Rasputin's Shadow (22 page)

I
was back at Federal Plaza, feeling on edge and antsy. Not a great feeling, especially when it’s coming up on one in the morning and I’m still at the office instead of annoying Tess with my alleged snoring.

On one level, it felt like the game had been played out, and we’d lost. Our mystery Russian—who we’d all started referring to as Ivan—had Sokolov and had pulled back into the shadows. Maybe that was it. Sokolov seemed to be what Ivan was after. Now that he had what he wanted, maybe they were gone for good. But if so, it left a lot of unanswered questions. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t help feeling that this was just a lull before the real storm.

As you’d expect, everyone was burning the midnight oil on this. We’d had three incidents with a total of eleven deaths in less than seventy-two hours. No one was going home just yet. I’d texted Tess to say I didn’t know when I’d be back and not to worry. That last bit was, of course, kind of pointless. By now, she knew it meant we were dealing with something seriously nasty and worrying was entirely reasonable. But what else could I say?

Information was streaming in from various corners. All five of the dead Russians, as well as the one at the hospital, were confirmed to be part of Mirminsky’s outfit. The Sledgehammer had lost seven men, with another out of action and in custody. We’d picked up a couple of calls informing him of this, but rather than going ballistic over it as you’d expect, he seemed oddly subdued. This lined up with the unexplained reverence he showed toward Ivan.

I wanted to know how we’d missed tracking the other two
bratki
, the ones who’d been at the real meet with Ivan. We’d put as tight a lock on all of the Sledgehammer’s comms, and yet Ivan was still able to get through to him and arrange for his escort. Our surveillance guys were reviewing all the video, audio, and data from Mirminsky’s club to try to figure out how Ivan had bypassed us. Ultimately, I doubted it would lead to anything. The key, as it always was, was Sokolov. Which was what the more intriguing bit of information that came in was about.

A background search on Leo Sokolov—or
Lev
Sokolov, to use what would have been his real Russian name according to our resident guru Joukowsky—didn’t turn up much. His prints were clean. The little on record confirmed that Sokolov lived a straightforward, uncomplicated life. Then the search threw us a major curveball: it kicked up a Lev Nikolaevich Sokolov who was born on the same day as our Leo, back in 1952—but who died nineteen years later. Which could be an incredible coincidence. Or, and this was far more likely according to my finely honed detective intuition, Leo—our Leo—wasn’t really Leo Sokolov at all. He’d somehow got hold of Lev’s birth certificate and used it as a breeder document to get himself a social security card and build a fake identity from it.

Which threw everything into question.

Leo Sokolov wasn’t really Leo Sokolov at all.

***

J
ONNY ARRIVED AT THE
chop shop on Cross Island Parkway fifteen minutes after he’d broken into the metal locker. Shin was already there, leaning against the double doors, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He was dressed in a tattered old tracksuit and faded sneakers, with the hood of his top almost obscuring his entire face.

As the van turned onto the lot, Shin slapped one of the big doors three times with the flat of his hand. They both swung open with the grating sound of metal being dragged over concrete, then Jonny drove the van straight into the large space inside. Shin followed on foot and the doors immediately creaked shut behind him.

The chop shop was a twenty-four-hour operation. At present, there were four guys remodeling a Porsche Panamera and a Bentley Continental, readying them to be shipped out to Moscow or Beirut, where they would end up with new owners who weren’t particularly bothered that their new cars had been stolen from someone a couple of continents away.

As Jonny jumped down from the cab, one of the crew working on the hot cars pointed at the van with his wrench.

“Hey, Jonny, nice wheels. You want us to drop a five-seven-two and some nitrous tanks in it? Or just fix your eight-track player?” He cracked up, as did his friends.

Jonny’s face didn’t even crease into a smile.

“Jachin’s dead. Some Russian
gaejasik
took him out.”

The laughter died instantly.

The team’s top dog, a muscle-bound Kkangpae called Bon, wiped his oily hands on a cloth and walked over toward Jonny.

“That’s rough, man,” he said, running a finger along one of the bullet holes in the front windshield. “So what are we gonna do?”

“Something, that’s for sure. I don’t know what just yet. Meantime, I need to figure something out.”

Shin appeared from behind the van, causing Bon to sneer.

Bon said, “With
that
?” Meaning Shin.

