Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  Schechter rose from his chair and said something quick and sharp to the other guard, who racked the slide on his pistol to chamber a round. Bad form. His weapon should have been loaded already.

  “Heller, for God’s sake,” Schechter said, exasperated.

  Mongo reared back and took a wild swing at me, which I easily dodged. When Schechter shouted, “That’s enough, Garrett,” he stopped short like a well-trained Doberman.

  “Now, please finish cutting him loose,” Schechter said. “And keep your mouth shut while you’re doing it.”

  Garrett, or Mongo, as I preferred to think of him, snipped the remaining cuffs, his eyes boring holes into mine. Twin rivulets of blood trickled down the lower half of his face. When he was done, he wiped the blood off with his sleeve.

  “Much better,” I said to Schechter. “Now, if we’re going to have a candid conversation, please tell these two amateur muscleheads to leave.”

  Schechter nodded. “Semashko, Garrett, please.”

  The guards looked at him.

  “You can stand right outside. There won’t be a problem, I’m sure. Mr. Heller and I need to speak privately.”

  On his way out, Mongo brandished his pistol at me threateningly as he once again wiped his bloody nose with his sleeve.

  When the door closed, Schechter said, “Now, was there something you wanted to find out?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Does Marshall Marcus know you arranged the kidnapping of his daughter?”

  71.

  He expelled a puff of air, a scoff. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  “Given your association with both Marcus and Senator Armstrong—the father of the kidnapped girl and the father of a girl who assisted in that kidnapping—don’t try to pretend it’s a coincidence.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that we’re all on the same side?”

  “When you ordered me to stay away from the senator and his daughter, and when you announced that my services were no longer needed, it kinda made me wonder. Me, I’m on the side that wants to get Alexa Marcus released.”

  “And you think I don’t?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look at it statistically,” he said. “What are the odds, truly, of Alexa coming home alive? She’s as good as dead, and I think Marshall already understands this.”

  “I’d say you tilted the odds against her considerably by refusing to let Marcus hand over the Mercury files.”

  Schechter went silent.

  “Are they really worth two lives?” I said.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Why don’t you enlighten me.”

  “They are worth far, far more. They are worth the lives of the one million Americans who have died defending our country. But I think you already know that. Isn’t that why you had to leave the Defense Department?”

  “I left because of a disagreement.”

  “A disagreement with General Hood, your boss.”

  I nodded.

  “Because you refused to call a halt to an investigation that you were explicitly ordered to drop. An investigation that would have warned off certain parties who were unaware they were targets of the greatest corruption probe in history.”

  “Is that right,” I said sardonically. “Funny no one said anything about that back then.”

  “No one could. Not then. But now we have to trust your discretion and your judgment and your patriotism. And I know we can.”

  “You know nothing about me,” I said.

  “I know plenty about you. I know all about your remarkable record of service to this country. Not just on the battlefield, but the clandestine work you did for DOD. General Hood says you were probably the brightest, and certainly the most fearless, operative he ever had the good fortune to work with.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said sourly. “And what got you so interested in my military record?”

  He folded his arms, leaned forward, and said heatedly, “Because if you had been in charge of Marshall’s security, this would never have happened.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that.”

  “You know damned well I’m right. You are an extraordinary talent. Yes, of course I have your file. Yes, of course I’ve checked you out.”

  “For what?” I said.

  He paused for ten, fifteen seconds. “I’m sure you know about that ‘missing’ two-point-six trillion dollars that an auditor discovered at the Pentagon a few years ago?”

  I nodded. I remembered reading about it, then kicking it around with some friends. The story didn’t get the kind of play in the so-called mainstream media you’d have expected. Maybe Americans had gotten blasé about corruption, but it’s not like we’re Somalia. Maybe such a sum of money was just too big to conceive of, like the weight of planet Earth.

  “That’s what happens when you have a government agency with a budget of three-quarters of a trillion dollars and barely any internal controls,” he said.

  “The money was never found, right?”

  He shrugged. “Not my concern, and not my point. I’m just saying that the Pentagon is a black hole. Everyone inside the intelligence community knows that.”

  “How would you know? You’re not on the inside.”

  He tipped his head to one side. “It’s all in how you define the term. A half century of CIA proprietaries might argue with you.”

  “What, so Batten Schechter is a CIA front?”

  He shook his head. “CIA? Please. Have you seen how far down they are on the org chart these days? Somewhere just below the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CIA used to run the intelligence community. Now they report to the director of national intelligence, and the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone—”

  “All right, then what the hell are you?”

  “A middleman, nothing more. A conduit. Just a lawyer who’s helping make sure that no one ‘misplaces’ three trillion dollars again.”

  “Could you possibly be any more vague?”

  “Let me get a bit more specific. Who paid your salary when you worked for the DOD in Washington?”

  “Black budget,” I said. That was the top-secret funding, buried in the U.S. government budget, for clandestine operations and classified research and weapons research, and so on. All the stuff that officially doesn’t exist. It’s so well hidden in the tangled mess of a budget that no one’s ever sure how much there is or what it’s paying for.

