by Gary Haynes
The man looked to be in his mid-thirties, with a flabby stomach. He was swaying on his feet. Kazapov could smell the cheap alcohol on his breath. His cheeks were speckled with red-spider veins.
‘I have gold coins and silverware. In a bank, close by. You can have it all.’
Kazapov saw that Weber was sweating and shaking. He couldn’t tell if it was fear or the alcohol.
‘Did the Russian Jews in Kalmykia offer you gold and silver?’
Weber’s eyes lowered to the fraying carpet. ‘I have nightmares,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Kazapov said. ‘But you weren’t forced to do what you did. You could have gone home. You weren’t under any threat if you didn’t murder children and pregnant women.’
‘I couldn’t let my friends do all the dirty work. But I wish to God I had. The nightmares never stop.’
‘You won’t have nightmares tonight.’
Kazapov inched towards him, the knife held at head height.
‘I’m going to gut you like a fish,’ he said.
Weber turned, pushed open the French windows and staggered forward. He flipped over the balcony silently, a dull thud and a scream from a female passer-by testament to his suicide.
Kazapov put the knife in his jacket pocket and walked past a cracked wall mirror. He stopped and turned to look at his reflection. His black eyes were dull and pitiless. There was not one vestige of humanity left in them.
84
Brooklyn, 2015, the next day.
Carla’s SUV was stationary in a parking lot at the foot of Atlantic Avenue, the main truck route through the borough, about a mile southeast of Gabriel’s home in Brooklyn Heights. The parking lot was a stone’s throw from the South Ferry waterfront and opposite an Arabic mosque, with a selection of antique shops, pastel-coloured rowhouses, red brick office buildings and Middle Eastern restaurants to the rear. It was 5.35 pm, the sun still high in the west, the landscape criss-crossed with shadows, and the tarmac was emptying of vans and station wagons, the drivers pulling on cigarettes and talking into smartphones.
Gabriel got out of his sedan and sat in the SUV’s front passenger seat. Carla had called him that morning and asked to meet with him. He would normally have taken a cab or walked, but she’d told him not to.
During the short drive, he’d had the feeling that he was becoming lost in something like a lethal maze. He didn’t have a rational explanation for that, other than his not having a clue which direction to go in next, and all the previous day’s talk of torture and death with Bronislaw Stolarski was playing on his mind. He wasn’t sleeping more than a few hours a night. As for Joseph Kazapov, he had no idea how or whether to investigate him further at this stage. He was probably dead, anyhow.
‘It’s good to see you,’ Carla said.
‘You too, Carla. What do you have for me?’
‘It’s good news, up to a point. But I must say this first. The operational secrecy I’m acting under on this is of the highest level. Do you understand that, Gabriel?’
‘I’m a lawyer. Keeping confidences is second nature to me.’
Haven’t we had this conversation before? he thought.
‘That’s what I hoped you’d say. I have to believe it.’ Her tone was almost remorseful.
He watched her close her eyes briefly. She breathed deeply through her nose, as if willing herself to speak.
‘The Chechen confirmed that he sold the DVD to Jed Watson.’
‘This is a real breakthrough, Carla.’
‘It is. But that’s not all. I was informed yesterday that Jed Watson was under investigation by the SEC Division of Enforcement,” she said.
‘Go on.’
‘They intimated that he might have been involved in a major financial fraud. It’s early days,’ she said.
She brushed her black hair away from the side of her head, kept it up for a moment, as if she was overheating, before letting it cascade down over her shoulders.
Gabriel rubbed his face with his palms. ‘So, Watson was vulnerable to an arrest and to having his property searched, in which case the DVD would be found. Then a link might be made,’ he said, clarifying it in his own mind. ‘And that’s where Johnny Hockey came in.’
‘Right. I suspect Hockey was told to do a hit and get a DVD, so he did a hit and got a DVD.’
‘Did the Chechen confirm that Hockey did it?’ Gabriel said.
