by Drew Chapman
When he was finished, he carefully grabbed a replacement iced tea and two packs of unfiltered Camels, draped the uniform shirt and pants back over his shoulder, and slipped out the store’s back door to head north, to get as far away as he could from Charlotte, North Carolina, as fast as he could, and to repay the favor that Garrett Reilly had just done him.
HUNTS POINT, BRONX, JUNE 19, 11:15 A.M.
Celeste Chen cursed her arrogance as she checked the addresses on the buildings on Lafayette Avenue in the Bronx. She had been sure everyone in Ascendant would agree with her—that Garrett was a drug addict and that they needed to abandon this insane mission immediately. She was even the one who suggested that the vote be binding. There was no way she could lose. But she did. And now she was fucked, because what she really thought she should do was climb back on a plane and head to the West Coast.
Instead, she was in the Bronx, looking for Anna Bachev’s apartment.
“The FBI has been all over this,” she had told Garrett that morning. “There’s nothing we’re gonna find out about Anna Bachev that they don’t know.”
Garrett had nodded calmly, as if he were some elder statesman, which drove Celeste nuts. “True, but the FBI aren’t sharing data with us, so we need to find out on our own.”
So off she went to the Bronx. She’d never been there before, and she’d been expecting towering projects and gang members fighting in the streets. But Hunts Point, while poor and mostly black, was nothing like that. There were markets and offices, tidy apartment buildings, and seemingly happy women pushing baby strollers. It seemed like any other working-class neighborhood in a big city.
“Look for details,” Garrett had said back in Newark. “Remember—he exploits people’s weaknesses.”
Celeste found Bachev’s building—764 Bryant Avenue—and knocked on the manager’s door. The manager, a dour-looking Hispanic woman in her fifties, listened to Celeste claim to be from a legal aid foundation that was working for Anna Bachev’s family, then slammed the door in Celeste’s face. Celeste could hear her cursing in Spanish as she bolted locks and turned up the television.
Celeste stepped outside and called Garrett on the burner cell phone he had given her. They had agreed to not use names when they spoke, and to avoid all specifics of place or time.
“Manager told me to get lost,” she said. “And some other stuff, but it was in Spanish.”
“Expected. Check local stores, markets, whatever. See if they know her, know anything about her.”
Celeste sighed. She couldn’t imagine a task she could hate more than starting conversations with strangers and trying to extract information from them. Garrett seemed to sense that over the phone. “You did it once, brilliantly. You can do it again.” He was referring to China, and the detective work she had done there. He was right; she had been good at it, Celeste thought, but that still didn’t make it any easier.
She found a Starbucks down the block on Lafayette Avenue, bought herself a latte, and tried to make conversation with a pair of baristas, but neither of them had even heard of Anna Bachev.
“Don’t follow the news much?” Celeste asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t. It amazed her how badly informed Americans were at times.
The baristas, a young girl with purple hair and a boy with dreadlocks, stared at Celeste with blank faces, and she backed quickly out of the coffee shop. She stopped in a market, but the Korean owner barely spoke English; then she peeked her head into a dry cleaner’s and a pawnshop, but those also seemed like dead ends.
She called Garrett again. “Nothing.”
“All right; come back,” he said, disappointment in his voice, and hung up.
Celeste immediately hated herself for caring what he thought. She stood on the corner of Hunts Point Avenue and tried to think of any other angles she could exploit. Beater cars cruised past her, and a young man whistled at her from a gold-painted Camry. A Chinese restaurant was on the corner, and at the side entrance an old Chinese woman sat on an overturned plastic pail, peeling the leaves off a pile of bok choy.
Celeste walked up to the old woman. “Nín hăo.” Hello.
“Nín hăo.” The old woman didn’t look up.
“Wŏ shi jĭngchá,” Celeste said. I work for the police.
