Operator - 01

by David Vinjamuri

  I stop about twenty yards short of Drubich on the lower section of the walkway and lean over the railing, looking out at the Hudson as a small container ship drifts by. There’s a small, flesh-colored communication device in my ear, one that is a lot less noticeable than the jobs Secret Service guys wear, and I casually speak into it, keeping my voice low enough to fade into the blare of the traffic below.

  “Are you guys with me?”

  “This is Holland, we’re still where you left us,” he says.

  “Drive south and drop Brennan at 14th Street. He should enter the High Line Park and proceed north. Our target is standing right on top of 15th Street. Tell Brennan that when he spots Drubich, he should stay at least twenty yards away. I think our man is waiting for a meet. If I spot his contact, I’ll try to get in close and get a picture. Constantine could be here on unrelated business, but there’s a chance we’ll get what we came for.”

  “Okay, I read you – is there anything else?” Special Agent Holland asks.

  “Better call for reinforcements. If this doesn’t happen quickly and we can get someone into one of the buildings overlooking the park, I’d love to get audio on this.” I again get annoyed that we don’t have a real surveillance unit on Drubich. Unless we catch Constantine in a face-to-face meeting with the mysterious redheaded diplomat, overhearing any conversation he has is vital. Drubich might be untouchable because of his diplomatic immunity, but anyone he meets is fair game for the FBI.

  “Gotcha, I’ll see what I can do,” Holland says, his voice betraying some excitement. I wonder how long he’s been in the field.

  I turn south, making a show of watching a blonde in a clinging sweater who is approaching me, and start people watching. If at all possible, I want to spot Constantine’s contact as he makes his approach so I can move in while the two are first exchanging countersigns and less likely to notice me.

  I reach inside the lining of my raincoat. I’ve clipped a small remote control to an inside pocket meant for business cards that is sewn in near the waist. I slide a toggle switch on the small remote and a viewfinder appears inside the right lens of the clear Persol glasses. The lenses themselves are flat, as I do not need vision correction, but they make an excellent screen for the tiny camera hidden in the black frame. They also transform my persona, theoretically changing me from a bedraggled slacker into an urban hipster. Or so I guess. I don’t trust government-issued wardrobe in a place like New York because “the look” is so specific and changes so quickly. I’ve never believed the folks in Virginia have a perfect eye for details. In any city in the world I can do better by walking around until I find someone who looks the way I want to and asking him where he shops. I do like the raincoat, though.

  After ten minutes of watching, someone catches my eye: a man approaching from the north. He’s very conventional-looking, which makes him stand out in the lower Manhattan crowd. He’s a six-footer of medium build in a dark raincoat not too different from mine, with a dark suit underneath. His shoes are what catch my eye. They remind me of Dmitriev’s – they look like dress shoes on top but as he lifts his feet I can see a sturdy Vibram sole underneath. It’s the kind of thing a professional puts on when he needs to wear a suit but must be able to move quickly if necessary. I can also tell from the way he holds himself that he’s a military guy. It’s one of our weaknesses – those of us who spend most of our lives in the service. We get a certain upright bearing drilled into us and it becomes very hard to slouch like the rest of the world. That’s why most of us don’t do well at undercover work unless we hide ourselves under a shemagh and a thick wool coat.

  The man is less than a dozen feet from me when the Blackberry in my pocket vibrates. I pull it out, which serves as a good way to avoid making eye contact with the stranger. There’s sometimes an instinct that operators get about one another, a recognition that occurs when we lock eyes, and I don’t want that to happen here. I focus for a second on the Blackberry. The number is my mother’s. I frown, but press the red reject button to send the call to voicemail as I return the device to my pocket. When the stranger passes, I follow him, keeping behind an Orthodox Jewish couple, the man in a black fedora, the woman wearing a wig of straight brown hair. As we come within fifteen feet of Drubich – an acceptable range for the tiny camera in my Persol glasses, I briefly swivel to stare directly at Constantine, who doesn’t look back at me. Inside my coat pocket, my thumb flicks a toggle switch and a viewfinder appears in the right lens of my glasses. A scroll wheel enlarges the image. Having half of my vision temporarily magnified is an odd sensation and I have to repress the urge to close my left eye. Then I depress a button on the remote with my thumb and the image freezes for a second. I get a clear shot of Drubich. I relax fractionally, relieved that the unfamiliar device works as advertised. As I draw closer, I look away from him, focusing instead on the soldier a few paces in front of me. I’ll have to repeat the process if he’s really here to meet Drubich.