‘He wasn’t asked that question. Not yet at least.’
‘What about the girlfriend of the Hockey associate, the one who wants the reward?’
Carla shook her head. ‘There’s been no sign of her.’
‘And have the FBI subpoenaed the Watson family?’ Gabriel said.
‘Yes. Her name is Charlene Rimes. She was twenty-two years old.’
‘So you think she’s dead already?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, nodding solemnly.
Gabriel interlocked his fingers and placed them over his nose, as if he was a child that had smelled something awful.
A white van with tinted windows slowed down on the opposite side of the road in front of them and he watched Carla check it out. When what looked like a co-worker was dropped off at the pavement, the tension in the side of her neck subsided.
‘Do you think the Chechen knows Snow Lion’s name?’ he said.
‘He won’t say it, at least not for the present. He’s keeping a lot back until he’s offered the option of turning state’s evidence to get immunity from prosecution, although he’ll spend the rest of his life in a witness protection programme. He wants a chunk of real estate and a chunk of cash. His face will have to change. His identity. He knows that if he gives up Snow Lion, he will be a marked man.’
‘And will he be offered those things?’ Gabriel said.
‘I don’t know, Gabriel. My boss is adamant that he won’t give in to the Chechen’s demands.’
‘But he must,’ Gabriel said. ‘Tell him he has to. Jesus Christ. What’s his name?’
She hesitated, and it worried him, although he didn’t know why.
‘Hester. Section Chief Hester. But he said the FSB told him the Chechen is a child pornographer. It’s more complicated than you think. Besides, it’s above Hester’s paygrade. Have you met with that man you mentioned?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He felt sure now that Bronislaw Stolarski had been telling the truth about his brother, Icchak, and after what Carla had told him about the Chechen, he felt it was only right to tell her. He did so, without mentioning his name. He told her about Lieutenant Joseph Kazapov of the NKVD, too.
‘It’s a long shot, but could Hester contact the FSB again and see if they have any information on the wartime service record of Joseph Kazapov?’ he said. ‘He might have survived. He could still be alive. It’s possible, isn’t it?’
He wanted to verify Stolarski’s opinion that Kazapov had survived the war, if that was possible. Besides, he had a nagging feeling he couldn’t pin down about Stolarski and a burgeoning one about Kazapov — although if he was still alive there was no connection to the disappearances that he knew of, and no motive.
Her eyes seemed fixed on the traffic, on people emerging from the doors of businesses and homes. She wasn’t looking for anyone she knew, he thought. She was looking for someone she should be wary of.
‘Carla. Did you hear me?’
85
Carla’s house, the same day.
Carla had gone to bed early, tired after her long drive back from New York. She had a headache and had taken a couple of painkillers with a glass of Argentinian Malbec. Not a sensible thing to do, she realized, but she hadn’t felt like doing the sensible thing.
Monize was staying over at her father’s house in DC. Carla had rung her a couple of hours before from the car on her hands-free, and her daughter had said that she’d been to the movies and had eaten a tub of buttered popcorn. Carla had smiled to herself then.
Now, her eyelids flicked open. Her bedroom was dark, without a hint
of street or moonlight, due to her heavy curtains and the farmhouse’s remote location, and she blinked hard, once, to focus. She sensed that her hair was damp at the nape of her neck. She stroked her belly and thighs. It seemed her whole body was clammy.
The creaking sound had come, she guessed, from the maple staircase. It swamped her senses, and she tensed as the adrenalin pumped through her. But it could’ve come from anywhere. Couldn’t it?
Part of her decided it was the old house settling down. Another part of her didn’t.
Slowly, her right hand moved towards the mahogany bedside cabinet. Three of her fingers eased open the top drawer that held her Glock 22. She kept it there at night in a secure metal box. She couldn’t risk Monize finding it and squeezing off a round. It had a full magazine in place. It always had a full magazine in place. The key was kept on a piece of string around her neck. She lifted the box out and rested it on her belly.
