Authors: Brian Haig
After several unfruitful attempts, a midlevel employee at his investment bank was secretly approached by a Moscow weekly and
offered five thousand easy American dollars to chat a little about his employer. The employee confessed that he not only did
not know Alex personally, he had actually seen him only twice in person—two fleeting glimpses of Alex speeding through the
trading floor on his way to his office upstairs. Didn’t matter, they assured him. Surely Alex’s companies were rife with rumors,
gossip, and anecdotes, concocted or otherwise. The price was kicked up to seven thousand and the employee was suddenly too
eager to cough up a few confidences—as long as the check was good and, for sure, his name stayed out of it.
“Kid Midas” was the predictable headline that outed Alex, and it said it all and then some. It was rumored that Alex was Russia’s
richest man, its first fat-cat billionaire; he owned an armada of towering yachts; two hundred rare and exotic sports cars
housed in a temperature-controlled underground garage and spitshined daily; a fleet of sleek private jets to ferry him to
his sprawling estates in Paris, London, Rome, New York, and Hong Kong. The chatty employee had recently finished a spicy,
newly translated, unauthorized biography about the marvelously perverse life of Howard Hughes, and he plagiarized liberally
and imaginatively from that intoxicating tale to earn his seven grand.
Alex was a total schizoid paranoid, he’d said; he sat around his office nude, counting his rubles and hatching new businesses
in between watching old black-and-white Katharine Hepburn flicks. He collected beautiful women by the carton, renamed them
all Katharine, and was so germophobic that he boiled them before he slept with them. He was anti-Semitic, antisocial, ate
only raw vegetables, drank only boiled water, was left-handed, was rumored to go both ways sexually, and had to be chloroformed
by a squad of brawny assistants to get haircuts and his fingernails trimmed.
The resulting article was ridiculous, packed with bizarre lies, and viciously fascinating.
Fictitious or not, it incited an all-out frenzy and induced scores of Moscow reporters to join in the hunt. Sensationalized
stories about Alex quickly became daily fare, more often than not outrageously fabricated nonsense. One enterprising weekly
magazine initiated a column dubbed “Kid Midas Sightings” so the whole city could join in the fun: a five hundred dollar reward
was offered to anybody who could produce a photograph of Alex, five thousand if he was nude, purportedly his normal state.
Alex’s attorneys begged him to sue, promising to terrorize the publishing industry, as only lawyers can do. A flat, persistent
refusal was his stubborn response. It would only generate more unwanted publicity, he insisted. And anyway, it was a novelty
that would quickly wear off, he assured them, but he promptly hired his first security people. Six private bodyguards. All
former Spetsnaz special forces warriors, who looked fierce and swore they would be loyal to the end.
Alex was still scribbling notes and poring over thick business files when, two hours later, the pilot’s nasal voice launched
the usual preparatory steps for landing. Seat backs were jolted forward, eating trays shoved back into position, a few people
got up and stretched. The pair of watchers exchanged knowing winks.
Time for the fun to begin.
They followed Mr. and Mrs. Konevitch as they deplaned, he hauling their leather overnight bags casually slung over his broad
shoulders; both of them totally clueless. Light packing for what the couple obviously assumed would be a brief and enjoyable
business trip, in and out, a single night at most. Guess again, Alex.
The carry-on luggage was a welcome relief, nonetheless. Their instructions were stern and clear: avoid loose ends, anything
that might make the authorities suspicious. The Hungarian police weren’t known for nosiness or efficiency. Interference seemed
unlikely. Still, unclaimed bags that were tagged with contact information might cause an unwanted problem or two.
At customs, Mr. and Mrs. Konevitch offered polite smiles to the green-uniformed customs guard, flashed their Russian passports,
no problems there. Then they went directly through the sliding glass doors into the expansive lobby.
Midday. The foot traffic was sparse, which made the targets easy to track, but also made it harder for the reception team
to blend in and hide.
