The Hunted (50 page)

He was lying. She knew better.

Thankfully, he had acquired no tattoos; none she could observe, anyway. But who knew what was lurking beneath that shirt,
or under those baggy pants? And there was no doubt that Alex
looked
different. Harder, long greasy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail now, less expressive, a little slower to laugh, and his
eyes darted around constantly, alert in a way that tore at her heart. Even his walk was different. No longer the old determined,
upright clip straining to shave off a few extra seconds; it now resembled a slide more than a walk, slow, slumped, and slothful,
with hands perpetually sunk to the bottom of his pockets. A survivor’s walk. A way of saying he cared about nothing.

She understood but did not like it. Adapt, blend in with the natives, or you became bait to the strongest animals in the cage.

There was only one good thing about prison: sleep and exercise were plentiful. What else was there to do? Until this visit,
anyway, Alex always looked remarkably refreshed and fit. He must’ve had a bad few nights, though, because this time he looked
painfully exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot, with large bags underneath them. He hadn’t slept well in days, possibly weeks.

“This is crazy, Alex,” she uttered softly.

“It is what it is, Elena. Be patient.”

“I’ve been patient for a year. I want you in my bed, where you belong. I’m tired of sleeping alone.”

“I’m not all that crazy about sleeping with Benny, either. Have you ever heard an All-Pro lineman snore?”

“Stop it.”

“And the smell. All that bulk. He comes back from his workouts in the yard, the paint falls off the walls.”

Like Alex was an Irish rose himself. All the prisoners stank. They were oblivious to their own odors, but Elena was nearly
flattened by the stench in the prison visitors’ room. She wanted to bring Alex home and scrub a year of prison stink out of
his skin. Then take him to bed and heal a year’s worth of fear and misery and frustration and loneliness.

“Alex, are you sure you’re okay?” she pressed, more emphatically this time. She was his wife. All this jokiness was an attempt
to conceal something. He was far from okay.

Alex looked down and played with his fingers a moment—a slight twitch around his left eye, an almost imperceptible shift of
tiny muscles, and she knew.

She bent forward until her face was pressed against the glass. “Stop lying. What’s happening?”

“All right. Somebody tried to kill me yesterday.”

“Yesterday… what happened?”

“In the yard, I was playing basketball when a man made a run at me. He was carrying a crude hatchet constructed in the prison
shop. As attempts go it was stupid and clumsy. It had no chance.”

Elena was perfectly motionless. This was the nightmare she had long dreaded. She watched him and waited.

“I was lucky,” Alex informed her, trying to make it sound trifling, little more than a bad hand of cards. “Two of the cons
on my team are investors in the fund. I threw the ball in his face, his nose shattered, he slowed down, they disarmed him.
It wasn’t all that dramatic.” He left off the part about how his friends mauled the killer, stomping his hands and breaking
both arms to be sure he wouldn’t try again.

“Who was he? Why did he want to kill you?”

“A Russian. A former Mafiya gunman who obviously wasn’t as handy with an axe.”

“I asked
why
he wanted to kill you.”

A momentary pause. “Apparently, the people in Moscow are offering big money to whoever gets me.” Then a more prolonged pause
before he made the painful decision to tell Elena everything. “It was the second attempt.”

“I see. And when was the first?”

“Two months ago.”

“Two months? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I’ve been quite careful since then. Benny follows me everywhere he can. I’m surrounded at every meal by a squad of our investors.
A few of the guys watch over me when I shower, use the bathroom, use the library. They don’t want their golden goose hauled
out in a coffin. I’m only in danger when I leave my cell.”

Elena reeled backward into her seat and struggled to fight her horror—she couldn’t. “I’ll call MP and have him insist on moving
you to another prison. We’ll raise hell. Hold a big obnoxious press conference. We’ll—”

Before she could finish, Alex was already shaking his head. “I’ve already considered that. Don’t. Don’t even try.”

“Why not?”

“I’m alive only because I’ve established a network here. At each new place, it takes three weeks to a month, at a minimum.
I’d be completely naked.”

