Buried Secrets

PART THREE



If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.



—ÉMILE ZOLA





80.



Just before six in the morning, the FedEx cargo flight landed in Boston.

I desperately needed sleep.

If I was to have any hope of locating Alexa Marcus, I needed a little rest. Just a few hours of downtime so I could think clearly again. I was at the point where I could be mainlining caffeine and it still wouldn’t keep me awake.

My phone rang as I was parking the Defender.

It was Tolya Vasilenko. “The picture you just sent me,” he said. “I am very sorry for you. This is a particularly bad egg.”

“Tell me.”

“You remember this terrible murder of the family in Connecticut I told you about?” He was still pronouncing it wrong.

“He was the one who survived? The one who escaped?”

“So I am told.”

“Name?”

“We still haven’t discussed a price.”

“How much do you want?” I said wearily.

“It’s not money I want. It’s … let’s call it a swap of intelligence.”

He told me his demand, and I agreed to it without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he said: “Dragomir Vladimirovich Zhukov.”

I mulled over the name, tried to connect it to the snapshot that Navrozov’s security chief, Eugene, had e-mailed me: the hard-looking man with the shaven head and the fierce expression. Dragomir, I mentally rehearsed. Dragomir Zhukov. A hard-sounding name.

“An unusual name for a Russian,” I said.

“Uncommon. His mother’s a Serb.”

“What else do you have on him?”

“Besides the fact that he is a sociopath and a monster and an extremely clever man? There is maybe more you need to know?”

“Specifics about his background. His childhood, his family.”

“You have decided to become a psychoanalyst in your spare time?”

“It’s how I work. The more I know about a target’s personal life, the more effective I can be.”

“Unfortunately we have very little, Nicholas, apart from the arrest files and his military records and a few interviews with family members and witnesses.”

“Witnesses?”

“You don’t think this home invasion in Connecticut was his first murder, do you? When he served in Chechnya with the Russian ground forces, he was disciplined for excess zeal.”

“What kind of ‘zeal’?”

“He took part in a zachistka—a ‘cleansing operation’—in Grozny, and did certain things that even his commanders couldn’t bring themselves to talk about, and these are not sensitive souls. Acts of torture. I know of only a few things. He captured three Chechen brothers and dismembered them so thoroughly that nothing remained but a pile of bones and gristle.”

“Is that why he was sent to prison?”

“No, no. He was jailed for a crime he committed after he returned from the war.”

“Another murder, I assume.”

“Well, no, not exactly. He was sentenced to five years for theft of property. He’d gotten work on one of the oil pipeline projects in Tomsk, operating excavation equipment, and apparently he ‘borrowed’ one of the excavators for his own personal use.”

“Like getting Al Capone for not paying taxes.”

“That was all they could get him on. The Tomsk regional police were unable to definitively connect him to something far worse that they were sure he did. The reason he borrowed the excavation equipment. For more than a year the police investigated the disappearance of a family, a husband and wife and their teenage son who vanished overnight. They questioned Zhukov extensively but got nothing. They had nothing more than unfounded rumors that Zhukov had been hired by a fellow prison inmate to do a hit.”

“A hit on a family?”

“The man owned several auto dealerships in Tomsk. He had been warned that if he didn’t sell his dealerships to a friend of Zhukov’s, his entire family would suffer. It seems these threats were not hollow.”

“So the family’s bodies were never found.”

“They were found. A year after their disappearance. And purely by coincidence. An abandoned parcel of land outside the city was being developed for a housing project, and when they dug the foundation, three bodies were unearthed. A middle-aged couple and their teenage son. The police forensic examiners found large quantities of dirt in their lungs. They were buried alive.”

“Which was why Zhukov borrowed the excavation equipment.”

“So it seems. But the case could never be proven in the courts. You see, he is very, very good. He covered his tracks expertly. I can see why Roman Navrozov hired him. But if you are looking for a psychohistory, Nicholas, you might be interested to know that when Zhukov was a boy his father died in a coal-mining accident.”

“Also buried alive?”

“Maybe ‘drowned’ is more accurate. The father worked in an underground mine, and when some of the miners accidentally dug into an abandoned shaft that was filled with water, the tunnels were flooded. Thirty-seven miners drowned.”

“How old was Zhukov?”

“Nine or ten. You can imagine how traumatic this must have been for the families. Especially for the young children who were left fatherless.”

“I don’t see a connection between some childhood trauma and—”

“His mother, Dusya, told our interviewer years ago that her son’s chief complaint at the time was that he never saw it happen. She says that was when she first realized that Dragomir wasn’t like the other little boys.”

