The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  DECISION: OPEN FILE ON NASH.

  We stared at the screen in a frozen silence. Finally I looked at Chuck. “You programmed this thing to open investigations?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Alex, it makes suggestions,” he said. I could hear the panic. “The idea was to make our decisions more data-driven. To remove even the shadow of a suggestion that politics could influence an investigation.”

  “How’s that been going?”

  He tapped his keyboard and the screen slid up into the ceiling.

  “It’s still in the beta phase,” he said nervously. “We can override it.”

  The lights went up, the outside windows cleared, and the lock clicked open on the door.

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one. The searches are logged at FinCEN, but only the searches. Not the conclusions.”

  I didn’t say anything. We both knew how ridiculous that statement was. FinCEN was part of the Treasury. The secretary was the president’s friend. It wouldn’t take the White House long to find out Harry Nash was tied into an investigation.

  Chuck looked trapped. He paced across the office and stared at some prints on the wall. He turned and paced back. Chuck didn’t mind the smell of blood in the water, as long as it was someone else’s. In the plan for today, it was supposed to be mine. But he had put his fingers into the operation, and he was now understanding where that placed him. Between the president of the United States and the man trying to replace him.

  “So I guess we know why the secretary sent that blue,” I said.

  He seized his hair in both hands.

  “We are not investigating a presidential candidate!”

  “Tell them at the White House,” I said. “I guarantee they already know about the searches. They are going to be asking if the searches are part of an investigation. And while we’re on the subject of investigation, is now a good time to tell me why you advanced the operation?”

  “I developed my own source.”

  “Please don’t tell me you put an agent in the field without me knowing.”

  “I asked Amy Curtain to have a look around in Brighton Beach.”

  I stared at him. “You’re joking. Amy Curtain? She’s not an agent.”

  “She passed the Basic Field Training Course at Quantico.”

  “The BFT? That means she knows how to shoot a gun and read a map. It doesn’t mean she’s ready to be dropped behind enemy lines at night with a supply of invisible ink and the cyanide capsule in case she’s caught.”

  “She speaks fluent Russian.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She was a trainee officer on FinCEN’s Russia desk until they rotated her here to help with the intercepts. She’s not a spy. She translates intercepted Russian phone calls. She did Slavic Studies at Yale, so I guess she speaks OK Russian and can tell you about Peter the Great.”

  “She’s missing,” he said.

  “You mean you had a contact protocol and she missed it?”

  Chuck took a file from his tray and opened it.

  “Interrupted phone call,” he said.

  “She was reporting and broke off the call?”

  Chuck nodded.

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “The day before you advanced the operation.”

  “She said that Lime was making what looked like an important contact.”

  “And she was interrupted?” Chuck just looked at me, so I added the obvious. “You understand this is bad.”

  “I’ve notified security.”

  “Well, now we can all relax.” I tapped out a quick message to Tabitha asking her to pull a list of all the operatives we had available in New York City. “You’ve reported this up to the secretary?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid it will become political.”

  “Surely not,” I said. “An agent disappears investigating a Treasury target. The target is a business associate of the man most likely to take the presidency away from the treasurer’s boss, the sitting president. You can’t think our superiors would use that information for crass political motives.”

  “Heap it on,” Chuck said. “But Washington is a dangerous town. The president fears he’s going to lose the election. He will try to take Nash down. It’s not going to be pretty, and we’ll be in the middle of it.”

  I got up and snatched the file from the desk. “It’s Amy Curtain who’s in the middle of it,” I said angrily, and went back to my office to do what I could. I had an ugly feeling it wasn’t going to be enough.

  4

  That night, thin gray clouds slipped through the sky like thieves, stealing the last of the day. The streets filled with the nylon light of evening in New York.

  The crowd flowed along the sidewalk like a serpent, coiling and uncoiling from street to street as it made its way to Lincoln Center. Harry Nash and Honey Li were coming to the ballet. Thousands of people were streaming through the street to see them. And the diamond.

