In for a Ruble tv-2

by David Duffy

  Silence.

  I wanted to slap him, then drown his head in the sink. Jenny killed, his father hanging by a thread—because of him. I managed to stifle all that.

  “Listen to me. This isn’t about you and your promises anymore. They killed Jenny. They tried to kill your father. They tried to kill Irina Sunday morning. She was the target, not her stepfather. Do you understand that?”

  He looked at the ground.

  “Do—you—know—where—she—is?”

  He looked up. “We… we always agreed if there was a problem… if something happened, we’d meet at my dad’s house in Millbrook. No one ever goes there anymore.”

  “Where in Millbrook?”

  “White Horse Lane. Only house on the road. It’s more like… a farm. We used to have horses. But not since…”

  Daria died, unless I missed my guess.

  Foos was already at the computer, pulling up a map. I looked over his shoulder. White Horse Lane was a mile-long cul-de-sac that ran southeast off Route 44, several miles north of town. Foos switched to a satellite image. Rolling fields interspersed with patches of forest the fields had been carved out of. New York horse country. Few roads. He zoomed in on a large farmhouse with an equally large barn, garage, smaller house, pool, and tennis court. The main house, guesthouse, and garage were arranged like a backward “7” with woods north and west. The barn was a hundred yards to the east. The driveway, an extension of the road, split into a “Y,” one prong leading to the barn and the other hooking in front of the main house at the top of the “7,” the guesthouse, set back from the corner, and the garage at the bottom of the long side. The closest road to White Horse Lane, other than Route 44, was Caldecott Lane, another dead end, about a half mile south.

  “Where exactly is she?” I asked Andras.

  “Guesthouse. She has a key.”

  “And you?”

  He nodded.

  “Hand it over.”

  He hesitated.

  I thought Foos was going to whack him. Andras must’ve thought so too. He reached into his pocket and took a key off a ring.

  “Alarms?”

  More reluctance.

  Foos said, “Turbo’s on your side, man. But you’re losing me fast.”

  “I’ll write down the code.”

  “Somebody plow your driveway?” I asked.

  “Dad has a caretaker.”

  “And if he encounters Irina?”

  “She has a letter to show him,” he said quietly.

  With a forged signature. Not my concern.

  “You set up a communications protocol—a means of contact, cell phone, a way she knows it’s you?”

  His eyes bored through the cheap carpeting. If they were lasers, he’d be down to the Super 8’s basement by now.

  “Goddammit! You’re wasting time, man,” Foos said.

  “I call her three times. First time, four rings. Second time, two. Third time, she answers.”

  “Phone has to be on for that.”

  Foos banged at the keyboard.

  “Back on.”

  “Calls?”

  “One incoming. Guess who?”

  “She answer?”

  “Uh-huh. Talked three and a half minutes.”

  “Outgoing?”

  “Two. One to the old country.”

  “Russia?”

  “You got it.” He read off a number.

  “That’s Moscow. The other?”

  “Seven-one-eight number… cell phone… in Brooklyn—Brighton Beach.”

  “She’s setting up something—or someone.”

  “Wait!” Andras cried.

  “No time,” I said. “Foos, check the Yellow Pages—outdoor equipment or sporting goods.”

  I was lucky—there was a store a mile away.

  “See if there’s a Kinko’s nearby.”

  “You’re on a roll. Looks like there’s one in the same strip mall.”

  “E-mail a few pages from ConnectPay’s database for printing. They could come in handy.”

  “On it.”

  Andras shifted back and forth nervously.

  “What are you going to do?” he finally blurted.

  “First step, convince Irina we’re on her side,” I said.

  “I can help,” he said. “I’ll call her right now.”

  How do you tell a kid that not only has he been played for a sucker by his supposed girlfriend, but having got what she wanted, she no longer has any use for him?

  You don’t. At least, not now.

  “Let me get up there first, get the lay of the land. Then we’ll see.”

