by D. R. Bell
“Yes, they must have gone in soon after we took off. Somebody told them when we were leaving and gave them the security code. I don’t think it would have been Andrei, he could have just ordered Alex to leave with us.”
David said, “So it must have been Petr or Tamara?”
Oleg nodded. “Yes. I think it was Tamara. Petr’s been with Andrei for over four years, well before Alex and me. Tamara moved in only a few weeks ago.” Oleg choked back his grief. “I will kill whoever did this. But Alex did not go without a fight. He had at least five bullets in him, but he got one of the bastards.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was blood by the door and outside, must have belonged to one of them.”
James said, “Detective, before I ask Frank to tell us about Jonathan Schulmann, is there anything that you know and are willing to share?”
Megrano hesitated. After some internal struggle, he said, “OK. But I think I’ll have some of that scotch now.” He accepted a drink from Bowen. “We never thought it was about the engineering documents. We looked at the ‘Shulman’ angle, but didn’t use the right name. I’m afraid we don’t have anything on ‘Thomas Mann.’ The plan was to have David work with us on a drawing. David identified the Lincoln’s driver, and we are going through his contacts and activities. We are getting a search warrant to check out his place and his phone logs.”
“You didn’t do that yet?” David said.
“You identified him only yesterday, and this is a weekend. We should have it tomorrow,” Megrano said. “We were focusing on trying to find the two Mexican guys, given that, according to eyewitnesses, they are the actual killers of Jim Plasche. But we don’t have much to go on, except knowing from David that they’re big and one has a snake tattoo.”
Bowen asked, “Don’t you think it’s strange that the Chinese are working with Mexican gangs?”
“Not necessarily,” Megrano said. “It’s somewhat unusual, but when there is money to be made, everyone will cooperate.”
Oleg nodded. “Yes. We work closely with Mexicans in some areas. Sasha manages Compton and Adams areas for us.”
“Who is Sasha?”
“His name is really Alejandro, which is kind of like Alex in Russian. But we already have … “ Oleg swallowed hard and corrected himself. “We already had one Alex, so we named him Sasha, which is another shortening of Alexander. Sasha has his own group of a dozen people.”
“So this is another gang?”
“No,” Oleg said. “He’d be offended if you called him that. Sasha is a businessman, just his line of business sometimes involves illegal substances. He does not like these gangsters that wear colors, flash signs, and shoot people in the streets. We outsourced part of the business to him. He probably has similar arrangements with others.”
Megrano got interested. “Do you think he can help look for the people that killed Jim Plasche on the tennis courts?”
“I’ll ask.”
Megrano was not finished yet. “I believe that the answer to this puzzle is in Seattle. There was a shooting Friday morning in Green Lake Park. Three Chinese males are dead; one of them arrived a day before from Shanghai. One Caucasian is in a hospital in critical condition. Then another recently arrived Chinese national has a ticket on the same flight as David, but ends up dead in a men’s room instead. One other passenger does not board the plane. And in a trashcan near the gate, police found a bag with a light overcoat, a hat, and glasses.”
“You think that was Thomas Mann, or whatever his real name is, who didn’t board the flight and killed the man in the airport?”
“Yes, I think so. That’s why we can’t seem to find anyone on security tapes who matches the description that David gave us. He sets up David by making it appear as if David is his associate, gets his two pursuers to separate, kills the one that stays with him, and disappears. He must have had another flight booked earlier. We tried to pick him up from security cameras but could not establish which flight he went on.”
James asked, “So who do you think we are dealing with?”
Megrano shrugged. “Don’t know for sure. But given the scale, it’s not some run-of-the-mill mafia dispute. If I had to guess, I suspect we are not dealing with mafia at all, but with MSS.”
“What’s MSS?” David asked.
Frank spoke for the first time since the introductions. “The Chinese security apparatus. Kind of like Chinese KGB, although of course technically there is no longer a KGB.”
