Rasputin's Shadow

by Raymond Khoury

  It was no longer about destroying each other militarily. It was now all about making money and getting the upper hand economically. And if a terrorist attack or a war in another country helped to distract, weaken, and bankrupt us while messing us up as a society—all the better.

  We had a dead third secretary downstairs and a counselor here to assist us in the investigation.

  More old-school. But potentially nastier.

  I turned and took in the rest of the room. There was a sofa, well used and floral patterned, and a couple of plain armchairs on either side. There was a big old TV set facing them, and massive bookshelves all along one of the side walls. The shelves were crammed with books and held what looked like a pretty elaborate stereo system, with two beefy speakers sitting on opposite ends of the top shelves. There was the broken coffee table I noticed earlier. And there was the large window that gave onto the street. Its glass was mostly gone, and the timber frame was cracked and splintered.

  “So where are we with this?” I asked the three of them, pointing at the damage. “What do we know? This wasn’t Yakovlev’s place, right?”

  “No,” Giordano answered. He handed me another framed photo. It was of the same couple as the picture in the hallway, only this time they were on vacation somewhere sunny. “You’re looking at Leonid Sokolov and his wife, Daphne. They live here.”

  “So where are they?”

  “Well, they ain’t here, are they?” Adams pitched in.

  His tone wasn’t particularly friendly. Not that I cared. But I didn’t have much patience for juvenile sulking or for a jurisdictional pissing contest. I’d seen it played out in too many bad movies to ever want to suffer through it in real life.

  Giordano stepped back in. “Sokolov teaches science at Flushing High. He didn’t show up at work this morning.”

  “And his wife?”

  “She’s a nurse at Mount Sinai. She was on the night shift last night, came off work at seven.”

  “No sign of her, either?” Aparo asked.

  Giordano shook his head. “Nope. We had a look around the place. Toothbrushes in the bathroom, bed’s been slept in, reading glasses still on the night table. There’s a couple of empty suitcases tucked away in the hall closet where you’d expect them. The toaster’s got a couple of slices of bread in it. Doesn’t look like they’re on a trip.”

  I nodded and, avoiding the debris on the carpet, stepped over to the window. I looked down. The tent was directly below us. Then I looked across the street. It might have been helpful if there had been similar buildings across from where I was standing. Maybe someone there would have seen something. But there was only a single-story row of shops. Great open view for the Sokolovs and their neighbors. Not so great for us.

  “Anyone hear or see anything useful? Neighbors, people out on the street?”

  Zombanakis said, “We’ve got uniforms and detectives out canvassing, but nothing so far.”

  I turned to Larisa. “So why was Yakovlev here? What was he doing?”

  “I don’t know. I spoke to the first secretary for Maritime Affairs—his direct boss. As far as he knows, Yakovlev had no official business here.”

  “Did Yakovlev know the Sokolovs?”

  “Not that we know of,” she replied. “But we need to talk to people who knew him.”

  “Was he married?” Aparo asked. “Any next of kin we should be talking to?”

  “He was single,” she replied. “Any relatives he has are back in Russia.”

  “Girlfriend?” Aparo pressed on. “Boyfriend? Sponsor?”

  My partner, the king of tact. I shot him a small glare, to which he responded with his trademark, faux-surprised “What?” look.

  Larisa didn’t flinch. “None that he’s bragged about,” she told him flatly. “Look, this only happened a couple of hours ago, and as you can imagine, everyone at the consulate is pretty shaken up about it. We’ll get some answers soon enough. Believe me, we want to know what happened here as much as you do.”

  I nodded and glanced at the framed picture again. Leo and Daphne Sokolov. Sweet and harmless-looking older couple, the kind of folks we’d all like to have as neighbors. Only there was obviously more to them than that. That much was clear. But I doubted there was any point in pressing Larisa on it. If she knew anything more about them, she wasn’t about to share.

  Still, for the record, I asked, “What about the Sokolovs? Anything else we should know about them? Any kids?” I hadn’t seen any telltale pictures of kids and grandkids.

  “Doesn’t look like it, but we’re not sure,” Giordano said.

  I asked Larisa, “Are they on your radar for any reason?”

  “No. But then again, I wouldn’t expect them to be. As you well know, there are hundreds of thousands of Russians in this city. We have no reason to keep tabs on them any more than you do. They only come to us if there’s some kind of problem.”

  “Which the Sokolovs never had—until this morning.”

  She shrugged and nodded in agreement. “So it seems.”

  “Would anyone want to harm them?” I asked.

  She looked at me curiously. “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, could be there was a confrontation and one of the Sokolovs ended up pushing Yakovlev through the window. But Yakovlev seemed like someone who was in pretty good shape and I’m finding it hard to imagine Leo or Daphne Sokolov getting the upper hand on him physically like that.”

  “Unless Leo—or Daphne, for that matter—unless one of them had a black belt we don’t know about,” Aparo threw in helpfully.

  “Sure, there’s always that possibility,” I granted him without too much sarcasm in my tone.

  “Or they could have drugged him,” he added.

