Rasputin's Shadow

by Raymond Khoury

  He looked bummed, and proceeded to shuffle papers aimlessly across his desk.

  “One more question,” I said.

  He raised a stiff hand. “The woman?”

  I smiled again.

  He glanced down at his now-open palm, pointedly.

  I pulled out another hundred and gave it to him.

  “Long black hair. Spectacular body. You can’t miss her.”

  I nodded. “Appreciate it.”

  I was heading back to my chair when a noticeably attractive woman with long dark hair, a short dress, and four-inch pumps came in and went straight for the elevators.

  To the untrained eye she could have been a high-class escort, but everything was a bit too perfect and considered. This was a woman who genuinely cared about the impression she gave, rather than giving an impression because she was paid to.

  I already knew she wasn’t Kirby’s wife, since some of the pictures Kurt had taken off Facebook and sent me had Mrs. Kirby in them. To be doubly sure, I pulled them up on my phone. It wasn’t her. Then something clicked in the periphery of my memory, and I scrolled through the other shots. Our mystery woman was in one of them, standing next to Kirby’s wife, the two of them all hair and heels with big smiles all around. They were friends.

  I called Kurt.

  56

  It didn’t take Kurt long to call me back. He sounded out of breath.

  “You’re going to fucking freak, dude.”

  “Go on.”

  He said, “She’s his sister-in-law. Inès Alcalde. His wife is Sofia Kirby, née Alcalde. Inès is three years younger, single, a Realtor with a very healthy business. No kids; I don’t think she can have any. It’s like a movie of the week, dude. I hate those.”

  “You hacked her medical records?”

  “Nope. Facebook again. Seriously, Zuckerberg’s gonna put us all out of business.”

  This was good. Really good. “All right, thanks. I’ll take it from here. Consider your free pass well and truly earned. Just don’t use it anytime soon.”

  “Sayonara.”

  I now felt armed with more than enough to bring Kirby around to my way of thinking. But that didn’t mean that he’d agree to my terms.

  I took the elevator up to the fourth floor, found 414, and knocked on the door.

  It took a few seconds to get a muffled “Yes?” from Kirby, who was standing by the still-closed door.

  “Mr. Kirby? Hotel security, sir.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then he cracked the door open. He was in a dressing gown.

  “What is it?” He was seriously annoyed.

  I decided the direct approach was best. “Do you think your wife would have a problem with the fact that you’re screwing her sister?”

  His face exsanguinated faster than in any vampire movie I’d seen.

  I nodded comfortingly. “It’s okay, Stan. It’s going to be fine. She doesn’t need to know. But I’m gonna need a few minutes of your time. So why don’t you throw some clothes on, tell Inès you won’t be long, and come down to the bar with me. Given your line of work, I’m sure she’ll understand. Hell, play it right and she might even get a kick out of it.” I added a conspiratorial wink for good measure.

  Kirby was having difficulty processing what I was telling him. In fact, for someone who had been caught committing a catastrophic error, it was apt that his brain appeared to be shutting down altogether.

  I moved closer to him. Lowered my voice. “Take a breath, Stan. I’m giving you a way out, and it doesn’t involve money or pain or betraying your country. You can even keep seeing the lovely Inès if you want to, though I’m not sure I can heartily recommend it.”

  It took a while for this to sink in, but when it had, he seemed to regain control.

  “Give me a second,” he said.

  ***

  WE TOOK A BOOTH in the even-darker bar.

  I ordered a Coke. Kirby asked for a double whiskey, which I thought was entirely justified.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, nervously spinning his iPhone around on the table.

  “Not really relevant right now. You just need to focus on keeping me happy and this will all blow over real quick.”

  The drinks arrived. He let go of his phone and knocked back both shots within a second of his glass hitting the table. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to find someone for me.”

  “Find someone?” He studied me, then asked, “What are you, a fed?”

  I ignored his question. “Again, not relevant. I just need to put a real name to an alias. A Company one.”

  He got my drift immediately, and his eyes went wide. “This is someone at the Company?”

  “Yes.” I looked straight at him.

  “I thought you said this wouldn’t involve anything like that?”

  “It doesn’t. This is personal. And if you do it carefully enough, no one needs to know it ever happened.”

  “This is fucking blackmail. I could report you and have your ass thrown in jail.”

  I felt a lurching in my gut at the word, like I’d just hit the lowest point on a roller coaster less than a second after being at the highest. But I couldn’t pull out now. “Sure. Go ahead. Tell them everything. But you go down that road and you’re quickly gonna find yourself in one hell of a custody battle and looking down the barrel at ten years of crippling alimony while trying to find women in singles’ bars who won’t mind going back to your dump of a one-bedroom apartment without the promise of chocolates or flowers ’cause you’re still paying for your son’s braces and your daughter’s riding lessons and you can’t even afford a new shirt, let alone gifts for your lover. How does that sound to you?”

  I waited for all that to sink in. It didn’t take long.

  “You’re an asshole,” he muttered.

  “Extreme measures, pal. Not by choice. But don’t doubt my commitment for a second.”

  He glared at me, trying to find some measure of hope in my expression. I stared back like a sphinx. Then after a painful few seconds, he broke.

