Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  “Who gave you this message?”

  Her father ignored the question and sniffed. “I didn’t think Borodin would kill Pinto. But Pinto started playing games. Macie, that little asshole stole something. Something more valuable than you can imagine. He called. I showed up to pay the ransom. I get there, and he tried to jack the price. He didn’t even bring the package with him.”

  “So you sent Borodin,” she said, staying on point.

  From the bed came a moan. “Borodin . . .” Then a papery mutter, “Luka Borodin, he was there when I got poisoned.” Confirmation that Luchik was no mere repo thug from Long Island. Her tacit assumption, because they were both Russian, had been that Trifonov and Borodin were working together. Now it looked like the opposite: Like Borodin was a contractor for Baltik-Eskort hunting down Trifonov. So was Pipe Wrench. During her rendition, when he kept asking where the Russian was, she thought he meant Borodin when he meant the dying man before her. Pyotr’s fuck-you-e-mail threat obviously had changed the game after his poisoning; they were no longer content to let him go off and die as an example. They needed him found and silenced.

  “So your man from Baltik-Eskort beat it out of Pinto,” said Gunnar. “Or tried to. Until Rúben died on him. All for this.” He reached in his backpack and pulled out the zipper pouch.

  Both men reacted at the sight of the package, Trifonov most strongly. He smacked both hands over his face. “I fucking die for this! Those mudaks kill me for losing!”

  While the Russian wailed in heart wrenching despair, and her father slumped back in silent agony, Wild capped the most traumatic day since the murder of her brother by sending a one-word text from her phone: “Now.”

  No longer than it took for Gunnar to pick up and reholster his Sig Sauer, the lock chirped and the hallway door opened. “FBI,” said Special Agent Stack as he and Special Agent Nemec entered.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  The management and guests of the Hotel Cornwell could not have been too pleased with the activity at the decorous East Side retreat, including a cordoned-off seventh floor, one of its two elevators commandeered by law enforcement, plus a small convoy of inelegant government vehicles double-parked out front, but, with any luck, the operation would be over by afternoon check-in. That was the least of priorities in Room 716. Directed by SA Stack, the six other FBI agents who had swarmed into the junior suite behind him went to work in quick order, all at once searching Jansen Wild and Pyotr Trifonov for weapons and escorting Borodin’s Ruger to the hallway in an evidence bag. With gloved hands, they opened the dresser drawer where Gunnar had deposited Trifonov’s revolver, Jansen Wild’s Walther, and the most smoking gun of all: the orange Rhodia comp book with Trifonov’s holistic confession, including the orchestration of laundering all those Russian millions through Manhattan real estate.

  The feds not only had the time to coordinate deployment but to arrive with warrants, thanks to the heads-up call Macie had placed to Stack before she and Gunnar made their move on Trifonov’s suite. The Evidence Response Team, the FBI’s Crime Scene Unit, took possession of the weapons, the diary, the burner phones, and the zippered pouch holding its damning collection of stamps and seals. They carefully placed each in its own container, all labeled and signed-for, creating the chain-of-evidence paper trail. There would be no screw-ups on the road to this trial, certainly not by the bureau.

  Paramedics arrived and administered to Trifonov. Gunnar briefed them on his polonium-210 poisoning, not so much to do the doomed man any good, but to aid the safety of the medics. When they gurneyed him from the room, he had withered, singing a children’s song to himself in Russian on the way out.

  Macie and Gunnar gave statements out in the hallway. The agents took it all down, and without needing too much reflection, Stack said that Trifonov’s diary would be a bonus, but the stamps and seals were the prize and had been long sought. They were the only proof they needed to crack open the laundering operation. It also was the only evidence sufficient to enable them to freeze illegal Russian bank accounts. “That’s why Trifonov had to be made an example of for his fuck-up. This is not going to be a happy day for Vladimir Putin,” said the agent. “Let’s just say, if you saw him shirtless, those nipples would not be hard.”

  Hearing the FBI say that they had been after those stamps and seals a long time knocked a loose thought free in Macie. “Jeffrey Stamitz. I hear the crew chief was a confidential informant for you guys. Did you give him a shopping list for The Ajax?”

