No Time for Heroes

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The terror was still juddering through Maksim Zimin when he was led into the interview room. He smelled foul and Cowley guessed he’d wet himself, perhaps worse. He looked with undisguised hatred at both of them, his gaze remaining on the American.

‘You quite sure now?’ said Cowley.

‘Bastard!’ It was a hoarse whimper, without any force, the man had screamed so much. ‘You know what I’m going to do! And enjoy doing it.’

‘Wait!’ warned Cowley, not to put off the inevitable but to get as much as they could before it came: he still delayed switching on the tape recorder. ‘You don’t have them: I guess your people have, but you don’t. We’re not dealing with that, not now. What we’re going to decide today is whether what you tell us is good enough to stop us putting you back in the hole, like last night. And we will. If you fuck us about maybe we’ll even give you a shared cell. And go on doing it until we’re satisfied we’ve got it all. You clear on that?’

Danilov sat on the sidelines, bewildered. There’d been no rehearsal, as there hadn’t when the American had recognised the man as a bully who could be broken, and Danilov didn’t have any idea what this latest exchange was about. Once again he decided to wait, until he got a guide from his colleague.

‘Bastard!’ said Zimin again, louder this time.

‘You’re wasting time: risking going back down below. Don’t be stupid.’ Cowley had realised the previous night there was no way the man would have been carrying copies of the photographs – the photographs Cowley, in fact, did have, locked in the briefcase at his hotel.

‘You’ll deal!’ It was meant as a threat but it came out more as a question. ‘My people will make you deal.’

Not just a bully but a fool, thought Cowley. The man had just confirmed who the blackmailers were. It hardly mattered. He couldn’t use the information to any benefit.

Did Zimin imagine the American had more influence in Italy than he did, as a Russian? thought Danilov. It had been Cowley who’d manipulated the man’s collapse, so he might think so.

Beside him Cowley depressed the start button on the recording machine and said: ‘You’re Chechen, right?’

Momentarily Zimin hesitated, and Cowley thought he was going to go on with the threats. Then he said: ‘Yes.’

‘What level?’

‘ Komitet.’

‘Inner council?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many?’

‘Three.’

High, seized Danilov triumphantly: high enough to explain everything, surely!

‘What was the meeting for, in Sicily?’ Another Quantico lesson was that the more they talked, the easier the flow became.

‘Big. The biggest ever…’

‘For them? Or you?’

‘Biggest ever for the Chechen.’

‘How big?’

‘Ten million.’

‘Which currency?’ The man was exaggerating, trying to make himself sound more important.

‘Dollars.’

‘You don’t have access to ten million dollars!’ challenged Danilov, deciding the intrusion was necessary, thinking the same as Cowley. They wanted the truth, not lies from a man trying to avoid being thrown back into the horror they’d shown him. The profit from crime in Moscow had to be enormous, but there couldn’t be this much.

‘There’s more. Ten million was all I was authorised to negotiate this time.’

‘For what?’ Cowley decided to let the man believe he was successfully bullshitting them until he tripped over his own lies. Then he’d threaten the hole again.

‘Drugs,’ declared Zimin. ‘Heroin, from the Liccio people here. Cocaine through the Genovese, from Latin America…’ Zimin went between the two investigators. ‘There’s a huge market, everywhere in the world. The idea was to make it two way. We were going to set up an organisation in Georgia: move heroin and marijuana from Uzbekistan and Kazakstan… ship it out through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean to here…’

Zimin was being clever, thought Cowley: mixing what could have been fact with fiction. Before he could make the intended threat, Danilov said: ‘You’re lying! You don’t have ten million dollars!’

‘So you’re going back to the hole!’ supported Cowley, reaching out to turn off the recording machine.

‘No!’ wailed Zimin. ‘There is the money!’

‘From where?’ demanded Cowley. ‘The truth!’

‘Government money!’

The announcement momentarily stopped both investigators, each coming towards the same conclusion from different directions. Cowley guessed it was going to throw the entire American government into the biggest loop of this or any other administration. Danilov decided what they were hearing would be officially blocked and diverted and derailed and that all along he’d been a puppet, dancing on a string to convince the Americans of co-operation never intended. It’s like a dub, everyone looking after each other. Leonid Lapinsk’s cynicism echoed in his mind, more like a jeer than a warning.

