Rasputin's Shadow (12 page)

Sokolov turned to Jonny. “What about Kim-Jee? Don’t you need to ask him?”

“Kim-Jee? He’s out. His girlfriend’s expecting twins. Two girls. Living the dream, isn’t that right?” He snorted derisively.

Sokolov nodded and stepped out, and the door swung shut behind him, drowning out Jonny’s bitter laughter.

We all choose our own paths
, thought Sokolov.

Jonny had chosen the power of violence.

He had tried to choose peace.

Until now.

L
arisa had suggested we meet at J. G. Melon’s, on Seventy-fourth and Third. The restaurant was close to where she lived. I loved the place, and since she’d already had dinner while neither I nor my demure partner had eaten much all day, we snagged a quick table and ordered a couple of Swiss cheese burgers, skins, and Cokes.

“You gonna behave?” I asked Aparo.

He grinned. “Why on earth would you ask that?” He looked pensive for a second, then he subtly raised his arm a bit and leaned his head sideways and took a quick whiff to check himself.

I made a mental note to see if there was anything I could start slipping him that would throttle back his testosterone a couple of notches.

We just about managed to get through our burgers by the time she breezed in. I stood up, caught her eye and waved her over. She threaded her way to our table, put her hand out for a businesslike handshake, and directed a warm “Nice to see you again” at me with a look that lingered a second more than was strictly necessary.

“So what’s going on?” she asked, straight to the point. “You said it was important.”

“Did you catch the news?”

She nodded, then her expression changed into one of surprise as she made the connection. “The shootings in Brooklyn?”

“Yes. Two of the victims were Russians.”

“Oh my God. Not—”

“No, not the Sokolovs. Just a couple of hired guns. I don’t have names yet, but we think they’re part of Yuri Mirminsky’s crew. You know who I’m talking about, right?”

“Of course,” she said, not exactly upbeat about it.

A waitress dropped by, and Larisa hesitated, then ordered a Bloody Mary. Aparo and I stayed with our Cokes.

Aparo unlocked his phone, pulled up a photo from its picture gallery, and showed it to her.

“Do you know this guy?”

She looked at it, then shook her head. “No. Should I?”

He made a hold-on-a-sec gesture as he pulled up another one. “Wait, that was the before shot. This one’s more recent.”

He showed it to her. She flinched—slightly. He’d just shown her two shots of the dead Russian hoodlum: a screen grab from the phone video taken outside Sokolov’s building, the other with a bullet through his forehead.

Larisa gave Aparo a cold stare. “Are you done?”

“Hey, I’m just wondering what the connection is between your dead coworker and a known
bratki
,” Aparo replied.

“Is there a connection?” she asked coyly. Then she turned to me. “Is this what you asked me here for? Were you hoping to shock me into saying something I shouldn’t and spill all our dirty little secrets?”

I smiled, took a breath, and leaned in. “We’ve got seven dead bodies, Larisa. Eight, counting Yakovlev. Now, that’s a big deal in this city. It’s not something we take lightly. This is going to get noisy. The papers haven’t even got started with Yakovlev, and the minute they hear two of the dead at the motel were
bratki
 . . .” I gave her a knowing look. “You can imagine the headlines. And the kind of attention you and everyone else at the consulate are going to get hit with.”

She frowned.

“It’s not going to be fun,” I pressed. “And given the protests last week about what’s been going on back in Moscow, I’m sure it’s the kind of publicity you’d rather avoid.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“This is all about Sokolov.”

She looked at me quizzically. “Why do you think the two are connected? The shootings and Yakovlev?”

“Come on,” Aparo said, holding his phone up. “The ‘before’ shot? That was taken outside the Sokolovs’ apartment a few nanoseconds after your buddy took the quick way down.”

She eyed us thoughtfully, like she was wondering how much to say.

“What’s Sokolov involved in?” I pressed.

“I don’t know.”

Even though I doubted that, I really couldn’t tell for sure whether she was being honest with me. I studied her for a second, then I half smiled. Not a warm kind of smile. A smile that said “I know you have to play this game, and I know you know I know that.”

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but whatever it is, it all goes back to Sokolov. It started with him. So we can either wait until this all spins out of control and you’re running around doing damage limitation and rebutting every blogger and nutty conspiracy theory out there . . . or we can work together to shut it down before it gets even messier. But to do that, I need you to level with me. I need to know what Sokolov was involved in and why all these people are interested in him. I need to know what your ‘third secretary for maritime affairs’”—and yes, I did give her the air quotes—“was doing out at his apartment.”

