A Raging Storm

Jones didn’t throw many softballs. But this was one of them.

“The failed ‘bathhouse’ coup in 1991.”

“Exactly.”

Storm knew the story well. It had been a defining moment in history. On August 17, 1991, a Saturday, the head of the KGB, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, summoned five senior Soviet officials to a Moscow bathhouse to discuss how they could overthrow Soviet president and party boss Mikhail Gorbachev. Kryuchkov often held meetings in steam rooms because it was one way he could insure that his colleagues were not secretly recording his conversations. While sitting naked, they decided to put Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, under house arrest and then use KGB troops and the Soviet military to seize control of Moscow. At first, the diehards seemed to be winning. But that had changed when Russian soldiers refused to fire at a huge crowd of Muscovites assembled outside the White House — the home of Russia’s parliament. Kryuchkov and the others were arrested. Only after they were in jail did the Kremlin discover that the KGB had secretly moved out of Moscow several billion dollars of rubles and precious metals that belonged to the Communist Party. They hadn’t wanted it to fall into the hands of Gorbachev and other reformers if the coup failed. Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and all of the presidents who had followed them had searched for the missing billions. But none of them had succeeded in finding them. Stories began sweeping through Russia. The gold bars had been transported by Vympel soldiers — KGB special forces — to a hidden bunker. The Vympel were much like the U.S. Navy SEALs and were used by the KGB for clandestine missions. They first gained notoriety in 1979 when a team of Vympel operatives assassinated Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin while he was sleeping in his bed inside the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and being protected by some five hundred guards. Legend had it that the Vympel officer in charge of hiding the gold had killed all of his men and then committed suicide so that none of them would be tempted to reveal where the billions in bullion had been hidden.

“When was the photograph taken?” Storm asked. “Was it while the gold was still in Moscow or after it disappeared?”

“Ah, you’ve just asked the key question,” Jones replied.

He passed the fourth photograph, the one he had held back, across his desk to Storm. It showed three men standing together. They were Jedidiah Jones, Senator Thurston Windslow, and oligarch Oleg Petrov. They were holding the gold bar that Storm had just seen.

“Somehow,” Jones explained, “Petrov found out where the Party’s missing fortune is hidden. He brought a gold bar with him to the U.S. as proof and showed it to Senator Windslow because he was head of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence. Windslow brought Petrov to me.”

“How’d he find it?”