“And if the investment fund for some reason has a bad month? A sudden market correction, for instance. That happens, Alex.
How good will your protection be then?”

He forced a smile. “Believe me, I think about that every day. It certainly helps focus the mind.”

She crossed her arms and did not acknowledge the smile. “And if you stay here, it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? Say one
of your new friends becomes distracted, or at the wrong moment bends over to tie a shoe. Maybe somebody slips a little poison
in your food, or a little knife in your back.”

“A lot could happen,” Alex admitted, rubbing his temples. “They’ve been scared off a few times. A week ago, in the library,
before some of my friends made a threatening move. Five days ago, in the shower, three men were approaching me when a guard
showed up.”

“I see.”

“Look, I won’t pretend I’m not worried. These are rough people, killers. They’re watching me every day, looking for an opening.
I know the odds.”

“You have to get out of here, Alex.”

“Believe me, that thought has crossed my mind. The past few weeks, I’ve lived in the law section of the library.”

“There has to be something. You can’t just let these people kill you.”

About two cubicles down, a loud argument suddenly exploded between a prisoner and his wife. The woman was barely more than
a child, maybe nineteen, dressed in a scant black leather skirt, black net stockings, a halter top that did more to reveal
than conceal, false eyelashes that flopped like gigantic butterflies, and enough cosmetics to camouflage a battleship or capsize
it. Only a moment before, she and the hubby had their faces pressed tightly against the glass panel, whispering sweet nothings
back and forth, like they were ready to disrobe and grope each other through the divider. The husband suddenly recoiled backward,
nearly tipping his chair to the floor.

“Oh yeah, you heard right. Your twin brother,” the woman roared.

“My own brother. You’re sleeping with my own brother,” the husband wailed, slamming both fists like noisy gavels against the
glass panel.

“Yeah, well… least I kept it in the family, since I know how much that word means to you. This time, anyways.”

“You’re a bitch. A whore. A backstabbin’ whore.”

She stood up and jammed her face up against the divider. “Hey, you noticed, finally. Guess what, idiot? I’m givin’ it away
to any fool who looks twice. They’re thinkin’ of naming a mattress after me. So what are you gonna do about it, huh?” she
taunted.

Until this moment, the three guards in the room had looked on with an air of bemused boredom. Old hat, old story, happy days
again in the visitors’ room. A wife cheating on a locked-up hubby: what’s new? A tired old scene the guards had observed a
thousand times with few variations. Many marriages lasted a year, some more than two, very, very few beyond the third year
of separation.

There was one inviolate rule, though, and this prisoner bashed it to pieces. He snapped, leaped to his feet, and, howling
at the top of his voice, began trying to crawl and claw his way over the divider. Two guards lost their look of boredom and
sprang into action. They yanked him off the glass, jerked his arms behind his back, and slapped cuffs on him. They began dragging
him out as he hollered a bewildering array of curses at his wife.

His wife stood and loitered, arms crossed, watching it all with a smile that smacked of huge contentment.

Then, at the final moment before they yanked her husband through the door, she whipped down her halter, exposing two rather
impressive breasts. With two hands, she cupped and then began juggling them. “Hey,” she yelled at her husband, “remember these?
Tonight your brother’s gonna have a field day with ’em. And once I get bored with him, you know what? I’ll bet I can get your
father in the sack.”

She tugged the halter back up, spun on her heels, and with a loud triumphant clack of high heels departed the room.

“Poor man,” Elena remarked with a sympathetic frown after the tumult died down.

Alex bent forward and shook his head. “That’s Eddie Carminza. He’s up for bigamy. Five years in the joint, the max. She’s
one of four wives.”

“My God, this place is crazy, Alex. You have to get out.”

“Well, there is one thing we can try. Move the case out of immigration channels into a federal court. It’s premature, though,
and incredibly risky.”

“You might prematurely die in here if we don’t try something.”

“I know. But there are two problems. Serious problems. One, federal court means different rules and procedures. MP isn’t a
criminal lawyer. Also he has no experience in the federal system. The rules of evidence and admissibility are stricter. It’s
too late to replace him, though.”

