The Hunted

Elena caught his eye in the rearview mirror. "Whenever Alex accompanied Yeltsin on overseas trips he submitted his passport for the required visa. Now that Russians are free to travel overseas, seventy years of curiosity about the outside world demands to be instantly vented. The visa office of the Foreign Ministry is choked with requests. Mountains of paper everywhere. And more often than not, requests with the accompanying passports get lost or misplaced in the logjam. These are former Soviet bureaucrats we're talking about. It's a miracle they find their way home at night."

Alex continued, "Two or three days out, my office would call to complain, and liberally mention Yeltsin's name. Rather than hunt for a pin in a haystack, a clerk would just issue a new passport with the appropriate visa and send it by courier. That's the right expression, right? Pin in a haystack? Anyway, a month or two later, when the original turned up, it was returned by mail."

"Exactly how many do you have?" Eugene asked, enjoying his little peek into Russian inefficiency. A died-in-the-wool capitalist, he loved hearing about the sins of former commies.

"I honestly don't know."

"Guess."

"Ten. A dozen. Perhaps more."

Elena had twice gone along on Yeltsin's trips; she had three passports, one, of course, now inconveniently tucked in the back pocket of Vladimir's corpse. But Alex always shoved a few extras in his baggage, in the event the ones he or she were using got lost or stolen.

"There are two borders we can head for," Alex was saying, sharing the possibilities as he tried to think this through. "Austria to the south. Or due east, to Czechoslovakia."

"Okay, which?"

"I think Austria makes the most sense. It's closer. Also, I have part ownership of an advertising company in the capital. Illya Mechoukov is the president. A good man. I trust him. Better yet, the KGB had little influence there." He opened the window and took a deep breath. The night had turned cold. A frigid blast of air hit him in the face, but he felt dizzy. He briefly pondered the possibility that the exhaust was spewing carbon monoxide into the cabin. "Unfortunately, that border takes a visa. The Czechs and Slovaks, though, as former Bloc members, still have open borders for Russian passports."

"Where do you want to cross?" Elena asked, now that Austria was ruled out. She searched the rearview mirror. Nothing.

"Avoid the major arteries. Our best chance is a secondary or backcountry road. The guards at the smaller checkpoints will be the last ones alerted."

Eugene decided to join the discussion and leaned forward from the backseat. "Then what?"

"Then… directly to the nearest international airport. That would be Slovakia," Alex answered.

"Then Russia, right?"

"Maybe."

"I don't see that you have a choice, pal. You better get back there fast," Eugene advised.

"Do you think?"

"You better rescind those letters before anybody can act on them."

"I have other worries right now," Alex replied almost absently. He reached up and switched on the overhead light, which thankfully seemed to be the one thing in the car that functioned properly. He began flipping through passports and thumbing the pages.

"You know what?" Eugene announced, lurching forward in his seat.

"I think you're about to tell me what."

"Damn right I am. I think you got conked on the head harder than you realize. You're not thinking clearly. They could empty out your bank accounts in hours and, in a day or so, swipe all the investors' money in your banks."

"Don't you think that's a lot of cash to haul away?" Alex replied, curiously indifferent.

"You know damn well what I'm talking about. Come on, pal. They'll wire it all to a bank in the Azores or Switzerland. Then it'll shuttle around to a hundred banks and fall off the radar."

With no small amount of pleasure, Alex said, "I don't think so."

"Think harder."

"The people who forced me to sign those letters know nothing about banking. To move even a dollar they need my account numbers and the security codes."

"Oh."

"And those are all locked away in a safe in my office, guarded around the clock. They didn't know enough to ask about the numbers and I wasn't in the mood to educate them."

Elena reached over and patted her husband on the leg. "You're a genius."

His nose was stuffed back inside the passports. Sergei Golitsin sat behind Alex Konevitch's massive hand-carved desk and stared across it at the ten hungry faces around the long conference table. The irony of using Alex's own office as a command post to track him down and kill him was too delicious.