  Special Agents Stack and Nemec exchanged glances. Stack maintained a poker face. “I don’t know the source of your information, but I am sure I would not comment on that.”

  “I think you just did,” said Gunnar.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Downstairs Macie and Gunnar watched agents from the Evidence Response Team load Pyotr Trifonov’s luggage and some bankers boxes that they had brought down from his suite into an unmarked van. “Tell me the truth,” said Gunnar. “Were you expecting Orem Diner?”

  “I would have preferred,” she said. That was her truth.

  “Do you think Diner is dirty?”

  Macie shrugged. “I think he’s a lawyer.”

  The evidence team returned for another load, lagging briefly at the lobby doors to let out Stack and Nemec, who were escorting Jansen Wild in handcuffs. Macie’s vision fluttered slightly upon taking in the tableau she never would have imagined seeing in her life: her father in custody.

  Upstairs she had asked to have a private word with him before they left, and Special Agent Stack gave her the nod and looked the other way as soon as they had buckled him in the back seat of their SUV. Macie stood in the open door and looked in at him. His face was swollen and mottled from crying. “I am so sorry for what I have put you through,” he said hoarsely, the voice of all broken spirits.

  “I have to know something, Dad. I need to know why.” When he didn’t answer, just cast his gaze downward, she said, “Do you think you can tell me that?”

  When he brought his eyes to meet hers they were rimmed with water again. “I knew it was wrong. I never knew it would get to this, but I knew it wasn’t right.”

  “Then why?”

  He cleared his throat. “It was Walter.” Macie’s own eyes started to fill at her brother’s name. “When he got taken. So violent. So stupid. It just . . . I lost every . . . I lost my soul, Macie.”

  “It hurt us all, Dad.”

  “I lost my soul,” he repeated, but louder, a plea to be heard. “My marriage, my work, everything. Meant. Nothing.” After the sourness of that, the corners of his mouth twitched, a failed attempt at a smile. “Except for you. You were—you were my Mace. But. When it’s all shit?” He tilted his head back to blink the tears away before he resumed. “I said, fuck it.” He looked around the FBI vehicle then to her. “And I guess I did.” Agent Nemec opened the shotgun door and got in. Stack sidled up beside Macie and rested his hand on the door frame. “Can you forgive me?” asked her father.

  “I’ll come see you, and we’ll talk some more.” She wanted to take his hand, but it was cuffed behind him. So she leaned in and kissed his cheek. Macie and Gunnar stood in the driveway of the Cornwell and watched the SUV depart with its prisoner. She couldn’t see through the tinted windows and started to give a wave as it left, but she never did. Macie did move to the sidewalk, though, so she could watch it go until it disappeared in traffic.

  The hotel doorman got them a taxi that made two stops: University Place to drop Wild at her apartment, then onward to deliver Gunnar to his loft in NoLIta so he could get off his leg and take a recuperative nap. Macie’s plan was to make a quick change and then head off to the Manhattan Center for Public Defense. It was an insane form of denial, Gunnar had warned her. The serial traumas of the past twenty-four hours alone would have put the most hardy soul in a psych ward. Wild couldn’t drop everything, but compromised, deciding she would handle the essentials only, and from home.

  After a phone call to her mother in Germ
any and the anguish that came with it, Macie acknowledged Gunnar’s emotional intelligence and was glad she had decided not to go in. It wasn’t her mom’s upset that distressed her, but the lack of it. Dr. Wild took the news of her father’s arrest stoically, you could even say, clinically. Although she said she would come home on the first available flight, for Macie, her mother’s arid response signaled the true ending of the Wilds as a family.

  In defiance of her fragility, Macie set about knocking off her workload via e-mail. In sanitized bullet points, she updated her team on the disposition of the case, omitting the juicy (translation: self-incriminating) parts of her experiences, such as Luka Fyodor Borodin’s death—which Gunnar had insisted would never blow back on them, same as Pipe Wrench and his pal in the Bronx. Too many law enforcement entities would prefer not to draw attention to their ineptitude or secret involvement. “Some conspiracies aren’t just theories,” he’d said. “This time it breaks our way.”

  “That doesn’t make it disappear.”