  “Your coroner will look into things like that, won’t he?” Larisa asked.

  “Yes, we’ll get a full tox report on the victim. But maybe the Sokolovs weren’t behind this. Maybe they were in some kind of trouble and they turned to Yakovlev for help. Maybe they were friends and he showed up here at the wrong time and interrupted something and got shoved out the window for it.” He turned to the detectives. “Either way, Yakovlev shows up here, there’s some kind of a fight, he ends up taking a dive out the window, and the Sokolovs are gone. The key is to find the Sokolovs. That sound about right to everyone?”

  “Hey, you guys are the pros,” Adams said sourly. “We’re just here to do the legwork.”

  I let it slide and asked, “You got a BOLO out on them?”

  It sounded weird to say it. Not the word. The idea. To have an all points bulletin out for a couple of sixtysomethings who seemed like your quintessentially harmless citizens felt odd. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like they might be in trouble. We needed to find them.

  Adams, meanwhile, had feigned a deeply concentrated look, like he was racking his brain about it, before his face lit up in a eureka moment. “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?” He turned to his partner and pointed in our direction. “Listen and learn, buddy. These feds, they’re just magic. Listen and learn.”

  He was obviously aching for me to give him an excuse to escalate things, and judging by the uncomfortable face his partner pulled, it wasn’t a first. But I didn’t feel like getting baited. Aparo was off to one side checking out the shelves and he turned too, but I shot him a look to make sure he kept his cool.

  “All right,” I said. “Until we find the Sokolovs, we’ve got a lot of questions that need answering. Let’s start at the beginning. How did Yakovlev get here? Did he drive, did he take a bus or the subway or a cab? Did anyone see him arrive? Was he alone?” I looked pointedly at the detectives. They stayed mum. “Was anyone else here already,” I pressed on, “and if so, how did they get in? Also, what happened to Yakovlev’s cell phone? You didn’t find one here, did you?”

  Adams shook his head.

  “’Cause there’s no sign of it downstairs,” I continued, “and he had to have one, right? And who else was
here? Clearly, someone was. Was it the Sokolovs? Someone else? Either way, how did they leave? Is there a back entrance to the building, a service entrance? Did anyone see them leave? Do they have any cars and if so, where are they?” I let the barrage of questions hang there for a moment. “So there’s a whole bunch of legwork that needs to be done here.” I then added, eyeing Adams as I said it, “And you can either lose the attitude and make yourself a couple of friends at Federal Plaza, which could come in handy someday, or you can stop wasting our time and get your ass out of here and let us do our job. Your call. But make your play, here and now.”

  Giordano glanced at Adams and said, “We’re cool here. And we’re glad to help. As long as you keep us informed on what you find. It’s gotta be a two-way street.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And we’d like to share the collar,” he added.

  “Not a problem. Though if we end up following this thing halfway across the planet, it might not work out that way.”

  Aparo chuckled. “These things do have a habit of turning out that way with him,” he said, referring to me.

  I glanced at Adams. Giordano gave him a look.

  He frowned, then nodded grudgingly. “Sure. Whatever.”

  Aparo cut the tension by remarking, “Hey, was this open like that when you came in here?”

  We all turned to see what he was talking about.

  He was pointing at the stereo. I stepped over for a closer look.

  The stereo was a stack of black, clunky, old-style components—amp, tuner, cassette player, and CD player. The cassette player had two decks in it, but it was the CD player that had caught Aparo’s eye. It was one of those five-CD changers that stored the discs not in a stack, but on a tray the size of a twelve-inch vinyl album that slid out when you hit the Eject button, allowing you to place the five CDs in their respective slots around its rotating platter. The tray was in its out position. I took a closer look. It had four CDs still in it. The slot farthest out—the one that would start playing if you hit the Play button and it had a CD in it—was empty.

  Which was curious, sure. But whether it actually meant something was doubtful.

  Aparo was studying the names on the CDs with a smirk on his face. “Whoa. Get a load of the opera and classical stuff they’ve got in here. And given the size of those speakers . . . the neighbors must love them.”

  We all looked at him blankly.

  He shrank back. “I’m just saying.”

  “What about the media?” Giordano asked. “They’re waiting for something from us.”

  I thought about it for a moment, then handed Giordano the framed photo. “Let’s put it out. Say we need to talk to the Sokolovs, it was their apartment, but they weren’t here when the tragedy happened. Choose your words and your tone carefully and make sure you don’t paint them as suspects, that needs to be clear. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will call in.”

  Giordano nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I took in the room again.

  A Russian diplomat had been pushed out a window after some kind of fight, and an older couple was missing.

  Not exactly worthy of raising the threat alert level to orange. Or even beige, for that matter.

  I had to admit I wasn’t too excited about dealing with it. It was, well, a murder investigation, and as such, it was probably better left to the local homicide detectives, at least to start with. Even a jackass like Adams could probably put it to bed effectively. The only reason Aparo and I were there was because of the kind of passport the dead guy carried. And we had bigger fish to fry—not to mention the spook I was hunting. Still, there was no ducking the assignment. Besides, somewhere at the back of my skull, an irrepressible little voice was telling me that the Sokolovs needed our help. And after all these years, I knew better than to ignore that nag.

