The Red Horseman

9

The plane was the personal transport of the Minister of defense and still the rest room smelled like an outhouse and no water came out of the sink taps. No paper towels. So much for personal hygiene!

Jake opened the door and stepped out into the aisle that led to the cockpit. There was no cockpit door and he could see the instrument panel between the pilots.

The warning placards were in Cyrillic and the instruments had funny labels. He stood there looking over their shoulders for several seconds before the pilot realized he was there and looked over his shoulder. He said something in Russian and Jake replied in English.

“Good morning,” the pilot managed.

“Good morning,” Jake echoed. “Nice plane you got here.”

When the pilot tapped his watch and made half a circle on the face with his finger, Jake nodded sagely and returned to his seat.

General Yakolev was in a seat across the aisle conferring with his aide. They were going over documents. Toad sat in the next row with Jocko West, who was broadening the American’s horizons. Behind them sat the other foreign military representatives.

Today they were making a trip to a Russian nuclear weapons depot to see how warheads were disassembled. The name of the base they were going to was Petrovsk, on the Volga watershed. Jake glanced at the map again. The place was a hundred miles or so north northeast of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where the Soviet army shattered Adolph Hitler’s ambitions.

Jake Grafton hadn’t even been born then, but Yakolev was a young soldier in the Soviet army. Once again Jake pondered the twists of fate that had lifted Yakolev to the top, wondered again about the man who wore that uniform.

The window was scratched from being repeatedly wiped with dirty rags, but Jake managed to get a look through it at the land sliding by thirty thousand or so feet below. Forests, occasional small villages, roads that followed the contours of the land.

It just didn’t look like America, or even western Europe. Those landscapes had their own distinct look that an experienced air traveler would recognize at a glance. Part of the problem, Jake decided, was that Russia was just too big. Great distances were the blessing that caused Napoleon and Hitler to founder and the curse that had stymied generations of Communist economic planners.

Soon Jake heard the power being reduced and felt the nose drop a degree or two as the pilot began his descent.

All this talk about weapons…it would be good finally to see some of the damned things.

The weapons were being disassembled in a makeshift clean room that didn’t look any too tight. This was the scene of Yakolev’s show-and-tell session. The Western visitors gathered in front of a plate-glass window and watched white-robed technicians use mechanical arms to manipulate the warhead parts while an interpreter translated Yakolev’s comments, which were in Russian. Amazingly, when they entered the facility no one had offered them film badges to record the level of radiation to which they might be exposed, nor was anyone working here wearing one.

Beside the general stood a man in civilian clothes who looked nervous. Jake assumed he was the manager of this facility. Occasionally Yakolev asked him a question and pondered the reply, but the interpreter didn’t translate these exchanges.

From the clean room an army truck took the party to a large hangar where row after row of missiles sat on their transporters. Against one wall were stacked wooden crates of pallets — nuclear warheads. The small party stood in silence taking it all in.

Yakolev stood beside Jake. Finally he spoke, in English. “Impressive, yes?”

“That it is.”

“Russia shook the world with these missiles,” Yakolev said. “And now we take them apart.”

Jake Grafton searched the older man’s impassive face.

“We become another poor country without a voice in the world’s affairs,” the general continued after a moment, still looking at the row upon row of missiles decorated with huge red stars. “The television brings us news of the great things that are happening in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Bonn… We learn the thoughts of the great men of our age. The world’s leaders ponder the future of mankind and debate how much money to give Russia while we eat our potatoes and borsch.”

Yakolev slapped Jake on the back. “That is progress, no? No more bad old Communists! Now Russians buy televisions and watch CNN and the BBC and bet on world cup soccer and tennis matches at Wimbledon. They worry about stock prices in Tokyo and London and New York. No more bad old Russians! They are just like us.”

Yakolev turned away and Jake Grafton watched his retreating back. Then he stood looking at the missiles.

General Yakolev excused himself for a few hours work, so Jake asked for a tour of the base. This disconcerted the civilian interpreter, but within a few minutes a military guide-interpreter was provided. “What want to see?” the man asked with a heavy accent, wearing a perplexed look.