Suddenly I didn’t feel sleepy. “He’s not doing this for the money, is he?”

“I’m sure the money will come in handy for his escape and buying new identities and such. But no, I imagine he took this job because it offered him a rare opportunity. I’m just guessing, of course.”

“Opportunity?”

“To watch someone drown before his eyes.”





81.



Alexa sang as loud as she could: songs she liked to dance to, songs she loved listening to. Or just scraps of songs, when she couldn’t remember the rest.

Anything to keep her mind off where she was.

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” She tried to remember the French lyrics near the end of the song. Something about revenge. That distracted her briefly. Then “Poker Face.” She sang so loud she was almost yelling. But that one was too easy. She imagined being Lady Gaga herself and wearing a skintight outfit made entirely of duct tape.

Black Eyed Peas next. “Imma Be” worked for a little while. She moved on to Ludacris: lots of lyrics there to try to remember. Too many. She tried MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” for a while but that was too hard and she soon gave up.

When she stopped, bored with it and discouraged, her throat hurting, she remembered where she was, and she began to shudder uncontrollably again. It felt like something was raking her nerve endings. She felt chills deep down, her entire body cringing. The way the mere thought of rubbing Styrofoam against cardboard set her teeth on edge.

But the physiological reaction was nothing compared to the deep horror that came over her now, the cold black cloud of fear, as it had done over and over again throughout this nightmare. That realization that there really was something worse than death, and this was it.

She screamed, long and loud, and it became a hopeless sob. She felt her tears scald her cheeks.

She screamed, clawed at the lining of her coffin. Her fingertips hit a hard square object mounted on the lid, and she knew it had to be the video camera.

She could feel the tiny lens and she put her thumb on it.

Held it there for a while.

Now he couldn’t see her.

She had the power to blind the Owl.

She held her thumb over the lens until her hand began to tremble.

Then the Owl’s voice bleated through the speakers and she jumped. “If you are playing a joke, Alexa, this is not a very good idea.”

She didn’t reply. Why should she? She didn’t have to answer him.

Then she thought of something so monumental that her heart began racing from excitement instead of terror.

She could rip the damned camera off its mounting.

She could blind the Owl forever.

Without his camera, he had no power over her!

Grabbing the camera’s casing, she tugged, wiggling it back and forth like a loose tooth to dislodge it from its mounting.

This was genius. The videocam was the key to his whole plot. This was how he made his demands, using her, coaching her, having her recite his bizarre demands over video so Dad would totally freak out.

So she’d get rid of it.

Cut off his access to her, his surveillance. Cripple his scheme, where he couldn’t do anything about it.

Without the video, the Owl’s plan couldn’t work. No camera, no ransom.

Tear down the camera, he’d get desperate. He’d have to improvise.

He’d have to dig her up.

He’d have to fix his damned camera, because that was the key to the whole thing.

Why the hell had it taken her so long to figure this out?

She felt a little warm pulse of pleasure. Her father, who probably did love her after all but totally didn’t respect her, would be proud of her now, wouldn’t he? He’d be amazed at her cleverness, her resourcefulness. He’d say, “My Lexie, you got the saichel, you got the head of a Marcus.”

She gripped the little metal box so hard her whole arm shook. She tugged at it, twisted it, and finally she felt something start to give way.

A tiny piece of something dropped onto her face. She felt it with her left hand. A little metal screw. Must be part of the mounting.

She was doing it. She was ripping out the Owl’s eyes.

She smiled to herself, crazy with triumph, felt the camera thing began to wobble ever so slightly.

A sudden blare: “Another bad idea.”

She didn’t reply.

Of course he didn’t want her to rip the damned thing down. Of course he didn’t want that.

“You know, Alexa, I am your only means of communication with the world,” the voice said. Not angry, but patient.

She gritted her teeth and kept twisting, hand shaking with exertion, the sharp metal corners cutting into her palm.

“If you disable the camera,” the Owl said, “you will be cut off from the rest of the world, you know.”

She stopped twisting for a moment.

“They will think you have died,” the voice said. “Why else would the video stream stop, yes?”

Her hand was frozen in a grip just above her face. A few more minutes of this and she’d be able to snap off the other screws or posts or whatever it was that kept the camera stuck to the lid of the …

“Maybe your father will cry. Maybe he feels relief. But at least he knows this is over. There’s nothing he can do. He never wanted to give us what we ask anyway, and now he thinks, I don’t need to do this. What is the point, yes? His daughter is dead.”

