14
“TRUDY?” JIM ASKED STUPIDLY, refusing to credit his eyes. Staring evenly from the doorway at the back of the empty room was indeed the wide-eyed, bubbly, lucky secretary from the previous night’s game. All traces of last night’s wide-eyed bubbliness had vanished, replaced by hooded eyes, a triumphant smirk, and an impatient demeanor. Jim realized, of course, that she had not been a victim of beginner’s luck.
“Thanks for coming.”
“I wasn’t aware you had extended the option of not coming.”
She smiled thinly, a small change of expression that evoked the idea of sympathy without extending any actual sympathy. “Just come on back here and have a seat.”
Jim looked behind him, saw Gramm and Joseph standing between him and the door.
“I assume he’s been searched?” Trudy called over his head.
“He’s not carrying,” said the one who had jammed an elbow into his gut on the ride over.
Jim stood his ground in the center of the room.
“At this very moment,” Trudy said sharply, “right now, you are, I would estimate, about twenty minutes away from being charged with espionage. Do you understand me? Now, please, come back here and have a seat and we’ll see whether we can’t work something out.”
“Espionage?” Jim asked incredulously, his voice cracking and a wave of flop sweat prickling him from head to toe. “Are you joking? Who am I spying for?”
“Well, why don’t you come on back and have a seat so we can talk about it.” Trudy nodded toward her office, keeping her arms crossed and her expression neutral. Her cocky stillness indicated a predetermined outcome, and her folksy invitations to dialogue were backed with a threat that she made sure Jim felt.
She watched how he walked toward her: not with the solemn, resigned trudge of the condemned, but quickly, with long strides, his eyes alive and his teeth clenched with anxiety, and she knew then that he was there to be used, not arrested.
“Crow?” he asked dubiously as he sat down. Mina followed him in and took a seat behind him, shutting the door.
Trudy nodded. The room was vast and stark, with gunmetal filing cabinets lining the back wall, a bare steel desk with a cheap swivel chair behind it and two metal folding chairs in front. The cinder-block walls had no windows; there was no phone on the desk, no fax or copier, or even, as Jim’s eyes scanned the walls, any electrical outlets at all.
The bare cement floor sloped downward toward a drain between the desk, where Trudy settled in, and the chair where she installed Jim. A pair of long brown hairs trailed pleadingly from the drain toward Jim. Next to the drain was a single handcuff attached by a chain to a ringbolt in the floor. When Jim sat down, he started to slide forward on the chair. After righting himself, he did it again. Then he noticed the chair’s two front legs were about an inch shorter than its back legs: it was designed to keep the sitter ill at ease. Jim sat forward on the seat with his weight on his legs.
“I was expecting Tunney, actually.”
“Were you, now?”
“I guess I was supposed to, right? That’s why he was invited last night?”
“Whatever do you mean? He’s a regular; I’m not. I was the one who had to waylay Mr. Woods for a space at the table.”
“And why did you do that?”
“Well, I wanted to meet you, Seamus. It’s an odd name, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“I mind, actually.”
“Let’s not start snapping at each other just yet, shall we? We’re just here to talk.”
“Tunney made me the same offer, you know.”
“Oh? And what offer is that?”
“To talk. He gave me his card,” Jim said, reaching into his wallet and handing it to Trudy, “and said he paid for information.”
Trudy took the card by the corner and, with a cackle, dropped it onto her desk as if it were a dead mouse. “That brooding fuck. Strictly freelance, I’m afraid. Nothing to do with us. Mina, I thought we were going to do something about that.” She sighed. “Prick thinks because he’s been here forever he knows everything and always has to show it,” she said over Jim’s head to Mina. “Listen, Jim,” she turned her attention back to him. “I’m sorry about all this. You understand we had to do it this way. We couldn’t just tell you to meet us here, and hope you’d show up and not tell anyone. Especially given the company you’ve been keeping.”
“What company?”
“Well, we’re going to discuss that, too.”
“And where is ‘here’?”
