by Thomas Laird
“All those Greeks and Trojans going at it over one lonesome piece of cooze,” I smile.
“Helen must’ve been something, all those Greeks dying for her. The sack of Troy, all because of one beautiful woman…Wade lets his empire go to hell. He murders all those folks, all because of one broad and a fling in a janitor’s office.”
“Nah. It’s because of Wade himself. His pride, his ego. Maybe it was his absolute amorality, Tommy.”
“We still have the prime player on the loose. We have the Grant girls under Federal protection, so they’re safe. The Feds are also watching your house because of the lovely Miz Vonskaya, who has retreated also to whereabouts unknown…You think she’s with Alexei?”
“No. I don’t think they’d want to run together. I think they’d like the odds better if they took off in separate directions. She’s too sly.”
“I think Natalie’s okay. They’ve got a guard at her door twenty-four/seven also.”
“You wouldn’t think Karin would be crazy enough to take a run at her now, would you.”
I try to sound confident, but I don’t know if I’ve convinced Tommy or me.
We keep searching the airports and the bus terminals. We’ve got APB’s on all of Grodnov’s vehicles and on Karin Vonskaya’s as well. We have every level of police watching for him—State, County, City and Federal. Everyone’s got the eye out for him, and it’s become as notorious a manhunt as, say, Dillinger’s or Pretty Boy Floyd’s manhunts, back in the thirties. But the media is our ally these days. Grodnov’s face is plastered on every newscast on every channel, cable and network. His likeness appears on websites on the internet. His mug is the most famous visage on the air today. He’s had more publicity than a Hollywood geek.
He can’t stay underground long. It depends on how much cash he’s got with him. If he uses one of his own plastic cards, we’ll have a line on him in minutes. If he uses a telephone to call any of his cronies, we have all their lines tapped.
But there is a silence now like the sounding of a great whale. He’s gone to the bottom of the ocean, it seems, and he’s holding his breath.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Before the FBI disappears Wade S. Hansen into Witness Protection, Kelvin gives me a chance at him one last time before the grand jury hears from him against Grodnov.
I see Hansen in the same interrogation room as before, here at CPD in Headquarters, but this time there’s Tommy and me inside the room with him and Kelvin waiting outside.
“I want to get this timeline straight in my head, Wade.”
He’s dressed as always in an immaculate Armani suit, and he’s wearing those eyeglasses that have the darkening lenses, when it becomes bright around him. The lenses are just a little brown from the overhead fluorescents.
“I really don’t have to talk to you any more, Lieutenant.”
“You better check with your lawyer, sweetheart,” Tommy grins.
“Never mind…Let’s just get this over with.”
“Do you remember what time the first plane hit the Tower in New York?” I ask.
“It was in the morning.”
“It was at 7:46 A.M. Central time on September 11, 2001. Flight 11 from Boston. Sound right to you?”
“What’s the point of all this history?” Wade wants to know.
“I want to know whose idea it was to cash in on the Towers.”
Wade smiles.
“The Russian was going to blow the Anderson Building after making another offer to Merton. I called him around ten and told him that he needed to blow the building immediately, and that way we’d have cover. No one would suspect it was anybody other than Bin Laden and Al Qaida…And it damn near worked.”
“So you called Grodnov and told him to do it right away. He goes out to that podunk town, buys the fertilizer, hauls it to the Anderson Building, and drops it off with Crealey, who he paid five grand to ignite the damn thing.”
“He used knotted up gauze and an accelerant as the timer. He barely made it out of the place before it blew,” Wade smiles.
“So it was you who decided to blow it on the twelfth, not Grodnov.”
“Grodnov’s a thug. He likes to intimidate, he likes to strike fear into whomever he’s fucking with. He would’ve hit the Anderson Building maybe a month later. If he were in this himself, you’d already have him locked away six months ago. He’s about as subtle as a blowtorch…Are we through?”