  We needed to find them. And fast.

  5

  Dare County, North Carolina

  The call came in as Gordon Roos was on his way back from his late-morning walk on the beach. He loved it out in the Outer Banks. The constant breeze coming in off the ocean, the salty taste in the air that did wonders for his sinuses, the Zen-like openness of the landscape—it was far more enjoyable than the confines of the Falls Church, Virginia, penthouse he used to live in before his retirement from the Company. A bit removed from the action, perhaps, but still close enough for him to be able to jump in when something juicy came up.

  Something like this.

  He checked the caller ID on his 1024-bit RSA key-encrypted cell phone, even though he knew who it was before he looked at it. Hardly anyone had that number, for besides being a retired agent of the CIA, Gordon Roos wasn’t a social animal, not by any stretch. A couple of tried and tested high-class escorts were more than enough to liven up his nights when he needed company. Which was not unusual at all for someone who’d spent most of his life running dangerous undercover assignments for his country. Not that he minded. Gordon Roos had never had much patience for small talk and cocktail parties, something his wife eventually decided she couldn’t live without.

  He took the call in his customary fashion, without uttering a word.

  His caller knew the drill.

  “Our Russian friends just heard from two goons babysitting Sokolov’s wife,” the man said. “One of them was waiting for their guy outside the apartment and saw him take the dive. He drove off in a panic and they called it in.”

  Roos kept walking at the same leisurely pace. “Where are they now?”

  “They’re babysitting her at some dive. A motel in Queens, near JFK. Russian-owned. The guys at the embassy are waiting to hear back from Moscow on how to handle it now that Sokolov’s in the wind.” He paused, then added, “Maybe it’s time we move in and take her off their hands. It would give us leverage over Sokolov.”

  Roos processed the suggestion in all of four seconds. “No. Let’s keep her there and let it play out. Sokolov seems to have some of that old pluck left in him. If she’s there, there’s a good chance it’ll draw him in. Even if he doesn’t find his way to the motel, she’s the bait that’ll flush him out. Better we don’t rock the boat and spook him. We just need to be ready to swoop in when he shows up.”

  “All right. I’ll put a team on it.”

  “Off the books, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Keep me apprised. Day or night.”

  “You got it, buddy.”

  Roos hung up.

  As he walked on toward his house, which appeared behind a wind-swept sandbank up ahead, his mind drifted back many years, to when it had all begun. To the initial, unexpected approach from the Russian. The excitement at the prospect. The meticulous planning. The green light. The adrenaline of putting the lift in motion.

  The thrill of meeting the Russian for the first time.

  Then came the little prick’s stab in the back.

  The damn Russian. He’d been a major snag in Roos’s stellar rise at the Agency. More than a snag. He’d almost derailed his career altogether. But Roos had overcome the defeat and the humiliation. He’d cleaned things up, he’d redeemed himself by shepherding other tough projects to success—and here they were again, more than thirty years later, playing the game again.

  He smiled inwardly at the prospect of what the days ahead would bring. Maybe it would all finally come good, after all those years. He had far more options now that he was out on his own. “Independent contractor.” It was the wave of the future, and a future with much greater promise than he’d ever counted on had suddenly dropped into his lap.

  Sokolov could be a mighty prize indeed. The kind of prize that could bankroll a much more satisfying level of retirement. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let that prize get away from him a second time.

  6

  London, England

  At about the same time, four thousand miles east of there, another man received a similar call informing him of similar developments, only this call o
riginated a couple of thousand miles farther east from his own location.

  From Moscow.

  From the Center, to be exact.

  The Center being a sprawling, cross-shaped concrete structure nestled in the middle of a large forest just southwest of the city.

  The Center was also the headquarters of the SVR, the successor of the KGB’s notorious First Chief Directorate. Officially tasked with foreign intelligence gathering and counterintelligence. Unofficially tasked with anything else that was deemed necessary to safeguard the Motherland’s interests.

  Anything.

  And when a particularly tricky anything came up, the odds were it would be assigned to someone from its highly secretive Zaslon unit—the word meant “the shield,” and not in its badge sense—an elite team drawn from the Spetsnaz special forces, whose members excelled in their physical and military prowess as well as their talents at deception.

  And when the Zaslon unit was handed a particularly sensitive task, the odds were it would be assigned to Valentin Budanov.

  Not many people knew that. For the simple reason that not many people knew Budanov even existed. They didn’t need to. Budanov worked alone. He worked in the shadows, only emerging when he needed a critical piece of information or some operational support from someone—usually a senior embassy staffer or a fellow SVR agent—who would have been ordered to provide him with anything he required. And when he did emerge, it was, of course, never as Budanov. Like other SVR agents, he traveled under a number of false identities. He also spoke many languages flawlessly—seven at last count—and could easily disguise himself so he would pass unnoticed. And on the rare occasions when he did break his deep cover, it was never as Budanov or as whatever ID he was using at the time.