From Manhattan with Revenge (The Fourth Book in the Fifth Avenue Series) (16 page)

“But what if he can’t stand his family and
would rather see them dead than lose face now?”

“Do you know something we don’t, Babe?”
Carmen asked.

Babe looked at her in surprise. “What does
that mean?”

“It was just so declarative, the way you
said it. I’m just wondering if you know something about Katzev that we don’t.
You did mention meeting him once.”

Babe waved a hand. “That was twenty years
ago.”

Carmen spun her web carefully. “How well
did you know him? Was it long enough to give us insight into what he might do
when we send him the video or if he even cares about his poor family?”

“Twenty years changes all of us, Carmen.
You. Me. Jake. Vincent. We’re all different. The person I was twenty years ago
has radically evolved. Back then, I was a different person. The same is true
for all of us. How can I tell you that the man I knew back then is the same man
now when that can’t be the case?”

On the surface, it was a fair enough response,
but Carmen didn’t overlook the fact that Babe still hadn’t answered the
question. She didn’t say how well she knew Katzev. She didn’t say she had an
affair with him. She chose not to divulge that information.

“I didn’t realize that you knew Katzev,”
Jake said, startling Carmen with the angry tone of his voice. It was clear by
his tense expression that he felt he should have known this. That she should
have divulged it. And he was right. “How did you meet him?”

Babe shrugged. “Too long ago,” she said.
“I can’t remember.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jake said. “The fact
that you know him certainly should have come up at some point since I’ve been
involved in this. You’ve never once mentioned knowing him to me. I think it’s
important that you knew him, regardless of how long ago it was. You know what
the man looks like, for Christ’s sake, which neither I nor Carmen know.”

Carmen looked at Jake differently. He was
genuinely angry, as he should be. She watched Babe take to one of the red
chairs and sit down. She folded her legs at the knee and was a portrait of
calm. “I met him through Jean-Georges,” she said.

“Where?”

“Honestly? I don’t remember. It probably
was at a party. I used to go to a lot of them back them. Several a week. It’s
something we McAdoos were supposed to do. Go to parties. Attend the right
social events. Show up at the right showings. We’re part of New York society’s
old guard, as they say. Before my father died and I became free to do as I
pleased, he expected all of his children to follow the rules or be left out of
the will. So, we lunched, we brunched, we went to church, we took to the
country to hunt, we went to suppers, we spent our summers in Northeast Harbor,
we mixed with our own kind here, there, and everywhere.”

“Laurent was your own kind?” Jake asked.

Babe laughed. “Hardly. He was an upstart.
I can’t remember what party I met him at, Jake, but it doesn’t matter. He
likely was someone’s guest at some random event. Same with Katzev. There will
always be those with new money who want to be one of us. Those two were no
different.” She raised her hands in frustration. “But how is this helping our
situation now?” she asked. “We need to focus on that video and on Chloe.”

“What confuses me is that you’ve said that
you’ve met him and that you know him. There is a divide there.”

“A very small one.”

“How well did you know him, Babe?” Carmen
pressed.

And Babe McAdoo of the McAdoo family, who
was no fool when she knew she was being pressed for a solid reason, as she was
now, resigned herself to coming clean. “Well enough to have had an affair with
him,” she said. “Again, that was twenty years ago. But we did have a little
tryst.”

Incredulous, Jake looked at Carmen, then
turned back to Babe. “A little tryst?”

“That’s right. A tryst. It began at that
party. I was tipsy. He wasn’t. And I have to tell you, he’s very good looking.
He took me to one of the upstairs bedroom and we had a go of it. Smallest penis
I’ve ever seen—it was like a red berry resting in a nest—but
everything else was good. His hands. His tongue. His aggression. We met two
times after that, but then I cut him off. He was just using me, and while he
had a good build, the sight of him naked from the waist down was revolting. It
ended uglier than you could imagine, but who cares? The affair, if you even
want to call it that, meant nothing. I should have told you, but I was too
embarrassed to bring it up.”

“You should have,” Carmen said.

“Who told you?” Babe asked. “Somebody did.
You pressed for a reason.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Probably Gelling,” she said. “Gave him
another reason to take another breath. Disappointing, really. I thought I could
trust him.”

“I never said it was Gelling.”

“My dear,” Babe said, her gaze falling on
Carmen. “You didn’t have to.”

“When did
you
hear?” Jake asked
Carmen.

“A moment ago on the phone. I also was
surprised.”

“Gelling,” Babe said. “Dear, sweet
Gelling.”

“Babe, I hope you see how this information
makes us question whether we can trust you,” Jake said.

Babe nodded. “Of course, I do. I didn’t
come clean with it. My mistake. I keep large parts of my life private, as we
all do. I, for instance, know practically nothing about you, Jake. You just sit
there and judge, but what do we know about you really? Who are you?”

“Just an assassin, Babe. You know how we
work.”

“I do,” she said. “And I get it. I see why
you’re upset. You can trust me. I’d like nothing more than to see Katzev dead.”

“Why?” Carmen asked.

“The reason our little fling ended so
quickly? I’ve never told anyone this, but I suppose I owe you an answer. Katzev
beat me. I made the mistake of giggling at how small he was down there. I said
it while we were showering after our final romp. I thought he’d have a sense of
humor about it because he was so marvelous in every other way, which I told him
he was. But it turns out he didn’t like that giggle at all. He didn’t like me
calling it ‘Little Willie.’” And because he didn’t, he let me have it in such a
way that I warned him that if he ever came near me again, I’d have him killed.
We were a lot younger then. He wasn’t as powerful as he is now. He was just
starting out. But back then, he saw my family as powerful and so well connected
that my threat carried real weight. He knew he made a mistake. We were at a
hotel when he did it. Some out-of-the-way place on the West Side where I knew I
wouldn’t run into any of my people. Those things still mattered to me then
because Daddy was alive. Katzev gathered his things, left, and I’ve never heard
from him since.”

