by Matthew Hart
“I take it back,” he growled.
The pretense of a meeting under cover had evaporated. Neither took pains to keep a low voice. At the altar, the old priest soldiered on through the Mass. His flock, alarmed by the angry voices, stayed with him.
“Body of Christ,” he said, and the congregation bowed their heads.
I hadn’t seen Lavrov move until the young cop said, “the old guy.” Lavrov was already out of his seat and halfway to the Brazilian’s pew, hauling out an old Red Army Makarov semi-automatic as he went. It looked small in his enormous paw.
“I’m going to be very serious,” Lily said to the Brazilian. “I need you to not do anything too completely stupid.”
Lavrov’s pistol pointed at his ear.
With a flourish the priest removed a cover from the chalice and turned in a swirl of vestments to come around the altar to distribute communion. The old people at the front got to their feet and began to shuffle from the pews into the main aisle. Distracted by the movement, Lavrov’s attention flickered for the briefest moment. The Brazilian spun like a cat, leaning his head away from the gun and swiping his arm upward in a blur of speed. A bright red stripe opened from Lavrov’s chin to his forehead across the center of his left eye. The Makarov boomed and behind the altar a flight of angels exploded in a shower of stained glass.
“Tackle One,” the captain said into a microphone. “Disable suspect vehicle.” His voice was calm.
Lavrov slapped at his face. A piece of his eye slid out onto his cheek. He lost his balance and toppled backward. He fired the Makarov again and a statue of the Blessed Virgin beneath the wrecked window burst into a cloud of white powder.
Outside, a matte-black NYPD Crown Vic with no insignia, unless you counted the ramming grid on the front, shot out of a side street and accelerated toward the church. On the wide-angle view we had from a building two blocks away it didn’t look dramatic, but I wouldn’t want to have been sitting in that Escalade when the Crown Vic torpedoed its ass.
“Fucking Russians,” said the captain. “It’s always an Escalade.”
Lily was on her feet with her hand inside her jacket when the Brazilian’s hand flashed again. It swiped across her forearm. She got herself out of the way of the next slash, and by then she had the Glock in her good hand. The Brazilian tried to duck, but a round of Fiocchi Extrema comes out at a muzzle velocity of 975 feet per second. You’d have to be pretty fast. A dime-sized hole appeared in the Brazilian’s forehead and the back of his head blew off.
The priest stood rooted to the sanctuary steps, the chalice in one hand and the pale disk of a communion wafer in the other. He was still staring back over his shoulder at the blown-out window and the haze of plaster dust.
Holding her injured arm Lily staggered into the aisle and ran to a side entrance.
“She’s screwed,” the captain said. “That door is permanently locked. I checked it myself,” he added. Unwisely. She disappeared through the door.
Lavrov’s wife climbed to her feet and hobbled to her husband’s side. She had swollen ankles and wore elastic compression stockings. She stooped and picked up the Makarov and handed it to him, giving him a little pat on the arm as she did. He struggled to his feet and they made their way up the aisle to the main door. Lavrov had one hand over his eye and blood streaming onto his neck, but other than that they looked like any elderly couple coming out of a church to find cops hauling Russians out of an SUV and spreading them face down on the road. I could see the Portuguese backup disappearing around a corner. Lavrov waved the Makarov in the direction of the street and fired. A cop with his knee on a captive’s back rolled away in a spasm of agony. Lavrov’s wife opened her big purse and pulled out a Stechkin machine pistol. Those big Stechkins have twenty rounds in the magazine and can fire them all in 1.6 seconds flat. You have to pull the trigger, though, and before she could, she caught a high-impact round from a sniper on a roof across the street. It’s true that she wore a Kevlar vest, but, fatally, not a Kevlar hat.
Slav Lily came out the side of the church and disappeared behind the white rectory next door.
“Tackle Two,” the captain said beside me, “target exited church south side. Apprehend target rear of house.”
“Copy that,” the speaker crackled, and the second Crown Vic appeared, gunning out of Ocean View Avenue and bouncing up onto the rectory lawn. It slewed badly on the rain-slicked grass. The driver twisted the wheel and tried to accelerate out of the spin, but the front end smacked sideways into a thick maple and erupted in a cloud of steam.