Megrano continued. “I wish we could talk to the shoot-out victim who is now in UW’s Medical Center. But from what I understand, he is not talking, and in any case, our captain won’t send us to Seattle. The budget is tight, and he doubts it’s related to Jim Plasche’s murder.”
Frank said, “Perhaps I can help. The mayor of Seattle is an old friend of mine. We attended UW’s Law School together. I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”
“Great, thank you,” Megrano said. He turned to Oleg. “One more thing. Since one of the people in Andrei’s household is a traitor, it would be helpful to start following their movements. Can you attach GPS trackers to the cars that Tamara and Petr usually drive? I can give you a couple that are very difficult to detect and then we can follow them easily.”
David asked, “Do you have a tracker on my car?”
Megrano smiled. “No. I usually would need a court order to do this. Plus, we weren’t sure you were worth tracking. No offense, but we never seriously considered you to be a suspect.”
Bowen clapped his hands. “Thank you, this was very useful. But there is a whole other topic for us to discuss: Jonathan Schulmann.” He turned to Frank.
Sunday, 4/24/2022, 8:53 p.m. PDT
Maggie was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The small room contained a twin bed with a thin pillow, a table with a pitcher of water, two chairs, and a nightstand with a lamp and an alarm clock. There was a window, but the shutters on the outside were almost closed, and during the day it allowed only small slivers of light. No way to open the shutters or to break the window—she’d thrown a chair at the glass, but it only bounced back and hit her on the leg. There were two doors: one led out of the room, the other to a tiny windowless half-bathroom with a toilet and a sink, no shower.
This morning Andrei and his entourage had left for lunch. She’d stayed behind. Maggie did not particularly want to go with the group and needed to catch up on her UCLA studies. With all the craziness of the past two days she’d had no chance to work on her research. She didn’t think David was coming back to Andrei’s house and wondered if she’d ever see him again or if he’d go into hiding and disappear. Might as well. The whole thing with him was crazy and had turned her life upside down.
She’d felt better after taking her customary morning run. Alex had also stayed behind. He tried to engage her in a conversation, which after a few minutes irritated Maggie. He smelled of smoke and she had to get to her studies. Just as she excused herself and started walking up the stairs, leaving Alex in the vestibule, the door opened and two men with guns walked in. She watched from about one-third of the way up. Alex reached for his gun then staggered as he was hit by a bullet. But she heard no gunshot sound. He’d managed to fire twice with loud booms before collapsing on the floor that was quickly filling up with blood. Three more men ran in. Maggie turned and tried to run upstairs, but someone caught her ankle and brought her down. Two pairs of legs went past her to the second floor. Heavy footsteps rushed around, men shouting excitedly in another language. It sounded like Chinese. She understood one word clearly—“Ferguson.”
One of the men had good command of English and he roughly turned her around, screaming at her, “Where is Ferguson?”
She shook her head. “He’s not here.”
The two men returned from upstairs. The one standing above her must have been the leader because he gave a command, and the other two lifted Maggie, quickly taped her mouth, tied her hands behind her back, and half-carried, half-dragged
her out of the house. She kicked one of her captors in the shin as hard as she could. He yelled and swung to hit her. The other man shouted, “Zhi!” And the first one stopped his fist inches from Maggie’s face.
She saw two others carrying a man who was bleeding and screaming in pain, and she thought, Alex got one of them. They ran to the service entrance where two SUV’s were idling. She was forced into the second SUV, and it took off just as sirens sounded in the distance.
There were three men in the car with her: the two that brought her out and the driver. All were Asian. They were talking loudly and didn’t look happy. She heard “Ferguson” multiple times. The car turned north on Van Nuys Boulevard, crossed Ventura Boulevard, and got into a left turn lane for Ventura Freeway North. The driver turned back, looked at Maggie, and gave an instruction. Maggie was lifted and unceremoniously thrown on the floor, with two pairs of boots holding her down. She felt the car accelerating.
