The Hunted

by Brian Haig

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Action & Adventure; Suspense

Synopsis

In 1987, Alex Konevitch was thrown out of Moscow University for "indulging his entrepreneurial spirit." But by 1991, he was worth $300 million. On track to become Russia’s wealthiest man, he makes one critical mistake: he hires the former deputy director of the KGB to handle his corporate security. And then his world begins to fall apart. Kidnapped, beaten, and forced to relinquish his business and his fortune, Alex and his wife escape to the United States, only to be accused by his own government of stealing millions from his business. With a mob contract out on his life and the FBI hot on his trail, Alex is a desperate man without a country-facing the ultimate sacrifice for the chance to build a new life for himself and his family.

Release date: August 12, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 464

Sample

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 office only the day
before on the pretext of looking for a job. Olga’s specialty was honeypot operations, the luring of victims into the sack
for entrapment or the value of their pillow talk. She could do shy Japanese schoolgirls, a kittenish vixen, the frosty teacher
in need of a role reversal, a doctor, a nurse, a wild cowgirl—whatever men lusted after in their most flamboyant yearnings,
Olga could be it, and then some.


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.


“Would you care to guess?”

“Okay, the CIA? The Americans always use money.”

Yutskoi shook his head.

Another knuckle cracked. “Stop wasting my time.”

“Right, well, it’s his. All of it.”

Golitsin’s thick eyebrows shot up. “Tell me about that.”

“Turned out he was already in our files. In 1986, Konevitch was caught running a private construction company out of his university
dorm room. Quite remarkable. He employed six architects and over a hundred workers of assorted skills.”


“That would be impossible to hide, a criminal operation of such size and scale,” the general noted, accurately it turned out.

“You’re right,” his aide confirmed. “As usual, somebody snitched. A jealous classmate.”

“So this Konevitch was always a greedy criminal deviant.”

“So it seems. We reported this to the dean at Moscow University, with the usual directive that the capitalist thief Konevitch
be marched across a stage in front of his fellow students, disgraced, and immediately booted out.”


“Of course.”

“Turns out we did him a big favor. Konevitch dove full-time into construction work, expanded his workforce, and spread his
projects all over Moscow. People are willing to pay under the table for quality, and Konevitch established a reputation for
reliability and value. Word spread, and customers lined up at his door. When perestroika and free-market reforms were put
in place, he cleaned up.”


“From construction work?”

“That was only the start. Do you know what arbitrage is?”

“No, tell me.”

“Well… it’s a tool capitalists employ. When there are price differences for similar goods, an arbitrager can buy low, sell
it all off at a higher price, and pocket the difference. Like gambling, he more or less bets on the margins in between. Konevitch’s
work gave him intimate familiarity with the market for construction materials, so this was the sector he first concentrated
in.”


“And this is… successful?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. A price vacuum was created when Gorbachev encouraged free-market economics. The perfect condition
for an arbitrager, and Konevitch swooped in. There’s a lot of construction and no pricing mechanism for anything.”


“Okay.”

That okay aside, Yutskoi suspected this was going over his boss’s head. “Say, for example, a factory manager in Moscow prices
a ton of steel nails at a thousand rubles. A different factory manager in Irkutsk might charge ten thousand rubles. They were
all pulling numbers out of thin air. Nobody had a clue what a nail was worth.”


“And our friend would buy the cheaper nails?” Golitsin suggested, maybe getting it after all.

“Yes, like that. By the truckload. He would pay one thousand rubles for a ton in Moscow, find a buyer in Irkutsk willing to
pay five thousand, then pocket the difference.”


Golitsin scrunched his face with disgust. “So this is about nails?” He snorted.

“Nails, precut timber, steel beams, wall board, concrete, roofing tiles, heavy construction equipment… he gets a piece of
everything. A big piece. His business swelled from piddling to gigantic in nothing flat.”


Sergei Golitsin had spent thirty years in the KGB, but not one of those outside the Soviet empire and the impoverishing embrace
of communism. Domestic security was his bread and butter, an entire career spent crushing and torturing his fellow citizens.
He had barely a clue what arbitrage was, didn’t really care to know, but he nodded anyway and concluded, “So the arbitrager
is a cheat.”


“That’s a way of looking at it.”

“He produces nothing.”

“You’re right, absolutely nothing.”