She said, in a guttural animal growl, “He’ll know you failed.”

“He will give up. Believe me. Or don’t believe me. I don’t care.”

The muscles in her forearm and wrist were aching. She had to lower her hand.

“Yes,” said the Owl. “You prefer to get out of this box, isn’t that right?”

She began to sob.

“Yes,” he said again. “This camera is your only hope of getting out of there alive.”





82.



As badly as I needed sleep, I needed to talk to Diana Madigan even more, to tell her what I’d found out.

Six in the morning. She was an early riser. Odds were she was awake and having coffee and reading e-mail or whatever FBI agents do before they go to work in the morning, those who aren’t married and don’t have kids.

So instead of going straight home, I drove a few minutes out of my way, looped around to the South End, down Columbus Avenue and a left up Pembroke Street.

Her apartment lights were on.

* * *



“HOW ABOUT coffee?” she said warily.

“I think I’m past the point of no return,” I said. “Any more caffeine’s just going to put me into a coma.”

“Ice water, then?”

I nodded. I sat on her couch, and she sat on the chair next to it. Exactly where we’d sat last time. She was wearing a white T-shirt and sweatpants and was barefoot.

She went to her little kitchen and filled one of her funky handblown drinking glasses with ice water. She handed it to me and sat down again.

Then I told her as much of what I’d just learned as I could. It wasn’t exactly a coherent presentation. My brain was much too fried. But I managed to set out the basic facts. “Now I’ve got Dorothy checking on every place in New Hampshire that rents excavation equipment, but she’s not going to find anything until nine or ten when the places open.”

“Okay,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ve looked at the case files on that Connecticut home invasion.”

“Already? But how did you know…?”

She smiled ruefully. “Nico, you need sleep. Badly. You told me about that last night.”

I shook my head, embarrassed.

“The husband survived. I wanted to see whether he might recall anything more about the attackers. But … well, he’s not going to be talking to anyone. Zhukov left him seriously brain damaged.”

I nodded.

“No latent prints were found at the scene. Neither Zhukov nor his associate. I was hoping that the locals might have submitted any unidentified fingerprints to the unsolved latent file at IAFIS. Maybe those same prints turned up somewhere else … But nothing.”

“And that’s it?” I stood up. I was exhausted and cranky and desperate to do something. I started pacing around her living room.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s the FBI’s budget again? Like almost ten billion dollars, right? And every single law-enforcement officer in the country on tap. More databases than you know what to do with. And you still haven’t found a damned thing more than me and Dorothy.”

“Oh, and what have you found? Last I heard, that girl is still in the ground.”

I turned away, headed toward the door. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“No,” she said, “you need sleep. You’re just about at the breaking point. There’s not a damned thing you can do right now until one of our leads comes in. Or one of your leads. Or until the business day starts. So go to sleep, Nick.”

“After.”

She came in close, put a hand on my shoulder. “If you don’t give your brain and your body a rest, you’re going to start screwing up, and then what?”

I whirled around. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I don’t screw up.”

“Now I know you’re sleep deprived,” she said with a laugh.

And before I knew it, my lips were on hers.

Her mouth was warm and tasted of mint. I held her face in my hands and stroked her hair. Her eyes were closed. Her smooth hands slid underneath my shirt and pressed flat against my chest, her fingernails lightly raking my chest hair. Then I was caressing her breasts and kissing her throat, and I heard the clink of her fingers at my belt.

“Diana,” I said.

She silenced me with her mouth on mine, and her legs wrapped tightly around my waist.

* * *



“I KNOW we can’t go back to the way things were,” she said.

“I wasn’t thinking this was a do-over.”

She smiled, but her eyes were wet. She reached for me, and I held her for a long time. It felt wonderful. Almost enough.

My phone rang, and I glanced at it. Marshall Marcus.

“Nick,” he whispered, “I just got a message.”

A beep indicated a call coming in on the other line. Dorothy.

“Message from whom?”

“Them. I have until the end of the day and then they’ll—”

“Hold on.” I clicked on Dorothy’s call.

“Nick, Marcus just got an e-mail from the kidnappers.”

“I know, he’s on the other line, he was just telling me.”

“It’s not good,” she said.

I felt my mouth go dry.

“Are you near your computer?”

I hesitated. “I’m near a computer.”

“I’m going to send you an e-mail right now.”