The old woman stared up at Celeste, then studied her from head to toe without saying a word. From the look on her face, Celeste could tell that the old woman didn’t believe a word of it. But she shrugged nonetheless and continued in Mandarin, “What do you want?”
“I am trying to find out about the woman who lived here, the woman who shot the banker in Manhattan. Her name was Anna Bachev.”
The old woman went back to peeling the leaves off the bok choy.
“Did you know her?”
The old woman shrugged.
Celeste took that as a yes. Her pulse quickened. “She came here sometimes? To the restaurant?”
Again, the woman shrugged.
“How often did she come to eat here?”
The old woman stopped peeling and took in the sky for a moment. “Not so much lately.”
Celeste smiled. The old woman was talking. That was good. “Why not lately? Do you know?”
“Very sad.”
“Depressed?”
“Yes.” The old woman nodded. “Very depressed. This country makes people depressed.”
Celeste nodded. There was truth in that. Especially if you were peeling vegetables on the sidewalk in the middle of the Bronx on a hot summer’s day. But there was something else the old woman wasn’t telling her. “Yes, it does. Makes me depressed sometimes too.” Celeste waited a moment. “Was there anything else?”
The old woman squinted slightly in the midday sun. “Lose her baby.”
“She had a miscarriage?”
The old woman shook her head. “No, she had a baby. But they took it away. Because she was a drug addict. They took it out of the country.”
Celeste blinked in surprise. “Who did? Who took it away?” She realized immediately that she had raised her voice too quickly and spoken too fast. The old woman ducked her head and dove back into peeling bok choy.
Celeste took a long breath, then tried again, slowly, respectfully. “Could you tell me, maybe, where the baby went? Please.”
The old woman said nothing. Celeste waited. The sun beat down on her. She measured her breaths. If she had learned anything from her time in China, it was patience, always patience. Finally, after a full two minutes of silent peeling, the old woman made the slightest of head gestures, nodding back across Hunts Point Avenue. If Celeste hadn’t been watching closely, she would have missed it, but she didn’t. She turned and looked. The old woman had nodded to a Medicaid clinic a block away. Celeste hadn’t thought to look in there.
“Xièxiè, xièxiè.” Thank you, thank you. Celeste hurried back across Hunts Point Avenue and walked to the front door of the clinic. The place looked like a thousand other storefront medical offices across the country. A laminated placard in the window said WE ACCEPT MEDICARE AND MEDICAID and SE HABLA ESPAÑOL. She opened the front door, walked inside, and knew immediately that she had hit the jackpot.
Half a dozen black and Latino patients were spread out across chairs in the front room. One woman rocked a crying baby. Another man cradled his bandaged elbow in his hand. But that wasn’t the revelation. The revelation was that everyone behind the counter in the clinic—the two nurses, the clerk working the phone, and the doctor who poked his head in from the hallway—was speaking Russian.
Ten minutes later, walking toward the subway stop at Longwood Avenue, Celeste called Garrett one last time. “I know how they got her to do it.”
“Yeah?”
“She had a baby. They took it back to Russia. My guess is, held it ransom.”
“No shit.” There was a long silence. “I guess that would do
it.”
Celeste agreed, then got on the subway, and all the way back to Manhattan, then out to New Jersey on the PATH train, she felt the barest hint of inner satisfaction. There had been a puzzle, and she had solved it. Done and done.
She was back.
ROCK CREEK PARK, WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 19, 12:15 P.M.
Alexis watched as General Kline stepped out from a stand of trees at the edge of the park, a hundred yards from the lot off Military Road, and into the glare of the noon sun. The wash of sunlight allowed her to make out her boss’s face, and he was not happy. But then, neither was Alexis; she was tired, having just driven all the way from Newark to DC in four straight hours, and hungry and scared.
“Have you lost your mind?” Kline roared. “After everything we talked about?”
