CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Aeroflot 4217 landed ten hours later at its hub in Sheremetyevo International Airport 18 miles north-west of Moscow, and less than ten minutes taxi ride to Sheep Dog’s destination in Russia—a destination he had traveled to six times previously in his life. He had only his carry-on bag and a large black shoulder bag. He had no weapons and did not expect to need any. He walked out to the first cab in the queue and leaned into the driver’s open window.
He said to the cabbie, “You speak English?”
The cabbie shook his head. Sheep Dog turned and walked towards the second cab in the queue.
“Mebbe a leetle,” the cabbie called after him.
“Good. How much to Khimki Center?”
“200 rubles.”
This time Sheep Dog shook his head, “100,” he said, and the taxi driver had no doubt that he meant it.
“How about 150,” he whined. “I don make nothing with a 100.”
“I’m busy. 110 is it. If you wait for me at my stop, I’ll give you 200 for the return trip plus 50 for every half hour wait.”
The cabbie looked puzzled. His English was not good enough for the fast talking American or what ever he was. He shrugged his shoulders and frowned.
Sheep Dog smiled and said simply, “You take me. You wait. I pay, друг.”
The cabbie nodded and said equally simply, “отвечать.”
Sheep Dog took the man’s guttural answer for a ‘yes’, and the cabbie decided to take a chance that the man really meant, ‘friend’.
The traffic was lighter than usual on the Leningradskoe Shosse—the M-10. They were at the Khimki-Tverosky district in ten minutes, and at the city center in fifteen. The driver insisted on taking Sheep Dog a bit out of the way to drive past the Alley of Heroes in Novolyzhinskoe cemetery near the center and insisted on telling him all about it and the government’s decision to move the memorial. Sheep Dog directed him to the corner of Ulitsa Raskovy and Ulitsa Kalinina Roads and had him park around the corner on Kalinina.
Sheep Dog held up a handful of rubles and said, “Wait.”
That was the kind of English the driver understood, and he enthusiastically nodded ‘yes’.
Sheep Dog moved quickly back onto Raskovy and walked two grey buildings down and turned into the entry path. No sooner had he done so than two plug-uglies moved out of the entrance of the building. They both wore wife-beater shirts, and their arms, chests, and faces were heavily covered with Russian prison tattoos that announced to the world that they were Russkaya mafiya. The ex-cons referred to their survival tattoos as the Mark of Cain. One had a .45, and the other had an AK-47, and both barrels were aimed at Sheep Dog’s chest. He already knew that he was in a mafiya enclave. For all practicality, several sections of Khimki belonged exclusively to rich mafiyas, and they were fully protected by men for whom murder came as easily as slopping down a bowl of borscht and a tumbler of turnip vodka.
“What are you doing here,” the ugliest one demanded, his show of teeth revealing that he was a long-time meth user.
“English,” Sheep Dog said, confident that the man spoke his language from the American expressions on a couple of his inkographs.
The thug repeated his question, this time in English. He brandished his hand gun with a feverish menace. He truly wanted Sheep Dog to do something; so, he could fire.
“Yuri Yurievich” Sheep Dog said saying the man he had come to see’s given name and patronymic.
“Not one by thet name heer.”
“I’m busy. Get me to him.”
“Now you the boss?” he asked in guttural Russian.
The Kalashnikov wielder laughed heartily at his partner’s fine joke.
Sheep Dog fixed his pale hazel eyes on the thugs. He moved slowly forward. The thug waggled his pistol at the stranger. He lifted it to a direct chest aim. Sheep Dog patted aside the man’s gun hand as fast as a lightening bolt and bent his wrist backward so swiftly that the criminal did not see it happen, and was surprised when his wrist snapped, and fractured in a splintering spiral. Sheep Dog kept the screaming man in front of him as the other mafiya began bringing up the Kalashnikov up to fire. Sheep Dog dropped the first man, batted away the rifle barrel, and was behind the second man before he could register what had happened to him. Sheep Dog rendered him unconscious by sharply clapping his cupped palms over the man’s ears.
