Buried Secrets (29 page)

He didn’t believe me.

On the laptop screen there was sudden movement. A scuffle.

The camera jerked as if someone had bumped against the laptop on the other end. Now you could see only half of the kid’s body, his shoulder and arm in the white duck fabric of his Posey straitjacket.

And the black cylinder of the sound suppressor screwed onto the end of Darryl’s Heckler

& Koch .45.

Navrozov was staring now. “You don’t think I will possibly believe—” Darryl’s hand gripped the pistol. His forefinger slipped into the trigger guard.

Navrozov’s eyes widened, raptly watching the image on the screen.

Darryl’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The loud pop of a silenced round. A slight muzzle flash as the pistol recoiled.

Navrozov made a strange, strangled shout.

His son’s scream was muted by the duct tape. His right arm jerked and a hole opened in his upper arm, a spray of blood, a blotch of red on the white canvas.

Arkady Navrozov’s arm twisted back and forth, his agony apparent, the chair rocking, and then I clicked off the feed.

“Svoloch!”
Navrozov thundered, his fist slamming the desk.
“Proklyaty sukin syn!”
A pounding at the door. His guards.

“Tell them to stand down,” I said, “if you’d like to discuss how to save your son’s life.” Enraged, face purpling, he staggered out of his chair and over to the door and gasped,

“Vsyo v poryadke.”

He came back, stood with folded arms. Just stared at me.

“All right,” I said. “Call your cutout and tell him the operation is over.” He stared for a few seconds. Then he took out his mobile phone, punched a single button, and put it to his ear.

After a few seconds, he spoke in Russian, quickly and softly.

“Izmeneniya v planakh.”
He paused, and then:
“Nyet, ya ochen’ seryozno. Seichas.

Osvobodit’ dyevushku. Da, konyeshno, svyazat’ vsye kontsy.”
He punched another button to end the call.

He lowered the phone to his side, then sank down in the chair. The power and menace seemed to have seeped out of the man, leaving a mere Madame Tussaud waxwork: a lifelike model of a once terrifying figure.

In a monotone, he said, “It is done.”

“And how long after he makes the call before Alexa is free?”

“He must do this in person.”

“You haven’t heard of encrypted phones?”

“There are loose ends to tie up. This can only be done in person.”

“You mean, he’s going to eliminate the contractor.”

“Operational security,” Navrozov said.

“But he has to drive from Maine?”

He glowered at me. “It will take thirty minutes, no more. So. We are done here.”

“Not until I speak to Alexa.”

“This will take time.”

“I’m sure.”

“My son needs immediate medical treatment.”

“The sooner she’s free, the sooner your son will be treated.” He exhaled, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s. “Fine. We have concluded our business here.

Marcus will get his daughter, and I will get my son.”

“Actually, no.”

“No … what?”

“No, we’re not done here.”

“Oh?”

“We have more to talk about.”

He squinted at me.

“Just a few questions about Anya Afanasyeva.”

He drew breath. I knew then I had him.

“Where did she pick up such a lousy Georgia accent?”

77.

Roman Navrozov took from his breast pocket a slim black box with a gold eagle on the front. Sobranie Black Russians. He carefully withdrew a black cigarette with a gold filter and put it in his mouth.

“This is a no-smoking room, yes?”

I nodded.

He pulled a box of matches from his front jacket pocket. He took out a match and lit it with his thumbnail. He put the match to the end of the cigarette and inhaled. Then he let out a long, luxuriant plume of smoke between his rounded lips.

Navrozov didn’t just smoke Russian cigarettes; he smoked like a Russian too. Russians, especially older Russians, hold cigarettes the way Westerners hold a joint: between the thumb and forefinger. Habits like that never go away.

“Anya Ivanovna really was not a bad actress at all,” he said. “But she was not, shall we say, Meryl Streep. Clearly she needed to do more research into the State of Georgia.” I had no reason to think that Marshall Marcus was lying about how he met the woman who called herself Belinda Jackson. He was the victim, after all. And when he’d met her at the Ritz-Carlton bar in Atlanta, he must have known she was an escort. A horny old goat like Marcus could tell, the way a spaniel can smell game.