  The police were funneling the crowd into a network of steel barricades. White city dump trucks loaded with sand blocked the intersections around Lincoln Center. Not a taxi, not a private car moved anywhere inside the cordon. Counterterrorism cops in black helmets and body armor held stubby submachine guns in their black-gloved hands.

  “It’s like the Macy’s Parade, except a thousand times stupider,” my daughter said as she tottered along beside me through the crowd. She’s a big kid, and not used to heels. Especially those stilettos she’d talked her mother into letting her wear.

  It was Annie’s fifteenth birthday. We were going to see Sara Mearns dance the Lilac Fairy in the New York City Ballet’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. With the stilettos, Annie wore a shimmery silver dress with spaghetti straps and a ragged hemline that looked as if it had been ripped off between her knees and waist. Last year it was Madison Square Garden for the New York Rangers, this year the Lilac Fairy and the heels. They change. But Annie wasn’t talking about the ballet. She’d decided that what I needed most was an enumeration of the assets of my ex-wife’s new friend.

  “He has a Jaguar XKE. That’s a famous kind of English car that’s very expensive and they don’t make them anymore. They can go very fast. But he doesn’t drive it fast because he’s a true gentleman. He has a very caring disposition.”

  It was news to me that gentlemanliness and a caring disposition were high on the male asset list of teenage girls, so I guessed I was hearing someone else’s assessment.

  “Where did your mom meet him?”

  “Miss Harington’s summer party. He came over from West Point. That’s a famous school where people go for army training.”

  “And bad haircuts.”

  “Now that,” said Annie, sounding exactly like her mother, “is what you always do. You’re sarcastic. It’s called a ‘black sense of humor.’ You get it from being a spy.”

  “I’m not a spy, Annie.”

  She stopped in her tracks and whirled and grabbed me by the arm. She stared into my eyes with a look that I know was meant to be deeply meaningful.

  “Dad, you can be yourself with me.”

  Then she let go and tottered off again.

  “He’s called Colonel Tim Vanderloo. That’s a very old name in New York State.”

  “Tim is?”

  But she ignored me.

  To advance through the police check points and avoid being herded behind the barricades, we had to show our tickets. I got tired of waiting while the cops examined them, and started just flashing my Treasury ID instead. It has a gold shield and the diagonal red stripe that means a top clearance.

  The security around Lincoln Center—I’m glad it wasn’t my job. Nash had not yet won the nomination, but there was no one in his way. His opponents had withdrawn one by one. The nominating convention was going to be a coronation. People with a chance of becoming president are protected by the Secret Service, and in New York by the NYPD too.

  A couple of Secret Servi
ce guys were standing at the NYPD checkpoint where Annie and I entered the plaza on the north side. They were scrutinizing everybody through their shades. One guy seemed to be in charge. Tall and heavyset, with a freckled face and bald head. He took my pass from the cop who was looking at it, and took off his sunglasses. His eyes were colorless. He had a pig’s nose, pushed up like a snout, but maybe I just didn’t like him.

  “Stand over there,” he said to me, pointing in one direction. No “sir,” and I can tell you I outrank anybody so low on the ladder he’s on VIP security. He pointed a thick finger at Annie.

  “You, stand over there.”

  And hey, she’s a teenager, but she’s still a kid, and suddenly she looked afraid. That’s because he meant her to be afraid. So right away things started to go off. I stepped very close to him, into his space.

  “She’s my daughter,” I said, speaking straight at his face. “We’re together.”

  He stared at me with those empty, washed-out eyes, then jerked his chin at one of the agents beside Annie.

  “Let me see her purse.”