“Jim, this is what we call a safe house. I imagine you’re familiar with the term?”
“I’ve heard it, sure.”
“You were probably expecting something a bit more glamorous.”
“I never really thought about what to expect, to tell you the truth. It never even crossed my mind that I’d see the inside of a safe house.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s a good sign, Jim. I’d like to believe it’s also true. Do you know why you’re here today?”
“I wish I did, Trudy. Crow.”
“For our purposes, here, today, Seamus, ‘Trudy’ will be just fine. ‘Crow’ is a family nickname. I assume Mina used it?”
Jim nodded. “You’re related, are you? The white-bread Minnesota branch of the Haddads?”
“Wrong family, Seamus.” She drummed a pen on her desk, then signaled over his head. A shadow moved across his face; instinctively, he winced, but it was just Mina passing Trudy a file. “I’m glad to see we’ve got your attention. Why don’t you tell me how you came to be here. In Moscow, I mean; I know this particular ‘here’ we’re responsible for.”
“I was hired by the Memory Foundation.”
“Before you left? You arrived here with a job?”
“Not exactly. I had a preliminary couple of interviews back home, but I wasn’t officially offered the job until I arrived here.”
“And home is where?”
“Washington, D.C.”
“The city itself?”
“Don’t you know all of this already?”
“I’d rather hear it from you. What we know we know from a variety of sources; when we have the horse we like to make him use his mouth.”
“I see. Then, no: the interviews were in the city, but home is Rockville, just outside.”
“How did you hear about the job? Did they contact you?”
“No, I reached out to them. A friend of a friend profiled the Foundation’s founder for the Post. I was hired through him.”
“So you came here without a job.”
“Technically, yes. But it seemed likely, after the two interviews back home and a couple of conversations with Dave Willow, who runs the Foundation, over the phone, that they were going to hire me.”
“Still, it’s quite a risk you took. What motivated you to come here?”
“I speak the language. My father is Russian. And I wanted to live abroad for a while.”
“Just wanderlust, pure and simple?” Jim shifted in his seat and nodded weakly. Trudy pounced gently. “Nothing else? I mean, Jim, forgive my pointing this out, but you’re not twenty-two. You’re not even twenty-five.”
“Or twenty-six. Or even twenty-seven. Or twenty-seven and a half.”
“I’m glad you can joke, but it’s a serious question. I’m asking if anything else prompted you to leave.”
“Debts,” Jim said quickly, cutting his eyes away from Trudy. He felt her stare. He felt Mina’s, too, and his parents’, and their parents’, and Vivek, and everyone else he had ever met who had done better, or who knew he was supposed to do better. He felt all of them, and his face burned out to his ears, and the back of his neck prickled. When he turned back to Trudy, he saw her face soften: just a slight relaxation around the corners of her mouth, a pulling back of the gaze, and he knew she already knew. He knew he had gambled correctly.
“To whom?”
“A bookie. A couple of them, actually: two brothers who ran a card game and sports book out in Maryland.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Thousand?”
“No, dollars. Yes, of course thousand. Actually, a little less now: I gave them a down payment, about seven thousand, through a lawyer—the same guy who helped me find this job—and left to try to make back the rest.”
“So by your own admission you’re over here to make money, right? Don’t look at me like that. We’re all Americans here, right, and none of us works for free. Tell me you’re here for cultural reasons or to ‘get in touch with your roots’ or something like that, you’ll make me retch. It’s a bullshit allergy I have. Much more suspicious. Money we can all understand. So. Is that accurate?”
“Sure.”
“Have you done anything else for money since you’ve been here?”
“Like what?”
“Like you tell me. Bartending? Teaching English? Freelance research of any kind?”
“No, nothing.”
“So you would be prepared to swear, under oath, to a polygraph, that your only source of income has been from the Memory Foundation. And if necessary, you would permit us to check your bank accounts to verify that statement?” She drummed her pen against her desk while Jim pretended to think, but really just stalled. Then it clicked.