  “But…”

  “Turbo knows what he’s doing,” Foos said, shutting the door on discussion. “He calls the shots.”

  I was calling the shots. Whether the first statement had merit was anybody’s guess.

  CHAPTER 50

  Slow going. Only good thing—Konychev couldn’t be moving any faster.

  Snow kept falling, wind kept whipping, plows and sanders fought the highway to a standoff. Rush hour traffic inched along. Inevitably, some idiot trying to make time ended up impacted on a guard rail or the back of another car. The Explorer’s four-wheel drive held its own, but that was no protection against the impatient fools around me. One of their miscalculations, and I was done.

  Konychev and I started out equidistant from Millbrook, I figured, and we had the same traffic to contend with. I needed to get there first, and I wasn’t planning on the direct route up the driveway. That put me at least an hour behind. I’d stopped at the outdoor equipment store and lucked into a pair of boots that fit. Better yet, snowshoes. Watching one more idiot in an Explorer like mine lose control and take a Honda Accord to the side made me tap the brake and wonder whether Konychev’s Escalade had any better four-wheel drive than my Ford’s.

  I turned off I-287 and followed a back road route to the Taconic Parkway. The roads were in worse shape than the interstate, but I had them to myself. As I reached the parkway, 1010 WINS reported a four-car pileup where I-287 and the Taconic met, five miles behind. All lanes blocked. With a little luck, Konychev was caught in the backup and I had the head start I needed.

  I checked messages at the office. One, from Aleksei, a few hours before. Call ASAP.

  No time for coffee protocol. I used Brandeis’s phone and called his disposable number.

  “Thought you’d want to know right away,” he said. “Irina Lishina was treated at a Moscow hospital for a bad wound and infection on December twenty-eighth. She told the doctor she’d fallen on a metal staircase, but he said she’d also been burned. He put her down as a tough kid. She had to be in severe pain the entire time. We’re checking DNA now but I’m betting what we found on the murder weapon matches hers.”

  “You got a date of death for her father?”

  “Guess. Good tip. I’m grateful.”

  He sounded sincere—maybe even a little contrite. Time for that later, I hoped. “You’re welcome.”

  “Think she killed him?” he asked.

  “Don’t know, but I wouldn’t put much of anything past her.”

  “Konychev’s nieces have a penchant for trouble.”

  “Meaning?”

  “See Ivanov yesterday?”

  “No time.”

  “He finally ran down the identity of the girl in Konychev’s car on Tverskaya. Tamara Konycheva, daughter of Oleg Konychev. Big wheel in the Barsukov syndicate. And Efim’s stepbrother.”

  “Ivanov have any theories on what she was doing in the car, dressed for a night on the town?”

  “He says Uncle Efim likes the girls young and younger and isn’t inhibited by family connections.”

  I thought about that for a minute. Things continued to clarify. “Can you check a Moscow phone number for me?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. Time’s running out here for someone.” I read off the number Irina called.

  “Hang on, this may take a minute.”

  It took sev
eral. “You’ll never guess.”

  “The aforementioned Oleg Konychev?”

  “If you knew, what did you need me for?”

  “Making sure what I’m getting myself into.”

  “And?”

  “I have a feeling I’ll meet up with Uncle Efim and his axman later tonight.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I plan to. But I’ve got another feeling that those two may be the least of my worries.”

  I broke the connection and called Victoria. Voicemail. I did the right thing. I told her where I was and where I was headed and that I believed Konychev was headed there too. She’d send the cavalry—but in this weather they wouldn’t make it before I finished my business with Nosferatu.

  The snow narrowed the Taconic to one lane, but the traffic thinned too. Impatient commuters turned off as they neared home. Eventually, a sparse parade of well-spaced cars marched north at a steady thirty miles per hour through Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. I kept two hands on the wheel, two eyes and half my attention on the road. The rest of me pondered how a seventeen-year-old girl could so successfully confound organized crime. I thought I understood why she’d want to, but not why she thought she could get away with it. Maybe she didn’t expect to.