  “Bingo.”

  “‘Mercury’ refers to U.S. black-budget funding?”

  “Close enough for government work, as they say. Any idea how big the black budget is?”

  “Sixty billion dollars or so.”

  He snorted. “Sure. If you believe what you read in the Washington Post. Let’s just say that’s the figure that’s leaked for public consumption.”

  “So you’re…” and I stopped.

  Suddenly it all seemed clear. “You’re telling me that Marshall Marcus has been investing and managing the black budget of the United States? Sorry, I don’t buy it.”

  “Not all of it, by any means. But a good healthy chunk.”

  “How much are we talking?”

  “It’s not important how much. Quite a few years ago some very wise men took a look at the ebbs and flows of defense spending and realized that we were putting our national security at the mercy of public whims and political fads. One year it’s ‘kill all the terrorists,’ the next it’s ‘why are we violating civil liberties?’ We lurch from Cold War to ‘peace dividend.’ Look at how the CIA was gutted in the 1990s—by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Then 9/11 happens, and everyone’s outraged—Where was the CIA? How could this have happened? Well, you eviscerated the CIA, folks, that’s what happened.”

  “And…?”

  “So the decision was reached at a very high level to set aside funds from the fat years to take care of the lean years.”

  “And give it to Marshall Marcus to invest.”

  He nodded. “A few hundred mi
llion here, a billion or two there, and pretty soon Marshall had quadrupled our covert funds.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “And now it’s all gone. Talk about a black hole. Doesn’t sound like you did a whole lot better than the green eyeshades at the Pentagon.”

  “Fair enough. But no one expected Marshall to be targeted the way he was.”

  “So Alexa’s kidnappers aren’t after money at all, are they? ‘Mercury in the raw’—that refers to the investment records?”

  “Let’s be clear. They want some of our most sensitive operational secrets. This is a direct assault on American national security protocols. And frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin’s people have a hand in this.”

  “So you think it’s the Russians?”

  “Absolutely.”

  That would explain why the kidnapper was Russian. Tolya had said members of the Sova gang were often hired by Russian oligarchs. But now I wondered whether the Russian government might instead be behind it all.

  “You’re given access to security-classified information above top secret?”

  “Look, it’s no longer possible for the Pentagon to sluice money directly into false-front entities like they used to. You know all those anti-money-laundering laws aimed at global terror—they just give far too many bureaucrats in too many countries around the world the ability to do track-backs. Private funding has to originate in the private sector or else it’s going to be unearthed by some corporate auditor running the financials.”

  “I get that. So what?”

  “If the wrong people got hold of the transfer codes, they’d be able to identify all sorts of cutaways and shell companies—and figure out who’s doing what for us where. To hand all that over would be nothing less than a body blow to our national security. I can’t allow it. And if Marshall were in his right mind, he wouldn’t either.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

  “Believe me,” Schechter said, “nothing would make me happier than if you could find Alexa Marcus and somehow free her. But that’s just about impossible now, from everything I’m told. We don’t have the names of her captors. We don’t have the slightest idea where she is.”

  I didn’t correct him. “Are we done here?”

  “Not quite. You’ve seen some highly classified files, and I want your assurance that it goes no further. Do we have an understanding?”

  “I really don’t care what’s in your files. My only interest is in finding Marshall Marcus’s daughter. And as long as you stay out of my way, then yes, we have an understanding.”

  My head began thudding again as I got to my feet. I turned and walked out the door. His goons attempted to block my way, but I pushed past them. They scowled at me menacingly. I smiled back.

  “Nick,” Schechter called out.

  I stopped. “Yes?”

  “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you can count on it.”

  72.

  It was almost ten thirty by the time I returned to Mr. Derderian’s van. I powered on my BlackBerry and it began to load up e-mails and emitted a voice-mail-alert sound.

  One of the calls was from Mo Gandle, the PI in New Jersey looking into Belinda Marcus’s past.

  I listened to his message with astonishment. Her employment as a call girl was by far the least interesting part of her history.

  I was about to call him back when I noticed that four of the calls I’d received were from Moscow. I checked my watch. It was twenty minutes past six in the morning, Moscow time. Far too early to call. He would certainly be asleep.

  So I called and woke him up.

  “I’ve been leaving messages for you,” he said.

  “I was temporarily offline,” I said. “Do you have names for me?”

  “Yes, Nicholas, I do. I didn’t think it prudent to leave this information on your voice mail.”

  “Let me pull over and get something to write with.”

  “Surely you can remember one name.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  Then he told me.

  IT WAS too late to catch a shuttle flight from Boston to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

  But there was always a way. An old friend flew cargo planes for FedEx. He was based out of Memphis, but he got me on the eleven o’clock run from Boston to New York. In a little over an hour I was walking into an “adult entertainment club” called Gentry on West Forty-fifth street in Manhattan.