I signaled to Diana, who brought her laptop over, and I signed on to my e-mail. Meanwhile, I clicked back to the other line. “Hold on, Marshall, I’m just opening it right now.”

“How can you do that?”

I didn’t reply. I was too busy reading the text on another anonymous e-mail.



The rules are all change now



Now demand is very simple for you to save your daughter



Five hundred 500 $ US mil must be wired into account listed below by close of business 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today





This is not open of negotiation



This is final offer.





If $$$ received satisfactory by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today your daughter Alexa will be released. You will be notified of her public place location and can pick her up then.



No further negotiation possible.



If $$$ not received by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today you will get one last opportunity to watch your daughter Alexa on internet



You will watch when coffin is flood with water.



You will watch your daughter drown before your eyes



You will watch last minutes of your daughters life



Then followed the name and address of a bank in Belize, bank codes, and an account number.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Nicky,” Marshall Marcus said, his voice high, quavering. “Dear God in heaven, please, Nick, help.”

“That’s all we’re doing,” I said. “Round the clock.”

“Five hundred million dollars? I don’t have that kind of money anymore, thanks to those bastards, and they damned well know it.”

“Where’s Belinda?”

“Belinda? She’s right here beside me. Like always. Why?”

“Let me get off the phone,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way to pull this off.”

“How?”

But I just hung up.

I leaned over and gave Diana a kiss.

“Call me as soon as you know anything,” she said.





83.



I arrived at the office with a Box o’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts and a dozen assorted donuts.

Half an hour later, after repeated calls to Belize City, I was on the phone with the Honorable Oliver Lindo, minister of national security in Belize.

“Nick!” he said. “Have you been trying to call me? I’m so sorry. I was at the gym. I have a personal trainer now. Someday I may even look like you, my man.”

“And how’s Peter?”

“Did you know he’s in his second year at Oxford, Nick?”

“I had no idea. Congratulations. Have you remarried, by any chance?”

He chuckled. “We have a saying here: Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”

“I may have heard that before,” I said.

No need to get explicit with Oliver Lindo. When I was working at Stoddard Associates in D.C., I’d helped him out with a sticky problem involving a boat, a rum factory, one of his ex-wives, and a lot of angry Cubans. Later he asked me to extricate his son, who was then at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, from a situation involving gangbangers in Trenton.

“Do you happen to know anyone at the Belize Bank and Trust Limited?”

“It is a shady bank, my friend. If you are thinking about hiding money, well, I can recommend—actually, this is not a conversation we should be having on the mobile phone.”

“If I ever have enough money to hide away somewhere, you’ll be the first person I’ll call,” I said. “But I’m calling about something else. I need a favor.”

“Anything you want, Nick. You know that.”





84.



“You want to explain to me how this is going to work?” Dorothy said.

“Just before the bank in Belize closes, Dragomir Zhukov is going to get a confirmation that five hundred million dollars has been deposited into his account,” I said.

She took a long sip of coffee from a mug that said JESUS SAVES—I SPEND. “And your friend in Belize can get this done?”

“He’ll pay a visit to the bank’s president himself. I’m guessing that this bank might not want to be complicit in the abduction of a teenage girl. Or maybe he has other means of persuasion. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“But it’s all a trick, right? The bank is going to confirm a deposit that was never made?”

“Of course.”

“But what’s the point? If this Zhukov guy has gone rogue, he doesn’t answer to anyone. It doesn’t make any difference whether he gets the money or not, he’s never going to let Alexa go.”

“Not if he thinks he doesn’t have to. That’s why the timing is crucial. There’s going to be a last-minute complication. Some screwup in the number of his bank account that requires him to make a call.”

“And you’ll be on the other end of that call.”

I shrugged. “I’m going to let him know that he gets the five hundred million only after he releases Alexa.”

She looked at her computer, looked at me. Looked down at the floor and then back up at me. “Nick, you’re delusional. You have no leverage. None. He’ll just refuse, he’ll say it’s my way or the highway, and then he’ll kill her.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So what am I missing here?”

“He’ll want to keep her alive until five o’clock. So he can show that she’s still alive. He’ll want to keep his options open.”

“Okay, but then at five, whether he gets the money or not, whether there’s a last-minute hitch or not, he’ll kill her anyway.”

“I agree.”

“So what’s the point, Nick?”

“To give me until five o’clock today to find Alexa,” I said. “Now I want you to go back to your idea about locating him based on the schedule of plane flights, the interruptions in the satellite signal.”

