Last to Fold (6 page)

I hadn’t been completely honest with Mulholland about my business. I do have a partner. We have a handshake deal that I’ll never disclose his involvement. In fact, our entire partnership is based on a handshake, which can be nerve-racking since Foos is unpredictable, to put it mildly. “Scumbag” is the moniker he applies to most of our clients, especially the successful ones, his views unmitigated by his own fortune. But he has special reason to dislike Mulholland.

Foos, or Foster Klaus Helix as his birth certificate says, is a certified genius and certainly paranoid. Maybe all geniuses are a little wacko, I don’t know, he’s the only one I’ve ever met. He grew up in Palo Alto and dropped out of high school, but by the time he was twenty, he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science from Stanford. He came east to take a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the place Einstein hung his hat for thirty years. He got interested in relational data, as he calls it—what one thing can tell you about another, what two things can tell you about a third, what three things can tell you about a thousand. That led him to the work being done by companies like ChoicePoint and Seisint and LexisNexis, which maintain some fifty billion data files on virtually every American—people in other countries, too—which they make available to marketers looking for new ways to sell people things they don’t need and government agencies looking for new ways to keep an eye on the body politic under the pretext of fighting crime, terrorism, or whatever evil comes along to supplant terrorism. State security by another name.

Fifty billion is a lot of files to organize, search, correlate, and compare, and Foos found each company’s software lacking in some respect. He set out to write a program that would do better than any one of them—or all three combined. He succeeded. He started his own company and soon had a client list that included half the Fortune 500 and several hundred federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies—and FirstTrustBank.

Foos was more naive in those days. He was horrified to discover FTB was using his technology to determine whom to bombard with junk mail and telephone marketing offers for new “free credit cards with special introductory interest rates” that jumped to eighteen percent after the first six months. He cut them off. FTB, which had a contract, took him to court—and won. At which point, Foos—I thought the nickname referred to the foosball game every dot-com company had to have, but he swears he’s never played—had an epiphany, not unlike the men who worked on the Manhattan Project. He’d invented his software because it could solve problems better than what came before. In the right hands, it could be used for a lot of beneficial purposes—catching a serial killer, for example, or shutting down a financial scam before it sucked in too many victims. In the wrong hands, it was downright, deeply, totally invasive. Of course, it was impossible to keep it out of the wrong hands—those belonging to men like Mulholland. Foos sold his business, pocketing $100 million on the deal. Then he went to work on a new and improved version—on the grounds that he needed to keep track of what the bastards were up to—which he dubbed Basilisk after the mythological beast, the most poisonous creature on the planet. There’s a painting of one in our reception area—rooster’s head and legs, body of a hawk, a dragon’s scaly wings, and a serpent’s pointed tail. It’s damned ugly. He also started a foundation, endowed with half the proceeds from the sale. STOP, or Stop Terrorizing Our Privacy, has the self-appointed mission of monitoring, exposing, and thwarting the data-mining activities of marketers, advertisers, data collectors, cops, spies, lawyers, bureaucrats, and anyone else Foos sets his sights on.

“I’m not sticking up for Mulholland,” I said. “Especially since he’s married to my ex-wife.”

He was raising the pizza to his mouth. It stopped in midair. He stood for a minute, mouth open. “You shitting me?!” Sometimes I can surprise even him.

“Wish I was. She’s the one calling herself Felicity, or Felix, these days. Her daughter’s been kidnapped. He wants our help, but he hasn’t told her. And I’m betting he doesn’t know anything about her past.”

I held out the photo. He finished off the slice and took it. Behind the thick lenses, the eyes worked over the picture like a scanner as the brain put the power of multiple workstations through the paces of considering and rejecting a series of scenarios—all the ones I’d thought of and only he knew how many myriad more.

Eventually he said, “Could be real. Could be she’s into some kinky scene and needs dough.”

“She may have a drug problem.”

“That could explain it, too.” He dropped his bulk into a chair. “How do you and the ex get on?”

“Haven’t seen her in twenty years. We got married young—for all the wrong reasons. She was what you’d call high maintenance. I thought I could conquer that, and I needed a wife to get a foreign posting. The KGB didn’t send single men abroad for fear they’d fall into the clutches of some capitalist vixen.”