“Do you believe in the soul, Wade?”
“Are we finished?”
“Do you have any notion of justice?”
“Lieutenant…Call in Agent Kelvin, please. This is beyond—“
“Any clue what hell must be like?”
“Fairy tales are for children, Lieutenant.”
“What’s the price on a thousand souls, do you suppose?”
“Jimmy?” Tommy asks.
“You’re not skipping on this one, asshole. You’re just postponing it. Remember where you heard that, Wade,” I tell him.
*
“You’re letting your personal feelings interfere,” Tommy grins at me in my office.
“You’re absolutely right…But it feels good cleaning all that up, because I believe him. I think it really was Wade who called Grodnov minutes after 7:46 A.M. on September 11th. I think it really was Wade who was sly enough to use that tragedy as cover. Grodnov would’ve tried again to double his take on the Anderson Building by putting the muscle on Merton again—and then he would’ve had Crealey set the torch that blew the fertilizer. It makes sense that Wade was the real brains behind all this…
“And we’re letting him go.”
“We’ve been over all this, Jimmy. It’s the price for Grodnov and all his little Russki buddies.”
“It doesn’t make it right.”
“Since when do deals care about fair?”
“He masterminded a thousand murders and he walks.”
“How many Nazis did we let loose at the end of World War II? How many animals got sprung because they were useful? And Stalin was our fucking ally. So was the Shah. So was Hussein, a while back.”
“This guy did it on our watch, though.”
“You got a solution?”
“I’m working on it, Tommy. I’m working on it.”
“What? A contract with the Ciccios on him?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“I’ve gone fucking deaf, Jimmy. I didn’t hear a word you just said.”
“No. I don’t use my crooked side of the family…But there’s got to be a way.”
“There’s nothing you can do. He talks, and then he walks. That’s it. End of story.”
I give him my most winsome smile, and then he laughs loudly.
*
Natalie improves, at the hospital. She’ll be released in a few days. Right after they tie her tubes and see if she’s okay, that is. The idea of the tubes scares me a bit. I know we ought to knock off the procreation because of my age, but what if something were to happen to me and Natalie wanted to re-marry?
“I’ll never re-marry,” she tells me as she holds Jimmy in her arms.
“You can’t say that.”
“I just did.”
“You can’t know how you might feel if I died.”
“Don’t you dare ever say that again. Don’t you dare ever bring it up. You don’t know how much that kind of talk upsets me and I want you to promise me before God you will never ever bring up your death again.”
She has that Irish anger look on her lovely freckled face.
“Okay. I’ll never bring it up again.”
I don’t want her blood pressure to rise and keep her in the hospital any longer than she has to be here. I want her home, with Maggie and Leigh, our other two little ones. Mike is home for the summer, as I said, and Mary, the eldest girl is staying at the house for a few days with her husband so that she can see her new brother.
“I am never going to fall in love again. I know it as sure as I’m breathing, Jimm
y, so don’t question me about it again.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry. I promise.”
The nurse walks in.
“Time to take your bp,” Nurse Jennie Owens says. She’s a stout little brunette, around 35, I’d guesstimate.
She wraps the thing around her left arm after I take hold of my son. His eyes are a beautiful sky blue, but we won’t know what his real color will be for some months yet. I’m hoping they stay like this. Mike wants him to have Natalie’s green eyes.
“Your pressure is up. Ninety-two on the bottom…Something bothering you, Natalie?” the nurse smiles, and she proceeds to stare at me.
“Mea culpa…I confess, it was my fault. I got her going…Give her a minute and try again?” I ask the nurse.
“Okay…Put yourself in your happy place,” she grins at Natalie. “I’ll try again in fifteen minutes…And you leave her alone, Dad.”
“I want to go home, Jimmy.”
The nurse leaves temporarily. She promises she’ll be back in that quarter of an hour.
