Buried Secrets

68.



At a few minutes after nine at night, the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston, was an obsidian monolith. A few lighted windows scattered here and there like a corncob with not many kernels remaining. Some of the building’s tenants were open round the clock.

But not the law offices of Batten Schechter, on the forty-eighth floor. No paralegals toiling frantically through the night to meet a filing deadline or a court date. Batten Schechter’s attorneys rarely soiled their hands with anything so vulgar as a public trial. This was a sedate, dignified firm that specialized in trusts and estates and the occasional litigation, always resolved in quietly vicious backroom negotiations, perhaps a word whispered in the ear of the right judge or official. It was like growing mushrooms: They preferred to work out of the light of day.

I drove the white Ford panel truck down Trinity Place along the back of the Hancock Tower, and up to the loading dock. A row of five steel pylons blocked my way. I got out, saw the warning signs—DO NOT SOUND HORN FOR ENTRY and PUSH BUTTON & USE INTERCOM FOR ACCESS WHEN DOOR IS CLOSED—and I hit the big black button.

The steel overhead door rolled up, and a little fireplug of a man stood there, looking annoyed at the interruption. It was 9:16 P.M. Stitched in script on his blue shirt, above the name of his company, was CARLOS. He glanced at the logo on the side of the van—DERDERIAN FINE ORIENTAL RUGS—nodded, hit a switch, and the steel columns sank into the pavement. He pointed to a space inside the loading dock where a few other service vehicles were parked.

He insisted on guiding me in as if I couldn’t park by myself, waving me in closer and closer to the dock until the van’s front end nudged the black rubber bumpers.

“You here for Batten Schechter?” Carlos said.

I nodded, striking a balance between cordial and aloof.

All he knew was that the law firm of Batten Schechter had called the Hancock’s property management office and told them that a carpet cleaner would be working in their offices some time after nine o’clock. He didn’t need to know that the “facilities manager” of Batten Schechter was actually Dorothy.

Couldn’t have been easier. All I had to do was promise Mr. Derderian I’d buy one of his overpriced, though elegant, rugs for my office. In exchange he was happy to lend me one of his vans. None of them were in use at night anyway.

“How’s it going there, Carlos?”

He gave the standard Boston answer: “Doin’ good, doin’ good.” A Boston accent with a Latin flavor. “Got a lotta carpets to clean, up there?”

“Just one.”

He grunted.

I pulled open the van’s rear doors and wrestled with the big bulky commercial carpet extractor/shampooer. He helped me lower it to the floor, even though it wasn’t his job, then pointed a thumb toward a bank of freight elevators.

The elevator was slow to arrive. It had scuffed steel walls and aluminum diamond-tread-plate floors. I hit the button for forty-eight. As it rose, I adjusted Mauricio’s STI pistol in my waistband. I’d been storing it in the Defender’s glove box ever since I’d grabbed it from his apartment.

I didn’t see any security cameras inside the elevator, but I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t take it out.

A moment later, the steel doors opened slowly on a small fluorescent-lit service lobby on the forty-eighth floor. Obviously not where the firm’s clients or partners entered. I wheeled out the rug shampooer and saw four doors. Each was the service entrance to a different firm, each labeled with a black embossed plastic nameplate.

The one for Batten Schechter had an electronic digital keypad mounted next to it. David Schechter’s firm probably had reason to take extra security measures.

From my duffel bag I drew a long flexible metal rod, bent at a ninety-degree angle, a hook at one end. This was a special tool called a Leverlock, sold only to security professionals and government agencies.

I knelt down and pushed the rod underneath the door and twisted it around and up until it caught the lever handle on the inside, then yanked it down. Thirteen seconds later I was in.

So much for the fancy digital keypad.

Now I found myself in some back corridor where the firm stored office supplies and cleaning equipment and such. I pushed the rug shampooer against a wall and made my way by the dim emergency lighting.

It was like going from steerage to a stateroom on the Queen Mary. Soft carpeting, mahogany doors with brass nameplates, antique furnishings.

David Schechter, as a name partner, got the corner office. In an alcove before the mahogany double doors to his inner sanctum was a secretary’s desk and a small couch with coffee table. The double doors were locked.

Then I saw another digital keypad, mounted unobtrusively by the doorframe at eye level. Strange. It meant that Schechter’s office probably wasn’t cleaned by the crew that did the rest of the building.

It also meant there was something inside worth protecting.

The odds were, the combination to the digital lock was scrawled on some Post-it pad in his secretary’s desk drawer. But faster than looking for it would be to use the Leverlock.

The whole thing felt almost too easy.

From the duffel bag I removed a black carrying case. Inside, a flexible fiberscope lay coiled in the form-fitted foam padding like a metallic snake. A tungsten-braided sheath encased a fiber-optic cable two meters long and less than six millimeters in diameter. Bomb-disposal teams used these in Iraq to look for concealed explosives.

I bent the scope into an angle, screwed on the eyepiece, and attached an external metal-halide light source, then fished it under the door. A lever on the handle allowed me to move the probe around like an elephant’s trunk. Now I could see what was on the other side of the door. Angling it upward, I inspected the wall on the far side of the doorframe. Nothing appeared to be mounted there.

When I swiveled the scope over to the other side of the door frame, I saw a red pinpoint light, steady and unblinking.

A motion detector.

A passive infrared sensor. It would detect minute changes in room temperature, caused by the heat given off by a human body. A common device, but not easy to defeat.

A solid red light meant the sensor was armed and ready.

I cursed aloud.

