The Pandora Key (25 page)

“First of all,” I said, “Thorne told me a lot of things I’m not sure I believe. I’m not sure whether to believe Kraft. But I believe this: it is Thorne’s intention to kill Kraft. I won’t turn anyone over to be killed.”

“Of course not,” Harvey agreed.

“Second, we now have a new billion-dollar variable in the equation. Now we have to wonder if Drazen is looking for Roger because he wants revenge, or because he wants his money, or both. Something tells me he wants his money back.”

“But we do not have it.”

“That’s true. At the moment, we don’t have anything to give Drazen to make him happy—except the name of Vladi’s real killer.” I resisted the urge to wink at Rachel. “But maybe if we can find him his money, it will turn out he’s not that concerned about revenge, and
then
we can all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who will get your ovaries ripped out if you’re wrong. How are we supposed to find the money?”

“If anyone has it, it’s Kraft. He has the computers from Zormat.”

“Can you call him?”

“He’s a little hard to find.” I tried to think of what I would say to him if I did. Then I remembered our conversation at the hotel just before the bullets started flying. “But I still have something he wants.” The only question was whether or not I had it in me to betray Lyle Burquart.

25

I OPENED MY EYES THE NEXT MORNING AND DECIDED THE world wouldn’t end while I went for a run. I hadn’t been out in days, and the muscles in my back and shoulders felt as if they’d baked in a kiln. I got up and dressed and spent a good fifteen seconds stretching my hamstrings. When I got outside, I was pleased to find one of the first warm mornings of spring. I was not pleased to find that I had the lung capacity of a small bird. That’s what happened when I slacked off.

Just past the turn to Memorial Drive, I noticed a car lingering off my left shoulder. It was easy to spot, keeping pace with me and not the rest of the vehicle traffic. No one trying to be stealthy would be caught dead following at that range. When the driver pulled up alongside and I saw who it was, I was annoyed more than anything. I couldn’t even go running in peace. I was also on the verge of fainting, so I stopped and went over to lean in the window and see what Special Agent Eric Ling wanted.

“Hi there,” he said. “How’s it going?” He offered a steaming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

“Never touch the stuff. Thanks anyway.”

He shrugged and fit the cup into a holder in the console between the seats. Government vehicles had all the snazzy features. He dropped his cool surfer shades and looked at me over the rims. “Get in. I’ll drive you back.”

“That kind of defeats the purpose.”

“Maybe, but you weren’t exactly burning up the course. I just wanted to ask you about this.”

He pulled a photo from an envelope and held it up. It was a picture of Bo, ever the gentleman, holding the door for me at Grigorii’s, the morning we had gone to meet Drazen Tishchenko.

He pointed at Bo. “Who’s your friend?”

“Who says he’s my friend?”

“We’ve been trying to identify him. We ran his plates, but that was a dead end.”

That helped me feel marginally better. There was no end to the tricks Bo knew. It also explained why he was feeling so much heat.

Ling put the picture back into the envelope, then reached over and popped the door open. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

I looked down the path I wouldn’t be running that morning and felt…relief. I opened the door and climbed in. He waited until I was buckled in, checked his side mirror, and pulled away from the curb. He turned at the next side street. There was no place to park, so he pulled up to a hydrant and killed the engine.

“Government plates,” he said, not seeming all that bashful about it.

“I knew you had a team on me,” I said.

“Sure.” He twisted around in his seat so he was more or less facing me. “The Bureau has unlimited funds and manpower to spend following around a private investigator. That would be an easy sell.”

He didn’t actually say “two-bit private investigator,” but it was implied. I knew they weren’t up on Bo, and there had been only three people in the meeting. “Are you set up on Tishchenko?”

“We’re up on Grigorii’s. We have been for months. I got a call that an unknown female had wandered into the picture, which is pretty unusual for that place. I thought it must be Rachel, but it was you, and I asked myself, ‘What would she be doing there?’ I thought about it. Want to know what I came up with?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It all comes back to Betelco. Everyone is connected through Betelco, including your partner. Harvey is connected through his ex-wife. His ex-wife is connected personally through Roger and professionally as the company’s auditor. Tishchenko is connected because he was running dirty money through there. Right?”