He just didn’t know that she was no longer employed in that capacity by VIP

Exxxecutive Service.

She was employed by Roman Navrozov.

My cyber-investigator had checked on the dates of her employment by the escort service and confirmed my gut instinct. Then, as he traced her background, he was able to dig much deeper than Dorothy ever could, since he had access to certain archives and records in New Jersey that she didn’t.

The woman who changed her name to Belinda Jackson, who’d dropped out of the School for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, had in fact enrolled under her real name.

The name on her birth certificate: Anya Ivanovna Afanasyeva. She’d grown up in a Russian enclave in Woodbine, New Jersey, the daughter of Russian émigrés. Her father had been an engineer in the Soviet Union but could only get some low-level desk job at an insurance company here.

That was about the sum total of the facts I knew. Everything else was informed guesswork. I imagined that Anya sought work as a call girl only when she couldn’t get work as an actress. Or maybe out of some sort of rebellion against her old-fashioned émigré parents.

“I assume you provided Anya with a complete dossier on Marshall Marcus,” I said. “His likes and dislikes, his tastes in movies and music. Maybe even his sexual peccadilloes.” Navrozov burst out laughing. “Do you really think an attractive and sexually talented woman like Anya needs a dossier to capture the heart of such a foolish old man? It takes very little. Most men have very simple needs. And Anya more than met those needs.”

“Your needs were simple too,” I said. “His account numbers and passwords, the way his fund was structured, where the critical vulnerabilities were.” He gave a snort of derision that I assumed was meant to be a denial.

“Look, I’m familiar with the history of your career. The way you secretly seized control of the second-largest bank in Russia, then used it to take over the aluminum industry. It was clever.”

He blinked, nodded, unwilling to show me how much he enjoyed the blandishment. But men like that were unusually susceptible to flattery. It was often their greatest vulnerability. And I could see that it was working.

“The way you stole Marcus Capital Management was nothing short of brilliant. You seized control of the bank that handled all of Marcus’s trades. You actually bought the Banco Transnacional de Panamá. Their broker-dealer. It was … genius.” I waited a few seconds.

Strategic deception, in war or in espionage, is just another form of applied psychology.

The thing is, you never actually deceive your target—you induce him to deceive himself. You reinforce beliefs he already has.

Roman Navrozov lived in a state of paranoia and suspicion. So he was automatically inclined to believe that I actually had a shooter positioned in an empty office across the street—not just a remote-controlled light switch that I could turn on and off by hitting a pre-programmed key on my cell phone. George Devlin, of course, had designed it for me and had a colleague in New York set it up: That kind of technology was far beyond my capabilities.

And he had no reason to doubt that I had people in the adjoining rooms. Why not? He’d do it too.

Same for the staged video that Darryl had taped earlier, with the help of a buddy of his who’d agreed to wear a straitjacket wired with a squib and a condom full of blood. A buddy who trusted Darryl’s assurance that his H&K was loaded with blanks, not real rounds.

Roman Navrozov believed the whole charade was real. After all, he’d done far worse to the spouses and children of his opponents; such cruelty came naturally to him.

But what I was attempting now—to pull information out of him by convincing him I knew more than I did—was much riskier. Because at any moment I might slip and say something that would tip him off that I was just plain lying.

He watched me for a few seconds through the haze of his cigarette smoke. I saw the subtle change in his eyes, a softening of his features, a relaxing of his facial muscles.

“Well,” he said, and there it was, the proud smile that I’d been hoping to provoke.

In truth, it was sort of genius, in a twisted way.

If there’s some hedge fund you want to loot, all you have to do is buy the bank that controls its portfolio. Obviously that’s not going to happen with most normal hedge funds, which use the big investment banks in the U.S. But Marcus Capital wasn’t a normal hedge fund.

“So tell me something,” I said. “Why did you need to kidnap Marshall’s daughter?”

“It was a salvage operation. A desperation move. Because the original plan didn’t work at all.”

“And the original plan…?”

He sucked in a lungful of smoke, let it out even more slowly. Then fell silent.

