by Rick Acker
She realized that there were a lot of things she had never noticed about Sergei. He had a reputation as a good agent, and she knew from personal experience that he was a good shot—but beyond that, she had known very little about him until the last few days. He was just a Russian guy who did bank work and whom she sometimes saw around the office. It occurred to her that the scholarly, clean-cut look was probably an asset in the field. Suspects and witnesses would make useful unconscious assumptions about him.
Just like I made assumptions about him. She never would have guessed he would be so much fun to spend time with or that he would drive a sports car and have a tattoo.
She glanced at the clock on her computer screen. It was six thirty. She bit her lip and put the picture down. Then she closed the file, put it back in her cabinet, and did her best to focus on the witness preparation she needed to do.
The silent darkness was like a drug. It blurred the line between consciousness and unconsciousness and confused Sergei’s sense of time. He could not tell if he had been alone in that room for a few hours or a few days.
After his tormentor vanished, Sergei had apparently been forgotten. He had seen and heard nothing since then. It was so quiet that he guessed he was either underground or in a soundproof room. The complete absence of any light reinforced that guess—even after enough time had passed for his eyes to adjust, he still saw nothing. Not even the faint glow of a covered window or a sliver of light from underneath a closed door.
The deprivation of two of his senses enhanced the others. He was acutely aware of the itching pain from the electrical burns on his back, arms, and legs. The growing sour dryness in his mouth and throat spawned dreams of cool water in his troubled half-sleep.
A sudden noise startled him fully awake as a door opened somewhere behind him. Light poured into the room and blinded him. He heard footsteps walking toward him. A hand grabbed his chin and jerked his head up and sideways, sending waves of sharp pain through his body as his burns rubbed against the chair. “Open your eyes, dog!” a voice ordered in heavily accented Russian. “See your death.”
Sergei opened his eyes in a painful squint and saw the muzzle of a pistol a few inches from his face. It was held by a short, wide man with a thick black beard and burning eyes. Sergei tried to struggle, but he was still firmly tied to the chair and was badly weakened by his ordeal. The man jammed the gun against Sergei’s forehead. “Now you will die like the filthy beast you are.” Sergei watched helplessly as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger. The trigger slowly moved back. There was a loud metallic snap as the gun’s hammer came down on an empty firing chamber.
Sergei winced involuntarily at the sound, and the man laughed. “You think we will give a clean bullet to a disobedient Russian animal?” He spat in Sergei’s face. “We save you for the battery acid.” He laughed again and hit Sergei in the side of the head with the gun barrel, sending the Russian tumbling back into darkness.
Tony Simeon watched Ben’s retreating back and smiled. A good kid, he decided, and he’s got the makings of a good lawyer. Corbin had shown a strong courtroom presence and had generally known the right questions to ask. He was a little slow on the uptake at times, but he would get better with age. Most important, he had good instincts. He’d do well.
Tony remembered himself at that age. He’d had good instincts too. He also had the ruthless drive of a barracuda and an uncanny knack for winning. After one brilliant and improbable victory, the judge had invited him back to his chambers. Judge Jenkins had been nearly eighty at the time, a relic of a slower and more genteel era of legal practice. He’d puffed on a gnarled old pipe and poured himself a glass of brandy as Tony waited.
“Mr. Simeon,” the old jurist had said at last, “you have remarkable gifts in the courtroom.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“The question is, what do you want to do with them?”
“Win.”
The judge had puffed in silence for a time, wreathed in smoke. “And when you’re my age and you look back on your life, is that what you want to see—a neat stack of courtroom victories? Is that all you want to see?”
For many years, that had been all Tony really wanted to see—and he had seen it. Win followed win for decades. His reputation and bank account had both grown to impressive proportions. Opposing counsel learned the wisdom of settling early when their opponents retained him. One side or the other called him in virtually every big case filed in Chicago, and his firm paid him essentially whatever he asked for.
Winning had its costs, of course. The time and energy devoured by his cases hadn’t left enough of either to make a marriage work, something that had taken two divorces for him to learn. Winning also made close friendships difficult: anyone who knew him well enough to be a true friend also knew that he would sacrifice that friendship if it would give him an advantage—and in the upper echelons of Chicago’s legal community, that was bound to happen eventually.
Not all of his clients had been particularly savory, so early in his career he’d made it a rule to never ask questions that might have awkward answers. About fifteen years ago, he had amended this rule to add, “unless the awkward answers implicate Tony Simeon.”
Ironically, that change had been caused by Tony’s hobby, not his law practice. His one passion outside of the law was art, especially the art of ancient Greece. As his wealth grew, he had begun to collect sculpture and painted vases from the Classical Period. The ancient art market was a shadowy place, abounding in forgeries and treasures from unauthorized digs. It was also subject to a growing body of intricate, conflicting, and generally ignored regulations as the countries that were the source of most antiquities tried to clamp down on what they viewed as black-market trading in these items.