There were ways to get by these things. I tried to recall the tricks I’d heard about, though this wasn’t my expertise. Not at all. The best I could do was guess. I considered abandoning the operation.

But I’d come too far to turn back.





69.



So I gathered a few items from the Batten Schechter offices. The first was easy. Arrayed on the console behind Schechter’s assistant’s desk was an assortment of pictures. I slid the rectangle of glass out of a framed photograph of a panicked-looking little girl sitting on a shopping-mall Santa’s lap.

In a storeroom among the shelves of packing and mailing supplies I found a carton of polystyrene sheets, used to line boxes or protect rolled documents, and a roll of packing tape.

When I returned to Schechter’s office, I slid the Leverlock flat against the carpet under the double doors and had them open in ten seconds.

Then came the tricky part.

Holding the polystyrene square in front of me like a shield, I advanced toward the motion sensor, moving slowly through the eerie twilit interior, palely illuminated by the city lights below and the stars above. If I was remembering correctly, the foam would block my heat signature from being detected.

It took an agonizingly long time to reach the wall where the sensor was mounted. I held the sheet of foam a few inches from the sensor’s lens. Not too close, though. If I blocked it entirely, that would set it off too.

Like most state-of-the art infrared sensors, this one had a built-in flaw. It was equipped with what’s called “creep zone” coverage: If someone tried to slither on the floor underneath it, its lens would detect it right away.

But it couldn’t see above.

From behind the polystyrene scrim I took the small square of glass, taped to my belt, lifted it slowly, then placed it against the sensor’s lens. The strip of packing tape kept it securely in place.

Then I let the foam sheet drop to the floor.

The red light remained steady. I hadn’t triggered it.

I exhaled slowly.

Glass is opaque to infrared light. The sensor couldn’t see through it, yet didn’t perceive the glass as an obstruction.

I switched on the overhead lights. Two walls were paneled in mahogany. The other two were glass, nearly floor to ceiling, with breathtaking views of Boston: the Back Bay, the Charles River, Bunker Hill, the harbor. The lights twinkled like a starlit canopy fallen to earth. If this was the view from your office every day, you might start to believe you ruled the land below.

His desk was a small, delicate antique: honeyed mahogany, tooled bottle-green leather top, fluted legs. The only object on it was a phone.

There was a time once when the more powerful an executive was, the bigger his desk. You’d see CEOs with desks big as tramp steamers. But now the more important you were, the smaller and more fragile your work surface. As if to show the world you exerted power by mind control. Paperwork was for peons. There was no computer anywhere in sight. How someone could conduct business these days without a computer baffled me. Clearly it was good to be king.

Priceless-looking antiques were everywhere—spindly Regency chairs, dusky mirrors, parchment waste cans and credenzas and pedestal tables. A finely knotted antique silk rug in pale olive green flecked with muted yellows and reds that Mr. Derderian would drool over.

I knew bank CEOs who’d been fired for spending this kind of money on their office décor. They’d forgotten that if you decorated like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, you were likely to die like one, at the guillotine. The smart CEOs ordered from Office Liquidators.

But David Schechter had no shareholders to answer to. His clients didn’t care that their billable hours paid for expensive furniture. A rich lawyer is a successful one.

Then I noticed a second set of mahogany double doors.

They were unlocked. As I pulled them open the overhead lights came on.

Schechter’s personal filing cabinets. The ones that held documents too sensitive to be kept in his firm’s central files where anyone could access them.

Each steel file cabinet was secured with a Kaba Mas high-security lock. An X-09, electromechanical, developed to meet the U.S. government’s most stringent security standards and generally considered unpickable.

The locks were unpickable, but not the cabinets themselves. These were commercial steel four-drawer file cabinets, not GSA-approved Class 6 Security file cabinets. It was like putting a thousand-dollar lockset on a hollow-core door a kid could kick in.

I chose the one marked H–O, hoping to find Marshall Marcus’s file. Kneeling, I inserted a metal shim between the bottom drawer and the frame, and sure enough, the locking bar slid up.

Then I pulled open the top drawer and scanned the file tabs. At first they looked like client files, past and present.

But these were no ordinary clients. It was a Who’s Who of the Rich and Powerful. There were files here for some of the most influential public officials in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The names of the men (mostly, and a few women) who ran America. Not all of them were famous. Some—former directors of the NSA and the CIA, secretaries of State and Treasury, certain Supreme Court justices, White House chiefs of staff, senators and congressmen—were dimly remembered if at all.

But it wasn’t possible that David Schechter could have represented even a fraction of them. And what kind of legal service could he have provided anyway? So why were these files here?

As I tried to puzzle out the connection among them, one name caught my eye.

MARK WARREN HOOD, LTG, USA.

Lieutenant General Mark Hood. The man who’d run the covert operations unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency I once worked for.

I pulled out the brown file folder. It was an inch thick. For some reason my heart began to thud, as if I had a premonition.

Most of the documents were tawny with age. I rifled through quickly, not sure what these papers were doing here.

Until I noticed one word stamped in blue ink at the top of each page: MERCURY.

So here it was.

And somehow it was connected, through my old boss, to me.

The explanation was here, if only I could make sense of the columns of figures, the cryptic abbreviations or maybe codes. I kept turning the pages, trying to find a phrase or a word that might bring it all into focus.

I stopped at a photograph clipped to a page of card stock. At the top of the card were the words CERTIFICATE OF RELEASE OR DISCHARGE FROM ACTIVE DUTY. A military discharge form, DD-214. The man in the photograph had a buzz cut and was a few pounds lighter than he was now.

