Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  “Do you think you’re better than me? ’Cause you’re not,” my father continued, slurring a word or two. “Hell, you’re probably not even an American. A real American, that is. Born here. In fact, I’m lookin’ around this room and I hardly see any real Americans at all.”

  Sadira Yavari was a philosophy professor with an epistemological focus. A bigoted rant was right smack in her professional wheelhouse, and she had a front-row seat.

  C’mon, Sadira, look up from your book and stare at the crazy lunatic. How can you resist?

  She couldn’t.

  Now, let the real show begin.

  CHAPTER 65

  “GREAT, SOMEONE else who can’t mind their own damn business,” said my father, his jabbing finger swinging over to the attractive woman in the gray skirt and white blouse. “Oh, and look, she’s another foreigner. I bet you’re a Muslim, aren’t you, lady? It doesn’t matter how American you dress. You can’t hide it.”

  That was my cue. Muslim.

  “That’s enough,” I announced from a few chairs over. “You’re out of line.”

  Heads whipped back and forth now between my father and me, anyone within earshot waiting to see how he’d respond. But my father was only getting started with Sadira, as was the plan. I was merely setting the table.

  “What are you reading there, Muslim lady? The Koran? Do you want to see what I read?” He stood and reached into his back pocket, pulling out the copy of the Constitution and all but shoving it in Sadira’s face. “See? This is what real Americans read.”

  “Then why don’t you sit back down and read it,” I said, “and leave the woman alone. In fact, leave us all alone.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you!” barked my father.

  “I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone—you shouldn’t be talking at all.”

  “This thing here says I have the right to speak my mind,” he said, pointing. Elizabeth had wrinkled, rolled, and dog-eared his pocket copy of the Constitution so much there was no doubting he’d been carrying it around with him for years, if not decades.

  “You have the right to speak, and I have the right to tell you to shut the hell up,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? Just try and make me, you commie-loving bastard.”

  Damn, my father was good. Almost too good. Commie-loving bastard? I was ready to spring out of my chair and pop him one.

  But no. I couldn’t be the guy who threw the first punch. Everyone loves a hero, only this wasn’t the movies. This was manipulation. Human psychology. Pavlov’s dog. We needed a precise reaction from Sadira, which meant there could be no doubt about what she was witnessing. It had to seem real.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” said my father, smirking as he watched me now try to ignore him. Most anywhere else in the country I would’ve been chickening out. But in Manhattan it was called living to fight another day. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it worked.

  Hello, one percent.

  My father neatly placed his flask and pocket Constitution on his chair. By the time he turned back around, he was already lunging for me. I had just enough time to stand up so he could knock me down.

  The secret to a fake fight? Real punches. As I rose to my feet, my father landed the first one as required, a haymaker that would’ve caught my chin were it not for a quick turn of my shoulder. Everyone began to scramble, scream, or gasp. Not Sadira, though. She’d barely budged in her chair. From the corner of my eye, I saw her simply staring at the spectacle, taking it all in.

  Duly noted: the woman has seen her fair share of violence.

  From the corner of my other eye, I could see the guards rushing toward us. Elizabeth had released them like hounds. I had only a few seconds before they would break up the fight, just enough time to seal the deal.

  Sympathy is a powerful emotion, but it makes a lousy aphrodisiac. I couldn’t merely be the victim in Sadira’s eyes. Nor was it enough to be the guy who came to her defense. I had to be able to take a punch and, more importantly, be able to land one. A really good one at that.

  Brace yourself, Pops …

  It was no haymaker or roundhouse. In the trade, it’s called a stunner: a quick, sharp jab to the xiphoid process, otherwise known as the small extension of the sternum.

  Suddenly, the drunk old man with a lot to say was rendered silent as he bent forward, the wind knocked clean out of him. It was the last thing Sadira saw before the guards swooped in and grabbed us. Before anyone even had a chance to say the old man started it, they were dragging the two of us out of the room.

  All the while, I didn’t risk sneaking a peek at Sadira. I didn’t have to. I could feel her gaze. Would it be enough, though? Had she bought in?

  CHAPTER 66

  APPROXIMATELY A half hour later, a court clerk read off a list of twenty names in the jury-pool waiting room. The pool was being pared down for the day, the clerk explained, the twenty names having been chosen randomly. Of course, Sadira was one of them.

  I was pacing outside the courthouse, pretending to be looking at my phone. I had my back to the doors, waiting for the signal from Elizabeth, who was watching from the side about twenty yards away. She was pretending to eat a hot dog. It would’ve been more convincing if she’d actually taken a bite of the thing.

  Never mind. She gave me the nod.

  I turned around, my eyes still glued to my phone. The rest of me, however, was clearly visible to Sadira. I continued pacing, a human lure.

  She took the bait. I could hear the clicking of her heels heading my way. “Excuse me,” she said. I looked up. “I just wanted to thank you for what you did in there earlier. Coming to my defense the way you did.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “It was nothing.”

  “It certainly wasn’t nothing to that old man. He didn’t like you very much.”

