The Hunted (2 page)

Konevitch, in a suddenly wary voice: “How do you know that?”

“I… your receptionist…” Long pause, then with uncharacteristic hesitance, “Yes, I believe she mentioned it.”

“He. His name is Dmetri.”

“All right… he. I misspoke. Who cares who told me?”

Konevitch, sounding surprisingly blasé: “What gave you the idea I’m looking to hire?”

“Maybe you’re not. I’m fishing. My mother is desperately ill. Throat and lung cancer. Soviet medicine will kill her, and I
need money for private treatments. Her life depends on it.”

Nice touch, Yutskoi thought, admiring Olga’s spontaneous shift of tack. Among the few details they
had
gleaned about Alex Konevitch was that his mother had passed away, at the young age of thirty-two, of bone cancer in a state
sanitarium. Like everything in this country, Soviet medicine was dreadful. Yutskoi pictured Mrs. Konevitch in a lumpy bed
with filthy sheets, writhing and screaming as her bone sores oozed and burned and her young son looked on in helpless agony.

Surely that pathetic memory rushed into Alex’s head as he considered this poor girl and her ailing mother. Have a heart, Alex;
you have the power to save her mama from an excruciating, all but certain death. She’ll twitch and suffer and cough her lungs
out, and it will be all your fault.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think you’ll fit in.”

She had been instructed to get the job, whatever it took, and she had given it her best shot and then some. Olga’s perfect
record was in ruins.

Yutskoi slid forward in his seat and flipped off the recorder. A low grunt escaped Golitsin’s lips, part disappointment, part
awe. They leaned forward together and studied with greater intensity the top photograph of Alex Konevitch taken by Olga. The
face in the photo was lean, dark-haired and dark-eyed, handsome but slightly babyfaced, and he was smiling, though it seemed
distant and distinctly forced.

Nobody had to coerce a smile when Olga was in the room. Nobody. Golitsin growled, “Maybe you should’ve sent in a cute boy
instead.”

“No evidence of that,” his aide countered. “We interviewed some of his former college classmates. He likes the ladies. Nothing
against one-night stands, either.”

“Maybe he subsequently experienced an industrial accident. Maybe he was castrated,” Golitsin suggested, which really was the
one explanation that made the most sense.

Or maybe he suspected Olga.

“Look at him, dressed like an American yuppie,” Golitsin snorted, thumping a derisive finger on a picture. It was true, Konevitch
looked anything but Russian in his tan slacks and light blue, obviously imported cotton button-down dress shirt, without tie,
and with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The picture was grainy and slightly off-center. He looked, though, like he just
stepped out of one of those American catalogues: a young spoiled prototypical capitalist in the making. Golitsin instantly
hated him.

He had been followed around the clock for the past three days. The observers were thoroughly impressed. A working animal,
the trackers characterized him, plainly exhausted from trying to keep up with his pace. The man put in hundred-hour workweeks
without pause. He seemed to sprint through every minute of it.

Broad-shouldered, with a flat stomach, he obviously worked hard to stay in tip-top shape. Olga had learned from the receptionist
that he had a black belt, third degree, in some obscure Asian killing art. He did an hour of heavy conditioning in the gym
every day. Before work, too. Since he arrived in the office at six sharp and usually kicked off after midnight, sleep was
not a priority. Olga had also remarked on his height, about six and a half feet, that she found him ridiculously sexy, and
for once, the target was one
she
would enjoy boinking.

Yutskoi quickly handed his boss a brief fact sheet that summarized everything known to date about Alex Konevitch. Not much.

“So he’s smart,” Golitsin said with a scowl after a cursory glance. That was all the paucity of information seemed to show.

“Very smart. Moscow University, physics major. Second highest score in the country his year on the university entrance exam.”

Alex had been uncovered only three days before, and so far only a sketchy bureaucratic background check had been possible.
They would dig deeper and learn more later. A lot more.

But Moscow University was for the elite of the elite, and the best of those were bunched and prodded into the hard sciences,
mathematics, chemistry, or physics. In the worker’s paradise, books, poetry, and art were useless tripe and frowned upon,
barely worth wasting an ounce of IQ over. The real eggheads were drafted for more socially progressive purposes, like designing
bigger atomic warheads and longer-range, more accurate missiles.

