Buried Secrets (30 page)

“The operation has been terminated,” he said. “The girl is to be released at once.”

“It’s too late,” the
zek
said.

Chuzhoi pulled a sheaf of papers from his breast pocket. “I will see to it that you are wired your completion fee immediately. All you have to do is sign these forms, as we’ve already discussed. Also, in consideration of your excellent service, you will receive a bonus of one hundred thousand dollars in cash as soon as the girl is handed over.”

“But ‘terminated’ is not the same as ‘concluded,’” the
zek
said. “Was the ransom not paid? Or were other arrangements made?”

Chuzhoi shrugged. “I am only a messenger. I pass along what the Client tells me. But I believe other arrangements have been reached.”

The
zek
stared at him, and Chuzhoi, hardly a delicate man, felt a sudden chill. “Do you need a pen?” he said.

The
zek
came near. Chuzhoi could smell the cigarettes on his breath.

The
zek
gave a hideous grimace. “You know, we can go into business for ourselves,” he said. “The girl’s father is a billionaire. We can demand a ransom that will set us up for life.”

“The father has nothing anymore.”

“Men like that are never without money.”

A sudden gust of wind lashed the small window with rain. There was a rumble of distant thunder.

But why not offer him whatever he asked? It was all irrelevant anyway. He’d never get a cent.

The
zek
put his arm around Chuzhoi’s shoulder in a comradely fashion. “We could be partners. Think of how much we can make, you and I.”

His hand ran smoothly down Chuzhoi’s back until it lightly grasped the butt of his pistol.

As if he knew precisely what he would find and where.

“Last time you came unarmed.”

“The weapon is for my protection.”

“Do you know what this is?” the
zek
said.

Chuzhoi saw the wink of a steel blade, a thick black handle.

Of course he knew what the thing was.

In the calmest voice he could muster, he said, “I am always happy to discuss new business opportunities.”

He felt the nip of the blade against his side.

The
zek
’s left hand slid back up his spine to his left shoulder, the long fingers gripping the shoulder blade at the front. Suddenly he felt a deep twinge and his left arm went dead.

Chuzhoi sensed the man’s hot breath on his neck.

“I know the Client’s ransom demands have still not been met,” the
zek
said. “I also know he has made a deal to give me up.”

Chuzhoi opened his mouth to deny it, but the blade penetrated a little more, then pulled back. The pain was so intense it made him gasp.

“If we are to do business together, we need to trust each other,” the monster said.

“Of course,” Chuzhoi whispered, eyes closed.

“You need to earn my trust.”

“Yes. Of course.
Please
.”

A tear rolled down his cheek. He wasn’t sure if it was from the physical pain of the
zek
’s pressure point or simple fear.

“I think you have some idea where the girl is located,” the
zek
said.

Chuzhoi hesitated, not wanting to admit he’d had the man followed after their last meeting. That would only enrage him.

Chuzhoi had ordered the follower to keep the surveillance discreet. In fact, he’d stayed back so far he’d lost him.

But … was it possible the
zek
had detected the surveillance?

Even so, Chuzhoi had only an approximate location of the burial site. He didn’t know the name of the town. The county, yes. Hundreds of square miles. So what? That was as good as nothing.

Before he could think how to reply, the
zek
spoke. “A man with your experience should hire better eyes.”

Chuzhoi felt the blade again, white hot, but this time the
zek
didn’t pull back, and the pain shot up to the top of his head and down to the very soles of his feet. Heat spread throughout his body, or so he thought, until he realized that in fact his sphincter had given way.

In desperation he cried,
“Think of the money—!”

But the knife had gone in deep into his stomach. He struggled against the
zek
’s iron embrace, retched something hot, which burned his throat.

Outside the wind whistled. Rain spattered the clapboard sides of the house. It had become a downpour.

“I am,” the
zek
said.

“What do you want?” he screamed. “My God, what do you
want
from me?”