“He sucks the cream from other people’s sweat and labor. A big fat leech.”

“Essentially, he exploits an opening in a free-market system. It’s a common practice in the West. Highly regarded, even. Nobody
on Wall Street ever produced a thing. Most of the richest people in America couldn’t build a wheel, much less run a factory
if their lives depended on it.”


Golitsin still wasn’t sure how it worked, but he was damned sure he didn’t like it. He asked, “And how much has he… this Konevitch
character… how much has he given Yeltsin?”


“Who knows? A lot. In American currency, maybe ten million, maybe twenty million dollars.”

“He had that much?”

“And then some. Perhaps fifty million dollars altogether. But this is merely a rough estimate on our part. Could be more.”

Golitsin stared at Yutskoi in disbelief. “You’re saying at twenty-two, he’s the richest man in the Soviet Union.”

“No, probably not. A lot of people are making a ton of money right now.” Yutskoi looked down and toyed with his fingers a
moment. “It would be fair to say, though, he’s in the top ten.”


The two men stared down at their shoes and shared the same depressing thought neither felt the slightest desire to verbalize.
If communism went up in flames, their beloved KGB would be the first thing tossed onto the bonfire. In a vast nation with
more than forty languages and dialects, and nearly as many different ethnic groups, there was only one unifying factor, one
common thread—nearly every citizen in the Soviet Union had been scorched by their bureau in one way or another. Not directly,
perhaps. But somebody dear, or at least close: grandfathers purged by Stalin; fathers who had disappeared and rotted in the
camps under Brezhnev; aunts and uncles brought in for a little rough questioning under Andropov. Something. Nearly every family
tree had at least one branch crippled or lopped off by the boys from the Lubyanka. The list of grudges was endless and bitter.


Yutskoi was tempted to smile at his boss and say: I hope it all does fall apart. Five years being your bootlicker, I’ve hated
every minute of it. You’ll be totally screwed, you nasty old relic.


Golitsin knew exactly what the younger man was thinking, and was ready to reply: You’re a replaceable, third-rate lackey today,
and you’ll be a starving lackey tomorrow. Only in this system could a suck-up loser like you survive. The only thing you’re
good at is plucking fingernails from helpless victims. And you’re not even that good at that.


Yutskoi: I’m young and frisky; I’ll adapt. You’re a starched lizard, a wrinkled old toad, an icy anachronism. Your own grandchildren
fill their diapers at the sight of you. I’ll hire you to shine my shoes.


Golitsin: I cheated and backstabbed and ass-kissed my way up to three-star general in this system, and I’ll find a way in
the next one, whatever that turns out to be. You, on the other hand, will always be a suck-up loser.


“Why?” asked Golitsin. As in, why would Alex Konevitch give Yeltsin that much money?

“Revenge could be a factor, I suppose.”

“To get back at the system that tried to ruin him. How pedestrian.”

“But, I think,” Yutskoi continued, trying to look thoughtful, “mostly influence. If the union disintegrates, Yeltsin will
wind up president of the newly independent Russia. He’ll owe this guy a boatload of favors. A lot of state enterprises are
going to be privatized and put on the auction block. Konevitch will have his pick—oil, gas, airlines, banks, car companies—whatever
his greedy heart desires. He could end up as rich as Bill Gates. Probably richer.”


Golitsin leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. It was too horrible to contemplate. Seventy years of blood, strain, and
sweat was about to be ladled out, first come, first served—the biggest estate sale the world had ever witnessed. The carcass
of the world’s largest empire carved up and bitterly fought over. The winners would end up rich beyond all imagination. What
an ugly, chaotic scramble that was going to be.


“So why didn’t we find out about this Alex Konevitch sooner?” Golitsin snapped. Good question. When, three years before, Boris
Yeltsin first began openly shooting the bird at Gorbachev and the Communist Party, the KGB hadn’t worried overly much. Yeltsin
was back then just another windbag malcontent: enough of those around to be sure.


But Yeltsin was a whiner with a big difference; he had once been a Politburo member, so he understood firsthand exactly how
decrepit, dim-witted, incompetent, and scared the old boys at the top were.


That alone made him more dangerous than the typical blowhard.

And when he announced he was running for the presidency of Russia—the largest, most powerful republic in the union—the KGB
instantly changed its mind and decided to take him dreadfully seriously indeed.