“Tackle Two—what the fuck?” the captain screamed.
The doors sprang open and four guys in full tac tumbled out and sprinted for the house.
“Have we got a camera behind that house?” I asked the young cop.
“Negative,” he said, stunned by the disaster snowballing out of control on the screens.
“There’s no way out back there,” the captain said, but I think we both knew how much faith to put in that.
“Close the net,” I told him as I tossed my headset on the console and hurried outside.
My driver’s black Yukon was backed up to the trailer with the passenger door already open. The Yukon was the model with the 6.2-liter V8 engine. The driver was a former wheelman for a smash-and-grab gang. We were going eighty-five down Surf Avenue by the time I got my seatbelt fastened.
“Tackle Three,” I heard on the speaker, “Tackle Three, come in,” followed by an unintelligible burst of noise.
“Where is she?” I said.
A terse crackle came from the police-band monitor mounted on the dash.
“There’s a motorcycle on the beach. They think it’s her.”
Over the radio came a staccato of laconic monosyllables as units moved to take up positions that transformed Brighton Beach into a trap. Picture Brooklyn sticking a sandy tongue into the Atlantic Ocean: that’s Brighton Beach. Two bridges and a neck of land is all that joins it to the mainland, and we had those choked tight. Speeding further out toward the tip of the tongue, Lily was moving ever deeper into the trap.
The Yukon had strobes in the grill and one of those fire-truck horns that are supposed to clear even New Yorkers out of the way. But Brighton Beach is to the Russian mob what Little Italy was to the Mafia. Flashing lights and a blaring horn made no impression on the stolid drivers plugging the road.
The driver cranked the Yukon into a sharp turn, banged across the sidewalk, and barreled up a flight of concrete steps. We blew across the boardwalk and onto the beach. Offshore, a sudden breeze was prying apart the overcast and piling it into stacks of cloud against the bright blue sky. A hard, silvery light enameled the surface of the ocean.
The truck wallowed and rocked through the sand. The driver’s face wore a beatific expression. His bejeweled hands gripped the steering wheel. Far ahead along the shore, two NYPD squad cars shot out of a street and onto the beach and churned off eastward, fishtailing through the sand. Ahead of them the red dot that was Slav Lily sped along the dark waterline and into a patch of light. The water shelving on the sand gleamed like polished glass.
I studied the map on the dashboard screen. There was no way out, the beach ended. After that there were some streets of houses, and then the channel out of Sheepshead Bay into the Atlantic.
“She might be able to dodge around in there for a while,” I said, “but she can’t get out. There aren’t any bridges across Sheepshead Bay. There’s a line across the water, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Line?” the driver said.
He stabbed the brakes and slewed the Yukon around in a hard turn that ended with the front wheels parked on the boardwalk.
“That line—it’s a footbridge.” A look of wonder transformed his sagging face. “Jeez, I forgot about that.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “Smart girl. She’s going to tie the pursuit into knots out there at the end of the beach, and then cut back to the bridge. It’s only a footbridge, but it could take a motorcycle
.” He looked at me. “If she gets across that bridge, she’s out.”
We thumped down off the boardwalk and went racing back along the beach. Five minutes later we had rounded the bottom of Sheepshead Bay and come up the other side, just in time to see a red motorcycle fly into view on the far side of the water. She almost made it past a car that was coming toward her on the wet street, but at the crucial moment it went through a puddle, and the sheet of spray smacked Lily off the bike. She hit the pavement and slid along the surface. The motorcycle plunged over the seawall. Lily picked herself up and stumbled to the footbridge. She held her injured arm straight down by her side, and in that hand she had the Glock. Her other hand was clasped tight to her forearm where the Brazilian had cut her. I got out of the Yukon and headed for the bridge.
Just then a police car with its siren wailing skidded to a halt. Two cops jumped out with their weapons drawn. Lily had reached the middle of the wooden bridge. She stopped, put her back to the railing, and hooked a heel on the lowest rung. She looked like someone posing for an ad.
