The Hunted

Long, raucous meetings were held about what to do, with the usual backbiting, finger-pointing, and evasion of responsibility. This sneaky white knight, whoever he was, knew how to hide his fingerprints. Whatever he was doing to evade their most advanced techniques of snooping and detection had to be enormously clever. That level of sophistication raised interesting questions and dark misgivings. After much heated discussion, inevitably the preponderance of suspicion fell on foreign intelligence agencies. Surveillance of selected foreign embassies and known intelligence operatives was kicked up a notch and the squad of watchers increased threefold. Most of the foreign embassies were wired for sound anyway. And after seventy years of foreign spies lurking and sneaking around its capital, the KGB had a tight grip on every drop site and clandestine meeting place in Moscow.

More nada.

As Yeltsin's poll numbers climbed, frustration grew. The KGB was averse to mysteries-unsolved too long they turned into career problems. So the KGB chief of residency in Washington was ordered to kick the tires of his vast web of moles, leakers, and traitors in the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and any other alphabet-soup agency he had his devious fingers in. Money, cash, lucre-that was America's preferred weapon. And even if America wasn't the culprit, the CIA or NSA, with their massive, sophisticated arsenals of electronic snoops, probably knew who was.

More nada, nada, nada. More wasted time, more wasted effort, more millions of dollars flooding out of nowhere, with more supporters flocking to Yeltsin's banner.

Yutskoi observed, "Actually, it's a miracle we found out at all. Konevitch is very, very clever."

"How clever?"

"In the private construction business, nearly everything's done in cash. And nearly all of it under the table. Compounding matters, right now, we're a mix of two economies: communist and free-market. The free-market guys know we don't have a good handle on them. They're inventing all kinds of fancy new games we don't know how to play yet. It's-"

"And what game did he play?" Golitsin interrupted in a nasty tone, tired of excuses.

"Everything was done offshore. It was smuggled out in cash, laundered under phony names at Caribbean banks, and from there turned electronic. He moved it around through a lot of banks-Swiss, African, American-divided it up, brought it back together, and just kept it moving until it became untraceable and impossible to follow."

"And how did he hand it over to Yeltsin's people?"

"That's the beauty of it. Not a single ruble ever touched the Soviet banking system. That's why we never saw it." He smiled and tried to appear confident. "What we now hypothesize was that he smuggled it back in as cash and handed it over in large suitcases." The truth was, they still had no idea, though he wasn't about to confess to that.

"Then who helped him?" Golitsin immediately barked, with a sizzling stare. Another good, unanswerable question. Soviet citizens knew zilch about international banking, money laundering, electronic transactions, or how to elude detection. The Soviet banking system was backward and shockingly unsophisticated. Besides, nobody had enough money to dream of getting fancy.

Or almost nobody-the Mafiya had money by the boatload. And they were masterminds at financial shenanigans; they had tried and perfected all kinds of underhanded tricks and scams. In the most oppressive state on earth, their survival depended on keeping their cash invisible. Golitsin waved a finger at his aide's folder. "Any evidence of that?"

"None. Not yet, anyway. It doesn't mean their crooked fingers aren't in it, just that we haven't found it."

"Keep looking. It has to be there."

After a moment, and totally out of the blue, Yutskoi mentioned, "I read a term paper he wrote as a freshman, something to do with Einstein's theory of relativity."

His boss had moved back to the window, restlessly watching the loud, angry crowd down on the street. Only a few years before the whole lot would already be in windowless wagons, trembling with fear on their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. They'd be worked over for a while, then shipped off to a uranium mine in the Urals where their hair and teeth would fall out.

The old days: he missed them already.

Yutskoi interrupted the pleasant reverie. "At least I tried to read his paper, I should say. I barely understood a word," he mumbled. "And all those complicated equations…" He trailed off, sounding a little stunned.

"What about it?" Golitsin asked absently. The crowd below was now dancing and chanting and growing larger by the minute. He felt weary.