His offices and home were watched by an elite squad of nosy agents 24/7. His phones were tapped, his offices and home stuffed
with enough bugs and listening gadgets to hear a fly fart. Several agents insinuated themselves inside his campaign organization
and kept the boys at the center up to date on every scrap and rumor they overheard. Anybody who entered or left Yeltsin’s
offices was shadowed and, later, approached by a team of thugs who looked fierce and talked even fiercer. Give Boris a single
ruble, they were warned, and you’ll win the national lotto—a one-way ticket to the most barren, isolated, ice-laden camp in
Siberia.


Concern, not worry, was the prevailing mood among the big boys in the KGB. This was their game. After seventy years of undermining
democracy around the world, they knew exactly how to squeeze and strangle Yeltsin. An election takes money, lots of it; cash
for travel and aides and people to carry and spread the message across the bulging, diverse breadth of a nation nearly three
times the size of America.


Boris wasn’t getting a ruble. Not a single ruble. He would rail and flail to his heart’s content in empty halls and be roundly
ignored. After being thoroughly shellacked in the polls, he would crawl under a rock and drink himself into the grave. So
long, Boris, you idiot.


It was the inside boys who first raised the alarm. Hard cash was being ladled out by the fistful to campaign employees, to
travel agencies, to advertisers, to political organizers. The conclusion was disquieting and inescapable: somewhere in the
shadows a white knight was shoveling money at Yeltsin, gobs of it. Boris was spending a fortune flying across Russia in a
rented jet, staying in high-class hotels, and to be taken more seriously, he had even traveled overseas to America, to introduce
himself to the American president; Gorby was forced to call in a big favor, but he got Boris stiffed by a low-level White
House flunky before he got within sniffing distance of the Oval Office. Boris’s liquor bills alone were staggering.


Millions were being spent, tens of millions. Where was the mysterious cash coming from?

A task force was hastily formed, experts in finance and banking who peeked and prodded under all the usual rocks.

Nothing.

A team of computer forensics experts burgled Boris’s campaign offices and combed the deepest crevices of every hard drive.

Not a trace.

Long, raucous meetings were held about what to do, with the usual backbiting, finger-pointing, and evasion of responsibility.
This sneaky white knight, whoever he was, knew how to hide his fingerprints. Whatever he was doing to evade their most advanced
techniques of snooping and detection had to be enormously clever. That level of sophistication raised interesting questions
and dark misgivings. After much heated discussion, inevitably the preponderance of suspicion fell on foreign intelligence
agencies. Surveillance of selected foreign embassies and known intelligence operatives was kicked up a notch and the squad
of watchers increased threefold. Most of the foreign embassies were wired for sound anyway. And after seventy years of foreign
spies lurking and sneaking around its capital, the KGB had a tight grip on every drop site and clandestine meeting place in
Moscow.


More nada.

As Yeltsin’s poll numbers climbed, frustration grew. The KGB was averse to mysteries—unsolved too long they turned into career
problems. So the KGB chief of residency in Washington was ordered to kick the tires of his vast web of moles, leakers, and
traitors in the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and any other alphabet-soup agency he had his devious fingers in. Money, cash, lucre—that
was America’s preferred weapon. And even if America wasn’t the culprit, the CIA or NSA, with their massive, sophisticated
arsenals of electronic snoops, probably knew who was.


More nada, nada, nada. More wasted time, more wasted effort, more millions of dollars flooding out of nowhere, with more supporters
flocking to Yeltsin’s banner.


Yutskoi observed, “Actually, it’s a miracle we found out at all. Konevitch is very, very clever.”

“How clever?”

“In the private construction business, nearly everything’s done in cash. And nearly all of it under the table. Compounding
matters, right now, we’re a mix of two economies: communist and free-market. The free-market guys know we don’t have a good
handle on them. They’re inventing all kinds of fancy new games we don’t know how to play yet. It’s—”


“And what game did he play?” Golitsin interrupted in a nasty tone, tired of excuses.

“Everything was done offshore. It was smuggled out in cash, laundered under phony names at Caribbean banks, and from there
turned electronic. He moved it around through a lot of banks—Swiss, African, American—divided it up, brought it back together,
and just kept it moving until it became untraceable and impossible to follow.”


“And how did he hand it over to Yeltsin’s people?”

“That’s the beauty of it. Not a single