“If you say so.” I didn’t see anything to argue with in there but didn’t want to just agree with him. He could be tricky.

“Four years ago, Roger Fratello disappeared. He took Drazen’s money with him. There’s some indication he also killed Drazen’s brother Vladi, but that’s mostly rumor coming from his people. Drazen’s been looking for Roger ever since. Are you with me?”

“I’m following along nicely, thank you.”

“Good, because here’s where you come in. Cut to right now. Traces of Roger start to show up again. Drazen Tishchenko ends up in Boston, and your partner gets grabbed.”

“Didn’t he say he was out shopping for a new wheelchair?”

He smiled, indulging me. “Then I saw this.” He tapped the envelope with the picture in it. “Lew and I started tossing around a few ideas for why you, a person with no prior connections to ROC, would be meeting with a high-priority ROC target.”

“ROC?”

“Russian organized crime. That’s what I do. I’m with a special unit.”

I wanted to mention that Drazen was Ukrainian, but if he chased Russians for a living, it was a good bet he already knew.

“Anyway, even after all this time, Drazen is looking for Roger. If he thinks, for some reason, that Harvey can tell him where to find him, that’s a good reason to snatch him up. If you want Harvey back, that’s a good reason for you to visit with Drazen.”

“That’s a theory,” I said. A pretty darn close theory.

“As you know, new information came up leading us to believe Roger had resurfaced, so we’ve also been looking for him.”

“Right,” I said. “He popped out of a terrorist’s closet in Zormat.”

“Well, I see that you
have
been following along nicely.” Ling didn’t look exactly impressed, more that I might not have been as two-bit as he’d thought. “We got a call from State. They had some items they couldn’t identify. We started running prints for them and came up with a wallet belonging to fugitive Roger Fratello. We were pretty psyched about that development. Then we tracked a key from inside the wallet to the safety deposit box in Brussels, which is where we found your partner’s prints. You see how that all works together?”

“I do.”

“We came to see Harvey. We almost killed you. We left. We got the call from Harvey to come back. That’s the part where the two of you lied to federal agents.”

“Do you have some proof that we lied?”

“No, but I don’t need it, because I don’t really care about that. What I care about is Drazen Tishchenko, and since Harvey came back from his time out with head and hands intact, I have to think that you and Drazen worked something out. That’s what I’m interested in.”

“You’re not after Harvey?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re not after Roger?”

“We were,” he said, “but he’s dead. He died in the hijacking.”

“You knew that?”

“We figured it out.”

“How?”

“Probably the same way you did. We started asking some people.”

“How come you guys didn’t already know about that? The government is supposed to know things like that.”

He shrugged. “We don’t know a fraction of what we should know. Besides, we never knew he was on the Salanna plane until we got the prints from Zormat. Then we put it together. It’s a bummer, too, because Roger was our best shot at getting Drazen.”

I pointed at the envelope. “You obviously know where the guy is. Why don’t you just go and pick him up?”

“Because I have nothing to charge him with, and if I did, no one would testify against him, and if they tried to, he would do the whole head-and-hands thing. We told you what happened to Walter Herald, and he did that knowing he was killing a fed. That sent a pretty strong message. Everyone at Betelco went running for cover after that.”

“I could see how that would be discouraging to people.”

“But let’s be generous for the purpose of this exercise and assume I could pick him up and charge him with something. Do you know what he would do?”

“Call a lawyer?”

“Call the CIA.”

“For what?”

“He has strong ties to the organization formerly known as the KGB. He knows state secrets. He says he does, anyway. The CIA swoops in, whispers something about the greater good, spirits him away, and the next time we see him, he’s back doing exactly what we left him doing. Roger was our best chance. Not even the spooks would have had the guts to pull him out from under felony murder of a federal agent.” He shook his head. He had the look of Charlie Brown after he’d tried again to kick the football, only to have the CIA snatch it away at the last minute. “I would have finally had him.”