He leaned down and took hold of the Kalashnikov by the barrel, swung in over his head, and slammed the stock down on the concrete with such force that the barrel and the handle parted ways. He tossed it aside and picked up the first thug’s .45 and put it in his rear waist band. He stooped down so as to avoid injuring his back; it is always a good thing to lift properly, and took the skinny muling mafiya by the neck and lifted him to his feet.
“Now,” he said, “we go to see Yuri Yurievich.” knowing that he had just spoken a language the man understood.
The much chastened mafiya meekly walked ahead of the Sheep Dog. At the entrance to the apartment building, he spoke briefly to a cordon of six more guards giving sullen looks to Sheep Dog, but they parted to let him past. Someone took the young man with the broken wrist to a side room to deal with the fracture. The cordon closed behind him as Sheep Dog ascended the stairs. The building’s exterior belied the interior. Outside was all grey drab Stalinist concrete, small windows, and harsh angles with little in the way of vegetation to add color or to offset the menace. Inside—however—even the stairways were attractive in the style of a wealthy czarist Russia that was now largely gone. The stair wells were brightly lit; the walls were papered with scenes of gold Cossack horsemen on a blue background. The stairs themselves had a blue veined white stone facing. Brightly polished mahogany railings helped the unsteady to mount the steep and narrow stairs all the way to the third floor.
The door to Yuri’s quarters and world was open. The entire floor was one large room, and that room could have been one of the last czar’s second homes. A thick plush red carpet lined the room wall-to-wall. The walls were red with gold accents provided by multiple different wall paper patterns. The furniture and draperies were thick, heavy antiques, any one of which cost more than most of the guards made in a quarter of a year. Yuri was seated on a high-backed black leather computer swivel chair, the only item of furniture in the room that was not in the czarist/Stalinist red motif. He continued to peck away at a computer—one of five—on his immense desk area as Sheep Dog walked in.
Without a glance at the men following Sheep Dog, he said, “Go away,” and they went away.
Yuri Yurievich Chopiak was an interesting contrast to the rest of the men hovering around the Khimki apartments. He was fifteen years old, had long, clean, blond hair and was slender to the point of delicacy. He was dressed in trendy Los Angeles teen-ager garb complete with heather colored flip-flops. He had rings on every one of his long pianist’s fingers, piercings in his ears, lower lip, and tongue; and he had no tattoos. The boy had never been to prison, a fact which set him apart from the lower rungs of life that surrounded him. Yuri was under the full protection of Iosif Zaslavsky who was every bit the equivalent of the Cosa Nostra capo di tutti capi in Sicily. Over the years two of Zaslavsky’s underlings had made the mistake of considering the delicate boy to be a tasty morsel. Their ham-strung bodies left hanging from a bridge served as an indelible life’s lesson to all successive mafiya who might have had such evil thoughts, and Yuri led a charmed life in the inner gangland circle.
It was not some sort of father-son or uncle-nephew love that protected the boy. Rather, he was an incredibly valuable asset. Yuri Yurievich Chopiak—a gutter-snipe in origin—was the world’s most accomplished hacker—a genuine genius. He could go anywhere he wanted in the cyber world. A substantial segment of Hunter Caulfield’s Starbright Corporation effort had been to thwart Yuri’s activities. That effort was largely a failure, and it had been Hunter’s brain-child to hire the boy rather than to fight him. Starbright paid Yuri a retainer fee
of $500,000 a year not to do his work, at least not to do it against Starbright’s clientswho were more often than not—agencies weremore often than notagencies of the United States federal government. Zaslavsky, one of Russia’s remaining 1.5 million Jews, happily accepted the half million dollar stipend as a welcome addition to the gang’s wealth, especially since they really did not need to hack into U.S. government agencies with any frequency; so, there was very little in the way of a down-side.
