Hempstead came off the couch
and floated toward the desk. “Blew it up? Who?”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m
merely asking a question.”

“This isn’t the time for soaring hypotheticals,
Admiral,” Hempstead said acidly, “or cute
questions about when someone stopped beating his wife.”

She stalked back to the couch and snatched up her
notepad.

“I assume you do have some basis for your question,”
Owen Lancaster said uneasily. “Exactly what
did you find out on your helicopter trip
to Serdobsk?”

“The reactor and containment vessel are
gone, sir, nothing left but a crater and some rubble.
The entire control budding was destroyed. A storage
building a hundred yards or so from the reactor was
severely damaged and the plutonium containers that were
inside ruptured.”

Lancaster merely nodded. Like most people, he had
only n was or what the physithe vaguest idea of
what a meltdow cal effects might be. He
expected something terrible of course, but just what was rather
hazy.

This description sounded properly catastrophic,
so he murmured “horrible” and shook his head.
“Nobody survived, I supposeThat

“No, sir,” Jake Grafton said, and paused
for a few seconds to gape at the va/s of the great
man’s ignorance.

Then he continued: “The fallout zone is huge and
extraordinarily hot.

Collins will have some numbers in a few hours.
We won’t know the exact dimensions of the fallout
zone until aerial surveys are conducted. But
to return to my question-I guess I didn’t phrase
it right. Please excuse me. I’m just curious about
how willing the United States government might be
to get into a shooting scrape over here if the
junta looks like it might be coming out on top.”

“That’s a decision for the president,” Hempstead
piped from her ringside seat, her tone suggesting
Grafton was a few cards short of a full deck.

Lancaster spoke more slowly. “I seriously
doubt if anyone in Washington will be very enthusiastic
about a military adventure in Russia,
Admiral, even if Yakolev himself personally
blew up a dozen reactors and CBS News
has a videotape of him pushing the plunger.
Speaking hypothetically, of course.”

Jake Grafton wondered what the
administration’s reaction would be to medium-range
ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads in
Iran or Iraq. He didn’t ask the
diplomats though. He wanted to talk to Hayden
Land before he set Lancaster’s pants on fire.

While Senior Chief Holley was checking the
navy’s minuscule office for bugs and rigging the
telephone scrambler, Jake went to find Jack
Yocke.

“I want you to write a story about what you saw
today. Get the radiation numbers and isotopes and
all that from Collins when he gets back. Write
an eyewitness account, just what you saw.
Leave out the bit about the transporters and the
missiles. And let me see the story before you call
it in.

Jack Yocke had just completed his shower. He was
tired and looked longingly at the couch in the small
apartment that Grafton and Tarkington shared. Now
Grafton was ordering up journalism like a
fried-to-order hamburger. Yet he barely
paused before he said, “Yessir.

I’ll have the story for you in about an hour. When
Collins gets back I can just insert a few
paragraphs.”

“I’ll be down in the office.”

Back in the office Holley was still looking for
electromagnetic fields that shouldn’t be there.
“What did Herb Tenney do today?” Jake asked.

“He left the embassy about eleven, sir, and
returned in time for dinner.”

The admiral grunted and began to think about what
he was going to say to Hayden Land. When Holley
pronounced the office clean, Jake punched his
code into the scrambler and placed his call. It took
seven minutes before the Pentagon operator got them
connected.

“Let’s go secure,” Land told him
after he heard Jake’s voice.

Jake pushed the proper button and waited while
the two encrypters talked to each other with chirps and
clicks, then he heard Land’s voice.

“Richard Harper is dead.”

“How?”

“Apparent heart attack.”

111DO you have the report?”

“No. The house was ransacked.”

Jake didn’t wait for the effect of that to numb
him. He immediately began to report the events of the
day.

While Jack Yocke tapped away on his
laptop in the small living room, Toad and
Rita took a long shower together and then crawled
into bed.

With the lights out and her head cradled on Toad’s
shoulder, Rita said, “On the ride over here from the
airport Yocke was telling me some wild tale
about some women he met, a Shirley Ross and a
Judith Farrell. I listened for about five
minutes before it dawned on me that he was talking about
Elizabeth Thorn.”

“She had a lot of names.”

“And she’s dead.

“Yes. “You loved her, didn’t you?” Rita
whispered.

“Yes.”

“Yocke needed someone to share it with.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s a good guy underneath.”

Toad Tarkington didn’t want to talk about
Jack Yocke.

Judith Farrell was on his mind, and this
extraordinary woman beside him.

“It wasn’t-was Toad began.

“Hush,” she told him. “I’m not jealous. I
know what I mean to you.”

He thought about that, tried to get the round peg into the
square hole.

Women are really amazing creatures-just when you
think you’ve got their brain structure figured out,
they stun you by revealing a feature of genetic
engineering that you never expected, not in your wildest
“Still,” she added, “I think you should have told me about
her. Oh, you married me and all that, but I didn’t
realize that you had all these torrid romances stacked
in the closet that I am going to have to keep dealing with.”

It dawned on Toad that the peg wouldn’t fit.
“You aren’t the first woman I ever shook
hands with.”

“You did a lot more than shake Elizabeth
Thorn’s hand, or Judith Farrell, or whatever
her name was. Don’t sugarcoat it and don’t deny
it.

“Rita, I’m not denying anything! And I’m not
going to lie to you about Judith. She was one hell of a
fine woman.

I loved her very much. She went her way and I
went mine and eventually I met you. And I’m damn
sorry she’s dead.”

“Just how many more of these women are out there?”

The ol’ Horny Toad knew the ice was damn
thin. He carefully weighed his answer. “You’re the
woman I married. You’re the woman I want
to spend my life with. Why are you jealous?”

“I am not jealous! Answer the question.”

“What question?”

“How many?”

“I dunno for sure. I didn’t carve
notches on the bedstead. Not counting you, let’s see
… maybe ten thousand, more or less.”

“Go ahead and count me, Romeo,” she growled.
There was acid in her voice.

“Well, I’d have to consult my little
black books. All of us Romeos have those. I
did ratings, on a one-to-ten scale.

I can probably use those records to come up with a
fairly accurate count, although of course I
didn’t rate casual encounters. As I recall
you scored a ten. It’s sorta sad, but there weren’t
many tens, not more than one a month. All those books
, , , it’ll be a big job.” He took a deep
breath and exhaled audibly, laced his fingers across his
chest and stared at the ceiling, apparently contemplating
the vast quantities of time and effort that were going to be
involved in rooting through his voluminous files.

When she remained silent, he decided to take the
offensive. But carefully. “How many of your old
boyfriends are you gonna torture me with?”