  “So who is it?”

  This was the point of no return. Once Kirby had the name, the risk that he would go back to Langley and flag it became very real, with unknowable consequences for me and my family. But I couldn’t let go of it. Not when I might be one small step from dragging Corrigan out of the shadows and into the light of day.

  “Corrigan. Reed Corrigan. It’s a cover. That’s all I can tell you about him. There are other things, but knowing them may prejudice you, so all you get is the name.”

  He studied me for a beat, then asked, “What did he do?”

  “When I said it’s personal, I meant it. But one thing I can tell you. He’s a piece of shit. Makes you look like a saint. Keeping the bastard’s real identity a secret is not worth you losing everything you’ve spent twenty years building, and you should be able to get me what I need without anyone finding out. And that would be the end of it. You have my word. Get me the name—his real name—and you’ll never hear from me again.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then all bets are off. So your best course of action is to find a way because I really want to find him. And the sooner you do it, the sooner I’m out of your life.”

  “When do you need it by?”

  “It can wait till morning.”

  Kirby grimaced painfully, then he shook his head and nodded.

  “Is that one ‘r’ or two?”

  ***

  KOSCHEY INTERRUPTED SOKOLOV’S WORK again, secured him in the small office, and stepped away to make another call.

  The Lebanese car dealer answered after the first ring.

  “Have your people made a decision?” he asked in Arabic.

  The man said, “They’re interested, but they’re nervous. They fear the potential retributions.”

  Typical, Koschey thought in silence. All bluster, no guts. Still, he knew they were close to biting. He just needed to press some more
and be more convincing.

  “Tell them the retributions are coming at them anyway, whether they do anything or not,” Koschey told him. “You know the Americans and the Israelis are gunning for them as well as I do. It’s only a matter of time. They’re not going to let them keep their reactors and their centrifuges. They’re never going to let them into their exclusive club. But if we do this,” Koschey said, using the “we” to include himself in the circle of interested plotters, “we’d be hitting them first. And we’ll have something to threaten them with that’ll make them think twice about retaliating. Attacking them like this is the best defense. And after Stuxnet and Flame,” he continued, referring to the sophisticated U.S./Israeli cyberattacks that had been wreaking havoc on Iran’s computer networks and crippling its uranium-enrichment programs, “the irony of our method won’t be lost on them. Even if they won’t be able to prove it.”

  “Since when has that stopped them from doing anything?” the man grumbled.

  “We have a small window in which to do this. I’ll need an answer by morning.”

  “I’ll let them know,” the man said. “I’ll have an answer for you by then.”

  Koschey ended the call and stared at his phone in silence. He knew they’d find his offer hard to resist. He was giving them a chance to strike at the Great Satan in a way they would have never imagined possible. And even that wasn’t the whole truth.

  Koschey hadn’t told them who his real target was. They would have never agreed to that. They would have been too scared. But if they did accept his proposal, as he expected, his conversations with them would be enough to frame them for what he really had in mind, and they were hardly in a position to plead their innocence while acknowledging that they’d agreed to bankroll a different terrorist strike on U.S. soil.

  Everything was in place. Koschey’s central concern was now time. He needed to do it quickly. Pressure would be mounting and the noose around him would be tightening with every hour now that the Americans realized what he had. Which would make his disappearing act all the more difficult the longer he waited.

  He nodded to himself, then turned to retrieve Sokolov and finish what they’d started.

  The second hundred million dollars, a new face, and a new beginning were only hours away.

  57

  Miraculously, Thursday night had come and gone without us having to call in another convoy of coroners’ wagons.

  I’d made it back from DC on time and spoken to Aparo on my way home. He’d confirmed that nothing noteworthy had happened while I was out of town. He pressed me on how my trip had been and when I was going to let him in on “Whatever the hell it is you’re getting yourself into,” as he put it. I’d said we’d talk about it in the morning and driven home to Mamaroneck, where I managed to grab some quality time with Tess before she glided into sleep and I mulled over whatever the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  Then Alex had woken up, just before five a.m., with another nightmare. What frustrated me to no end was that I couldn’t go to him then and comfort him. I was worried it might only make things worse, given what they’d seeded about me in his head. Tess had spent the rest of the night—both hours of it—in bed with him. She was great at calming him down. I was truly lucky to have her in my life.

  It was seven thirty and all four of us were in the kitchen, wolfing down pancakes—with slightly more elegance than Kurt had that day at IHOP, I hoped—along with a small mountain of raspberries and blueberries. I glanced at Alex and smiled, and he smiled back like everything was perfect in the world.

  And right there, for that brief moment, it was.

  A little over an hour later, I was back at Federal Plaza, and the ants in my pants were on tenterhooks, both from the frustration I was feeling regarding our lack of progress on tracking down Koschey and from wondering when I was going to hear from my favorite libertine.

  As far as Koschey was concerned, we were at a standstill. Apart from hoping the APB on the van paid off, the only thing we could do was keep monitoring for any relevant chatter or hope for an NSA intercept that could clue us into his current movements. Homeland Security had a major lock on airports, ports, and border crossings, based on the assumption that Koschey had to be getting ready to get out of Dodge, with Sokolov and the van in tow. If not the whole van, then at least whatever it was Sokolov had put in it. But we live in a big country, and it’s not that difficult to smuggle something or someone out of here if you really put your mind to it.