“May I borrow your mobile?” the
zek
said. “I’d like to make a phone call.”

79.

“Put it on speaker,” I told Navrozov.

This was it. The call that told us either that the kidnapping had been successfully called off, or …

Navrozov answered it abruptly:
“Da?”

“Speaker,” I said again.

To me he said, “I don’t know how to do this.”

I took it from him and punched the speaker button, and I heard something strange, something unexpected.

A scream.

AND THEN a man’s voice, speaking in Russian.

I could make out only intonation and cadence, of course, but the man sounded calm and professional.

In the background was a continuous whimpering, a rush of words that sounded like pleading. I set the phone down on the desk, looked at Navrozov, whose face registered puzzlement.

He leaned over the phone, not fully understanding the concept of a speakerphone, and said,
“Kto eto?”

The calm voice on the other end:
“Vy menya nye znayete.”

“Shto proiskhodit?”
Navrozov said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“He says the contractor is not available to speak but he can pass along a message—” The whimpering in the background abruptly got louder, turned into a high, almost feminine shriek that prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. A peculiar gargling sound, then a rush of words:
“Ostanovitye!… Ya proshu … pazhaluista prekratitye! Shto ty khochish?… Bozhe
moi!”

Navrozov looked stricken. His face was flushed, his features gone slack as he listened.

“Nye magu … nye … magu…”

The pleading voice in the background grew fainter.

“Who is it?” I demanded.

Then the calm voice was back on speaker. “Someone is there with you?” the man said, this time in English. “Tell Mr. Navrozov that his employee will no longer be reporting back to him. Good-bye.”

A few seconds of silence passed before I realized that the connection had been severed.

I had a sick feeling. I knew the worst had happened. So did Navrozov. He hurled the phone across the room. It hit a bedside lamp, knocking it to the carpeted floor. His face was dark, mottled. He let loose a string of Russian obscenities.

“The bastard thinks he can defy me!” Navrozov said, spittle flying.

The door to the room came open, and his security guards burst in. The one in front had a weapon in his right hand, a keycard in his left. They’d managed to get one from the front desk.

“This bastard murders my employee!”

The security men did a quick assessment, assured themselves that I wasn’t doing harm to their boss. They muttered hasty apologies, I guessed, and retreated from the room.

“Who was that?” I said.

“This is the whole point of cutouts!” he shouted. “I don’t
know
who it is.”

“
Where
is he, then?”

“I told you, somewhere in New Hampshire!”

“Within a thirty-minute drive from the Maine border,” I said. “Right? We know that much. But do you know if he was based in the north part of the state, or the south, or what? You have no idea?”

He didn’t answer, and I could tell that he didn’t know. That he was experiencing something he rarely felt: defeat.

“Wait,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I do have something. A photograph.” I looked at him, waited.

“The cutout was able to take a covert photograph of the contractor. For insurance purposes.”

“A face?”

He nodded. “But no name.”

“I want it.”

“But this man’s face is not in any of your law-enforcement databases. It will not be easy to find him.”

“I want it,” I repeated. “And I want one more thing.”

Navrozov just looked at me.

“I want to know what Mercury really is.”

He told me.

Thirty minutes later, still numb with shock, I found my way to the street and into a cab.

PART THREE

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself
such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

—ÉMILE ZOLA

80.

Just before six in the morning, the FedEx cargo flight landed in Boston.

I desperately needed sleep.

If I was to have any hope of locating Alexa Marcus, I needed a little rest. Just a few hours of downtime so I could think clearly again. I was at the point where I could be mainlining caffeine and it still wouldn’t keep me awake.

My phone rang as I was parking the Defender.

It was Tolya Vasilenko. “The picture you just sent me,” he said. “I am very sorry for you.

This is a particularly bad egg.”

“Tell me.”

“You remember this terrible murder of the family in Connecticut I told you about?” He was still pronouncing it wrong.

“He was the one who survived? The one who escaped?”

