From Manhattan with Revenge (The Fourth Book in the Fifth Avenue Series) (10 page)

“Colleagues,” he said, glancing up at the
monitors.

“Katzev,” came a dozen replies.

“Since last night, I’ve been reading over
our files on Carmen Gragera and our seven-year history with her. There’s no
question that she must go, as many of us agreed upon weeks ago due to the
potential threat she invites via her relationship with Alex Williams. The good
news is that, in researching the information we’ve compiled on her over the
years, I’ve found a possible Achilles heel.”

He let a beat of silence pass and watched
the impatience on some of their faces turn to interest. “Carmen loves
children,” he said. “I have no idea why, since I can’t stand them myself. But
Carmen loves them in ways that are almost...unnatural.”

“How do you know this?”

The question came from Conrad Bates, who
owned more of Las Vegas than he probably should, given the financial straits
that city was in. Still, for balance, his portfolio offered a wealth of other
properties, mostly hotels located in Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles,
and throughout Europe, with particular attention paid to London and Paris,
where his businesses thrived.

He was younger than Katzev, a product of
one of the better Boston families who took his sizable inheritance and actually
did something with it. He was aggressive and unethical, which were fine traits
the syndicate embraced, though Katzev had never liked the man, not that his
feelings for him mattered much. What mattered was the money Bates brought to
the syndicate, which like everyone else here, was substantial. It also was
critical to achieving what each desired as they moved forward not just into
greater wealth, but into what they really wanted—unfathomable power.

“Hello, Conrad,” he said.

“Illarion.”

“How’s Vegas treating you these days?”

“I’m hoping we can address that at our
next meeting.”

“I’ll bet.”

“But if you could answer my question now,
I think we’d all agree that’s more pressing. Or at least it seems to be given
the urgency of this meeting.”

“In reading over Carmen’s files, one thing
became clear. Each time she was assigned a job that involved killing a child,
she turned it down flat. She gave no reason why. She simply refused to do it.
In her files, there are seventeen instances of her doing so over our time with
her.”

“Who cares?” Bates said. “So, she likes
kids. Some of us do. What’s your point?”

Katzev kept his features neutral even
though he wanted to call the man an idiot for not having the imagination to see
something so obvious. “If Carmen loves children so much, then we threaten her
with them.”

“Does she have children?”

This time, it was the eighty-year-old
Greek shipping heiress Hera Hallas who asked the question. Katzev looked up at
the elegant woman with the tan skin and the chic, pure white hair pulled away
from her face in a blunt ponytail and knew again that in her youth, she must
have been a great beauty.

“She doesn’t have children,” he said.

“If she loves them so much, why not?”

“Caring for a child while gunning down
adults is probably a lot to handle,” Conrad Bates said.

“I’d imagine changing diapers and changing
gun magazines would be a challenge for any single mother. But I still don’t see
the significance, Illarion. So what if she loves children?”

Patience,
he told
himself.
Patience.

“In going through the intelligence, what
also came to the fore is that she gives to only one charity.”

“Crying Toddlers Anonymous?” Bates said.
“Early Onset Childhood Dementia? The Skinned Knees Institute of Montana? The
Boogieman Fund?”

Hera Hallas rolled her eyes in reaction to
the juvenile comments. In the monitor next to her, another member of the
syndicate, who was in Paris, where it was evening, was wearing black tie and
starting to look annoyed. Katzev saw him check his watch. Since they all could
see each other, he wondered if Bates also caught the man’s impatience.

“Actually, Conrad,” Katzev said,
“regardless of the disrespect you bring to the table, not to mention your
cynicism, which is unwarranted, you’re not that far off as the charity does
have to do with children. Under Franco’s leadership, Carmen Gragera’s father
became an unintended adopted orphan.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Bates
asked.

“If you pay attention to the
news—and I hope that you do, Conrad, beyond the truncated information
wedged into the CNN crawl—you’ll remember the scandal that broke out in
Spain in 1989, when it was revealed that three hundred thousand babies were
stolen after their mothers gave birth to them. Does anyone remember that?”

“I do,” Hera Hallas said. “It was awful.”

“The mothers—often young and unmarried
and thus considered worthless under Franco’s regime—were told that their
child was stillborn. Or that it died soon after birth. When the mother asked to
see the child, she was shown, at a distance, a baby’s corpse the hospital kept
in a freezer. Why? Because her child already had been sold by the Catholic
Church. That adopting couple who paid for the child was generally affluent and
a member of the church, and thus deemed more suitable to raise the child than a
single mother considered a disgrace to Franco and naturally to the church.
Franco died in 1975. The church continued this practice for another fourteen
years, only stopping when the scandal came to light because a man on his
deathbed revealed the truth to his son that he bought him for two hundred
thousand pesetas. Or about fifteen hundred dollars. It became a sensation.
Worldwide news. Another bullet to the heart of the Catholic Church. Certainly,
you heard of it, Conrad.”

Bates hesitated, but then said of course
he had.

Bullshit
,
thought Katzev. But he pressed on. “For Carmen’s father, the problem went
beyond the mere kidnapping. The parents who bought and raised him were
Christian zealots. Monsters. They bought him with the sole intent to abuse him,
thinking that if they beat this child born to a woman they considered a whore,
then certainly they’d be rewarded for their efforts when their time came to
enter Heaven’s gates.” He waved his hand. “Or something like that. They were
horrific to him. They did unspeakable things to him. It wasn’t until Nerón
Gragera was sixteen that he managed to free himself by stabbing them to death
while they slept. He disappeared for years. No one knew where he went. It was
during that time that he fell in with the right people—at least as far as
he was concerned—and was trained to become an assassin.”