  Then I notice something. Just as he’s getting closer to Drubich, the operator slides his right hand inside his coat pocket. The gesture is efficient and calculated in its smoothness. It’s not something you ordinarily do when you’re approaching a contact unless your instructions are to light a cigarette or offer a piece of gum – both gestures that would look distinctly odd in this context. You normally want to keep your hands out in the open so the person you’re meeting won’t think you’re planning to shoot him. I instinctively step around the Orthodox couple, moving myself directly behind the operator. His hand emerges from his pocket just before he reaches Drubich and I glimpse the thin tip of a needle barely protruding from his fingers. At the same time, I see another man, larger and more solidly built than the soldier in front of me, approaching Drubich from the opposite direction. As I watch, the bigger man stops and turns towards Constantine, tapping him on the shoulder. Constantine pivots towards the larger man and away from me and the man with the needle. In that instant, the operator in front of me raises his left hand towards his mouth to cough, drawing attention from his other hand like a trained magician. As his right hand rises, I clearly see a palm-push syringe in his grasp. The hand snakes towards the Constantine’s neck, and I have a moment of total clarity. Drubich may think this is a meeting, but it’s really a hit. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s his own guys – another Spetznaz team – that are trying to kill him.

  Time slows to a crawl as I react. I see the soldier’s hand moving towards Constantine’s neck in slow motion, following a graceful arc. Meanwhile, the bigger man has leaned in towards Constantine, talking earnestly to distract him. I grasp the Russian operator’s hand at the last instant, just before the needle penetrates the skin on Drubich’s neck. I swiftly lock the wrist and bend it back on itself. With my other hand I immobilize his arm, which spasms as he loses control of it. Before he can react, I bend the arm back on itself, and the needle in his hand plunges into his own neck. I have a sudden feeling of awareness, like a flashbulb going off in front of me, and I dart sideways, letting go of the soldier. Just at that moment, I hear a scream as the Orthodox man behind me collapses in a heap, followed by the crack of a high-velocity rifle. I realize that a sniper is covering the Russian team on the ground.

  The operator I’ve forced to inject himself collapses immediately, folding like a stuffed doll to the ground. As he drops, I catch the eyes of the big Russian who is chatting with Drubich and see him pulling a small pistol, an SR-1 Vector from his coat. Taking a step forward, I push Constantine Drubich to the side with two fingers and step into the space between him and the big Russian. As Drubich stumbles backwards, a splash of blood erupts from his shoulder, and he hits the railing hard and slides down to a sitting position. There’s another crack of that high-velocity rifle. I step towards the big Russian who has his Vector almost in firing position and see that there is another man drawing a weapon five paces behind him. It’s a team of four, then – three on the ground and one with a sniper rifle. Accelerating, I step almost past
the big Russian, to the left. My left arm sweeps up under his right, hitting it at the nexus of a dozen nerves on the inside of the tricep and forcing the arm and the gun straight up in the air. Then as I straddle the man with my hips perpendicular to his, my right hand sweeps under his neck and I catch his Adam’s apple in the crook of my sweeping arm, reversing his momentum just at his point of balance. I point my outstretched right hand towards the ground and his head follows. At the same time, with my left hand, I’ve gripped his paralyzed right at the forearm, bending it backwards so that it points towards the third Russian, who is frozen in mid-stride, his weapon aimed at me. I dig my thumb and forefingers into the bundle of tendons in the middle of the big Russian’s forearm and the automatic in his hand explodes once, twice as he pulls the trigger involuntarily, hitting the third man in the middle of the chest, collapsing him instantly. Then I step my left foot back quickly like a matador and turn my extended right arm over, catching the big Russian’s neck under my elbow. Arching my back, I wrenched my elbow and feel a snap as I sever the man’s spinal cord. I look up. There’s an unfinished twelve-story building almost directly in front of me, one that the High Line runs directly through. It’s the ideal spot for the Russian sniper, and my eyes fix on it as I finish off the big Russian. Just as he starts to slide from my grasp, I see a flash from one of the unfinished floors in the middle of the building.

