The Americans onboard were Mr. and Mrs. Ricardo Silva, from Westchester, New York. I knew that from glancing at their passports before I sat down with them in a little reading nook beside the main bar.
“My name is James Wilson,” I said, and smiled. “Tough morning, huh! Would you folks like a Bloody Mary or screwdriver to perk you up? I’ll make it.”
They both shook their heads. “Water, perhaps?”
“Yes, water would be nice.” I looted the fridge under the bar and brought them each bottles of water and took one for myself. French bottled water, no less. Evian. I opened the cap and sipped. It tasted okay.
The wife jumped right in. “So who do you work for, Mr. Wilson?”
“Call me Jim. I’m a civil servant.” I produced my bogus passport and State Department ID. The lady merely glanced at the stuff and handed it back.
“And how about you,” I asked. “Are you retired or still working?”
“I’m a college professor, and Ricardo is a capitalist.”
“Really!” I said. Addressing myself to Ricardo, I said, “You are the very first person I’ve ever met who was willing to wear the ‘capitalist’ label. Most folks just call themselves businessmen.”
“I’m an investor,” Silva said with no warmth. “Some would call me a venture capitalist. I invest in start-ups run by great people with great ideas.”
“Tough racket, I’ve heard,” was my response. “I suppose in his own way Yegan Korjev is a venture capitalist too. Have you known him long?”
“Years.”
“Un-huh. Is this your first cruise aboard Korjev’s yacht?”
“No. This is our third cruise. We did one last year and one the year before. Yegan called me up and said he’d love to see us both. Ava and I looked at the calendar, she took some leave, and here we are, damn it.”
“Really,” I responded.
“We were going to Corfu,” Ava said, jumping right in. “Yegan said he had to get back to Russia for urgent business, and we certainly understand that.” Her husband nodded. She got busy telling me about past vacations ruined by unexpected trouble with an investment. I sympathized. Making big money is apparently a lot more hassle than I thought it would be, but I didn’t make that remark.
I addressed Ricardo. “Have you ever done business with Yegan Korjev in the past?”
He simply stared. His wife spit out, “I don’t think our private business is any of yours.”
I did a soft back-pedal, which is hard to do sitting down. “As I said, I’m just a civil servant. Last night Yegan Korjev was shot in the master bedroom in an apparent murder attempt. We’re doing a little preliminary investigation—attempted murder is a very bad crime, as you know, whether it happens in the States or in international waters. Everyone aboard this ship is going to get a hard look by law enforcement —that’s inevitable.”
They apparently had heard about Korjev’s narrow escape from the grim reaper and had stopped weeping about his injuries and near demise. In any event, they had no questions. Ricardo Silva’s short answer to me was, “We make all our SEC filings. Read ‘em.”
“Thank you for your time,” I said, and sent them back to the lounge with the others.
The two Englishmen willingly gave me the information they knew I had from their passports, and that was about it. Oh, they were pleasant and polite about it, but they knew nothing about Korjev’s businesses and were simply social guests. They were vague on when they received their invitations to this cruise, although they did remember they had joined her in Monaco. Asked why they thought they had been invited, one said he didn’t know Korjev’s thinking, and the other said he couldn’t imagine.
The German couple were retired investors, I was told. They had met Korjev somewhere in prior years—they couldn’t remember just where or when—and he had graciously invited them to spend a few weeks cruising. They hoped he made a full recovery from the attempt on his life, which was tragic. They ventured the opinion that the man who shot Korjev was deranged.
The last guest couple were from Vienna, one of the greatest cities of Europe, in my opinion. Korjev’s son knew their son, so that is why they were invited, they thought. Really, though, they hadn’t asked. Do you ask your host why she invited you to dinner?
Maybe the FBI could get more out of the Silvas if they wanted to try. The Brits we would have to leave to the tender mercies of Scotland Yard. Whether the German or Austrian couple would ever answer a question when they got home was beyond my power of prediction.
After I finished with the four couples, I walked past them through the lounge. They were in earnest, whispered conversations with their spouses or significant others. I let it go at that: I had no lever to pry them open with. I suspected their attorneys were going to get calls as soon as they got home, wherever that was.
