Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“Okay, then,” she said softly. “So tell me something. Why didn’t you try the carrot first, before the stick?”

“You mean why didn’t my people offer you a bribe?”

She nodded.

“We didn’t attempt a bribe, because your reputation preceded you.”

“My reputation?”

“For fierce probity,” Protasov said with a tart smile. “But as it turns out, you are full of surprises. So we will do business, you and I. Ten million dollars into your Caymans account. We have an understanding.”

She smiled, maybe a little too broadly. She didn’t want him to see what she was feeling.

“I think maybe people, maybe they underestimate you, is that right?”

“Occasionally,” she said, and shrugged.

She thought of the lipstick in her purse that wasn’t really a lipstick, and the belt buckle, and the soles of her shoes. No one had taken anything away from her, patted her down. She was recording him, and if any single device malfunctioned, there were plenty of backups.

Had he been explicit enough? Should she press him harder, try to get him to say more?

She couldn’t risk it, she decided. She had enough.

He said, “You know, Catherine the Great was far more ruthless than her husband. First she forced him to abdicate the throne; then she arranged to have one of his guards strangle him to death one night. So then she took over as czarina. She had tens of thousands of her people put to death for daring to rebel against her. Maybe hundreds of thousands. She even executed noblemen. But you know, it’s like they say — you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Fabergé eggs.”

“Very clever,” she said drily.

“I’m actually in negotiations with the Kremlin to buy her crown, the Great Imperial Crown, the crown of all the Romanovs. But a lot of people don’t want it leaving the Kremlin. Whereas I say, everything has a price. So we have a deal?”

She nodded.

“Good. Now, have you tried the caviar canapés? They’re to die for.”

She steered the Tesla over to the side of the road about a half mile outside Protasov’s estate. A black Suburban pulled in right behind her. The front passenger’s-side door opened, and Alex Venkovsky got in. He sat down and opened a Dell laptop.

“How’d it go?” he said.

“No problem.” She unbuckled the skinny black belt and handed it to him. “They didn’t detect a thing.”

“Because we’re good,” he said with a grin.

“As long as this one worked right, we’re all set.”

Venkovsky took the belt and began to work the silver buckle, finally taking out a pin from his pocket and using it to pop out what looked like a SIM card. He seated it into a port on the side of the laptop with a click.

A minute later, he’d opened an audio program on his laptop and clicked a green play button.

The sound came through clear and loud. A woman saying, “Welcome. The board members are gathering in the sitting room for some coffee before the meeting.”

Then, much louder, her own voice: “Thank you.”

“Great,” Venkovsky said.

“We got it?”

“Good quality too,” he said. “I mean, you can’t tell with these tinny laptop speakers, but the sound gradient is excellent.”

He clicked some buttons on his laptop, forwarding and clicked play again.

“Please stand with arms at side.” The voice of the young guard who had wanded her. The device seemed to have recorded just fine.

“Mr. Protasov will be with—”

All of a sudden the sound became a loud white-noise static roar, like an airplane taking off. She saw the oscillating green sound-wave icon on Venkovsky’s laptop twitch and dance on the screen.

And all they could hear was that white-noise roar.

“Shit,” Venkovsky said. “When they wanded you, they disabled the recording devices.”

“What about the — the key fob?” She pulled the Tesla key fob from her purse. Venkovsky extracted a small black chip-like thing from the back of the Tesla logo and inserted it into his laptop.

He clicked a Play button on his laptop, and a male voice came out. “Mr. Protasov will be with—”

A staticky roar broke in.

“Shit,” Venkovsky said again.

“Is it even worth trying the shoes?” she asked.

“Why not.”

She took off her left shoe and handed it to him. He located the slot on the side of the wedge heel and pressed a little button, and the black chip popped out. He inserted it into the computer and played, fast-forwarding until they heard “Mr. Protasov will be with you shortly.”

There was a long pause and then Protasov’s voice. “Judge Brody, I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a very busy time.”

Venkovsky smiled.

“Got it?” she asked.

“So far so good.”

They listened for a few seconds longer.

“Good thing they didn’t wand your shoes. This is excellent,” Venkovsky said. “This is how we get him to play ball with us. This is our pressure point. Because I’d wager that he’d rather spend the next twenty years of his life in some kind of witness protection program in America than face the kind of... ‘debriefing’ process he’d be put through back in Moscow.”

She nodded, took out her phone, and texted Duncan. All systems go.

She flew home that afternoon on Cape Air, which was a bit of a comedown after Giles McNamer’s Gulfstream G650.

Duncan got home from New York much later, looking rumpled and bleary-eyed, and made them both espressos. He had drunk a lot of Scotch at lunch, he said. But he’d accomplished exactly what he’d set out to do, which was the second phase of Juliana’s plan.

He had had lunch in New York with his old friend, Professor Arnold Coren, at the Metropolitan Club. What he and Juliana called his “disinformation” lunch.

He and Arnold had been in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, when Duncan was a junior fellow and Arnold a senior. Coren, an old Russia hand, later moved to the Columbia University faculty and had appeared on Russian TV. He wrote a lot for The Nation . He’d interviewed Putin, was said to be friendly with him. He defended the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said that Crimea belongs to Russia anyway. He harped on American anti-Russian attitudes, insisting that powerful, greedy, sinister forces wanted, needed Russia to be our enemy. A recent article on him was headlined, “Putin’s Favorite Professor.”

Arnold Coren made no bones about the fact that he had sources in the Kremlin, what he called his Kremlin drinking buddies.

“We talked a lot about Pale Moth,” Duncan said, as they sat at the kitchen table that evening.

“Pale Moth?”

“That’s Putin’s nickname.”

“Putin has a nickname?”

“Apparently. Among Arnie’s Kremlin drinking buddies. After our third whiskey, I became indiscreet.”

“Sounds about right.” She smiled.

“Sure, I told him in the strictest confidence about how you’d been brought in to consult with the CIA’s new cooperating asset, the oligarch Yuri Protasov. Told him about how Protasov wanted to cut the cord with his Kremlin masters. How he was now spilling all kinds of secrets to the CIA.”

“But I’m sure that’s not leaking to Moscow any time soon.”

She remembered seeing at a distance the heated conversation at the board meeting between Protasov and Olga. How she seemed to be berating the oligarch. Juliana’s unexpected arrival, which so clearly dismayed Olga, would cause questions about Protasov to be asked in Moscow. Or so Paul Ashmont of the CIA believed. Olga would report back about the meeting between Protasov and an American judge. Then there was the ten million dollars Protasov was about to transfer to an offshore account the Treasury Department had set up, which would look suspiciously like a bribe.