Tony had always had his purchases checked to make sure they were genuine and not subject to an outstanding warrant, but otherwise he’d done little to ensure that every form had been filled out and every permit granted in their countries of origin. That was the dealer’s problem, not his.
Then one day he’d opened the Chicago Tribune to discover that Allan Robbins, a respected partner from another law firm, was under investigation for allegedly violating the antiquities laws of Turkey. According to the newspaper, he had attempted to donate several Roman marble busts to the Field Museum, which had determined they had come from an illegal dig near the ancient city of Ephesus and had been smuggled out of the country.
As days passed, the scandal worsened. Robbins at first denied that the sculptures had come from looters. Then he claimed ignorance of their origins. Finally, he offered to return them to Turkey. The Customs Service, however, decided to make an example of Robbins and prosecuted him. He reached a plea bargain that kept him out of jail, but he lost his law license and was forced into an early and ignominious retirement.
The day after the lawyer’s fate became public, Tony received a call from Dmitry Kolesnikov, an importer from whom Tony had purchased an exquisite statuette of the Titan Prometheus found near the ruins of a Greek temple on the Black Sea. Dmitry had occasionally asked Tony to represent him and his company, the Brothers, but Tony had always demurred. The Brothers were a little too questionable even for Tony. Moreover, they were small fry from his perspective and simply did not have cases big enough to interest him. “I read about that lawyer, Allan Robbins,” Dmitry had said. “It was terrible how they destroyed him, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Tony replied warily. “I feel very sorry for him.”
“As do I,” replied Dmitry. “I am calling because I would hate to see something like that happen to you.”
“Is there a problem with the item you sold me?”
“Unfortunately, the gentleman from whom we purchased it did not have official permission for his excavation. We could try to get permission now, but the Ukrainians are not likely to grant it. They would probably prosecute us.”
; “So take back the sculpture and return my money.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. It would be illegal for me to receive undocumented antiquities, but I’m sure none of this will be a problem if we work together.”
Tony had suspected something like this was coming. “What did you have in mind?”
What Dmitry had in mind was that Tony would take care of all of the Brothers’ legal needs and they would never breathe a word about his statuette. Over the years, he’d helped them with a variety of small matters, from setting up an LLC to reviewing draft contracts to litigating a tax case against the IRS regarding several unexplained wire transfers.
So when the Brothers had asked him to defend a low-level drug dealer in a tiny breach-of-contract case, he’d done so without raising an eyebrow. And when they’d asked him to help them ensure the enforceability of a lucrative agreement with a shadowy group of Chechens for the resale of the contents of a safe-deposit box, he’d had a pretty good idea why they had hired him to defend Nikolai Zinoviev. But he’d made no effort to find out what was inside the box. The less he knew about what these clients did, the better.
When Ben won a big victory, he often celebrated at Alinea, one of Chicago’s premier restaurants. If he was lucky, there would be a late cancellation and he could get a table on the same day. Tonight he was lucky.
Alinea was housed in an elegant brick building on the North Side. It offered a single “menu,” which was really a complete multicourse meal chosen by the chef. Ben, Noelle, and the Ivanovskys enjoyed an excellent meal and an hour or more of conversation over coffee. They were all in high spirits as they paid the bill and put on their coats. It was drizzling lightly, so Ben and Dr. Ivanovsky went to get their cars, leaving the women in the lobby. As they walked, Ben brought up his conversation with Anthony Simeon at the Metropolitan Club.
“The bottom line is that we need to talk to the police and the FBI,” he said as he finished. “He basically warned me that his clients might try to kill you.”
“No!” Dr. Ivanovsky insisted. “We have decided before. No police.”
Ben had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with that decision. “Yes, but let’s look at the facts here. Each time you get close to winning this case, somebody dies or disappears. Now it looks like you might be close to winning again. Who’s left? Simeon and I have already done all the damage we can. Judge Harris almost certainly signed the order before he left for the day. There’s only one person left whose death can change things: you.”
“I do not worry,” the scientist replied with a dismissive wave.
“Look, you trusted my judgment during this trial, right?”
Dr. Ivanovsky nodded. “Yes.”
“And it paid off, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then trust me one more time. As your lawyer, I strongly advise you to contact the authorities.”
“No.”
They had reached the crossroads that Ben had feared and expected. He chose his words carefully. “I cannot allow you to use my services to commit a crime. You know that. It would be a crime for you to obtain possession of biological weapons or instructions on how to produce them. If you are not willing to contact the proper authorities, I am afraid I will have to.”
Dr. Ivanovsky stared at Ben. His face grew red and the stringy muscles on his neck stood out as he clenched his jaws in shock and fury. Ben braced himself for an outraged tirade, but none came. His client slowly calmed himself and took a deep breath. “You always say nothing is for sure in courts,” he said evenly, though banked fires of anger burned behind his eyes. “Okay, so we wait until it is for sure that we win. We will talk tomorrow after we see what the judge has decided. I make no promise, but maybe we call the FBI then.”
Ben relaxed and smiled. “Good. Why don’t you come to my office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We can talk about the order and decide what to do.”