She flashed me an amused smile and waited while the waitress deposited her Bloody Mary on the table and walked off before leaning in. “‘Third secretary’?” she asked, mimicking my air quotes. “Should I take offense?”

I spread my palms out. “Seriously? ‘Maritime affairs’? ‘
Third
secretary’? Like we’ve got that many maritime issues that two diplomats aren’t enough to deal with them?”

“We have plenty of outstanding maritime issues,” she countered. “Fishing rights and Arctic exploration and boundary agreements and all kinds of disputes going on all the time. Yakovlev had his arms full.”

“And yet, for some reason, the first thing on his agenda Monday morning was to go to Sokolov’s apartment and get pushed out of his window—which I’m guessing didn’t have anything to do with depleted tuna stocks.”

She eyed me curiously.

“Okay, fine,” I said, in a conciliatory tone. “I know there’s stuff you can’t talk to me about. There’s a lot I can’t talk about either. But I’m telling you this is going to turn into a PR disaster for you. You want to roll with it, fine. You want to head it off and make it go away, then help me out here. Besides, it might be better for you to have us focused on the bad guys than casting our net all over the place.” I flashed her a knowing look. “You never know what else we might drag up.”

She took a sip of her drink, then sat back and studied me for a moment with her head tilted slightly. After a long second, she sighed with exasperation. “We don’t have anything on Sokolov, and that’s the truth. Nothing. Which in itself is curious.” She paused, then asked, “What do you know about his background? Do you know when he came to this country?”

I remembered what Daphne’s sister had told me. “He got married in 1983, and I don’t think he’d been here that long. A couple of years, maybe.”

She nodded like it confirmed something that was burgeoning in her mind. “So if he came to America in ’81 or ’82, the questions we need to ask are, where did he come from and how did he get here?”

“His sister-in-law said he came from Russia.”

“Well, that’s why I ask. Because it wasn’t that easy to leave the Soviet Union back then. Under the Communists, no one was allowed to leave. The only people who made it here were dissidents and defectors who managed to escape and were granted political asylum after they got out—and they’re all on record. We know who they are, and Sokolov isn’t one of them. Then in 1970, after Kuznetsov and his gang of refuseniks tried to hijack their way out of there, Brezhnev agreed to allow some Jews, but only Jews, to leave—and only to Israel. But a lot of them never intended to stay on in Israel. They just used it as a way out and ended up here, in New York.”

Actually, I knew it wasn’t a humanitarian move by the Politburo chiefs, nor were its consequences that great for us. This vast exodus wasn’t just made up of innocent, persecuted Jews. The KGB simultaneously and quietly released thousands of hard-core criminals from the Soviet gulags, the ones who happened to be Jewish, and let them leave. In one swift move that probably gave rise to a lot of mirth in the Kremlin, the KGB dumped these ex-cons on an unsuspecting world—knowing most of them would end up here. We didn’t know which of the immigrants we were taking in had been in jail and if so, for what reason, since the Russians never shared their criminal records with us. Still don’t, for that matter. Fidel Castro, ever the faithful follower of his Soviet mentors, took a page out of the same playbook several years later during the Mariel boatlift, emptying a lot of his jails and shipping them our way, with the ensuing effect it had on crime in South Florida.

“And that policy didn’t change until 1985,” Larisa continued, “when Gorbachev relaxed controls and opened the borders. But you’re saying Sokolov came here around 1981, before Gorby’s policy shift, and I don’t remember seeing a mezuzah or anything like that in the Sokolovs’ apartment. Do we know if Sokolov is Jewish?”

“I don’t. I know his wife is Greek. And they had icons in the entrance hall.”

“Christian icons,” she noted pointedly.

“Yes.”

“Which matches the fact that he’s not on any of our lists either. So if he didn’t defect and if he wasn’t part of the Jewish exodus, then how did he manage to get out of the Soviet Union at a time when no one was allowed out?”

I pondered her words and realized we needed to do a lot more digging into Sokolov.

Assuming that was even his real name.

“Okay. We’ll have a look at that.”