Danilov spoke first. ‘Are you telling us – wanting us to believe – your presence here is known about by the Russian government… that it’s somehow official?’ The man could still be lying. But Petr Serov had been a Russian diplomat. And Oleg Yasev, a senior and as yet unchallenged Foreign Ministry man, had withheld a name-identifying document. And Gennardi Fedorov, who’d gone to Serov’s funeral, was attached to the Finance Ministry.

‘Not the government,’ groped Zimin, who’d started to sweat badly. ‘Not the government in control now!’

‘You’re not making sense!’ protested Cowley.

‘ Listen to me!’ pleaded Zimin. ‘It was the coup!’

The American remained lost. For Danilov the fog was still thick, but there were shapes vaguely forming. Serov’s concealed diary-entry dates connected perfectly with the August 1991 attempt by the desperate Communist hardliners to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachov and reverse the reforms he had initiated. Danilov’s awareness grew. Billions had been stolen: stolen and never recovered. A government commission had been established to investigate. If he was correctly interpreting what Zimin was saying, the exposure – if it ever were exposed – would be sensational.

‘How much, in total?’

‘We don’t know!’ insisted Zimin. ‘Twenty million at least.’

‘We’re talking about the Communist Party funds that were looted? And have never been found?’

‘Of course we are!’ said Zimin, almost impatiently.

Conscious of the need to get it audibly on the slowly revolving tape, Danilov said: ‘The Chechen, a Moscow Mafia organisation, have access to twenty million dollars of looted Communist Party funds?’

‘That’s right.’

Both Danilov and Cowley were curious at the sly smile that accompanied the admission.

‘In Moscow?’ pressed Danilov.

‘No.’

‘No, it wasn’t, was it:’ understood the American. ‘It’s in Switzerland! Michel Paulac was looking after it: the local man administering it!’

‘Only government officials – Communist government officials – would have been able to move a sum of money that large out of Russia?’ suggested Danilov.

‘I suppose so,’ agreed Zimin.

That was slightly off centre, as if the man knew a lot but not all, even though he claimed to be on the governing committee of the crime family. Where was the key? Was it in the past, in August 1991? Or maybe earlier: as early as May of that year, the very first time a name still unexplained appeared in the Serov documents? Abruptly, Danilov said: ‘Who is Ilya Iosifivich Nishin?’

Danilov was unsure if the frown was of genuine ignorance or surprise that he had the name. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You must!’ pressed Cowley. He was sure he would be tainted with the man’s stink.

‘I don’t!’

Nishin was important, Danilov determined. And he thought at last he knew the direction in which to look, to fit another piece into the puzzle. It would have needed a government official to move at least $20,000,000 out of Russia. But the coup had collapsed so quickly it would have had to be moved prior to the attempt, because there was no time afterwards! May, 1991 – when Ilya Nishin had visited Geneva and then Washington – was very significant. His mind on Switzerland, Danilov said: ‘Why was Michel Paulac killed?’

‘He was stupid. Wouldn’t listen.’

‘To what?’ came in Cowley.

‘That control was going to change.’

‘Control of the money in Switzerland?’

‘Yes.’

‘To the Chechen?’

‘Yes.’

‘From whom?’

‘The Ostankino.’

Finally it was settling into place! Danilov asked: ‘Why was Serov killed?’

‘A warning.’

‘Who to?’

‘Those who had to realise it.’

‘Why was Ignatov murdered?’ demanded Cowley.

‘A warning again.’

‘Who to?’

‘The Ostankino.’ He paused. ‘I’m getting tired.’

‘There’s a cell downstairs, in the basement, where you can rest if you want,’ said Cowley relentlessly. ‘“Control was changing.” Changing from the Ostankino to the Chechen?’

‘Yes.’

‘So the Ostankino had the money first?’

‘Thought they did.’

‘How did the Chechen learn about it?’

Zimin shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Cowley decided the man had fouled himself. The Russian said: ‘A recruit.’

One of the August 1991 ringleaders had been KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov: whose all-embracing, all-knowing, all-pervasive intelligence organisation had probably been the most hard-hit casualty. ‘There were a lot of unemployed, weren’t there? He must have been high ranking, before. Or been in some administrative position, to learn things?’ It was a supposition, but Danilov was sure it was a correct one.

‘What was the rank?’ chanced Cowley, joining in the guess.

‘Colonel,’ conceded Zimin.

‘We need to get names,’ said Danilov. ‘Why don’t we start with his?’