“What’s to go back to? That’s a dead end. Didn’t you tell me the FBI didn’t find any matches in the FAA database?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you think they’re wrong?”

“Not at all. I think they searched all flights in the FAA database. But I don’t think they searched all flights.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“Because the one thing I know is the U.S. military. And I know that they don’t like to share information on military flights with pencil-neck civilian geeks in the federal government.”

“Military flights?”

“There are military air bases in Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire. They each keep their own flight logs.”

“Online?”

“Never.”

“Then how do we get to them?”

I picked up the phone and handed it to her. “The old-fashioned way,” I said.





85.



Dorothy assigned Jillian to pull up a list of all companies in New Hampshire that rented or leased construction equipment.

There were almost nine hundred.

Even after narrowing it down to just “earth-moving equipment” and “heavy construction equipment,” we had close to a hundred. It was just about hopeless. We’d have to get extremely lucky.

Meanwhile Dorothy spent two hours on the phone with military air bases and Air National Guard air traffic controllers. I had to get on a few times and throw around names of generals in the Pentagon who probably didn’t remember me. But when she walked into my office with a wide grin on her face, I knew she had something for me.

“What’s a KC-135?” she asked.

“Ah. The Stratotanker. Made by Boeing. Mostly aerial refueling tankers, though some of them have been reconfigured as airborne command posts. Let’s hear it.”

“We got a hit. Each one of those interruptions in the video signal coincides exactly with a KC-135 flight out of the Pease Air National Guard Base.”

“Meaning what? They’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“No, no,” she said. “Not that simple. The kidnap site could be anywhere from about five miles to forty miles away.”

“You can’t narrow it down? Like by triangulating or something? Don’t you digital forensic techs always triangulate stuff?”

“Not enough data points to do that. All I have is three cutouts on the video, about ten seconds after three KC-135s take off.”

“You’ve got plenty,” I said. “You know the direction the planes took off toward, right?”

“True.”

“You probably know the speed the planes generally take off at, right?”

“Maybe.”

“You should be able to get within ten miles, I’d say. Do I have to do all your work for you?”

I tried to head off the Look with what I thought was a disarming smile. But it didn’t work. I got the Look anyway.

Then my BlackBerry rang. I glanced at it, saw it was Diana.

“Hey,” I said. “You got the photo I sent.”

“More than that, Nick,” she said. “I think we found him.”





86.



I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“Nick?”

“You found Zhukov?”

Diana’s voice was taut, louder than normal. “We got a hit on his phone.”

“New Hampshire?”

“Right. Just west of Nashua.”

“He must have switched it on.”

“Listen, I have to go. We’re deploying up north.”

“Where?”

“A forward staging area in a parking lot a couple of miles away from the target site.”

“You’re deploying with the SWAT team?”

“They’re calling in all assets, operational or not. They want me at a surveillance point outside the SWAT perimeter.”

“Give me the exact location.”

“You can’t be there. You know that. It’s a Bureau operation. You’re a civilian.”

I inhaled slowly. “Diana, listen. I don’t want her to die in the middle of some big noisy SWAT team operation. I want her alive.”

“So do they, Nick. Their number-one priority is always victim recovery.”

“I’m not talking about intention. I’m talking about technique.”

“Our SWAT guys are as good as you get.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

I closed my eyes, tried to focus. “What’s the location?”

“A house on a country road. It looks deserted, from the satellite imagery.”

“Is there land?”

“It’s a farmhouse.”

“Secluded?”

“What’s your point, Nick?”

“Is it just him, hiding out there? Or is that where he has Alexa buried? It makes all the difference in how you approach him.”

“We don’t know if she’s there or not.”

“As soon as he hears the snap of a twig, or he sees guys in ghillie suits coming through the woods, he’s not going to wait to be shot. He’s going to kill her. He’s already threatened to flood the grave, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s set up to do it remotely. As simple as pulling a lever on an irrigation system in the house. And no matter how fast you guys can dig, you’re not going to save her in time.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She’s his bargaining chip. He wants her alive. If he floods the grave and kills her, he has no leverage.”

“Diana, this guy doesn’t operate by normal rules. To assume he does would be a dangerous miscalculation. He wants to flood the grave or shut off her air supply and he wants to watch it on his computer screen. He wants to watch her gasping and struggling and trying to scream. He wants to watch her die.”

“Then why the ransom demand?”

“He figures he’ll collect a load of money and kill her anyway. Tell your squad commander he wants me there on scene. Tell him I’m the only one who knows anything about Dragomir Zhukov.”