“Good thinking.”

“We made it eight years. One son—Aleksei, I’ve mentioned him once or twice.”

He nodded. “The kid you haven’t seen since he was two.”

“That’s right. When the breakup came, it was characterized by betrayal, violence, and retribution—all on her part. On the other hand, she felt I’d deceived her for as long as I’d known her, and she wasn’t wrong about that, although there were extenuating circumstances. You want details?”

He shook his head. “Not unless they’re relevant.”

“Only to us. So imagine my surprise when Bernie asks me to meet with his client Mulholland who’s got a kidnap problem and she waltzes down the stairs.”

He nodded with understanding. “Kinda broke your flow.”

“One way of putting it. Mulholland’s her third husband, so far as I know.”

He considered that for a moment. I’d given him the name of the second in my phone message. Even geniuses get tripped up by the conventions of Russian naming, the feminization of Barsukov, for example, to Barsukova.

“Dame got a commitment problem or just lousy taste?” he asked.

“Maybe both—man in the middle’s Lachko Barsukov.”

“The mobster?”

“One and the same.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“
That’s
why I let you hang out—entertainment value. You can’t make this stuff up.”

“Me and Pig Pen.”

“I doubt that’s the way Pig Pen sees it. Mulholland really get busted?”

“Uh-huh. I was there. I got the impression from Bernie the Feds have had him in their sights for a while.”

“Goddamned government moves with the speed of cold molasses. They should’ve nailed that bastard years ago. Still, I may volunteer my services—they can use the Basilisk for free. Make sure they get him this time.”

“Don’t be rash. We get six hundred sixty-six K, if we find the girl—and he’s around to write the check.”

“Huh. What price getting even? There’s an ethical dilemma that bears consideration. You definitely going ahead with this thing?”

I shrugged in ambivalence I didn’t necessarily feel. I knew where I was leaning. “I wouldn’t mind clipping Mulholland for that six sixty-six.”

“Uh-huh. You and I both know the probability gods didn’t put Mulholland, your ex-wife, and Lachko Barsukov in your path for their own amusement.”

“That’s the problem with you mathematicians. No room for luck—good or bad.”

“You gonna operate on luck, let’s get a deck of cards. You’ll need Mulholland’s fee to cover your losses.”

I laughed. He grinned a lopsided grin. “Look,” he said, “any competent bookmaker would give two-to-one odds that photo’s faked and the kidnapping thing’s bull. He wouldn’t even want to calculate the chances of your ex-wife showing up married to your new client after … how many years has it been?”

“A lot bigger number than the odds. But you’re not figuring in the intangibles.”

“Pain and death are pretty damned tangible.”

“I’m talking about curiosity—mine.”

“Do I remember something about a dead cat?”

“We both know there’s another shoe that’s going to drop. Maybe I want to see what it is.”

“You ask me, it’s gonna be a steel-toed boot swinging toward your face.”

“I’ll remember to duck.”

He shrugged. “They’re your teeth.”

He pushed himself to his feet and headed off to his office. A minute later, I could hear him banging away on his keyboard. He types with the same subtle touch that characterizes the rest of his approach to life.

I was about to call Bernie to see if I still had a client when the phone rang and a young male voice announced itself as Malcolm Watkins from Hayes & Franklin. The kidnappers wanted their money—tonight.

*   *   *

Decision time now for real.

Mulholland apparently considered me still in his employ. Polina would have tried to get me fired, but her husband’s prison problems doubtless complicated her efforts, and maybe she hadn’t tried too hard. With all the trouble she’d gone to to cover her tracks—not just one but two new identities (maybe more, for all I knew)—the last thing she wanted was exposure. She’d have to give Bernie a convincing reason to overrule his client. While she probably trusted him as much as anyone, she didn’t trust anyone very far. She definitely wouldn’t have told him the truth.