It actually took a second before I recognized myself.

The shock was so profound that I didn’t hear the tiny scuffling on the carpet behind me until it was too late, and then I felt a hard crack against the side of my head. A sharp, crippling pain shot through my cranium, and in the moment before everything went black I tasted blood.





70.



When I came to and my eyes were finally able to focus, I found myself in a paneled conference room, seated at one end of an immense coffin-shaped conference table.

My head throbbed painfully, especially my right temple. When I tried to move my hands, I realized my wrists were secured with flex-cuffs to the steel arms of a high-end office chair. The nylon straps cut into the skin. My ankles were bound to the center stem of the chair.

I had a dim memory of being dragged somewhere, trussed upright, cursed at. Hell, maybe waterboarded for good measure. I wondered how long I’d been slumped in this chair.

At the far end of the table, peering at me curiously, was David Schechter. He was wearing a bright yellow V-neck sweater and gave me an owlish look behind his round horn-rimmed glasses. I half expected him to start speaking in the voice of Dr. Evil, pinkie extended, demanding one million dollars for my release.

But I spoke first. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today.”

Schechter gave what was apparently his rendition of a smile. The corners of his nearly lipless mouth turned down into a perfect inverted arch, like a frog’s, tugged downward by dozens of vertical wrinkles. It looked like smiling was hard work for him and something he rarely practiced.

“Did you know,” he said, “that breaking and entering at night with intent to commit felony can land you in prison for twenty years?”

“I knew I should have gone to law school.”

“And that doing so with an unregistered dangerous weapon can get you life behind bars? There’s not a judge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who wouldn’t give you at least ten years. Oh, and there’s the matter of your private investigator’s license. That’s as good as revoked.”

“I assume the police are on the way.”

“I see no reason why we can’t settle this man to man without the police.”

I couldn’t help but smile. He wasn’t going to call the police. “I find it hard to think clearly when I’m losing circulation in my lower extremities.”

A slight motion in my peripheral vision. Skulking on either side of me were a couple of wide-bodied thugs. Security guards, probably. Or bodyguards. Each held a Glock at his side. One of them was blond with no neck and a vacant face with a steroid-ravaged complexion.

The other one I recognized.

He had a black crew cut and a muscle-bound physique even more extreme than the blond guy’s. It was one of the two men who’d broken into my loft. Over his left eye just below the brow was a thin white bandage. A much bigger one was plastered next to his left ear. I remembered throwing an electric shaver into his face and drawing blood.

Schechter looked at me for a few seconds, blinked slowly like an old iguana, and nodded. “Cut the man free.”

Mongo threw his employer a look of protest but fished a yellow-handled strap cutter from a pocket of his ambush jacket. He approached me cautiously like he was a bomb disposal expert, I was an armed nuclear weapon, and he was about ten seconds too late.

Silently, sullenly, he jabbed his cutters at the nylon loop that held my wrist to the chair’s right arm, while his moon-faced colleague fixed me with a beady vacant stare, his pistol leveled.

As Mongo worked, he leaned close and muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth, “How’s George Devlin doing?”

I stayed very still.

He took his time. He was enjoying the chance to taunt me. Almost inaudibly, he went on, “I caught a glimpse of Scarface on one of our surveillance cams. Broke the lens.”

He gave me a furtive smile, met my cold stare.

“Gotta be tough looking like a monster.” He snipped the other loop, freeing my hands from the arms of the chair but still leaving them cuffed together. “One day every girl you meet wants to get into your pants, next day you couldn’t pay a skank to get near y—”

With one quick upward thrust I slammed my fists under his chin, shutting his jaw so violently I could hear his molars crack. Then, as he reeled, I smashed down on the bridge of his nose. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, but I put a lot of force into it.

Something snapped loudly. The gout of blood from his nostrils indicated I’d probably broken his nose. He roared in pain and rage.

Schechter rose from his chair and said something quick and sharp to the other guard, who racked the slide on his pistol to chamber a round. Bad form. His weapon should have been loaded already.

“Heller, for God’s sake,” Schechter said, exasperated.

Mongo reared back and took a wild swing at me, which I easily dodged. When Schechter shouted, “That’s enough, Garrett,” he stopped short like a well-trained Doberman.

“Now, please finish cutting him loose,” Schechter said. “And keep your mouth shut while you’re doing it.”

Garrett, or Mongo, as I preferred to think of him, snipped the remaining cuffs, his eyes boring holes into mine. Twin rivulets of blood trickled down the lower half of his face. When he was done, he wiped the blood off with his sleeve.

“Much better,” I said to Schechter. “Now, if we’re going to have a candid conversation, please tell these two amateur muscleheads to leave.”

Schechter nodded. “Semashko, Garrett, please.”

The guards looked at him.

“You can stand right outside. There won’t be a problem, I’m sure. Mr. Heller and I need to speak privately.”

On his way out, Mongo brandished his pistol at me threateningly as he once again wiped his bloody nose with his sleeve.

When the door closed, Schechter said, “Now, was there something you wanted to find out?”

“Yes,” I said. “Does Marshall Marcus know you arranged the kidnapping of his daughter?”





71.



He expelled a puff of air, a scoff. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Given your association with both Marcus and Senator Armstrong—the father of the kidnapped girl and the father of a girl who assisted in that kidnapping—don’t try to pretend it’s a coincidence.”

“Did it ever occur to you that we’re all on the same side?”