  I’m already moving, and the shot misses me. In a fluid motion, I draw the Sig-Sauer from a holster on my hip I’ve rigged underneath the raincoat and put six rounds high into a wall-to-ceiling window on a finished floor just above the sniper. The glass shatters and I hear screams as I bend down over Drubich. I know without looking that everyone in this section of the park, even those who’ve seen the Orthodox man and Drubich get shot, are now looking up at the hotel, more or less at the spot the sniper is firing from. I’m hoping that this attention will force the sniper to move, if he doesn’t want his muzzle flash to be witnessed by a hundred onlookers. It may give me a few precious seconds with Drubich. It’s a long shot, but I have to take the chance.

  Constantine Drubich is in shock, and he’s losing blood quickly. I grab him by the collar of his beautiful overcoat and bring my face to within a few inches of his. Speaking Russian, I say, “You’ve been sold out. Your own people are murdering you. This is your only chance to get even. Tell me the name of the redheaded American.”

  He looks into my eyes and he smiles for a moment. Then the cloud starts to come back over his eyes and I can see that he’s scared. His mortality is confronting him, but he just shakes his head and smiles. I know that I won’t get anything from him. A mental timer goes off in my head and I jump to the side upright just as a high-velocity round smashes into Constantine’s chest, ending his life instantly. I jump onto the railing, take three steps along it and then leap off of the viaduct, hitting the roof of a city bus emerging from under the bridge on 14th Street, heading toward the West Side Highway. I roll sideways and regain my feet. Then I make a six-foot leap to the roof of a second bus, going the other way into Manhattan. I have to drop down immediately to avoid being knocked over by the trestle. When I’m under the High Line and out of sight of the sniper, I slide off the side of the bus.

  “What the fuck just happened?!” I hear in the earpiece. I can’t tell if it’s Holland or Brennan, but I ignore them both. I suddenly have a very bad feeling. I pull out the Blackberry and dial into voicemail. I hear my mother’s voice on the message. It sounds strained.

  “Michael, this is your mother. There are some men in the house waiting for you, some foreigners. I told them you’ve gone home to Washington D.C. but they are insisting on waiting and it’s already almost eight now. Virginia is here and Amelia is supposed to stop by as well. I don’t like the look of…” and here her voice cuts out abruptly as the line goes dead. I suddenly realize that I’m sweating.

  * * *

  A red Toyota 4Runner with tinted windows is parked in the driveway of my mother’s house. The porch lights are on, and pale yellow light leaks from a narrow slit in the door. As I unlatch the gate on the white picket fence and tread along the slate path to the house, I notice details that didn’t catch my eye on Saturday. The shutters are painted blue, a light robin’s egg color that makes the house look a little like a bed and breakfast. Someone has put new stairs up to the porch, but the off-white paint on the wood planks doesn’t quite match the rest of the porch. There is a bike with a triangular saddle, twist gearshifts and old-fashioned candy-colored streamers spouting from the handlebars leaning against a column on the porch, probably Ginny’s. I remember teaching her to ride on a spring afternoon when my father was passed out on the couch after a bender. As I step up to the porch, I see a little hole in the screen that I made as a nine-year-old when I slipped the hook lock with a pen. I got five smacks with a leather belt for that one.

  I pull open the screen door and knock.

  The door swings open and I’m greeted by the business end of a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver, a very serious piece of iron. The man connected to the gun has shoulder-length dark hair, a scruffy beard and familiar tattoos creeping up his neck. I recognize his face from one of the photos that Dmitriev handed me at lunch. His name is Maxim Petrov and he’s a goon from Kyzyl, a frozen little Russian town about a thousand miles from anywhere. He linked up with the Tambov Gang after spending a decade in Kresty prison on drug charges. Like the rest of the Tambov thugs, he’s in the U.S. on an H1-B visa.

  With the gun planted firmly in my cheek, Petrov grabs a handful of jacket and yanks me into the foyer. As he shoves me over the banister to frisk me, I inventory the room. The staircase in my mother’s house divides the living and dining areas on the left side of the house from the family room and kitchen on the right. The left side of the house is open but on the right, doors separate the kitchen from the dining room and the family room from the entry foyer. The door to the family room is open, however, and there’s a man with an MP5 lurking in the doorway. He’s in the shadow but his face and background are familiar to me; Arkady Tchayka is a step up the Tambov food chain from Petrov. This guy is the only one of the remaining mobsters with any military training other than Yuri. Arkady served as a sergeant in the Russian Army and did a tour in Chechnya. He was just regular army, but the guy has seen combat. I can tell by his bearing, even from the millisecond glimpse I get while I’m being spun around. I won’t underestimate him.