‘Visco,’ said the man. ‘Georgi Petrovich.’

‘Go on,’ prompted Cowley.

Zimin nervously allowed himself a faint sneer. He said: ‘The KGB had a file on us. On all the Families. Visco knew a lot, about everyone.’ He smiled openly at Danilov. ‘There were files on co-operative people in the Militia, too. The most comprehensive details of all were about the transfer to Switzerland of the Party funds. He’d heard about it from another KGB officer, Anatoli Zuyev, who had links with the Ostankino and who had somehow – he didn’t know how – been involved.’

Quantico’s teaching had been right, Cowley thought: once the floodgates opened, the disclosures poured through. ‘Let’s go on with names! All the Chechen! And the Ostankino: as many as you know!’

Zimin’s list came to twenty-two, eighteen from his own organisation. The ultimate leadership, the other two on the komitet, were Arkadi Pavlovich Gusovsky and Alexandr Dorovich Yerin.

‘More!’ demanded Danilov, following an idea. ‘What is Ivan Zavorin, the man with you?’

‘Money man. Accountant.’

‘Boris Amasov, the other one?’

‘A bull.’

‘Like Mikhail Antipov!’ seized Danilov.

For the second time, Zimin risked something approaching a sneer. ‘Pity you had to release him. An embarrassment.’ At the word the man focused on Cowley, seeming about to speak, but at the last minute he changed his mind.

‘Those amenable people you learned about from your KGB recruit?’ said Danilov. ‘Anatoli Metkin one of them? Vladimir Kabalin another?’ He intentionally stopped short of mentioning Kosov.

‘Please let me stop,’ pleaded Zimin. ‘I’ve done a lot: told you a lot.’

They were all tired, Danilov accepted. If they went on they risked becoming overwhelmed, losing sight of what they were getting.

‘Not enough,’ refused Cowley.

‘Tomorrow,’ said the man, still pleading. ‘But don’t send me back: please don’t send me back!’

Cowley looked enquiringly at Danilov, who nodded. The American snapped the machine off. With the recording off, Zimin said: ‘You will help me? I’ll tell you everything, but you must help me.’

He wouldn’t, Cowley knew. But they’d already got far more than he’d expected. ‘You won’t be sent back tonight. What happens tomorrow depends on what you tell us tomorrow. Before then you can clean yourself up.’

The meeting with Melega and Barclay Smith was the first in which they had anything worthwhile to exchange. Melega said, pessimistically, they might have prevented the link-up this time, but another would succeed soon. The local FBI agent just said: ‘Jesus!’ Neither was hopeful what they knew now would pressure the people they were questioning into any confirmation or new disclosure. Danilov argued there were still unresolved enquiries in Russia and America which could be hampered by any publicity about the confession, which would be better kept until the eventual trial. Melega reluctantly agreed.

After the conference, Cowley and Danilov separated to their different embassies to send their cables. For each of them, incoming messages were waiting.

Cowley was told of the possible Geneva photographic identification of Ilya Nishin and that scientists at Quantico, working through the sample instruments provided from Moscow, believed they had isolated the number dialled on Yevgennie Kosov’s car telephone, from which they could trace an address.

After a day solving a lot of mysteries the information at the embassy for Dimitri Danilov created another one, but he put it aside, more anxious to understand the bewildering exchange between the American and Zimin, at the beginning of that morning’s interrogation.

Cowley was already in the cocktail lounge at the Bernini Bristol when Danilov got back to the hotel. The Russian accepted a drink at the bar but carried it away to a table, making Cowley follow him.

Quoting, Danilov said: ‘“Bastard! You know what I’m going to do! And enjoy doing it.”’ He waited several moments. ‘What is it Zimin doesn’t have but “his people” do?’

‘You told us it was safe! Specifically! That’s what you had to do! All you had to do: find out!’ Gusovsky’s voice was frighteningly quiet.

‘That’s what he told me!’ protested Kosov ‘He was going back to Washington! The investigation was virtually over.’

‘Why would he trick you?’ demanded Gusovsky.

‘I don’t know!’

‘You’ve got to find out,’ said Yerin, looking blank-eyed at the Militia colonel. ‘And you’ve also got to find out what’s happening in Italy: if anyone’s talking.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘No,’ said Yerin. ‘You won’t try. You’ll find out. And if you don’t, we’ll kill you.’