  A chicken’s hardly a bird, a woman’s hardly a person—one of our less appealing, but no less illuminating, sayings. It speaks more to the insecurity of Russian men than the tough-mindedness of our female counterparts. Still, I was unlikely to cite it to Victoria.

  The women I knew in the camps were the strongest people there. They had to defend themselves, not only against the elements, the guards and the system—they had to keep other zeks at bay too. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to a corpse on the sploshnye nary—communal sleeping boards—with a knife wound in the chest or neck, next to where the object of his unwanted attention had spent the night.

  In later years, I discovered that in a nation whose history is replete with irony, the position of women was irony amplified. They had no rights under the czars, yet five became czars themselves, including Catherine. History awarded her the same sobriquet as Peter. The Bolsheviks made a big deal of neutralizing gender, but like so many other Communist constructions it was founded on quicksand. Not one woman served in the Politburo under Lenin or Stalin. Khrushchev appointed the first—as (surprise!) minister of culture. She bore the same name as the empress, and with our sense of irony, became known as the second Catherine the Great. After Stalin’s wife committed suicide, he had the wives of his Politburo cronies rounded up and shipped off to jail or the camps. Little wonder that wives of future leaders stayed deep in the background, rarely appearing in public with their sour-faced husbands. The first “first lady” to take a high profile was Raisa Gorbachev—with the predictable result of undermining public confidence in her husband and his reforms because people thought she was calling the shots.

  As Russia moved from Party control through glastnost and perestroika to democratic chaos to pseudodemocracy run by the Cheka, women came out of the back room. Some flaunted their sex and control over the oligarchs who rivaled the Politburo bosses in coarseness but showered their newfound ornaments with gifts and wore them like prizes—often two, three, four at a time—on their arms. Tamara Konycheva’s predecessors.

  Others excelled in sports and culture. Still others made their mark in business and professions such as journalism. Many of the crusaders who have been cut down for carrying the flame of truth close enough to scorch the powers that be were female. Still others, if Irina Lishina was any indication, had a talent for crime.

  Given the history and the lawless, dog-eat-dog society in which she grew up, it wasn’t all that astonishing that Irina thought she could single-handedly one-up the BEC. Her father had helped start it, maybe died because of his role. She’d almost certainly witnessed his murder. Her uncle and stepfather were successful crooks. One of them likely killed her old man. One of them screwed teenaged girls. This was her world. Her actions began to appear totally consistent—an eye for an eye, a wound for a wound, a corpse for a corpse. She’d show she could dish out as much pain as she received.

  She’d found a willing agent in Andras. I was betting she had others. I was hoping I wasn’t acting as one more. I couldn’t swear that I wasn’t.

  A good time to watch my back—just like I told myself two weeks ago at Trastevere.

  CHAPTER 51

  Nothing was stirring on Route 44, the main road through Millbrook, at 8:00 P.M. Snow kept falling. I stopped and put down the window a mile north of town. As dark and still as I remembered Siberia to be—no houses, no cars, no lights, no sound. No sky either, just falling snow.

  Caldecott Lane was two miles farther on. It hadn’t been plowed, but I made it far enough in for the darkness to hide the Explorer from cars passing on the main road. My new boots sank six inches into fresh snow. Not for the first time, I bemoaned the fact that the sporting goods store hadn’t sold firearms. There are supposed to be more gun dealers in the United States than McDonald’s in the entire world, but Stamford was an empty room in the armory. I’d made do with a large hunting knife in a plastic scabbard and an aluminum baseball bat. The thought of either embedded in Nosferatu’s bucktoothed face wasn’t displeasing.

  I climbed a fence and strapped on my new snowshoes. I tucked the hunting knife into the waistband at the small of my back. Standing atop the accumulation of two storms, the top of the fence barely reached my knees. I set off at a clip that surprised me in ease and speed, at a thirty degree angle from Route 44. No moon, no stars, no lights. Just more snow. Even in the middle of an open field, I was invisible.