Over the phone, at six in the morning—after the Ascendant team had had their makeshift staff meeting—she’d hinted to Kline in the most oblique language possible as to whom she’d been with during the last few days, and what they’d been doing. Kline had clearly gotten the point. He told her where to meet him and hung up without another word. She’d driven the rest of the morning near tears. Now, in the park, standing face-to-face with him, Alexis felt even worse, like a wayward child who’d just disappointed her loving parent.
She told him, in a low, rapid whisper, about Markov, the passports, and his background, about how Garrett had predicted it, and what Garrett thought might be about to happen, but Kline cut her off before she could finish.
“This is not our fight. He is not a member of the program. Anyway, it doesn’t matter—he’s wanted on a murder charge. You cannot protect him from that.”
“He’s being set up for that exact reason. So that he won’t help track down Markov.”
“You are aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice.”
“Sir, it’s more complicated than that. I believe time is of the essence, and the FBI doesn’t understand that yet—”
Kline waved his hand in the air, as if swatting away her arguments. “You want my help? You want the DIA back in on this?”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to stop Markov without more sophisticated technology. We need real-time tracking, access to corporate networks. Things that you and I know DIA can get.”
“For a paranoid fantasy?”
Alexis had to take a moment after Kline said that. Bingo’s words, his description of Garrett talking to himself in the empty office, echoed in her head. She pushed on. “The man is a terrorist. He is set on taking down the American financial system.”
“And which man are we talking about? This Russian? Or Garrett Reilly?”
Down a trail, she heard a pair of joggers chatting to each other as they ran, but she couldn’t see them. She hoped they couldn’t see her as well.
“How do you know Reilly’s not playing you? Using you to achieve his own ends? It would certainly make sense, given that he paid someone to kill a federal banker.”
“I know you are angry with Reilly for what he did to Ascendant, but—”
“Do not psychoanalyze me, Truffant.”
“He’s been spot-on about everything having to do with Markov so far. I see no reason to stop believing him now.” That was a lie. She did see reasons to stop believing Garrett. But she would ignore those reasons for the time being.
Kline shook his head in a blur of motion. “No, no, and no. I don’t buy it. Not for a second. And anyway, it’s way past our authority now.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and held it out to Alexis. “Call the FBI. Tell them everything. Your involvement, Reilly’s whereabouts. The whole nine yards. If Reilly’s telling the truth, then the FBI will discover that and go after this Russian. If he’s lying, then at least you turned him in.”
Alexis took a long breath. “No,” she managed to say.
Kline’s face flashed disappointment. He gave a quick nod, as if he expected her response, then turned the phone around and started to dial. “Then you leave me no choice but to call them myself and report you all.”
“I’ll take you down with me,” Alexis said.
Kline froze. Alexis could feel her entire life rushing at her; everything she’d worked for, all the orders she’d followed, all the rules she’d upheld—she was about to explode it all. She could barely make her mouth function or her voice come out of her throat. She had lived within the guidelines of the military, or within a family that was deeply enmeshed in the military, for almost all of her twenty-eight years. The Truffants were American patriots and did what they were told, when they were told to do it. And now she was blackmailing her superior officer.
Alexis wanted to climb out of her skin. She wanted to run away as fast as she could, anything not to see the hurt and betrayal on her mentor’s face.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Kline managed to say.
Alexis simply nodded. She would. She would absolutely dare.
“You realize this ends our relationship. Everything we’ve ever done together.”
Again, she nodded. Yes, she realized; she knew only too well. She was fully in Garrett Reilly’s boat, and that boat would either float her to success or sink her into unfathomable failure and disgrace.
They stood in silence in the growing heat of the day, the birds singing, distant traffic echoing through the trees. Alexis waited for some sign from her boss, some inkling of emotion, or a clue as to what he would do or say.
Finally, Kline pocketed his phone. “So be it,” he said, and walked away.
LOWER MANHATTAN, JUNE 19, 1:58 P.M.
