The Kremlin Phoenix (5 page)

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, feigning
surprise.

Craig smiled, appreciating her
nakedness. “Do you always answer the door that way?”

“What way?” She asked innocently.

He smiled as he stepped into her
apartment, dropped his briefcase and proceeded to give her a long kiss.

“I wasn’t expecting this tonight,”
she said, “But, I like surprises.”

“I wasn’t planning to come over,
but I didn’t want to go home yet. I needed someone to talk to . . .”

“Talk? I thought you were just
using me for sex!”

He smiled again, then sobered. “Two
of the partners at GM&P have been murdered.”

Nikki’s playful smirk
disappeared. “Oh, that’s terrible!” Realizing he really did want to talk, she
said, “Hold on, I’ll throw something on.”

While Nikki vanished into the
bedroom, Craig liberated a beer from the refrigerator, then retrieved the photo
of his father from his coat and studied it anew.

How tough
was it?
He wondered.

Presently, Nikki emerged from the
bedroom, transformed. Tight fitting jeans, loose fitting shirt, hair combed but
no makeup, looking fabulous. “Let’s talk.”

* * * *

Craig lay awake, eyes closed, deep in
thought, while Nikki slept curled up next to him. He’d told her everything –
leaving out only the female apparition. When they’d finally gone to bed after 1
AM, the nightmarish vision of McCormack’s burning car refused to let him sleep.

Suddenly a thought flashed into
his mind,
The envelope!

After the shock of seeing the car
explode, he’d completely forgotten it. He eased himself out of bed and quietly
retrieved the envelope from his briefcase. There was a single sheet of paper
inside with a heading that filled him with dread and hope.

MARCELL LAURENCE INCORPORATED

MASTER LIST

It was a list of bank accounts,
names and addresses. Craig skimmed the names, but recognized only the first
name on the list. It was Goldstein, McCormack & Powell alongside accounts
with both Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase.

“What are you doing?”Nikki asked,
blinking sleepily from the bedroom doorway.

“You’re the financial expert,”
Craig said, handing her the page. “What do you make of this?”

“Do you know what time it is?”
she said without reading it.

“Please, this is important.”

Nikki stifled a yawn and ran her
eye down the page. “Banks, bank account numbers, bank identifier codes, passwords
and dealers.” She skimmed the names of the dealer organizations responsible for
each group of accounts. They were located in the world’s financial capitals: New
York, London, Shanghai, Zurich, Frankfurt, Sydney and Tokyo. “Everything you
need to transfer money from one bank to another.” She snapped sharply awake. “You’re
not becoming a white collar criminal are you?”

“This is what they were killed
for,” Craig said.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I stole it.”

“You should put it back, before
anyone knows you have it.”

“That would be the smart thing to
do.”

“Whose Marcell Laurence?”

“I don’t think he exists. One of
the associates did a search once – out of curiosity – but found nothing. It’s just
a name.”

“Sounds French,” Nikki said.

“I think this is what the guy who
phoned me wants.”

“You can’t give him this!” Nikki
said, suddenly alarmed.

“It’s all I have to trade,” Craig
said, his mind already made up.

“If you’re caught, you’ll go to
jail forever! And you will get caught. Go to the police. Tell them this guy is
trying to blackmail you. They’ll help you.”

Craig took the page out of her
hand. “If he got a whiff of the police, he’d disappear, and I’d never find out what
happened to my old man.” He slid the master list back into the envelope and locked
it in his brief case

“Promise me, you won’t do
anything stupid.”

“Define stupid.”

“Don’t play your smart ass lawyer
games with me. You know the law, stay on the right side of it.”

Craig looked at her big dark
eyes. “Will you rat on me?” He put his arms around her.

“No. But I won’t be visiting you
in prison.”

He pulled her close. “Not even
for conjugal visits?” Skin touched skin, and they both felt the electric charge
of contact. Craig began running his hands over her body as her arms came up
around his neck and they kissed.

When she pulled away for air, she
smiled. “OK, I’ll visit you once or twice, but only if you have a private cell.”

“I know a great lawyer,” he said
with a grin.

* * * *

Craig returned
to his apartment early next morning to change into fresh clothes before work. Pete,
his cat, slinked out from under a table and wound itself around his legs.

“Hello
boy, did you miss me?” Craig cooed as he picked up the cat and stroked its fur.
He carried it into the kitchen, setting it down beside an empty bowl. “You
hungry, Pete?”

The cat
purred as Craig emptied a tin of cat food into his dish. With the cat’s
immediate needs satisfied, he retrieved the master list from his brief case and
scanned the document into his computer, being careful to manually check every character
had been read correctly. When he finished, he shredded the original page, copied
the computer file onto a flash drive and wiped all trace of the MLI file from
his computer. He took a roll of adhesive tape into his bedroom and taped the
flash drive inside the toe of an old pair of sneakers, then dropped the
sneakers casually at the foot of his bed, in plain sight.

Craig
returned to the computer and changed three numbers in each account, then three
more in each of the passwords, ensuring the computer file was useless. Satisfied,
he printed the corrupted master list, slid the page back into Goldstein’s
envelope and locked it in his brief case.

