by Rick Acker
Dmitry went off on a seeming tangent about Nicki’s drug problem and the risk that he might overdose. “What would happen to the case if he died?” he had asked. “Ivanovsky’s testimony would destroy us then, wouldn’t it?”
While Dmitry was speaking, Rosa had walked into Tony’s office and handed him an urgent message about another case. He skimmed it as they spoke. “Well, for one thing, Ivanovsky wouldn’t be able to testify,” he’d said without really thinking. “The Dead Man’s Rule would keep his testimony out. If you’re really worried about Nicki’s health, I can recommend a rehab clinic that some of my other clients have used.”
“Thank you,” Dmitry had said a bit too smoothly. “I’ll talk to Nicki and call you back if we decide to go that route. Well, I know you’re busy. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
Tony hung up the phone and turned his entire attention to the message in his hand.
He had forgotten about the conversation completely until three days later—when Nicki died on the day of his deposition. He realized then that Dmitry had known about the Dead Man’s Rule all along, likely from his second cousin, a disbarred lawyer who occasionally advised the Brothers. Dmitry had merely called Tony to confirm how the rule would operate in this case.
The attorney-client privilege arguably covered their conversation, because Dmitry hadn’t technically used Tony’s advice to commit a crime but only to find out what the impact of a crime would be. Even if the privilege didn’t apply, Dmitry had carefully avoided saying anything incriminating enough to be useful to the police.
Tony, however, was not without options. All of them had consequences, of course, ranging from disbarment to death, but he was no longer a man who could—or would—turn a blind eye and do nothing. He had put off his decision for as long as possible. Then he had bought voice-altering equipment, and, deep into a sleepless night, he had called Ben Corbin.
Despite all that had happened since, Tony did not regret his decision. But the game is not over, he thought with a grim smile. There’s still plenty of time for regret.
Ibrahim would only get one shot, so it had to be perfect. He had waited all day for that shot, but it hadn’t come. First, the man with the LeGrand Security Services van had spent hours installing equipment. Shortly after he’d left, a plumbing contractor had come and dug a trench across the driveway and part of the yard, putting in white PVC pipe and leaving a ridge of raw earth where he had buried the pipe. When he finally moved his van out, Ibrahim could see that he had left a lump of steel plate and asphalt behind where he had torn up the driveway. All the while, Simeon had stayed inside behind shuttered windows.
It was late afternoon now, and still the lawyer had not shown himself. Even if he did, the glare of the low sun on the windows of the house would make a shot difficult unless he were to actually step outside. Ibrahim decided to abandon his primary plan and go with his backup. He methodically and quickly disassembled and packed his sniper rifle, a thin line between his black eyebrows the only sign of frustration that his iron self-discipline allowed to show.
He jogged through the school and out to his van, where he rapidly changed into workman’s coveralls and put magnetic stickers on each side of the van that read “Chicagoland Electrical Services—Certified Electricians.” He mentally ran through what he would need to do. He had watched the security devices go in and knew how to slip past them. Would there be others that had not just been installed? Maybe. That was one reason why this plan was the backup and not the primary option. He would also have to be careful while driving over that metal plate; he wouldn’t want to leave a scrape of paint or other evidence for the FBI. After all, the whole point of this mission was to deprive the Americans of evidence.
Will it work? Tony wondered. In the courtroom and at the negotiating table, he had routinely bet millions—sometimes billions—on his ability to understand and outthink his opponents. Now he was betting his life and more. Much more.
Have I missed something? His mind had begun to slip in recent years. Not much, but he could tell. He wasn’t quite as quick on his feet as he had been ten years ago, and he occasionally missed subtle points that would have been obvious to him in his prime. Maybe he had merely grown mentally and emotionally tired of the practice of law—or at least the way he had practiced it. That might explain why he had lost some of his edge. Or it might not.
God, I commit this into your hands, he prayed silently. I know you haven’t missed anything, even if I have.
He crouched nervously behind a chair in his living room, watching a narrow wedge of driveway through a crack in the shutters. He estimated that he had about thirty seconds from the time an alarm went off until an intruder could get inside and start looking for him, so he made sure that he had chosen a watching post less than thirty seconds from the rum closet.
A white van turned into his driveway and his heart nearly stopped. This was it. He jumped up from behind the chair and ran into the study. As he jerked open the hidden door, he slipped on an area rug and nearly fell. Regaining his balance, he hurried into the secret chamber, pulling the door shut behind him.
It was dark and silent in the little room, and Tony’s breath sounded unnaturally loud in his ears. The walls were cold, slightly dank, and close enough to make even a spelunker claustrophobic. The air was stale and smelled faintly of mildew.
Tony had a cell phone on his belt and was tempted to call LeGrand or the police. He resisted. The alarms should be enough, and he didn’t want to spring his trap too soon.
Ibrahim parked the van in the lawyer’s driveway, making sure that it blocked the nearest neighbor’s view of the front door. He suspected that the door would be locked and fitted with alarms, but both problems could be fixed easily enough.