“Yeah,” he told him. “Now, get back to work. I’ve got to take care of this.” Then he remembered his bike. He fished out his keys and chucked them to Bon. “I need someone to bring back the Kawa. It’s on 169th. The alley by the Laundromat.”

Bon spat to one side, shrugged, and headed back to the Bentley. “No problem.”

Shin approached Jonny and pulled down his hoodie, revealing a crew cut atop a skinny, haggard face.

The sight surprised Jonny. “What the hell is wrong with you? You look like shit.”

“I’m living off fucking food stamps, man. Fucking PhD’s not even good for wiping my ass.” He shook his head ruefully. “They keep feeding me the same dog shit that I’m overqualified. No jobs. No teaching posts. Nothing. Why? ’Cause I’m overqualified. How fucked-up is that?”

He looked close to tears.

“So lie,” Jonny told him. “You can’t live like that.”

“It’s Nikki, she . . .”

Jonny spared his old school friend the humiliation of having to admit that he was pussy-whipped within an inch of his life. “You could come back to work,” he told him. “This new guy we’ve got takes twice as long to scan and code an RF key, and then when he’s done, half of them don’t work.”

“I promised Nikki, man.”

“It’s good money.”

“Maybe I should. I don’t know.” Shin didn’t sound very convinced. He nodded toward the van. “What’s this worth?”

Jonny’s eyes narrowed.

“I’ll let you know when you tell me what it is.”

Jonny gestured for Shin to follow him through the van’s rear doors. Inside, he opened the metal storage box and moved back to sit on a wheel arch while Shin moved in for a closer look.

The postgrad went quiet for a moment as he examined its contents, then he let out a long whistle and turned around.

“
Mwuh-ya yi-gae
, Jonny. Where’d you get this? Area 51?”

W
h
o the hell was he?

I didn’t have a clue.

None of us did.

Was he a sleeper? If so, what had he been up to all these years? Or was he running from something? If so, what was it and who was he hiding from? And why was this all happening now, thirty years or so after he’d taken on the Sokolov name?

It was easier to pull off back then. Things weren’t that computerized, you didn’t have the level of electronic databases we have these days. It wasn’t that hard to get yourself a driver’s license, Social Security card and bank account, either by getting a doctor to sign a fake birth certificate or, as seemed to be the case with Sokolov, using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a teenager.

We didn’t know who he was. We didn’t know where he was from. We didn’t know why he was valuable, valuable enough for someone to kill this many people over him without hesitating. There was a hidden history here that we knew nothing about. Old secrets that had sprung back to life with a vengeance. And the most frustrating thing about it was that maybe it was all over before we even got started. Now that Ivan had him, maybe that was the last we’d ever hear of Leo Sokolov, and we wouldn’t know what the hell it was all about.

I hated this feeling.

I hated having so many open questions, not just about Sokolov, but about Ivan. We knew our shooter was either a high-level Mafiya enforcer or a state-sanctioned operative. I was hoping for the former. If it was the latter and if this wasn’t over, then things were going to get complicated, politically. A Russian agent gunning down several American agents on our soil—not exactly a misdemeanor. Either way, we’d need to bring in other agencies to find out more about Sokolov’s background: CIA and ICE, for starters. There wasn’t much we could tell them beyond giving them a set of his prints that we’d sourced in his apartment. Maybe that would be enough. If he had a secret Soviet history, they might know. Whether they’d want to share it with us was another story.

Then, of course, there was the lovely Ms. Tchoumitcheva. If Ivan was one of theirs, I wondered if she was now taking part in a private celebration deep within the consulate, now that Sokolov was in their hands. I was convinced the Russians had to know who he really was—but whether she was fully in the loop was another matter.

I’d also need to ask Daphne about this, although my gut told me that it would come as much as a surprise to her as it did to us.

As I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass and looked down across Foley Square from our twenty-third-floor offices at the magnificent criminal courts buildings, I found myself churning over everything from the very beginning, yet again, and wondering how a high school science teacher ended up being the centrifugal force of an escalating situation with a body count that was already in double figures. And why an unassuming and quiet guy in his early sixties would trust a young Korean gangster over New York’s finest with his wife’s safety. And why he’d insisted on using his old van for their rescue mission.

Kanigher’s voice broke through the synaptic maelstrom that was raging inside my skull.

“Check this out,” he said as he rushed over, waving a couple of sheets in his hand.

