The Guise of Another

by Allen Eskens

  Two days later, a package arrived. The postmark on the package, Kansas City, Missouri, was an obvious red herring, yet Drago would later spend weeks in Missouri, hoping to pick up a trail. The package contained a CD housed in a box that previously held a DVD of the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer, a cheap shot that surely brought a laugh to the face of Jericho Pope. Along with the CD, Pope gave Garland a note setting out an account number and a routing number to a Swiss bank account. The note demanded that the money be deposited annually—on December 1st—into the specified account.

  Garland fed the CD into his personal computer, and he and Drago watched the footage. When they were done, Garland immediately wired $500,000 to the account number given to him by Jericho Pope.

  Now, Drago finished the last of the DVDs and went to Jericho's bed. He used his knife to rip the material apart, tearing the stuffing out and finding nothing. He pulled the box spring off the bed and did the same to it.

  When he finished the bedroom, he went to the kitchen in search of something to eat. While he was there, he took a peek at the tracking locator on his computer and saw that the dot had started to move. Ianna was heading back to Minnesota. He rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes and looked again. It continued north.

  He leaned against a wall and slid down until his butt rested on his heels. He still had much of the apartment to tear apart. The drive to Wisconsin had taken a little under five hours. He would have only four hours to finish his search. If he couldn't find the flash drive by then, he would need to come up with an alternative plan.

  He entertained the thought of killing Ianna when she walked through the door, take a gamble that he would still find the flash drive somewhere in the apartment. But after finding no trace of it anywhere, he began to suspect that Ianna would be the key to finding his property. He could make her tell him. He knew ways. If she had any knowledge, she would tell him, and then she would die. He rubbed his temples, wondering whether there might be a better strategy, a way to live in the head of this woman.

  That's when the phone in her apartment rang. He waited as it transferred into voicemail and he heard a man speak.

  “Ianna, this is Alexander. I didn't want to bug you while you're…well, with your mother, but I thought I'd call in case you came back already. Just wanted to tell you that I found a witness who knows all about Jericho Pope and what happened on that yacht. Detective Rider is flying in tonight. We're going to meet up at Delancy's Pub. I'm not sure when you're getting back, but she'd mentioned that she'd like to talk to you. So if you happen to get back in town tonight, this is Tuesday, by the way, call me. We're meeting around seven. Call me when you get back, regardless. Um…bye.” Click.

  Drago stared across the room and considered this new information. Detective Alexander Rupert knew what happened on the Domuscuta. Who was this witness he'd found? How much did Rupert already know? All of it? But then, knowing and proving were two different things. The police would have very little without the flash drive. Drago would have to find it first. He also needed to silence the source of Detective Rupert's information. There might be some additional cleanup before he flew back to New York to kill Garland, but Drago could feel that his hunt was quickly coming to an end.

  He looked at his watch. He would not kill Ianna Markova, not yet. He would plant bugs and surveillance cameras in the apartment. She would not stay there, but neither would she leave without the flash drive if she knew its location. He would watch her. He would listen to her. He would stalk her. She would lead him to the flash drive. He would spend the next hour covering the apartment with his electronic eyes and ears. Then he would track down Detectives Rupert and Rider at a place called Delancy's Pub.

  Alexander—for the first time in a long time—felt like a real cop again. As he waited for Max and Billie to arrive at Delancy's Pub, he took a moment to enjoy the feeling. The trove of information he uncovered in Iowa filled in so many holes that the only major piece of the puzzle still missing was the location of the flash drive. He had Pope's hard drive, so if the video had been transferred onto that computer, he could find it. If Pope hadn't kept it on the computer, it might be in Ianna's apartment. He tried to think of other places to look, but the notoriety of Ashton's death distracted him. This case would be national. It was turning into everything he wanted it to be. By morning, he would have enough of a case that he could walk into Tiller's office and wield it like a wrecking ball. No one indicts a hero, he thought.

