Avenue of Thieves

by Sean Black

  He came up behind Crewcut as he walked past the alley. Ty threw a massive arm around the man’s shoulders.

  “Oh, man, I thought it was you,” said Ty, smiling.

  Crewcut looked shocked. He tried to wriggle free, but Ty’s hand clasped his shoulder hard. His other arm came up and crossed the man’s chest as he felt for a shoulder holster. Handguns were highly illegal in New York, but no one seemed to have told the criminals.

  It was clear. All the guy had under his arm was a serious case of body odor. Ty’s hand dropped to the man’s waist. Also clear.

  “What are you doing this far uptown” Ty continued, propelling the man off the street and into the mouth of the alleyway.

  “I don’t know you,” Crewcut said, with an unmistakably Russian accent.

  He went to push away, but it was too late.

  “Sure you do,” said Ty, manhandling him further into the alleyway.

  As the man broke free, Ty shoved him hard with both hands into a Dumpster. Crewcut stumbled back, slamming into it as Lock strode toward them.

  “You can’t do this,” said Crewcut. “You’re not the police.”

  “Yeah, and neither are you, asshole,” said Lock. “Now, who are you, and why are you keeping tabs on us?”

  Lock didn’t expect him to cough up any answers to either question. Etiquette demanded that he was at least afforded the opportunity.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A standard response. He didn’t look like a guy who’d be overly troubled by a few broken ribs or a black eye. Beating information out of someone could work. Beating accurate information out of them was harder. And in the end it all came down to the individual.

  Thankfully, there was a more direct route that Lock had employed over the years.

  He gave Ty the nod. Ty grabbed the man’s wrists, pulled his arms behind his back and spun him round so that he was facing down the alley. Lock reached over and frisked him, coming up with a wallet.

  Crewcut began to struggle, which kind of gave the game away. Ty let go with one arm and dug a hard left hook into the man’s liver. The Russian doubled over with a groan.

  Lock flipped open the wallet, looking for ID. He came up with a driver’s license, a bank card, American Express, and a work ID. Whipping out his phone, Lock took a quick snap of the driver’s license, put it back into the wallet, which he returned to Grigor Novak’s pocket.

  He grabbed the scruff of Novak’s jacket, pulled him upright and fished inside. From a pocket he pulled out a green and gold passport. Lock recognized it immediately.

  He flipped it open. The name matched everything else.

  Lock held up the passport for Ty. “Diplomatic.”

  “No kidding,” said Ty, sarcastically. “What are the odds, huh?”

  Lock handed it back to Novak. Embassies and consulates were rife with spies and intelligence officers. Diplomatic immunity gave them almost completely free rein to conduct business. If they were caught, the worst that could happen was that they were expelled.

  “Go tell your bosses that Dimitri Semenov and his family are off limits from now on. Oh, and this,” said Lock, dangling the passport in front of his face. “It won’t save you if we meet again. We’re not the government, and we don’t give a shit about creating a diplomatic incident.”

  Novak’s expression didn’t shift. He straightened, still clutching his side.

  Lock doubted very much that he would file a police report. The only people he’d be reporting this incident to were his superiors, and even then that wasn’t guaranteed. Spies tended not to admit they’d been spotted, dragged into an alley, beaten up, and given up their identity.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said Ty, staring hard at Novak and moving around him to get a better angle on something.

  Ty pulled the leather jacket from his shoulder. Grabbing his shirt collar, he yanked hard, exposing his neck.

  Inked on Novak’s neck from just above his shoulder was a single eight-pointed star. Etched in blue ink, it was solid.

  “How many diplomats you know rocking tats, these days?” said Ty.

  The comment drew a smirk from Novak, but he kept his own counsel.

  The passport looked real enough, but Lock figured it might be a very good fake. But why would someone following them, presumably working for the Russian government, go to the trouble of carrying a faked diplomatic passport?