The rain was heavier now. Her hair was plastered to her head. Black tendrils curled around her elvish ears. Her lips were gray. She locked her eyes on mine and smiled wanly before she arched her back across the railing and toppled over, splashing into the water a few yards from a rigid inflatable with twin 150-horsepower Mercury outboards that slid out from under the bridge. I could see how weak she was when they dragged her in, but she had enough strength to fire three quick rounds. A wooden post disintegrated, spraying my face with splinters. Lily disappeared up the channel and into the thickening rain.
2
Well that was the trifecta,” Tommy Cleary shouted as we came down the West Side Highway. “Russian gun moll disappears with the diamond, you get spattered in the face with wood chips, and the NYPD wants your head on a platter, which, knowing your boss, they will probably get.”
The canvas convertible top snapped and rippled in the wind, but Tommy didn’t really have to yell. He was just in a bad mood.
“I’m telling you, amigo,” he said, stabbing a finger the size of a bratwurst at me, “I hope you’re not counting on moving to a bigger office any time soon. My advice: Check the fine print on your employment contract.”
What was really making Tommy mad was that I hadn’t said a word about the $10,000 paint job on his 1957 Cadillac Eldorado. It had taken him months to locate a body shop that could recreate the original Dakota Red. They’d done the upholstery too and enameled the dash. A company in San Diego had cast a reproduction eighteen-inch Brougham steering wheel—add four grand just for that.
“And before I forget,” he added, “your trashed face? That is not a hero look. It’s a loser look.”
Tommy was a former federal prosecutor now attached to our unit. He specialized in supplying the dense legal reasoning that gave our bosses in Washington cover when we did something embarrassing. So he was mad about that too. I wasn’t the only one who was going to have a busy day.
I saw Tommy check his appearance in the rearview. He had recently traded in his dreadlocks for a close-to-the-head redesign, dyed blonde. Surprisingly, it made him look fiercer, even with the lilac bowling shirt that billowed against his black skin.
“I thought this operation was supposed to be planned to the nth degree,” he said.
“I’m not the one who suddenly moved it up.”
Tommy snorted.
“Be sure to mention that. We’ll see where it gets you. Veteran field agent with full control on the ground and big-time resources messed up because the operation was advanced.” He raised a hand and let it fall heavily on the steering wheel. “I’ll try to think of something nice to say at the funeral.”
It was going to be a long morning.
We hit a dip in the road. The Caddy sank and then rose again like a fairground ride. It was sprung too soft for a car that weighed more than two tons. I knew better than to open my mouth about it. One word and Tommy would start telling me about the Hydra-Matic transmission and the 364-cubic-inch engine.
Powerful gusts buffeted the car and lashed the Hudson River into whitecaps. Across the river a hydrofoil pulled away from the ferry terminal and dashed downriver for the Battery, slamming and shuddering through the waves. People save on their income tax by living in New Jersey. This morning they were going to pay for it.
“And another thing,” Tommy said as we shot through the amber light at Fifty-Seventh Street. “The pink that showed up last night? I can feel the headache coming on already.”
So could I.
The target of our operation was a hood named Sergei Lime. That’s who Lily worked for. Lime had deep roots in Russian organized crime. With an American father, he had dual citizenship, and at the moment was living in New York. What caused my bosses worry were Lime’s ties to an American billionaire named Harry Nash.
Nash and Lime were both connected to a hedge fund from which Nash had recently bought a diamond. A fantastically rare and previously unknown jewel, and—here’s where the problem was coming from—also a pink.
Normally, no problem. The investigation of one target leads to another. You look for the links between them. Lime was a known criminal. He and Nash had business ties. A pink diamond shows up in an operation against Lime. Nash has a pink diamond too. Maybe more than a coincidence. So we open a file on Nash, tap his phone, and rummage through his bank accounts. However, we didn’t. The reason we didn’t was that Nash was running for office.
The Oval Office.