Golitsin backed away from the photo and moved to the window. He was rotund with short squatty legs and a massive bulge under
a recessed chin that looked like he’d swallowed a million flies. He had a bald, glistening head and dark eyes that bulged
whenever he was angry, which happened to be most of the time. “And where has Konevitch been getting all this money from?”
he asked.

“Would you care to guess?”

“Okay, the CIA? The Americans always use money.”

Yutskoi shook his head.

Another knuckle cracked. “Stop wasting my time.”

“Right, well, it’s his. All of it.”

Golitsin’s thick eyebrows shot up. “Tell me about that.”

“Turned out he was already in our files. In 1986, Konevitch was caught running a private construction company out of his university
dorm room. Quite remarkable. He employed six architects and over a hundred workers of assorted skills.”

“That would be impossible to hide, a criminal operation of such size and scale,” the general noted, accurately it turned out.

“You’re right,” his aide confirmed. “As usual, somebody snitched. A jealous classmate.”

“So this Konevitch was always a greedy criminal deviant.”

“So it seems. We reported this to the dean at Moscow University, with the usual directive that the capitalist thief Konevitch
be marched across a stage in front of his fellow students, disgraced, and immediately booted out.”

“Of course.”

“Turns out we did him a big favor. Konevitch dove full-time into construction work, expanded his workforce, and spread his
projects all over Moscow. People are willing to pay under the table for quality, and Konevitch established a reputation for
reliability and value. Word spread, and customers lined up at his door. When perestroika and free-market reforms were put
in place, he cleaned up.”

“From construction work?”

“That was only the start. Do you know what arbitrage is?”

“No, tell me.”

“Well… it’s a tool capitalists employ. When there are price differences for similar goods, an arbitrager can buy low, sell
it all off at a higher price, and pocket the difference. Like gambling, he more or less bets on the margins in between. Konevitch’s
work gave him intimate familiarity with the market for construction materials, so this was the sector he first concentrated
in.”

“And this is… successful?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. A price vacuum was created when Gorbachev encouraged free-market economics. The perfect condition
for an arbitrager, and Konevitch swooped in. There’s a lot of construction and no pricing mechanism for anything.”

“Okay.”

That okay aside, Yutskoi suspected this was going over his boss’s head. “Say, for example, a factory manager in Moscow prices
a ton of steel nails at a thousand rubles. A different factory manager in Irkutsk might charge ten thousand rubles. They were
all pulling numbers out of thin air. Nobody had a clue what a nail was worth.”

“And our friend would buy the cheaper nails?” Golitsin suggested, maybe getting it after all.

“Yes, like that. By the truckload. He would pay one thousand rubles for a ton in Moscow, find a buyer in Irkutsk willing to
pay five thousand, then pocket the difference.”

Golitsin scrunched his face with disgust. “So this is about nails?” He snorted.

“Nails, precut timber, steel beams, wall board, concrete, roofing tiles, heavy construction equipment… he gets a piece of
everything. A big piece. His business swelled from piddling to gigantic in nothing flat.”

Sergei Golitsin had spent thirty years in the KGB, but not one of those outside the Soviet empire and the impoverishing embrace
of communism. Domestic security was his bread and butter, an entire career spent crushing and torturing his fellow citizens.
He had barely a clue what arbitrage was, didn’t really care to know, but he nodded anyway and concluded, “So the arbitrager
is a cheat.”

“That’s a way of looking at it.”

“He produces nothing.”

“You’re right, absolutely nothing.”

“He sucks the cream from other people’s sweat and labor. A big fat leech.”

“Essentially, he exploits an opening in a free-market system. It’s a common practice in the West. Highly regarded, even. Nobody
on Wall Street ever produced a thing. Most of the richest people in America couldn’t build a wheel, much less run a factory
if their lives depended on it.”

Golitsin still wasn’t sure how it worked, but he was damned sure he didn’t like it. He asked, “And how much has he… this Konevitch
character… how much has he given Yeltsin?”

“Who knows? A lot. In American currency, maybe ten million, maybe twenty million dollars.”

“He had that much?”

“And then some. Perhaps fifty million dollars altogether. But this is merely a rough estimate on our part. Could be more.”