“Can I come at ten? There is a thing I must do first.”
“Ten is fine. I’ll see you then.”
All in all, Tony Simeon was satisfied with his life. He enjoyed his work and he was very good at it. He had few friends but many acquaintances. He was never alone unless he wanted to be. The years had rolled by in a comfortable, almost-unnoticed rhythm for nearly four decades.
But that rhythm had stopped suddenly, six weeks ago, in a confusion of squealing tires, a shout, and the awful sound of metal on flesh, a sound that would echo in his mind forever.
He had been walking down Washington Street with one of his partners, Dan Wood, on their way to a hearing. They were deep in conversation, clutching overlapping umbrellas to ward off a bitingly cold October drizzle. Tony slipped on a patch of invisible ice on the sidewalk and fell. Dan stopped and leaned over to help him just as a taxi rounded the corner of LaSalle and Washington going too fast. Its tires lost traction on the slick road and it careened toward them. Tony could see it from where he lay, but it was approaching Dan from behind. Tony shouted and scrambled to the side, but Dan couldn’t react fast enough. He had only half turned before the cab hit him in the side with a loud, dull noise like the sound of someone hitting a pillow very hard with a baseball bat.
The collision threw Dan twenty feet down the sidewalk, where he lay in an awkward, unmoving heap. Tony ran over to him and checked for a pulse, but there was none. He called an ambulance on his cell phone, then he stood in the chill rain, looking down at Dan’s body. A small crowd of onlookers gathered. He didn’t know what else to do, and he was relieved when the ambulance finally came for Dan’s remains.
He’d gone back to the office, told the necessary people, and made the necessary phone calls. Then he had sat down at his desk and tried to do some work. But for the first time in his professional life, he’d been unable to focus on the work in front of him.
Six weeks later, not much had changed. He still did his work well and could maintain the same courtroom manner, but the practice of law no longer held any joy or meaning for him. During his divorces and other life crises he had been able to lose himself in the practice of law and forget what went on outside the office and the courtroom. But now it was as if a blazing light had seared the eyes of his mind and soul, leaving him to wander blindly through the empty mansions of his life.
He had told himself that it was the shock of the event, that he would get over it in a day or two—or a week or two. But he hadn’t. Every day he came into work and tried to concentrate, and every day the frozen face of Dan Wood stared up at him from the pages of pleadings and cases. And every day the sound of squealing tires and that terrible impact rang in his ears.
“Hello, James. We’d like to talk to you for a minute.” Special Agent James Washington looked up and saw two men standing in the doorway of his office, one he recognized and one he didn’t. The man he recognized was Fred Giacolone, his CIA liaison. The other man was an older African American with an air of authority and a faint frown, as if his lunch were giving him heartburn.
“Sure,” James replied. “What’s up?”
Fred closed the door and said, “James, I’d like you to meet Bill Alexander, deputy director for intelligence here at the CIA. Bill has some questions about a file search you ordered last week.”
“Fire away,” said James, trying not to sound as apprehensive as he felt. Getting a closed-door visit from the deputy director could hardly be good news. James was FBI, but his job was to be a point of contact between the two intelligence agencies. He hoped he hadn’t done anything to screw that up.
Deputy Director Alexander looked him in the eyes. “Mr. Washington, why did you request our files on Alexei Zinoviev?”
It was a routine, everyday errand—the kind one forgets almost before it’s over. Yet Khalid Mohammed would never forget buying stamps on Wednesday morning.
The day was clear and cold. A bright, small sun shone in a pale-blue sky. Khalid decided it was a perfect day
for a brisk walk.
The post office was about half a mile away, meaning the round trip would take about half an hour by foot. That would still leave plenty of time to call in his supply orders before lunchtime, as long as there weren’t long lines. Khalid doubted there would be at this time of day and set off at a quick pace, humming to himself as he walked.
As soon as he stepped inside the doors of the post office, he knew that he had guessed wrong about the lines. They snaked around the edge of the wide floor. Refusing to let this unexpected annoyance dampen his good spirits, he looked at his watch and decided that he would wait ten minutes. If he hadn’t reached the counter by then, he would walk back to the office, count this as his daily exercise, and pick up the stamps later.
A long and battered cork bulletin board ran along the wall beside the line. It was covered with hundreds of flyers for missing persons, library book sales, wanted criminals, and other government and community announcements. The “wanted” posters were mildly interesting, and Khalid idly scanned them as he waited. They ran the gamut from murderers to forgers to tax cheats. There was even a man wanted for stealing trees.
A ripple ran through the line and it slowly shrugged forward like a giant, lazy caterpillar. Khalid found himself in front of a new collection of faces and crimes. Right in front of him were police sketches of two vaguely familiar faces. According to the posters, they were both wanted “for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, and burglary.” He looked more closely at the faces. They looked uncomfortably like the two men he had met just before evening prayers the day before. Khalid doubted that his esteemed neighbors could be criminals, so he carefully read the descriptions under each sketch. They matched—even the injury to the shorter man’s hand was described exactly.