“You wanted the Mercury files,” I said.

“Obviously.”

It made sense. Roman Navrozov was a businessman, and certain businessmen at the highest levels traffic in the most valuable commodities. And was there any commodity rare than the deepest darkest intelligence secrets of the world’s sole remaining superpower?

“So were you planning on selling the black-budget files to the Russian government?”

“Black budget?”

“Maybe that’s a term you’re not familiar with.”

“Please. I know what black budget is. But you think the Mercury files have something to do with America’s secret military budget? I am a businessman, not an information broker.”

“They contain the operational details of our most classified intelligence operations.” He looked at me in surprise. “Is that what you were told? Next you will tell me you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as well.”

Then his mobile phone rang, emitting that annoying default Nokia ringtone you used to hear everywhere until people figured out how to select a different one.

He glanced at the display. “The cutout,” he said.

My heart began to thud.

78.

Kirill Aleksandrovich Chuzhoi drove up the long dirt road, chest tight with anticipation.

He didn’t enjoy wet work, but sometimes he had no choice, and he did it efficiently and without hesitation. Roman Navrozov paid him extremely well, and if he wanted loose ends tied up, Chuzhoi would do whatever it took. For God’s sake, he’d even gone down to Boston to take out a low-level drug dealer inside FBI headquarters! He had attracted too much attention and would very soon have to leave the country. He could work for Navrozov elsewhere in the world.

No, he didn’t much enjoy that kind of job. Whereas the contractor—the
zek
, the convict who’d done time in Kopeisk, was reputed to enjoy killing so much that he preferred to draw out the process, in order to make it last.

In this man’s line of work, such a disturbing streak of sadism was a qualification. Maybe even necessary. He was capable of doing anything.

He made Chuzhoi extremely uncomfortable.

Chuzhoi knew very little about the
zek
beyond this. And of course the owl tattoo that disfigured the back of his head and neck. He knew that the Sova gang recruited the most brutal inmates at Kopeisk.

Chuzhoi, who had trained in the old KGB and later climbed the greasy rungs of its main successor, the FSB, had encountered this type on a few occasions and had put a few in prison.

The most successful serial killers were like that, but they rarely got caught.

With his shaved head and his staring eyes and his grotesque tattoo and his bad teeth, the contractor knew he frightened people, and he surely enjoyed that. He viewed all others with contempt. He considered himself a more highly evolved species.

So he would never imagine that a washed-up old
silovik
, a former KGB agent, a lousy petty bureaucrat, could possibly attempt what Chuzhoi was about to do.

The element of surprise was Chuzhoi’s only advantage against this sociopathic monster.

An overgrown lawn came into view: wild, almost jungle-like. In the midst sat a small clapboard house. He parked his black Audi on the gravel driveway and approached the front door. It had started to rain.

Chuzhoi wore the same nailhead suit he’d worn in Boston, tailored to fit his broad physique. He moved with his accustomed air of authority. His long gray hair spilled over his shirt collar.

His trusty Makarov .380 was concealed in a holster at the small of his back.

The green-painted door swung open suddenly, and a face came out of the darkness. The shaved head, the intense stare, the deeply etched forehead: Chuzhoi had forgotten how fearsome the man was.

Something about his amber eyes: the eyes of a wolf, wild and feral and ruthless. Yet at the same time the eyes were cold and disciplined and ever calculating. They studied his acne-pitted cheeks.

“The rain has started,” Chuzhoi said. “It’s supposed to be a bad storm.” The
zek
said nothing. He glared and turned around, and Chuzhoi followed him into the shadowed recesses. The house had the stale smell of a place long closed up.

Was the girl here?

“You have no electricity?” Chuzhoi said.

“Sit.” The
zek
pointed to an armchair with a high back. It was upholstered in little flowers and looked like something chosen by an old lady.

Of course, the
zek
had no right to speak to him this way, but Chuzhoi allowed him his impertinence. “The girl is here?” he said, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. It was so dark he could barely see the sociopath’s face.

“No.” The
zek
remained standing. “Why is this meeting necessary?” Chuzhoi decided to meet brevity with brevity.