The Icon Thief (23 page)

A moment passed in silence. At last, Sharkovsky spoke. “I see no reason to draw out this transaction any longer than necessary,
keelyer
. Unless, of course, you have anything else on your mind.”

As he looked into the old man’s sole visible eye, Ilya was reminded of a crow peering sideways at its prey. “If Vasylenko is a Chekist, he will answer for it in the end. But what about the rest of the brotherhood?”

“What do you want me to say?” Sharkovsky said in Assyrian. “Chekist or thief makes no difference. Power is what counts. If you were told otherwise, it was because it was what you wanted to hear.”

Ilya felt the truth of these words as another tightening of the noose. He thought again of the cross around Vasylenko’s neck, and of the star scratched into its hidden side. “So why did he choose me?”

“He saw potential. Not every man can become what you are. It takes—” Sharkovsky paused to consider his words. “Detachment. Intelligence. And morality. There is nothing so dangerous as a deeply ethical man, once his life has been erased. And all it took was a word from him to leave you with nothing—”

Ilya’s hands grew cold, as if all the blood had withdrawn to his heart. He found that he knew precisely what the old man was going to say, as if the realization had been lurking there, just outside his circle of awareness, ever since the night of the vineyard. “What are you talking about?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Sharkovsky gave him a smile of monstrous tenderness. “You had to be on your own. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be an effective instrument. So he did what he had to do. At least they were allowed to die in their sleep. Not everyone receives the same consideration.”

Sharkovsky extended a hand for the satchel, which Misha gave to him at once. The old man turned back to Ilya, his good eye shining in its socket. “Now then. Are you ready to make the exchange?”

A
few moments earlier, Powell and Wolfe had watched from across the street as Ilya entered the courthouse. Barlow’s voice came over Powell’s headpiece: “The marshals want to handle the security themselves. I’ve signed off on this. If our guy cased the site beforehand, we don’t want to scare him away—”

Powell saw a door by the main entrance. “Do we have a man on the emergency exit?”

“One second.” Barlow went silent for a moment, then returned. “All right, it’s done. Kandinsky is in place. He knows the drill. We’re going to let them talk for as long as possible. An interpreter is on the line. After they’ve left the courthouse, we put tails on all of them. Security says that our primary target isn’t carrying the package. Once he leads us to it, we grab him.”

As Barlow signed off, Powell kept an eye on the courthouse, wondering if they were underestimating the Scythian. It was clear now that Ilya had stolen the painting. Based on the security footage, there had been two different men at the mansion, dressed in identical clothes. The heist had gone off as planned, but there had been a double cross, leaving one thief, probably Zhenya, dead.
There was also the small matter of the ballistics results, received less than an hour ago, indicating that the gun recovered at the mansion had been used to fire a bullet into Arshak Gasparyan’s brain.

And now Ilya had been heard on the wire, offering to trade a package for eighty thousand dollars. It wasn’t hard to guess what might be inside. As Powell reflected on the situation, though, he doubted that the demand for cash was real. If Ilya had been betrayed, he would not be content to be bought off. Which meant that this meeting might be about something else entirely.

Powell was about to share these thoughts with Wolfe when he saw that she was motioning for him to lower the volume on his microphone. He muted the headpiece. “What is it?”

“I found out what happened with Archvadze’s attorney,” Wolfe said. It was their first chance to talk privately since the day before. “I got the story from a junior partner at the firm. He teaches criminal procedure at Quantico every other summer, and loves to sound off to his former students, especially the girls.”

“I’m sure he had no trouble remembering you,” Powell said. “So what did he say?”

Wolfe kept her eye on the courthouse. “Archvadze went nuts. The door was closed, but you could hear him shouting halfway across the floor. He accused his lawyer of working for the Chekists, of leaking information about his art collection, and generally of being in league with the powers of darkness. Then he stormed out of the office. They haven’t heard a word from him since.”

Powell studied the figures passing through the revolving doors. “Was he right?”

