by David Duffy
MURDER MOST FIERY
Anyone who had any doubt of the Cheka’s long reach (Ivanov’s not one), read on. The Sword and the Shield and the flamethrower claimed two more victims last night—in a former Cheka safe haven in New York City.
Ivanov’s network reports this particular inferno took place in a Cold War fallout shelter under one of New York’s most famous bridges—named after borough Brooklyn—that was once used by enterprising Chekist spies as a secret meeting hall. Polina Barsukova—long known to followers of Ibanskian intrigue—was one victim. Roasted on a kerosene-soaked funeral pyre. But wait! The Cheka’s cruelty knows no borders. Polina’s daughter, Eva, was lured into igniting the blaze. It roasted her mother—she made it through the night but died this morning—and snuffed her young life as well. New York authorities have clamped on a tight lid, but Ivanov’s sources know no borders either.
What does the Cheka want? Why take such chances? Murder in Moscow is an organizational right—at least in the eyes of its perpetrators—but American authorities won’t necessarily see it that way.
Then again, maybe the re-emboldened Sword and Shield is so confident that the flamethrower doesn’t care.
I had to admire Ivanov’s editorializing—“Murder in Moscow is an organizational right”—but it wouldn’t register where it counted. Ivanov spoke truth to the powers that couldn’t see it anymore. In a society where murder had long been an organizational right, that was one reason Ibansk.com had achieved the status it had among the rest of us.
On the other hand, the facts, the details, they would register—at least where I wanted them to. The shelter, the kerosene, the fire, the booby-trapped door—they comprised the message I was sending. He’d have to assume I was the source. Time to make sure my message was received.
I went down to the street and walked a few blocks north until I found a pay phone. I dialed Brighton Beach and put a folded paper towel over the mouthpiece.
“Read Ibansk.”
CHAPTER 44
The empty construction site at John F. Kennedy International Airport wasn’t as cool or pretty as Central Park had been ten days before—but it was as good a place as any again to contemplate irony and fate. The roar of aircraft above the Valdez, parked in a rain-rutted access road, provided a backdrop of white noise. The airport hummed with early-evening activity, but my spot was empty and lifeless—the reason I’d chosen it. Whatever happened later, I didn’t want any witnesses.
Play the cards you’re dealt, I’d told Petrovin. Here’s one that’ll change your hand, he told me. Play it straight, Victoria said, and play according to Coyle. Sometimes the straight fills or you draw that fourth queen. This wasn’t one of them. However the hand played out tonight, nobody was going to be happy with the outcome, except perhaps to still be alive.
Ivanov turned out to be prescient in one respect—Polina hadn’t made it. She’d slipped off into her own netherworld, without regaining consciousness. Probably just as well. The pain would have been unbearable, and the sight of her mutilated face would have sent her screaming into lunacy. I felt more anger than sorrow. She’d done her best to ruin my life and done an excellent job, but no one deserved the fate she got, and neither God nor predetermination had a damned thing to do with it.
I’d called Petrovin with the news. There was a long pause before he said in a quiet voice that he’d tell Eva, if that was okay with me. I told him to go ahead and felt even worse when I lied about meeting them back at the Holiday Inn.
It was still light when I got to the airport. I drove around the loop road twice before I found what I wanted—a construction site for a new terminal, I didn’t care whose, locked up for the night. I pulled into the access road, cluttered with building materials and debris, parked to one side, and put a Homeland Security card—the companion to my forged ID—on the dashboard, just in case. The Basilisk had told me what I needed to know. Air France flight 9, departing JFK at 11:00 P.M., connecting at Charles de Gaulle with AF 2244 to Moscow, had a new passenger. I’d joined the evening rush hour into Queens.
I keep the trunk of the Valdez stocked with tools likely to come in handy, such as wire cutters. As dusk lowered, I used a pair to open a hole in the chain-link fence behind a construction trailer and took a stroll around. Hot, muggy, muddy. The steel frame of the new terminal was silhouetted against the hazy orange-gray sky. Looked as though the building would follow the curve of an airplane wing, rising from maybe two stories in the back to four or five in the front. A concrete floor had been poured at ground level, covering half the space; the rest was still open to the gaping foundation below. The site itself was mud and earth, mounded and rutted by rain and trucks.