Her surprise this morning had seemed genuine. She still despised me, she’d made that clear, but her anger also covered fear, fear that she’d been recognized, fear that someone now knew who she’d become. I was a threat, but the far bigger threat was Lachko, who was almost certainly unaware that his ex-wife and daughter were living in the same city he was. That explained her marriage to Mulholland (I’d already eliminated love as a reason, however unfairly) and her low profile since. Polina had always sought protection. As a child, she’d witnessed her father, a general in the GRU, cashiered out of the army, tried for treason, and sent to the Gulag. Her family and her life had disintegrated around her, and she carried a constant terror that it would happen again. It did, with me, one root of her hatred. She sought refuge in Lachko. Kosokov, too. But Kosokov ended up dead in 1999, according to Ivanov. For whatever reason, she hadn’t gone back to Lachko, she’d run, come here. She’d brought Eva with her and become Felicity Kendall. But what about Aleksei? Had she left him behind in Russia? Or …

I didn’t want to think about
or
.

Polina was resourceful. She’d had enough money and know-how to acquire a new identity. She knew her way around New York. She’d lived here twice before, with me. Even so, alone, in a foreign city, with Eva to worry about, she wouldn’t have felt safe. Especially if she thought Lachko was looking for her. So she’d married Mulholland and his money and settled down. Then—bang! bang! bang!—her cover’s blown, her husband’s jailed, and his fortune’s shrinking faster than an ice cube on the sidewalk outside. Unless I badly missed my guess, she’d be petrified. If this was a setup, it seemed doubtful she was part of it, unless someone was setting both of us up, together. That someone could be Lachko, but I still had the same questions—why and why now and what for?

Lachko hated me, of course. He’d played his part in the Disintegration. He’d destroyed my marriage and my career, and he’d walked off with the prize he coveted in Polina. If he’d wanted me dead, it wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange. At the time, back in Moscow, I’d waited for the late-night knock at the door presaging the trip to the cells of Lubyanka, but it never came. I’d often wondered if Lachko had tried but his father had vetoed the plan. As time passed, I more or less ceased worrying, although the alarm bells jangled in my head when I learned Lachko had moved to New York. He hadn’t looked me up, and I stayed away from Brighton Beach, where he lived. He might not even know I lived in the same city—he had bigger fish to fry these days.

Lachko ran Russian organized crime in New York. In the post-Soviet chaos, he and his twin brother, Vasily, used their positions to build a highly successful criminal organization in Moscow whose core businesses were protection and extortion, but which had expanded into all manner of related rackets—drugs, smuggling, money laundering, prostitution, contract killing, and more recently cyber-crime. A few years before, they’d gone international, and Lachko moved here to oversee the U.S. interests of the Badger brothers—Barsukov translates to Badger. I followed their progress from a safe distance via Ibansk.com. After the Cheka, the Badgers are Ivanov’s favorite subject, probably because it’s impossible to separate the two. As I’d told Mulholland, the line between criminals and those charged with catching them was never clear in Soviet times. In the New Russia, it disappeared entirely.

Try as I might, I couldn’t see why Lachko would bother with me, or even with Polina, for that matter, after all this time. The flaw in that logic was, I was assuming he had matured into a rational human being since I saw him last, when there was no reason to believe he wasn’t the same brutal, vindictive, destructive bastard I knew him to be—from painful firsthand experience.

The card player in me said I couldn’t yet see enough of the cards on the rest of the table to fold my hand. The Chekist in me said, if this was Lachko at work, I could walk away but he’d follow. Better to play on, eyes open. Besides, having put socialism solidly in my past, there was still that six sixty-six, plus expenses.

I should have been mindful of another Russian proverb. The only free cheese is in the mousetrap.

CHAPTER 6

Hayes & Franklin rents twelve floors of One New York Plaza, a big, ugly, waffle-walled tower at the southeast tip of Manhattan, five minutes’ walk from my office. Almost six o’clock, but the thermometer was still into the nineties, the air as solid as concrete. I could feel the heat of the sidewalk through my shoes.

The building’s modern, but Hayes & Franklin’s offices are decorated right out of the Thomas Chippendale catalog, if Thomas Chippendale had a catalog, which maybe he did. Lots of reproduction mahogany furniture, nautical pictures, and prints of birds and botanicals. Bernie occupied a corner office overlooking the South Ferry Terminal. Documents were stacked on every available surface, including the floor. I took two piles off the chair across from his desk and sat down. He didn’t look up, just muttered, “Fuck it,” to something he was reading, pencil in hand. He put a blunt black line across the page.