The Hunted
Authors: Brian Haig
The events and characters in this book are fictitious and are inspired by Alex, the main character’s story. Certain real locations
and public figures are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are totally imaginary, and any
resemblance of such characters and events are purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Brian Haig
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: August 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55083-3
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The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Contents
Secret Sanction
Mortal Allies
The Kingmaker
Private Sector
The President’s Assassin
Man in the Middle
For Lisa, Brian, Pat, Donnie, and Annie.
Dedicated to Elena.
T
here are always very many people to thank when a book is finally slapped on the shelves for sale. Certainly my family: Lisa,
Brian, Paddie, Donnie, and Annie, who are always my inspiration, especially since the kids are all facing college, and I have
to pay the bills. Also my parents, Al and Pat Haig—they are in every way absolutely wonderful parents, and I love them both.
And of course everybody at Grand Central Publishing, from top to bottom, a remarkable collection of talented people who couldn’t
be more helpful or exquisitely professional: Jamie Raab, the lovely, warmhearted publisher; my overwhelmingly gifted and understanding
editor, Mitch Hoffman; the very forgiving pair of Mari Okuda and Roland Ottewell, who do the too-necessary patchwork of repairing
the horribly flawed drafts I send and somehow, remarkably, make them readable; and Anne Twomey and George Cornell, who designed
this stunning cover.
Most especially I want to thank my trusted agent and dear friend, Luke Janklow, and his family. Every writer should have an
agent like Luke.
Last, I want to thank my friend and favorite writer, Nelson De-Mille, who in addition to being—in my view—America’s best and
most entertaining author, does more to help and encourage aspiring writers get a start than anybody. When I first met Nelson
he generously offered this great advice: “You will only write so many books, so do your best to make each one as perfect as
you can.”
He does, I try to, and I very much hope you enjoy this latest effort.
1
November 1991
I
n the final days of an empire that was wheezing and lurching toward death, the aide watched his boss stare out the window
into the darkness. Time was running out. The fate of the entire nation hinged on the next move at this juncture; the entire
planet, possibly.
Any minute, his boss was due to pop upstairs and see Mikhail Gorbachev to deliver either a path to salvation or a verdict
of damnation.
But exactly what advice do you offer the doctor who has just poisoned his own patient?
Only three short miles away, he knew, Boris Yeltsin had just uncorked and was slurping down his third bottle of champagne.
Totally looped, the man was getting even more utterly hammered. A celebration of some sort, or so it appeared, though the
aide had not a clue what lay behind it. A KGB operative dressed as a waiter was hauling the hooch, keeping a watchful eye
on ol’ Boris and, between refills, calling in the latest updates.
After seventy years of struggle and turmoil, it all came down to this; the fate of the world’s last great empire hinged on
a titanic struggle between two men—one ordained to go down as the most pathetically naïve general secretary ever; the other
an obnoxious, loudmouthed lush.
Gorbachev was frustrated and humiliated, both men knew. He had inherited a kingdom founded on a catechism of bad ideas and
constructed on a mountain of corpses. What was supposed to be a worker’s paradise now looked with unrequited envy at third
world countries and pondered how it had all gone so horribly wrong. How ironic.
Pitiful, really.
For all its fearsome power—the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the world’s biggest army, colonies and “client” nations sprinkled
willy-nilly around the globe—the homeland itself was a festering pile of human misery and material junk.
Two floors above them in his expansive office, Gorbachev was racking his brain, wondering how to coax the genie back into
the bottle. Little late for that, they both knew. He had unleashed his woolly-headed liberalizing ideas—first, that asinine
glasnost, then the slam dunk of them all, perestroika—thinking a blitzkrieg of truth and fresh ideas would stave off a collapse
that seemed all but inevitable; inevitable to him, anyway. What was he thinking?
The history of the Soviet Union was so thoroughly shameful—so pockmarked with murders, genocide, treachery, corruption, egomania—it
needed to rest on a mattress of lies to be even moderately palatable. Fear, flummery, and fairy tales—the three F’s—those
were the glue that held things together.
Now everything was coming apart at the seams: the Soviet republics were threatening to sprint from the union, the Eastern
Bloc countries had already made tracks, and communism itself was teetering into a sad folly.
Way to go, Gorby.
On the streets below them a speaker with windmilling arms and megaphones for tonsils was working up a huge rabble that was
growing rowdier and more rambunctious by the second. The bulletproof thickened windows smeared out his exact words; as if
they needed to hear; as if they wanted to hear. Same thing street-corner preachers were howling and exhorting from Petersburg
to Vladivostok: time for democracy; long past time for capitalism. Communism was an embarrassing failure that needed to be
flushed down the toilet of history with all the other old faulty ideas. Just rally around Boris. Let’s send Gorby and the
last of his wrinkly old apparatchiks packing.