  “He wasn’t a big fan of yours either.”

  She smiled. “Please tell me they arrested him.”

  I smiled back. A sheepish grin. “And it’s not even Christmas,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes while running a hand through her long brown hair. Sadira Yavari was truly even more stunning up close. “You didn’t press charges, did you?” she asked.

  “What can I say? I’m a sucker for drunk old bigots. The only thing I insisted on was that he drink some coffee.” I motioned inside the courthouse. “He’s doing that right now in their holding area.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Although I’ve read that’s a myth.”

  “What is?”

  “Coffee doesn’t sober you up any faster.”

  “You’re right. I’ve read the same thing,” I said. “Although that’s only in a medical sense.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “Psychological. The human brain can be tricked into sobriety if it buys into the myth.”

  Her eyes lit up with a flash of recognition. “I knew you looked familiar,” she said. “You’re the psychology professor who tracked down that serial killer last year.”

  “That’s me, all right.”

  “No wonder you let the old man off the hook,” she said. “Compared to a serial killer, everyone else is merely having an off day.”

  “Dylan Reinhart,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Sadira Yavari.”

  I could tell she was still sizing me up as we shook hands. “I remember reading about you after you saved the mayor’s life,” she said. “I actually spent a fair amount of class time talking about the Dealer’s motivations after he took his own life.”

  “Class time?” I asked.

  “It turns out we have more in common than jury duty,” she said. “I’m a professor as well. NYU.”

  “No kidding. What do you teach?”

  “Philosophy. Epistemology, to be exact.”

  “From the Greek epistēmē, meaning knowledge,” I said. “Ironic, don’t you think?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The word for the study of knowledge—epistemology—is a word that mos
t people don’t know.”

  “And to think I’ve dedicated my life to it.”

  “You know what Kierkegaard said, right?”

  “Well, I am a professor of philosophy, so I probably do.”

  “Truth always—”

  “Rests with the minority,” she said, finishing the quote. She raised a hand to her chin, giving me a quick up and down. “You’re an interesting man, Professor Reinhart.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “How about dinner tomorrow night? Will it get me that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to ask my wife.”

  Sadira blinked. She literally took a step back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see a wedding ring, and the way we were talking I sort of assumed that—”

  “I’m just kidding. There’s no wife,” I said. “And I’d love to have dinner with you.”

  BOOK FOUR

  THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

  CHAPTER 67

  “I CAN think of a dozen foreign governments that would give their collective left nut to blow up this table,” said my father.

  Julian chuckled. “Maybe we should move tables.”

  “Maybe I should call Foxx again,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “He’ll be here,” said Julian. “And don’t ask me what you’re about to ask me for the hundredth time.”

  For the hundredth time, I asked him anyway. “Julian, why are you here?”

  “Because Foxx wanted me here,” he said. “Last I checked, he was still the New York section chief.”

  As usual, Julian had a point. There were only a few people on the planet who could force him to leave his proverbial bat cave against his will. Landon Foxx was one of them.

  Now, if only Foxx would show up.

  No sooner had I booked my dinner date with Sadira than Foxx called and asked me to meet him at O’Sullivan’s Bar on the Lower East Side, the back booth. Word had already gotten to him that my father was in town. Foxx wanted him there, too. “Tell Eagle I look forward to seeing him,” he said.

  Lo and behold, there was Julian in the booth with a glass of whiskey when my father and I arrived. I’d spoken to him only an hour before to ask a favor. He hadn’t mentioned the meeting. Why not, I wondered. Once again, Julian wasn’t saying.

  I let it lie and focused on the favor.

  “So how many pages did you have to scrub?” I asked while we waited for Foxx.

  O’Sullivan’s had been around since Prohibition and smelled like it, too. It was the perfect Irish dive bar where everyone had their own problems.

  “Not as many pages as you might have thought,” answered Julian. “There was that story in New York magazine and a piece in the Provincetown Banner that referred to you as being rumored to be gay. All other mentions were in blogs.”

  “Are you sure you got them all?” I asked.

  Julian looked at me as if I’d just asked Annie Leibovitz if she was sure there was film in her camera. “Yes, I got them all,” he said. “When Sadira Yavari googles you, there will be nothing to dispel the notion that you’re straight.”

  I glanced across the table at my father, who looked to be holding his tongue on a couple of punch lines to the point of dizziness. Or maybe it was the fatigue catching up to him. He still hadn’t slept. If Foxx hadn’t explicitly asked for him to join us, I would’ve insisted he crash at Elizabeth’s apartment, as she’d offered. For the record, she was less than pleased that she couldn’t come along to O’Sullivan’s. She’d mumbled something about an all-boys club, but she understood the real reason. She didn’t work for Foxx. She wasn’t CIA.

  That didn’t mean she had to be happy about it. Whatever the purpose of the meeting, she knew it had to be important. I knew it, too.

  For the hundred and first time, “Just give me a hint,” I said to Julian. “Amuse me. Why does Foxx want all of us here? What’s it about?”