“You’ve already done that, haven’t you? You wouldn’t ask if you hadn’t.”
Trudy pointed over Jim’s head with the pen. “Your friend’s a bright one, Mina. Paranoid, maybe, but I like him. Yes, Jim, we have.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her file. “A paycheck every two weeks. About twenty-seven hundred. Not bad, for Moscow. And you live pretty frugally. In fact, unless you have absolutely no social life at all, I’d say it’s almost unbelievably frugally. It almost makes us wonder whether you aren’t using the First National Bank of Moscow.”
She waited for Jim to get the joke—or, better still, to acknowledge that she made a joke beyond his understanding. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. Finally, just to get her to start talking again, he gave in and shook his head. “That’s cash under the mattress, Seamus. Or in the toilet tank. Or the freezer. Where else, Mina? What else have we seen?”
“Under the oven.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Mina here is a little squeamish, is why she remembers that. Someone—doesn’t matter who: an American who was poking around where he shouldn’t have been—sealed his payoffs in layers of plastic and shoved them under his oven, where they built up a nice layer of cooking oil and cockroaches. Made sure nobody who didn’t really have a good reason to reach down there ever did. Almost eighty grand, he had. You have any special hiding places yourself?”
“You didn’t check there, too?”
“Mina?”
“No,” she said quietly. Jim thought—hoped—he could hear a touch of shame in her voice. “You’re a light sleeper. You were starting to move around; I thought I’d woken you.”
He turned to look at her and shook his head with disgust. “No. No special hiding places. No cash at home. And no social life.”
“So you’re just frugal.”
“Cheap, I think I’ve been called. I prefer cheap. Frugal implies something a little too noble. I’m just cheap.”
“I like a man who hates euphemism, I’ll tell you that. You don’t meet too many of those where I work. Let me try a different question, then: do you know Rodion Lisitsov?”
“Mina asked me that, too. My answer’s the same: no, I don’t know him.”
“Do you know of him? Have you heard of him?”
“Again, just what Mina told me.”
“Which is?”
“He’s an art dealer? Right?” He turned to look at Mina for support but she had her gaze fixed firmly on her shoes. “A gay art dealer? Travels back and forth between Russia and the States a lot?”
Trudy chuckled and shook her head. “For someone who hates lying, she sure is inventive. Do you know his granddaughter?”
“Of course. I was over last Sunday; met the whole family. No, I just told you: I don’t know him; I had never heard of him before yesterday; I’ve never met anyone named Lisitsov, Rodion or otherwise.”
Trudy leaned across her desk and handed Jim a picture, facedown. He turned it faceup.
“Fuck you both.” He scaled the picture across the desk, baseball-card-style, skillfully enough to hit Trudy in the face. He tried to stand up, but a quick jolt—an electric shock—to the back of his neck made him see white, clamp down hard enough on his tongue to draw blood, and snap forward in his seat. A broad hand pulled him upright and steadied him.
“Thank you, Mr. Gramm, I think that’s all. Is that all, Jim, or do you want to throw another tantrum?”
Jim turned around, still angry, and saw Gramm with a sadistic little grin, holding what looked like barber’s clippers with a thin bolt of electricity snapping and worming between two poles. Mina was slunk back in the corner, a hand over her mouth, again staring down, unable to meet Jim’s gaze. He held up his hands in resignation, but offered no apology.
“You’re not the first. People don’t like knowing they’ve been spied on, especially by their own country. You might be the most accurate, though. Nice throw. Gramm, I really think you can go.”
He nodded, but before leaving he thrust the Taser at Jim, stopping just short of his face. Jim didn’t flinch. Gramm huffed out, dejected at missing his fun. From the back he looked like a walking refrigerator with a crew cut.
“You didn’t need to do that, you know. You could have just asked me to sit back down.”
Trudy lowered her eyes slightly and nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Sometimes people do turn violent, Jim. I’m glad to see you’re an exception, and I’m sorry if I skipped a step. Now, will you please tell me about that picture?”
