Tatiana

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

She tapped the pack and caught a computer memory stick as it dropped out. It was plastic, about the size of a restaurant matchbook.

“What’s on there?” Arkady asked.

“What do you want? The murder of journalists, the beating of protesters, corruption at the top, the rape of natural resources by a circle of cronies, a fraudulent democracy, the erection of palaces, a hollow military. If you had been a source, the mention of any of this could earn you or someone close to you a bullet in the head. It’s all here in single-spaced articles.”

“But they’ve all been published, haven’t they? There’s nothing new?”

“The notebook. The notebook is new. Only I don’t have it. I have all this data leading to the top of a pyramid but I can’t reach it without knowing what Grisha was doing, and that’s in the notebook. I know who but I don’t know what. Your experts may know what but they won’t know who. Tell me about the people working on it. They’re linguistic experts or military analysts?”

“They’re two kids who play chess.”

She sat back. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. They’re good at games.”

“They’re children?”

Arkady nodded.

“Joseph. .” She had to laugh, stunned. “Joseph was sure the notebook would be impossible to decipher because you would have to live his life to understand his personal vocabulary. His sophisticated music, books, films and so on.”

“To be a middle-aged Swiss male who probably doted on Mozart? No. He’s lucky to have these two.”

“Poor Joseph. He got in over his head.”

“Where you led him.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she said after a moment. “Do you think I have led you in over your head?”

“Without a doubt.”

• • •

Victor maneuvered an easy chair to face the front door of Arkady’s apartment. Anyone coming in would have to go through him. Every few minutes he checked his cell phone in case Arkady had texted or left a message. Victor hated the Internet.

“Tell him,” Lotte said.

“There’s a nautical theme,” Zhenya said. “Navy, ship, submarine, torpedo, water, sea.”

“I’ll tell you what’s a theme,” Victor said. “A lot of money changing hands and every crook watching every other crook. Nobody trusts anybody else. That’s why they’re meeting.”

“Explain it to him,” Lotte said.

“Please,” said Victor.

“This is what I think the notebook says: ‘The Red Dawn Shipyard in China agrees to pay Russia two billion to repair and refit a submarine to seaworthiness. Maybe fifty percent to the Russian Ministry of Defense and fifty percent to certain anonymous partners of. .”

“Amber something,” Lotte said. “It has to be.”

Zhenya was disconcerted but he continued. “And there will be no public accounting. The parties will meet on the Natalya Goncharova.”

“You mean Grisha’s yacht.”

“I guess so.”

“Only Grisha is dead and the notes are two weeks old.”

“Then they’re meeting again, everyone but Grisha,” Zhenya said.

“Who is meeting?” Victor asked.

“We don’t know,” Lotte admitted.

Victor opened a fresh bottle of Fanta. “Amateurs.”

28

Arkady and Tatiana sat on the porch and watched waves rip and roll as foam up the beach. In the eaves, cobwebs billowed with each blast of wind. Tatiana wrote nonstop on a yellow pad. She looked so slight, a moth in lamplight, it was hard to believe she inspired anger and fear among armed men.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing?”

“It’s an opus horribilis. Or a chronicle of corruption, whatever you want to call it. There’s so much corruption to choose from it’s hard to know where to begin. Imagine a defense contractor embezzling three billion rubles out of its budget for building docks for nuclear submarines. That’s a hundred million dollars in real money that was invested into real estate. The police say when they raided the apartment of one of the alleged embezzlers they found art, jewelry and, guess what, the defense minister himself with his mistress.

“But that’s nothing compared to the siphoning of seven billion rubles from our satellite navigation system, which might account for all our failed satellite launchings. The list goes on and on. The Defense Ministry admits that a fifth of the military budget is stolen. One can only imagine what an independent investigation would find.”

She wrote effortlessly, but it struck him that there was something guarded, omitted, incomplete.

“That’s it?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“Do you have a tape recorder?”

“A journalist always has a tape recorder.” She reached into her backpack and handed the recorder to him. “Why?”

From his pea jacket he took a cassette. “I’ve been carrying this around for days for no good reason except that I found it in your apartment and, in very small letters, the label says ‘Again.’ Again what?”

He pushed “Play.” The tape was tinny but distinctive, a continuous metallic tap, tap, tap, scrape, scrape, scrape until Tatiana turned it off.

“An SOS from the submarine Kursk,” she said. She could as easily have said hell.

“Why should you care about an accident at sea that took place a dozen years ago?”

“Nothing has changed,” she said.

Arkady waited.

She said, “When the torpedoes on the Kursk exploded, our navy press office reported that the submarine had encountered ‘minor technical difficulties.’ By that time it had plunged to the ocean floor. Altogether, we made fourteen futile attempts to rescue the men inside before Norwegian help was accepted. The entire crew of one hundred eighteen men died. How could this happen to a submarine in the Red Navy? What did we learn? That the torpedoes were volatile and the hatches refused to close and, most important, when reporters revealed the truth they could be threatened with criminal libel. That’s what we learned.”

“That’s the past.”

“No, that’s the future. We have a new nuclear submarine, with much the same problems as the Kursk.”

“What is it called?”

“The Kaliningrad.”

“Of course.”

“Only there’s a problem. The Kaliningrad didn’t pass muster. They don’t dare let it operate. It has to be refitted from top to bottom. The original construction costs were a hundred billion rubles and the refit will cost just as much, yet the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense are happy.”