by Robin Cook
Buda was very aware that Albanian crews had developed a profile. One based in Queens had been taken down by the FBI a few years before; another in Staten Island was broken up in 2010. There were now more than two hundred thousand Albanians in the New York metro area, maybe three hundred thousand. The vast majority, all save a couple of hundred, were hardworking and law-abiding. Buda and his men drifted in and out of this Albanian diaspora, hiding among them in plain sight. The mob groups were clannish and secretive, hypersensitive to any kind of insult, and quick to use violence for the sake of vengeance. Under the Albanian code of besa, a man’s word was his bond and a handshake was a cast-iron seal. Buda had an agreement to complete this task, and he realized he was going to have to expose some of his men to take care of this particular problem. And doing work in public was another thing that made him nervous.
After Jerry Trotter made his proposal to Edmund three weeks previously, it had taken Edmund two days to call the number Trotter gave him. Ten, fifteen times he had told himself that he wouldn’t call, that he’d throw the piece of paper in the fireplace and forget all about it. Other times, he convinced himself that this was a test of his resolve set by Jerry, that if he called the number, Jerry himself would answer the phone. But at times, usually in the dead of night, when he sat by himself in his study drinking whiskey, Edmund ran through what such a call would be like to make. Say this guy actually was a killer for hire; how do you introduce yourself to someone like that? What do you say? He figured that if you called on business like this, you didn’t use your own phone.
Edmund finally called the number from a pay phone in a Laundromat on Second Avenue in the Sixties in Manhattan, a busy spot without any obvious security cameras trained on it. Edmund steeled himself, inserted his money, and dialed the number. Someone picked up but didn’t speak, and Edmund ran through his rehearsed lines.
“Hello. I got your number from a friend. I have a proposition for you. This isn’t a joke.”
Edmund didn’t say any more; the phone line quickly went dead.
An hour later, Edmund called again, from the same pay phone.
“Can we meet somewhere? I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say—”
Click.
The next day, on the fourth attempt, at ten in the morning, a thickly accented voice said, “Call in an hour. Pay phone bank at Grand Central. Main-level concourse.”
Edmund did as he was told.
“Take six train to Morrison Avenue, exit platform north side and wait.”
Edmund was at a point of no return. All he’d done was make a few phone calls, but now he was going to meet someone he knew was a killer. He looked at the commuters walking through Grand Central, ordinary people like him. If he went ahead with this, he would no longer be ordinary. In the recent endless days and sleepless nights, Edmund had weighed the possible costs of doing what Jerry demanded and doing nothing. If he failed to act, he’d be ruined financially and personally. But Jerry’s terrible scheme gave him a chance.
Another thought had occurred to Edmund and was proving impossible to ignore. These doctors were destroying his business. It was their fault he was in this position, and he was damned if he was going to let them get away with it.
Edmund rode the subway north to a section of the Bronx he’d never visited before. He got off the train on a windswept elevated platform. There was hardly anyone else around at eleven in the morning, just two men who had alighted at the station—one who had sat in Edmund’s car, another from the car behind his. Edmund left the station, walked down to the street, and stood by the exit. He checked his phone, and crossed and recrossed the street, looking for some sign of life.
Suddenly, a dark blue panel van drew up, and the back doors opened. A voice from within told Edmund to get in, and he did. The van drove away, and immediately Edmund’s arms were seized, tape was secured over his mouth, and a cloth bag was roughly forced over his head. His body was patted down, hands thrust into his armpits and groin. Then his clothes were removed, all of them, and he was left naked, bound, and gagged on the floor of the van, first as it rattled along the street and then, for what seemed like an age, parked someplace.
“Okay, Mr. Edmund Mathews, rich banker man from Greenwich, how did you get that phone number?” The voice came from the front of the van somewhere.
Edmund tried to talk but his mouth was taped shut. He mumbled and the voice said, “How rude of me. Let the man speak.”
The tape was ripped away crudely, and Edmund reeled from the shock.
“A friend of mine gave it to me. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”
“We’ll see. So what you want?”
Edmund laid out what he wanted. It didn’t take long, but he had to explain a couple of times the need for using polonium to effect the killings.
“Okay, this is what we do. You come to Middletown Road subway station, eleven tomorrow. Bring a deposit for me. As a gesture of goodwill. Say, fifty thousand dollars in Ben Franklin notes. Nonrefundable. Give the man back his clothes.”