“The enlisted barracks, the mess hall and the hospital,” Jake told him.

The guide was in uniform, with a rank designation that Jake didn’t recognize, and now he looked around in bewilderment. Jake guessed that he was in his early twenties. Seeing no one handy to voice his concerns to, yet unwilling to refuse the request of this important foreign visitor in the strange uniform, he slowly led Jake and Toad out the door of the hangar office and set a course across the packed dirt toward a distant building.

“What’s your name?”

“Mikhail Babkin, sir.”

“You speak excellent English.” Jake Grafton mouthed the complimentary lie easily, without a twinge of conscience. English is different than all other languages, he reflected. Most Frenchmen listening to badly spoken French will pretend that they cannot understand or ignore the offender entirely. Yet any American meeting a goatherd in sub-Sahara Africa or on the windswept steppes of Mongolia who knows a word or two of pidgen English will compliment that worthy on his command of the language.

The barracks was of concrete construction, the usual Russian mix of too little cement, too much sand. The soldiers lived in one large, smelly, musty room with wooden bunks without springs. In the middle of the room stood a wood stove with an exhaust pipe leading to the roof. The bathrooms were communal, with no seats on the filthy toilets and one large shower with five drippy heads. There was no hot water heater. The smell…

“No hot water?”

“Hot? No.”

For an American naval officer who had spent half his adult life aboard ship where men were forced to live together in close quarters, this barracks was an appalling sight. The men who lived here must be constantly sick.

The mess hall was even worse. It was filthy, without refrigeration facilities or hot water. Jake asked how the dishes were washed and was told that each man dips his plate into a large drum of cold water. He was shown the drums.

At the hospital he wandered the corridors and looked at the soldiers in the beds. They stared back at him. He peeked into one empty operating room with little equipment.

“Where do you sterilize the instruments?” They are boiled, he was told. There was a sink in the anteroom, the taps dripping. He turned them on full and let them run. Uh-oh.

“Hot water?”

“Hot? No. Want see X-ray machine?”

Stunned, Jake left the dimly lit building meekly when an officious person, presumably the administrator or doctor in charge, fired a volley of Russian at their escort and pointed at the door.

“The sewage treatment plant… I want to see the sewage treatment plant.”

The translator had great difficulty understanding the request. Toad got into the act. Finally Jake realized that there was no sewage treatment plant. Eventually it became clear that the sewage was piped straight to the local river. The translator led them to the bank where they could look down upon the discharge pipes.

And nearby was the garbage dump. Above ground. The wind brought a whiff of it to where Jake and Toad and the translator were standing. Some small creature darted toward the pile, birds wheeled above, clouds of flies…

For all these years, Jake thought savagely, we have been told about the vast capabilities of the Soviet military machine. And it’s all a lie. The shiny missiles and pretty tanks are the whole show. The men who must operate these weapons are poorly housed, in ill health, live in unsanitary conditions and eat food a Western health inspector would send to a landfill. It’s all a lie.

What was it General Brown had said? The Soviet Union is a nation in total social and economic collapse. Nothing works. Nothing!

He was in a subdued mood when he boarded the plane for the return flight to Moscow. General Yakolev made some comment but he paid no attention.

Toad Tarkington had a drink in each hand, and he held out one to Jake Grafton, who looked but didn’t reach.

“It’s Scotch on the rocks,” Toad said. Seeing the look on Grafton’s face, he added, “I broke the seal on the bottle myself and poured it.”

Jake accepted the glass and tried to grin.

“I know,” Toad said.

Around them the Fourth of July reception at Spaso House, the United States’ ambassador’s residence, was in full swing. Jake Grafton estimated the crowd at four or five hundred people. They were everywhere, in every room, in every hall, bumping into one another, nibbling delicacies from the trays of passing waiters, and drinking champagne by the gallon. In one corner a combo played light music by American composers. The light from the chandeliers cast a warm, soft glow over everything.

Ambassador Owen Lancaster was mixing and mingling. Agatha Hempstead hovered discreetly, ready to whisper a name into the ambassador’s ear yet far enough away that she was not a party to his conversations. It was a delicate balancing act but she seemed to pull it off without effort.