* * *
We got off the highway at Forty-Fourth Street. Tommy shoehorned the Caddy into a no-parking zone between two NYPD patrol cars. He slapped a piece of cardboard onto the dash and we climbed out. The sign said UNITED STATES TREASURY—OFFICIAL BUSINESS. But that wouldn’t stop a New York cop from writing a ticket. What stopped them was that back in his twenties, before his left knee blew out and he went to law school, Tommy had been a New York Jet, and at a flyweight 205 pounds, the fastest and meanest linebacker in the NFL. In New York City, where people rank you by the damage you can do, Tommy had more fans than Joe Namath. Every cop in the city knew what kind of car he drove. Tommy could park in Times Square, catch a show, and go for a late dinner; the Caddy would be waiting there when he got back.
The diner was full of cops, as usual. Tommy waded through the tables, slapping hands, until we reached the corner banquette.
“Let’s put Nash aside for now,” he said, sliding onto the seat and opening his briefcase. “Let’s talk about your friend Lily.” He found the file and was slipping on his half-moon reading glasses when the waitress arrived with coffee.
We gave her our orders, and when she left, Tommy resumed.
“Liliana Petrovna Ostrokhova, aka Slav Lily. At age seventeen, goes to work at Russgem, Russian state diamond conglomerate. Trains as a diamond sorter in Mirny, Siberia, grading rough diamonds from the Siberian mines. After some personal adventures we won’t get into here, transfers to St. Petersburg for advanced training in polishing. Moves to Antwerp office, which is where she gets busted.” Tommy glanced at me over his glasses. “By you.”
He returned to the file.
“A year later she arrives in the United States and sets up as an independent diamond trader.”
He closed the folder as a week’s supply of protein and carbohydrates arrived in the form of scrambled eggs, breakfast steak, hash browns, pancakes, toast. Bagel on the side. Four little plastic tubs of peanut butter beside the bagel. Even the cops at the next table were impressed.
The waitress came back with my yogurt and banged it down in front of me with an expression of disgust. I didn’t like it any better than she did, but I’d promised my daughter to clean up my diet. Unfortunately, she’d translated what I’d hoped was a general, goal-based agreement into specific menu items.
Tommy put his glasses aside, picked up his knife and fork, and began to whittle his way through the food.
“Everybody who reads your report is going to know
you’re running that girl. What they’ll also be asking themselves is who else she’s working for. Lime thinks she’s working for him. You think she’s working for you. Anybody else belong on that list?”
He speared a sausage and slathered on hot English mustard.
“Put simply,” he waved the sausage, “was the girl in the middle of a gunfight, stabbing, and general mayhem at a New York City church working for the bad guys, the good guys, and herself?”
I tried to get the waitress’s attention. The yogurt had thickened into a sort of mortar.
“You mean, does she sometimes trade illegal diamonds on her own? She’s a double, Tommy. How did you think that worked? She cooperates because we force her to. Since she’s cut a few corners in her life, and is now working for a crook, maybe we could look the other way if she takes care of herself while she’s at it.”
Tommy immersed himself in his email for a minute. I speared one of his sausages.
* * *
In the diamond business it’s easy to slip across the blurry line between the maybe legal and the definitely not. Lily had often slipped across it. One time I was waiting on the other side.
It was at Brussels airport. I let the Belgians grab her when she got off a flight from Banjul, the capital of Gambia, with a box of blood diamonds. The diamonds had originated in Sierra Leone. If you stuck a tap into Sierra Leone and turned it on, that’s what would come out—blood diamonds. Customs officers know that. So Lily had changed the country of origin to Gambia. Official Gambian government export licenses were stamped all over the parcel in bright red ink. She’d paid for those stamps. Her problem was—there aren’t any diamond mines in Gambia. And anyway, we had seeded that parcel with marked stones when it was put together in Sierra Leone.
Here’s how I flipped Slav Lily.
The Belgians waited outside the tiny room. It was one of those airless interrogation spaces designed to make the person being questioned feel trapped. A single table and two chairs. On one side of the table there’s lots of room. On the other—her side—you have to squeeze into a narrow space between the table and the wall. Lily slid into it as carelessly as if it were a sidewalk café downtown in the Grand Place and we were going to have a quick Kir before lunch. She gazed at me from her still, gray eyes, not even blinking as I dealt out onto the table, like a winning hand at cards, the black-and-white eight-by-tens. Each one digitally enhanced and so crisp you could see the straining muscles on the shackled men who worked the diamond digs.