I needed a place to wait and watch, out of sight, and I found what I wanted in a row of giant concrete pipe sections, easily eight feet in diameter, not far from the building. I could stand inside any one, invisible in shadows and the darkening night, with a clear view to the fence. With luck, the pipes would echo, too, and he might not be able to tell where I was. We’d get to that in due course—or so I hoped.
My watch read 8:02. Time to make the call, before he got here. I punched in the number. He answered on the third ring.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“About what? I’m on my way home. I’m sick of this place.”
“I know. I’m at JFK. You’ve got plenty of time.”
“How did you know… Where are you?”
“Construction site between Terminals Seven and Eight. There’s a little access road on your right as you come along. You’ll see my car, black Ford Crown Victoria.”
“We can’t meet in the terminal, like normal people?”
“I have people looking for me, official people, thanks to you and last night.” The best kind of lie—plausible and uncheckable.
“What is it we need to discuss—in such clandestine fashion?”
“I have what you want.”
That stopped him cold. I think he muted the phone—the silence was complete, no background noise, just ether hum, for a good thirty seconds, maybe more. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, hardened.
“What makes you think so?”
“Gorbenko, Kosokov, Polina, Eva. They all died for it.” The hook set, I could feel it. “Three hundred other Russians died, too, for what? Putin? A war? The Cheka? They included Rislyakov’s parents, by the way. At Guryanova Street. You missed that. Not like you.”
He bit. Hard. “Stay where you are. I’m half an hour away.”
“There’s a hole in the fence behind the construction trailer. I’ll be inside.”
He hung up. I walked back to the Valdez, retrieved an aluminum baseball bat from the trunk, leaned against the back side of the trailer, and waited.
* * *
Thirty-two minutes later, a car pulled into the access road, headlights off. It rolled up behind the Valdez, and the driver cut the engine. The noise of traffic and planes hadn’t lessened. The doors stayed closed, no one moved, nothing happened for five more minutes. Then two of Lachko’s men climbed out. The driver came in my direction, and the other went behind the car. I moved deeper into the shadows.
The driver passed by me and went through the fence. His colleague lifted a flat canister out of his trunk, the size of a small trash can lid, and approached the Valdez. He put the canister on the ground and knelt over it. I covered the distance between us in half a dozen steps. He heard me when I was six feet away and got out a yelp before the aluminum bat caught the side of his face. He fell forward into a muddy puddle. I pulled him to one side so he wouldn’t drown and examined the bomb he was about to attach to the underside of the Valdez. They’d come prepared. I searched the man until I found a small radio detonation device. I put that in my pocket, took the Glock automatic he was carrying, and crouched behind the car. The other man returned a few minutes later. When he saw his partner, he ran forward, adding force when I stood and swung the bat into his gut. He doubled over and collapsed. I grabbed duct tape from
my trunk and bound his ankles and wrists. I did the same to his unconscious colleague and dragged him to the back of their car. It was open. The utility light reflected off two ugly machine pistols with big silencers. I removed the clips, tossed the guns aside, and lifted the comatose weight into the trunk. I returned to the driver, who was trying to relearn how to breathe. A search of his pockets yielded another Glock and a cell phone. I hefted the car bomb and dropped it on his chest, dealing his lesson a setback. Yards of duct tape later, it was strapped securely to his midsection. He could almost breathe again, but he was shaking with terror.
I held out his cell phone. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said in Russian. “We’re going to make a call. To your boss. You’re going to talk. Then I’m putting you in the car and going inside with this.” I held up the detonator. The eyes told me all I needed to know. “Say the right words, and he shows up here, you live, maybe. Say the wrong ones, he doesn’t show, in ten minutes I push the button. Ten minutes. That’s all you get.”
He nodded hard.
