Vitaly was not the only person who was worried about hassles and red tape as the result of this accident. A bunch of Russians—who crashed a rental car and damaged a farmer’s property while driving drunk, in the process of smuggling some cigarettes—the thought of all the reports he would have to fill out made Clyde want to swoon.
So he led them out of the cornfield, retrieved his daughter from the fence post, flipped down the backseat of the station wagon, and packed the Russians into its spacious cargo hold. He could hear them making humorous comparisons between the Murder Car and Perestroika. They carried as many cigarette cartons as they could and packed them in among their bodies. Vitaly leaned over the seat and made faces at Maggie and marveled at her perfection while his crew ran back into the cornfield and scavenged more cigarettes. Clyde took out the first-aid kit Desiree had packed, which was the size of a suitcase, and found an inflatable arm splint, which he applied to the one crewman’s damaged limb, to the fascination and astonishment of the fliers.
Finally they were ready. He drove them the last two miles to the airport, pulled onto the runway, and drove up alongside the flank of Perestroika, which loomed as high as the bluffs of Wapsipinicon. Vitaly insisted that he and Maggie come inside for a tour. Clyde went in with some trepidation, worrying that this gang of pirates would close the hatches, take them off to Arabia, and sell them into slavery, perhaps throwing in some Marlboros and steel tubing as freebies. But although Vitaly was manipulative and blatantly untrustworthy, he was not evil, at least in that kind of spectacular way, and the moment Vitaly had seen Maggie, he had obviously decided that he and Clyde were friends for life.
The interior of the plane was the most sloppy and ramshackle thing Clyde had ever seen; it was a flying fraternity house, with cases of Soviet brandy and various other forms of contraband stashed everywhere. The wiring had been patched with lamp cord and duct tape, and everything was greasy with hydraulic fluid, which had dripped or sprayed from faulty connections and frayed hoses.
On the other hand, it could carry a locomotive thirty-five hundred miles at almost the speed of sound, so who was he to knock it?
Just the same, he got well away from the airport before the Antonov took off.
Chapter Fifteen
Larkin Schoendienst, professor of Ag Econ at the University of Idaho, and Betsy’s mentor, had, in an earlier life, worked abroad for many years as an agricultural attaché in various embassies throughout the Third World.
Actually, he had been working for the CIA in the Operations Division, and after many adventures, which he frequently alluded to but always declined to talk about, he had suffered a breakdown. The Agency had provided him with a greased path to a nice office in Moscow, Idaho, with a view over the otherworldly landscape of the Palouse Hills, and set him up with 125 percent disability, plus his professor’s salary, plus whatever he could pull down selling information and analysis back to the Agency. He divided his time between a furnished room above someone else’s garage in Moscow, and a condo in Ketchum a stone’s throw from the ski lift.
Betsy had arrived in Moscow, Idaho, at the age of twenty-one, fresh from Brigham Young, where she’d earned a B.A. in Russian. Larkin Schoendienst had been named as her adviser. He was, by a very wide margin, the most morally ambiguous person Betsy had ever met. Now that she had her M.A. and was in Washington working for the Agency, she understood that nothing was an accident; Schoendienst was a procurer for the CIA, and he had taken Betsy under his wing because she was a Russian-speaking Mormon from a sheltered home, the ideal candidate for Agency grooming.
So Betsy had a lot of qualms about Larkin Schoendienst and was pretty certain that, when he finished drinking himself to death, he was going straight to hell. But she loved him anyway. He had encouraged her, protected her, and, in one long, boozy session at a campus bar the day after she’d been awarded her degree, he had given her what he called the keys for survival in D.C.
“If you want to survive there,” he had said, “never suggest solutions, never take credit, and be a bit to the right of the President—whatever President—because they leave and you stay.”
She had shrugged off his cynical statements at the time. She thought that the CIA, with its unparalleled access to everything, would be a neat place to work. And so it was. For a while. But the more years she spent there, the more of Schoendienst’s little bits of advice came unexpectedly to mind. And after she was named acting branch chief and moved into Howard King’s office, where the telephone still reeked of his aftershave, the relevance of her adviser’s words became clearer every day.