“When you ordered me to stay away from the senator and his daughter, and when you announced that my services were no longer needed, it kinda made me wonder. Me, I’m on the side that wants to get Alexa Marcus released.”

“And you think I don’t?”

I shrugged.

“Look at it statistically,” he said. “What are the odds, truly, of Alexa coming home alive? She’s as good as dead, and I think Marshall already understands this.”

“I’d say you tilted the odds against her considerably by refusing to let Marcus hand over the Mercury files.”

Schechter went silent.

“Are they really worth two lives?” I said.

“You have no idea.”

“Why don’t you enlighten me.”

“They are worth far, far more. They are worth the lives of the one million Americans who have died defending our country. But I think you already know that. Isn’t that why you had to leave the Defense Department?”

“I left because of a disagreement.”

“A disagreement with General Hood, your boss.”

I nodded.

“Because you refused to call a halt to an investigation that you were explicitly ordered to drop. An investigation that would have warned off certain parties who were unaware they were targets of the greatest corruption probe in history.”

“Is that right,” I said sardonically. “Funny no one said anything about that back then.”

“No one could. Not then. But now we have to trust your discretion and your judgment and your patriotism. And I know we can.”

“You know nothing about me,” I said.

“I know plenty about you. I know all about your remarkable record of service to this country. Not just on the battlefield, but the clandestine work you did for DOD. General Hood says you were probably the brightest, and certainly the most fearless, operative he ever had the good fortune to work with.”

“I’m flattered,” I said sourly. “And what got you so interested in my military record?”

He folded his arms, leaned forward, and said heatedly, “Because if you had been in charge of Marshall’s security, this would never have happened.”

“There’s no guarantee of that.”

“You know damned well I’m right. You are an extraordinary talent. Yes, of course I have your file. Yes, of course I’ve checked you out.”

“For what?” I said.

He paused for ten, fifteen seconds. “I’m sure you know about that ‘missing’ two-point-six trillion dollars that an auditor discovered at the Pentagon a few years ago?”

I nodded. I remembered reading about it, then kicking it around with some friends. The story didn’t get the kind of play in the so-called mainstream media you’d have expected. Maybe Americans had gotten blasé about corruption, but it’s not like we’re Somalia. Maybe such a sum of money was just too big to conceive of, like the weight of planet Earth.

“That’s what happens when you have a government agency with a budget of three-quarters of a trillion dollars and barely any internal controls,” he said.

“The money was never found, right?”

He shrugged. “Not my concern, and not my point. I’m just saying that the Pentagon is a black hole. Everyone inside the intelligence community knows that.”

“How would you know? You’re not on the inside.”

He tipped his head to one side. “It’s all in how you define the term. A half century of CIA proprietaries might argue with you.”

“What, so Batten Schechter is a CIA front?”

He shook his head. “CIA? Please. Have you seen how far down they are on the org chart these days? Somewhere just below the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CIA used to run the intelligence community. Now they report to the director of national intelligence, and the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone—”

“All right, then what the hell are you?”

“A middleman, nothing more. A conduit. Just a lawyer who’s helping make sure that no one ‘misplaces’ three trillion dollars again.”

“Could you possibly be any more vague?”

“Let me get a bit more specific. Who paid your salary when you worked for the DOD in Washington?”

“Black budget,” I said. That was the top-secret funding, buried in the U.S. government budget, for clandestine operations and classified research and weapons research, and so on. All the stuff that officially doesn’t exist. It’s so well hidden in the tangled mess of a budget that no one’s ever sure how much there is or what it’s paying for.

“Bingo.”

“‘Mercury’ refers to U.S. black-budget funding?”

“Close enough for government work, as they say. Any idea how big the black budget is?”

“Sixty billion dollars or so.”

He snorted. “Sure. If you believe what you read in the Washington Post. Let’s just say that’s the figure that’s leaked for public consumption.”

“So you’re…” and I stopped.

Suddenly it all seemed clear. “You’re telling me that Marshall Marcus has been investing and managing the black budget of the United States? Sorry, I don’t buy it.”

“Not all of it, by any means. But a good healthy chunk.”

“How much are we talking?”

“It’s not important how much. Quite a few years ago some very wise men took a look at the ebbs and flows of defense spending and realized that we were putting our national security at the mercy of public whims and political fads. One year it’s ‘kill all the terrorists,’ the next it’s ‘why are we violating civil liberties?’ We lurch from Cold War to ‘peace dividend.’ Look at how the CIA was gutted in the 1990s—by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Then 9/11 happens, and everyone’s outraged—Where was the CIA? How could this have happened? Well, you eviscerated the CIA, folks, that’s what happened.”

“And…?”

“So the decision was reached at a very high level to set aside funds from the fat years to take care of the lean years.”

“And give it to Marshall Marcus to invest.”

He nodded. “A few hundred million here, a billion or two there, and pretty soon Marshall had quadrupled our covert funds.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “And now it’s all gone. Talk about a black hole. Doesn’t sound like you did a whole lot better than the green eyeshades at the Pentagon.”

“Fair enough. But no one expected Marshall to be targeted the way he was.”

“So Alexa’s kidnappers aren’t after money at all, are they? ‘Mercury in the raw’—that refers to the investment records?”

“Let’s be clear. They want some of our most sensitive operational secrets. This is a direct assault on American national security protocols. And frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin’s people have a hand in this.”

“So you think it’s the Russians?”

“Absolutely.”

That would explain why the kidnapper was Russian. Tolya had said members of the Sova gang were often hired by Russian oligarchs. But now I wondered whether the Russian government might instead be behind it all.