  “Okay, I'm here,” Max said as he sat down. “So what's the big meeting about, Festus?”

  “You may want to be a bit nicer to me, Maximilian. I'm going to be hot shit in the very near future.”

  “What? You win a lottery or something?”

  “Better,” Alexander said as a broad smile opened on his face. “I just dug up some great news on the Putnam case.”

  Max didn't react other than to slump a bit around the shoulders. “So you didn't invite me here to go over your grand-jury testimony?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Alexander sighed. “You and that damned grand jury. Don't you think of anything else?”

  “One of us has to think about it. You can't ignore what's coming down the pike. It's tomorrow, for crying out loud. We need to talk.”

  “What about?”

  Max leaned into the table and looked Alexander in the eye as if to study him as he spoke. Alexander readied himself. “My source tells me that your old partner, Rivas, flipped. He's turning state's evidence.”

  Alexander absorbed the information without the slightest tell. He tilted his head slightly but never broke eye contact with Max. The statement hung in the air between the two men as each scrutinized the other, the pause ticking away with neither brother saying a word for several seconds. Then Alexander said, “And what about it? I always expected one of them to turn. Didn't you?”

  “Does he know anything that might hurt you?”

  “Max, we've had this discussion. I'm clean. They can't have evidence on me if there's none to get.”

  “Were you involved with the raid on that dealer, Castasian?”

  “Christ! I swear to God, I don't need this crap right now.” Alexander could feel a fist-sized lump knotting up his throat.

  “You were there?”

  “You know I was there. You know who Castasian is. You know he's the dirtbag accusing us of taking a hundred grand in cash out of his basement. It was in the papers. Everyone knows about fucking Castasian. What's your point?”

  “Where'd the money go?”

  “There was no money.”

  “What if Rivas says that there was money? What if he burns you to get a better deal?”

  Alexander gave a little cough to clear his throat. “Is that what he said? Is he saying—?”

  “I don't know what he's saying. All that my source knows is that Rivas is talking.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I'm clean. I appreciate what you're doing, but we're ending this discussion. You've said your piece, and I've said mine. I'm not talking about this anymore.” Alexander slid out of the booth and stood beside his brother. “Order us a couple beers—on you. I'm going to take a leak. When I come back, we're going to talk about the Putnam case and nothing else. Can you do that?”

  Max shrugged and smiled. “Fine, we'll talk about the Putnam case.”

  “Great,” Alexander said. “Because I have a lot to tell you. It's going to knock you on your ass.”

  Alexander left the booth and headed for the men's room. Upon entering, he looked under the stall doors to make sure that he was alone. Once he made certain that no one would overhear him, he allowed his chest to deflate as a strange panic overtook him. The air around him seemed depleted of oxygen, and he gulped for breaths like a man bobbing in a rough ocean swell. He held the wall with one hand to keep from losing his balance, and with the other he gripped his own forehead.

  “Rivas, you fucking fuck.” The words seethed through his gritted teeth. “You…motherfucker. You…” He
struggled to mute the wail of anger that rose from somewhere deep inside his chest. He grabbed the edges of a sink with both hands and squeezed and shook the fixture until it rattled loose on its mooring. “How could you…you fuck. We had a deal.” A surge of pure anger pushed through his body. He started to swing at the wall, but pulled up short—not because he feared hurting his hand, but because he didn't want to have to explain the scrapes to Max. “Calm down,” he told himself. “Just keep your head.”

  He put his hands against the wall, one on either side of the mirror. “Rivas, you Judas piece of shit. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut. You swore to me. You said you'd take this to the fucking grave.”

  He breathed in three or four times to settle his tremors. He thought back to another time when such a pure panic took him over. He had been working undercover at the time, and his mark, a man who moved the majority of meth and heroin in the state, had locked Alexander in a storage room while he and three other men debated whether or not to kill him. They had stripped him naked, looking for a wire, which he hadn't worn that night. They beat him, thinking he would confess to being an undercover cop. That didn't work either. Alexander could hear one of the gang members swearing to the others that Alexander was a narc.