His boss cracked a wrinkled knuckle and asked softly, “So what do I tell Gorbachev?”
“Tell him he’s an idiot. Tell him he ruined everything.”
“He already knows that.”
Then tell him to eat a bullet, Ivan Yutskoi wanted to say. Better yet, do us all a big favor, shove him out the window and
have that spot-headed idiot produce a big red splat in the middle of Red Square. Future historians would adore that punctuation
point.
Sergei Golitsin, deputy director of the KGB, glowered and cracked another knuckle. He cared less for what this idiot thought.
“Tell me you’ve finally found where Yeltsin’s money’s coming from.”
“Okay. We have.”
“About time. Where?”
“It’s a little hard to believe.”
“I’ll believe anything these days. Try me.”
“Alex Konevitch.”
The deputy director gave him a mean look. After a full year of shrugged shoulders, wasted effort, and lame excuses, the triumphant
tone in his aide’s voice annoyed him. “And am I supposed to know this name?” he snapped.
“Well, no… you’re not… really.”
“Then tell me about… what’s this name?”
“Alex Konevitch.” Yutskoi stuffed his nose into the thick folder, shuffled a few papers, and withdrew and fixated on one typed
sheet. “Young. Only twenty-two. Born and raised in an obscure village in the Ural Mountains you’ve never heard of. Both parents
are educators, mother dead, father formerly the head of a small, unimportant college. Alex was a physics student at Moscow
University.”
Yutskoi paused for the reaction he knew was coming. “Only twenty two,” his boss commented with a furious scowl. “He ran circles
around you idiots.”
“I’ve got photographs,” said Yutskoi, ignoring that outburst. He withdrew a few blown-up eight-by-ten color photos from his
thick file and splayed them like a deck of cards before his boss. Golitsin walked across the room, bent forward, adjusted
his rimless glasses, and squinted.
The shots were taken, close up, by a breathtakingly attractive female agent who had entered Konevitch’s office only the day
before on the pretext of looking for a job. Olga’s specialty was honeypot operations, the luring of victims into the sack
for entrapment or the value of their pillow talk. She could do shy Japanese schoolgirls, a kittenish vixen, the frosty teacher
in need of a role reversal, a doctor, a nurse, a wild cowgirl—whatever men lusted after in their most flamboyant yearnings,
Olga could be it, and then some.
Olga had never been turned down. Not once, ever.
A top-to-bottom white blonde, she had gone in attired in an aggressively short skirt, low-cut blouse—not too low, though—and
braless. Olga had pitch-perfect intuition about these things: no reason to doubt her instincts now. Demure, not slutty, she
had artfully suggested. A few tactful hints, but sledgehammers were to be avoided.
Alex Konevitch was a successful businessman, after all; office games were the play of the day.
A miniature broadcasting device had been hidden in her purse, and every chance she had she snapped pictures of him with the
miniature camera concealed inside her bracelet. Yutskoi reached into his folder and withdrew a tape recorder. The cassette
was preloaded and ready to roll. “Olga,” he mentioned casually, requiring no further introduction. “She was instructed merely
to get a job and learn more about him. If something else developed, well, all the better.”
Golitsin jerked his head in approval, and Yutskoi set the device down on the desk and pushed play.
Golitsin craned forward and strained to hear every word, every nuance.
First came the sounds of Alex Konevitch’s homely middle-aged secretary ushering Olga into his office, followed by the usual
nice-to-meet-you, nice-to-meet-you-too claptrap before the game began.
Very businesslike, Konevitch: “Why do you want to work here?”
Olga: “Who wouldn’t? The old system’s rotten to its core and ready to collapse. The corpse just hasn’t yet recognized it’s
dead. We all know that. This is the best of the new. I’ll learn a lot.”
“Previous work experience?”
“Secretarial and statistical work, mostly. There were the two years I spent working at the State Transportation Bureau, helping
estimate how many bus axles we would need next year. Bus axles?… Can you believe it? I nearly died of boredom. Then the Farm
Statistics Bureau, where I’m stuck now. Do you know what it’s like spending a whole month trying to project the demand for
imported kumquats?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Don’t even try.” She laughed and he joined her.
Back to business, Konevitch: “Okay, now why should I want you?”
A long and interesting pause. Stupid question—open your eyes, Alex, and use a little imagination.
Olga, sounding perfectly earnest: “I type eighty words a minute, take dictation, have good phone manners, and am very, very
loyal to my boss.”
Another interesting pause.
Then, as if Konevitch missed the point: “I have a very capable secretary already.”
“Not like me, you don’t.”
“Meaning what?”
“I will make you very happy.”
Apparently not, because Konevitch asked quite seriously, “What do you know about finance?”
“Not much. But I’m a fast study.”
“Do you have a university degree?”
“No, and neither do you.”
Another pause, this one long and unfortunate.