A few minutes ago Jake had seen Herb Tenney talking to the British Army officer, Colonel Jocko West. In rumpled civilian clothes that somehow didn’t quite fit, West looked like the caterer’s husband dragged away from the television to help with the snack tray.

On the other hand Colonel Reynaud, the French officer, looked like a millionaire standing in the casino at Monte Carlo waiting for the baccarat tables to open. He was impeccably turned out in full dress uniform with medals. Just now he seemed to be discussing a wine with one of the embassy staffers — he was holding the glass up to the light, now sniffing it, paying close attention to what the State Department employee had to say.

Colonel Galvano, the Italian, was in a corner with a Russian diplomat. They were deep in conversation but weren’t grinning.

“Jack Yocke here yet?” Jake asked Toad.

“Not yet, sir. Dalworth is waiting for him at the door.”

Toad reached out and flicked a piece of lint off the left shoulderboard of Jake’s white dress uniform. With medals and sword. Toad was similarly decked out. He squared his shoulders and adjusted his sword.

“We look sorta spiffy, don’t we, sir? What say you go stand over next to that South American general or policeman or postal inspector and let me get a photo for posterity.”

“Dalworth know what to do?”

“Yessir. I briefed him. Stick like glue all evening.”

“Even in the head.”

“All evening,” Toad repeated. Jake wanted Herb Tenney and his CIA colleagues to see Yocke and learn who he was, but he didn’t want them moving in on him. So Spiro Dalworth had been carefully briefed.

“Okay,” the admiral said. Toad wandered off.

Dalworth seemed like a bright, capable junior officer. Just how the navy managed to keep attracting quality young people was one of the modern mysteries. It wasn’t the pay or career opportunities, not in this era of red tape, budget cuts, politically correct witch hunts and reductions in force.

Jake was sipping his drink and musing about the hundreds of men like Dalworth he had known through the years when the ambassador rendezvoused on his right elbow. “Good evening, Admiral.”

“Good evening, sir. Are all the Fourth of July whing-dings like this?”

“Well, this is my first, and the staff said I was going to be surprised. I think for a lot of the Russians the invitations were a welcome relief from the ordinary. I don’t think we’ll have many leftovers, if you know what I mean.”

Jake knew. He had already glimpsed several Russians by the hors d’oeuvre table surreptitiously wrapping food items in napkins and pocketing them. He had pretended not to notice.

“Haven’t had a chance to chat with you the last day or two. Everything going okay?”

Jake Grafton nodded thoughtfully. “So far.”

“Anything I or my staff can do… What do you think of General Yakolev?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“He’s as Russian as Rasputin. When you figure him out, I’d be interested to hear what you think.”

“Yessir. If I may ask, who are these four or five Americans that arrived this afternoon?”

“Eight of them, I think,” Lancaster said. “They’re investigators who are going to go through the files of the KGB, the Apparat…” Lancaster waved vaguely. “When Yeltsin invited the Americans over to look at the files, we took him up on it. They’re FBI, CIA, some military investigators, one each from the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees.”

“Will there be anything left in the files to find?” Jake asked, musing aloud.

“Depends on how hard they look,” Lancaster said sourly. “I doubt that shredder technology has arrived here yet but the Russians have matches and garbage dumps. Still, one never knows. A lot of these people thought they were in the vanguard of the march of history and wanted to preserve their place in it with written records. Then there’s the bureaucratic imperative, what I believe you military types crudely refer to as CYA.”

CYA — Cover Your Ass. Jake Grafton knew about that!

“Is Yeltsin here yet?” he asked the ambassador.

“No. He didn’t come last year either, which is a diplomatic faux pas that no European prime minister or president would ever commit. But this is Russia.”

Agatha Hempstead brushed against the ambassador’s elbow, and he raised one eyebrow at Jake. Then he was on his way to the next group. Jake smiled at Agatha as she passed and got an expressionless nod in return.

He looked at his watch. What was the time in Washington? About ten in the morning. If it were not a holiday Callie would be at the university holding office hours. She had an eleven o’clock class this semester. Amy was on summer vacation, going swimming and flirting with the Jackson boy, who had long hair and pimples and a learner’s permit. Since it was a holiday, they had probably gone to the beach. Jake wished he were there with them.

