Brighton Beach: A Kurtz and Barent Mystery (Kurtz and Barent Mysteries Book 5)

by Robert I. Katz

  Juan Moreno raised his head from the list of figures sitting on his desk. He was pleased. Business was good. Their profits were increasing, the narcotics supplied to his organization by the Russians, and supplied by his organization in turn to Javier Garcia, were making them all rich. He smiled. Very rich.

  What was that? The smile vanished from his face. Juan Moreno did not like to be disturbed by extraneous sounds. The walls in this house were thick, almost soundproof, but the sounds of gunfire, sharp and immediate, from very close by, could not be concealed.

  He reached into a drawer, pulled out a gun and rose to his feet, but he was already too late. The office door opened and four men charged inside. Juan Moreno raised the gun but before he could take aim, a hail of bullets took him in the chest. The last words that he heard were, “Javier Garcia and Sergei Ostrovsky send their regards.”

  Iosif Kozlov was pleased with himself. Iosif Kozlov knew that intricate plans did not always go as planned. Rarely did, in fact, and this plan was more intricate than most. Iosif Kozlov had risen to the rank of Colonel in the GRU. He knew that the love of intricate plans could be a weakness. Take advantage of your opportunities. Keep your objectives always in mind. Move with all deliberate speed, before the enemy has time to respond, or even prepare to respond, and most of all, do not allow yourself to be distracted. Iosif Kozlof smiled. As Napoleon had once said, “If you start to take Vienna, then take Vienna.” This, of course, was some years before Napoleon attempted to take Moscow in the middle of the Russian Winter and suffered his worst defeat, losing over half a million of his men. Also, of course, the folly of one’s old age did not negate the wisdom of one’s youth.

  There was a lesson in there, somewhere.

  In October, 2002, a group of Chechen terrorists had taken a theater full of people hostage in Moscow. After three days of futile negotiation, the building had been filled with a gas composed primarily of carfentanil and then stormed by a Ministry of Internal Affairs SOBR Unit, accompanied by the Spetsnaz of the FSB. Medical personnel had been alerted and instructed to have narcotic antagonists available. The scope of the operation, however, had not been specified and the narcotic antagonists that had been brought to the scene proved to be entirely inadequate. The operation had been deemed a success, except that a quarter of the hostages, along with all of the terrorists had died. One of those hostages had been Iosif Kozlovs’s sister.

  Alexei Rugov had been second in command of the Spetsnaz Vega Group that had participated in the assault. It had been Alexei Rugov’s responsibility to organize the medical response.

  In Iosif Kozlov’s opinion, Alexei Rugov had failed in his principal and most important responsibility.

  And now, here they were, both leaders of their own organizations within the much larger organization of Russian oligarchs, spies and mobsters, whose tentacles stretched all the way around the world and into the Kremlin itself. Both of them living in the small Russian community known as Little Odessa, in Brighton Beach.

  Brighton Beach, in Iosif Kozlov’s opinion, was too small a place for both of them. Simply put, Iosif Kozlov had been planning his revenge on Alexei Rugov for a very long time. Alexei Rugov’s continued existence offended him.

  As for Sergei Ostrovsky, he had grown old and fat and sluggish. Sergei Ostrovsky was weak and easily duped. He could not be discounted, not exactly, but Sergei Ostrovsky could be removed from the board at almost any time. It had pleased Iosif Kozlov to use Ostrovsky as a distraction.

  Iosif Kozlov looked up. The two foot soldiers stood at attention in front of his desk. They had patiently waited while he pondered on his strategy. Truthfully, Iosif Kozlov was not displeased with these men. They had proven to be efficient and reliable, despite their youth and their youthful mistakes. Nothing like losing a finger or two to point out the error of one’s ways. “You wished to see me?” Iosif Kozlov said.

  One of them looked at the other, who nodded. “Yes,” the second man said.

  Then both men did something unexpected, something that Iosif Kozlov had not foreseen. Each of them pulled a pistol from their holsters and pointed the pistols at Iosif Kozlov. He gaped at them.

  The first man shook his head, a sad expression on his face. The second man sighed. “As you have said to us in the past, we must be dedicated, to ourselves and to our cause. We must be obedient to those who have been placed above us and we must be loyal to the organization of which we are a part. We must understand our environment and our world and the sacrifices that success requires. We must know of what we are capable, and we must know our limitations.” The second man’s lips quirked upward. “You underestimated the enemy and mis-judged your own position. Do you understand? You are not as valuable as you seem to think.”

  Both men smiled.

  Iosif Kozlov’s bullet riddled body was wrapped in a tarpaulin and carried down to the water, where it was transported onto a yacht. The yacht sailed to the Southeast for approximately twenty miles. The tarpaulin was wrapped tightly in steel chains and three fifty-pound weights were attached. The body was thrown overboard and quickly sank to the bottom of the sea.

  It was announced that Iosif Kozlov had chosen to retire and had returned to his home city of Vladivostok. The operations of the Kozlov Corporation, whatever those operations happened to be, continued unchanged under the direction of Iosif Kozlov’s second-in-command, Grigory Mazlov.

  Both Alexei Rugov and Sergei Ostrovsky knew enough to know that they would never know exactly what had happened to Iosif Kozlov. They were both thankful that it had not happened to themselves.

  A week later, Richard Kurtz called on Father Robert Kamenov. Father Bob smiled when he saw him. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said.

  “I brought you something,” Kurtz said.