“You’re given access to security-classified information above top secret?”

“Look, it’s no longer possible for the Pentagon to sluice money directly into false-front entities like they used to. You know all those anti-money-laundering laws aimed at global terror—they just give far too many bureaucrats in too many countries around the world the ability to do track-backs. Private funding has to originate in the private sector or else it’s going to be unearthed by some corporate auditor running the financials.”

“I get that. So what?”

“If the wrong people got hold of the transfer codes, they’d be able to identify all sorts of cutaways and shell companies—and figure out who’s doing what for us where. To hand all that over would be nothing less than a body blow to our national security. I can’t allow it. And if Marshall were in his right mind, he wouldn’t either.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“Believe me,” Schechter said, “nothing would make me happier than if you could find Alexa Marcus and somehow free her. But that’s just about impossible now, from everything I’m told. We don’t have the names of her captors. We don’t have the slightest idea where she is.”

I didn’t correct him. “Are we done here?”

“Not quite. You’ve seen some highly classified files, and I want your assurance that it goes no further. Do we have an understanding?”

“I really don’t care what’s in your files. My only interest is in finding Marshall Marcus’s daughter. And as long as you stay out of my way, then yes, we have an understanding.”

My head began thudding again as I got to my feet. I turned and walked out the door. His goons attempted to block my way, but I pushed past them. They scowled at me menacingly. I smiled back.

“Nick,” Schechter called out.

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I know you’ll do the right thing.”

“Oh,” I said, “you can count on it.”





72.



It was almost ten thirty by the time I returned to Mr. Derderian’s van. I powered on my BlackBerry and it began to load up e-mails and emitted a voice-mail-alert sound.

One of the calls was from Mo Gandle, the PI in New Jersey looking into Belinda Marcus’s past.

I listened to his message with astonishment. Her employment as a call girl was by far the least interesting part of her history.

I was about to call him back when I noticed that four of the calls I’d received were from Moscow. I checked my watch. It was twenty minutes past six in the morning, Moscow time. Far too early to call. He would certainly be asleep.

So I called and woke him up.

“I’ve been leaving messages for you,” he said.

“I was temporarily offline,” I said. “Do you have names for me?”

“Yes, Nicholas, I do. I didn’t think it prudent to leave this information on your voice mail.”

“Let me pull over and get something to write with.”

“Surely you can remember one name.”

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

Then he told me.

* * *



IT WAS too late to catch a shuttle flight from Boston to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

But there was always a way. An old friend flew cargo planes for FedEx. He was based out of Memphis, but he got me on the eleven o’clock run from Boston to New York. In a little over an hour I was walking into an “adult entertainment club” called Gentry on West Forty-fifth street in Manhattan.

This was what used to be known as a strip club. Or a jiggle joint. But in polite circles it was called a “gentleman’s club” until that term became politically incorrect too.

I guess the tittie-bar owners didn’t want to offend feminists.

The mirrored lobby was lined with the requisite bouncers from New Jersey in black blazers too short at the sleeves over black shirts with white pinstripes. The carpeting inside was garish red. The railings and banisters were so shiny they didn’t even try to look like brass. The music was bad and loud. There were swoopy red vinyl lounge chairs, red vinyl banquettes and booths, half of them empty. The other half were filled with conventioneers and mid-level executives entertaining clients. Bachelor parties from Connecticut. Japanese businessmen on expense accounts. Spotlights swiveled and disco strobe lights spun overhead and there were mirrors everywhere.

The girls—excuse me, “entertainers”—were pretty and stacked and spray-tanned. Most of them looked cosmetically enhanced. When they danced, nothing jiggled. There was enough silicone in the place to grout every hotel bathroom in Manhattan. They wore thongs and garters, skimpy black brassieres and heels so high I was amazed they could keep their balance without pitching forward head first.

On the main stage, a shallow half-moon with a brass railing, an embarrassed-looking young guy with bad skin was getting a “stage dance” in the bright spotlights with a slinky black woman doing acrobatic moves an Ashtanga yoga master wouldn’t attempt.

A collage of huge “art” photos of selected female body parts lined the stairs. I found the “VIP Room,” according to the red neon sign on the door, upstairs just past the cigar bar and a line of private “rooms” with red velvet curtains that served as walls. A generously proportioned woman with pasties on her nipples held the door open for me.

Here the music was more traditional. Justin Timberlake was singing about bringing sexy back, which segued into Katy Perry confessing she’d kissed a girl and liked it. The walls were lined with white drapes illuminated from below with purple spotlights. A slightly higher class of clientele sat here, in tan suede clamshell banquettes that faced the stage. More scantily clad fembots tottered around with trays of drinks. A Brazilian-looking beauty was giving a lap dance to a corpulent Middle Eastern businessman.

The guy I was looking for was sitting at a banquette with burly bodyguards on either side of him. Each wore a cheap black leather jacket and was as big as a linebacker. One had a crew cut; the other had black Julius Caesar bangs. You could tell they were Russian a mile away.

The boy was tall and skinny, with a pasty complexion and a patchy goatee. He wore a foppish black velvet jacket with skinny, beaded lapels that would have looked fruity on Liberace. Under it he wore a black shirt with a tiny collar and a skinny black tie. He was drinking a glass of brown liquid and holding court for five or six equally scruffy-looking guys his age who were doing shots and ogling the entertainers and laughing too loudly and generally acting obnoxious.

Arkady Navrozov looked fourteen, though he was almost twenty. Even if you didn’t know that his father, Roman Navrozov, was obscenely rich, you could tell by the kid’s entitled demeanor.