  Passing yourself off as someone representing the Russian government was a serious offense. If you were working for them while living here, you’d almost certainly have one.

  “Take off your jacket,” Ty ordered Novak.

  He did as he was told. Lock watched as, at Ty’s order, he stripped off to the waist, revealing several more crudely rendered but weirdly ornate tattoos. The main one, spread across his chest, depicted what looked to Lock like a three-domed Russian Orthodox church.

  Ty had been right. Something was off about this guy, thought Lock.

  A solitary star was something you might just get away with. No doubt, like here, some spies came from the military. But this guy had a lot of ink.

  Lock whipped out his phone and took pictures. A couple of the smaller tattoos were words written in Russian Cyrillic script.

  “What’s the deal, Grigor? Who you with? Because I ain’t buying this diplomat bullshit.”

  Still smiling, Novak reached out a hand to take his shirt back as the sharp whoop of a siren at the mouth of the alleyway announced the arrival of an NYPD patrol car.

  Ty handed the man his shirt as Lock braced himself to explain the situation to the two cops who were walking toward them, hands resting on the grips of their Glock 19s.

  12

  Stepping into the vast hotel suite, Ruta Sirka felt like a princess in a fairytale. Dimitri had pushed the boat out this time. The hotels where they met were always five-star, always beautiful, with every possible amenity, but this was on another level entirely.

  She checked the time on her phone. She had an hour to prepare herself. Plenty of time. She had kept her hair and make-up on from the day’s photo shoot, and she would be lying naked on the bed when he arrived, so she didn’t have to worry about what to wear when he appeared.

  On a small side table, a bottle of freshly opened champagne stood in an ice bucket. Next to it were two crystal flutes.

  It had been a long day. She poured some champagne into a glass and took several sips. She walked into the white marbled bathroom with its claw-foot tub. She ran a bath, and sipped champagne as she watched the bath fill.

  Walking back into the bedroom area of the suite, she crossed to the window. She took off her clothes and stood naked by the window drinking in the view across Central Park.

  It was hard to imagine that less than eighteen months ago she had been a struggling student back home in Kiev. Now here she was in a hotel suite bigger than her parents’ apartment, about to spend the evening, if not the night, with one of the wealthiest men in the world.

  Some of the American models she worked with looked down on things like this. They said they would never sleep with a man because of his money. Ruta smiled to herself when she heard them make these comments. All it proved to her was that they had no idea what it was like to be properly poor.

  In any case, the boys her age were just that, boys. Not men. Okay, so they might have flat stomachs and muscles, but a man like Dimitri Semenov offered more than just money. He had been around. He knew how the world operated. He had wisdom.

  And usually all she had to do was pleasure him for a few minutes. He rarely lasted longer than that. Another thing to be grateful for, as far as Ruta saw it. Young men approached sex like some kind of athletic challenge, leaving her tired and sore.

  Stepping back into the bathroom, she put her glass on the side of the tub and slowly submerged herself in the hot water. After standing around all day in those preposterous shoes they made her wear, it was bliss.

  Her mind drifted to the message from Dimitri. He ha
d sounded different than normal, but she couldn’t decide how exactly. Maybe disconnected, a little out of it. He had said something about his daughter being sick, so maybe that was it. And, of course, there had been that business with his bodyguards, which had been all over the news.

  From the other men she knew, though, she suspected it was something else. When they talked about sex some men just sounded different. Their voice changed. She suspected that was it.

  After twenty minutes in the tub, she got out. She didn’t want her skin to go all wrinkly. She used some body lotion she found in a basket next to the sink. It smelled of lavender. As she applied it, she padded back into the suite and refilled her glass. She hadn’t eaten and was feeling a little lightheaded.

  In the bedroom, she rearranged the pillows on the king-size bed looking for the blindfold Dimitri had told her would be there. It was made of black silk. She put it on and lay down, sinking into the plush mattress.

  Without even being aware of it, she drifted into a light sleep.