  “Trust me, it’s in their interest to sweep this under a rug. And they have a very big rug.” Macie reflected on his absolute certainty of that. Was Gunnar sending her an oblique message, a hint to her about his own sealed records? Having suffered enough discord for a lifetime, she had decided not to touch that nerve, and let it go.

  Macie was mind-mapping on a legal pad to brainstorm an approach to deal with Jackson Hall’s charges when Gunnar called. He spoke to her over a wall of noise: the safety doop-doop-doop of a vehicle backing up and dispatcher calls amplified over radios. “You don’t sound much like you’re napping.”

  “I’m up in Jerome Park near the reservoir. Channel 2 called with a gig.”

  “You should be resting.”

  “Yeah, well, I was going to turn it down until I heard what it was.” A throaty horn sounded, unmistakably from a fire engine. “Hang on, moving out of the way. Shit. You still there?”

  “Here.”

  “The call was for a vehicle fire, fully involved. Mace, it was the FBI evidence van. Some heavily armed guys in masks jacked it at a light on its way downtown. They kicked out the driver and took off. It’s been torched. I mean completely torched. They left it here in the park. All that evidence, including Trifonov’s diary, is either gone or up in flames.”

  C H A P T E R • 39

  * * *

  The lone figure on the end of the East Harlem Fishing Pier cast straight out and watched his bait sail sideways on a sudden gust before it plunked into the whitecaps. In the distant miles ahead of him, bruised clouds shot strobes of lightning over Long Island as an early season storm fired up to the east. A metallic click behind him made the man turn. Jackson Hall regarded the tip of Gunnar Cody’s cane on the concrete. “Not going to sneak up on anybody like that.” He gave a nod and a hello to Macie then excused himself to reel in his hook. “If you don’t mind another cast, it may be awhile before I get another fishing day in.”

  “Go for it,” she said. This time he anticipated the wind and gained more distance. While he slowly rewound his reel, Hall toed a White Castle bag on the deck next to his bait pail. “Mr. Cody. Something for you there.” Macie picked it up and handed it to him. Under the burger wrappers rested his Beretta Jetfire. “Slugs are in the bottom of the sack. It’s unloaded.” Then he added for good measure, “And unused.”

  “Appreciate it,” said Gunnar. “By the way, is this the same bag you left me holding when you took off with my gun?”

  “Would it help if I apologized?”

  “Not much,” Gunnar replied. But he’d had his say, and that seemed enough for now.

  Macie looked off in the direction of Rikers Island, not visible from where she stood, but she pictured it somewhere past the crescent arch of the Hell Gate Bridge. Jackson Hall would be back there by supper, commencing the eighteen months for burglary Wild had pled down from the six years Fontanelli wanted. Whether it was the public defender’s threat to go for a media-splash jury trial after her client had first been falsely accused of murder then strung up in jail, or the bigfoot call from Special Agent Stack of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, WTF, literally, said the words, “What the fuck,” and caved to Wild’s deal.

  Her client was good with it too. When Soledad arranged a call from him to hear the terms, his immediate reply had been, “Whatever you say’s good for me, Ms. Wild. That’s why I asked for you at the jump.”

  She watched him now, giving his rod a small jerk as if he had a bite, then he shrugged and reeled it in again. “Mind if I . . . ?” He pointed to the river.

  “When you’re ready,” she said.

  “Not ever going to be ready. You tell me when.” He prepared another cast. Before he did, Jackson Hall turned back to face them. “Thank you. Thank both of you.”

  Macie and Gunnar backed away and sat on a park bench under the pavilion to let him make a few more casts before they took him in.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Happy hour was anything but for Macie, but she agreed to go with Gunnar to Tortaria, a Mexican joint in her neighborhood with authentic food and a killer bar. They were both running on fumes after the marathon they had been through, and were both nursing wounds: his physical, hers emotional. So much so that she’d almost declined. But Wild desperately craved some tequila-aided downtime. And she wanted to be close with this man.

  It was hardly downtime though. After what they’d been through, all they could talk about was what they’d been through. Neither could get past the FBI vehicle blaze. He said, “You have got to ask yourself this: not just who has the balls to jack an FBI vehicle? Who has the wherewithal to jack an FBI vehicle, and get away with it?”

  “As with anything,” she said, “it’s not just the how, it’s the why.”

