I flew back to Kansas City the next morning. Katrina took a separate flight, I think because she was still peeved and wanted to avoid me. The frosty look she gave me at the prison entrance tended to support that theory.
Anyway, I had bigger fish to fry than her hurt feelings, like for starters, a client who insisted he was innocent when every indication and piece of evidence screamed guilty, guilty, guilty.
Morrison was already manacled to the table as we walked in. Before we could even sit, he demanded, “Well? What have you accomplished?” His tone was petulant and bossy, a general officer talking down to two inferiors, and it pissed me off.
“We went to Moscow,” Katrina swiftly intervened, smart enough to ignore his lousy manners.
“Yeah, so…?”
“We accomplished a great deal,” I said, ticking off points with my fingers. “We discovered the prosecution will have no difficulty getting a conviction for adultery. Incidentally, your office phone was bugged and it’s all on tape.”
For a mere instant he appeared surprised, perhaps even shocked. Then the look melted. Given everything else he was accused of, the womanizing probably struck him as an incidental distraction. It would be embarrassing in court, but little more than a sideshow.
“Oh, and by the way,” I added, “Mary knew about it, too.”
This wasn’t news to him, I was just confirming it, but Katrina looked surprised. “We also met with Alexi Arbatov,” I continued, “and he thinks you’re innocent, that you were probably framed, but he doesn’t know by who, or why. Oh, and last but not least, somebody tried to kill us.”
“Moscow’s a dangerous place,” he dryly observed.
Even Miss Hold-your-temper lost it on that one. She said, “Somebody tried to assassinate us. We were ambushed. Mel Torianski got his head blown off.”
That dryness instantly evaporated. “By who?”
“The police claimed it was Chechen terrorists. But the ambassador said they blame everything on Chechens.”
He contemplated that a moment. “He’s right. It was someone else.”
I asked, “Like who?”
But he wasn’t listening to me. At first he seemed buried in thought, then suddenly his expression turned elated. “Don’t you see? This proves I’ve been telling the truth. Whoever tried to murder you is worried. They know you’re looking.”
“Nobody knew I was looking. We met with Alexi in secret.”
“You thought you were meeting him in secret. Obviously you were wrong.”
We’d already come to that conclusion ourselves, so I conceded the point.
Then he asked, “Where was Mary? Did you check on her whereabouts?”
“At work and her father’s home. Why?”
He began waving his arms around in excitement. “That proves nothing. It would’ve been so easy for her to arrange. Did she know you were there?”
“So what if she knew,” I said, realizing with an ugly jolt what he was implying.
He kept going anyway. “And if she guessed you were meeting with Alexi, she probably… oh shit… I was the one who turned him. I was the one he trusted. But with me out of the picture, she’d own him completely. She couldn’t let you expose him. She needs him for her future. Don’t you see it?”
“What the hell are you talking about? If you’re convicted of treason, the CIA won’t let her get within a continent of Arbatov. And the closest she’ll ever be allowed to get near that big building in Langley will be her father’s house. Her career’s over.”
He gave me a sly look. “She tell you that?”
“Nearly verbatim.”
“Drummond, you’re such a sucker. With me out of the picture they’ll be completely reliant on her to retain Alexi. Don’t you understand how important he is? And if she gets credit for turning me in, she’ll get a gold medal from those bastards she works for. They’ll love her for it. She chose her country over her lousy traitorous husband… what greater love for her country and all that crap. You beginning to see it?”
“What I’m seeing is a complete asshole.”
He leaned back into his seat and grinned. “I did a lot of thinking in that hospital bed. I thought, now, who would know me well enough to set me up like this? It had to be an espionage specialist. Nobody off the street has the knowledge or skills to pull this off. It would have to be somebody with a motive.” He looked at me expectantly. “She had a motive, all right. You discovered it yourself.”
“You’re losing it.”
“You stupid asshole. You have no idea how she plays. She’s not the sweet little thing you think, Drummond. How the hell do you think she got so far in the Agency so fast? She cut people’s nuts off before they even heard her coming.”
But before I could say another word, Katrina smoothly said, “Okay, we’ll look into it. I promise. In the meantime, we’re also considering other possibilities.”
“Like what?”
To which she replied, “Did you ever hear Alexi share any theories about some mysterious Russian cabal?”
He was distracted by other thoughts and offhandedly said, “Uh, yeah, sure. All the time.”
“And what did you think?”
“It’s Russia. If it sounds rotten there’s probably some truth to it. But so what? You gotta understand Russians.”
“And what do we have to understand about Russians?” asked Katrina, who was raised by a Russian and therefore had a few insights.
“They’re the most conniving race on earth. Their whole history is a never-ending series of coups and palace manipulations. It’s their national sport.”
“So you think there is a cabal?” Katrina asked.
“No. But Alexi believed it, and I used his suspicion to lure him in. Probably somewhere in Moscow there’s some group up to something, and Alexi has blown it out of proportion. Hell, there’s probably a hundred different groups, and Alexi has jumbled them all together into some single gargoyle. If there was something as big as he suspects, we would’ve detected it.”
“How?”
“Because our penetrations have increased a thousandfold since the Big Bang. Used to be it took work. It was a closed country with cops and soldiers and KGB guys on every street corner. If you joined a Russian for a drink, you had a thousand prying eyes on you, and afterward the poor bastard would get a late-night knock on the door that led to broken bones and yanked teeth and all that. It doesn’t happen anymore. The whole country’s a big fishing pond. Cast a line and you get a hundred bites.”
“So you think Arbatov’s paranoid?” I prodded.
“What Russian isn’t? Especially one with his background.”
“And what’s so special about his background?” Katrina asked.
“He was raised in a small farming village about nine hundred miles south of Moscow. His father was a pig farmer. You believe that? His mother died when he was two, and his father when he was ten, so Alexi was placed in a state orphanage. A year later he won some national math championship and got hooked up with Yurichenko.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“Yurichenko was the head of the Soviet Union’s version of an exalted Mensa society, this group of people with extraordinary IQs. Not geniuses… hyper-geniuses. So Alexi was flown up from his orphanage to meet with him. The old man virtually adopted him, then got him into accelerated courses in Moscow and then Moscow University. Hell, Alexi lived with him until he graduated from college.”
“So they’re close?” Katrina asked.
“Closer than father and son. But Alexi can’t escape his roots. Sure, he’s got good manners and seems poised and polished, because Yurichenko gave him that. But he still has peasant’s blood, and that makes him distrustful of