Five seconds later, the empty box was back in the drawer and she was holding the Glock close to her chest. She felt all of the weapon’s thirty-four ounces. She knew the trigger pull was 5.5 pounds. It bucked, but there was good shock adsorption. There was no traditional safety lever, save for the small one built into the trigger proper.
Her backup, a Glock 26 9mm, the so-called Baby Glock, was in the standing wardrobe. It was strapped to her ankle when she was on active service. But before she could retrieve the backup, she saw what appeared to be the beam from a torch beneath the bottom of her bedroom door. She sensed her heart rate escalate and had to force herself not to scream.
She threw back the duvet and swung her legs around. She picked up her slippers with her free hand. They had good soles, having been purchased with the bare floorboards of her home in mind. She thought about shooting at the door, but had no idea if anyone was behind it. She thought about walking to the wardrobe and squatting there. She decided to grab her smartphone and run. By the time she was outside and had cleared the curtilage, she could risk slowing down and speaking into it.
Three seconds before her bedroom door was flung open, she’d reached her en suite bathroom, her motion silent and fluid. She locked the door and put on her slippers. She opened the window that led to a portion of the rear fire escape and the walkway beneath, which extended for some six hundred yards to a sparely lit and barely populated minor road.
She heard heavy footsteps heading for the bathroom. She tucked the Glock and the mobile into the waistband of her pyjama trousers, then grasped the nearest fire-escape rail and swung her body over feet first. Swivelling around, she almost galloped down its steel steps, which were perforated to aid drainage and stability in movement.
She reached the walkway, sweat dampening her T-shirt, which bore an image of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer on the front. Both the Glock and the smartphone were pointing upwards in her hands now. She ran, her eyes fixed ahead.
She couldn’t remember when she had ever been so swift, when her body had felt so light, although her sense of fear was palpable. Her hands were shaking, her gaping mouth dry. She had an ache in her abdomen and the sweat was running into her eyes.
A few seconds later, she heard heavy breathing and multiple pounding feet about twenty feet behind her. She didn’t want to slow down to use her phone. It would be twenty minutes minimum before a patrol car turned up, longer for a SWAT team. By that time, it would be over.
Her eyelids stretched to their limit, her lungs heaved. The fear was on the brink of crippling her. She knew she couldn’t outrun them. But now her training kicked in.
Stop, she thought. Turn. Assume the firing position.
She didn’t need any motivation other than the threat of capture. Grabbed by the back of her flowing hair, perhaps, and flung to the hard surface. Or worse, hit with a bullet, as if they were culling an animal. A bullet might sever the femoral artery in her thigh, in which case she knew she’d bleed out in a few minutes. A bullet might irreparably shatter the ball and socket joint in her shoulder. It didn’t matter. She had decided to face them.
She saw them in the half light of the moon and illuminated by intermittent iron lampposts, but she found it hard to focus on individuals. There were three of them. No, four. She thought she saw a baseball bat, but it could have been a pump-action shotgun. She couldn’t tell if they were all Caucasians. That didn’t matter, either.
She positioned herself onto her right knee in what felt like one movement, placing the smartphone face up on the asphalt. She held the Glock at eye level, with one hand on the handle, one steadying the grip. She adjusted the rear white sight so that it aligned with the front dot.
Fifteen rounds, she thought. Enough, even if she wasted half a dozen.
She blinked. She didn’t understand why. Her hands began to tremble.
‘Fucking shoot!’
The sound of the man’s voice reverberated in her head. He wasn’t talking to her. She heard the buzzing. She felt the fifty thousand volts in her back, overriding her central nervous system and causing the uncontrollable contraction of her muscle tissue. The spasm debilitated her.
Taser darts.
She lay in the foetal position. She was shaking now, and fluid was dripping from her nose. Her lips were parted. and she was mouthing something.
Monize.
86
Yale, the same day.