  “To kill the evidence obviously.”

  “Russia, then?” she asked, but wasn’t asking, really.

  “Losing $70 million is nothing to them. This is about the whole laundering operation, counted in billions not millions.” He took a sip of his margarita. “Look at the lengths these assholes went to just to get their hands on those stamps and seals. Who knows if they were even aware that Trifonov’s diary was in there? But could you imagine the impact of that bundle? We’re talking one jumbo kick in the nuts to the nomenklatura.”

  “Impressive.”

  He repeated it. “Nomenklatura. Just don’t ask me to spell it. Of course they torched the evidence.”

  “And Trifonov’s not doing any more talking. When I asked Special Agent Stack to help me out with the DA, he told me the hospital put him on heavy palliative therapy. They give him a day, at most.” She studied the candle flame, lost in a pensive stare.

  “But on the upside, it does make the case tougher against your father. All the evidence against him is circumstantial.”

  “Well . . . he did confess to us.” She made a confidentiality check and leaned closer, speaking in a hushed tone. “And you recorded it.”

  They both considered that gravely. Gunnar said, “That’s true. I was rolling audio the whole time in that hotel room. I got Trifonov’s confession and your father’s.” While he got out his phone Macie quickly tossed the moral—and legal—implications over what to do with this audio. On the one hand, it was valuable evidence. It damned her father, but it also made the case against the Russians for their laundering. On the other hand, nobody but the two of them knew it had been recorded. While she weighed the brutal ethical choice, Gunnar’s face clouded. He looked up from his phone. “It’s gone.”

  “Gone how?”

  “Gone, as in not here anymore.” He held up his screen for her to inspect. The white field was blank except for two words: “No recordings.”

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  When they got to his loft, Gunnar didn’t bother switching on lights; he hobbled in, clacking his cane across the hardwood on a wincing beeline to the editing bay. Wild lit some lamps and found him seated before a keyboard typing in a password to access the backup he’d uploaded. Gunnar mainta
ined his usual cool, but she had gotten to know him enough to read his darting eyes as they flashed reflected light from the monitor. He double-tapped the track pad, opening one cloud storage file, then another, silently shaking his head with each. Finally, he creaked back in his chair. “I don’t get it. . . . Gone.” He turned to her. “It’s just gone.”

  “You sure you—”

  “I am damn sure.” He snatched up his phone and reached the CyberGauchito on the first ring. “G-man. Got a situation here.” Gunnar sighed repeatedly as he clicked and scrolled through his hard drive. “How bad?” he said into the phone. “Catas-fucking-trophic.”

  The cyberattack on Gunnar Cody ran deep and ugly. The Gauchito himself confirmed the worst of it when he arrived minutes later to work the rig, as he called Gunnar’s computer system. “They took everything,” said Gunnar. “The VICE material, all my footage of Borodin, Teixeira, the gait analysis video of Trifonov . . .”

  Wild said, “I think I can guess, but who would do this?”

  “Personally,” said CyberG, “I’d go with state sponsored. Or, at least, farmed out to cronies. And I definitely recognize some of the digital fingerprints I found.”

  “We’re back to Russia,” she said.

  The porteño nodded. “The bear has hacked the anti-doping results from Rio, the DNC, and turned off the fucking power grid to Kiev. Why should your computer present a challenge?”

  “They got me through the Internet, but guess what?”

  “You do external back up.” CyberG extended a fist to bump. “Dude! Data hygiene!”

  Gunnar rose from his chair. Favoring his tender calf, he hopped to the built-in where he stored his hard drives. He swung open both doors of the cabinet. Then turned to face both of them in disbelief. “Fuckers stole my hard drives too.” He surveyed the edit bay, then hopped on one foot to peer into the great room. “They were in here. Today.”

  To spare Gunnar the walk, Macie and the CyberGauchito made the trip down to the basement to retrieve the hard drive from his building’s security cam system. Gauch plugged the Seagate into his laptop and scrubbed the lobby comings and goings from that morning. “Got ’em,” he called. Macie drew Gunnar against her to support him while they surfed CyberG’s screen. He rolled the video back to where a pair of workmen in coveralls entered. One watched the glass door while the other used a key to pop the elevator.