“Number?”
He reeled off ten digits in Russian. I punched them into the phone and held it to the side of his head. He spoke fast. “The cinema’s open, the movie starts soon,” he said.
I had to assume that was code for all clear. He was too scared to lie. I put one more piece of tape over his mouth and shoved him toward the back of his car. A judicious tap with the bat, and he fell over into the trunk. I lifted in his legs and slammed the lid.
I used his phone to call Brighton Beach. One more check, to be sure.
Lachko came on immediately. “What the fuck now?”
“Your men fucked up. You should have sent competent people, not useless old cunts.” I used urki slang.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I didn’t send anyone anywhere.”
“Just checking.”
I cut the connection and got my vest out of the Valdez. I put it on under my jacket. It added to the heat of the night, but I ignored that. With a quick look around, I returned to the row of outsized pipe sections to wait, Eva’s story running around in my mind.
CHAPTER 45
She and her mother had moved out of the apartment they shared with Lachko a few months before the fire. Eva wasn’t sorry—Polina and Lachko had been fighting continuously for half a year. They were staying at their dacha in the Valdai Hills, which Eva didn’t like because there was little to do compared with Moscow. She was having trouble fitting into her new school, both educationally (she was at least a year ahead of everyone else) and socially. They were also spending a lot of time with Uncle Tolik, as she knew him, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She had picked up on his signals. Most of the time, he didn’t want her around, and he was sending those signals that day, even before the stranger arrived.
She went out to the barn with the doll she called Lena, despite the cold and snow. She was still exploring all the rooms and spaces of the old structure, which had horse stalls and haylofts, a workshop, garage bays and a warren of under-rooms that smelled like pigs. She was upstairs in the hayloft when Mom and Uncle Tolik and the stranger came in. The man came in first, then her mother carrying the shotgun. Uncle Tolik trailed behind as if he wanted to be somewhere else. Her mother made the man open the trapdoor—something Eva hadn’t discovered yet.
The blast from the gun was so loud she thought the whole barn had exploded. She hadn’t seen it, since she’d ducked behind the hayloft wall. When she peeked over, the stranger was gone. Her mother still held the gun. Had she fired? Where was the other man? Her mother and Uncle Tolik argued. She was too shocked and scared to remember the specifics. She heard her name—they didn’t know where she was. No way she could come out now, they’d both be mad at her. Her mother said she was going back to their dacha to pick up some things. Then she’d come back here and they’d all leave. Eva didn’t know where they were going—or why. She decided to wait right where she was until her mother got back. She was scared of Uncle Tolik and what he might do if he found out where she’d been.
She was watching for her mother’s return, out the hayloft window, when she saw another car pull in, a big limousine. She saw the driver shoot the caretaker as he came out to greet them. Now she was really scared. Then he got out of the car. The man her mother had taught her to fear above all others. “He hates you, as he hates me,” she told her whenever she mentioned his name. “Never trust him. Never trust any Chekist. He wants to see you boiled alive.”
She went looking for a better hiding place.
She was near the horse stalls on the main floor when the door opened and the light came on. The Chekist came in with Uncle Tolik. She saw the gun in his hand and ducked into a stall. She was afraid she’d been spotted, but he didn’t come to look.
The Chekist had a bottle, and he made Uncle Tolik drink. Again and again. He kept asking the same questions—“Where are the CDs? Where are the copies you made?”—over and over. Uncle Tolik wouldn’t answer. The Chekist got madder and madder. Uncle Tolik threw up. She could remember the smell. The Chekist hit him with the gun and kicked him on the floor. Then he came toward her.
She thought she’d been discovered. She climbed through a loose board into the stall next door. The gun fired. She heard the crack and the thud of the bullet as it sank into the wood—right where she’d been. He must have seen her. No. He walked on, into the garage. Terrified, she wanted to run, but even if she made it out of the barn without getting caught—a big if in her nine-year-old mind—where would she go? She huddled in a dark corner, behind an old hay trough. She couldn’t see what happened next. She heard the Chekist doing something, then smelled the petrol. He went back to the garage—she heard him go past a second time—and the petrol smell got stronger.