  By ten, I needed some air and some decent coffee and Aparo needed to hear what I was up to, so we stepped out of the building, did a pit stop at my favorite food cart, and took a bench across the street by the African Burial Ground monument.

  Aparo didn’t take it too well.

  “Jesus, Sean,” he said when his blood pressure finally settled enough to allow him to speak coherently. “You could go to jail for this.”

  I shrugged. “I know. But what the hell. If it all gets that messy, maybe that’s how I’ll finally get to the truth.”

  “You know that’s a pipe dream as much as I do. They can clam up and claim national security and lock your ass up faster than you can say patriot.”

  “You have a better idea for how I can find him?”

  Aparo frowned at me, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Let’s hope this Kirby really wants to hang on to his wife. ’Cause from where I’m standing, it’s not something I would gamble on.”

  I was thinking about what he said when an unfamiliar ringtone warbled in my immediate vicinity. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was coming from the prepaid phone I’d bought before flying down to DC, the one I’d purchased specifically so I could give Kirby an untraceable phone.

  You work in law enforcement long enough, you learn a few tricks from the criminals you spend your life chasing. Basic, in this case, but handy given my current predicament.

  “It’s him,” I told Aparo as I flipped open the flimsy plastic clamshell phone. At least, I hoped it was him and not some CIA security officer calling to get a lock on who and where I was before the troops swooped in.

  “You know what you’ve asked for isn’t exactly easy to access,” he said. His tone was hushed and clearly irritated, which was hardly surprising.

  “If it were, I wouldn’t have needed you, would I? Do you have the name?”

  “Reed Corrigan is mentioned in three case files,” he said. “All three were flagged, but I managed to pull them without tripping anything. Two of them are dormant and one’s active.”

  I was crushing the phone with my grip. “His name, Kirby. What’s his name?”

  “I can’t access it. These files are redacted. I can’t get to the clean ones without authorization, which means I’d have to tell them why I want them. And anyway, his name wouldn’t be in them. They would only ever mention his code name.”

  A charge of fury went right through me. “That wasn’t our deal,” I hissed.

  “Hey, nothing was ‘our’ deal,” Kirby shot back. “It was all your deal. It wasn’t open to negotiation, remember? Anyway, this is the best I can do. At my clearance level, anyway. If I get promoted tomorrow, maybe you’d be in with a chance. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  I tried to push back the searing sense of frustration that was engulfing me. “Send me the files.”

  “I can’t,” Kirby said. “I can’t take them out of here and I can’t leave that kind of electronic trail. The e-mail would get blocked before it even left our servers.”

  “Put them on a USB stick then,” I suggested gruffly.

  “Same thing,” he countered. “Any copying is immediately logged by the system. What do you think this is, Dunder Mifflin?”

  I was burning up inside. All that effort and risk, for nothing. I don’t know why, but I really wanted the damn files. Even though Kirby had already said they wouldn’t give me Corrigan’s real name.

  “The files. Are they paper, or on your screen?”

  “S
creen. Any old paperwork’s been scanned in.”

  “You have your phone with you, right? Use it. Take pictures of your screen. Message them to me.”

  “They’re big files.”

  “I don’t need all the cross references,” I told him. “Just the main body of each report.”

  I heard him let out a long exhale. “Then we’re done, right?”

  My turn to exhale. “Yeah. We’re done. But I need those screen grabs now.”

  “Fine,” he said grudgingly. “And by the way, you’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  I killed the call without replying.

  ***

  I CAN’T STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER, Shin thought.

  He’d been there for more than twenty-four hours. Sticking to the immediate vicinity of the bench, watching life wind down and start off again. Living off any scraps he could find in the park’s garbage cans.

  A fucking PhD, he lamented. What a joke.

  By this point he was dizzy, tired, and weary. His mind was starting to play tricks on him. One minute, he was imagining men in suits and dark glasses hustling his Nikki from their apartment and doing horrible things to her. The next he pictured her sipping Champagne and laughing it up in a luxurious hot tub with a rich, handsome dude in there with her.

  He had to put an end to this nightmare. There was no point in living if it meant living like this.

  He decided he’d make the call. An anonymous phone call. Tip the cops off to the Russian bastard’s location. Who knows. If they got him, maybe it would all go away. Maybe he’d have nothing left to worry about.

  He’d do it for himself. For Nikki. And for Jonny and Ae-Cha.

  He pushed himself to his feet and shuffled off to find a phone booth.

  ***

  KOSCHEY WAS BY THE door of the warehouse, watching life resume across the industrial park. Today would be a big day. A long one. A challenging one.

  He was ready for it. He’d spent most of the night planning the hit. He’d checked the schedule, laid out his timetable, and used the extensive resources available online to research the venue and everything around it. It would be tight, especially on such short notice, but it was doable. And the opportunity was too great to pass up. Besides, he was used to operating under pressure, and quick decisions and swift planning made leaks and last-minute-changes less likely.