He knew Alex Novosty was part of KGB's T-Directorate, Russia’s special organization for high-tech theft. In the old days he operated out of Sophia, arranging the laundering of underground Soviet funds by mingling them with the flight capital and drug money that made its way between Turkey's Ziraat Bank, the Vatican's Istituto per le Opere di Religione, and Geneva no-questions fronts with names like the Banco di Roma per la Svizzera.
The truth was, Michael Vance, Jr., and Aleksei Ilyich Novosty had, over the years, often traveled the same paths. They used the same organizations and contacts—Novosty to conceal illicit monies, Vance to expose them.
"You know, I always enjoyed our games." Novosty looked out over Athens, his voice trailing off. "But, as you say, that was the old days. The world's changed. Now perhaps we can just be two professionals. Do some business."
He seated himself on a block of marble, still slightly moist with morning dew, and withdrew a wrinkled clipping. It was from The Times of London. "Here, read this, please."
Vance glanced down at it, then realized he had already read it on the Reuters satellite news service. He had looked it over, stored it in his news-update computer file, and promptly forgotten about it.
SOVIET PARTY OFFICIAL SOUGHT IN DISAPPEARANCE OF FUNDS
MOSCOW, Mar. 18—The Central Committee today lodged formal charges against a CPSU official, Viktor Fedorovich Volodin, First Secretary of the oblast of Sakhalin, in connection with his alleged embezzlement of government funds and subsequent disappearance.
The island of Sakhalin, together with the Kuril Islands, is an administrative district in the far eastern region of the Soviet Federated Socialist Republics. Since being taken from Japan in 1945, the southern Sakhalin oblast has been closed to all Western visitors. The island is said to have a major military airfield at Dolinsk and a naval base at Korsakov facing La Perouse Strait, the only year-round passage between Soviet warm-water ports in Asia and the North Pacific. It is an economically and strategically vital part of the Soviet Far East, with the only oil fields in the eastern regions.
The amount embezzled is reported at twenty million rubles, which would make Party Secretary Volodin responsible for the largest outright theft of state monies in the history of the Soviet Union . . .
Vance looked up. "The home team at play. Some ministry shell game, probably. Little budget scam. What's it got to do with you?"