Maggie stared into the dirty floor, feeling numb and scared. She hated having no control over things that were happening to her. Damn it, why did David have to walk into her restaurant? She was so angry, she screamed into the masking tape and tried to grab the leg that was pressing on her right shoulder. She was rewarded with a kick on the back of her head.
Maggie tried to keep her mind from panicking by guessing where they were. They stayed on the freeway for what she thought was about ten minutes before slowing down, stopping, and then turning left. After a few minutes the car started climbing uphill in a series of hairpin turns, then proceeded downhill. Maggie was sliding back and forth on the floor, prompting the men holding her down to laugh. She figured they were heading west by one of the canyons connecting the Valley with the coast, probably Topanga or Malibu. They turned right, and beneath the noise of traffic she thought she heard the sound of crashing waves. The car stopped, a turn signal was on, they made a left, and everything went dark as if they were in a cave.
Maggie was lifted and dragged out of the car. Lights came on. She realized they weren’t in a cave but in a large garage. Two other cars were there, one of them the second SUV she saw by the service gate. Two people carried out the wounded man, who seemed unconscious.
They took Maggie into the house. She caught a glimpse of the ocean, but her captors proceeded to the second floor, pushed her into a small dark room, and closed the door. She found herself in the middle of the room she was in now, with her hands still tied behind her back and her mouth taped. In semi-darkness, she saw a bed and went to sit on it. Her hands and shoulders were hurting, the skin on her face was stretched by tape—and she had to pee.
Maybe that was what kept the despair at bay, because Maggie struggled clumsily with her bound hands to get off the bed, marched to the door, and started pounding it with her right foot.
After a few minutes, a large balding man opened the door and angrily barked in heavily accented English, “What do you want?”
Maggie just as angrily moaned into the tape. The man reached out and yanked the tape off, which made Maggie scream in pain.
The man repeated, “What do you want?”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
The man pointed at another door inside the room. Maggie spat out, “My hands are tied, you fucking moron!”
The man looked like he was going to hit her, and Maggie instinctively took a step back, but he slammed the door and left. She heard some voices, and then the man came back, untied her hands, and left without saying a word.
Maggie went to the bathroom, washed her hands, and inspected her face in a small mirror over the sink illuminated by a single bulb. The tape left a big red mark, and on her right temple there was an imprint of a shoe. She massaged her hands, shuffled back into the room, turned on the lamp on the nightstand, and inspected the room for a possibility of escape. The door was locked, so was the window. She picked up one of the chairs and threw it against the window, but only ended up hurting herself.
Maggie sat on the bed again. For some reason, all she could think of now was that she would be missing her shift at the restaurant tonight and had to let the owner know.
The door opened, and two men came in, the balding thick one she saw earlier and an older man who looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. The second man was dressed in a nicely tailored light gray suit with a white shirt, no tie. Maggie didn’t think he was one of the men she’d seen at Andrei’s house. His hair was mostly black, with some gray at the temples. He wore wide-framed, expensive-looking glasses, and his face looked well cared for. The man carried himself with a confidence that signaled to Maggie that he was the leader of this group.
He sat in one of the chairs and said in slightly accented but good English, “Please don’t get up. You are Margarita Sappin, correct?”
Maggie replied, “Yes, and who are you?”
The man smiled and offered, “You can call me Mr. Chao. Now, I am going to ask you a few questions. I understand you are angry”—he pointed to the second chair still lying on the floor next to the closed window—“but if you want to live, you will answer truthfully.”
After that, “Mr. Chao” proceeded to politely question Maggie about her relationships with David Ferguson and Andrei Chernov and the events of the past two days. Maggie controlled her anger and described everything except for their research into Jonathan Schulmann and their meeting with James Bowen. She was hoping to keep her old professor friend out of this. Mr. Chao kept circling back and going over the same events trying to uncover contradictions in her story. After about an hour, he stopped, thanked her, and got up to leave.