“I want to go home and I want to have my children and my husband around me. I want to go back to work. I want our lives back to normal—with no constant squad car out at the curb while some crazy Russian bitch is on the loose with her boyfriend and…”
“Stop. She’ll be back here soon. You’re going to relax.”
I hand her the baby again, and she holds him close. He’s been asleep through all of this.
“It was Hansen all along. He made the call to the Russian. He told him to blow the Anderson Building on the twelfth in order to hide behind the Towers. And that evil son of a bitch is going to walk away free and I can’t deal with it and I’m taking it out on you, Red. I’m sorry.”
I kneel next to her and I kiss her on the lips as she turns to me.
“So sex’ll be recreational for us for the rest of our married lives, uh?”
She laughs and kisses me again.
“Forget the Pope. I’ll buy us the Kama Sutra.”
“I don’t need any aids when it comes to loving you, Redhead.”
“No. That’s for sure. See this guy? You got me in trouble again, Jimmy P.”
“I’ll just have to live another forty years, then. Just so you can’t collect the pension and the insurance and blow them on some gigolo from the Cayman Islands.”
“Make it a hundred and ten and you got a deal.”
Jimmy Junior awakens with a howl. He has a distinctive cry. I can distinguish his little voice already, I’m thinking. Out of all the little wails in maternity, I can pick out his one-of-a-kind yelping.
*
He hasn’t taken a shot at the airlines that we can see, yet. Interpol has been notified that he’s on the loose, and there have been no sightings to date.
There was an old movie on TV the other night with James Caan. It was called Hide in Plain Sight. The title has stuck with me for a few days until I begin to wonder about that apartment above the sprinkler store on the northside.
Tommy and I don’t take backup. The notion that Alexei might have snuck back into his original crib is too ridiculous to try and float past the Captain, so we decide to give it a shot on our own. Uniforms did roust the sprinkler building, but they found it vacant.
“What do you expect to find there?” Tommy asks while driving us to the location.
“Nothing. But it bugs me that we’re coming up empty everywhere else. With all the manpower after him, you’d think there’d be a sign somewhere. And a sign for Vonskaya too.”
It takes thirty-five minutes to get to Grodnov’s headquarters. It’s 11:56 P.M. on an early July night. It is again sultry, almost breathless, on the streets. This has been one of the hottest summers I can remember. It’ll help me recall Junior’s arrival, all this heat and humidity. And drought. It hasn’t rained in weeks.
There is no squad in front of the location. Surveillance was taken off yesterday, Tommy found out before we left the Loop.
The door is unlocked. The building has been vacated by all of its occupants, and the Russians who lived here have scattered to the winds.
We take out our weapons in spite of its uninhabited appearance. I have the Bulldog in my right hand and my nine millimeter remains in my shoulder holster. The six inch blade is couched at my ankle, as always. Tommy has his .38 special unsheathed and at his side as we enter the building.
“Ooooh,” Tommy says as we enter the place.
“What?”
“Didn’t you feel the chill?”
“Just the air conditioning,” I tell him.
“They wouldn’t have left it running,” Tommy says.
“It is cold in here. Maybe they forgot and left the thermostat turned down.”
“I don’t think so,” Tommy says. “Some places just feel wrong. Don’t you believe in hauntings, Jimmy?”
“These guys left the place alive.”
“That doesn’t mean places can’t hold evil, like fucking residue.”
“Keep it up and you’ll scare the shit out of both of us,” I grin.
We search the main floor where the sprinkler ‘store’ used to be. There is no light inside here, and we don’t try to turn anything on to illuminate the place. We’ve got Tommy’s pen-flashlight that keeps us from tripping over anything that lies inside here.
We go into the back where Grodnov did his real business, but this room has been completely stripped down. There’s not a stick of furniture—nothing. Tommy sends the tiny beam from his penlight all across the back room.
We find stairs at the rear, stairs that lead to the apartment where Grodnov lived.