  Father Bob’s eyebrows rose when he saw the label. “Pappy Van Winkle? Where did you get that?”

  “My father in law. He knows somebody.”

  Carefully, Father Bob took the bottle and eased out the cork. He took it over to the sideboard. “Join me?”

  “Certainly,” Kurtz said.

  Father Bob poured a generous three fingers into each glass, hesitated, then added one very small ice cube to each one. “Cheers,” he said.

  They both sipped. “So,” Father Bob said. “What brings you here?”

  Kurtz nodded and peered at the light through his Bourbon. It really was excellent stuff, though still not worth the money. He sighed. “Did you ever get the feeling that things were happening all around you? Quiet things, big things, but things that you yourself could never quite figure out?”

  Father Bob frowned. “Not exactly. No.”

  “I’ve been told that I have an active imagination,” Kurtz said.

  Father Bob looked at him. “And what is your active imagination imagining?”

  “Something you said to me, the last time that I was here.” Kurtz took another pensive sip of his Bourbon. “Something about a spider at the center of the web.”

  Father Bob blinked. “I don’t remember saying that.”

  Somehow, seeing the guarded expression on the other man’s face, Kurtz thought that he did. “We were talking about Alexei Rugov, Sergei Ostrovsky and Iosif Kozlov.” Kurtz grinned and gave a small, almost silent chuckle. “Who I understand is no longer with us. You still don’t remember?”

  “No,” Father Bob said. “No, I don’t.”

  “It made me wonder,” Kurtz said. “You told me that it’s difficult to say where the mobsters end and the government begins. The Soviet Union had a lot of spies. Everybody knows that, or at least assumes it. What happened to those spies, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? Did they lose all contact with the homeland? Were they left adrift? Their assumed lives suddenly the only life that they had left?” Kurtz paused.

  Father Bob sipped his drink. “Excellent Bourbon,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” Kurtz grinned. “So, where was I? Oh, yes. So, we have all of these Soviet spies who are now cut off from their home ag
encies, because those agencies and the nation of which they were a part have vanished. Except that they didn’t vanish, not really. They went dormant for a few years, and then Russia gathered the remnants together and re-constituted them. The KGB split into two branches, the Federal Security Service and the Foreign intelligence Service, the SVR. And what happened then?” Kurtz shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe the CIA does, but I certainly don’t. I wonder, though…the old records were presumably preserved. Somebody in the new agency must know who the spies were, and those spies have presumably been contacted and re-incorporated into the new organization.”

  “You use that word a lot, presumed,” Father Bob said.

  “Don’t I? Like I said, I have an active imagination.”

  Father Bob leaned forward. “If what you are imagining is true, then talking about it could be dangerous for you. These people, these spies whose existence you presume, they would without doubt be dangerous men.” Father Bob grinned. “And women as well. If they exist as you suppose, then they have kept their secrets for a very long time. I imagine that they would not wish those secrets to be exposed.”

  “No,” Kurtz said, “I imagine that they wouldn’t, but who are we kidding? If I can think of these things, then the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and God knows who else must also have thought of them a long time ago. I don’t think that there is anything I can possibly imagine that the more paranoid factions of the United States government have not thought of first.”

  Father Bob scratched his head. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “So…” Kurtz rose to his feet. “I have surgery in the morning. I’m not a cop and I’m certainly not a secret agent. I’m going to return to my normal, happy, hum-drum life, and hope that I never get involved with another murder.”

  “I think you are wise. A happy, peaceful life is something that all of us should wish for,” Father Bob said. “Thank you for the Bourbon.”

  After Kurtz left, Father Bob sipped his drink until it was finished, then he drew a long sigh and picked up a phone. The number that he called was one that he knew by heart.

  “Yes?” a voice said.

  “You were correct about Dr. Kurtz,” Father Bob said. “He is an intelligent and perceptive man.”

  “What does he know?”

  “He knows nothing, but he surmises much.”

  “And what do you recommend that we do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I am merely informing you. As Dr. Kurtz himself has said, the ravings of an overactive imagination do not present a threat.”

  Dimitri Petrovich chuckled. “I agree. Dr. Kurtz will live for another day. Who knows? Perhaps one day, he will prove useful.”

  The End

  Information About the Author

  I hope you enjoyed Brighton Beach, the fifth book in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, which includes Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson, Seizure and The Chairmen.

  I graduated from Columbia College with a degree in English before attending Northwestern University Medical School. I’ve had a long career as an academic physician, which has resulted in over forty scientific publications. I began writing fiction many years ago, and in addition to the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, I am also the author of six science fiction novels to date: Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, The Cannibal’s Feast and The Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind, which includes The Game Players of Meridien, The City of Ashes, The Empire of Dust, and The Empire of Ruin. The fifth book in The Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind, The Well of Time, is in progress.

  For more information, please visit my website, http://www.robertikatz.com or Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Robertikatzofficial/. For continuing updates regarding new releases, author appearances and general information about my books and stories, sign up for my newsletter/email list at http://www.robertikatz.com/join and you will also receive two free short stories. The first is a science fiction story, entitled “Adam,” about a scientist who uses a tailored retrovirus to implant the Fox P2 gene (sometimes called the language gene) into a cage full of rats and a mouse named Adam, and the unexpected consequences that result. The second is a prequel to the Kurtz and Barent mysteries, entitled “Something in the Blood,” featuring Richard Kurtz as a young surgical resident on an elective rotation in the Arkansas mountains, solving a medical mystery that spans two tragic generations.