“What human was of interest today?”
“Yakov Dynkin, a Jew that these enlightened democrats stuffed into a crack for selling a car for more than he paid for it. Funny thing, the warden of Butyrskaya Prison says he isn’t there. No Jews are there, according to him. And I can’t find Dynkin’s wife.”
“You have her address?”
“Yeah. One of our people interviewed her a couple months ago. But the people at her apartment house say they never heard of her. Someone else has her apartment. No forwarding address. The people at the post office look at me like I’m a terrorist spy. The concept of giving a Russian’s address to a foreigner doesn’t compute.”
Jake Grafton rubbed his eyes.
Jack Yocke looked around at the expensive furniture and original art on the walls and the cheerful people sipping champagne and Perrier. A sour look crossed his face. “I wish to God I was back in Washington on the cop beat, back looking at street-corner crack dealers shot full of holes and interviewing their parents — even covering the District Building.”
“Well, look at all the material standing here tonight. Bring your notebook?”
“Tommy Townsend’s here. Though maybe I can go down to the kitchen and get enough for a Style section piece on how they do the canapés with a Russian twist…. Say, isn’t that General Yakolev standing over there ogling that broad?”
“That’s him.”
“I hear he wants to get rich. He signed a book contract the other day with a New York publisher to write a nonfiction treatise on the former Soviet armed forces. For a cool half a million. Dollars. That ought to keep the old fart in rubles until the middle of the next century.”
“Huh!”
“Yep. They’ve signed up Yakolev and about six other old Commies. One of them’s in the KGB, one in the Politburo, a couple of Gorbachev’s old lieutenants, a former ambassador to the United States and an ex-foreign minister. This time next year we’ll know more about the goings on in the Kremlin than we ever knew about the Reagan White House.”
“Money talks.”
“It sings, but I don’t have any to salt around. If I ever paid a nickel for an interview the Post would have my cojónes.”
“I didn’t know reporters had ethics.”
“Ha ha ha and ha. I ask my little questions and smile brightly and these Russians look at me like I’m some sort of low-life slime.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Dalworth returned with Yocke’s drink, and with the lieutenant at his elbow, the reporter drifted off to mix and mingle.
Jake Grafton had just greeted the naval attaché, Captain Collins, when a face he recognized from Time magazine approached, Senator Wilmoth from Missouri. “I thought I recognized you, Admiral. You’re Grafton, aren’t you?”
“Yessir. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before, Senator.”
“You testified in front of one of my committees several years ago about the A-12 Avenger attack plane. We were never introduced. You were a captain then, I seem to recall.”
“Yessir.”
“Are you permanently assigned here to Moscow?” Wilmoth actually seemed interested, which surprised Jake a little.
“It’s a temporary thing, Senator. I work for the DIA now.”
“Well, what’s your slant on fledgling democracy?”
“Don’t have one, I’m afraid, sir. Is this a working vacation for you or a business trip?”
“Business. I’m going to be digging through the KGB files too.” He looked at the crowd. “I just wish there was some concrete thing America could do to help the Russian people. Our foreign aid is just a drop in the bucket and it’s all we can afford.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Jake Grafton told him, then wished he hadn’t. “You’ll think it’s nuts,” he added tentatively.
Wilmoth eyed him speculatively. “Well, I could always use a laugh.”
Oh, well. What’s the harm? “Buy Siberia. Russia could use the money and we could use the resources.”
Wilmoth looked slightly stunned. He was apparently trying to decide if Jake was serious when Tarkington appeared at the admiral’s elbow.
“You have a telephone call from General Land, sir,” he whispered. “You can take it upstairs in the ambassador’s office.”
As Tarkington retrieved Jake’s attaché case from beside the credenza behind him, Jake said good-bye to the senator, who had decided to be amused at Jake’s suggestion. The admiral followed Toad through the crowded room toward the stairs in the hall.
Three minutes later he picked up the telephone in the ambassador’s office. The operator came on. “Admiral Grafton? Please wait while I connect you with General Land.”
In seconds he heard Land’s voice. After the usual greetings, Land asked, “Got your gadget handy?”
“Yessir, but I don’t have the code set.”
“You can do that afterward.”
“Just a moment, sir.”
The message took about twenty seconds to tape. The two men said their good-byes, then broke the connection.
Jake used a pocket calculator to compute the code, which he set into the device. Then he took it outside. A small garden in the back of the structure had some nice trees, some scraggly grass and flowers. No one was around. After a scan of the windows above him, he pushed the play button and held the device up to his ear.
Amazingly enough, the damned thing worked.
The second sentence was the essence of the message. “Albert Sidney Brown was poisoned.” That thought was expanded and various chemical compounds were discussed, but there was no doubt. The corpse contained lethal amounts of a synthetic compound not found in nature.
When Jack Yocke got back to the Metropolitan Hotel that evening, he asked the desk clerk if he had any messages. Assured that neither his editor nor his mother had seen fit to invest in a call halfway around the world this evening, he strolled for the elevator.
He checked his watch. Only ten-thirty. What the hey, why not a cup of coffee before bed?
He detoured into the bar, nodded at Dimitri, the night barman, and ordered.
With his coffee in front of him, he sat contemplating the painting on the wall opposite the bar. It looked as if it were old and the varnish had darkened, but maybe it had been painted to look old. The wall of the Kremlin was on one side of the picture and St. Basil’s Cathedral on the other. But Red Square wasn’t there — merely mud and a few shacks and a giant ditch along the Kremlin wall to make things tough for touring Mongols and visiting Poles. Just slightly left of center stood a nobleman listening to a peasant. Yocke looked at this painting at least three or four times a week and often wondered what the serf was saying.
His idle musings were derailed when he realized a woman had seated herself at the bar with only one stool between them. She greeted the barman pleasantly and ordered coffee in American English.
“A fellow Yank, as I live and breathe. What brings you to Sodom on the Moskva?”
She turned her head toward him and grinned. She had dark brown eyes, almost black, set wide apart. Dark brown hair tumbled to her shoulders. Her chin was the perfect size, her lips just right. With the exception of one prostitute who visited the hotel occasionally, she was the prettiest woman Yocke had yet seen in Russia, which was saying something since Russia had its fair share of beautiful women. Best of all, she was about his age and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Or any ring.
“I live in Moscow,” she told him.
“Is that a Boston accent?”
“Actually Vermont, but four years at Brandeis ruined me, I’m afraid.”