“Is that it?” Carmen asked, knowing the
truth when she heard it.

“That’s it, Carmen.”

“You should have told us,” Jake said.

Babe turned and gave him a tolerating
look. “When a woman is beaten, Jake, it’s not exactly something she wants to
relive. I’ve apologized. I know I should have divulged. I understand if any trust
between us has been compromised. Whether we go forward as a team is something
for you two to decide. It’s simple. Either we’re going to work together to
bring down that son of a bitch, or you both should leave now and forget that we
ever met.”

CHAPTER TWE
NTY

“We send him the video,” Carmen said.
“Together.”

“Carmen—”

“She told the truth, Jake,” Carmen
interrupted. “I agree she should have come clean earlier—and I’m
disappointed that she didn’t given the circumstances at hand and her knowledge
of how these things work—but the truth is out and I believe her. If
you’ve ever been beaten by a lover, and I doubt if you have given your size,
you’d understand the shame that comes with it. You would have recognized that
shame in her voice when she spoke about it.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” he
asked.

“I am.”

She looked at Babe. “I’m sorry for what
Katzev did to you.”

“As I said, that was years ago. I went
through it, I learned from it, and I’m over it. Mostly.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I wouldn’t mind watching that
bastard take a bullet in the face, just like Laurent.”

“Laurent took a few bullets.”

“All the better. I could put a spare one
between his legs and have a good giggle at the loss of ‘Little Willie,’ though
my aim would have to be immaculate, which it isn’t.”

Carmen smiled at her. “Mine is.”

Babe edged forward in her chair. “So, can
we plan this and get it over with? Or am I out?”

“You’re not out,” Carmen said. “We end
this together.” She took out her cell and wrote a detailed note to Katzev
before pushing the button that e-mailed it to him along with the video.

“What did you write?” Jake asked.

“What Katzev’s mother said in that video
could be interpreted any number of ways. He’ll see it as a cry for help. I told
him that if he didn’t contact me in an hour with plans on letting Chloe go, his
mother and the rest of his family would be dead. I told him that if he
contacted them, we would know and they would die immediately.”

“You typed more than that.”

She nodded. “I also said that if he
bothered either of us again, that we know where he lives,
 
his real name, and that the truth about
him and the syndicate would be released to the police. Plus, his childhood home
would be burned down and that we’d find his family and slaughter them if he
tries to hide them. And that, of course, we’d do the same to him.” She paused
and caught a smile on Babe McAdoo’s lips. “Essentially, I told him not to fuck
with us.”

“It’s video against video,” Babe said.
“Words against words.”

“That’s right,” Carmen said. “So, let’s
see whose video and whose words carry more weight.”

CHAPTER TWE
NTY-ONE

In the warehouse surrounded by his car
collection, which wasn’t there only to look at and to touch but also to remind
him how successful he was, Illarion Katzev leaned against his prized
three-million-dollar Bugatti Veyron Super Sport Vitesse, watched the video
twice, read Carmen’s note three times, and then watched the video again.

He was incredulous.

Somehow, Carmen Gragera had tracked down
where his family lived. She only ever knew him as a Russian. How did she learn
the truth that he was a Scot named Iver Kester from some backwater farm in
Aberdeen known for its cheese and that, in the States, he lived in a penthouse
on Fifth Avenue, for which she provided the exact address?

Did Alex tell her this before he was
murdered? He must have, which proved that the intelligence they thought Alex
had on the syndicate ran as deep as they imagined.

But did it run deeper?

How much did he know about him? The
syndicate knew about the security breach, but they weren’t exactly sure how
much information he came away with because of that breach.

Had he learned the names of the other
members of the syndicate and shared them with Carmen? What they did, where they
lived? He closed his eyes and willed it not to be true, hoping that the odds
were on his side if only because of the stringent safeguards they had long
since put into place to protect each member’s anonymity via encryption software.

If only because of those precautions,
there was a chance that Alex didn’t know everything when he died. He may have
been on the cusp of learning more, but his death robbed him of that. As slight
as it seemed to him now, there still was a chance that his intelligence ended
with information about Katzev. Katzev prayed that was the case because if it
wasn’t, he knew that Alex would have told Carmen everything.

He lifted his head to the high warehouse
ceiling and considered the situation. Certainly, at this point, if she did know
more than she wrote to him, she would have used it in an effort to get Chloe
back. Or was she holding back, waiting for the right moment to use it for a
greater purpose? What he did know is that whether Carmen knew everything or not,
the fact that she had tracked down his family and knew so much about him proved
she knew enough to be more dangerous than he imagined.

Somehow, he had to take her out. Fast.

There were a few ways he could handle
this. He thought them through, knowing that within an hour, if he was going to
save his family, he’d need to come through with an answer.

The question is whether he wanted to save
his family.

Katzev, who was raised knee-deep in sheep
shit by a strong-willed family who broke every child labor law known to man
while he was growing up, didn’t feel much of anything for them, with the
exception of his mother, for whom he felt a tug of something. Love? He wasn’t
sure. Did he even know what love was? Wasn’t sure. But there was something
there. Damned if he knew what it was.