Chapter Two
Four Months Ago
Moscow is the largest metropolitan area in Europe, has a population of over seventeen million, consistently ranks as one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live, and, in spite of recent efforts that have reduced its numbers, still has one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world.
Former capital at one time of both the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, and the home of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - brutal autocracies all - the “City by the Moskva River,” is over eight hundred and fifty years old. Like any concentration of mankind that has survived almost a millennium, its history has not been without its turbulent times. In fact, the name “Moscow” is believed to have been derived from an ancient Baltic-Finnic language, in which it means “dark” and “turbid.” Mysterious. Hidden. Tumultuous.
Two hundred and fifty feet below the Armory building in the Kremlin, three men sat around a long table in the middle of a sixty-by-twenty-foot room. A massive, circular, ultra-modern, cobalt steel vault door dominated one end of the room. At the other was a small break room and bathroom. Five identical walk-in safes lined each wall on either side of the table. One safe door was open.
A fourth man, middle-aged like the others, stepped out of the open safe and picked up a long, narrow, metal drawer from the table. The drawer was filled with two dozen small thick plastic bags. A note card was attached to each. Faded hand-written notations identified the weight, color, and clarity of the single rough diamond inside.
Yevgeny Andreyivich Dubrinin was fifty-two, plump, and had a fashion sense that was mired in Soviet-era sartorial splendor. The thick-rib corduroy pants he favored were either brown or navy-blue, an easy match for a not-so-finely-woven, less-than-white (because-bleach-was-a-luxury-in-Soviet-times) button-down cotton shirt. Over that he wore a pullover sweater, usually red, that looked like it was knitted by a blind grandmother, but was, in fact, a gift from his wife. Topping it all off was a horribly obvious comb over.
In spite of his rather drab appearance and a job that rarely released him to the light of day, Yevgeny Dubrinin was perpetually cheerful. Seldom did he let a working day pass without relating a joke or humorous anecdote to his colleagues.
The three men that worked with Yevgeny were about as nondescript as he was. Innokentiy and Vladimir were in their late forties, with Alexei the youngest at forty-three. All were of average physical appearance. If passed on Red Square the only thing anyone would be likely to notice - besides, respectively, the comb over, a bald head, a pockmarked face, and a bushy black mustache and eyebrows - was that they had just walked out of the Kremlin.
Yevgeny picked up the drawer and carried it to the nearest safe. Its Diebold Craine door was over sixty years old, and the space inside was roughly six feet deep, seven feet high, and four feet wide.
The back and left walls were concrete, but the right wall wasn’t really a wall at all, but floor-to-ceiling rows of metal drawers, like safety deposit boxes. Twelve rows of twelve, with one empty slot.
The Russian State Diamond Fund is part of the State Fund of Precious Stones, which is managed by the Ministry of Finance. Known primarily for its exhibition of precious stones and jewelry housed in the Armory building in the Kremlin, its most prized assets are rarely displayed. These include all cut and uncut diamonds larger than twenty and fifty carats respectively, as well as all rubies, emeralds, and sapphires over twenty carats cut and thirty carats rough.
Originally stored in the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, the collection was moved to Moscow in 1914 to escape the threat of German invasion and stored in a vault in the Armory basement. In 1926, Joseph Stalin authorized the sale at auction of over two-thirds of the inventory to aid the struggling Soviet economy. In selling the precious stones, Stalin violated Peter the Great’s proclamation that successive leaders should not only leave a number of their personal collection to the state, but that the growing national fund should never be touched. It existed to show the strength of the nascent world power.
Stalin wasn’t even Russian. He was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Georgia, in December, 1878, and later arrogantly changed his surname to “made of steel.” He fancied himself the second coming of Tsar Peter I, to whom he was often compared. Peter the Great transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the huge Russian Empire, and he, Stalin, would convert the Russian Empire into the Soviet empire. Then he would rebuild the diamond fund into the national asset that Peter Romanov had envisioned it to be.
However, Stalin was thinking beyond just jewelry and the rare invaluable museum-quality stones that Peter and successive monarchs had contributed. He envisioned a time in the near future when the Soviet Union would actually control the global diamond trade.
To that end, in late 1935, he authorized construction of a new storage facility deeper and more secure than the vault used since 1914. In this separate vault, the Soviet Union would stockpile rough diamonds. He entrusted the growth and security of this new and secret inventory, separate from the original State Fund, to a handful of loyalists. Construction of the new vault was delayed until well after the Second World War, and nearly a half-century later, this little-known group officially became known as Gokhran, the State Precious Metals and Gems Repository.
Innokentiy sat at the table and sipped the last of the coffee from the dented steel thermos he carried with him every day. He and the others watched as Yevgeny closed the safe door and rejoined them at the table.
“This inventory reminds me of postcard I receive from cousin in San Francisco America,” Yevgeny related as he rubbed his lower back. “Workers who paint Golden Gate Bridge start at one end, and when finish, is time to start over again.” The others laughed with him, for they appreciated his light-hearted demeanor.
“Like us here!” added Innokentiy, rubbing his hairless pate as he added to the laughter.
Yevgeny retrieved a battered leather satchel from the break room. He had no idea that the thirty-four loyal Soviets who built Stalin’s secret vault were entombed just ten feet away, behind the break room wall.
He walked to the big round vault door at the other end of the room and tapped a code on a keypad to the left. With a faint click and hum, the door slowly swung outward.