“As far as I can tell, the lawyer is clean. His client list includes some shady members of the expatriate community, but if there’s a connection to Russian intelligence, I can’t see it—”

She broke off. Following her eyes, Powell saw a familiar pair mount the courthouse steps. It was Sharkovsky, his eye patch distinctive from a distance, and Misha, a bag over one shoulder. “What about the art fund?”

Wolfe inserted her headpiece again. “I’ve looked into it. Reynard is clean as a whistle. No record of financial irregularity. And his business model depends on a sterling reputation. These days, he’s more famous as a trader, but he also runs a public database of art transactions. It’s the industry standard. For people to trust his numbers, he needs to keep his house in order.”

Powell considered this point as his earpiece was flooded with the ambient din of the courthouse. A moment passed, the echo broken now and then by the thunderous rustling of fabric, before a voice came over the wire: “I see no reason to draw out this transaction any longer than necessary,
keelyer
.”

When Powell heard these words, all his attention became fixed on the feed. It was the first time he had ever heard Sharkovsky speak. Based on the transcripts, he had expected something harder, and was struck by the quietly authoritative voice that came over his earpiece instead. When he heard the old man say the word
keelyer
, he felt another shiver of recognition. This was slang for a hired gun, twisted into something sinister by the Slavic pronunciation.

As the meeting began, Powell tried to tune out the interpreter’s voice, focusing on the speakers themselves.
When the conversation shifted to Assyrian, he switched gears, listening to the translation instead. What he heard was astonishing. Ilya had been one of Vasylenko’s men, but was now convinced that his mentor was a Chekist. Powell saw at once that this gave them an opening. If Ilya suspected the mob of working for the secret services, he would be completely on his own. And if they got to him now, when he was still vulnerable, he might be open to a deal.

Powell, his mind already working out the possibilities, forced himself to listen as the men prepared for the exchange. There was a pause as the interpreter searched for a word for an obscure phrase. “I’m not sure what they’re talking about,” the interpreter said. “It’s something like—”

A commotion erupted on the other end of the line. Powell’s earpiece filled with a wild thumping and scratching, as if something were striking the microphone itself. Then, with a whine, the wire went dead.

Barlow came back on the line, roaring. “What the fuck is going on? Did we blow it?”

Powell took a step forward, then another. Before he knew it, he was running. Fewer than fifty yards stood between him and the courthouse. Wolfe was sprinting at his side, shouting for pedestrians to get out of the way.

They were almost at the steps when the emergency exit flew open, clanging against the side of the building. A lone figure stumbled into the light, a bag clutched in one hand. As he stood against the portico, far above the street, his eyes caught briefly on Powell’s own. It was Ilya.

I
lya had considered the bag in Sharkovsky’s hands, which was within his reach at last. To disappear would require nothing but silence, exile, and cunning, but now he saw that such an escape was no longer possible. He looked into the
vor
’s one good eye. “Why are you telling me this?”

In response, Sharkovsky only lifted the patch, revealing the eye of a vulture, rheumy and unfocused. “Because you took this from me. Before we parted ways, I wanted to take something from you in return.”

Ilya rose from the bench. Before he could make another move, Misha stood as well, their faces only a few inches apart. Sharkovsky, still seated, lowered his eye patch with a sigh. “Don’t be a fool. Even if you could kill us now, it would not take back what has already been done.”

Looking at Misha, Ilya found himself thinking, strangely, of how easy it must have been. Breaking the flue would have required only a few strokes of the hammer, and with such accidents common among the old, the police would not have been inclined to draw out their investigation.

For a second, an iris seemed to open on his past,
threatening to swallow him whole. Then his head cleared, and he saw that the old man was right. He would accomplish nothing this way. Even as he made his decision, he heard himself speak in a low voice. “How do I know there isn’t a tracking device?”

Sharkovsky’s smile broke his face into many discrete planes of flesh. “Once our business is concluded, I see no reason to follow you.”

Ilya sat down again. His head was light, but his hands retained something of their old competence as he opened his own bag and removed a device the size of a transistor radio, with a liquid crystal display and a retractable antenna. It was a radio frequency counter that he had bought the day before, following a habit of caution that now seemed to belong to another lifetime.