  Alexander wasn't just any undercover cop—he was the best. And what made him the best was his ability to lie with the ease of a master magician. Alexander could make the thugs believe his bullshit over the word of one of their own, and he laid his bullshit on three or four layers deep. So when the gang boss opened the door that night, Alexander was ready and had an answer for every question they asked. When the interrogation ended, the boss slapped his soldier in the face for causing him embarrassment.

  When the Task Force executed the arrest warrant the following day, that boss man used his last breath to utter the words “fuck you” just before he shot Alexander in the hip—a final act of revenge that led to the boss man being ripped open by a hail of police bullets.

  Alexander ran his hands under some cold water and dabbed it to his face, being careful not to get his hair wet. He dried himself with a paper towel and looked in the mirror again to make sure that he looked the same as he had before he heard the news about Rivas's betrayal. “You've been through worse,” he said to the face in the mirror. “They never found the money, so it's still his word against yours. You can do this.”

  Drago Basta parked in a ramp near Delancy's Pub, finding a stall on the third floor of the six-story stack of concrete. From his rucksack he pulled those items he would need for the next few hours: a pair of tinted glasses, a baseball cap to block high security-camera angles, a book stolen from Jericho Pope's apartment, and the shotgun microphone. The microphone looked like a common pen but had a thin wire connecting it to an ear piece, which Drago threaded up his jacket sleeve. He slid the parking-ramp ticket into his pocket and paused to go over his plan once again. Satisfied that he hadn't overlooked anything, he tapped the Glock in his shoulder holster and stepped out of the car.

  At the elevator, he peeked out from beneath the bill of his cap to see a security camera covering the elevator doors but none in the elevator itself. He found another camera in the vestibule on the first floor where, later, he would have to pay to validate his parking ticket. He made a mental note to remember to wear the tinted glasses on his return, even though it would be dark.

  One block later, he walked into Delancy's Pub, taking a seat at the first barstool he found. There he waited as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the bar. Peering over the rim of the tinted glasses, he glanced carefully around the bar to see if his prey had yet arrived. That's when he spied a familiar face walking from the men's room toward one of the booths. He remembered the face from a website he found in Ianna's history. It was the Minnesota detective, Alexander Rupert. Rupert joined another man, who bore the same bone structure and genetic shadowing as Alexander. Brothers, maybe? About ten feet away from them, Drago saw an empty high-top table, a perfect location to set up surveillance.

  He vacated his barstool and made for that table, but before he could go more than a couple steps, Alexander Rupert turned halfway around in his seat and looked right at Drago. Drago kept walking toward him as Rupert raised a hand as if to signal hello. From over his shoulder, Drago heard the voice of a female call, “Hey, Festus.” He recognized the voice and kept walking. As Drago sat at the high-top, he caught a glimpse of the woman detective who had visited Garland in New York.

  Drago sat with his back to the three people, placed the book in front of him, slipped the shotgun microphone under the book's cover, and aimed it at the booth behind him. In a mirror over the bar, he could see the three; and in his ear, he could hear Alexander Rupert introduce Detective Rider to a man named Max Rupert. Drago ordered a cola and settled in.

  The three exchanged names and pleasantries for a few minutes before getting to the purpose of their gathering. Finally, Detective Rider got the ball rolling by telling Alexander Rupert, “I'll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  “Glad to,” he said. Alexander lowered his voice a notch and began telling the story of the Domuscuta. He told about Michelle Holla, a witness he had found in Iowa, a onetime stripper who found her way onto the yacht and into the cabin of Wayne Garland. Drago listened as Alexander Rupert reincarnated the name Prather, the false name that Drago had used back when Garland chartered the Domuscuta for their little excursion. When he got to the part where the wrong stripper took a bullet to the back of the head, Drago had to swallow back the bile that had bubbled up in his throat. How had he made such a mistake?