She nodded, then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and I need your help on something. We can’t get hold of the coroner’s report on Yakovlev. Can you get them to release it to us?”

I couldn’t see any harm in that. “Sure.”

“Did it show anything unexpected? Was he drugged?”

I smiled. Just the kind of thing a “counselor for public affairs” would think of asking. “Nothing unusual in his system,” I told her. “He was clean.”

“Look into Sokolov’s background,” she told me. “I’ll keep digging on my end. But let’s agree on something. If we’re going to contain this and bring it to a swift and mutually agreeable conclusion, we need to work together. Even though, like you said, there will be things we can’t tell each other. But we have to try and get past that. We need to be open with each other. Keep each other informed. If this is going to work, we need to share—maybe more than what would normally be considered acceptable.”

I wasn’t sure if she was toying with me or not, if watching what effect she had on men was just a personal little thrill for her or if it was a deliberate tactic to get our brains steamed up and our tongues loosened. Either way, it was breathtakingly effective. On other guys, of course.

“Okay,” I finally said with staggering eloquence. And despite the tumult in my mind, one thing was becoming clearer by the minute: this was all about Sokolov.

They obviously wanted him.

Which meant we had to find him first.

***

L
ARISA WATCHED
R
EILLY AND
Aparo drive off, then pulled out her phone as she headed home.

“Where is he on Sokolov?” her boss asked.

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“Did you help him along?”

“I gave him something. Pointed him in the right direction.”

“Good,” he told her. “Build on that. Get closer to him. We’ll use whatever resources we have available to help track Sokolov down. But if the FBI manages to find him before we do, you’ll need to make sure we have enough time to get there first.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” she told him. Then she hung up.

She turned down Seventy-eighth, feeling a bit hollow inside. This was definitely turning into the most significant assignment of her career, but not knowing the full story was really starting to grate at her. She hadn’t signed up for this in order to just be a pawn in someone else’s game, and she didn’t like playing a role without knowing the full backstory. Her line of work was all about judgment calls, and she was starting to question why they weren’t telling her the full story, with the obvious answer—the one that piqued her curiosity even more—being that they thought she might act differently if they did.

She had to get the entire story on who Sokolov really was. And given how her access to that information seemed to be blocked from all sides, she hoped Reilly would prove to be as good as they made him out to be.

Until then, she had no choice but to keep playing the game.

D
aphn
e Sokolov flinched as she felt the man’s presence close in on her. She was on a hard, cold floor, her hands tied behind her back and attached to some kind of pipe, a replay of what she’d been through at the hotel. Only this time, she was the prisoner of someone else.

She felt the man bend down, heard his clothes crease as he leaned into her. She sensed his hands reaching out to her, then he was pulling off the balaclava he’d covered her head with. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the light, and the man’s face came into focus.

He looked the same, only this time, up close, she could tell that the beard was fake and the glasses too clear to be anything more than a prop.

He stayed uncomfortably close, studying her.

Her eyes darted around to get a look at where he was keeping her. She was in a bare, windowless room, like an office in a light industrial warehouse that hadn’t been used for a while. The floor wasn’t carpeted, just a cold, bare screed. Then she noticed something on the floor next to her captor: a small toiletries pouch, the kind used for travel.

She didn’t quite know why, but the sight alarmed her.

He stayed unnervingly silent. After a moment, she summoned up the courage to speak.

“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do you want from me?”

He just stared at her quietly, then his eyes dropped to his pouch and he unzipped it. He reached in and pulled out a couple of small plastic ampoules. They were like the ones used for eye drops, with the snap-off tips. And these did have eye drops in them, but they were not intended for soothing dry or sore eyes.

“I’m going to need to ask you some questions,” he told her as he snapped the top off one of the little tubes. He held it up to her. “These will help you answer them. I ask you not to resist. They won’t harm you, they’ll only make you more . . . compliant. Make it easy on yourself and don’t fight me. One way or another, I always get the answers I need.”

She was too shocked to answer.

He didn’t wait for her reply. He just reached out and put one hand on her chin, tilting her head back against the wall and holding it in place.

“Don’t fight it,” he told her, softly. “Just let me put them in and we’ll get through this as quickly as possible.”

She started trembling wildly, uncontrollably. But she didn’t fight him. It was pointless. She just tried to take in deep breaths and control her fear as he reached in and, as deftly as someone who’d done this many times before, tilted her head so it was at a slight angle. Then his thumb and his index finger crept up and across her left eye and held it wide open, forcing her eyelid to stay up.