“I smell smoke,” Tommy whispers. “Cigarette smoke.”
We scale the stairs as quietly as we can. Just as we’re about to kick in the door to Grodnov’s upstairs apartment, we hear a crashing sound. So Tommy gives the door the boot, it explodes open, and we’re inside.
He flashes his mini light in every direction, but there’s nothing in the Russian’s living room. We have our weapons elevated, but there are no targets that we can make out.
So we advance toward the back of the apartment. There appears to be a living room and a dinette and one bedroom and a bathroom. This is a spartan dwelling, and no furniture is left inside here either.
We head toward the bedroom. I can smell the tobacco smoke also now. The door is shut, so Tommy gives this entry a forceful boot as well.
The window is wide open and the curtains are flapping gently. There is a fire escape outside. Then we hear the thumping of running feet out in the street. Tommy jumps out onto the fire escape, and then I follow him.
By the time we get to the street out front, whoever it was has disappeared. But he has left a smoldering cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Tommy bends over and picks it up and produces a plastic evidence bag. He places the butt inside. He forces the air out of the bag so the plastic won’t burn.
“We’ll have them check for DNA, anyway,” he says.
“I don’t really want to go back in there. Do you?”
Tommy Spencer gives me that bright, white grin.
“Boogedy boogedy,” he laughs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The DNA on the cigarette butt came up empty. It wasn’t Grodnov. Probably just some neighborhood punk who saw the Russians move out of a perfectly good crib.
But we get a phone call from a citizen on the northside who claims he’s seen Alexei Grodnov going in and out of a three flat on his block. The caller won’t give his name, but we check out every lead, especially since Grodnov’s trail has gone cold.
The apartment building looks abandoned. There are no shades or blinds over the windows. Tommy and I come here with a half dozen uniforms as backup. We go into the entry and find no names on any of the three mailboxes. The caller seemed to think Grodnov was occupying the third floor flat. He said he saw some low wattage coming out of the naked windows up there.
Tommy opens the lock of the entryway in thirty seconds or so, and the eight of us, I’m in
the front, all of us wearing vests, are headed quietly up the stairs.
This time Tommy boots the locked door to the uppermost apartment open. We storm inside to find no one in any of the five rooms. There are, however, pizza boxes on the floor as well as a few dozen empty bottles of beer strewn everywhere. If this was Grodnov, he’s a slob.
“I don’t think he’s gone,” Spencer says.
“Why not?” I ask.
“I just think he’s moving around a lot so no one’ll get an ID on him. He knows he’s famous, right now. He knows his picture’s all over the media. I think we arrived when he’s somewhere else on his circuit of safe houses. I think we ought to bug this joint electronically so we don’t spook him away with surveillance of the human kind.”
“We’ll put it to the Captain, then.”
We leave his trash in place, but we remove one half eaten piece of pizza and one empty of a beer bottle.
This time the DNA comes up a winner. Since Grodnov is a two-time loser, they had samples of his blood and DNA in the library. Perfect match, and three aces come up on the one armed bandit. The apartment is genuine. It’s one of his flops, so the Captain lets us bug the place. Anyone pops in, we’ll be listening to them, and there are miniature cameras scattered throughout the flop as well.
*
Marty Van Dyke is attacking the oncoming war in Iraq—that is, the second war in Iraq. He doubts the existence of weapons of mass destruction, he writes in his column. He thinks that the whole confrontation is a fix. The White House is looking for a fight, but they haven’t laid a glove on Bin Laden yet, and the Saudi’s trail is getting colder in Afghanistan all the time. We remember what happened to the Russians in their fine little adventure in Afghanistan. Now we’re going to begin a new adventure of our own in Iraq. The problem, Marty goes on, is that we’ll win the war in a few days, as we did in Part One, but when we try to occupy the country we’ll get mixed up in a thousand years of tribal feudalism. There’s no way of imposing democracy on the Iraqis, Van Dyke insists.