  Julian tilted his glass of whiskey, motioning over my shoulder. “You can ask him yourself,” he said. “Here he comes.”

  CHAPTER 68

  FOXX SAT down in the booth. He nodded to me and Julian and then promptly forgot we existed for a couple of minutes while he caught up with my father, reminiscing about a couple of missions. “Company hasn’t been the same without you, Eagle,” Foxx eventually said, shaking his head. “Like it or not, you’re a legend.”

  “Careful or I might just believe you,” said my father. “Now go ahead and ask me what you really want to know.”

  Foxx wasn’t one to play coy. Called out by my father, he normally would’ve been more than happy to cut to the chase. But he was also no dummy. When a man already knows your next move, you’ll never get what you want from him.

  “I was going to ask what brings you to New York,” said Foxx, “but we both know you have no intention of telling me the real reason because you’re not ready yet. So we’ll leave it at that.”

  My father smiled, impressed. For a second, I thought he might actually tell Foxx about our early morning encounter with Eli, the Prophet. Then I remembered. This is my father. As sure as Woodward and Bernstein, he would never burn a source.

  “Okay, now that we’ve got that settled,” I said. In other words, Let’s get on with things.

  I’d already briefed Foxx about Sadira when he called me at the courthouse. He was pleased that I’d made contact with her, although he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with my plan.

  “Sadira Yavari either killed Jahan Darvish herself or set him up for someone else,” said Foxx. “Either way, he had to have been compromised. The question is how.”

  “That’s what I’m working on,” I said.

  “It’s what we’re all working on,” said Foxx. He gave a quick nod to Julian. That was his cue.

  “Landon asked me to look at Darvish’s file to see if there was anything the Agency had missed about him,” said Julian.

  “So what was missed?” I asked. It had to be something. Julian wouldn’t be at the table otherwise.

  “The Agency had presumably pulled all of Darvish’s financial records, including a Caymans account that was receiving his payments from the Iranian government,” explained Julian. “The professor was laundering rials into dollars through an offshore gambling site, exactly as he’d told the Agency when he became a double agent.”

  I really heard only one word of that. “Presumably?” I asked. “The Agency had presumably pulled all of his financial records?”

  “We stopped at rials and dollars,” said Foxx.

  It was all he needed to say. I turned to Julian. “Cryptocurrency?”

  Julian touched his nose. Bingo. “Only this particular crypto is new and a bit different. It’s on the darknet and seems to be backed by hard currency.”

  That was new. Imagine being able to digitally print your own hundred-dollar bills. “But you don’t know which currency it is yet, right?” I asked.

  “No,” said Julian. “I have my suspicions, but the whole setup is rather sophisticated.”

  That was Julian’s way of admitting he hadn’t fully hacked it yet. There were indeed limits to what he could do from behind a keyboard, at least under a time constraint. Not that he would ever wave the white flag. As he was fond of telling me, failure is just success that hasn’t happened yet.

  “So transmission-wise, how does it differ from the likes of Bitcoin?” I asked.

  While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous, a few hackers have been able to chart individual transaction flows, as well as figure out the real-world identities of both senders and receivers. In fact, Julian was the first.

  “I can see where the crypto lands,” he said. “I just can’t see who sent it. There’s an added layer in this case, an intermediary account that actually erases the trail a split second before the transfer is complete,” said Julian.

  “How is that possible?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It’s as if the currency intuitively knows where to go even after the transaction is cancel
ed.”

  “You mean, like a snake that still slithers even after its head gets cut off,” I said.

  “More or less,” said Julian.

  I turned to Foxx. “So Darvish was receiving additional monies he didn’t tell you about, and it wouldn’t make sense that they were from the Iranian government since Iran was already paying him.”

  Foxx nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, Reinhart.”

  “You got played,” I said. “Darvish was feeding you misinformation.”

  “Maybe,” said Foxx. “Maybe not. We’ll never know for sure.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Julian.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Foxx. This was clearly news to him, too. “What do you mean?”

  My father chuckled. Exhausted as he was, he was still listening to every word. Better yet, he was reading between the lines.

  “He means he knows who the intermediary is,” said my father. “He knows who the money is funneled through.”

  Julian grinned and put a finger to his nose again.

  Bingo.

  CHAPTER 69

  “WHO IS it?” asked Foxx.

  Julian took out his cell. The picture was already cued up. “Meet Viktor Alexandrov,” he said.

  We all stared at the photo. It came from the web pages of Viktor Alexandrov International.

  “That’s convenient, the guy has a website,” I said. “Does it list an address?”

  “No, just his phone. But it’s a New York number,” said Julian. “He lives in SoHo.”

  Foxx grabbed the phone for a closer look, his finger scrolling. “He’s an art dealer?”

  “A Russian art dealer,” said Julian. “And if there was ever a country that would create a darknet cryptocurrency to counterfeit the ruble it would be the Russians. Black market weapons, money laundering, influencing foreign elections—and, of course, the occasional funding of terrorism.”