  The agent put his hand on her arm, and she stepped back. It was reflexive, a recoil, but he grabbed her. I must have telegraphed that I was going to intervene, because the first agent reached for me. I shot my hand under his nose and shoved up hard. He staggered back with tears streaming from his eyes. I was already heading for the guy with his hand on Annie when six huge NYPD cops just kind of flowed into the middle of the situation like someone had poured them from a drum. They filled up all the spaces so we couldn’t move. One of them peeled the Secret Service guy off Annie like picking lint from a sweater. Suddenly I couldn’t move. Something hard jabbed me in the ribs.

  “One move outta youse, wise guy, and I’ll spray your guts into that fountain.”

  I turned my head to look into Anthony DeLucca’s large brown eyes. He blew on the barrel of his finger, twirled it and shoved it back in its imaginary holster.

  The Secret Service guy was boiling with rage.

  “I’m Agent-in-Charge Rhinelander,” he spluttered at DeLucca. “The security of this location is under my direct command.”

  “I’ll be sure to mention that to the deputy commissioner who thought he was running things from his command post inside the Met,” DeLucca said.

  He was a tall, sad-looking man with curly black hair. He wore a shabby trench coat that smelled of cigarette smoke. He was a detective captain, and had come up through the ranks. After 9/11 the NYPD sent him to the US Army intelligence training center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and now he worked in counterterrorism. Terrorists need money, and DeLucca’s beat included money laundering. We sometimes worked together on joint operations.

  I got my arm around Annie and gave her a squeeze. She was shaking. DeLucca turned to a cop and told him to make sure that Rhinelander could speak directly to the secretary of Homeland Security on the deputy commissioner’s hotline.

  “That won’t be necessary, sir,” Rhinelander said.

  “Sure it will,” DeLucca said.

  Then he turned to Annie.

  “Wow, honey—don’t tell me you’re this mug’s daughter. Lucky you didn’t get your looks from him.”

  She was still pretty shaky.

  “Annie, this is Captain DeLucca.”

  “Tell you what, honey,” DeLucca said. “This nice guy right here,” he grabbed a towering cop from the large supply still milling around us, “is going to take you to your seat. He’s going to make sure everybody bows and scrapes as you walk by in that knockout dress.”

  Annie was still biting her lower lip. DeLucca leaned close to her and said in a stage whisper, “I have to keep your dad. It’s essential to the safety and wellbeing of the United States, and I need to get him to a phone booth quick so he can change into his Superman suit.”

  That did it. With a huge grin, Annie wobbled off beside the giant.

  The white travertine concert halls of Lincoln Center emit a special glow in twilight. Usually thronged with theatergoers, tonight the great square lay like a gleaming, empty rink. Those with tickets were directed by security to go straight in, and the only people on the wide expanse were uniformed cops and guys in dark coats and sunglasses muttering into their lapels.

  DeLucca surveyed the scene. I could see him checking out the spotters on the roof of the Met, raking the crowd with their binoculars. Beside each spotter, just visible at the roofline, the silhouette of a sniper with his rifle at the ready.

  People who had paid a fortune for their tickets packed the outside terrace that overlooked the square. A few might have actually come for the ballet, but most of them wouldn’t know the Lilac Fairy if she stopped them on the street and asked for a light. They were here for Honey Li. And the pink.

  “That Secret Service asshole was waiting for you.”

  “You know these VIP guys, Anthony. They get carried away.”

  DeLucca took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and tapped out a cigarette. He put it between his lips. Then he took it out again and examined it, shook his head sadly and put it back in the pack.

  He gave me a cold look.

  “You are not a sharing person, Alex. You keep things to yourself. That’s fine with me, except when we’re working on a joint investigation. Then when you keep things to yourself, I am more inclined to think of it as obstruction.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Oh, you’re sure. You were blown wide open in that church. You heard something that convinced you to advance the operation. It blew up in your face. Normally my position would be, I couldn’t care less. When I do care is when it blows up in my face too.”