He took out a simple magnetometer and swept along the edge of the door. The needle jumped where he expected it to, near the upper-left corner of the door. He put the device back in his toolbox and took out a thin strip of steel, which he carefully slid between the jamb and the door at the spot where the magnetometer had registered a field. Because the steel was ferrous, it would not interrupt the magnetic field, but it would tell him exactly where the magnet was.
Click. The magnet pulled the strip down to the top of the door and Ibrahim drew it back out. Reaching into his toolbox again, he took out a tube of quick-setting glue and a tiny but powerful magnet. Placing the magnet on the end of the steel strip, he squeezed a drop of glue onto the magnet and slid the strip back between the door and the jamb, positioning his magnet above the alarm system’s magnet. Then he lifted it up and pressed it against the sensor until the glue dried, which took slightly less than a minute. He dropped the strip back into his box and grabbed a diamond-bladed power saw—the fastest and quietest model on the market. He quickly sliced through the dead-bolt lock and put his tools away.
He took a deep breath and said a silent prayer to Allah. Then he opened the door. No alarm screeched. No strobe lights flashed. He smiled. Either the alarm system wasn’t turned on or he had successfully tricked the door sensor. In any event, he was now past the first barrier.
He cautiously leaned through the doorway and peered inside. The house had a wide entranceway floored with dark walnut, which was mostly covered by a large Persian rug. He scanned the walls, but saw no motion detectors.
Good. Any pressure sensors would be under the rug, and he could just walk around that.
He took out his gun and stepped into the house, feeling a pleasant tension as he shut the door softly behind him. There was nothing quite like the thrill of the hunt.
At the far end of the foyer, a door stood partially open. Ibrahim walked quickly but quietly around the rug and stopped to listen. Silence. He carefully looked around the edge of the door. It led into a high-ceilinged living room with a large marble fireplace and a scattering of elegant, comfortable-looking furniture. The tired light of a November evening came in through a wide picture window, giving t
he room a peaceful, slightly melancholy look. But Ibrahim cared about only three things in the room: the motion detector in the far corner and the two security-system control panels next to the door. Fortunately, only one of the panels showed the red light indicating that it was armed; the other glowed green.
He unscrewed the cover of the armed panel and attached two wires from a handheld device that looked like an overgrown calculator with wires of various sizes coming out of its top. He spent several nerve-racking minutes typing on the device’s small keyboard, expecting his target to walk in at any moment. At last, the numbers he needed appeared on the screen: 42235. He typed them into the security-panel touchpad and pushed the “Enter” button. The panel gave a soft chime and the red light turned green. He quickly disconnected the wires and put the device away.
He would have to move fast now. The lawyer might have heard the chime or there might be another panel elsewhere in the house—in the master bedroom, for example—that also chimed and went green, alerting the lawyer to the presence of an intruder.
He moved through the house with the speed and silence of a cat on the trail of its prey. He rapidly searched the downstairs but found nothing. He went upstairs, checking each bedroom with care, all too aware that his target could be waiting with a shotgun behind any door. But he wasn’t. Ibrahim went downstairs again and searched the basement. Still nothing.
There was only one place left to look. Gun at the ready, he went to the garage and eased open the door. In the dim light he could see a silver Jaguar parked on the far side. He walked cautiously around it—and saw something that sent a stab of real fear through his heart: another door.
While doing his surveillance, he had carefully positioned himself so he could see anyone entering or leaving through either the front door or the sliding door that opened onto the patio at the side of the house, but he had not realized that there was a third door tucked away in a little niche between the garage and the main body of the house. It was possible—in fact it now seemed likely—that the lawyer had somehow realized he was being watched, set the security system, and slipped out through this door.
What’s happening out there? Tony wondered. First he had heard the faint sound of the alarm being disarmed in the next room. He had anticipated that this would happen. Still, a moment of unreasoning fear gripped him when it actually did.
Then he’d listened as the intruder searched the house. Footsteps went through the study, not ten feet from the rum closet. They went upstairs and came back down again a few minutes later. They went back through the study and then faded from Tony’s hearing.
There was silence for a long time—or what seemed like a long time until Tony looked down at the glowing hands of his Rolex and saw that he had been in the rum closet for less than twenty minutes.
Had the intruder left? Or was he still on the prowl? Was he hiding somewhere in the house, waiting for Tony to make the next move? Whatever was happening in the rest of the house, Tony knew that his best strategy was to stay put for the duration, however long that might be. He leaned against the concrete wall and tried to relax.
Ibrahim stood in the garage pondering his options. He could reset the security system and wait for the target to return home. Then he remembered the van outside. There was no way the lawyer would miss that. If he left the house to move the van, it would create an unacceptably high risk that he would be seen on the way back.
If he had possessed sufficient foresight, he would have brought the materials necessary to rig a bomb under the lawyer’s Jaguar. He silently cursed his stupidity, but at least now he had a plan. It would be a simple matter to put together a car bomb and pay a visit to the parking lot at the train station where the target parked his car on most weekdays. He would need to borrow a tow truck to avoid suspicion about what he was doing under the lawyer’s car, but that could be arranged.