He turned on the counter, forcing himself to focus. After the display had tested its segments, cycling through each mode in turn, he held the antenna against the satchel, sliding the range switch to its lowest setting.

Ilya examined the display. The counter was picking up waves of random noise, but it was weak, the result of other devices, such as cell phones, in the neighborhood of the rotunda. The bar graph that registered signal strength indicated that there was nothing in the bag itself. He switched the range to another setting and scanned it again. There was still nothing.

A second later, he paused. Looking at the counter, he saw that it had picked up a signal strong enough to fill eight of the ten bars. According to the display, its bandwidth was too low for a cell phone, but well within the range of a listening device. Then he saw that the antenna
was no longer pointing toward the bag, but aimed at the vagrant on the opposite bench.

For the first time, he noticed that although the redhead’s clothes were dirty, his nails were neatly trimmed. Beside him, Sharkovsky glanced between the display and the man in the denim jacket, his predatory mind making the connection at once. “Hey,” the
vor
said. “Hey, you fuck—”

The man’s head jerked up. A twitch of uncertainty crossed his face. “Excuse me?”

Sharkovsky rose, fists balled, radiating a joyous rage. “You like what you’re hearing,
suka
?”

The man stood, startled, hands rising in an instinctive gesture of defense. “Wait—”

Before he could finish, an object that had been hooked on his waistband fell off and shattered against the floor, a pair of alkaline cells flying in opposite directions. It was the battery pack for a wire.

Ilya turned to the
vor
, warmth spreading across his face. “You brought the police.”

Sharkovsky looked back, his one visible eye vibrating back and forth. “I did nothing. It must have been you—”

Ilya did not press the argument. Picking up his own bag, he headed for the rotunda, seeing that the satchel was already back in Misha’s hands. He could feel his depth of field narrowing, contracting into tunnel vision, and fought it, knowing that he had to remain intensely aware of his surroundings.

It was fifteen quick steps to the rotunda. When he saw the emergency exit, he froze in midstride. A moment ago, it had been unguarded. Now a marshal in blue was blocking his best route to the outside world.

The marshal’s eyes met his own. For a fraction of a second, Ilya took in isolated details of the scene: the guard’s holstered gun, the silver in his hair, a spot of food on his tie. Then his attention locked onto the four yards of tiled floor that stood between him and the only way out.

He did not hesitate. Lowering his head, he plowed into the guard’s center of gravity, knocking him off his feet. That should have been enough, but something took hold of him as he collided with the other man’s body, a savage despair awakening after days on the run, and before he could stop himself, he lashed forward with the heel of his hand, breaking the guard’s nose with a neat snap of cartilage.

There was a meaty thud as the marshal hit the ground, clutching his face. The courthouse boomed with screams. Without slowing, Ilya pushed aside the stanchions and flung himself against the panic bar. An instant later, he passed through a portal of white light and emerged on the other side.

Behind him, the door swung shut. For a heartbeat’s pause, he stood on the edge of the terrace, high above the square. The guards would flood out of the courthouse soon. If he went down the steps, he would be in their line of fire.

A metal railing separated the terrace from the ground twelve feet below. Ilya couldn’t remember what the ground was like on that side of the building, but it was too late to wonder about this now.

He jumped. A weightless moment and then he was rolling on grass, angling his bag to protect the canvas as he rose to a sprinter’s crouch. Across the narrow street
stood the federal courthouse, its lower half hidden behind blue plywood. He ran for it, clambering up the chain link fence, the wire rattling and quivering. As he threw himself over the top, he heard the seams of his jacket rip open.

Pain blossomed in his left ankle as he fell to all fours, eye to eye with the concrete. He forced himself to his feet. Around him, the construction site was deserted. He ran parallel to the courthouse, feet clocking against the pavement, heading for the sheltered side. Behind him, the fence rang. He glanced back just long enough to see a man in glasses hauling himself over the gate.