“Do you have some proof that we lied?”

“No, but I don’t need it, because I don’t really care about that. What I care about is Drazen Tishchenko, and since Harvey came back from his time out with head and hands intact, I have to think that you and Drazen worked something out. That’s what I’m interested in.”

“You’re not after Harvey?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re not after Roger?”

“We were,” he said, “but he’s dead. He died in the hijacking.”

“You knew that?”

“We figured it out.”

“How?”

“Probably the same way you did. We started asking some people.”

“How come you guys didn’t already know about that? The government is supposed to know things like that.”

He shrugged. “We don’t know a fraction of what we should know. Besides, we never knew he was on the Salanna plane until we got the prints from Zormat. Then we put it together. It’s a bummer, too, because Roger was our best shot at getting Drazen.”

I pointed at the envelope. “You obviously know where the guy is. Why don’t you just go and pick him up?”

“Because I have nothing to charge him with, and if I did, no one would testify against him, and if they tried to, he would do the whole head-and-hands thing. We told you what happened to Walter Herald, and he did that knowing he was killing a fed. That sent a pretty strong message. Everyone at Betelco went running for cover after that.”

“I could see how that would be discouraging to people.”

“But let’s be generous for the purpose of this exercise and assume I could pick him up and charge him with something. Do you know what he would do?”

“Call a lawyer?”

“Call the CIA.”

“For what?”

“He has strong ties to the organization formerly known as the KGB. He knows state secrets. He says he does, anyway. The CIA swoops in, whispers something about the greater good, spirits him away, and the next time we see him, he’s back doing exactly what we left him doing. Roger was our best chance. Not even the spooks would have had the guts to pull him out from under felony murder of a federal agent.” He shook his head. He had the look of Charlie Brown after he’d tried again to kick the football, only to have the CIA snatch it away at the last minute. “I would have finally had him.”

“All right, so your job is hard. What are we doing now? Right here, you and me?”

“We’re talking about how you can help me with my job.”

“Let me see if I’m following. Drazen is your big prize. You want him for the murder of Walter Herald. You needed Roger Fratello to get him. You wanted Harvey to get you to Roger, which, by the way, raises this question: How come you’re just skipping over Rachel in this whole thing? Why aren’t you after her?”

“We don’t have Rachel’s prints on Roger’s money.”

“You have pictures of her kissing Roger.”

“That’s not against the law.”

“But you have to think she’s involved.” I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

“We think she was responsible for bringing the Tishchenkos into Betelco and a number of companies in the area. Again, there aren’t too many victims in this town-actually, in any town-willing to testify against the Russians.”

“All right, fine. But now we all agree that Roger is ashes in Sudan.” I looked for validation on that point. He gave me the nod. “Unless you want to nail him for lying about buying a wheelchair, doesn’t that mean that Harvey is off the hook? He can’t help you get Drazen on the agent’s murder, because he had nothing to do with that. If he’s off the hook, why would I help you?”

“Let me ask you something.” His lighter tone suggested a new turn in the conversation. “How much do you know about the fall of the Soviet Union?”

Definitely a new turn. “Let’s see, communism failed, the USSR crumbled and split apart. Now we have 220 countries competing at the Olympics instead of 180.”

“The last time I checked in with Drazen Tishchenko, he was trying to sell a diesel-powered, ninety-foot-long, Foxtrot-class attack submarine to Pablo Escobar. Pablo needed a little something to run his product up and down the West Coast. Do you know where Drazen got it?”

“I’d have to think the only navy that wouldn’t miss a sub would be the old Soviet navy, whatever it was called.”

“He bought it in Kronstadt, which is where the Baltic fleet of the Red Navy went to die. We’re taking about a hundred-million-dollar military vessel. Drazen paid five for it and had a deal to sell it for twenty.”

“That would have been a fair return on investment.”

“The thing about Russians is, they love money, they’re scared of absolutely nothing, and they will sell anything. If you need it and you’re willing to pay for it, Drazen Tishchenko will get it for you, and being who he is, he’s plugged in. He knows party officials who know things. You know, like where the stocks of weaponized smallpox are kept. Where all the tactical nuclear weapons happen to be. They know where the weapons-grade fissionable material is, and they know how to get all that stuff out and into the hands of the people willing to pay for it and willing to use it. Any idea who those people might be?”

“People who don’t like us?”

“That’s correct. The submarine deal never happened, but only because the local mafiya back home blocked it. Drazen forgot to cut them in. Otherwise, the U.S. Navy would be chasing drug-running subs up and down the Pacific Coast. Are you starting to get my drift?”

We were still chatting amiably, but an undercurrent had crept in, something in his usually imperturbable tone that carried more weight than the words he was saying. That, by itself, felt like a pretty good case for helping him out.

He went on. “When Tishchenko decides to put a few tactical nukes out there, there’s nothing to say we’ll catch him then, either. Wouldn’t it be better to just nip it in the bud?”

“I still don’t know how I’m supposed to help you do that.”

“I think you know where the fortune is.”

“The what?”

“The lost fortune.”

“His money has a name?”

“That’s what people say when they talk about it.” Having finished his own coffee, he reached down for the cup he’d brought for me and started peeling back the plastic flap. “According to legend, it’s a billion dollars.”

This was getting interesting, enough so that I couldn’t hide it. “How does anyone misplace a billion dollars?”

“The better story is how he got it in the first place. Drazen owned a bank in Russia.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the banker type.”

“I didn’t say he was a banker. He’s a gangster who owned a bank. That’s all the rage in Russia these days. There’s no real regulation of banks over there, so they buy them and use them as mattresses.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mattresses. Places to keep their cash. Then they use the U.S. banking system to turn all that dirty money into clean U.S. currency. It’s a beautiful thing. No one can accuse these gangsters of being stupid.”

“I have to believe he didn’t earn a billion dollars from ATM charges.”

“He stole it from KGB agents.”

“He stole it from the KGB? First of all, that sounds like a bad strategy. Second, where does the KGB get a billion dollars?”

“They stole it.”

“From whom?”

“The Russian treasury.” He glanced over, maybe to gauge my interest. This was probably the sort of thing that made most people’s eyes glaze over. But I had a personal stake.

“I’m listening.”

“The people who were most pissed off by the unraveling of the Soviet Union were KGB and party officials.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “The ones who benefited most from a corrupt system would be the ones with the most to lose. What did they do?”

“They stole the country.”

“Stole the country?”

“Starting in 1992, for about eleven years, the KGB and other party officials pulled off the greatest looting of a country that the world has ever seen. It’s hard to say how much money they took, but estimates run around six hundred billion.”