“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Now, Jake! Don’t start that crap! I’ve risked my butt this afternoon right along with you and Rita and all these other military heroes. It wouldn’t hurt an iota for you to come clean and tell me the whole truth. For once.”
Jack Yocke got the gray eyes full face. There was no warmth in them. “That’s the second time you’ve called me Jake. You aren’t old enough or wise enough. Don’t do it again.”
“Yessir. No offense. But I mean it about leveling with me. I feel like a kid in a haunted Halloween house. I’ve paid my buck and I keep getting the shit scared out of me even after it ceases to be fun. How about telling me what you know?”
“I don’t know what happened to those weapons. I was as surprised as you were when I saw those empty transporters and the bodies.”
“The story I heard that got me over to this country was that the Iraqis were trying to buy some nuke weapons. I heard they had three billion to spend for the right toys.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
Jack Yocke scratched his nose, then rubbed his face good. It went against the grain to reveal a source but he didn’t see any way out of it. Finally he said, “One of the ICB executives told me, off the record. He was sitting in a New York jail awaiting trial when I interviewed him.” The International Commerce Bank had recently been shut down worldwide for money laundering on a stupendous scale, that and a garden variety of other financial crimes.
“Did you believe him?”
This was the crucial question. A professional reporter hears a lot of stories, every now and then a true one. The good reporters can smell a lie a block away. “I thought he was telling the truth,” Yocke told the admiral. “Or what he believed to be the truth. It had the right feel.”
“I don’t mean to insult you, but did you get that feel when Judith Farrell told you her Soviet Square tale?”
“Yeah, I did. I’ve been thinking about that. In the first place she was a professional liar and damn good, and second, most of the story was true, in fact all of it except who was ultimately responsible. So it played well. There was nothing fancy or hyped. I bought it.” He shrugged.
Jake Grafton visibly relaxed. “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. I bought one of her stories one time too.”
Jack Yocke got the feeling he had just passed some kind of test. “Well, the ICB tip didn’t pan out over here. I had the names of two former ICB execs who had run to earth in Moscow that my source swore knew the ins and outs — if they could be persuaded to talk. These two birds supposedly shuffled the money every which way to Sunday to make it impossible to trace. That made sense, so I looked for them for four straight days but couldn’t get a sniff. Not that I’m any great shakes at finding people in Moscow, but still…”
“I heard about the money going through ICB too,” Jake said softly. “Maybe from Iraq. Maybe from an Iraqi working for Iran.”
“Heard any names? Which Russian might have gotten the dough?”
“A name or two. That much money, it’s impossible to keep it secret. Oh, they’ve tried. But that much money…” He had repeated the rumors to Richard Harper in the hope that he could find the trail. Did he?
He heard the power being reduced. “I’d better go talk to Rita,” Jake said. “We’ll land at another airport and Toad can call Aeroflot. No use letting the manager see who was on his chartered airplane.” Yocke got out of his seat, then Jake maneuvered himself into the aisle and walked forward to the cockpit.
Three billion dollars. That wasn’t pocket change anywhere, but in Russia it was a stupendous amount of money. Too much, really. Jack Yocke moved to the window seat and sat staring out, wondering where the money could be, what a Russian could use it for. In Russia there were no stocks to buy, no bonds, no office buildings to invest in, no art masterpieces for sale, no private oil syndicates setting out to drill up Siberia or the Gulf of Mexico. It was amazing, really. Here was a whole nation with not a goddamn thing to invest money in, unless you were looking to throw your bucks into worn-out factories producing obsolete, shoddy goods that no one on the planet except starving, penniless Russians wanted.
However, one possibility did come to mind. He looked toward the cockpit, started to get out of the seat and go that way, then decided against it. If he thought of it, the idea must have already occurred to Jake Grafton.
He sighed and scratched himself and turned his attention back to the window.
It was dark when the Tupolev 154 landed at Domodedovo, a huge field for domestic airliners thirty miles southeast of Moscow. Rita taxied to the corner of the airport most remote from the terminal and shut down the engines. Jake went back to find Captain Collins. He wiggled a finger at Iron Mike McElroy, the marine captain, who came over. “I want this airplane washed before we call Aeroflot. I don’t want any radioactivity overdoses on my conscience.”
McElroy agreed to use his people to find some tank trucks and hoses and to do the washing, and Collins agreed to use his equipment to ensure they got the hot spots and diluted the runoff as much as possible.
“Do the best you can,” Jake told them, and left it at that.
An hour later Jake was in Ambassador Lancaster’s office in the embassy complex. Ms. Hempstead sat on the couch with a notepad on her lap.
“Yeltsin refused to resign,” Lancaster said. “The anti-Yeltsin forces have forced a no-confidence vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies. The best Yeltsin could do was get it delayed until Friday.”
This was Monday evening. Jake glanced at the calendar on the ambassador’s desk to make sure. Three days.
“Yakolev and Shmarov have been on television,” the ambassador continued. “They and the rest of the junta seem to have a lot of support. People are hungry, unemployed, the factories don’t have raw materials or markets, this Serdobsk disaster may have been the last straw.”
“Yeltsin was popularly elected. I didn’t know the legislature could throw him out.”
“Technically they can’t. But over here they’re still making up the rules as they go along. If he loses on the no-confidence vote he can either call for a new election of deputies or resign and let the congress choose a successor. The problem is that his support is melting away.”
“What’s the American position?”
“We’ve got to let the Russians sort it out for themselves. We’ll recognize any government that gets in without resort to violence.”
“How about blowing up the Serdobsk reactor? Would Washington classify that as a violent act?”
Lancaster goggled. Hempstead came off the couch and floated toward the desk. “Blew it up? Who?”
“I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m merely asking a question.”
“This isn’t the time for soaring hypotheticals, Admiral,” Hempstead said acidly, “or cute questions about when someone stopped beating his wife.” She stalked back to the couch and snatched up her notepad.
“I assume you do have some basis for your question,” Owen Lancaster said uneasily. “Exactly what did you find out on your helicopter trip to Serdobsk?”
“The reactor and containment vessel are gone, sir, nothing left but a crater and some rubble. The entire control building was destroyed. A storage building a hundred yards or so from the reactor was severely damaged and the plutonium containers that were inside ruptured.”
Lancaster merely nodded. Like most people, he had only the vaguest idea of what a meltdown was or what the physical effects might be. He expected something terrible of course, but just what was rather hazy. This description sounded properly catastrophic, so he murmured “horrible” and shook his head. “Nobody survived, I suppose?”