“So, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the
tree,” Bates said. “Fantastic. But what does this have to do with why we’re
here now?”

“Carmen Gragera is a wealthy woman,”
Katzev said. “She and her father were close. It’s no coincidence that a great
deal of her money goes to one particular orphanage in Madrid and also to St.
Vincent’s Services’ seven group homes in Queens and Staten Island. Each caters
to troubled children, all emotionally scarred. She gives millions each year to
make certain each organization gives its charges the best care, from living
quarters to schools to access to doctors, including psychiatrists trained to
deal specifically with troubled children and teens. When she can, she visits
the children. She has grown attached to many of them, especially those here in
New York because here is where Carmen often finds herself. I think she gives so
much because she wants to honor what her father endured. She took his
experience, dipped deep into her own money, and is actively supporting two
organizations that need her to succeed. I think Carmen takes care of these
children because she knows that by doing so, they will be properly cared for
and won’t suffer her father’s fate.”

“How did you find this out?” Hera Hallas
said.

“There’s nothing I can’t find out, Hera.
If you read between the lines, much of it is here in the files. Some of it is
investigative work I did on my part. With it, I started to piece everything
together. Whatever I couldn’t fill in on my own was a few phone calls away.”

“But to what end?” Bates asked.

“Can’t you figure it out?” The person who
spoke was the Parisian, Marius Aubert. Katzev looked up at him and saw that he
was looking down at Bates, his impatience with the man as high as the tension
in the room. “Obviously, Illarion plans to target one of the organizations. I’m
assuming St. Vincent’s because of its close proximity to him and because Carmen
is now in New York. He’ll threaten Carmen with those children. He’ll tell her
that if she doesn’t come in, he’ll kill them one-by-one until she does.”
Aubert’s eyes lifted to Katzev’s. “Am I right, Illarion? Is that what you plan
to do? Exchange their lives for hers?”

“Something like that, Marius.”

“And then what?” Hera Hallas said. “I’m no
angel,” the octogenarian said. “But killing innocent children, especially in
the numbers you’re talking about, seems extreme, cruel, and unnecessary.”

“It won’t come to that,” Katzev said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know Carmen, and she knows me.
She knows I’ll go through with it if she forces my hand. She won’t second-guess
it. She knows I’ll even set fire to one or more of those group homes if that’s
what it takes to bring her in. I expect to hear from her. She’ll do what she
has to do to protect those children.”

“Will she risk her own life?” Hera Hallas
said.

“I think she will.”

“Carmen Gragera is not without her own
army of contacts,” Hallas said. “Tip her off, and she’ll have those homes
surrounded.”

“Let her.”

“You’re being awfully glib, Illarion. How
do you propose to pull this off?”

“Just watch me,” he said.

“I’d rather hear your plan, not what
Marius thinks you’ll do. I think we’d all like to hear it.”

He knew this was coming and so he told
them his plan. He watched the faces first shift into skepticism; he saw them
think it through; and then he watched their eyes meet his with what looked like
a trace of either admiration or respect. He decided he’d take either.

“Any questions?” he asked.

The room went silent.

Katzev looked over at Conrad Bates, who
was staring back at him. He cocked his head at him and waited for a sarcastic
reply, but when he realized that even Bates had nothing to say, he knew his
instincts were correct and that if he was going to succeed, he needed to act
fast.

CHA
PTER
TWELVE

Illarion Katzev, born Iver Kester in
Aberdeen, Scotland, before he assumed the identity of a Russian for the sake of
secrecy within the syndicate he helped to create with Jean-George Laurent, had
homes in Aberdeen, Moscow, and Manhattan.

It was only in Aberdeen, where friends and
family knew him as the boy who came from modest means and a broken home
shattered by an alcoholic father, that he went by his real name. In his
hometown, he was celebrated as a successful entrepreneur in the States and an
example of what could be achieved through risk, luck, and hard work.

With his father long since dead, but with
his mother, still alive and thriving in her seventies, he visited his hometown
once each year, generally for a week, whereupon he was feted by his mother, his
old friends, his aunts, uncles, and cousins. They knew him only as Iver, who
left Aberdeen when he was twenty to go to America, where he worked long hours
to carve out a fortune in buying and selling real estate, while much of his family
remained in Aberdeen to work on the family farm.

What his family and friends didn’t know
was the secret life he led.

They didn’t know that he went by Illarion
Katzev, they didn’t know that he spent years with a tutor to become fluent in
Russian; and they also didn’t know that he had spent the same amount of years
with the same tutor to perfect how a Russian accent would sound when spoken in
English.

There was more.

They didn’t know that he owned a home in
Moscow to galvanize the belief that he was, in fact, Russian. They knew about
the apartment in Manhattan, but because they couldn’t afford to visit him, they
had no idea that the apartment was a lavish penthouse on Fifth Avenue. They
knew he had done well, but they’d never suspect that he had amassed a net worth
of millions. And they certainly didn’t know about the syndicate, which grew
those millions exponentially.

To him, he always would be their Iver, who
worked hard when he was young at any random job he could find in Aberdeen, all
in an effort to buy a one-way ticket to America, where he was determined to
change the course of his life in Manhattan. He succeeded, only in ways they’d
never know or understand.

Now, in his penthouse, Illarion returned
from his office on Madison, where he had addressed the syndicate that agreed to
his plan to root out Carmen Gragera and have her assassinated. In his living
room, which overlooked Central Park, he fixed himself a Scotch and soda, and
thought through his plan.