General Yakolev was here tonight with his boss, Marshal Dimitri Mikhailov. The head of the Russian military looked every inch a curmudgeon used to getting his own way. He was playing with a champagne glass and listening to an interpreter explain what the British ambassador was saying.

Apparently not that enthused with diplomacy, Yakolev wandered to the buffet table and helped himself. Soon Ambassador Lancaster had him cornered, but the Russian was eyeing Ms. Goodbody Hempstead as he munched Swedish meatballs. Hempstead favored him with a demure smile. And there was Herb Tenney, handing them champagne from a tray. Herb Tenney, champagne waiter… Those CIA guys had all the social graces.

Jake looked at the drink in his hand. What if Tenney slipped his damned stuff into the embassy’s water purification system? Spaso House’s system? Moscow tap water was heavily polluted and the Americans ran it through a purifier before they made it available for human consumption. Perhaps the kitchen staff uses tap water to cook with. People brush their teeth with it. Ice cubes are made from it.

He had had what? — one or two sips?

Hell, Jake! Quit sweating it. This stuff is safe as holy water until Herb slips you the second half of the cocktail.

But it was no use. Even if he were dying of thirst he wouldn’t touch it. He put the glass with its two ice cubes on the table behind him, on a magazine so it wouldn’t leave a ring, and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

There was Yocke now, escorted by Spiro Dalworth. He came wandering over to where Grafton was parked and waggled his eyebrows in greeting. “How’s the booze?”

“Free.”

“Jack Daniel’s and water, a double,” the reporter told Dalworth. “And anything you want for yourself.”

After a glance at Grafton, Dalworth turned and headed for the bar.

“So what’s new on the Soviet Square murders?”

“Damn if I know,” the reporter replied. “They had me chasing human interest today. Tommy Townsend, our senior guy, took over the assassination since it’s so hot, but the poor bastard is probably hanging out at the Kremlin waiting for a press release. The cops over here won’t tell you diddley squat. I’m going to try to milk them tomorrow.”

“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.”

“Name’s Jake Yocke.”

“Shirley Ross.”

She wasn’t cover girl Cosmo gorgeous, Yocke concluded, but she had perfect bones: the forehead, the cheekbones, the chin. Her face was a feast for the eyes.

She had been here over a year, she told Yocke, first as an interpreter for an American telecommunications company, then as a journalist for an English-language monthly magazine published here.

“Small world. I scribble for a living too. Washington Post.”

“The Post?”

“The one and only.”

“Do you know Sally Quinn?” Sally was a Post reporter, columnist and all-around original character. She had even written a novel or two.

“Uh-huh.”

Shirley Ross grinned.

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the corner sipping Bailey’s. “So how is this borsch batch going to come out?” Yocke asked her.

“You want a prediction?”

He nodded.

“Yeltsin, democracy and where to place your bets for the coming civil war.”

Yocke tasted his drink again. She was working on her second but he was still nursing his first. After the whiskey at the embassy and the coffee here the liqueur was too sweet. And he was feeling the alcohol. This woman in front of him was also stimulating his hormones.

Her discussion of the political situation struck Jack Yocke as enlightened and well informed. She got her tongue around the names of these Russian politicians without a single slip. Jack Yocke felt slightly deflated. Shirley Ross knew more about Russian politics than he ever hoped to know. When she fell silent he told her that.

She grinned again. “Not really. It’s my job. You’ll pick it up. Wow your friends back home when they get tired of talking about TV shows and movies. People will avoid you at cocktail parties.” She mugged with a suspicious glance out of the corner of her eyes, then joined him in laughter.

He looked into those deep brown eyes and felt completely at ease. American women are the very best. “This Soviet Square killing — what are people saying about that?”

Her eyes flicked around the room and came to rest on him. “Do you want Sunday op-ed bullshit or do you want the truth?”

Dimitri was loading the German-made dishwasher and making the usual noises. Jack and the woman were the only people in the bar. “Without surrendering my right to later argue that op-ed pieces are an attempt to write the truth, I choose the second alternative. What truth do you know?”