I went through the ship looking in every compartment, ensuring we had scoffed up every computer. The people who had searched the crew and passengers assured me that we had every cellphone. I had them go back and pull all the cushions from the stuffed chairs and couches and strip all the beds. They found two more phones. A couple of Marines were loading laptops and desktops into large padded bags for transport by helicopter to Hornet when Jake Grafton came to watch.
“Gonna be a problem if they drop a bag in the water,” I suggested.
“They’ll try not to do that,” he deadpanned. “Next chopper, let’s get on it and go see how Korjev is doing. He should be out of surgery by now.”
“What about this scow?”
“The Catherine? When we leave, the captain will take her on to Sevastopol. The passengers can get off in Istanbul.”
“Might be hard to catch a flight from Sevastopol.”
“I suppose,” Grafton said.
“And the dead man?”
“Captain Olga’s problem. We have enough of our own.”
When we were back aboard the Hornet, Grafton went off the Flag Ops Center to do a post-op debrief of the strike on Catherine the Great with the admiral and his chief of staff. A Marine colonel and the senior SEAL were there, along with Lieutenant Wilt the Stilt. I sat in one corner and listened, but no one asked me anything. The computers we stole were flying off the ship that evening via an Osprey to NAS Sigonella, Sicily, where the Air Force would have a transport waiting to take them on to the States. They would be in the grubby hands of the National Security Agency (NSA) within twenty hours.
After the post-op debrief, we visited the medical spaces. The doctors told Grafton Yegan Korjev was coming out from under anesthesia and that he could have a few minutes. The admiral went in alone. He was back out in less than ten minutes. He didn’t look happy. I don’t know what, if anything, Korjev told him, but in that length of time it couldn’t have been much.
What he said to me was, “Be a couple of days before he can be moved. Let’s go get some dinner, then I want a briefing on what the passengers told you.”
“I can do the briefing right now. They didn’t tell me anything.”
“You must be losing your touch.”
“It’s only hot young women who want to unburden their souls to me,” I explained. “The youngest passenger was a gay guy from Birmingham who was fifty-two and looked every day of sixty-five. The rest were older than dirt.” I told him about the whispered conversations and worried looks.
Grafton merely grunted.
The menu in the wardroom was curry. Rice and beef tips, or perhaps it was lamb, with lots of yellow curry sauce and a few vegetables for color. I asked, but the Navy didn’t have any beans handy. Normally I am not a curry fan, but I ate it because I was hungry.
After coffee, I said good-night to Grafton and went up on deck for an evening stroll. I checked in every quadrant; Catherine the Great was no longer in sight. The wind was freshening and some of the stars were obscured. Hornet seemed to be pitching and rolling with more vigor than she had earlier. Below decks, a helicopter outfit was showing a movie in their ready room. I slipped into a seat in back. The flick couldn’t have been very good because I went to sleep. Afterwards, a woman Marine shook me awake and suggested I go roost in my own bunk.
I stopped by sick bay to see how Korjev was doing. Jake Grafton was in his room with the door closed, the corpsman said. The Marine sentry in front of the door looked at me with cold eyes. Bill Leitz was sitting at a little table in the reception area in front of a computer. I headed for my waiting bunk. After I stretched out the background noise of a ship at sea kept me awake for at least thirty seconds.
“I know absolutely nothing about a branch bank in Estonia,” Yegan Korjev said with conviction in his voice. “I have never used such a bank, have never been to Estonia, nor do I know anyone who has ever banked there.” He spoke with a Russian accent, but the English was excellent, quite understandable. English, the lingua franca of the modern age. A businessman who did business around the world must know it.
Jake Grafton settled back in his chair and looked at the man in the bed. He was about ten years younger than the admiral, balding, carrying thirty pounds he didn’t need, with IVs in both arms. A catheter dripped into a bottle in a bracket under the bed. Grafton could hear the drip, drip, drip. Korjev’s left side was covered in bandages and there was a sling for his left arm—the doctors said the bullet to his shoulder had torn the muscle. The head of the bed was propped up at a thirty-degree angle.
Jake decided to change tactics.
“Tell me about Capri.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“Mr. Korjev, three of my officers were murdered in a house overlooking the harbor, and another, together with an American naval officer, were both the victims of attempted murder on the quay, in full view of your yacht. Your captain says you were on the bridge with binoculars. What did you see?”
