http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/31949971

Red ink

When onetime dissident journalist Nikolai Katkov is tipped off to the murder of a highly placed government official, he doesn't count on the trail twisting into the lurid world of Moscow mafia casino-owner Arkady Barkhin. After Katkov's relentless digging almost gets him gunned down, he receives an unexpected appeal for help from the striking Gabby Scotto, a US Treasury special agent. She has been tracking laundered money flowing out of the US--an investigation that has led to Barkhin's casino and a similar dead end. But then Katkov obtains a sensitive government document that could shatter Russia's fragile and newly free economy--and join Scotto in Washington to pick up the trail. Katkov's tenaciousness in pursuit of a story has been honed by decades of KGB harassment, and his survival instincts--notwithstanding a penchant for vodka and American cigarettes--by a few hard years in the Gulag. He senses a kindred spirit in the vivacious Broolynite whose bravado is matched by her investigative savvy--and who leaps at the chance to lead some down-and-dirty field work. Scotto has doubts about sharing privileged information with a journalist, but they are squelched when Katkov makes a critical discovery about a shipping container heading south on I-95--one that they suspect is filled with $2 billion badly in need of laundering. As Katkov and Scotto's pursuit races from freeways to freight cars, from Baltimore to Miami, they are shadowed by American entrepreneur Michael Rubineau, a man intent upon seeing the container safely to its ultimate destination. A frequent VIP guest at Arkady Barkhin's Moscow nightclub, Rubineau has devised a scheme of stunning brilliance and unprecedented greed and venality. But as Scotto prepares to take him down, and Katkov composes his front-page headlines, they're forced into a gambit of extreme peril. Heading into the last outpost of communism, Katkov is about to discover that love of country and lust for money can crumble even the fiercest loyalties ...

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