Richard Castle: A Raging Storm

Jones interrupted his thoughts. “You really don’t have any idea what motive Petrov or Barkovsky might have for wanting Senator Windslow dead?”

“The senator’s final words were Jedidiah knows and Midas .”

Storm let his answer hang in the air, begging for an explanation.

But Jones didn’t immediately bite. Instead, he sat in his squeaky chair and stared blankly at his young protégé. And then, after several awkward seconds, he said: “OK, I agree. It’s time for me to tell you a bit more. Only a handful of government officials here in Washington are familiar with what I am about to say. Senator Windslow was one of them and it cost him his life. It can cost your life, too. Before I go any further, I need to ask: Do you want to take that risk?”

“You seem to forget,” Storm said. “I’m already dead.”

Jedidiah Jones walked to a wall safe with a magnetic strip that had the word “LOCKED” on it slapped across its reinforced steel door. Jones flipped over the strip so that the word “OPEN” was visible in bright red letters and punched a combination into an electronic screen that simultaneously verified his fingerprint. From the safe, he withdrew a thick red envelope marked “PROJECT MIDAS .” He shut the safe’s door, flipped the magnetic strip to “CLOSED” and double-checked to make certain the door was locked.

Returning to his chair, he wrote the name “STEVE MASON” in quotations on a log attached to the top secret file’s front. He wrote the date, the time, his own name, and then noted that he had authorized Mason to view four photographs from the file. The photos were numbered MIDAS 001, 002, 003, and 004. He asked Storm to sign the log with his pseudonym. After he did, Jones handed Storm three photographs but held one back.

“Tell me what you see in the pictures,” Jones said.

He’d played this game before. After Storm had been recruited by Clara Strike, Jones had sent him through a training course at the CIA’s legendary facility called the Farm, outside Williamsburg, Virginia. There he’d been shown a photograph, asked to return it, and then asked about it. What did you see? Why was that important? What did you miss? What does it mean? His private eye experience had made him an expert at it .

“The three photographs show a kilobar of gold,” he said. “That’s a thousand grams of gold or the equivalent of 2.21 pounds. The markings on the bar show that it is 99.9 percent pure, which means it’s high quality. But the reason why this bar is so unique is because of where it was minted and for whom.”

Jones nodded approvingly. “And who owned it?”

“The impression in the lower center of the bar shows a hammer and sickle, which is the seal used by the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic letters under the seal form an acronym, КПСС, which, when translated to English, stands for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The bar in the photo was minted specifically for the Party and belonged in its treasury.”

“It’s odd really,” Jones said, “how little knowledge most Americans have about the Soviet Union even though they grew up being told that it was an evil empire and its leaders planned on burying them. Just last week, I had to explain to a Senate committee that only a limited number of Russians were permitted to join the Communist Party during the Soviet era and that the Party had its own treasury that was completely separate from the Soviet Union’s governmental holdings.”

Storm didn’t interrupt. Jones had a reason for this history lesson .

Jones said, “I couldn’t believe U.S. senators didn’t know that the Communist Party charged its members dues — just like labor unions do here. The Party deducted a portion of each member’s monthly salary for its coffers.”

Jones stopped talking and began tapping his finger on his desk as if he were marking time.

Storm knew the drill. It was now his turn to evaluate .

“There’s another marking in the photograph,” Storm said. “It identified that individual kilobar as being number 951,951. Logic tells us that this means there were 951,950 identical gold bars minted before it was and that those previous 951,950 gold kilobars also belonged to the Communist Party, not to the Soviet government.”

“Do you know the price of gold?” Jones asked.

This was more than a simple question. It was a test. CIA operatives chosen for covert missions were expected to know the worth of precious metals. During wars, local currencies were worthless. But gold and diamonds always could be used to buy information, friends, and supplies .

“You’re wondering if I still keep track,” Storm replied. “Gold is trading today for $1,770 per troy ounce. That means an individual kilogram bar — like the one in the photograph — would be worth just under $57,000. If you were lucky enough to have the other 951,950 kilo bars that were minted before that bar, you’d have yourself a tidy bit of pocket change.”

“Nearly five billion dollars’ worth to be exact,” Jones said.

“No,” said Storm, correcting him. “If you want to be exact, you would have $54,124,326,318. When you’ve been busted and had bill collectors pounding on your office door like I have, you don’t do estimates when it comes to cash. You count it to the penny.”

That was something Jones had always admired in his wunderkind operative. Even though Storm had been rough around the edges when Clara Strike recruited him, Jones had recognized that Storm had a lightning-quick mind and an amazing ability to remember the smallest details — especially when it came to money and instructions .

“Any idea where this fifty-four billion dollars in gold came from?”

Jones didn’t throw many softballs. But this was one of them .

“The failed ‘bathhouse’ coup in 1991.”

“Exactly.”

Storm knew the story well. It had been a defining moment in history. On August 17, 1991, a Saturday, the head of the KGB, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, summoned five senior Soviet officials to a Moscow bathhouse to discuss how they could overthrow Soviet president and party boss Mikhail Gorbachev. Kryuchkov often held meetings in steam rooms because it was one way he could insure that his colleagues were not secretly recording his conversations. While sitting naked, they decided to put Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, under house arrest and then use KGB troops and the Soviet military to seize control of Moscow. At first, the diehards seemed to be winning. But that had changed when Russian soldiers refused to fire at a huge crowd of Muscovites assembled outside the White House — the home of Russia’s parliament. Kryuchkov and the others were arrested. Only after they were in jail did the Kremlin discover that the KGB had secretly moved out of Moscow several billion dollars of rubles and precious metals that belonged to the Communist Party. They hadn’t wanted it to fall into the hands of Gorbachev and other reformers if the coup failed. Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and all of the presidents who had followed them had searched for the missing billions. But none of them had succeeded in finding them. Stories began sweeping through Russia. The gold bars had been transported by Vympel soldiers — KGB special forces — to a hidden bunker. The Vympel were much like the U.S. Navy SEALs and were used by the KGB for clandestine missions. They first gained notoriety in 1979 when a team of Vympel operatives assassinated Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin while he was sleeping in his bed inside the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and being protected by some five hundred guards. Legend had it that the Vympel officer in charge of hiding the gold had killed all of his men and then committed suicide so that none of them would be tempted to reveal where the billions in bullion had been hidden .