“Will you please tell me why you took it? Why you’re following me? Why any of this . . .”
“Yes. Yes, Jim, I will, but you first.”
Jim sighed, then spat some blood from his tongue toward Trudy. There was nothing else he could do. “What do you want to know?”
“Who’s the girl, Jim? Who is she and who is she to you?”
“Her name is Kaisa Harmaja. She’s an actress I met. Just before this picture was taken, it looks like.” It showed Jim and Kaisa, their arms around each other, both smiling and looking down the street in front of The Chinese Pilot, presumably to hail a cab. “We were on our way to my apartment.”
“How did you meet her?”
“At the bar. This bar, that night.”
“You don’t mind me saying, Jim, she’s awfully pretty for you.”
“Fuck you again.”
“You’re an item, now, are you?”
“No.”
“Mina told me you told her you were dating a Finnish actress. Present tense. Now, you might have the strangest and most specific fetish in history, but I assumed you were talking about the woman in the picture. Is this the wrong actress?”
“I seem to have misunderstood the nature of our relationship, Trudy. I thought I would see her again. I wanted to see her again. I’ve called her a few times. Nothing. I guess you could call what I told Mina aspirational. Hopeful. A positive spin on an ambiguous situation. If you don’t mind my asking, why are you so interested in my romantic life?”
“Or sudden lack thereof. It concerns us, Jim, because the woman in this picture, while she may be an actress, is not Finnish. Her name is not Kaisa Harmaja. She’s Russian. Her name is Katerina Lisitsova, and she is the granddaughter of Rodion Lisitsov.”
Jim clenched his fists in his lap and pressed his teeth together behind his lips to keep himself from saying anything. Nothing good can come from talking when confused. Trudy took comfort from his silence, figuring that if he had actually known who Lisitsov was, he would immediately have denied it, loudly. Besides, she had seen wounded male pride before; she could recognize a man-sulk as well as any thrice-divorced professional observer.
“Would you like to know who her grandfather is?”
Jim shrugged. “If you want to tell me.”
“Rodion Lisitsov, just so you know, ran Biopreparat, the main Soviet bioweapons facility, for almost a quarter century. And when I say ran, I don’t mean he was the name above the door; I mean he was the real power. The head bureaucrat. Less fame, fewer perks, but more power, and in Soviet times, less danger of being toppled. He wasn’t just in charge of security or staffing or acquisitions or anything like that. He’s the real thing, and he’s a total mystery to us. First Gulf War, when his buddies decided it was time for a little sun and sand in Cairo, Tunis, Casablanca, and places thereabouts, you know where he was?”
“Baghdad?”
“In his apartment. Early 1990s, they pass Nunn-Lugar to keep the nukes and germs where they should be. Every weapons facility, every scientist, every drunken drooling Russian who ever guarded anything with gunpowder just signs on the dotted line for their cash, you know where he was?”
Jim shook his head.
“In his little apartment in Novokuznetskaya. Doesn’t even want our cash. We don’t think he’s still churning out the creepy-crawlies; it wouldn’t have cost him anything to just take a little something for under the tree, but he stays home. Yeltsin leaves, the FSB state arrives, Putin starts droning on again about reconstituting Russia’s greatness, you know where he goes?”
“Let me guess.”
“That’s right: in his apartment. At home. Living off his pension. You know how many times we tried to buy this guy? Directly, but also through our Russian agents, Brits, EU, fake Arabs? Not interested. Never has been. Not for anyone. Doesn’t have money; doesn’t want it. What do you do with a guy like that?”
“Forgive me for asking, but how does that hurt you?”
Trudy looked at him with an arch grumpiness.
“Sorry: hurt us, I meant, of course.” Her expression eased. “If he’s happy living as he is, doing what he’s doing, why not just let him stay there?”
“Because we prefer making people happy to finding people who already are happy. Unfortunately, we don’t know what would make Colonel Lisitsov happy. If it really is living his nice cozy life with his nice cozy family, then God bless him. But he won’t even talk to us about it.” Trudy looked perplexed at the thought that someone wouldn’t want to wrap their lips around America’s golden tit.