For now, he needed to get out of the house as quickly as possible. But first he would cover his tracks. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had been there—the sawn-through dead bolt in the front door made that impossible—but he could hide the purpose of his visit by making it appear to be a simple burglary. He holstered his gun and went back into the house. Jogging upstairs, he quickly cased the bedrooms and grabbed a pair of diamond cufflinks and a gold Cartier watch from the nightstand in the master suite. Back downstairs, he walked quickly through the rooms, looking for something small but valuable. He paused briefly in front of the ancient bronze statuette in the study, looking regretfully at the defiant Titan. From his days as a smuggler, Ibrahim had a fair idea of the market value of a perfectly preserved classical Greek artifact, and it would be quite high. Unfortunately, it would take too long to get the statuette out of its sealed case, and it would be difficult to dispose of such a unique item safely on the international market.
Ibrahim scanned the room for other items worth stealing. The bookcase along one wall held an assortment of knickknacks, but few of them looked valuable. One item, however, caught his eye: a gold-hilted dagger with a black-velvet sheath. Ibrahim wouldn’t mind keeping that for himself.
As he walked over to the bookshelf, he noticed something he hadn’t seen before: the rug in front of the bookcase was bunched and crooked. It was the only imperfection he had seen in the lawyer’s immaculate house. His curiosity piqued, he examined the shelves more closely and found a set of well-hidden hinges where one section of shelves ended and another began.
He smiled and drew his gun.
As the rum closet door began to open, Tony threw himself against it. The door burst open and he fell forward into the study. A man he had never seen before tumbled to the floor a few feet from him. The stranger was about forty and had short salt-and-pepper hair. He was a big man, and his baggy coveralls did not disguise his muscular build. His gloved hand held a black semiautomatic pistol.
Tony lunged for the gun, but the man jerked it away and punched him in the face with his free hand. He wasn’t able to put much force into the blow because he lay half-sprawled on the floor, but it knocked Tony back while the intruder scrambled to his feet.
Tony got to his hands and knees. He saw a paperweight lying on the floor next to him and hurled it at his opponent. It hit the man in the forehead and he staggered back, cursing in a language that Tony didn’t understand.
Tony grabbed a letter opener from his desk and took a step toward the intruder. Blood dripped down the man’s face, but he had recovered from the blow. He brought his pistol up and fired.
The shot hit Tony in the left side of the chest. Agony knifed through him. He stumbled and coughed uncontrollably as blood poured into his lung. He steadied himself and looked the man in the eye, knowing what was coming.
The assassin fired again, hitting Tony in the upper chest. The bullet smashed through his spine on the way out and he collapsed backward, falling through the doorway that led from the study into the living room.
As he lay on the floor, he saw the alarm panels beside the front door. His vision was fading, but he could see that all the lights showed green. Despite the pain from his wounds, Tony smiled in victory. He had specifically asked Peter LeGrand to make the driveway alarm light green, not red.
At least that worked, he thought with relief as consciousness slipped away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NIGHTFALL
“Mr. Corbin, my name is Pierre LeGrand of LeGrand Security Services,” said a tense, French-accented man’s voice. “I installed a security system at Tony Simeon’s home. It included a custom-built device in the driveway. He asked me to call a list of people if the alarm for that went off. It did, and you’re on the list. I need you to meet me at his house right now. The address is 415 Hancock in Wilmette. It’s two houses from Fifth and Hancock.”
Ben hit the mute button on the TV remote control, cutting off the announcer in midsentence. “Wait—who are you? Is Tony in trouble?”
“I’m Pierre LeGrand of Le
Grand Security,” the man repeated in irritation. “Tony might be in serious danger. Someone set off a custom-built security device at his home. He told me to inform you if that happened. You are to meet me at Fifth and Hancock now.”
Ben thought quickly. This didn’t feel like a trap. Even if it was, it made sense to play along until he knew more. “Okay. I’m on my way.”
“Good. I’ll explain more when we’re there. I have more calls to make now.” The line went dead.
Ben dropped his phone into his pocket and looked at the circle of inquiring faces gathered around him. “That was a man who claimed to be from Tony Simeon’s security company. He said his name was Pierre LeGrand.”
“I know LeGrand,” said Sergei. “I’ve worked with him a couple of times. He’s a sharp guy. What did he want?”
“He said someone broke into Tony’s house and they’re getting away. He also said Tony might be in trouble.”
“Chechens,” said Sergei.
Elena and Will nodded. “Where’s his house?” asked Noelle.
“Fifth and Hancock. That’s less than a mile from here,” he added for the benefit of their guests.
“Then we might get there in time to do some good,” said Sergei as he headed for the door.
Sergei and Elena took Sergei’s car and Will went with the Corbins. Noelle called the police on her cell phone as Ben sped along the empty streets. Will had his gun out and his eyes darted back and forth as they drove, scanning for ambushes and evaluating firing angles.
“The police are already on their way,” Noelle announced as she clicked off her phone, “but they won’t be here for at least another five minutes.”
They turned from Fifth onto Hancock and saw a white van with a LeGrand Security Services sign parked on the north side of the street in front of a stately brick mansion with a long, winding driveway.