Gabriel had asked a male student to meet him at Yale, a German national named Berne Lange, with red hair and freckles. He was an affable young man who was a conscientious, if not brilliant, student. He arrived at Gabriel’s small office at 9.35 pm, wearing tanned trousers and a turtleneck sweater on his lanky frame.
After what Stolarski had told him, and what he’d said to Carla about asking Hester to contact the FSB to search their own archives for Joseph Kazapov’s service record, Gabriel had come up with an idea a few hours ago. It wasn’t a particularly creative one, he knew, but it was an idea for all that. Besides, he had no further leads to go on at present.
Gabriel had consciously left the blinds open and he made Berne a cup of espresso using his portable coffee machine. He invited him to sit at his old writing desk, in his high-backed computer chair, telling him what he wanted. He asked him to keep it between them. There was nothing sinister about it, he said. It was simply an academic paper he was working on.
Berne said, ‘Sure, Professor Hall. Does this mean I’m going to get a few extra marks this term?’
‘No, Berne, it doesn’t.’
Berne’s pianist-like fingers moved nimbly over the laptop’s keyboard.
He checked the wealth of historic newspaper archives online. He told Gabriel that the Berlin State Library, in conjunction with Germany’s Centre for Contemporary History and the Fraunhofer Society, a research organization, had spent four years digitizing every issue of East Germany’s newspapers published between 1945 and 1990, including Neue Zeit, Berliner Zeitung and Neues Deutschland.
Berne searched diligently. Gabriel refilled his coffee cup a couple of times and spent the rest of the time pacing the oak floorboards until Berne politely asked him to stop. Not wanting to distract him, he did so, and instead sat in an armchair and rubbed his upper lip with his forefinger.
A couple of hours later, Berne said, ‘Wow.’
‘You have something?’
‘Listen to this, Professor. It’s about the workers’ uprising on June seventeenth, 1953. The East German government called in Soviet tanks and open fired on crowds of peaceful demonstrators. An edition of the Berliner Zeitung blamed the uprising on fascist elements from West Berlin. Neues Deutschland said the government had protected the city from agents of foreign powers. Outrageous propaganda, huh. I won’t find anything that compromises the laughable legitimacy of the Soviet Union here,’ Berne said.
‘Where else can we look?’
‘There are several West German newspapers and periodicals online too.’
‘I’m not sure. It’s getting late,’ Gabriel said.
‘OK.’
Berne sounded
disappointed.
‘Just a little longer then,’ Gabriel said. ‘If you’re sure?’
Berne nodded, without taking his eyes from the screen.
Berne found a site for Der Spiegel, the popular German weekly news magazine that had been founded in the late 1940s by a British Army officer and a former Wehrmacht radio operator. It was known for its investigative journalism. The site had records going back to its inception.
‘Try up to 1960,’ Gabriel said.
‘It has a decent search facility.’
Three cups of espresso later, Berne said, ‘Ah-hah.’
‘Another workers’ uprising?’
‘No, Professor Hall.’
Gabriel moved over to the plasma screen.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘A human-interest story with potential political ramifications. It happened in West Berlin in 1954. There was one witness to a murder. That witness was an eight-year-old girl, the female victim’s daughter. The child’s name was Helma. It makes out there was a happy ending. She was adopted by a US military attaché and his wife, a man named Peter Honey. It appears that wasn’t an uncommon practice. She got out of the enclave. There’s mention of an affidavit by the mother, signed in 1945.’
Berne ran his finger down the online article and pointed to a name.
‘There,’ he said.
Gabriel squinted at the small font size.
‘The name you’re looking for, Professor.’
Gabriel saw the name: Joseph Kazapov.
87
Virginia — Brussels, the next day.
The station wagon was parked under a flyover, next to an all but stagnant, coffee-coloured stream. The first thing Carla noticed was that her hands were cuffed to a steering wheel. She knew she’d been drugged. She felt nauseous, her vision blurred. She had little memory of how she’d gotten here.
Vaguely, she heard a police siren in the distance, but realized it was travelling away from her.