Brian Garfield - Kolchak's gold

I had to be kept ignorant of the scheme because there was always the chance the Soviets would tumble to what I was doing; that they would either shut down the archives to me or interrogate me. In either case the gold would be lost again but if the Soviets interrogated me and found out that the CIA and the Mossad had put me up to it there would have been hell to pay. At least if I didn’t know who was calling the shots I couldn’t tell the Russians.

The best my puppeteers could do for me was put me under the protective wing of Vassily Bukov because he had a far more viable organization in the Crimea than the CIA had. Unfortunately this had backfired because my visit with Bukov had inflamed the Soviets’ suspicions.

In the end I was to have been persuaded by the CIA to turn over to them whatever I discovered about the gold. Originally this debriefing was not to take place until I was safely out of the Soviet Union after having completed my research there. But Bukov had reported that Zandor was breathing down my neck too closely; that the Russians might lock me up at any time; and therefore Ritter had gone in, ahead of schedule, to find out as much as he could.

“What if I’d told him I knew where the gold was? What if I’d specified a location?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d have killed me, wouldn’t he? To keep the Russians from squeezing me.”

“No,” she said vehemently. “He had orders to get in contact with Vassily. Together they were to smuggle you out safely.”

Something had convinced Ritter that I’d found it. Probably the poor way I handled the meeting with him. I’d given it away, or Ritter thought I had-it amounted to the same thing. The screw was cranked a few turns tighter and I did what I had to do: I broke and ran, and was delivered onto MacIver’s doorstep, or Nikki’s, on schedule.

“All right,” I said. “What’s supposed to happen now?”

“To you? You were supposed to tell us where the gold is.”

“I didn’t find it, Nikki.”

She had nothing to say to that.

I said, “Suppose I’d found it. Suppose I told you, or MacIver, where to find it. What would have happened then?”

“They expect to make a trade with the KGB. It’s a lot of gold, Harry.”

“Yeah. I know it’s a lot of gold. One million pounds of it. Troy. What was the trade for?”

“Gold.”

“Trading gold for gold?”

“Have you ever heard of washing money?”

“Like gangsters?”

“Yes. That was the plan.”

Organized crime takes in enormous sums of money but it can’t be spent overtly because that would bring the Internal Revenue people down on the spenders. It has to be “washed” first-funneled through a Mafia-owned legitimate enterprise, such as a gambling casino, where it can show up as acknowledged gross receipts, then be balanced off against operating losses so that the income tax is minimized.

Nikki said, “The Russians have five hundred tons of Spanish gold in the Ural vaults.”

“Five hundred and ten.”

“All right. There are two plans, really. One is to persuade the Russians to give that gold back to Spain. The United States and Israel will get a substantial portion of it from Spain in what will be written up as repayment of foreign-aid loans.”

“I didn’t know Israel had lent money to Spain.”

“It would funnel through Washington.”

“What was the second plan?”

“Repayment for World War Two lend-lease. Direct payment, in gold, from the Kremlin to Washington. To equal exactly half the value of the gold we led them to.”

“And you think the Russians will go for either one of those?”

“Either they will, or they don’t get the gold. Half of it is still a lot of gold for them to keep. More than two billion dollars’ worth.”

I said, “And Tel Aviv ends up splitting fifty-fifty with Washington, whatever the Russians pay?”

“Yes. We’re a silent partner. The Russians might not go for it if they knew we were involved. We’re not exactly political bedfellows.”

“An unwise turn of phrase, Nikki.”

She flushed to her hairline. “Harry-”

“Let me tell you something. I didn’t find the gold. That leaves all of you looking pretty foolish, doesn’t it? Maybe it makes it a little easier to see things clearly-what you’ve really done.”

“To you?”

“To both of us. All of us.”

“It was worth the cost. It had to be.”

“The Nazis and the Communists have a phrase for it. To use a knotty overworked saying, the ends justify the means. Any means.”

“Don’t try to put words in my mouth, Harry. You act as if you’re the only one who’s got a right to principles. I’ve got principles too-things that come higher than my feelings about you or anyone else.”

“It ain’t the principle, it’s the money.”

“I hate you when you make cheap jokes, Harry. It’s beneath you.”

“So is theft.”

But I remembered the documents I’d stolen and destroyed.

“Theft from whom?” she said. “Whose gold is it? The Czar’s?” She stood up. Her shoulders went up and her face lifted. “Let’s talk about another principle. We made it possible for you to do your research, Harry. Without us you wouldn’t have found a thing. You probably wouldn’t even have got clearance into the Soviet Union at all. It was a sort of bargain, even though you were forced to sign the contract without reading it. That’s regrettable, but we kept our part of the bargain. You got everything you wanted. You’ve got your book to write. You’ve got the fantastic story of the gold to tell the world. Nobody will stop you from doing that-as long as it’s not published before we complete our arrangements with the Russians and the gold changes hands. You’re alive, you’ve had an adventure-”

“And Pudovkin is dead, and my notes are hanging on a barbed wire fence in Russia.”

“We’ll get them back for you. We’ll make it part of the deal with Moscow.”

I thundered at her. “What deal with Moscow? Don’t you understand? Don’t you listen? I found no gold. No gold .”

“You’re lying, Harry,” she said. She turned her bitter face toward the window. “And how about that for principles.”

“You all keep telling me I’m lying. As if by saying it you can make it so.”

“Don’t you think I know you well enough to know when you’re keeping things back, Harry? You were never a good liar.”

“I thought I knew you pretty well too, Nikki. We do make mistakes about people, don’t we?”

“You found the gold, Harry. If you hadn’t you wouldn’t have stolen those papers from the archives.”

“It was one of Vassily’s men. He was in the room watching you. He saw you roll them up and slip them into your sleeve. Now you didn’t steal them for the information they contained-you could have taken notes. You stole them to keep anyone else from finding what you’d found. It had to be the gold, Harry. Nothing else would have made you do that.”

I had sagged into the chair; she came to me and the touch of her fingers on my shoulder was electric. She murmured, “Harry, you’re destroying yourself. You take it all upon yourself and it’s not even your responsibility to bear. Would the world fall down if you kept your part of the bargain? Harry, what have you got to gain from sticking this out? What will it accomplish?”

“Sometimes you can’t go by that. Maybe it’s just the rationale of a lost cause.” I was whispering, I think. “Something stupid. But you go along all your life thinking you’re honorable and principled, and then just once you’re up against it. You can’t turn away. You can’t even pretend it didn’t happen. You just have to go ahead. Stubborn. Just because it’s a matter of principle. Even if it doesn’t accomplish a damned thing except your own destruction.”