“Why aren’t the Russians keeping him happy?”
“They are, apparently. He probably gets a good pension, but not much more. When the military downsized after the collapse, it left hundreds of guys like him out in the cold. The newer generation of weapons are all geared toward assassination, not battlefield use, and they’re targeted, usually radiological or chemical, not biological. Guys like Lisitsov are out of fashion, nationally, but they still know their stuff, and there are a lot of actors willing to pay a lot of money to have him design a little something to set off on the Metro or in a shopping mall.
“Look, it isn’t the weapons that worries us. Or it isn’t the weapons we know about. Those we can track. Those we can prepare for. Sure, nobody wants a suitcase nuke to go off in the Metro, but we know where they are. What worries us more is someone designing new ones, ones we haven’t seen, we don’t know about. Weapons we can trace. Weapons we can seize. Knowledge and imagination are trickier to lock down. Everyone who ever tightened a bolt or signed a purchase order has had offers. We’re not too worried about them; if some schmo who worked on the line at the Kalashnikov factory has figured out a way to bilk the North Koreans, God bless him. It’s practically state law over here. Every commander, every general, has a sideline selling equipment. And not just to Russians, but to anyone: Chechen fighters have been killing Russian soldiers with Russian weapons for years now. But the scientists—the real scientists, not the politicians—haven’t budged until now.”
“What do you mean ‘until now’ ?”
“Matvei Yagachin,” Mina piped up from behind Jim. “He was another scientist in Moscow we were monitoring.”
“Was?”
“He disappeared. Got into a government car and drove away. Left his wife behind; she doesn’t know where he went, but all of a sudden she’s got a private doctor and a round-the-clock guard. That’s how all of this started. On the same day you met Katerina, which is why we took this picture.” Mina looked down at Jim warmly, pleadingly, hoping for a reprieve. “We weren’t following you at all, Jim. Not until we saw this. We were watching Lisitsov and his family.”
“Who is ‘we’? Who’s actually doing the watching?”
“That I don’t think you need to know,” said Trudy, shifting uneasily in her seat. “Neither of us, if that’s what you’re wondering. But it shouldn’t come as any real surprise to you to hear that we sometimes check in with people like Yagachin and Lisitsov. We’re getting reports from out east that another one . . . What’s her name?”
“Svetlana Rybovna,” Mina said. “She went to visit her daughter in Perm and never came home.”
Mina handed a file over Jim’s head to Trudy. “You see how good she is?” Trudy asked Jim, winking then looking down at the file. “The secret to a successful career: hire good people and take credit for everything they do. She’s going to get me out of this hellhole, and she’ll run it herself.” She snapped the file shut and looked up. “That’s three scientists in about as many days. You can see why we’re worried. Most scientists of this stature, believe it or not, have turned down all offers. They’re Soviet down to their cold Commie bones. They don’t want Nunn-Lugar, and they don’t want any dinars. Suddenly they start running, we need to know who’s chasing them.”
“Do you know?”
“At the moment, Jim, we have precisely one connection to any of them.”
“Who’s that?”
Trudy pointed across her desk at Jim.
“Me? I told you: I had no idea who she was. Is.”
“Be that as it may, Jim, she still approached you. She still lied to you. You’re still the only person we know to have spoken with her. You’ve also had some pretty interesting contacts over the past few days. Tell me if you recognize these men.”
She handed Jim three black-and-white pictures. One showed a young man in military dress, alarmingly thin, hollow-cheeked and grim, staring at the camera with a Soviet passport face. It was posed, and looked official. The second also showed a young soldier, but this one was ruddy, healthy, and smiling, standing outside against a fence aiming a machine gun at the photographer and laughing uproariously. Jim shook his head. The last showed a man in a white coat, also swarthy, standing over an empty examination table with a look of utter seriousness. It was also clearly posed, and with that picture Jim got it. “Are these . . . I know these men. That last one I just talked to yesterday. Faridian. He’s a doctor. And the first one sells junk at Izmailovsky. Balderis, his name was. This second one, my God. He can barely stand up. He’s a drunk. But why are they in uniform? They’re all survivors.”
