money and the things money could buy.
Together, we conspired to smuggle heroin into our beloved motherland — auctioning it off to the highest bidder among Moscow’s many criminal gangs.
““But then the devil named Gasparov played me false,’” Koniev continued reading out loud. He could not hide the contempt in his voice. ““He told me he no longer needed me. That he had other men who would do what I had done — and for less.
Enraged, I resolved to take my revenge. So I sabotaged his aircraft by installing contaminated fuel filters and by ensuring the fuel itself was impure. I cared nothing for the others whose lives I took.
““Now, however, I am haunted by their ghosts and by the knowledge that my crimes must soon come to light. I am ashamed of what I have done, and of what I have become. I cannot live with that shame … ”” Koniev’s voice tapered off. He looked up. “It ends there.”
Thorn swung away and stared up at the corpse suspended from the rafters. Was this it? Had John Avery and all the others died simply because of a falling out between two greedy drug smugglers?
He’d seen enough combat to know how thin the line between life and death really was — and how often survival depended more on sheer luck than on skill or virtue. But the deaths of the O.S.I.A arms inspection team members now seemed especially meaningless.
He tore his eyes away from Grushtin’s body and turned to Helen. “What do you think?”
She looked equally troubled. “It seems plausible. At least on the surface.” She glanced at Koniev. “We need other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting, Alexei. And an autopsy. As soon as possible.”’ The MVD officer nodded rapidly. “I will arrange it.” He snapped out another string of orders to the senior SOBR trooper and then rejoined them.
“The commandos will touch nothing until a crime scene unit arrives.”
Thorn nodded toward the personal computer on Grushtin’s desk. “You should also have somebody take a close look at the files on that machine, Major. If we’re lucky, this bastard may have been keeping track of their suppliers and maybe even their customers.”
“Good idea, Peter,” Helen said quietly. Her hand rubbed at her left leg, unconsciously tracing the faint scar left by the bullet that had severed her femoral artery two years before.
He knew what she was thinking and remembering. A partially wrecked laptop computer had been the only real prize they’d netted from the raid where she’d been so badly wounded. But her sacrifice had not been in vain. The captured computer had yielded encryption software that had allowed them to tap into a deadly terrorist group’s e-mail communications network.
Almost against his will, Thorn found himself staring back up at the grotesquely bloated face of Captain Nikolai Grushtin. Had the dead man told them the truth in his apparent suicide note?
Or had he taken other, darker secrets with him to the grave?
Helen Gray took a shallow breath and looked away from the stainless steel autopsy table — refocusing her attention on cracks in the room’s green wall tiles and then on the bright fluorescent lights overhead.
She had witnessed many autopsies in her years with the FBI — first as a student at the academy and later as a field agent. But she’d never been able to get used to the cold, clinical butcher’s work required to extract useful information and evidence from a corpse.
The attitude of the doctor conducting this autopsy, a bored and cynical militia coroner named Rachinsky, only reinforced her dislike of the whole procedure. Right from the start, he’d made it clear that he regarded the process as a colossal waste of time and effort — and that he intended going through the motions only to keep them off his back.
Helen was also aware that outside observers might reasonably conclude that Peter, Koniev, and she were doing much the same thing — going through the motions. So far all the evidence supported the conclusion the Russian government was eagerly drawing: that Nikolai Grushtin had single-handedly caused the An-32 to crash as an act of vengeance directed at his fellow drug smuggler, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov.
Certainly the story fit all the known facts.
The MVD’s experts had compared the suicide note with other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting found in his dacha. It matched. They judged the shaky, uneven nature of the writing to be the result of severe emotional distress — probably compounded by the massive amount of alcohol he had apparently imbibed just before hanging himself.
And nothing other experts had found in the dead Air Force captain’s personal computer files shed much more light on his dealings with Gasparov. There was no list of heroin suppliers or buyers — no day-to-day journal revealing any more details of their freelance smuggling network. Only a slim file containing his financial records had proved to be of interest. It showed four separate wire transfers of $250,000 each to a Swiss bank account in his name. The first payment had been made in early April, the last on May 24.
Unfortunately, none of the file entries indicated the ultimate source of Grushtin’s funds.
Helen looked back toward the table in time to see the coroner step back with a disgusted look on his thin, unshaven face. The overhead lights glittered off his wire-rim spectacles.
Rachinsky snapped off the overhead microphone and snorted.
“As I knew all along, this man was a genuine suicide.” He stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them toward a waste bin in one corner of the room. “You should not have wasted my time. For God’s sake, there are three thousand murders a year in Moscow now. That’s eight a day! I have better work to do than confirming what should have been blindingly obvious to any police cadet!”
Helen kept a tight grip on her temper. “Nevertheless, we’d all appreciate a more detailed explanation of your findings, Doctor.”
She glanced across the table at Peter Thorn and Alexei Koniev.
“Right, gentlemen?”
They both nodded.
Koniev added an explicit warning. “This is a matter of the highest importance to the government, Rachinsky. I’m sure you would not want any hint that you had done anything less than your best work to reach the wrong ears in the Kremlin …”
“Oh, very well,” the Russian coroner groused. Moving with an ill grace, he yanked on a new pair of surgical gloves and motioned them closer.
Rachinsky roughly pulled Grushtin’s head to one side, exposing a deep groove across his neck where the noose had been. He spread the gouge apart with two fingers. “You see these marks?
The black-and-blue speckling along this line?”
Helen studied the groove carefully — noting the tiny marks the coroner had indicated. “What are they?”
“Minute areas of bleeding caused by the rupture of small blood vessels in the skin.” Rachinsky shrugged. “They show this man was alive when the noose tightened.”
“What else?” Koniev asked.
“These areas of postmortem lividity.” The coroner pointed to purplish areas on Grushtin’s face, above the neck, and then to others on his arms and legs. “Again, the areas where the blood has pooled and settled are consistent with a death by hanging.”
Helen shook her head. “I’m not questioning the fact that Grushtin died that way, Doctor. I’m asking you what makes you so sure he inflicted that death on himself?”
“What makes me sure of that?” Rachinsky stared at her in disbelief.
“The man was drunk beyond description. He must have known he would be arrested soon. There are no signs of other injuries. More to the point, he left a note in his own handwriting! So what else could it be but suicide?”
Helen frowned. Everything the militia coroner said made sense, but something still nagged her about Grushtin’s apparent suicide. It seemed so convenient — almost too convenient. It was like being handed a perfectly wrapped package — one the Russian government was only too ready to accept.
She summoned up a mental image of the Russian captain’s body dangling from the rafters of his dacha. Something about that image seemed wrong, or incomplete, somehow. Something about the stains on the dead man’s uniform trousers … She looked up at Rachinsky. “Captain Grushtin lost control over his bowels while dying,