Hunter knew that Yuri was not above being a double-agent and double-dipper, and maybe, at times, a triple-agent; but for the most part had honored the bargain with Starbright Corporation. Hunter had made several trips to Khimki over the years to have a chat with his Russian asset, and on more than one occasion had paid the boy a little extra to do some expert hacking for him and his company. That was the reason for today’s visit.
“Hello, Yuri,” Sheep Dog said.
“Hello, Hunter,” Yuri answered in his quiet teenager’s voice, “what brings you out slumming?”
“I missed you.”
“Sure you did. You’ve become quite the world celebrity. I keep up with the news, you know.”
“Okay, Yuri, in actual fact, I have some business for you.”
“I’m hurt. What do you want me to do?”
Hunter explained in detail and handed Yuri a photograph, two sheets of explanatory prose, and a throw away cell phone which was identical to one he carried.
“Don’t do a thing until I get in touch.”
“This sounds like more than my regular retainer. Given your international fame, am I to expect something from a source other than Starbright?”
“I have several parts of this assignment, Yuri; I have personal sources of funds; and I will pay you handsomely when the work is done. Depending on whether or not I have to do everything I have in mind I will pay you in excess of a million American.”
Hunter Caulfield had never played the cabbie-to-client haggling game with Yuri and neither had failed to deliver on their end of bargains. Sheep Dog had no intention of changing that paradigm.
“You know me, Yuri, we have trust with each other.”
In Yuri’s precarious world, trust was an exceedingly rare commodity. His mind calculated the risk/benefit ratio and found in favor of Hunter. He had never had a reason to doubt before.
“Do we have a deal, my friend?” Sheep Dog asked pointedly.
“We do. Send the money through the usual channels. You will be able to check my work on your toy computer.”
“I’ll keep close tabs on it,” Sheep Dog said. “You might have deduced from my little entrance performance, that I am not one to be trifled with.”
“Um hmmh,”
In Yuri’s sphere, there were very few men to be ‘trifled with’, and almost none who stayed alive were unwary. There old mafiyas, bold mafiyas, but almost no old, bold mafiyas. He supposed it was much the same with the people with whom Hunter Caulfield now worked and his former U.S. government employers.
Hunter shook Yuri’s slim hand and left him to his work. He descended the stairway and left the building and apartment complex without interference. The cabbie was waiting patiently where Sheep Dog had left him and was keeping a precise record of the waiting time on a small grimy notebook he kept on the passenger side seat of his cab.
Sheep Dog had him go directly back to the Novotel Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport Hotel. This time they were driving in rush hour, and the fifteen minute trip took almost two hours. Had Sheep Dog had a flight to catch, he would have missed it. At the hotel entrance, he gave the patient and faithful cab driver 600 rubles, a gross overpayment.
“Tenk you much, tenk you very much.”
“My друг, I have paid you well. I come back to Москва several times a year, and we may meet again. Forget you ever saw me; do you understand?”
“Yes, друг, even now I forget you.”
Anyone who came and went in that part of Khimki Center unscathed was one worth forgetting.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Olivia Perez was busy scrubbing the kitchen tile and carrying on a one-sided, order driven conversation with her husband.
“Daniel, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said perfunctorily.
He was absorbed in a piece of work on his computer.
“I said, I want you to move the Grand Canyon to Iowa this afternoon.”
“Yeah, wait’ll I get done with this.”
Olivia got up off her knees and marched over to the computer and pulled the plug.
“Hey, you’ll wreck the thing. It cost three thousand bucks, if you recall?” Daniel yelped. “You made me lose everything I just wrote. Jeez!”
Daniel could not get angry with Olivia. She was his mainstay and life’s love. But, she was exasperating at times. Lots of times.
“So, what’s so important?”
He was inclined to swear; but the house rule—Olivia’s rule—was no swearing; and Daniel obeyed that one to the letter as long as he was on their property.
“I have six honey-dos, dear,” she said sweetly. “I have had these six honey-dos on my list for just about that many weeks. How about you make me real happy and do them today. You got plenty of time. For one day, the PRUC stuff can wait. The hearing isn’t for three more weeks, and you know they’ll just get another continuance. Take a break.”