Roman Navrozov was said to be worth over twenty-five billion dollars. He was an exile from Russia, where he’d amassed a fortune as one of the newly minted oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin by seizing control of a few state-owned oil and gas companies and then taking them private. When Vladimir Putin took over, he threw Navrozov in jail on grounds of corruption.

He served five years in the notorious prison Kopeisk.

But he must have struck a deal with Putin, because he was quietly released from prison and went into exile, much of his fortune still intact. He had homes in Moscow, London, New York, Paris, Monaco, St. Bart’s … he’d probably lost track himself. He owned a football club in west London. His yacht, the biggest and most expensive in the world, was usually docked off the French Riviera. It was equipped with a French-made missile defense system.

Because Roman Navrozov lived in fear. He’d survived two publicly reported assassination attempts and probably countless others, thanks to his private army of some fifty bodyguards. He’d made the mistake of speaking out against Putin and the “kleptocracy” and apparently Putin was thin-skinned.

His only son, Arkady, had been thrown out of Switzerland the year before for raping a sixteen-year-old Latvian chambermaid at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne. His father had spread around quite a bit of money to make the charges go away.

He feared his son might be kidnapped and made sure that Arkady never went anywhere without his own matched set of bodyguards.

But Arkady was a modern kid, and he posted things on Facebook and some social-media site called Foursquare where apparently you tell all your friends your whereabouts every moment of the day.

Earlier in the day he’d posted:



Arkady N. in New York, NY:



wrote a tip @ Gentry: Rocking VIP Rm tonight!



When he arrived, he posted:



Arkady N. @ Gentry



w. 45th St.



Not long afterward, I arrived at Gentry too, only I wasn’t rocking it and I didn’t post it anywhere.

I don’t like people to know where I’m going before I get there. It spoils the surprise.

* * *



MY TABLE was across the room but within view. I glanced at my watch.

Exactly on time the best-looking woman in the room sidled up to Arkady. His bodyguards shifted in their seats but didn’t consider Cristal to be a mortal threat. She whispered something in the kid’s ear and slithered onto his lap. One hand stroked his crotch.

His friends sniggered. He got up bashfully and followed her through the purple-lighted drapes to one of the private areas on the other side.

Arkady’s bodyguards hustled over, but he waved them away.

As I’d expected.

Before they returned to the banquette I was gone.

* * *



THE CURTAINED-OFF private-dance area where Cristal had led Arkady looked like a fake Victorian boudoir in a Nevada brothel. It had red velvet tufted walls, a shaggy red carpet, and a large red velvet bed with gold fringe. The lights were low.

From behind the red curtains I could see the two of them enter.

“—to make yourself nice and comfortable while I fetch us some champagne, all righty? You like Dom?”

She settled him down on the bed and put her tongue in his ear and whispered, “I’ll be back in two shakes.”

“Hey, where the hell you going?” the kid said. He had a flat, over-Americanized Russian accent.

“Honey, when I get back I’m gonna take the top of your head off,” she said, slipping out through the curtains. Then I handed her a wad of bills, the second half of what I’d promised her.

Arkady smiled contentedly, stretched like a cat, and called after her, “That a promise?”

He didn’t notice me sidling up to the bed from the other side. I lunged, quick as a cobra, clapped a hand over his mouth and jammed my revolver against the side of his head. I cocked the trigger.

“You ever see the top of a man’s head come off, Arkady?” I whispered. “I have. You never forget it.”





73.



Roman Navrozov owned the penthouse condominium in the Mandarin Oriental, with one of the great views of the city. He had been spending a lot of time in the city recently. He was trying to buy the New York Mets, whose owner had been hit pretty hard by the Bernard Madoff fraud.

He felt safe in the Mandarin, according to my KGB friend Tolya. There were multiple layers of protection and several entrances and egresses. The vigilant staff were only his first line of defense.

I was met in the lobby of the Residences by a slim, elegant, silver-haired man of around sixty. He wore an expensive navy pinstriped suit with a gold pocket square, perfectly folded.

He introduced himself as Eugene, no last name: an “associate” of Mr. Navrozov.

He reminded me of an English butler. Even though it was after midnight, and he knew I had just kidnapped his boss’s son, his demeanor was cordial. He knew I was here to transact business.

As he led me toward Navrozov’s private elevator, I said, “I’m afraid there’s been a slight change in plans.”

He turned around, arched his brows.

“We won’t be meeting in his condo. I’ve reserved a room in the hotel, a few floors below.”

“I’m quite sure Mr. Navrozov will not agree to that…”

“If he ever wants to see his son again, he might want to be flexible,” I said. “But it’s up to him.”





74.



Fifteen minutes later, the elevator on the thirty-eighth floor opened, and five men emerged.

Roman Navrozov and his small army of bodyguards moved with a military precision: one in front, one behind, and two on either side. These bodyguards seemed to be of a higher caliber than the cretins he assigned to his son. They wore good suits and curly earpieces like Secret Service agents wear. They were all armed and appeared to be wearing body armor. Their eyes briskly surveyed all angles of approach as they escorted their boss down the hallway.

Roman Navrozov was a portly man, not tall, but he exuded authority. He could have been a Vatican cardinal emerging on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to proclaim, “Habemus papam.” He had hawkish eyebrows and an unnaturally black fringe of hair around a great bald dome. He reminded me a little of the actor who played Hercule Poirot on the British TV series.