Korjev looked around again at the small room he was in. The metal walls, the light fixtures, the gentle motion of the room, the swaying of the IV bottles on their hooks: there was no doubt he was on a ship. “The last thing I remember,” he said, “was shooting through the door at that piece of dog dung named Pavlychev. He had shot me and we traded shots through the stateroom door. I remember that.” He looked at the bandages and grimaced. “Apparently he shot me twice.”
He shook his head and grimaced again. “The rest is just a blur. I was bleeding, the girls were screaming, then… I must have slept, because I heard the pounding on the door. It’s very…” he searched for a word. “…vague. I remember the pistol in my hand and standing, opening the door, and then nothing. I woke up here. In this room. A captive of the Americans.”
“Before all that. Two nights before. The yacht was in Capri and you were on the bridge. What did you see?”
Ahh, Jake thought. We get down to it. Why? He couldn’t say that billions of dollars were flowing from Russia through Estonia and on out into the world, and that a man in the SVR fingered you. Pointed at you as the man responsible—not in words, but in context. No, Jake couldn’t say that. What he could do was wonder at the accuracy of Janos Ilin’s finger, which had done the pointing.
What he said to Korjev was, “Because three Americans were murdered, shot, and there must have been a reason. I am not accusing you of sending a man to kill them, but the possibility that you might have is in my mind. Because a man on the quay opened fire with a submachine gun equipped with a suppressor at two other Americans. They dove into the harbor, unhurt. The man with the gun ran. All this must be explained.”
“Why do you ask me?”
“Because you saw the man on the quay, gave orders to your captain to get underway, and set a course for Sebastopol in the Crimea. That was a drastic change of plans. Your guests thought the yacht was going to Corfu. Your captain thought the yacht was going to Corfu. No, Sebastopol! Now! Right now!”
Korvjev watched Grafton’s face and didn’t reply.
“Messages were sent to Russia. Messages were received from Russia. They are on the computers that were in the radio room on the yacht, and we have the computers. In a few days, I will have a translation of every message. This is your chance to explain the sudden decision to sail to the Crimea.”
“By what right do you ask me anything?”
“Pavlychev spent the early morning hours before you were shot on the encrypted radio circuit. Two hours, at least. Then he went to your stateroom, knocked on the door, and shot you. Why?”
Korjev inspected the overhead and the IV bottles.
“You are lucky to be alive.”
“Ah yes. Lucky. That is so true. In Russia today every man is lucky to be alive, to eat, lucky to hope to be alive tomorrow.”
Grafton decided to press. “If we hadn’t stopped that yacht and brought you to the medical facilities aboard this ship, you would probably be dead by now. Or you would soon be dead when Catherine the Great reached Sebastopol.”
“What do you want?” Korjev asked, searching the admiral’s face.
“I want you to talk to me, to answer my questions. I want you to think about the people in Russia who want you dead. I want you to think about what you owe them. I want you to think about whether you wish to keep living.”
Yegan Korjev finally nodded. “I will think about it, Admiral. But now I am tired. I want to sleep.”
“Later, then.” Grafton rose and left the room, closing the door behind him.
He found Bill Leitz at a little table outside hunkered over the computer. Leitz made eye contact with Grafton and nodded. Grafton went on out of sick bay and proceeded to the Flag Ops Center.
Grafton found the admiral and his chief of staff, a captain, waiting there. After the enlisted men and women left and the door was locked, the admiral asked, “Any luck?”
“No.”
“So what do you want to do with Korjev?”
“I don’t know.” Grafton flung himself into a chair and rubbed his head. He was tired and needed a break. “The bottom line is that a man on that yacht tried to kill him, and that man didn’t get that idea out of thin air. Someone told him to do it. Korjev knows that. He knows that if we put him ashore, he’ll probably be killed. He needs to cogitate upon that. We’ll have to give him time.”
The two naval officers nodded.
“Go get some sleep,” the admiral said to the CIA director.
Jake Grafton shook both their hands and left the compartment.
Lying in his private stateroom, listening to the ship’s tiny creeks and groans as it rode the back of the sea, Grafton reviewed his prior contacts through the years with Janos Ilin, a high officer in the SVR. Ilin’s loyalty was to Mother Russia, not the dictator who happened to be on top of the Kremlin heap at the moment. At least that had been the case in the past. Whether it was now…
Then there was Yegan Korjev. Ilin’s hint hadn’t really been necessary. Grafton would have suspected Korjev regardless. Might have taken a little while to get there, but he would have eventually concluded that Korjev was a man who needed to be investigated.
