The Hunted, page 1
Copyright
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.
Grand Central Publishing
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New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: August 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55083-3
Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Contents
Copyright
Also by Brian Haig
Acknowledgments
Book One: The Heist
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Book Two: The Exile
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Author’s Note
Also by Brian Haig
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.
Acknowledgments
There 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.
Book One:
The Heist
1
November 1991
In 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
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.
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.