His thin lips were cruelly pursed in a regal glower. He wore a black blazer with one tail of his crisp white shirt untucked, as if he’d just thrown it on and was annoyed to be skulking around the halls of the hotel in the middle of the night.

When they were halfway down the corridor, the lead guard made a quick hand gesture, and Navrozov stopped, flanked by the rest of his entourage. Meanwhile, the first guard approached the door, weapon out.

He saw at once that the door was ajar, propped open on the latch of the security lock.

He flicked his hand again, and a second guard joined him, then the two moved swiftly into position on either side of the door. The first one kicked the door open, and they burst in, weapons drawn, in classic “slicing the pie” formation.

Maybe they were expecting an ambush. But since I was watching through the peephole in the room across the hall, they didn’t find anyone inside.

Then I hit a number on my phone. “Moving into position one,” I said when it was picked up.

“Roger that,” a voice replied.

The voice belonged to a member of my Special Forces detachment named Darryl Amos. While I was in flight, Darryl had driven into the city from Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he worked as a convoy operations instructor. He’d checked into a true fleabag on West Forty-third called the Hotel Conroy. If you look it up on one of the travel websites, you’ll find it described as the filthiest hotel in the city. Not long ago a maid had discovered a body under a bed wrapped in a bedsheet. The sheet was reused, though they did launder it first.

Then he waited for me, and Arkady Navrozov, in the alley behind the strip club.

Right now Darryl was babysitting Roman Navrozov’s son at the Hotel Conroy. I was fairly certain the oligarch’s son had never seen its likes before.

Satisfied that Navrozov’s men were simply doing their job—making sure their boss didn’t walk into a trap and not attempting anything more—I opened the door and crossed the hall.





75.



A minute later I was standing at the window a few feet away from the man who had masterminded Alexa Marcus’s kidnapping.

We were alone in the room. He sat in a chair, legs crossed, looking imperious. “You’re a very trusting man,” he said.

“Because I’m unarmed?”

We both were. He rarely carried a weapon, and I’d surrendered mine. His guards were stationed in the hall right outside the door, which had been left propped open, by mutual agreement. I was sure they were prepared to burst in if their boss so much as coughed.

He replied without even looking at me. “You say you have my son. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. In any case, now we have you.” He shrugged. Very matter-of-fact; very casual. “Now we have all the leverage we need.” He grinned. “So you see: You haven’t played this very well.”

“You see that building?” I said.

Directly across the street, looming like a great gleaming black monolith, was the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

“A fine hotel, the Trump Tower,” Navrozov said. “I wanted to invest in Mr. Trump’s SoHo project, but your government blocked me.”

“See that row of rooms right there?”

I pointed again, this time to a line of dark windows. Offices, not hotel rooms, though he probably didn’t know that.

Then I raised my hand, as if to wave, and a single window in the long dark row lit up.

“Hello,” I said. “We’re right here.”

I raised my hand again, and the window across the street went dark.

“My friend over there is a world-class sniper,” I said.

Navrozov shifted his body to one side, away from what he probably thought was the line of fire.

“An army buddy?”

“Actually, no. He’s from Newfoundland. Did you know some of the best sharpshooters in the world are Canadian?”

“Perhaps, but at this distance—”

“My Canadian friend holds the record for the longest confirmed combat sniper-shot kill. He hit a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan from two and a half kilometers away. Now, do you think we’re even one kilometer away from the Trump Tower?”

He smiled uncomfortably.

“Try four hundred feet. You might as well have a bull’s-eye painted on your forehead. To my Canadian friend, you’re such a big fat easy target it’s not even fun.”

His smile faded.

“He’s using an American Tac-50 sniper rifle made in Phoenix. And fifty-caliber rounds made in Nebraska. It’s a hot round—ultra-low-drag tip and a flat trajectory.”

“Your point?” he snapped.

“The second any of your men approaches me, my friend across the street will drop you without a second’s hesitation. And did you know that this room connects with the two on either side? Yep. The doors between them are unlocked. The hotel management really couldn’t have been more accommodating to a group of old college buddies in town for a reunion.”

He just stared. His eyelids drooped.

“So am I trusting?” I said. “Not so much.”

To my surprise, Navrozov laughed. “Well done, Mr. Heller.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you ever read O. Henry?”

“It’s been a while.”

“O. Henry was very popular in the Soviet Union when I was a child. My favorite was his story ‘The Ransom of Red Chief.’”

“And I thought we were here to discuss your son.”

“We are. In O. Henry’s story, a rich man’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the boy is such a little terror that the kidnappers, who can’t stand him, keep dropping their ransom price. Until finally the father offers to take him off their hands if they pay him.”

“Maybe you’d like to tell your son you don’t care what happens to him.” I turned to the laptop I’d set up on the desk and tapped at the keys to open a video chat window.

“Here’s Red Chief,” I said.

On the laptop screen was a live video feed of Arkady Navrozov, hair matted, against a grimy white plaster wall, a wide strip of duct tape over his mouth.

He wasn’t wearing his black velvet jacket anymore.

Instead, Darryl had put him in a medical restraint garment borrowed from the hospital at Fort Dix, used to immobilize and transport violent prisoners. It was an off-white cotton duck Posey straitjacket, with long sleeves that crossed in front and buckled in the back.

The Posey wasn’t strictly necessary—Darryl probably could have duct-taped him to the chair—but it was an effective restraint. More important, it had its effect on Roman Navrozov. In the bad old days, Soviet “psychiatric prison hospitals” used them on political dissidents.