They were printouts from some kind of traffic camera. The grainy pictures showed a panel van driving toward it. “We’ve got Sokolov’s ride. I figured they’d have taken either the Brooklyn Bridge or the Battery Tunnel to get from the restaurant to the docks. Location and time stamps match, and that sure as hell looks like Jonny boy in the passenger seat.”

I took a closer look. I could make out Jonny, no question. Then I noticed the air-conditioning unit on the roof. “You sure? It’s a refrigerated van.”

“I know.”

I studied the picture more closely and got the distinct feeling I was missing something. “Why would he need that?”

“Who knows. Maybe it was just a cheap buy. Especially if the AC’s shot. It’s not exactly fresh off the showroom floor, is it?”

I was still baffled by it when Aparo appeared and cut in. “I just got a call from the NYPD guys we sent to bring back the van,” he said. “They can’t find it.”

“Jonny said he only left it there, what, a couple of hours ago?”

Aparo said, “If that.”

It didn’t compute. In fact, nothing about that van made sense. And it sounded like Jonny had been less than forthcoming about it too. Everything about that van was suddenly bothering me. Everyone seemed to be lying about it. And right at the moment, it wasn’t a lot, but it was all I had, and I didn’t feel like spending the rest of the night lost in my own questions.

“Put out a priority APB on the van,” I told Kanigher, handing him back the printouts. Then I turned to Aparo as I grabbed my jacket. “Let’s get some Korean takeout.”

J
on
ny felt dizzy.

Shin had just finished an extended discourse on microwave technology and the mathematical principles behind cell-phone networks, but Jonny still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

“Just, please, tell me in plain English what you think it is,” Jonny implored, “before my head explodes.”

Shin rolled his eyes.

“Someone with a weird hobby and lot of free time on their hands seems to have stripped down a cell-phone tower, taken off all the juicy bits, and used them to turn this van into a mobile microwave transmitter. That’s what the refrigeration unit on the roof is. He’s just using it as a cover for the drum.”

Jonny frowned. “So what’s it do?”

“No idea. I doubt he’s just after some unlimited 4G, though. Nice as that would be.” Shin looked stumped. “I really don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” He pointed at something that looked like the equalizer of a high-end stereo among the stack of electronics in the metal locker. “He’s got a custom-built modulator in there. Kind of thing that can tune the waves within infinitesimally small degrees. It’s linked to the laptop, which must control it. And he’s running the whole thing off the car’s engine, which acts like a power generator. That’s why he asked you to keep the engine running. This thing must eat up a lot of juice.”

Jonny spread his hands open questioningly. “That’s it? Look, I don’t care about the technical mumbo-jumbo. I just want to know what it does. And here I was, thinking you were one of Mensa’s finest.”

“I am. But this guy is some kind of meta-geek. Sergey Brin–level.”

“Funny you should say that,” Jonny said. “The guy who built this is also Russian.”

Jonny decided not to burden Shin with any further information on that front. The last thing the poor guy needed was more stress on his plate. Instead, he asked, “What about the earmuffs?”

Shin thought about it for a moment. “You said the guy said it would give you some kind of advantage in a tough situation. The ear protectors must be some kind of shield against it.”

“But from what? When I tried it, I couldn’t hear anything, even when I took them off.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily hear anything. The wavelengths could be so short that they’re outside the audible spectrum. Kind of like a dog whistle. The protectors are probably meant to shield your inner ear from the oscillation caused by the waves.” Shin thought about it. “You know they’ve got these things for crowd control now. Sonic weapons. They blast out loud noise that’s very focused, like a spotlight. Kinda like what they did at Waco. They had these things deployed around the Olympic stadiums in London last year. I’m thinking maybe this is in the same ballpark, only it’s a different technology. And what effect it’ll have exactly . . . I can’t say. I can tell you it’s probably not gonna be very Zen.”

“How bad can it be?”

“The cell-phone towers, like the one this guy’s jacked? They’re microwave transmitters. Same basics as in the oven. A microwave oven cooks food using microwave radiation. A cell phone can do the same if it’s turned up high enough. That’s why there’s all this research into cell phones: do they cook our brain cells and give us cancer, all that stuff. I don’t buy into it. But it all depends on the frequency of the waves—and how much power is feeding them.”

Jonny felt a stir of excitement. “You think this thing could fry someone’s brains?”

“It’s possible.”