  He had a right to be mad. He was the guy carrying the can for an old lady gunned down on the street right in front of the church where an innocent “tourist” got shot in the head when a drug deal went bad. That’s what the NYPD was trying to get the press to swallow: murderous druggies, Brazilian tourist at his morning devotions, old lady caught in the crossfire. They couldn’t very well say it was a secret Treasury operation that had gone sour, because the taxpayer wasn’t supposed to know that the people who printed their money had guys like me working for them, or that NYPD snipers and tac units would be giving us a hand.

  “It wasn’t my decision,” I said.

  “No shit. I sort of figured that out, on account of you looking like a total asshole at the end of it. It seemed more likely to me that it was the brainchild of master spy Charles Chandler III, and that you were simply the dope sent to sit in the command truck so you could have a really good look at how completely Lime had you taped.”

  A radio crackled. A cop beside DeLucca tilted his ear to the receiver clipped to his shoulder. He pressed the acknowledge button.

  “Just crossed Fifth Avenue, captain.”

  DeLucca nodded. “Nash is on the way,” he said. “His motorcade is coming through the park.”

  Nash lived in a mansion on the Upper East Side. The easiest way for the NYPD to get him to Lincoln Center was straight through Central Park. With a motorcycle escort clearing traffic, he’d be here in minutes. We made our way to the center of the plaza.

  “That girl in the church who did the Houdini on us,” DeLucca said, “I have a feeling she’s not working solely for Lime.”

  “Who else would she be working for,” I said.

  DeLucca shrugged. “Fine, have it your way. My bet, that girl is a double. You turned her. Lime thinks she works for him, but in fact she works for you. So tell me, how’s that going so far?”

  The NYPD helicopter circling nearby shifted its position closer. Nash was almost here.

  “You know and I know, Alex, she’s a double agent for exactly as long as it takes Lime to figure out you turned her. Once he figures that out, he’ll either kill her or turn her again. The dividing line between a double agent and a triple agent is a narrow one, and for all you know, she’s already crossed it.”

  We stopped by the fountain in the middle of the plaza.


  DeLucca shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around and shook his head before he turned his sad brown eyes to me.

  “Here’s what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to have one of those conversations where I say what’s on my mind and you preserve your sphinxlike silence. The scenario tonight is not me the plodding gumshoe and you the uberspook. The scenario is two cops cooperating with each other so that one of them does not have to remind the other of the serious amount of shit he could rain down on your head by complaining to the short guy standing over there with the dignitaries.”

  He meant Bill Fitzgerald, the NYPD commissioner, an immaculate sparkplug nicknamed Silver Bill for his carefully coiffed gray hair. A former Boston cop, he was a tough policeman with a high regard for his own reputation, and a famously unsparing way with anyone who let so much as a speck of dust land on it. Chuck was too low on the pecking order for Silver Bill, but the secretary had gotten an earful. That was another reason for the overnight blue.

  We could hear the distant cheering of the crowd as the motorcade came out of the park onto West Sixty-Sixth Street. The route was packed all the way and the noise built quickly, rolling toward us like a wave as the first motorcycles appeared, followed by squad cars with their roof lights flashing, and at last, the row of gleaming black SUVs with blue and red strobes rippling in their grills.

  As the motorcade drew to a halt, the Secret Service detail jumped from the leading SUV and surrounded the Nashes’ car. At a signal, they opened the doors.

  Nash popped from the car and headed for the rope line, reaching into the crowd, shaking hands and scorching the cameras with his smile. Behind him, Honey Li oozed from the car as if she had been squeezed from a tube, lithe and smooth as paste. She wore a full-length silver sheath that made her skin look lustrous, and against that skin, like a jewel on a cushion, hung the Russian Pink.

  Honey Li brought the diamond to life. Her skin awakened it. The diamond poured its radiance into the night. It slung pink photons around the square and into the waters of the fountain. The fountain caught the spray of crimson light and scattered it into the sky. It was easy to see how the diamond had come to stand for the campaign. It was a synonym for the dash and brilliance of the couple themselves—rich, exotic, unmatchable.