Sitting on the couch in Garrett Reilly’s apartment, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry tried to let the frustration and exhaustion of the case run off her shoulders. She tried to meditate, as her father had once taught her to do in her childhood home back in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but it didn’t help. Meditation, as far as she could tell, was a whole lot of Indian-themed bullshit.
So much of the story of Phillip Steinkamp’s murder was escaping her grasp, and the pressure to find his killer was skyrocketing. They were calling from the Hoover Building in DC every few hours, mostly executive assistant directors, but the last call had come from the deputy director himself, and it had not been fun. He had been terse, and expectant, and not particularly supportive of the job she was doing. Add in the constant media speculation and the energy drain of daily press conferences, and Chaudry was wiped out. Plus, she had barely slept.
Her brief attempt at transcendence ruined by the onrushing thoughts in her head, Chaudry picked herself up and took one more spin around Reilly’s apartment. She had gone through the place once, five days ago, when the FBI had first battered down his door, but at the time she had let the forensics team do most of the investigating. They had written up their findings in four different reports, and Chaudry had read them, every single word, but she still felt she was missing something. The place was telling her something about Reilly, but what?
Walking from room to room, the space was much as Chaudry remembered it: a Spartan bachelor pad with a few pieces of furniture, some nice suits, and stacks of books on statistics and finance. Beyond Reilly’s security obsession—the FBI techs had found six online cameras, two motion detectors, and bolt locks on every window—a couple of things stood out for her.
One was the inordinate number of prescription drugs secreted about the place. There were bottles in his bathroom cabinet, three by his bed, and half a dozen more in the kitchen. Reilly seemed to have pain issues, and if he wasn’t already an addict, he certainly was well on his way to becoming one. Some of the prescriptions were obviously black-market fakes, but others were legit. An agent at the field office had already started an investigation into which local doctors had so casually prescribed him meds.
Two, Reilly had money, but he didn’t seem interested in spending it. Agents had found multiple account statements in his desk, from brokerage houses all over the worl
d. Reilly was nearly a millionaire, and the guy was still three years shy of thirty. He had more money than Chaudry’s entire family, yet his apartment was sparsely furnished, and the furniture was a level below IKEA quality: a beater La-Z-Boy, a couch that looked as if it had been found on a street corner, and a TV that was five years old at a minimum. Only his computer technology seemed current, and even that was limited to a pair of sleek laptops, three LED monitors, and a laser printer. If he was proving himself by becoming rich, it wasn’t to the world at large—no conspicuous consumption was involved. Chaudry thought that perhaps he was proving himself . . . to himself. As if to say, I can do this. I really can. That was odd, but she also kind of liked it.
And finally, Reilly was a man obsessed, but he wasn’t obsessed with Phillip Steinkamp. Of his two laptops, the first was password protected and basically uncrackable. They’d sent it to DC, to the tech lab, but the hard drive had erased itself once they got close to decrypting it. But his second laptop, which he seemed to use exclusively for e-mail and was unprotected, was full of references to the many people who were stalking him on the Web. He had links to endless chat rooms and bulletin boards dedicated to discovering who made up the Ascendant team. Possible members were listed—brokers, mathematicians, programmers, and finance professors—and Reilly’s name was on a few of them. In one file he saved hate mail—easily five hundred pieces of it, most of them laced with death threats. None of them had been sent exclusively to him—they were group hate blasts—but they were alarming nonetheless.
Ascendant r Nazis. Find them, kill them. Slit their throats, read one. Die fuckheads die was another popular e-mail header. A handheld video, blurry and taken at night from Reilly’s living-room window, showed a group of young men standing on the street corner and pointing up at the camera, laughing and shouting obscenities. Chaudry couldn’t make out if the harassment was aimed at Reilly or was just drunken revelry, but either way, the cameras and the window locks suddenly made a lot of sense. No one seemed to have zeroed in on Reilly as a leader of Ascendant, but people were certainly getting close.