Yegan Korjev had found a way for Russia to evade the American and European sanctions on their activities in the separatist Ukrainian states of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the breakaway states in Georgia. He created The International Settlements Bank in Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, on Stalin Street. He was the guiding force in opening the Center for International Settlements in Moscow. Using these banks, Russia sent critical goods, such as fuel and food, to the separatist states. The collected money financed the operation, all as a way to circumvent international sanctions that might have a severely crippling effect on Russia if Europe or America tightened the screw.
The CIA thought hundreds of millions of dollars had flowed through these banks, easing the financial pain of cash-starved Russia. At stake was Russia’s vision of itself, its desire to be a regional and international power. The sad fact, if one were sitting in the Kremlin looking out, was that the money to pay for this vision of Russia’s future was not in the treasury. Nor, indeed, was it in the country. America, the UK, Europe, China, Japan, Korea, even that miserable sinkhole Vietnam, were staggering in fits and starts toward a world economy that enriched all these countries with international trade. Russia was not a part of it.
Enter Yegan Korjev.
So Jake Grafton had thought Ilin’s naming Korjev as the man making the money river flow through the good offices of the Bank of Scandinavia in Estonia was plausible. Probable. Now, he was not so sure.
Korjev needs to stew a while, he thought. Someone in Russia wants him dead. Let him think about that, remember the bullets, and watch the IVs drip. And listen to the dripping of the urine from the catheter.
Another possibility was that Yegan Korjev was a pawn that the Kremlin was willing to sacrifice to divert the Americans and protect the monetary river. I need to keep that possibility firmly in mind, Grafton thought.
On the other hand, someone wanted the money river discovered. The fate of Audra Rogers was Exhibit A.
All these thoughts were swirling in his head when sleep claimed him.
Hany Khalidi, the Palestinian, owned a pawn shop in South Boston. Like so many immigrants who had come to America in the last two centuries, he settled in an area populated by people who spoke his language, liked the food he liked, and worshipped the same way he did. The mosque was just down the street, the grocery store on the next corner. His wife and two daughters lived with him upstairs over the pawn shop. He rarely left the neighborhood.
Khalidi was rich. His business was loaning money at exorbitant rates. The Prophet, May He Rest in Peace, had frowned on interest for loans, so Hany Khalidi didn’t loan money per se to fellow Muslims… although he certainly took in the items they didn’t need when they needed to pawn them, and he did charge them a little interest. In America, one had to do that to survive. He was a pragmatist and comfortable with his decision; he was known in the neighborhood as the man to see when the wolf was at the door. He was a respected member of the community, and he liked that.
He did loan money, however, to nonbelievers, and he charged them dearly for it. One of his customers was Sal “Big Tuna” Pizzoli, who was a money lender himself. Unknown to Sal, Khalidi kept a book in which he recorded the dates, amounts, and identity of his clients.
Today his shop was empty, so he was sitting on a stool behind the counter examining the book. The women were cooking in the kitchen above, and the smell of something spicy was drifting down the stairs.
Two men in abayas and black and white keffiahs entered the shop. Khalidi looked up from his book as the door opened, but he recognized neither man. They closed the door, came over to the counter, and began looking at the rings and knick-knacks displayed there. As he looked at one of the men, the other pulled a silenced submachine gun from under his robe, pointed it at Khalidi, and pulled the trigger. The gutteral snarl filled the shop, as did the sound of broken glass and bullets thudding into solid pieces of the building.
When the gunman’s weapon was empty, Hany Khalidi lay behind the counter in a sea of glass.
The other man removed a pistol from his pocket, screwed a silencer on to the barrel, and stepped behind the counter. Khalidi was surely dead, with at least eight bullet holes in his body, one in the neck and one under his left eye. Still, the gunman aimed and fired one shot into the center of Khalidi’s forehead.
Calls came down the stairs. Perhaps the women had heard the noise.
The two men put their weapons under their robes and walked out of the shop.
When her father didn’t answer her calls, one of Khalidi’s daughters came down the stairs and found him.