  As hands probe my pockets, I get a better look at the living room. The blinds are all pulled down tightly and the room itself has been rearranged. The couch has found a new home against the living room window that overlooks the porch, far from the fireplace, and the stuffed chairs are parked up against the wall next to the TV. Two plain wooden chairs have been dragged from the dining room. My mother and Ginny are in the chairs, sitting in the middle of the bare living room, their hands bound behind them with duct tape. My mother eyes me coldly as Petrov slides his hands down my legs. Tellingly, she is gagged, while Ginny is not. There are marks on my mother’s face, including a fading handprint where she has recently been slapped. She has that effect on people.

  She must also feel the imprint of the double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun stuck in the small of her neck for my benefit. A giant, an albino with straight long gray hair and cold eyes, handles the shotgun. He’s the real degenerate of the group – his name is Oleg Golovkin. Until three years ago, Oleg was imprisoned in the infamous Ognenny Ostrov, an island prison like Alcatraz on Lake Novozero, 400 miles north of Moscow. Ognenny Ostrov was exclusively reserved for death row inmates until Russia instituted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996. His crime was the rape, torture and murder of a dozen little girls, which makes him notorious even for the Tambov gang. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had any word of his escape before they ran the stack of photos through a database search. He must have come into the country with forged papers.

  The fourth man I spot is bald on top, but compensates for the lack of hair on his scalp with muttoncho
ps and a piratical earring. He’s holding an even bigger handgun than the Ruger sticking in my back – a Desert Eagle .50 Magnum automag. That gun can blow a softball-sized hole in you at close range and do something much worse at twenty or thirty yards. It’s absurdly hard to control the recoil, however, so the only shot that really counts is the first. Not that you’d need more than one. His name is Valery Pichushkin and he’s holding that very big handgun to the head of my sister Ginny. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are faintly streaked with mascara.

  The main thing I notice in my glance around the living room is who is not there. There’s one person missing from this picture, which changes the entire situation. I don’t see Yuri. He may be lurking in the kitchen, waiting to make a dramatic entrance, but he doesn’t strike me as the type. The wheels in my head start spinning, trying to figure out why he’s not here. Then Petrov stands me up, apparently satisfied that I am weaponless and therefore defenseless.

  Arkady attempts to address me in English and I cut him off sharply in Russian. “Speak Russian please, Arkady Sergeivich,” I say. He looks for a second as if I’ve slapped him and I see Pichushkin and Petrov quickly exchange startled glances. This confirms my first suspicion. These guys don’t know my background. Yuri is too much of a professional not to have checked me out after our run-in at the steel mill, so that means he’s kept them in the dark for a reason. That’s assuming he’s behind this little hostage situation, but I am convinced that he is. Arkady blanches a little more as he realizes that not only have I spoken Russian, I’ve addressed him by his name and his patronymic – an archaic form that he’s probably only heard his grandmother use. The men look visibly uncomfortable, even the giant Golovkin. They are wondering what else I know. I need to keep them off-balance. I step away from Petrov, gently pushing the .44 away from my cheek while keeping my eyes on Arkady. I lift my left hand and hold it out straight with my finger extended like an accusation and point to my mother, raising my voice a notch as I do. “That’s my mother sitting there next to my sister. That’s my mother that someone has slapped, gagged and tied to a chair. You have a mother, don’t you Arkady Sergeivich? A sister too, if I’m right. Her name is Natalia and she lives in Komarovo with her husband, and a baby boy, your nephew Anatoly. They live in a little wood house with red shutters, do they not? How would you feel if someone were to treat them with this same lack of respect you’ve shown to my family?” Arkady steps back as if I’ve slapped him. It’s a huge gambit challenging Arkady in this roomful of armed gangsters. Threatening the Slav’s mother and sister is especially dangerous, even while they’re holding my own mother and sister at gunpoint. But my audacity is also what is holding them back. These gangsters have been conditioned to respect power and I’m throwing around information and threats like a serious player. Before they can regroup I press my advantage.