Their briefing was unequivocal on this point—stay with the Konevitches every second of every minute. No respite until the
arrival-and-reception team had matters firmly in hand. Same kind of job they had done hundreds or possibly thousands of times
during the past fifty years, always successfully. Old age had slowed them down a few steps, but in their line of work the
trade-off was more than equitable; nobody suspected a pair of doddering old geezers.
The customs agent barely gave them or their passports a glance as he waved them through. What possible threat could these
wrinkled old wrecks pose to the Republic of Hungary? they were sure he was thinking. If only he knew. They had thirty confirmed
kills to their credit, with six more they stubbornly claimed, though the corpses had been incinerated into ashes or fallen
into deep rivers and washed away.
Mr. and Mrs. Konevitch were walking briskly through the lobby, straight for the taxi stand outside. The tail team followed
at a safe distance, hobbling and creaking with every step.
At the taxi stand, three people were already lined up ahead of the Konevitches—a hatchet-faced lady struggling with her oversized
luggage, and two faces the tails instantly recognized, Vladimir and Katya.
Vladimir was the boss of the arrival-and-reception team, a man they all thoroughly feared and deeply loathed. Katya, like
the rest of them, was vicious, cold-blooded, and unemotional, a veteran killer with a long and enviable list of hits—but always
just business. Vladimir was a sadistic bastard with freakish appetites. He would’ve done this work for free; paid to do it,
probably. Even the toughest killers in the unit felt a wash of pity for his victims.
The tail team from the airplane backed off, ignoring the Konevitches and redirecting their attention to trying to spot the
private bodyguards. They had memorized as many faces from their flight as they could. Now they separated from each other,
about twenty yards apart, stopped, pretended to fumble with their luggage, and watched for familiar faces.
The call came in at 2:37 p.m. and the secretary put it right through.
Sergei Golitsin checked his watch, right on time. He lifted the phone and barked, “Well?”
“Good news, they’re here,” the voice informed him. “Everything’s under control.”
“So you have them?”
“No, not yet. They’re at the taxi stand two feet from Vladimir and Katya. Everything’s on schedule, everything’s in place.
I’ll call you in a few minutes when we do.”
“Don’t mess this up.” Golitsin snorted.
“Relax. We won’t.”
There was a long pause. Golitsin, with barely suppressed excitement, asked, “Are the communications set up?”
“They are. The listening devices are state of the art. You’ll get a crystal-clear feed into the phone lines and through your
speakerphone. I tested it with your secretary an hour ago. Everything’s fine.” After a pause, the voice added, “Vladimir’s
going to handle this. It’s going to be loud and ugly.”
“It better be.” Golitsin closed his eyes and smiled. “I want to hear every sound.”
T
he old lady at the front of the line shoved two bags at a cabbie and crawled painfully into a blue BMW with
TAXI
splashed in bold letters across the side.
The couple directly in front of Alex and Elena stepped forward, and a black Mercedes sedan that had been idling by the far
curb suddenly swerved in front of the other taxis and screeched to a noisy halt half a foot from the taxi stop. Vladimir,
wearing the garb and collar of a Catholic priest, made a fast survey of the surroundings, then quickly threw open the rear
door. The same instant, Katya, dressed as a nun, pushed out an ugly black pistol hidden inside the folds of her baggy sleeve
and pointed it in Alex’s face.
Her partner turned around. Coldly and in Russian he said to Alex, “It’s a simple choice. Get into the car or die right here
and right now.”
Alex looked into his eyes. He had not the slightest doubt he meant every word. After a moment, he said, “Fine, I’ll go. This
young lady, however, you will leave alone. I don’t know her. She’s not with me.”
“Don’t be stupid, Konevitch. Katya will kill you, or your wife, or both of you. Doesn’t matter to us.”
Alex’s face froze. His
name
. The man had used his name, and he
knew
Elena was his wife. For three years he had prepared himself for a moment like this. Dreamed about it. Dreaded it. Now it
was actually happening, and he couldn’t think or react.
Vladimir’s thick hands shot out and grabbed Elena by the neck. He spun her around like a puppet; one hand slipped under her
chin, the other against the back of her head. Elena squirmed and fought at first, but Vladimir was too large and strong. He
tightened his grip, and she yelped with pain.