I knew the sight would strike fear into Navrozov’s granite heart.

His son was cowering. You could see the corner of a bed next to him, its coverlet a hideous shade of orange.

Then you could see the barrel of a gun, with a long sound suppressor screwed onto the end, move into the frame and touch the side of the guy’s head. His eyes started moving wildly. He was trying to shout, but nothing was coming out except high, screeching, muffled sounds.

His father glanced at the screen, then away, as if someone tiresome were trying to show him an unfunny YouTube clip.

He sighed. “What do you want?” he said.





76.



“Simple,” I said. “I want Alexa Marcus released immediately.”

Navrozov breathed softly in and out a few times. His eyes had gone hard.

A few minutes ago he’d regarded me with something approaching admiration. Now he recognized me as a threat. I could see the predator instinct come out. He looked at me the way a wolf stalks his prey by staring it down, his body rigid.

“Is this a name I should recognize?”

I sighed, disappointed. “Neither one of us has time for games.”

He smiled mirthlessly, a flash of long sharp teeth.

“Where is she?” I said. “I want exact coordinates.”

“When I hire a man to do a job, I don’t look over his shoulder.”

“Somehow I doubt that. Guy like you, I bet you know exactly where she is and what they’re doing to her.”

“They don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who they are. Much safer this way.”

“Then how do you communicate with them?”

“Through an intermediary. A cutout, I think is the term, yes?”

“But you have some idea where they are.”

A shrug. “I think New Hampshire. This is all I know.”

“And where is your cutout located? Don’t tell me you don’t know that.”

“In Maine.”

“And how do you reach him?”

He replied by pulling out his mobile phone. Wagged it at me. Put it back in his pocket.

“Call him, please,” I said, “and tell him the operation is over.”

His nostrils flared and his mouth tightened. It rankled him, I could see, to be spoken to that way. He wasn’t used to it.

“It’s far too late for that,” he said.

“Tell your men to close the door,” I said. “Tell them you want privacy.”

He blinked, didn’t move.

“Now,” I said.

Maybe he saw something in my eyes. Whatever the reason, he gave me a dour glance and rose from the chair. He walked to the door, spoke in Russian, quickly and quietly. Then, pulling the security latch back, he let the door shut and returned to his chair.

“Cancel the operation,” I said.

He smiled. “You are wasting my time,” he said.

Now I tapped a few keys on the laptop, and the video image began to move. Then, hitting another key to turn on the computer’s built-in microphone, I said, “Shoot him.”

* * *



NAVROZOV LOOKED at me, blinked. A slight furrow of the brow, a tentative smile.

He didn’t believe me.

On the laptop screen there was sudden movement. A scuffle.

The camera jerked as if someone had bumped against the laptop on the other end. Now you could see only half of the kid’s body, his shoulder and arm in the white duck fabric of his Posey straitjacket.

And the black cylinder of the sound suppressor screwed onto the end of Darryl’s Heckler & Koch .45.

Navrozov was staring now. “You don’t think I will possibly believe—”

Darryl’s hand gripped the pistol. His forefinger slipped into the trigger guard.

Navrozov’s eyes widened, raptly watching the image on the screen.

Darryl’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The loud pop of a silenced round. A slight muzzle flash as the pistol recoiled.

Navrozov made a strange, strangled shout.

His son’s scream was muted by the duct tape. His right arm jerked and a hole opened in his upper arm, a spray of blood, a blotch of red on the white canvas.

Arkady Navrozov’s arm twisted back and forth, his agony apparent, the chair rocking, and then I clicked off the feed.

“Svoloch!” Navrozov thundered, his fist slamming the desk. “Proklyaty sukin syn!”

A pounding at the door. His guards.

“Tell them to stand down,” I said, “if you’d like to discuss how to save your son’s life.”

Enraged, face purpling, he staggered out of his chair and over to the door and gasped, “Vsyo v poryadke.”

He came back, stood with folded arms. Just stared at me.

“All right,” I said. “Call your cutout and tell him the operation is over.”

He stared for a few seconds. Then he took out his mobile phone, punched a single button, and put it to his ear.

After a few seconds, he spoke in Russian, quickly and softly.

“Izmeneniya v planakh.” He paused, and then: “Nyet, ya ochen’ seryozno. Seichas. Osvobodit’ dyevushku. Da, konyeshno, svyazat’ vsye kontsy.”

He punched another button to end the call.

He lowered the phone to his side, then sank down in the chair. The power and menace seemed to have seeped out of the man, leaving a mere Madame Tussaud waxwork: a lifelike model of a once terrifying figure.

In a monotone, he said, “It is done.”

“And how long after he makes the call before Alexa is free?”

“He must do this in person.”

“You haven’t heard of encrypted phones?”

“There are loose ends to tie up. This can only be done in person.”

“You mean, he’s going to eliminate the contractor.”

“Operational security,” Navrozov said.

“But he has to drive from Maine?”

He glowered at me. “It will take thirty minutes, no more. So. We are done here.”

“Not until I speak to Alexa.”

“This will take time.”

“I’m sure.”

“My son needs immediate medical treatment.”

“The sooner she’s free, the sooner your son will be treated.”

He exhaled, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s. “Fine. We have concluded our business here. Marcus will get his daughter, and I will get my son.”

“Actually, no.”

“No … what?”

“No, we’re not done here.”

“Oh?”

“We have more to talk about.”

He squinted at me.

“Just a few questions about Anya Afanasyeva.”

He drew breath. I knew then I had him.

“Where did she pick up such a lousy Georgia accent?”