Edmund’s arms and legs were freed, and he dressed quickly. The van moved again and stopped after a few minutes, and the doors opened. Edmund got out in a bleak parking lot behind an abandoned building. He figured out where he was, less than a half-mile from where he had been picked up, and he took the subway back to Manhattan.
More than at any point throughout the whole ordeal, Edmund’s flight reflex was strongest that night. If he called the FBI, surely he could give them Jerry and this guy, whoever he was, and at least he would be free from this crazy plot. But he wouldn’t be free of LifeDeals and Gloria Croft and his own imminent destruction. The Statistical Solutions data had finally come in, and merely underscored what Russell and Edmund already knew. Their model was shot to pieces the moment regenerative medicine became a reality. His need to stand and fight kicked in.
Edmund traveled again to the Bronx, and was again driven away in a van, this time of a different color. Again, he was bound and stripped, but his clothes were returned more quickly this time and his mouth wasn’t taped, a small mercy for which Edmund was grateful. He could feel that the envelope with the $50,000 was no longer in his jacket pocket.
“Thank you for the money,” the same voice said. “A more cautious man would throw you out of the van now and be happy with good takings for one day’s work. But I read about you, Mr. Mathews, and I am intrigued. Then I read about the people you say you want to die and I think, What are they doing? I don’t understand, I am a stupid peasant . Then I think, This guy must be for real. I don’t know why but I do. I also think this is a very expensive idea. Someone has to go to Russia, buy this radioactive material from some very bad men and not get caught. They have to give this material to the marks, plus the bacteria, and not get caught. We can do it, but not for one million dollars.”
“How much, then?”
“Two. And a half.”
“Jesus.”
“Mr. money guy, I see where you live, how much money you make. You are not doing a trade, here, on Wall Street. I don’t negotiate—that is the price. And tomorrow, the price is more.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry, speak up, please.”
“Okay,” said Edmund.
The two men met once more, three days later. Edmund told Russell he needed a huge amount of cash but not what it was for. Russell asked once, and Edmund bit his head off so Russell just did what he was told. It took Russell two and a half days to assemble one and a half million dollars from various business and personal accounts. Edmund packed it into a large baseball equipment bag and drove to the address he had been given on the phone. It was the same parking lot where he had been let out the first day. Once more, Edmund got in the van and went through the same degrading procedure.
“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”
The man gave in
structions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.
“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”
Edmund said nothing.
“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”
“No.”
“So, who was it?”
Edmund was silent.
“I really want to know.”
So Edmund told him.
“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”
From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.
“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”
The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.
Aleksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.
“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”
“Shit.”
“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”
The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?
“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.
“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”
“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”
“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”
Buda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.
“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”
“You see,” Genti said to Prek, “we should have done her when we had the chance. Like I said last night, knocking her around wasn’t going to be enough.” He turned to Buda. “She’s a tough bitch.”
“I can see that,” Buda said. Genti had been nursing a black eye all day. “Now this whole thing is about to go down the drain because of her. She knows what happened, God knows how. You gotta get back over there right now and take out her boyfriend and grab her off the street.”
“Boyfriend?” Prek said. “What boyfriend? You mean the kid she was hanging around with last night? Unless he’s with her when we grab her, I don’t know if we’d recognize him.”
“He’s the guy with his tongue in her ear!” Buda snapped. He was steaming, but he quickly realized Prek was right to be cautious. Killing the wrong man would be counterproductive.
“I’ll get a picture of him from the medical school database and send it to your phones. His name is . . . George Wilson,” he said, referring to a note.
“And remember, pick up the Grazdani woman,” Buda said. “And don’t touch her, you animal, unless she’s not related to anyone important, in which case she’s all yours. Understand, Genti? Word is she was in Rothman’s lab just a few minutes ago, poking around. Take her to the summer house and call me when you get there. And take Neri Krasnigi with you. It seems like the two of you can’t handle her.”
Krasnigi was relatively new to the crew, younger, inexperienced, and more vicious than either Genti or Prek. The two men were affronted by the order but didn’t show it.
As the men exited the trailer, Buda shouted after them, “Use the white van for the pickup and then dump it. Take the blue one to the house.”
Prek gave a thumbs-up sign and walked away.
Prek and Genti found Neri Krasnigi sitting in a battered old armchair at the back of the warehouse reading a German Playboy. Prek told him to follow, and the three men got into the white van. The plates were obscured with what appeared to be dried mud but which was actually cleverly painted plaster.