  The main door into the suite opening and closing woke her. She panicked for a second when it was still pitch-black. Then she remembered the blindfold and giggled to herself.

  She called out to Dimitri. He didn’t reply, but she heard soft footsteps as someone entered the bedroom and walked over to the bed.

  For a moment she worried that maybe it was a member of staff. Then she caught the faint trail of the cologne he always wore, Tuscan Leather by Tom Ford, and relaxed. She bit down on her lower lip, stopping herself smiling. Men, especially older ones, could get mad if you laughed when they were trying to be sexy or romantic.

  His fingertips touched the top of her thigh. She startled a little then tried to relax. This was so funny. There was obviously more to him than met the eye.

  His hand ran up and down the inside of her legs. It moved up over her flat stomach to her breasts, fingertips circling her nipples.

  Yes, there was definitely more to this Russian than she had realized. A lot more.

  Hands reached under her at the knees, and the neck, strong arms scooping her up from the bed. He was still dressed. She could feel the material of his clothing as he carried her, still blindfolded, across the room.

  Ruta shivered as a sudden blast of cold air swept across her body. He was carrying her, but she didn’t know where. The cold intensified. At first she’d thought it was the air-con, but it wasn’t. It felt like the whip of wind from an open window.

  What was he doing? Where was he taking her?

  “Dimitri?” she said, shivering.

  He had told her not to speak when he came into the room. To put the blindfold on, and lie there, naked.

  He didn’t respond. Without thinking, she reached up to touch his face. His hand grabbed her wrist.

  “No,” he said.

  A sudden fear surged through her. It wasn’t Dimitri’s voice.

  Somehow she managed to free her wrist from his grip. Pulling the blindfold up, she looked around. Drapes whipped into the air at the open window. Her eyes flashed from it to the face of the man carrying her toward it. He had piercing blue eyes, and his hair was clipped close to his scalp. She screamed as loudly as she could, kicking, arms flailing as she tried to scratch at his face with long nails.

  Eyes wide, she looked to the billowing drapes as he carried her to the window. Her mouth dried. Her vision tunneled until all she could see was the top of a small tattooed star on his neck as he tightened his grip on her.

  As she struggled, he took three final steps to the window. He rolled her out of his arms like a carpet. Her hands grabbed for him, trying to hold on.

  Limbs flailing, she fell, tumbling through the air and down toward the sidewalk below.

  13

  Grigor Novak got out of his car and walked to the edge of the stand of trees. This place was only an hour and thirty minutes outside Manhattan, but it might as well have been way up in farthest Michigan. It was pin-drop quiet.

  He paced anxiously back and forth and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. He should have shaved. Dimitri Semenov was always clean-shaven.

  That tiny detail had almost screwed up the whole thing. It had only occurred to him when the girl had reached up to touch his face. That was when he’d panicked and grabbed her wrist.

  She was stronger than she had looked. Skin and bones, but strong. For a second in the hotel suite, just as he was dropping her out of the window, she had almost grabbed him and taken him with her.

  It had been close.

  He wouldn’t mention it to Ninel. He would keep that little detail to himself. He was worried about her reaction to him having been caught by the two guys he’d been tailing. He didn’t think she knew anything about it, but he couldn’t be sure. That was why, when the cops had shown up, he’d played dumb until they grew exasperated and let everyone go.

  The sound of a car engine snapped him back to the present. He watched as an ancient Cadillac sedan trundled over the rutted ground. Ninel was in the passenger seat. Alexei was driving. No computer-controlled cars for them, thought Novak. You might be able to cut the brake cables, but no one was hacking this vehicle, not even the kid driving.

  Since Ninel had begun spending more time around this kid Alexei, Novak had noticed that she was increasingly paranoid about technology, especially anything that could be connected to the internet, either by wireless or using a Bluetooth connection. Messages were typed or handwritten and delivered using old-fashioned dead drops. The most crucial meetings and debriefs were conducted face to face.