Bon had sauntered over and started listening in while eyeing Shin disdainfully. Shin did his best to ignore the pile of muscle looming over him and kept his eyes on Jonny.

Jonny asked, “What about the laptop?”

“It’s got to be the command and control unit, but I can’t get in it. It’s password-protected. Must be rigged to go to sleep when the power drops, then comes to life when you hit the switch on the dashboard.”

Jonny said, “Try ‘Daphne.’”

“Why ‘Daphne’?”

“Just try it,” Jonny ordered.

Shin typed it in, then shook his head. “No go.”

Jonny frowned, frustrated at being so close to something he felt held big potential. Then he remembered something Sokolov had said more than once. “Try ‘
Laposhka
.’”

Shin’s eyebrows rose. “Seriously?”

“Try it.”

“How do you spell it?”

“How the fuck should I know? Like it sounds.”

Shin went to work. He typed in a few letters, hit the Return key. Hit a wall. Then he tried again using another spelling.

The screen came alive.

His face lit up with an ear-to-ear grin.
“Bil-eomeog-eul.” Goddamn
. “We’re in.”

The screen showed another synthesizer, only this one was virtual. It had banks of controls and digital readouts on it, as well as several buttons that had Cyrillic writing under them.

Jonny sat patiently as Shin’s studious eyes explored the screen, the electronic deck and all the wiring, back and forth. Finally, he looked up. “I think he’s picked out several specific frequencies and saved them to these buttons, like you save FM stations on a car stereo. The first one’s preset as the default frequency. That’s the one it would have broadcast when you were going to use it. But beyond that—I can’t tell you what effect it has or what it’ll do.”

Jonny went all quiet and thoughtful for a long moment. Then he said, “Let’s go try it out.”

Shin objected, “What, now?”

“Right now.”

“We don’t know what it does.”

“Exactly,” Jonny said. “Only one way to find out.” He turned to Bon. “You up for that?”

Bon grinned from ear to ear. “You bet.”

Jonny pointed at the van. “And better slap some fresh plates on it. These ones are hot.”

Bon went off to do it. Jonny turned to Shin. “This should be fun. Come on.”

Shin hesitated. “You did hear what I said about microwaves, right?”

“Every word.”

Shin seemed bewildered.

“Let’s take it down to Brighton Beach,” Jonny said. “Try it out on some Russkies. Seeing as one of them invented it.”

Shin took a couple of steps away from the van.

“Not for me, man,” he said, his finger doing a wiper blade. “No way. I’m outta here.”

Jonny stepped closer to him. “Come on. I need you for this. Besides, what the fuck else you got to do tonight, you and that piece-of-shit PhD of yours? You’d rather go home and stare at your nice framed diploma while Nikki finds new ways to call you a loser?”

He put his arm around the gaunt man and headed him back to the van. “Come on, bro. Where’s your scientific curiosity? You, me, and the Pulgasari,” he said, pointing at Bon and using his favorite nickname for him, that of the Korean Godzilla-like monster. “Let’s go fry us some Russkie motherfuckers. What do you say?”

Shin hesitated, then nodded. Then he remembered something. “The earmuffs,” he told Jonny. “You said there were two sets?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s three of us going,” Shin pointed out. “Maybe I’d better sit this one out.”

Jonny thought about it for a moment, then grinned. “You and I can wear them. See what you can rustle up for the Pulgasari. I wouldn’t be too worried about him. It takes a lot to get through his thick skull.”

***

K
OSCHEY SLOWED DOWN AS
he drove by the restaurant on his first recon pass, his eyes surveying the place’s entrance and its immediate surroundings and picking out points of interest with the speed and precision of the best multipoint autofocus software.

There was a gaggle of people outside the Green Dragon’s double doors, smoking and chatting away in small cliques. The Asian community, he knew, were heavy smokers, and all the way there, he’d noticed huddles of smokers outside bars and restaurants. He spotted an armed bouncer closer to the doors, standing alone, staring down the sidewalk at nothing in particular. He was wearing a black T-shirt under a sleeveless black leather vest that didn’t do a great job of hiding the shiny grip or holster strap that was peeking out from underneath it. Koschey also spotted a man in a parked car two spots away from the restaurant’s entrance, clearly keeping an eye on the place. A cop or a federal agent, no doubt. Koschey assumed it would be the same out back, at the service entrance.

He didn’t think he needed a second pass.

