Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

It was a great deal of money — probably more than Orlov had ever seen, and certainly more than I had ever seen — and it had its persuasive effect.

He scanned the wads, rifled through them, apparently satisfying himself cursorily that it was real. He looked up and said, “There is — what? — perhaps three-quarters of a million dollars here?”

“An even million,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes wide. And then he laughed, a harsh, derisive caw. Theatrically, he pushed the bundles toward me. “Mr. Ellison, I am in very difficult financial straits. But as much as this is — it is nothing compared to what I was supposed to receive.”

“Yes,” I said. “With your help, I can locate the money. But we must first talk.”

He smiled. “I will accept your money as a good-faith payment. That proud I am not. And, yes, we will talk. And then we will come to an agreement.”

“Fine,” I said. “In that case, let me put my first question to you: Who killed Harrison Sinclair?”

“I had hoped you would be able to tell me that, Mr. Ellison.”

“But it was Stasi agents,” I said, “who carried out the order.”

“Quite likely, yes. But whether it was Stasi or Securitate, it had nothing to do with me. Certainly it would not have been in my interest to eliminate Harrison Sinclair.”

I cocked a brow questioningly.

“When Harrison Sinclair was killed,” Orlov said, “I and my country were cheated out of over ten billion dollars.”

I felt my face flush, hot and prickly. From everything I could tell, he was speaking the truth. My heart thudded slowly and evenly.

Certainly there was nothing modest about Orlov’s Tuscan villa, but neither was he living in great wealth, as some of those high-level Nazis did in Brazil and Argentina in the years after the Second World War. A great sum of money would purchase not only a life of luxury but, far more important, protection for a lifetime.

But ten billion dollars !

Orlov continued: “What was that memoir written by the CIA Director under Nixon, William Colby? Honorable Men , isn’t that what it was called?”

I nodded warily. I didn’t much like Orlov, though for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or the bitter rivalry people used to imagine existed between the KGB and the CIA. Hal Sinclair once confided to me that when he was station chief in various world capitals, some of his best buddies were his opposite numbers in KGB station. We are — I should say were — far more alike than different.

No, I found Orlov’s smugness repellent. Moments ago he had been lunging at me like an old woman; now he sat there like a pasha — and thinking mostly in Ukrainian , for God’s sake.

“Well,” Orlov continued, “Bill Colby was, is, an honorable man. Perhaps too honorable for his profession. And until he betrayed me, I thought Harrison Sinclair was, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How much of this did he tell you?”

“Very little,” I admitted.

“Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he said, “I secretly contacted Harrison Sinclair, using back channels that had not been used in many years. There are — were, rather — ways. And I asked his help.”

“To do what?”

“To remove from my country most of its gold reserves,” he said.

I was astonished, even overwhelmed... but it made a certain sense. It gibed with what I knew, what I had read in the press as well as heard from spook friends of mine.

The Central Intelligence Agency had always calculated that the Soviet Union had tens of billions of dollars in gold reserves, in their central vaults in and around Moscow. But then suddenly, immediately after the hard-line Communist coup d’état failed in August 1991, the Soviet government announced that it had a mere three billion dollars in gold.

This news had sent shock waves throughout the world financial community. Where on earth could all that gold have disappeared to? There were all manner of reports. One reliable one had it that the Soviet Communist Party had ordered 150 tons of silver, eight tons of platinum, and at least 60 tons of gold to be hidden abroad. It was alleged that Communist Party officials may have hidden as much as fifty billion dollars in Western banks, in Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg, Panama, Liechtenstein, and a whole array of offshore banks, such as the Cayman Islands.

The Soviet Communist Party, it was reported, laundered money furiously in its last years of existence. Heads of Soviet enterprises were creating fake joint ventures and shell companies to spirit money out of the country.

In fact, the Yeltsin government even went so far as to hire an American investigating firm, Kroll Associates — one of Alex Truslow’s chief competitors, by the way — to track down the money, but nothing ever turned up. It was even reported that one massive transfer to Swiss banks was ordered by the Party’s business manager, who committed suicide — or was murdered — a day or so after the coup collapsed.

Might it have been Orlov’s former comrades, seeking to stop me from tracking down the gold, who killed the CIA man Charles Van Aver in Rome?

I listened in dull amazement.

“Russia,” he said, “was falling apart.”

“You mean the Soviet Union was falling apart.”

“Both. I mean both. It was clear to me and to everyone else with a brain that the Soviet Union was about to be cast on the ash heap of history, to use Marx’s tired phrase. But Russia, my beloved Russia — it was about to collapse as well. Gorbachev had brought me in to run the KGB after Kryuchkov had attempted a coup. But the power was slipping from Gorbachev’s fingers. The hard-liners were pilfering the country’s riches. They knew Yeltsin would take over, and they were lying in wait to destroy him.”

I had read and heard a great deal about the mysterious disappearance of Russia’s assets, in the form of hard currency, precious metals, even artwork. This was not news to me.

“And so,” he went on, “I came up with a plan to spirit out of the country as much of Russia’s gold as I could. The hard-liners would try to regain power, but if I could keep their hands off the country’s wealth, they would be powerless. I wanted to save Russia from disaster.”

“So did Hal Sinclair,” I said, as much to him as to myself.

“Yes, exactly. I knew he would be sympathetic. But what I was proposing frightened him. It was to be an off-the-books operation, in which the CIA helped the KGB steal Russia’s gold. Move it out of the country. So that one day, when it was safe, it could be returned.”

“But why did you need the help of the CIA?”

“Gold is very difficult to move. Extraordinarily difficult to move. And given how carefully I was being watched, I could not have it moved out of the country. My people and I were under constant scrutiny, constant surveillance. And I certainly could not have it liquidated, sold — it would be traced back to me in a second.”

“And so you two met in Zurich.”

“Yes. It was a very complicated procedure. We met with a banker he knew and trusted. He set up an account system to receive the gold. He agreed to my condition, that I be allowed to ‘disappear.’ He had all pertinent location data on me deleted from the CIA’s data banks.”

“But how did Sinclair — or the CIA — manage to get it out?”

“Oh,” he said wearily, “there are ways, you know. The same channels that were used to smuggle defectors out of Russia in the old days.”

These channels, I knew, included the military courier system, which is protected by the Vienna Convention. This particular method was used to extract several famous defectors from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember hearing gossip about one legendary defector, Oleg Gordievsky, on the Agency rumor grapevine, to the effect that he’d been taken out in a furniture truck. It wasn’t true, but at least it was plausible.