  Ninel Tarasov got out of the car and slammed the door. She was a plain-looking woman in her early fifties with short, spiky black hair and almond-shaped brown eyes. About thirty pounds overweight, she stood a little over five feet six inches tall. She wore jeans, sneakers and a brown turtle-neck sweater. Physically she was in every way the opposite of the young Ukrainian model whose death she had rubber-stamped.

  Ninel had a brusque, businesslike way of dealing with people that reminded her fellow Russians of an old-style Soviet bureaucrat. It was fitting because her parents had both been senior Communist Party apparatchiks. Ninel was Lenin spelled backward, and she had never really shaken off the manner of someone who had been born thirty years later than she should have been.

  She shared one other characteristic with the old Soviet Party bureaucrats. She loved her country, and she could easily separate her personal feelings from what were, as she saw them, her professional duties.

  She hadn’t always been like this. Certainly she had always had a steely inner core, but bitter life experience, and certain disappointments, especially when it came to matters of the heart, had hardened her.

  With Alexei trotting behind her, she made her way across to Novak. As she walked she scanned the nearby tree line. Beyond it, hidden by the sycamore and ash trees, was an old water-filled quarry. “Tell me,” she said to him, skipping the formalities.

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. It went to plan. No one saw me enter the room. I left immediately and no one saw me then either.”

  Ninel closed the distance between them. “Is that a scratch on your face?” she asked, reaching up to touch his face.

  This time he didn’t bat away the hand but let her trace over his face.

  She inspired fear in him. Scaring men like Grigor Novak was perhaps her greatest gift. It was a gift she had honed over the years until it was razor sharp. Her reputation preceded her among the vory. It had been built over decades.

  Men like this were useful. But they had their limitations. They were like dogs. Biddable, eager to please their master, but sometimes not as clever as dogs.

  “It’s nothing,” said Novak, taking a step back. “She was struggling. It’s only a scratch. It’ll be gone by next week.”

  Ninel didn’t say anything to that. There was no point in explaining DNA trapped under a fingernail to him. He had messed up, not once but twice. His work was good, but sloppy. Surveillance required a knowledge of counter-surveil
lance.

  “What about the two men with Dimitri? The security operators?”

  “I haven’t had time to finish my report, but I don’t think there’s anything to concern us. They visited with him, then with the girl at the hospital. That’s all.”

  The girl at the hospital. The one part of this that Ninel felt bad about. An innocent among thieves. Ninel could only pray that she made a full recovery. The orders had been clear that no one from their side should threaten her in any way. She was to be left out of this. This was between them and Semenov. Sure, they might use family and friends, like this young mistress, as leverage, but children were strictly out of bounds. Even in the darkest days Ninel had held to that rule.

  Ninel said nothing to his comment. What was the point in confronting him with the truth? It was easier to let it go. Or appear to let it go.

  She turned back to the old sedan without another word. Alexei followed her.

  “What now?” Novak called after her.

  She opened the car door. That was the signal for the sniper posted in the trees.

  There was the briefest crack, like a branch snapping, and Novak fell forward, clutching his chest as blood blossomed from it.

  She looked across at Alexei. His mouth was open, and she could hear the faint splash of urine as his bladder opened with fright.

  The sniper and another man appeared from the trees. They were dressed like hunters, appropriate under the circumstances. One rolled out a plastic ground sheet.

  The sniper grabbed the body by the shoulders and dragged it onto the sheet. The two men rolled it up.

  Alexei was still rooted to the spot. He looked down.

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Ninel. “I did something like that the first time I saw someone shot.”

  It was a lie. But she didn’t want Alexei to feel too bad. It was better to offer him reassurance now rather than spelling out what they both knew. The message had been delivered. Mess up and you’ll meet the same fate.

  So far Alexei had exceeded her expectations. People threw around the word “genius,” but this kid with his savant-level hacking skills came close. Not only had he managed to hack the sedans, he was also an expert in so-called deep fakes.