The Guise of Another (17 page)

Drago Basta had made a career out of remaining in control of his emotions while those around him did not—starting on the day that he killed the Albanians who were raping his mother. So it surprised him when he felt a powerful urge to take a baseball bat to Jericho Pope's apartment. At five o'clock that evening, Drago walked into the master bedroom to begin its dissection, acknowledging, for the first time, the tiny voice that whispered defeat. He had gone through the trouble of killing Magda Markova and that unlucky sap from the parking garage—just to clear the way for this search, and now it seemed unlikely that he would find anything. He had no backup plan. He had been so sure that the flash drive would be in the apartment, and if it wasn't, the key to where it lay would be found there. But now it occurred to Drago that he may be leaving empty-handed.

In the bedroom, he found another small collection of DVDs and a handful of game CDs. He tested every track, fully expecting to find the video that Jericho Pope stole from him. It had been copied to a CD when Jericho first sent a copy of the video to Garland.

Jericho Pope, the first mate of the
Domuscuta
, had disappeared into the murky waters of the Lower New York Bay on August 25, 2001, his meaningless existence all but forgotten by the likes of Wayne Garland and Drago Basta—until late November of that year, when Garland received a phone call. The caller demanded that the receptionist put him through to Garland, and when she raised a fuss, the caller told her to tell Garland that the first mate from the
Domuscuta
had a gift to deliver.

Garland panicked when he heard the message and pushed the wrong button, accidentally hanging up on Jericho. Before Jericho called
back, Garland had the good sense to summon Drago Basta, who had an office at Patrio headquarters at that time.

When Jericho called back, he told Garland exactly what he had in his possession and exactly what it would cost Garland to keep the data out of the hands of the government. Garland gave Jericho his private mailing address, a location where Jericho could mail a copy of the proof of Garland's crime.

Two days later, a package arrived. The postmark on the package, Kansas City, Missouri, was an obvious red herring, yet Drago would later spend weeks in Missouri, hoping to pick up a trail. The package contained a CD housed in a box that previously held a DVD of the movie
I Know What You Did Last Summer
, a cheap shot that surely brought a laugh to the face of Jericho Pope. Along with the CD, Pope gave Garland a note setting out an account number and a routing number to a Swiss bank account. The note demanded that the money be deposited annually—on December 1st—into the specified account.

Garland fed the CD into his personal computer, and he and Drago watched the footage. When they were done, Garland immediately wired $500,000 to the account number given to him by Jericho Pope.

Now, Drago finished the last of the DVDs and went to Jericho's bed. He used his knife to rip the material apart, tearing the stuffing out and finding nothing. He pulled the box spring off the bed and did the same to it.

When he finished the bedroom, he went to the kitchen in search of something to eat. While he was there, he took a peek at the tracking locator on his computer and saw that the dot had started to move. Ianna was heading back to Minnesota. He rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes and looked again. It continued north.

He leaned against a wall and slid down until his butt rested on his heels. He still had much of the apartment to tear apart. The drive to Wisconsin had taken a little under five hours. He would have only four hours to finish his search. If he couldn't find the flash drive by then, he would need to come up with an alternative plan.

He entertained the thought of killing Ianna when she walked through
the door, take a gamble that he would still find the flash drive somewhere in the apartment. But after finding no trace of it anywhere, he began to suspect that Ianna would be the key to finding his property. He could make her tell him. He knew ways. If she had any knowledge, she would tell him, and then she would die. He rubbed his temples, wondering whether there might be a better strategy, a way to live in the head of this woman.

That's when the phone in her apartment rang. He waited as it transferred into voicemail and he heard a man speak.

“Ianna, this is Alexander. I didn't want to bug you while you're…well, with your mother, but I thought I'd call in case you came back already. Just wanted to tell you that I found a witness who knows all about Jericho Pope and what happened on that yacht. Detective Rider is flying in tonight. We're going to meet up at Delancy's Pub. I'm not sure when you're getting back, but she'd mentioned that she'd like to talk to you. So if you happen to get back in town tonight, this is Tuesday, by the way, call me. We're meeting around seven. Call me when you get back, regardless. Um…bye.” Click.

Drago stared across the room and considered this new information. Detective Alexander Rupert knew what happened on the
Domuscuta
. Who was this witness he'd found? How much did Rupert already know? All of it? But then, knowing and proving were two different things. The police would have very little without the flash drive. Drago would have to find it first. He also needed to silence the source of Detective Rupert's information. There might be some additional cleanup before he flew back to New York to kill Garland, but Drago could feel that his hunt was quickly coming to an end.

He looked at his watch. He would not kill Ianna Markova, not yet. He would plant bugs and surveillance cameras in the apartment. She would not stay there, but neither would she leave without the flash drive if she knew its location. He would watch her. He would listen to her. He would stalk her. She would lead him to the flash drive. He would spend the next hour covering the apartment with his electronic eyes and ears. Then he would track down Detectives Rupert and Rider at a place called Delancy's Pub.