“So I am told.”

“Name?”

“We still haven’t discussed a price.”

“How much do you want?” I said wearily.

“It’s not money I want. It’s … let’s call it a swap of intelligence.” He told me his demand, and I agreed to it without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he said: “Dragomir Vladimirovich Zhukov.”

I mulled over the name, tried to connect it to the snapshot that Navrozov’s security chief, Eugene, had e-mailed me: the hard-looking man with the shaven head and the fierce expression.

Dragomir
, I mentally rehearsed.
Dragomir Zhukov
. A hard-sounding name.

“An unusual name for a Russian,” I said.

“Uncommon. His mother’s a Serb.”

“What else do you have on him?”

“Besides the fact that he is a sociopath and a monster and an extremely clever man?

There is maybe more you need to know?”

“Specifics about his background. His childhood, his family.”

“You have decided to become a psychoanalyst in your spare time?”

“It’s how I work. The more I know about a target’s personal life, the more effective I can be.”

“Unfortunately we have very little, Nicholas, apart from the arrest files and his military records and a few interviews with family members and witnesses.”

“Witnesses?”

“You don’t think this home invasion in Connecticut was his first murder, do you? When he served in Chechnya with the Russian ground forces, he was disciplined for excess zeal.”

“What kind of ‘zeal’?”

“He took part in a
zachistka
—a ‘cleansing operation’—in Grozny, and did certain things that even his commanders couldn’t bring themselves to talk about, and these are not sensitive souls. Acts of torture. I know of only a few things. He captured three Chechen brothers and dismembered them so thoroughly that nothing remained but a pile of bones and gristle.”

“Is that why he was sent to prison?”

“No, no. He was jailed for a crime he committed after he returned from the war.”

“Another murder, I assume.”

“Well, no, not exactly. He was sentenced to five years for theft of property. He’d gotten work on one of the oil pipeline projects in Tomsk, operating excavation equipment, and apparently he ‘borrowed’ one of the excavators for his own personal use.”

“Like getting Al Capone for not paying taxes.”

“That was all they could get him on. The Tomsk regional police were unable to definitively connect him to something far worse that they were sure he did. The reason he borrowed the excavation equipment. For more than a year the police investigated the disappearance of a family, a husband and wife and their teenage son who vanished overnight.

They questioned Zhukov extensively but got nothing. They had nothing more than unfounded rumors that Zhukov had been hired by a fellow prison inmate to do a hit.”

“A hit on a family?”

“The man owned several auto dealerships in Tomsk. He had been warned that if he didn’t sell his dealerships to a friend of Zhukov’s, his entire family would suffer. It seems these threats were not hollow.”

“So the family’s bodies were never found.”

“They were found. A year after their disappearance. And purely by coincidence. An abandoned parcel of land outside the city was being developed for a housing project, and when they dug the foundation, three bodies were unearthed. A middle-aged couple and their teenage son. The police forensic examiners found large quantities of dirt in their lungs. They were buried alive.”

“Which was why Zhukov borrowed the excavation equipment.”

“So it seems. But the case could never be proven in the courts. You see, he is very, very good. He covered his tracks expertly. I can see why Roman Navrozov hired him. But if you are looking for a psychohistory, Nicholas, you might be interested to know that when Zhukov was a boy his father died in a coal-mining accident.”

“Also buried alive?”

“Maybe ‘drowned’ is more accurate. The father worked in an underground mine, and when some of the miners accidentally dug into an abandoned shaft that was filled with water, the tunnels were flooded. Thirty-seven miners drowned.”

“How old was Zhukov?”

“Nine or ten. You can imagine how traumatic this must have been for the families.

Especially for the young children who were left fatherless.”

“I don’t see a connection between some childhood trauma and—”

“His mother, Dusya, told our interviewer years ago that her son’s chief complaint at the time was that he never saw it happen. She says that was when she first realized that Dragomir wasn’t like the other little boys.”