Finally, he spoke again, still asking about the CDs. Uncle Tolik’s voice was faint, but somehow she knew he wasn’t telling. After a minute, the Chekist said, “I’m going to light a match. I estimate you’ll have five minutes. Shout if you change your mind.”
She heard Tolik’s answer this time.
“Fuck off. You’re just another Cheka killer.”
She came out of her hiding place and saw the fire encircling the barn. She remembered that clearly—it was like a train, the fiery engine racing along an invisible track. Behind it flames climbed the old wooden walls. In seconds, she was surrounded.
She ran to Uncle Tolik, who was tied to one of the wooden columns supporting the barn’s roof.
“Eva! What the hell? Get out of here! Quick!”
She ignored him and pulled at the ropes. The heavy knots were too much for her little fingers.
“Eva! Find a knife or saw. Something sharp!”
She ran around the barn, but there was nothing she could use. The fire had already blocked off the workshop.
She went back to Kosokov and pulled at the knots again.
“Eva! Listen to me, you can’t do it. Run, while you still have time. Run!”
She ignored him. The fire had enveloped the walls. She remembered the searing heat as it started to spread across the roof. Kosokov must have used his hip to push her away as burning wood and shingle fell where she had stood. It exploded as it hit the ground, and a chunk landed in her lap. Her skirt was aflame in an instant. Panicked, she ran in circles, only serving to fan the flames.
“In the hay! Jump in the hay!” Kosokov called. She did as he said. The pain was like nothing she’d ever felt. When she stopped rolling around, she wasn’t burning anymore, but the hay was. There was nowhere that wasn’t aflame. She had no idea anything could be this hot.
“Eva! Do this for me. Please. For your mother. The shelter. Over there. The trapdoor. Go down there and close the door. It’s your only chance. Now, child! Please!”
Another piece of roof fell, this one striking Uncle Tolik on the head. He slumped sideways, the ropes holding him up as his clothes started to burn. Another load of burning wood and shingle fell next to her. The hay pile was a bonfire.
>
She did as Uncle Tolik said. She heard the roar of the roof giving way just after she pulled the door closed.
It was hot, but nothing like aboveground. Her legs felt like they were still aflame. She slipped on the stairs and fell, landing on the stranger’s body. His dead eyes stared at her. She screamed and screamed and screamed. There was no one to hear her but him.
She had no idea how long she was down there. All she remembered was her burning legs. She found some water and poured that on, which helped a little, but the pain wouldn’t let up. Eventually, she thought, she just passed out. She didn’t remember anything until the trapdoor opened and she screamed again, certain the Chekist had come back for her.
“Eva! Oh my God! Eva!”
It was her mother. Polina carried her up to the smoldering ruin, the snow, and the dark night above. Eva’s memory was of a full moon, dark gray and hostile behind the black clouds blowing across the sky.
Her mother took her to the house and tried to treat her with snow and creams, but the skin was already twisted and discolored, and it stank. Eva threw up.
The rest was a blur. Her mother gave her something to drink—doubtless laced—and they drove for hours. She didn’t get medical attention until two days later, the first of several attempts to deal with what must have been second- or third-degree burns to her thighs. Somewhere along their journey, Polina informed Eva that Lachko wasn’t her real father, that it was the man she hadn’t been able to save from the inferno. I don’t often give Polina credit for kindness, but I do believe she was trying to help. The main thing she accomplished, of course, was to pile an unbearable failure onto the already hopeless guilt of a nine-year-old child. She started stuttering a few months later.
CHAPTER 46
He arrived at nine twenty-four. I heard the car pull in and stop, the engine cut off. One door opened and closed. A minute later, he stooped through the hole in the fence. He was wearing a suit and tie. His hands were empty. He stopped a few feet inside and tried to scan the building site. His eyes weren’t as well adjusted to the dark as mine. I let him look for a minute before I called from inside one of the pipe sections.