She toyed with her swizzle stick while he studied her face. At last the eyes came up to meet his. “The truth will never come out.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and relaxed. He looked at his watch. Tomorrow was going to be a long day hunting for cops willing to talk while he listened to Gregor’s tales of Brooklyn. He took a deep breath, exhaled and scooted his chair back. “Do you come here often, Shirley?”

“The KGB is setting up Yeltsin.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Yocke squared off to face her. “What can you tell me?”

“Nothing that you can print.” She lay down the swizzle stick and hunted in her purse. She extracted a pack of Marlboros and a pack of matches. After she lit one she examined Yocke’s face through the smoke.

“You came here tonight to meet me, didn’t you?”

Her eyes stayed on his face. She smoked the cigarette in silence. The dishwasher behind the bar lit off with a rumble.

“Anything you tell me I have to confirm. Someone else must confirm every fact or I can’t print it.”

“If you ever tell anyone where you got this or who I am you will ruin me.”

“We never reveal sources who request anonymity.”

“This is Russia.”

She didn’t know anything. Perhaps she thought she knew something, but what the hell could it be? She’s an American, for Chrissake!

“Three KGB officers…” She stubbed out the cigarette and looked at Dimitri, who was working on receipts on an IBM computer terminal. Her eyes came back to Yocke.

“Three KGB officers…” He had to lean forward across the table to hear her voice above the noise of the dishwasher.

She swallowed and fumbled for another cigarette.

“Three KGB officers went to police headquarters a half hour before the assassination. They ordered the police away from Soviet Square.”

“How do you know this?”

A whisper: “The order was transmitted over the radio. The police in the square heard it on their little radios. You’ve seen those little radios they wear, haven’t you?”

“I’ve seen them.” The police here were wired up just like the cops in Washington and Detroit.

“Kolokoltsev was a pawn sacrifice. It’s the king they want.”

“Who’s they?” To his chagrin, Yocke’s voice came out a whisper. He raised it a notch and repeated the question. “Who’s they?”

She just shook her head.

“I need some names.”

She leaned back and sucked fiercely on the cigarette. Her eyes went to Dimitri and stayed there.

“He can’t hear us.”

“He’s KGB. All these hard-currency hotel people are.”

“He can’t hear us over that dishwasher,” Yocke insisted. “You’re going to have to point me in the right direction. Give me a name. One name. Any of them. Any one of them.”

She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and drained her drink.

“I have to have someplace to start looking, Shirley, or your trip down here was a waste of time. You must know how goddamn tough it is to get Russians to open up to an American reporter. It’s like asking a dope dealer if he’s got a load coming in anytime soon.”

Her lips twisted into an attempt at a grin as she stood up. Now the lips straightened. Gripping her purse tightly she leaned across the table and whispered, “Nikolai Demodov.”

“Was he one of the three?”

But she was walking out. She went through the door and turned left and was gone.

Up in his room Jack Yocke wrote the name on his computer screen and sat staring at it. Nikolai Demodov.

Well, it was a pretty story. No getting around that. A pretty story. He didn’t know enough to even guess how much truth there might be to the tale, if any, but his instinct told him some truth was there. You develop that instinct in this business after you have listened to a lot of stories. Maybe it’s their eyes, the body language.

He tapped aimlessly on the keyboard for a few moments, then turned the computer off.

He brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands and stared at his reflection in the mirror over the sink while he thought about Shirley Ross and the three KGB agents.

If only he could have gotten more out of her. How should he have handled it? She must have known all three of the names. At the minimum she knew how the hell Nikolai Demodov fits in. Where had he lost her? And where did she get her information?

Aaagh! To be tantalized so and have the door slammed in your face! Infuriating…

Most people are poor liars. Oh, every now and then you meet a good one, but most people have not had the practice it takes to tell a lie properly. Cops can smell a lie. So can some lawyers and preachers. And all good reporters. Even if you can’t put your finger on why it plays right, you know truth when you find it.

Just now Jack Yocke decided he had seen some of it. And the glimpse excited him.