Rasputin's Shadow (21 page)

I stood and calmly collected the pieces of my cell. Aparo did the same.

“Tell us about him. The Russian.”

Jonny described the scene. There wasn’t much he could tell us about what the Russian looked like, but his take on the man’s moves sent a chill down my spine. Jonny wasn’t exactly a wallflower, and yet, despite everything he’d been through, it was pretty clear that even thinking about the Russian gave him the creeps.

We were done here. We got up, but before we headed out, I turned to Jonny. He preempted me.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “And why would I? I wasn’t there, right?”

“Right,” I told him as we walked out.

***

I
SAT IN THE
car while Aparo collected his takeout, and one image kept monopolizing my thoughts: the Russian, charging forward, using Sokolov as a shield, firing away relentlessly.

If we ever got to that point again, the guy wouldn’t hesitate to go down fighting, even if the outcome was clear.

Aparo appeared holding a brown paper bag packed with Korean delicacies and climbed in.

“Any sign of the guys?” he asked.

We were waiting for an unmarked with a couple of SSG’s—meaning members of the Bureau’s Special Surveillance Group team—to show up. Front and back of the restaurant, one SSG for each. I wanted to keep an eye on Jonny from here on out. Besides being the only live lead in this mess, he was angry and was probably thinking about some kind of retribution right about then. Which I preferred to avoid. The city didn’t need any more body bags.

I said, “They’re five minutes out.”

Aparo nodded and offered me a Korean dumpling, which I took, the maxim holding true as it always did: never pass up an opportunity to eat while on the job.

As I bit into it, an unremarkable panel van drove by, and it reminded me of Sokolov’s odd move. I wondered why a brainiac like him needed a van. We needed to figure out what his movements had been during the day, and I made a mental note to check with the DMV for a listing of the van in the hopes of finding out where he kept it.

J
onny waited a few minutes to make sure the agents were gone, then he hurried back into the bedroom and changed.

As he emerged into the living room, his aunt came back in. She looked at him sternly.

“You stay here,” she said. “Police is one thing, but FBI? We don’t need that kind of trouble.”

Jonny placed a consoling hand on his aunt’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,
ee-mo
. I’m only going out to get some air. I need to clear my head. Besides, if I stay here, I’ll just have Ae-Cha pestering me about Jachin. Again.”

It wasn’t a total lie, but the thought of it pained him. He didn’t know how he was going to tell his cousin that her boyfriend—her intended, as far as she was concerned—was dead.

He managed to suppress the ache in his heart enough to give his aunt a half-wink, then he hurried out, leaving the woman with a stoic expression lining her face.

He took the stairs up two flights and unlocked the door to his apartment. He stepped around the glass table, scowled at the sofa as he remembered inviting Sokolov to sit there when he first came to the Green Dragon, then went into the bedroom. He raided his stash and pulled out a Sig 9mm auto. He checked its magazine, tucked it away in the small of his back, then opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape.

He rode the metal stairs up to the roof, moving quietly, aware of potential surveillance in the alley down below. Once there, he walked across the roofs of two other buildings before taking the stairwell of the third back down to the street. He paused in the building’s front doorway and glanced out, made sure no one was watching, then stepped out into the night.

Even that late, there was still enough life on the sidewalk for him to not stand out. He turned a corner and headed for the heliport parking lot four blocks east of him, down by the river. He knew several of the watchmen who worked there, and they had an arrangement regarding discretion and the erasing of CCTV footage that often came in handy that he kept alive using crisp hundred-dollar bills. Tonight, he’d need one of the motorcycles he kept there. And as he made his way there, he realized that his aunt was probably right. Business was good. His position in the gang was solid. The last thing they needed was heat. And for what? A crappy old heap? It made absolutely no sense. But then again, Jonny had always listened to his instincts, and right then, his instincts were telling him that there was more to this van than one would assume from looking at it. Taken together, Sokolov’s insistence and his evasiveness, the hard-core nature of the bastard who took him, Daphne’s surprise at the vehicle’s existence, and those weird heavy-duty ear protectors all pointed to something more.

He just didn’t know what.

It was enough to persuade him that he had to get the damn meat wagon and take it somewhere quiet so he could look at it properly. Maybe even take the whole thing apart if he needed to. Luckily, he had lied to the feds about where he’d left the van. Not through luck, actually. It was more like second nature.

A second nature that was kicking into gear and baying for blood.

***

K
OSCHEY WAS DUMBSTRUCK.

The eye drops had done the trick. Just as they had many times before.

Sokolov had told him everything. And it was way beyond what Koschey had read in the brief the general had sent him.

As he sat there facing Sokolov, he felt exhilarated. The man sitting across from him was a bona fide genius. Not in the sense that people used it these days. Koschey hated that. It was a term that was grossly overused, especially in the West. Everyone was a genius there when, by any reasonable standard, they were not even remotely so. But Sokolov certainly was. And what he’d achieved made Koschey’s head spin.

It also fired up his own brand of creativity in all kinds of ways.

There was huge potential here. Opportunities to be exploited. Plenty of them. Taking Sokolov back to Russia, back to his superiors, as per his assignment—maybe that was no longer the best play.

He needed time to think. To plan. To strategize. He knew that this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. This was his chance to even the score. To make things right. To slam down his two-faced comrades in a way that they’d never forget.

Sokolov had handed him something unique. Something that could achieve all kinds of things for all kinds of people. People who would be willing to reward such achievements very, very generously. People Koschey knew and had done business with in the past.