“Can he handle it?”

“I’m not sure any lawyer can and MP is already holding a bad hand. And who knows how much ammunition our friends in Russia
have provided the prosecutor over the past year.”

“But Mikhail—”

“Mikhail hasn’t found us the silver bullet. There’s no legally acceptable proof that my money was stolen. No proof I’m being
framed. Nothing to keep me from being shipped back to Russia.”

“All right, what’s two?”

“If we rush into federal court, and I lose, I’ll be shipped right back here. We can try an appeal, and we will. But that takes
time. I’ll probably be dead long before.”

“So it’s a choice between very bad and awful?”

“More like between certain death and probable death.”

“So what’s this idea?”

“It’s called a motion for habeas corpus. Technically, by shoving me into the federal prison system, they’ve created a loophole
we should be able to exploit. It forces the government to show cause for my imprisonment. If a judge accepts it, the process
happens very fast.”

“How fast?”

“Three days after we launch it, we’ll be in court.”

“Oh… that fast.” Elena stared at her shoes a moment. She began fidgeting with her hands. “Is it too fast?”

“Possibly,” Alex told her. “We have a lot of enemies, here and in Russia. Everything has to happen at once. And everything
has to succeed, or as my friend Benny puts it, it’s game over. Also Mikhail will have to move up his time schedule. And we’ll
have to pray for a legal miracle.”

“We’re overdue for a miracle.”

“I don’t think it works that way. We’ll have to produce our own.”

“I’ll call Mikhail the second I’m out of here.”

“You have a busy weekend ahead of you. It’s time to share everything with MP, then pray it’s enough.”

O
n September 18, 1996, one year and two months to the day since Alex’s incarceration in federal prison, MP Jones bounced up
the steps of the D.C. Federal Courthouse, one of the loveliest, most impressive buildings in a city littered to the gills
with marble monuments. The day alternated between warmth and chill, the first hint that another long, humid summer in a city
built in a swamp was coming to a close. Elena, along with a stout paralegal hauling a box of documents, accompanied him.

Two days before, Elena had called and frantically insisted on an emergency meeting. MP dropped everything and Elena arrived,
pale, tired, angry, upset, and wildly determined. She told him Alex’s idea and MP instantly launched a hundred objections.

It was too fast. Too risky. Federal court wasn’t his thing. Besides, who knew what the Russian prosecutors and INS had cooked
up, how much damning material they could throw at Alex? Elena insisted that she and Alex had entertained all the same reservations,
told him about the four attempts on Alex’s life, and that ended the discussion. MP called his clients with pressing cases
over the next week and foisted their files off on other immigration specialists around town.

So they moved with deep nervousness through the wide, well-lit corridors, straight to the office of the federal clerk. MP
signed in at the front desk, moved to the rear of the room, and waited patiently with Elena and his paralegal amid a clutter
of other nervous lawyers until the clerk called his name.

He nearly sprinted to her desk. He proudly threw down a document and with a show of intense formality informed her, “I am
introducing a motion for habeas corpus on behalf of my client Alex Konevitch. I ask the court for expeditious handling on
behalf of said client, who has been incarcerated beyond any reasonable length and forced to endure immeasurable suffering.”

The clerk, a large, feisty black woman, lifted up MP’s motion and automatically plunked it into a deep wooden in-box, a vast
reservoir filled to capacity with other such requests, motions, and lawyerly stuff. “First time here?” she asked without looking
up.

“Uh… yes.”

“This ain’t no courtroom. Plain English works fine in here.”

MP looked slightly deflated. “It’s a habeas corpus motion.” She chewed a stick of gum with great energy and stared intently
into a computer screen. The sign on her desk suggested she was named Thelma Parker.

“I heard what you said,” Thelma noted. “How long’s your guy been in?”

“A year and two months.”

“Uh-huh.” Thelma did not appear overly impressed. “What facility he at?”

“At the moment, based on a federal contract, the state prison in Yuma. It’s his third prison.”

The reaction was delayed, but she slowly shifted her gaze from the screen and directed it at MP. “His third? Inside a year?
That what you sayin’?”