Maggie was sweating by that point. She said, “Wait, I told you everything. Why don’t you let me go? I don’t know where this place is.”
Mr. Chao politely declined. “I am afraid you’ll have to be our guest for a while longer, Ms. Sappin.”
Maggie shot back angrily, “Do you lock all your guests as prisoners and starve them?”
Mr. Chao smiled and told the balding man to make sure Mr. Sappin was properly fed and comfortable. They both left, but the younger man came back a bit later with a plate of two sandwiches and a can of soda.
Maggie ate because she thought she had to keep her strength. The balding man came back to take the plate and refill the pitcher, and she’d been left alone since. She figured that her kidnappers were the same Chinese that attacked David, that they really wanted him, and she just got in the way. There was really nothing that they needed her for. And they did not seem to have any qualms about killing people.
That was when Maggie realized that Mr. Chao was going to kill her. She started to cry. It was all so absurd. She’d been working her shift, some bloodied guy showed up, and now she was going to die. She felt sorry for her parents back in Kiev. She longed to get back to her life. She liked what she was working on, enjoyed her independence, her morning runs around the campus, her comfortable little tidy room. Maggie shared her three-bedroom apartment with two others, but she’d been there the longest, so the owner gave her a break on the rent to watch the place, and she liked being in charge. Proper, serious graduate student on one side, boy-toying chocolatoholic on the other, but always in charge. She was only thirty-two; it wasn’t fair she should die like this. Couldn’t somebody, anybody, come rescue her please?
Maggie wiped the tears, got up and checked everything one more time, her mind working furiously on ways to escape. Nothing. She lay down on the bed, wishing she had for comfort a few of the stuffed animals she shared her bed with at home. She expected the door to open any moment and the balding man to come take her away. She tried to imagine how they would kill her. She did not want to die but wanted to be prepared to go with dignity.
But the door remained shut.
Eventually Maggie drifted into an uneasy sleep to the sound of the waves that somehow managed to penetrate the thick window glass.
Sunday, 4/24/2022, 9:12 p.m. PDT
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous
to
our liberties than standing armies.”
—Thomas Jefferson
The circle of men at Bowen’s house all turned their attention to Frank Gorman and the subject of Jonathan Schulmann.
Suddenly in the spotlight, Frank hesitated. “What is it you want to know? Just about his SEC work? Or more?”
Megrano spoke up. “Well, if people are willing to fly in from China and kill for some information related to Schulmann, I guess we need to find out as much as possible. You can never tell which detail will prove important.”
Frank stood up, rubbed his hands, and began pacing the floor. “I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I met Jonathan in 1998. I was forty-eight and teaching a class in Georgetown’s Law School. Jonathan was a twenty-three-year-old student. One of the smartest kids in the class, but without a trace of arrogance. Very idealistic. Most kids said the right things, but they were there for the money. Jonathan wanted to do good things. I think he got it from his parents. I met them; they were old-fashioned Jewish liberals, believing that welfare and chicken soup could cure all that’s wrong with the world. The kind of families that came originally from shtetls in Poland and Russia. Those who stayed in the old country didn’t survive the Holocaust. I’ve often wondered how people maintained their faith in God after that, but that’s neither here nor there.”
Frank took a sip of his cognac. “I was happy to give Jonathan a recommendation to intern in a law firm. They hired him after graduation. He practiced corporate law, mostly defending corporate executives from paying for whatever shenanigans they did trying to screw shareholders, taxpayers, and what not. Got married, got divorced, no kids, made it to partner. A few times a year we would meet for coffee or drinks. Our little tradition. I was at SEC by then. I thought Jonathan had lost his idealism and became your typical successful lawyer. But then he changed. I think his father’s death in 2013 affected him a lot. He did not have much family left after that, only a sister in Phoenix and a niece that he loved very much. Maybe his father said something, or maybe Jonathan felt that he’d missed his calling. Who knows? But soon after his father’s death, Jonathan left the law firm and went to work for CFTC.”