He drove the Yukon around, selected a strategic place to leave his car, and pulled in. Then he got out, walked around the block, and headed toward the restaurant, slowing his pace, timing his approach.

He’d adopted yet another look for the occasion, a smooth, metrosexual combo of gelled-back hair, jeans, charcoal-gray turtleneck, beige corduroy jacket, and trendy black-rimmed glasses. He could have been an architect or a graphic designer, except that an architect or a graphic designer wouldn’t have an unsheathed fixed-blade boot knife balanced up his sleeve.

He pulled out his cell phone and feigned taking a call while pausing until a suitable target walked by. He didn’t have to wait long. Three Asians he’d spotted moments earlier passed him unawares, two guys and a girl, strolling together, talking and laughing loudly, out on the town.

Heading toward the restaurant.

With no one coming up behind them.

No one to witness anything.

Still faking a casual late-night chat on his phone, he tucked in behind them.

Kept their pace, moving right up so he was merely a couple of feet behind them.

Selected one of the guys, the one walking alongside the shop fronts.

Timed it so he was behind him when they were about twenty feet from the Green Dragon, maybe ten from the first of the smokers.

Allowed the blade to slide down his wrist and into his hand.

And struck, lighting-quick.

His arm moved unnaturally fast, lashing out for a nanosecond, the powder-coated three-and-a-quarter-inch-long blade aimed to perfection, stabbing the man’s flank below his rib cage—a clean, deep in-and-out, the blade back up his sleeve before his victim had a chance to scream.

Which the young Asian did after stumbling and rag-dolling to the ground.

His friends leaped to his aid as he writhed on the ground, howling, his face a cascade of confusion and pain, the three of them in a sudden panic. They were all freaking out in loud outbursts of Korean and English, frantically trying to figure out what was wrong with him. The sudden commotion made the cluster of smokers outside the restaurant stir and take notice too, their curiosity drawing them in close to the fallen man.

It also drew in the bouncer, who threw a quick glance around the street before edging away from his post to see what was going on.

Koschey kept going, moving fluidly.

With the phone still stuck to his ear, he used the chaos to slip past the smokers and the bouncer and duck inside the restaurant just as a couple of patrons were leaving.

***

W
E WERE CHURNING RUBBER
heading uptown on Sixth Avenue in Aparo’s Charger when my phone rang. I glanced at the caller display. It showed
PRIVATE
CALL
.
I took it, heard her voice, and frowned. I hadn’t expected to hear back from her this late in the night, or in the game for that matter.

“Miss Tchoumitcheva,” I said as I took the call. “You’re up late.”

Aparo’s face lit up and he flashed me a juvenile, suggestive grin.

She said, “I heard there’s been some trouble in Brooklyn? More dead Russians?”

“You’ve got good ears.” Said with a side of sarcasm.

She didn’t flinch. “What, you think you’re the only ones with a finger on Mirminsky’s pulse?” A real pro.

But I didn’t like being played, and right at the moment, I wasn’t really in the best of moods. I decided to shake things up a little. “No, I’m sure we’re not. But I’m still surprised to hear from you.”

She seemed taken aback. “Why’s that?”

“Well, you really don’t need to keep up this pretense any longer, do you? You got what you wanted. Mission accomplished. Or are you just calling to gloat?”

Aparo swiveled around to face me, eyes wide, mouth forming a silent, surprised
“What?”

She went quiet for a breath. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” she insisted, sounding put out.

“Come on. All that hogwash about us needing to work together. You were just pumping me for information about Sokolov. Well, you’ve got him now. What more do you need from me, aside from an update on how we’re doing in tracking your man down? ’Cause you know this isn’t over, right? You know we’re not gonna stop until we take him down. Him and everyone connected to him.”

I was tired and I was angry and I wanted to prompt a reaction, but I knew I might be venting pointlessly. Even if she was part of this, she and her colleagues at the consulate had diplomatic immunity. Getting to any of them would be tricky and frustrating, if not downright impossible. And even if we did take them down, they’d probably get traded for someone we wanted back and end up as pampered cheerleaders for the regime back home.

“I understand why you might think that,” she countered. “But you’re wrong. I was actually calling to see if you wanted to talk about us leaning on Mirminsky together. Seeing as he’s connected to this shooter. Maybe use him to flush him out. But hey, if we’re on opposite sides, then maybe it’s a bad idea. Anyway, think about it, and if you want to talk it through, give me a call in the morning.”