  This was what used to be known as a strip club. Or a jiggle joint. But in polite circles it was called a “gentleman’s club” until that term became politically incorrect too.

  I guess the tittie-bar owners didn’t want to offend feminists.

  The mirrored lobby was lined with the requisite bouncers from New Jersey in black blazers too short at the sleeves over black shirts with white pinstripes. The carpeting inside was garish red. The railings and banisters were so shiny they didn’t even try to look like brass. The music was bad and loud. There were swoopy red vinyl lounge chairs, red vinyl banquettes and booths, half of them empty. The other half were filled with conventioneers and mid-level executives entertaining clients. Bachelor parties from Connecticut. Japanese businessmen on expense accounts. Spotlights swiveled and disco strobe lights spun overhead and there were mirrors everywhere.

  The girls—excuse me, “entertainers”—were pretty and stacked and spray-tanned. Most of them looked cosmetically enhanced. When they danced, nothing jiggled. There was enough silicone in the place to grout every hotel bathroom in Manhattan. They wore thongs and garters, skimpy black brassieres and heels so high I was amazed they could keep their balance without pitching forward head first.

  On the main stage, a shallow half-moon with a brass railing, an embarrassed-looking young guy with bad skin was getting a “stage dance” in the bright spotlights with a slinky black woman doing acrobatic moves an Ashtanga yoga master wouldn’t attempt.

  A collage of huge “art” photos of selected female body parts lined the stairs. I found the “VIP Room,” according to the red neon sign on the door, upstairs just past the cigar bar and a line of private “rooms” with red velvet curtains that served as walls. A generously proportioned woman with pasties on her nipples held the door open for me.

  Here the music was more traditional. Justin Timberlake was singing about bringing sexy back, which segued into Katy Perry confessing she’d kissed a girl and liked it. The walls were lined with white drapes illuminated from below with purple spotlights. A slightly higher class of clientele sat here, in tan suede clamshell banquettes that faced the stage. More scantily clad fembots tottered around with trays of drinks. A Brazilian-looking beauty was giving a lap dance to a corpulent Middle Eastern businessman.

  The guy I was looking for was sitting at a banquette with burly bodyguards on either side of him. Each wore a cheap black leather jacket and was as big as a linebacker. One had a crew cut; the other had black Julius Caesar bangs. You could tell they were Russian a mile away.

  The boy was tall and skinny, with a pasty complexion and a patchy goatee. He wore a foppish black velvet jacket with skinny, beaded lapels that would have looked fruity on Liberace. Under it he wore a black shirt with a tiny collar and a skinny black tie. He was drinking a glass of brown liquid and holding court for five or six equally scruffy-looking guys his age who were doing shots and ogling the entertainers and laughing too loudly and generally acting obnoxious.

  Arkady Navrozov looked fourteen, though he was almost twenty. Even if you didn’t know that his father, Roman Navrozov, was obscenely rich, you could tell by the kid’s entitled demeanor.

  Roman Navrozov was said to be worth over twenty-five billion dollars. He was an exile from Russia, where he’d amassed a fortune as one of the newly minted oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin by seizing control of a few state-owned oil and gas companies and then taking them private. When Vladimir Putin took over, he threw Navrozov in jail on grounds of corruption.

  He served
five years in the notorious prison Kopeisk.

  But he must have struck a deal with Putin, because he was quietly released from prison and went into exile, much of his fortune still intact. He had homes in Moscow, London, New York, Paris, Monaco, St. Bart’s … he’d probably lost track himself. He owned a football club in west London. His yacht, the biggest and most expensive in the world, was usually docked off the French Riviera. It was equipped with a French-made missile defense system.

  Because Roman Navrozov lived in fear. He’d survived two publicly reported assassination attempts and probably countless others, thanks to his private army of some fifty bodyguards. He’d made the mistake of speaking out against Putin and the “kleptocracy” and apparently Putin was thin-skinned.

  His only son, Arkady, had been thrown out of Switzerland the year before for raping a sixteen-year-old Latvian chambermaid at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne. His father had spread around quite a bit of money to make the charges go away.

  He feared his son might be kidnapped and made sure that Arkady never went anywhere without his own matched set of bodyguards.

  But Arkady was a modern kid, and he posted things on Facebook and some social-media site called Foursquare where apparently you tell all your friends your whereabouts every moment of the day.

  Earlier in the day he’d posted:

  Arkady N. in New York, NY:

  wrote a tip @ Gentry: Rocking VIP Rm tonight!

  When he arrived, he posted:

  Arkady N. @ Gentry

  w. 45th St.

  Not long afterward, I arrived at Gentry too, only I wasn’t rocking it and I didn’t post it anywhere.

  I don’t like people to know where I’m going before I get there. It spoils the surprise.

  MY TABLE was across the room but within view. I glanced at my watch.

  Exactly on time the best-looking woman in the room sidled up to Arkady. His bodyguards shifted in their seats but didn’t consider Cristal to be a mortal threat. She whispered something in the kid’s ear and slithered onto his lap. One hand stroked his crotch.