“How happy would it make you if I did those honey-dos, Livy?”
“It would make me happy.”
“How happy?” he asked with his boyish grin.
“That happy,” she said and rolled her eyes.
The door bell rang.
“You get it, Livy; I have to restart my computer.”
Olivia sighed in resignation knowing the moment was past. He would be able to put it off again.
She pulled aside the curtain on the side window to get a peek at who was ringing the bell at this time of day. She saw an innocuous looking stoopshouldered, ponchy, balding late middle-aged black man in a frumpy grey suit standing there fussing with a folder of papers. She opened the door.
“Good morning, Mrs. Perez. I hope I’m not disturbing, but I need to speak with Mr. Perez.”
“What about? If you have something to sell, we don’t need it. If you are collecting for a charity, we already gave. If you’ve got a bill for us, you came to the wrong house.”
Sheep Dog laughed, “None of the above. I have a message for Mr. Perez.”
“What’s it about?”
“Please, ma’am, would you tell Mr. Perez that one of his old partners has come by with a message from Roger Ward in Viet Nam.”
Just hearing the name—Viet Nam—gave her a small shiver. Nothing good ever came from anyone who mentioned that country directly in reference to her husband. She and Daniel had married soon after he came back from the war and had settled in this same Alhambra neighborhood. Then, it was a pleasant place with neat rows of houses, trees, lawns, and gardens. People left their doors unlocked, the keys in their car’s ignitions, and their garage doors open.
She and Daniel raised six kids there, and he was able to heal the wounds from the time in the jungle. They weren’t wounds you could see, and it had taken him over twenty-five years to let the infection of PTSD out bit by bit. She hated anything or anyone who brought it up again. Daniel was a changed man. Over the years with a normal wife, a normal family, a normal job, he had lost the jerky tension, the night terrors, and the habit of always looking back over his shoulder.
When the gangs began to move in, the citizens began to move out, but not Daniel and Olivia. When the houses and yards turned to graffiti and trash, Daniel’s and Olivia’s had remained clean, neat, regularly painted, and the yard trim and presentable. When the violence and drive-by shootings became the order of the day, Daniel Gonzalo-Perez’s family, house, cars, and person stayed safe. That was because Daniel had established from the get-go that no one threatened his family or his place. She was not sure what had happened exactly, but afte
r that day, she became aware that her husband was treated with deference, and his family with respect. More than one gang-banger had been overheard to say, “man, that one is nobody to mess with. El no está un hombre; ese es El Diablo proprio.”
“Come in,” she said with some reluctance.
Sheep Dog stepped just inside the entryway.
“Wait here.”
She walked back into his office and said to Daniel, “There’s one of them here to see you. Says he has a message from somebody named Roger Ward from Viet Nam. Daniel, be careful.”
“I’m always careful, Livy, you know that.”
She did; but still, it was her job to worry about her good man.
Daniel did not recognize the African-American standing in his doorway.
“I’m Daniel Perez.”
He offered his hand.
“Who might you be?”
“Roger Ward called you a while back. Do you remember.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m the guy he talked about.”
“I don’t remember any black guys with the Program.”
“There weren’t any. This a bit of Hollywood. I’m Hunter Caulfield. That name ring a bell, Daniel?”
It certainly did, and even the voice had some familiarity.
“If you’re Hunter Caulfield, you’re in a heap of trouble, I understand. The cops seem to think you’re a number one bad guy.”
“That’s me, Daniel. Mind if we come in and sit down. I just got off a long flight, and this disguise stuff is hot.”
They sat in the old-fashioned parlor on furniture from central casting for a 1940s Argentine movie. It was cool, dimly lit, and comfortable. Olivia brought in some cherry lemonade. Sheep Dog took ten minutes to explain something about what he had been doing, and how The Company had turned against him and made him the hunted instead of the hunter.
Sheep Dog and the Wolf Page 41