By the
time Craig completed the switch, Pete had devoured his dinner and was curled up
on the couch sleeping peacefully. Craig showered and started dressing for work.
When he was selecting a tie, he noticed the old shoe box wrapped with an
elastic band that he’d been storing for years. He took it down and removed his
father’s hand gun. He hadn’t fired it in years, and was at best, an average shot,
but he’d kept the gun in good condition for sentimental reasons. Beside the gun
was a half full carton of ammunition. He loaded the gun, slipped it into his
pocket and finished dressing. He started feeling foolish, reminding himself
that he was a lawyer, not a vigilante. There was nothing connecting him to the
MLI master list, so there was no way the killer, whoever he was, would even
know he existed.

When he
finally departed for work, he left the gun in his bedside table drawer.

Rick Harriman and Hal Woods took seats
opposite Phil Powell in the interview room at Police Headquarters. Harriman sat
silently watching Powell, who avoided eye contact by studying his fingernails.

“You bought two guns yesterday,”
Harriman said. “One was found with McCormack last night. I assume you have the
other?”

Powell opened his jacket, revealing
the pistol in his shoulder holster.

“You think that will save you?”
Harriman asked.

“It’ll even the odds.”

“We can protect you.”

Powell smiled sourly. “No you can’t.”

“Are you sure you don’t want our
help?”

Powell met Harriman’s eyes for
the first time. “I’ll take any protection you can offer, Detective, but I
really don’t know
why
this is happening.”

“What do you know?”

Powell returned his gaze to his
fingernails, deep in thought, then briefly outlined what he knew about MLI,
adding, “We never met anyone face to face. Everything was done by phone or email.
The phone calls were scrambled, the emails encrypted. They provided us with the
equipment, all very advanced stuff. Nothing you could buy commercially. With
the files gone, I’m now all that’s left of the MLI money trail at the New York
end.”

“So you think it’s a money
laundering operation?” Harriman asked.

“No. We invested money for them,
all around the world, all in cash. They were very specific, it had to be in
cash.”

“Why cash?” Woods asked.

“Only reason you stay in cash is
so you can withdraw it fast,” Powell replied. “We directly invested as much as
we could, and used intermediaries in the world’s leading financial centers to
manage the rest. There was just so much of it, no one firm, no one country,
could invest it all.”

Harriman’s eyes narrowed. “How
much are we talking about?”

Powell leaned forward, and even
though they were in the privacy of an interview room, he whispered. “More than
a thousand billion dollars! I have no idea where it came from. We tried tracing
the source once. They knew immediately. They said if it happened again, they’d terminate
their business with us. We never tried again, because we knew, they were
watching everything we did.”

“When you tried to trace it, how
far did you get?”

“We followed the trail back through
a bank in Cameroon to Hong Kong, then to Switzerland. That’s when they caught
us.”

“So what do you think MLI is a
front for?”

Powell shrugged. “They’re not
listed on the stock exchange. It’s a private company, owned by a maze of other private
companies.”

“We’ll start our own trace,”
Harriman said, nodding to Woods to take care of it. “In the mean time, we’ll
move you to a safe house while we work out a plan with the witness protection
program.”

“For how long?”

“Until we catch whoever is trying
to kill you.”

“But you have no leads.”

“Yeah, it’ll take time.”

“I’m not going to be a prisoner. I’ll
take my chances,” he said, patting the gun beneath his jacket.

“If you refuse protection, and
you have a professional hit man after you, he will kill you.”

Powell leaned forward with a
determined look. “Maybe, but if you’re watching me and he makes a move, you can
get him.”

“We don’t use people as bait.”

“And I’m not going to any safe
house, so the question is, are you going to follow me?”

He’s a
dead man
, Harriman thought. “All right Mr
Powell, we’ll follow you, and we’ll put a protection squad in your house, but
we’ll only get this guy
after
he’s made an
attempt on your life.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

* * * *

Craig answered the phone in his office
shortly before eleven.

“Mr Balard?” the heavily accented voice
asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you found anything?”

“I have something you might want.”

“Really?” The man said, suspecting
a lie.

“I have a MLI document. A very important
document.” There was a long silence at the other end. “Hello? Are you still
there?”

“Do you know Romano’s?”

“On Fifth?”

“Meet me there at midday.”

“How will I know you?”

“I’ll reserve a table in your
name,” the man replied, then hung up.

* * * *

In sub level four of the underground carpark
below Craig’s building, a dark van with no side windows was parked alongside a
locked metal door which secured the tower’s telecommunications control system. Three
men wearing headphones sat inside the van, listening to all calls in and out of
the law firm’s offices. They used eavesdropping equipment only available for electronic
intelligence gathering purposes, equipment that had been smuggled into the
United States in pieces and assembled in secret. Each member of the three man
team had carefully constructed identities that would easily fool local police
and challenge even the CIA.

Computers analyzed every call,
searching for key words and specific voice prints. A search term alert suddenly
flashed, indicating the computer had detected the trigger word,
MLI
. The team leader switched to the indicated channel,
unaware what MLI meant or why it was important.

The electronic surveillance unit’s
orders came directly from the East Coast operations commander himself, with
specific instructions on how to report any actionable intelligence. They were
unusual orders, but not without precedent for particularly sensitive work. Only
the regional commander, a former high ranking army officer, knew the
intelligence gathering operation was not an officially sanctioned mission, but
one requested by very senior officers in Moscow to whom he was personally
loyal.