The best part was that right at the moment, no one else knew what he had. Sokolov had guarded his secret well. Not even his wife knew about it. The Americans certainly didn’t know about it. And the general and the select few back at the Center and the First Directorate who knew about Sokolov’s work were way behind the curve. Decades behind. What Sokolov had achieved back then was already staggering. What he’d done with it since was nothing short of astounding. Koschey reveled in his handlers’ ignorance. His contempt for them only bloomed when he imagined them back in Moscow, at the Center, all smug and self-important and drowning in corruption while being clueless about what he had just uncovered.

Which meant he had a free hand. A free hand for the foot soldier to turn into the kingpin.

But before anything, there was a major hitch he needed to address.

He could see Sokolov’s eyes flagging—subjects who’d been administered SP-117 fell into a prolonged, deep sleep after their interrogations. And he needed one more piece of information from Sokolov before he allowed him to drift off.

He reached out and clasped Sokolov’s chin tightly in his hand, forcing him to focus on him.

“Tell me more,” he told Sokolov, “about this ‘Jonny’ and where I can find him.”

J
onny turned left off Crocheron onto 169th Street and slowed his Kawasaki down to a crawl. He circled the entire half block at walking speed, scanning left and right for any sign of cops, and saw none.

The van was still where he’d left it—parked in an alleyway behind the tree-lined suburban street, the rear license plate backed against a wall and the front one hidden by a Dumpster that he’d pushed against it. He hadn’t wanted to drive across the bridge or through the tunnel in the van, not with its partly spiderwebbed windshield or its other assorted bullet holes. He figured that if there hadn’t already been an APB out for the van before his conversation with the feds, there had to be one now.

He needed to get the van off the street, fast.

He was also eager to see what made it so special to Sokolov. But that would have to wait. Regardless of how desperate he was to flick the metal switch and see what would happen, this wasn’t the place to fire up a siren that was so loud it required ear protection.

He chained his bike to a solid iron fence at the mouth of the alley, then walked back and rolled the Dumpster away from the front of the van.

He climbed inside and started the engine.

His first thought was to find somewhere around the mess of access roads where the Cross Island and Grand Central parkways met by Alley Pond Park, but he immediately dismissed the idea. Although the traffic noise would mask the sound of the siren—or whatever the hell it was—he knew there were traffic cameras there and he couldn’t afford to be spotted.

The other option was much better. His gang had a warehouse off Powells Cove Boulevard, close to the water. There were no houses on the block, just a lumberyard on one side and a waste-management company on the other, both of which would be deserted at this time of night. He also knew there were no cameras at all on the side of the lumberyard that faced Long Island Sound.

He set off, and given how late it was, the streets were empty. He was there in no time.

He parked the van alongside the graffiti-covered warehouse and gazed out across the water. If the siren was seriously loud, it might even be mistaken for a boat’s foghorn. Certainly, unless they were standing right next to the van, no one would suspect the battered white panel van with the refrigeration unit bolted to the top. Besides, the place was quiet as death.

He gazed at the button for a long time, then without further thought, grabbed a pair of ear protectors, slipped them on his head, and flicked the switch.

Nothing.

Not even the faint sound of a siren.

Only total quiet.

He pulled off the headphones.

Still nothing.

He flicked the switch back to off and shook his head.

He could feel a headache coming on. Little wonder, considering the way things had gone since Sokolov had come to see him two days earlier. And now his blood brother, the boyfriend of a cousin who was more than a sister to him, was dead, and he was in the crosshairs of the feds. Now that his brother was no longer running things, Jonny was supposed to be keeping everything ticking over while his boss was in Miami, not dragging the gang into an unwanted spotlight.

He cut himself a couple of lines and snorted them. One of the benefits of being so high up the supply chain was near-constant access to high-grade product, and this was certainly a privilege he didn’t want to lose.

He took a few breaths and let his heartbeat go back to normal after the initial hit of the powder.

The whole thing was ridiculous. Surely the switch had to do
something
.

He had the key in the ignition and there was definitely power to the electrics.

Then he realized that he still hadn’t looked properly inside the van’s main compartment. He’d been so preoccupied—first with Sokolov, then with his wife—that he hadn’t even opened the back for a good look.

It was time to remedy that.

He climbed out of his seat, opened the cabin door, and squeezed through the narrow doorway.

The rear compartment was neat and tidy. It was lined with a hard white plastic surface, like the inside of a fridge. It was mostly empty, apart from a big metal storage box that was bolted to the cabin’s floor. Along the opposite wall were four low black boxes that were also firmly attached in place. These looked like old PC towers, but they seemed new and had small panels with red and green LEDs and digital displays on them. A thick but tidy stream of wires linked everything. More wires ran up the inside of the van and into the refrigeration unit, while others disappeared into the base of the partition behind the driver’s position.

The storage box was secured by a bar and a large padlock, but there was no key for it on the van’s key ring.

Jonny left the van and went looking for something with which to force the padlock.

It didn’t take long. A length of rebar was lying on the ground about twenty feet away, probably from the waste-management yard.

He brought it inside the van and used it to bust the padlock. On the third attempt and to the soundtrack of him cursing out loud in Korean, it popped open.

The box was stuffed with elaborate electronic gear. It was like some kind of mega-stereo that someone had built themselves, a metal rack covered with dials, meters and sockets. An abundance of wires crisscrossed between them.

Apart from a laptop secured to the top of the stack, he had absolutely no idea what any of it was. Whatever it was, it was complicated.

After a few minutes spent staring at the boxes’ contents and trying to divine what they were there for, he decided to bring in an expert.

He took out his cell, dialed, and waited.

A sleepy voice answered.

“Shin,” he said, “get your ass over to the chop shop. There’s something you need to see.”