“Survivors?” Trudy echoed, leaning across her desk. “Survivors of what?”
“Of Solovetsky. The camps.”
“Yeah? Did they tell you that, or did you actually see documentation?”
“Documentation? No, no . . . I just . . . I interviewed them; they told me. There was another, too, Grigory Naumenko.” He heard Mina writing furiously behind him.
“I find it hard to believe these men were actually in the camps, Jim.”
“No, they were. They absolutely were. They said . . .”
“All three retired from the army, Jim,” Mina said. “At rank. Colonel or higher.”
“What? Why would they lie about that?”
“We don’t know. How did you find them?”
“Well, through each other. Each one told me about the next one. All personal connections.”
“And the first?”
“Naumenko was . . .” Jim didn’t finish the sentence. He let his hand, which he had been using to gesticulate, drop to his lap as his stomach leaped up into his throat. What had he done? “Kaisa—Katerina—said he was her grandfather.” He pressed his fingers into his eyes, and let his head fall forward.
“Jim,” Trudy said quietly. He didn’t move. “Jim. Jim! You can see why we need your help.”
He shook his head, defeated, angry, exhausted, ashamed. “What do you want me to do? You know who she is. I don’t, apparently. I never did.”
“What do you want us to do, Jim: kidnap a Russian national on Russian soil? We can’t even talk to her without either asking permission or upsetting our hosts. You can. We’ll even tell you where she lives.”
“Look, I really need to just think about . . .”
“I’m sorry, you do not have time. We don’t. We cannot have the architects of the biggest, most ambitious, and most dangerous weapons programs in history disappearing without us knowing why. Now, I’d appeal to your patriotism or your sense of survival, but like I said before, I like being the one to alleviate unhappiness. You know the saying: Give a man a fish, and he’ll come back for more; teach a man to fish, and you’re fucked. He’s gone. Now, let me have your passport.”
“My pass . . . No.”
Trudy sighed heavily. “I’m tired. I’d like the rest of my evening to start now. Gentlemen?”
Before Jim could even turn around, one of the linemen had winched his arms painfully behind him while driving a knee into the small of his back while the other searched his pockets. Jim had plenty of time to regret putting his passport in the rather baggy front pocket of these particular jeans. The searcher tossed the passport across the desk to Trudy, who put it in the top drawer and threw another one to Jim.
“This is the same one,” he said, finding his name, picture, birth date, on the photo page.
“Almost. If you try to scan the bar code it’ll say you’re wanted for questioning by the FSB in regard to a series of rapes. Underage Russian girls. We made sure to pick little blondies. A cop stopping you on the street won’t care, but if you try to leave the country with that, you’ll probably die on the way from the airport to the police station. If you’re lucky.”
A thousand murderous thoughts raced through Jim’s mind, but, feebly, all he could manage was a halfhearted swear.
Trudy widened her eyes and stood up. “Listen, Jim, I do not care about you one way or the other, do you understand? We need your help, and, unfortunately, long experience has taught me that threats succeed where pleading fails. You help us, and you’ll find me a very different person in a few days’ time, okay? You don’t, and it won’t just be you that goes to jail. Do you know how many restaurants survive a thorough audit? Do you know Montgomery County just strengthened the penalties for tax evasion?”
Jim snatched up his passport and walked out. Gramm stood in the doorway, blocking Jim’s way and sneering confidently. Jim clenched his fist and pivoted his chest back like he was about to punch him, but when Gramm raised his hands to block, Jim drove his knee into Gramm’s groin as hard as he could, and the big man fell to his knees, moaning and turning a satisfying purplish color. Joseph advanced toward him, but Trudy called him off, as Jim knew she would. Today he’d have to satisfy himself with being right only in the smallest things.