David Duffy - Last to Fold

“I lied for you twenty years ago, because you gave me a chance. I lied for the Cheka, because I took an oath. I’m prepared to hand over Kosokov’s file, and you can bury it along with him and Gorbenko. But I want to hear what happened. That’s my price.”

“There are things about you I’ve never understood, Turbo. Probably never will. Come out here where we can talk face-to-face.”

“I’ll stay where I am.”

“I mean you no harm.”

“And the two urki with their machine pistols and car bomb?”

“Shit! Those were Lachko’s men. I told him—”

“The blinders have been removed, Iakov. You took them off yourself, last night, with the box cutter, the kerosene, and the fire. Tell the story.” I changed pipes again.

He looked at the ground and shook his head. He spoke without raising it.

“It was a fuckup, a giant fuckup, from the start. Patrushev’s operation—he said he had Putin’s blessing. I never found out for sure. A number of us opposed it—if the goal was war with the Chechens, there were other ways. If the goal was to make Putin president, that would happen in due course. But some of my colleagues were impatient—he was one—and they had to have their way.

“Patrushev actually got the idea from the Chechens. They planted a bomb in July in Krasnodar. Didn’t go off, faulty timer. We caught the bombers, they confessed, they named names, and they were dealt with. We took out the whole hierarchy, almost got to Maskhadov himself. Patrushev realized what would have happened if it had exploded, the public outcry, the demand for revenge—it was a way to achieve a goal he’d been after a long time. He took over where the Chechens left off. Gorbenko was his choice to run the operation. We already knew he was a problem for us, but he had the expertise and he was a known go-between with the Chechens. When it was over, we could expose him as a Chechen agent and toss him to the wolves.”

I listened in my pipe section, glad he could not see my face. I probably could have covered my surprise, but any little tic, he would have spotted it. It wasn’t the lie that shocked. I was prepared for that. It was the indifference with which he told it—and the realization that he’d been doing so for as long as I’d known him. I should have spotted that years ago, had I been looking.

“You know the rest,” he said. “Bombs in that mall, Buynaksk, Pechatniki, the Kashirskoye Highway. Then Gorbenko got cold feet. He bungled the job in Kapotnya. It didn’t matter by that point. The outcry was everything Patrushev wanted. Even the fuckup in Ryazan—and his foolish statements—couldn’t undermine it.”

I had a minor epiphany as I switched pipes again. Iakov—the ultimate Cheka puppetmaster—had sent Patrushev out to try to deflect accusations against the Cheka, and he’d done it with a claim of innocence he knew full well would meet with disbelief bordering on incredulity.

Iakov was still talking. “There were factions within the organization, as always, but we came together, as we do when we’re under attack. No one could prove anything. I thought we were out of the woods. Then Kosokov’s problems started.

“We’d done business with that bastard for years, since ’92. He was stupid and greedy—easy to manipulate. I never trusted him, though, so we kept watch. Office, apartment, dacha, all wired. That’s how I knew about Polina. We thought he’d weathered the financial storm in ’98, but he’d been adept at hiding his losses. He made the same stupid bets as everyone else. The bank’s balance sheet was in tatters. Only a matter of time until it failed—which would bring in auditors, the Ministry of Finance, that bastard Churnin, and who knows what they’d find?”

“That’s not true—you knew exactly.”

“Fair enough. So, yes, we set the fire at Rosnobank Tower. We took care of the backup data center. I figured Kosokov would make a run for it, and we’d get him at the border, which would look good at the trial. I knew Gorbenko would turn anywhere to save his worthless skin, but the one place I didn’t count on was the CPS. They were impotent—not a factor, not even a consideration.”

Cheka arrogance.

“I heard Gorbenko at the dacha that day—on the tape. I heard him and Kosokov discussing another set of records. I listened to Polina kill him. She shot him in cold blood, if you don’t know. Kosokov didn’t have the balls to do it himself.”

“You set the fire?”

“What?”

“The fire in the barn. The fire that killed Kosokov. The fire that almost killed Eva.”

He took a step forward and peered through the night in my direction. His eyes would be adjusting. He was also buying time to think. I moved deeper into the pipe.

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to confess to, Turbo? Then I can catch my plane.”

That’s the way it worked in the old days. The interrogator dictated the confession. The only thing the confessor caught was a bullet—in the back of the skull. “The fire, the barn—you burned Kosokov alive.”

I couldn’t make out his face, but I sensed worry, maybe even fear, for the first time.

“I set the fire, yes. I needed the CDs, the bank records he copied. For the Cheka. It never occurred to me he’d die before he talked. I always thought he was a weak man.”

“And Eva?”

“I had no idea she was there.”

“And if you had?”

“Turbo! What the fuck is the point? Shall I just confess to every supposed crime of every Chekist right now? Will that satisfy you?”

“Keep going. What happened next?”

“I followed Polina to her dacha. Just missed her. Maybe we passed on the road. It was snowing hard by then. I went back to Kosokov’s, but travel was slow. She’d come and gone. She slipped through our fingers.

“She’d put what was left of Kosokov in the shelter with Gorbenko. I left them. Better to have everyone asking what happened to the crooked banker than how the crooked banker got burned to death. Once we had Polina, we could discover the bodies and hang both murders around her neck. I never stopped looking, like I told you, but she covered her tracks well. In my mind, it was still unfinished business, and it looked more and more like it would remain unfinished. I’d almost written it off until one day she called—out of the blue.”

“She called you? When?”

“December, just before Christmas.”

Shit! I was the one who was sloppy. I’d missed that. The Basilisk had served it up, and I’d ignored it. The trips to Hammersmith. She’d gone expressly to make untraceable calls to Iakov. She’d gone straight to the source with her blackmail threat. The one man who had everything to lose from exposure. That’s why she’d been so scared. Lachko she could handle. Iakov—she knew better.

He said, “She had the file. Kosokov had hidden the CDs in Eva’s stuff. She demanded a hundred million! Polina was never shy.”

“So the six hundred million you told me she stole, that was another lie.”

“Polina could never get enough. She was the most venal—”

“I’ve heard that speech, Iakov. I was married to her for eight years, remember?”

“If you know so much, why are you asking?”

“Keep talking.”

“Rislyakov set up the payment system. He was supposed to find out who and where she was.”

“Wait a minute. How’d you know about Rislyakov? I thought you and Lachko weren’t talking.”

“As I asked the other day, what kind of jackass do you take me for?”

Of course. He had his own man—or men—inside Lachko’s organization.

“You’re right about Rislyakov’s parents. I didn’t check that, until later, after he disappeared. He was another one—he thought he could outwit the Cheka. Sooner or later, they all learn—you take on the Cheka, you take on the whole organization. Something you might want to bear in mind.”