Golitsin stared at Yutskoi in disbelief. “You’re saying at twenty-two, he’s the richest man in the Soviet Union.”

“No, probably not. A lot of people are making a ton of money right now.” Yutskoi looked down and toyed with his fingers a
moment. “It would be fair to say, though, he’s in the top ten.”

The two men stared down at their shoes and shared the same depressing thought neither felt the slightest desire to verbalize.
If communism went up in flames, their beloved KGB would be the first thing tossed onto the bonfire. In a vast nation with
more than forty languages and dialects, and nearly as many different ethnic groups, there was only one unifying factor, one
common thread—nearly every citizen in the Soviet Union had been scorched by their bureau in one way or another. Not directly,
perhaps. But somebody dear, or at least close: grandfathers purged by Stalin; fathers who had disappeared and rotted in the
camps under Brezhnev; aunts and uncles brought in for a little rough questioning under Andropov. Something. Nearly every family
tree had at least one branch crippled or lopped off by the boys from the Lubyanka. The list of grudges was endless and bitter.

Yutskoi was tempted to smile at his boss and say: I hope it all does fall apart. Five years being your bootlicker, I’ve hated
every minute of it. You’ll be totally screwed, you nasty old relic.

Golitsin knew exactly what the younger man was thinking, and was ready to reply: You’re a replaceable, third-rate lackey today,
and you’ll be a starving lackey tomorrow. Only in this system could a suck-up loser like you survive. The only thing you’re
good at is plucking fingernails from helpless victims. And you’re not even that good at that.

Yutskoi: I’m young and frisky; I’ll adapt. You’re a starched lizard, a wrinkled old toad, an icy anachronism. Your own grandchildren
fill their diapers at the sight of you. I’ll hire you to shine my shoes.

Golitsin: I cheated and backstabbed and ass-kissed my way up to three-star general in this system, and I’ll find a way in
the next one, whatever that turns out to be. You, on the other hand, will always be a suck-up loser.

“Why?” asked Golitsin. As in, why would Alex Konevitch give Yeltsin that much money?

“Revenge could be a factor, I suppose.”

“To get back at the system that tried to ruin him. How pedestrian.”

“But, I think,” Yutskoi continued, trying to look thoughtful, “mostly influence. If the union disintegrates, Yeltsin will
wind up president of the newly independent Russia. He’ll owe this guy a boatload of favors. A lot of state enterprises are
going to be privatized and put on the auction block. Konevitch will have his pick—oil, gas, airlines, banks, car companies—whatever
his greedy heart desires. He could end up as rich as Bill Gates. Probably richer.”

Golitsin leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. It was too horrible to contemplate. Seventy years of blood, strain, and
sweat was about to be ladled out, first come, first served—the biggest estate sale the world had ever witnessed. The carcass
of the world’s largest empire carved up and bitterly fought over. The winners would end up rich beyond all imagination. What
an ugly, chaotic scramble that was going to be.

“So why didn’t we find out about this Alex Konevitch sooner?” Golitsin snapped. Good question. When, three years before, Boris
Yeltsin first began openly shooting the bird at Gorbachev and the Communist Party, the KGB hadn’t worried overly much. Yeltsin
was back then just another windbag malcontent: enough of those around to be sure.

But Yeltsin was a whiner with a big difference; he had once been a Politburo member, so he understood firsthand exactly how
decrepit, dim-witted, incompetent, and scared the old boys at the top were.

That alone made him more dangerous than the typical blowhard.

And when he announced he was running for the presidency of Russia—the largest, most powerful republic in the union—the KGB
instantly changed its mind and decided to take him dreadfully seriously indeed.

His offices and home were watched by an elite squad of nosy agents 24/7. His phones were tapped, his offices and home stuffed
with enough bugs and listening gadgets to hear a fly fart. Several agents insinuated themselves inside his campaign organization
and kept the boys at the center up to date on every scrap and rumor they overheard. Anybody who entered or left Yeltsin’s
offices was shadowed and, later, approached by a team of thugs who looked fierce and talked even fiercer. Give Boris a single
ruble, they were warned, and you’ll win the national lotto—a one-way ticket to the most barren, isolated, ice-laden camp in
Siberia.