Vladimir said to Alex, “You have a black belt, I hear. Surely you recognize this stance. A quick shift of my weight and her
neck will snap like a rotten twig. Now, will you
please
get into the cab?”
As they were sure he would, without hesitation or another word, Alex climbed inside. A moment later, Elena was shoved in beside
him and landed awkwardly against his side. The man knew what he was doing; he was using her as a buffer from Alex’s hands,
and he squeezed into the backseat to her right. The woman in the nun’s outfit, obviously anything but one of God’s saintly
servants, slipped into the front passenger seat with her pistol in Alex’s face.
The driver, a trusted cohort and a skilled getaway man, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and off they sped with a noisy
screech. Nobody said a word. As if on cue, the lady in the front shifted her gun at Elena’s face. The man in priest’s garb
said to Alex, “Hold up your hands, together.”
Alex did as he was told. The man bent across Elena and efficiently slapped thick plastic cuffs on Alex’s wrists, then with
a show of equal dexterity, Elena’s.
After a moment, Alex asked, “What do you want?”
“Be quiet,” came the reply from Vladimir. He withdrew two black hoods and clumsily covered their heads.
In March 1992, two months after the press frenzy over Alex Konevitch began, the initial attacks on his companies were detected.
Somebody was making repeated highly sophisticated attempts to break into Konevitch Associates’ computer networks. Quite successfully,
or so it appeared. The Russian Internet backbone, like everything inherited from communism, was shockingly backward and inefficient.
Alex had therefore hired an American company that specialized in these things and plowed millions into creating his own corporate
network, a closed maze of servers, switches, and privately owned fiber-optic cable that connected his companies. The only
vulnerabilities were in the interfaces between his private network and the Russian phone companies, interfaces that were,
regrettably, unavoidable. Naturally this was precisely where the attacks occurred.
That discovery was made minutes after a new American anti-virus software program was installed, a magical sifter that sorted
gold from fool’s gold. Tens of thousands of spyware programs were detected—like small tracking devices—that had penetrated
and riddled the entire network. The programs were sophisticated little things, impossible to detect with homegrown software.
They not only tracked the flow of Internet traffic, they caused each message to replicate and then forwarded copies to an
outside Internet address.
Private investigators easily tracked the Internet address to a small apartment on the outer ring of Moscow and burgled their
way into the flat. It was completely empty and wiped clean. Nothing, except a small table and dusty computer. The plug was
pulled out. The hard disk had been removed.
What was going on? Alex had anxiously queried his technical specialists. Somebody is mapping your businesses and transactions,
came the answer. For how long? he asked. Maybe weeks, more probably months, and it seemed fair to conclude that whoever launched
this attack now had an avalanche of information regarding how his rapidly expanding empire came together, how one piece interfaced
with the next, how and where the money flowed, even the identities of the key people who pushed the buttons. The computers
in the human resources department, particularly, were riddled with enough spyware to feed a software convention.
The programs were wiped clean, gobs of money were thrown at more protective software—all imported from America, all state
of the art, all breathtakingly expensive—and nothing was heard from the originator of the attack. Corporate extortion or any
of several forms of embezzlement had been anticipated—pay us off, the intercepted traffic will be destroyed, the attacks will
stop. But after long weeks during which Alex’s hired computer wizards held their breath and nobody approached the firm, a
new, more hopeful scenario was reached. It was probably one of the expanding army of nettlesome computer nerds, his technical
people speculated—nothing to be overly concerned with. This was an everyday problem in the United States, Alex was told, where
hackers sat up all night and thought up ways to be bothersome for no greater reason than the idiotic satisfaction of imagining
it made them something more than the insignificant little twits they were.
In fact, Alex was warned, it could have been much worse; the sneaks could’ve hacked in, crashed the entire system, and demolished
mounds of irreplaceable information. A helpful and timely warning, actually—take better precautions, spend whatever it takes,
and then some. Stay alert. Be thankful we detected the problem early and eliminated it, Alex was told by his head technician,
an American imported and paid a small fortune for his erudition in these matters.