As they pulled out into Lorillard Place, heading quickly toward East Fordham Road, Prek filled Neri in on the afternoon’s operation. What they had in mind to pull off was a pair of Albanian specialties: a blindingly fast hit and snatch, in broad daylight if necessary. In the Albanian mind-set, it didn’t matter. Neri was excited; this would be his first official hit. They checked that their automatic pistols were loaded. Duct tape, blankets, balaclavas, two Columbia University Medical Center police uniforms, and a can of Ultane, a volatile, rapid-induction anesthetic, were piled into the back of the van.
The white van pulled into a garage and Genti got out and climbed into a blue van. Starting it up, he followed Prek in the white van. They parked the blue van near the George Washington Bridge and set out again in the white van toward Columbia University Medical Center.
46.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 25, 2011, 3:54 P.M.
Unbeknownst to George Wilson, at the same time he was thinking about contacting the police, Pia was too. Not seriously, but it had crossed her mind. It was certainly true that if an investigation needed to be done, they were far more capable and could turn over rocks she couldn’t even approach. But then there was the issue of what she would tell them. Would she say that she’d picked up a few lonely alpha particles in a coffee cup and thought it was evidence of a grand conspiracy? Of course not. There was no doubt in her mind that she would not be taken seriously, which ultimately would increase her vulnerability rather than decrease it. The police would think she was crazy and probably call the dean, believing they were acting in her best interest. Of course, going to the police had another downside. They might be tempted to look her up in their computer, and even though bad stuff about her teenage years was not supposed to be there, it might be. No, she would not go to the police. Instead, as planned, she’d go to the OCME in a final attempt to figure out the affair. If that didn’t yield overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, she’d give up, just as she’d told George.
When Pia had reached the street coming from the hospital cafeteria, her intention had been to head down to Broadway to take the subway downtown. But feeling the temperature and noticing that the rain had increased, she decided to take a quick detour back to the dorm for a better coat and an umbrella. She knew the subway would get her only so close to the OCME and that she’d end up walking. How far, she had no idea.
In the dorm she hesitated outside her door, just as she and George had done outside his earlier. Being attacked in her room the previous night made her paranoid. She didn’t know how the men had gotten into her room.
Repeating what she and George had done, after silently unlocking her door, she opened it suddenly, prepared to flee if needed. She also carefully checked her bathroom to make certain it was empty. It was.
With a warmer, rain-resistant coat and an umbrella, Pia set off on her way to the subway. She had put the Geiger counter in another shopping bag to make it easier to carry. She checked the time. It was almost four, so if she was going to make it to the OCME before it clo
sed, she had to get moving.
Walking quickly in the darkening day, Pia passed the Black building. She went another fifty feet along West 168th Street when she saw two hospital security police up the street, walking toward her. She stopped. She couldn’t see them well in the fading light with mist rising off the pavement, but she could see their uniforms well enough. They were the same uniforms her attackers had worn the previous night. To make matters worse, they seemed approximately the same height and build.
Fighting the urge to flee, Pia stopped dead in her tracks. Ahead to her right was a porte cochere for the hospital. Pia considered racing to it and into the hospital where she could vanish into the crowds, but she’d hesitated too long. She’d have to pass the security guards before she got to the entrance.
She looked behind her and saw there were surprisingly few people on the street. She thought about dashing back to the Black building but thought that if the men wanted to catch her, they probably could before she got inside. Turning back around, she eyed the approaching guards. They seemed to be staring intently at her. She froze, suddenly remembering a similar scene imbued with the same fear and dread.
She was thirteen at the time and had been at the Hudson Valley Academy for Girls for maybe a year. The stress of constantly being on guard, the fear of being attacked at any time, wore on Pia. A couple of times she’d cracked and tried to run away from the school, and she did so again. This time she got lost and had to spend a harrowing moonless night in the woods surrounding the school grounds. The night wore on and on and hummed with threat. Pia tried and failed to make her way back to the academy in the hope of breaking back in before anyone realized she was gone.
Pia had spent the hours before dawn slumped against the trunk of a tree, dozing fitfully. She arose at first light and walked east toward the sun until she found herself on an unfamiliar street winding downhill. It was then that she saw two policemen in the middle distance. They were implacably and threateningly walking toward her, staring at her unblinkingly, silent like automatons. Pia froze, as if by standing as still as possible they might not see her. When they were within ten feet of her, they parted, one walking to her left, one to her right. Perhaps they hadn’t seen her! Perhaps they weren’t looking for her at all! But when the men came alongside her, they suddenly lunged at her, roughly grabbing an arm each. Once again she was a prisoner of the state, totally vulnerable.