“All right, so your job is hard. What are we doing now? Right here, you and me?”

“We’re talking about how you can help me with my job.”

“Let me see if I’m following. Drazen is your big prize. You want him for the murder of Walter Herald. You needed Roger Fratello to get him. You wanted Harvey to get you to Roger, which, by the way, raises this question: How come you’re just skipping over Rachel in this whole thing? Why aren’t you after her?”

“We don’t have Rachel’s prints on Roger’s money.”

“You have pictures of her kissing Roger.”

“That’s not against the law.”

“But you have to think she’s involved.” I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

“We think she was responsible for bringing the Tishchenkos into Betelco and a number of companies in the area. Again, there aren’t too many victims in this town—actually, in any town—willing to testify against the Russians.”

“All right, fine. But now we all agree that Roger is ashes in Sudan.” I looked for validation on that point. He gave me the nod. “Unless you want to nail him for lying about buying a wheelchair, doesn’t that mean that Harvey is off the hook? He can’t help you get Drazen on the agent’s murder, because he had nothing to do with that. If he’s off the hook, why would I help you?”

“Let me ask you something.” His lighter tone suggested a new turn in the conversation. “How much do you know about the fall of the Soviet Union?”

Definitely a new turn. “Let’s see, communism failed, the USSR crumbled and split apart. Now we have 220 countries competing at the Olympics instead of 180.”

“The last time I checked in with Drazen Tishchenko, he was trying to sell a diesel-powered, ninety-foot-long, Foxtrot-class attack submarine to Pablo Escobar. Pablo needed a little something to run his product up and down the West Coast. Do you know where Drazen got it?”

“I’d have to think the only navy that wouldn’t miss a sub would be the old Soviet navy, whatever it was called.”

“He bought it in Kronstadt, which is where the Baltic fleet of the Red Navy went to die. We’re taking about a hundred-million-dollar military vessel. Drazen paid five for it and had a deal to sell it for twenty.”

“That would have been a fair return on investment.”

“The thing about Russians is, they love money, they’re scared of absolutely nothing, and they will sell anything. If you need it and you’re willing to pay for it, Drazen Tishchenko will get it for you, and being who he is, he’s plugged in. He knows party officials who know things. You know, like where the stocks of weaponized smallpox are kept. Where all the tactical nuclear weapons happen to be. They know where the weapons-grade fissionable material is, and they know how to get all that stuff out and into the hands of the people willing to pay for it and willing to use it. Any idea who those people might be?”

“People who don’t like us?”

“That’s correct. The submarine deal never happened, but only because the local
mafiya
back home blocked it. Drazen forgot to cut them in. Otherwise, the U.S. Navy would be chasing drug-running subs up and down the Pacific Coast. Are you starting to get my drift?”

We were still chatting amiably, but an undercurrent had crept in, something in his usually imperturbable tone that carried more weight than the words he was saying. That, by itself, felt like a pretty good case for helping him out.

He went on. “When Tishchenko decides to put a few tactical nukes out there, there’s nothing to say we’ll catch him then, either. Wouldn’t it be better to just nip it in the bud?”

“I still don’t know how I’m supposed to help you do that.”

“I think you know where the fortune is.”

“The what?”

“The lost fortune.”

“His money has a name?”

“That’s what people say when they talk about it.” Having finished his own coffee, he reached down for the cup he’d brought for me and started peeling back the plastic flap. “According to legend, it’s a billion dollars.”

This was getting interesting, enough so that I couldn’t hide it. “How does anyone misplace a billion dollars?”

“The better story is how he got it in the first place. Drazen owned a bank in Russia.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the banker type.”

“I didn’t say he was a banker. He’s a gangster who owned a bank. That’s all the rage in Russia these days. There’s no real regulation of banks over there, so they buy them and use them as mattresses.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mattresses. Places to keep their cash. Then they use the U.S. banking system to turn all that dirty money into clean U.S. currency. It’s a beautiful thing. No one can accuse these gangsters of being stupid.”