  He remembered that execution well. He had secured the true names of the strippers he hired before taking them to the Domuscuta. Then, while Garland and Ashton were getting their money's worth, he tracked down the addresses of the two women—just in case. When Ashton refused to give in to the blackmail, Drago and Garland executed their plan B. Drago killed Richard Ashton, tied his neck to an iron weight that he had smuggled on board in his suitcase, and tossed Ashton into the sea.

  With the death of Ashton, a well-known figure in political circles, there would be press coverage. With press coverage came the potential for one or both of the girls to seek their fifteen minutes of fame. Drago slipped into Hillary Wolkochek's apartment and saw her sleeping, her dark hair—cut just as he remembered it from only a few hours earlier—spilling across the ridge of her cheekbone, obscuring her face. She had no roommates, so there could be no confusion. He placed the muzzle of his gun an inch away from the base of her skull and pulled the trigger.

  He gritted his teeth in frustration. Would there be no end to the mistakes born of Garland's insistence on bringing those hookers on board?

  When Alexander Rupert finished his update, the booth fell silent for a moment as Max Rupert and Detective Rider took in the magnitude of the case. “If this pans out,” Max said, “we're looking at a major footprint. The head of a multi-billion-dollar corporation—a defense contractor, no less, with connections in Washington, DC—kills his partner and takes over the company. And then does what? What were Prather and Garland trying to convince Ashton to do?”

  “My guess,” Rider said, “is bilk the government and make millions on kickbacks.” The men looked at each other and then back at Rider. She continued. “That's what I came here to tell you guys. We've reopened the case of Ashton's death. I began by trying to track down Prather. Turns out, there is no Prather. I have a buddy in Homeland Security who did a little digging. He found a guy named John Prather, who held the position of security consultant at Patrio back around that time. But my guy could find no true record of this Prather. His address was an abandoned lot in Newark. He had no past other than on paper. We haven't gone to Garland with this yet. My bosses are leery about opening that door, and I didn't think that I had enough for a warrant.”

  “But you do now,” Max said.

  Rider nodded. “With the information that Michelle Holla gave us, we'll have enough to pick up Garland for a talk, but aft
er that…I don't know. I mean it's all hearsay. We don't have a witness who saw the murder of Ashton. All we have is what Jericho Pope said happened. When it comes right down to it, it's the word of Wayne Garland against a stripper-slash-hooker who, by the way, may have been involved in blackmail and identity theft. If Garland doesn't hang himself in the interview, we don't have much.”

  “We could just find that flash drive,” Alexander said.

  “Yeah, we could do that,” Rider echoed with a smile.

  Max waved to the waitress for another round and downed the last of his beer. “Getting back to Prather, if that man on the Domuscuta wasn't John Prather, then who was he?”

  Drago watched in the mirror over the bar as Rider leaned in and summoned the guys to do the same with a jig of her finger. “That's the part I didn't want to talk about over the phone.”

  A bar patron paused between Drago and the booth full of detectives, temporarily blocking Drago's microphone. Drago had been bent over his table, pretending to read a book, but now he straightened up and glanced over his shoulder. The oaf of a man had stopped there to catch something on the television on the wall. His presence blocked Drago from hearing what they knew about him. He wanted to put a bullet in the man simply to get him out of the way. After a thirty-second eternity, a commercial came on the television and the man went away.

  “Drago was the name that the yacht captain remembered,” Alexander said in a way that suggested that he was filling in a blank.

  Rider took over. “So my source tells me this Drago Basta is supposed to be a real badass. Grew up in the Balkans during the wars. Killed his own family. They called him ‘The Beast.’”

  Drago bristled at Rider getting his name wrong, and he muttered under his breath. “They called me ‘Psoglav,’ you stupid whore.”