Alexander—for the first time in a long time—felt like a real cop again. As he waited for Max and Billie to arrive at Delancy's Pub, he took a moment to enjoy the feeling. The trove of information he uncovered in Iowa filled in so many holes that the only major piece of the puzzle still missing was the location of the flash drive. He had Pope's hard drive, so if the video had been transferred onto that computer, he could find it. If Pope hadn't kept it on the computer, it might be in Ianna's apartment. He tried to think of other places to look, but the notoriety of Ashton's death distracted him. This case would be national. It was turning into everything he wanted it to be. By morning, he would have enough of a case that he could walk into Tiller's office and wield it like a wrecking ball. No one indicts a hero, he thought.

“Okay, I'm here,” Max said as he sat down. “So what's the big meeting about, Festus?”

“You may want to be a bit nicer to me, Maximilian. I'm going to be hot shit in the very near future.”

“What? You win a lottery or something?”

“Better,” Alexander said as a broad smile opened on his face. “I just dug up some great news on the Putnam case.”

Max didn't react other than to slump a bit around the shoulders. “So you didn't invite me here to go over your grand-jury testimony?”

“Jesus Christ!” Alexander sighed. “You and that damned grand jury. Don't you think of anything else?”

“One of us has to think about it. You can't ignore what's coming down the pike. It's tomorrow, for crying out loud. We need to talk.”

“What about?”

Max leaned into the table and looked Alexander in the eye as if to
study him as he spoke. Alexander readied himself. “My source tells me that your old partner, Rivas, flipped. He's turning state's evidence.”

Alexander absorbed the information without the slightest tell. He tilted his head slightly but never broke eye contact with Max. The statement hung in the air between the two men as each scrutinized the other, the pause ticking away with neither brother saying a word for several seconds. Then Alexander said, “And what about it? I always expected one of them to turn. Didn't you?”

“Does he know anything that might hurt you?”

“Max, we've had this discussion. I'm clean. They can't have evidence on me if there's none to get.”

“Were you involved with the raid on that dealer, Castasian?”

“Christ! I swear to God, I don't need this crap right now.” Alexander could feel a fist-sized lump knotting up his throat.

“You were there?”

“You know I was there. You know who Castasian is. You know he's the dirtbag accusing us of taking a hundred grand in cash out of his basement. It was in the papers. Everyone knows about fucking Castasian. What's your point?”

“Where'd the money go?”

“There was no money.”

“What if Rivas says that there was money? What if he burns you to get a better deal?”

Alexander gave a little cough to clear his throat. “Is that what he said? Is he saying—?”

“I don't know what he's saying. All that my source knows is that Rivas is talking.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I'm clean. I appreciate what you're doing, but we're ending this discussion. You've said your piece, and I've said mine. I'm not talking about this anymore.” Alexander slid out of the booth and stood beside his brother. “Order us a couple beers—on you. I'm going to take a leak. When I come back, we're going to talk about the Putnam case and nothing else. Can you do that?”

Max shrugged and smiled. “Fine, we'll talk about the Putnam case.”

“Great,” Alexander said. “Because I have a lot to tell you. It's going to knock you on your ass.”

Alexander left the booth and headed for the men's room. Upon entering, he looked under the stall doors to make sure that he was alone. Once he made certain that no one would overhear him, he allowed his chest to deflate as a strange panic overtook him. The air around him seemed depleted of oxygen, and he gulped for breaths like a man bobbing in a rough ocean swell. He held the wall with one hand to keep from losing his balance, and with the other he gripped his own forehead.

“Rivas, you fucking fuck.” The words seethed through his gritted teeth. “You…motherfucker. You…” He struggled to mute the wail of anger that rose from somewhere deep inside his chest. He grabbed the edges of a sink with both hands and squeezed and shook the fixture until it rattled loose on its mooring. “How could you…you fuck. We had a deal.” A surge of pure anger pushed through his body. He started to swing at the wall, but pulled up short—not because he feared hurting his hand, but because he didn't want to have to explain the scrapes to Max. “Calm down,” he told himself. “Just keep your head.”

He put his hands against the wall, one on either side of the mirror. “Rivas, you Judas piece of shit. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut. You swore to me. You said you'd take this to the fucking grave.”

He breathed in three or four times to settle his tremors. He thought back to another time when such a pure panic took him over. He had been working undercover at the time, and his mark, a man who moved the majority of meth and heroin in the state, had locked Alexander in a storage room while he and three other men debated whether or not to kill him. They had stripped him naked, looking for a wire, which he hadn't worn that night. They beat him, thinking he would confess to being an undercover cop. That didn't work either. Alexander could hear one of the gang members swearing to the others that Alexander was a narc.

Alexander wasn't just any undercover cop—he was the best. And what made him the best was his ability to lie with the ease of a master
magician. Alexander could make the thugs believe his bullshit over the word of one of their own, and he laid his bullshit on three or four layers deep. So when the gang boss opened the door that night, Alexander was ready and had an answer for every question they asked. When the interrogation ended, the boss slapped his soldier in the face for causing him embarrassment.

When the Task Force executed the arrest warrant the following day, that boss man used his last breath to utter the words “fuck you” just before he shot Alexander in the hip—a final act of revenge that led to the boss man being ripped open by a hail of police bullets.

Alexander ran his hands under some cold water and dabbed it to his face, being careful not to get his hair wet. He dried himself with a paper towel and looked in the mirror again to make sure that he looked the same as he had before he heard the news about Rivas's betrayal. “You've been through worse,” he said to the face in the mirror. “They never found the money, so it's still his word against yours. You can do this.”