  I was fifty yards from Leitz’s place, climbing another fence, when the barn appeared. The drive in front had been plowed during this storm, but hours ago. It showed no tire tracks or footprints. I pressed on, veering north, around the back of the main house, until I reached the pool. I recognized it from the satellite map and the large rectangle of fence top peeking out of the snow. The guesthouse was on the other side, thirty yards away. Beyond that was the garage. The stately main house stood to my left, woods fifty yards to my right. My watch said 8:55.

  I waited a good ten minutes, watching, listening. Not a sound. Not a sight. Not a light. I could have assumed wrong and Irina didn’t have Uncle Oleg’s muscle here after all. More likely, the man—men?—were good and well hidden by the garage.

  I moved to the back door of the guesthouse and pressed myself to the building while I removed the snowshoes. The alarm panel showed green. I worked the key in the lock. It turned easily, and the door opened without a creak. I closed it softly and stood in the dark. The heat was on. The house was warm.

  I was in a small kitchen. I could make out a counter, stove and sink to my left. Table to my right. Fridge against the opposite wall. Door, cracked open, next to the fridge. More darkness beyond.

  Clutching my aluminum bat, I crossed the room in two steps and nudged open the door. Dining room—table and four chairs, fireplace in the left wall, and open French doors at the far end. Still no sound.

  I skirted the table to the French doors. A large L-shaped living room wrapped the front of the house. Two windows and a door opposite. The edge of the mantel on another fireplace, backing up on the one in the dining room to my left. Leather armchairs, a leather couch, lots of blankets and throws.

  I stood still, sensing someone there I couldn’t see on the other side of the “L.” I listened for breathing, a rustle of clothing, something. If she felt my presence, she was doing the same thing. The silence was broken only by the mild whip of the wind outside. Stalemate. Three to one she was just around the corner. Same odds she was armed. But I wasn’t the one she planned to kill. Or so I hoped. A bad bet. I took a breath and stepped into the room.

  She was sitting in the farthest corner, where I expected her to be. Her eyes were wide open and focused on me. Her face showed no surprise. A shotgun rested in her lap, the raised barrel pointed at my chest.


  “This is a twelve-gauge pump. I know how to use it. My father taught me. One more step and I will.”

  * * *

  “Put down the bat.”

  I did.

  “He couldn’t keep it shut, could he?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “I’m not stupid, Cheka Pig. Don’t treat me like I am.”

  “He’s trying to help.”

  She laughed. More of a bray—full of meanness, void of humor.

  “He’s always trying to help. A fool, but he’s served his purpose.”

  “What was that?”

  “You’re so smart, what do you think?”

  “Hacking the BEC?”

  She grinned.

  “Stealing the eight million?”

  The grin widened.

  “Placing the worm?”

  “That’s the best of all. That’s what really got…” The grin disappeared and she shifted in her chair. The shotgun didn’t move.

  “Enough, Cheka Pig. I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t. But I’m curious. That’s what really got—what?”

  She didn’t answer.

  She’d chosen her location with care. Tucked in the corner, she was out of the line of sight—and fire—from every window, unless someone leaned far in the big bay to her left, in which case she had him. She had a clear view of the front door. Anyone using the back would end up entering the room as I did—an easy target. She was wearing black jeans and a turtleneck. The gun in her hand didn’t shake or waver. She had a box of shells in her lap.

  “Waiting for your uncle?”

  Her eyes stayed fixed on me.

  “Who then?”

  Nothing.

  “He give you your scar?”

  She seemed to jump in her chair, then settled back down. The impassive mask returned. “What scar?” A touch of something new in her voice—surprise? Fear?

  “On your neck. I noticed it the other night, when we stopped at Burger King. I saw it on your WildeTime videos too—but only the recent ones.”

  “You’ve seen my videos?!” A possibility she hadn’t considered—and didn’t like.