The four men stepped quickly through the entrance. Just as quickly, Yevgeny tapped a code on an identical keypad on the outside wall, and the huge door began to close.
Mounted in a small niche next to the outer keypad was a device that looked like a microscope. Above it, built into the wall, a one-inch wide glass strip ran from one side of the recess to the other.
They stood in a small anteroom. On the far side of the room was a wide, unmarked, thick steel door. To its left, a security station overlooked the anteroom through a window made from three layers of one-inch-thick glass-clad polycarbonate. It was made to stop every size projectile up to and including a fifty-caliber bullet.
From within, access to and from the vault was controlled by two armed soldiers from the Kremlin guards unit now known as the Presidential Regiment. Part of the Federal Protective Service (FSO), it is responsible for security of the Kremlin and its treasures, as well as for the government’s highest officials.
A clear barrier wall made of the same polycarbonate bisected the room. In the middle of that wall was a sally port, the size of a small half-bathroom, with doors on either side. It was also made of the bullet-resistant material.
Completely enclosed within this chamber was a whole-body, passive millimeter wave scanner. Two vertical antenna bars within this seven-foot-tall enclosure rotate an arc on either side, transmitting low-powered radio waves. The reflected energy is then converted into an image of the subject, revealing any hidden items.
A small shelf with a built-in dual palm/fingerprint scanner - an after-market modification - was mounted within. Beneath the glass plate of the scanner was another device, a VeriChip reader, that emitted a weak short-range radio signal and then read the return, usually from a subcutaneously implanted receiver/transmitter.
Finally, a sensitive pressure plate in the floor weighed each man. If any of the men were more than two pounds heavier than when they entered, or more than five pounds over their previous day’s weight, an alert would sound in the security station.
Each of these devices had a margin of error of approximately eight percent, but used together, that failure rate dropped to one percent.
Clearly, security was taken seriously here.
Yevgeny entered the chamber and had his hand scanned. Once through to the other side, the wide locked door next to the security station swung open, and Yevgeny entered for a full body cavity search. Then he dressed, retrieved his jacket which hung nearby, and took his poked and prodded body to a nearby elevator. Not until the doors to both the remotely controlled elevator and the search room closed completely was the next man allowed into the chamber.
Upstairs, Yevgeny passed through yet another sally port. There were no security devices here, but the passage was overwatched by a Presidential Regiment senior sergeant in a security station. The station had the same bullet-resistant construction as the one below, but was much smaller.
Two more regiment soldiers, a sergeant and a junior sergeant, played cards at a desk. Upon seeing Yevgeny enter the sally port, they rose and stepped over to a long table to search the custodian’s satchel.
Satisfied, they bid him good evening.
Finally, Yevgeny slid his identification card through the slot in what looked like a credit card machine, and entered a PIN. The door clicked, he pulled it open, and exited.
It took just as long to leave as it did to enter.
The walls of the Kremlin also formed a rough triangle, with the Moskva River bordering the bottom. To the right were Red Square, the world-famous Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and the plaza below it, known as Saint Basil’s Downhill. To the left was the park known as the Alexander Garden. In the bottom-left corner, rose the Borovitskaya Tower, part of one of the Kremlin’s main entrances. Next to the entrance sat the Armory.
Moscow had clear skies and sixty degrees, nearly a record high for March, as Yevgeny stepped onto a triangular cobblestone courtyard between the Armory and the western wall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Young cedar trees grew in a small island in the middle. To the left, a street passed through a ground-level tunnel in the palace. It continued up between the outer wall and the Palace of Congresses, to the Kremlin Arsenal, traditional home of the imperial guard and current home to the Presidential Regiment. To the right, a tall, ornate, wrought-iron fence topped a low stone wall. There were two entrances, both wide enough for one vehicle.
As Yevgeny passed through the nearest gate in the wrought-iron fence, he glanced down at a row of six-inch wide steel plates. He never stepped directly over them. They were the tops of anti-vehicle barriers, designed to be raised in the event of a terrorist attack.
He turned left and walked up Borovitskaya Street, the stately gold-and-ivory Baroque palace on his left. He would exit the Kremlin onto Red Square at the Spasskaya Tower gate. This route was a little longer than the others he could take home, but it was the most picturesque, and his favorite.
Across the Moskva on his right, the Zamoskvorechye Peninsula spread south. Its tip was actually an island. Named Balchug, the spit of land was separated from the rest of the peninsula by the Vodootvodny Canal.
Past the palace on the left lay Cathedral Square. While Red Square dominated with its sheer size, Cathedral Square entranced with a concentration of bright stone topped with golden domes. Yevgeny’s eyes fell across the three cathedrals, two churches, and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower. He’d seen these buildings so many times, yet he was never bored or jaded with the spectacle. Though he would never learn it, he shared with Tyler Oakland a love of beautiful architecture.
If his colleagues had looked up when they made this twice-daily trek, it was probably just to guess the nationality of the latest tour bus group. More concerned, they were, with getting home to their wives and the bottle of vodka sitting in the freezer, where it would stay until finished. Or, when winter set in, moved to the mini snow drift on the kitchen window sill. For the most part, the four vault custodians led routine lives with routine jobs and routine wives. That was all they had known, and all they would know.
It was one month before Bethany Andrews’ murder.
And less than one hour before their own.