His gaze locked on hers as he brought up the small tube of clear liquid and held it in front of her for a torturous moment. Then he turned it and squeezed it, allowing its contents to drip into his captive’s eye.

Daphne needed to blink, but she couldn’t, not until the man was done.

He pulled back, studying her curiously, like she was a lab rat. He was clearly enjoying the dread and the confusion that had to be playing across her face.

“There,” he comforted her. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He did the same to the other eye, emptying the other ampoule into it. Then he put the empty ampoules back in his pouch and got up.

“Let’s give it a few minutes to take effect,” he said. “Then we’ll chat.”

He walked out, leaving Daphne shivering more out of fear than from the chill of the cold floor.

***

T
HE QUESTIONING DIDN’T LAST LONG.

Code named SP-117—the SP stood for “
spetsial’noi podgotovki,
” or special preparation—the drops were a cocktail of barbiturates, alkaloids, and other psychoactive substances, and they worked. The world—and Department Twelve of the KGB’s S Directorate, in particular—had come a long way since the days when alcohol, given as intravenous ethanol, was used to loosen tongues. But while so-called truth serums encouraged the talkativeness of their subjects, their weakness was that it was hard to tell what part of the subjects’ blabbering was fact from what was fiction. The reliability of what was said while under the drug’s influence was key. And that was what made SP-117 special. It subdued the imagination and made its victims focus on nothing but what they believed was fact.

In this case, though, the facts Daphne Sokolov had given him were worthless.

Sokolov hadn’t told her anything. She knew nothing of his past, or of his work.

Which wasn’t unexpected. Koschey anticipated as much. Still, having her here was important. Sokolov was a capable man, and they were clearly very much in love. Koschey knew the scientist would do everything he could to get her back. It was only a matter of time before he popped his head over the parapet again.

Koschey reclined his car seat as far as it could go and leaned back, running through possible scenarios of how things might play out from here. It was a discipline that had served him well. He hadn’t failed yet. His whole career had been a string of successes, right from the beginning. Only things had changed. He’d grown bitter and disillusioned. And sitting there in the darkness of the empty warehouse, he wondered if this assignment was going to lead to a new beginning.

A rebirth for the deathless.

He’d grown up in a patriotic communist family in Minsk and had been recruited by the KGB while working in a factory alongside his father, making parts for military helicopters. He graduated from the KGB’s Academy there after excelling in marksmanship and bare-handed combat, and was on his first mission in Riga, breaking into and bugging the British embassy there, when the Wall fell. His work wasn’t affected. He was busy running audacious disinformation campaigns against the CIA, identifying and taking out Chechen rebel leaders, and seeding insurgency headaches for the West in places like Afghanistan and Sudan. He reached the rank of major six years after graduating, lieutenant colonel five years after that.

And then it had all changed.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything he’d been trained to fight for was suddenly gone. His role changed. It wasn’t about helping to spread Communism and beating America at the game of global dominance. It wasn’t about sneaking missiles into Cuba or arming Arab states or supporting South American insurgencies. Ideology was no longer relevant.

Instead, it was now all about money.

A tsunami of greed and corruption had swept up everyone around him. And while Koschey was out in the field, defending the values he’d had instilled in him by his father and his mentors at the Academy, fighting a dirty war against capitalism and the decadence of the West, those same mentors were jumping ship. His superiors at the KGB, even hard-liners like the general, jettisoned any allegiance to the founding concepts of the Soviet Union and threw themselves into the pursuit of wealth with embarrassing abandon. To a man, they scrambled to line their pockets and grab as much money as they could, shamelessly and ruthlessly—and there was a lot of it waiting to be grabbed.

Koschey, ever the perfect soldier, had stubbornly and naïvely clung to his values, only to find himself out to sea in a world that no longer existed. And with each passing year, he grew more disillusioned and more cynical. He took pride in knowing that he excelled at what he did—which was why they needed him, why they spoiled and cossetted him. Only, things were different. He knew he was being used. He was no more than a glorified enforcer, a foot soldier in a global battle that was about more than greed, sent out to safeguard his superiors’ cushy lives and their bank accounts. His missions were now all about controlling oilfields and gas pipelines and making sure turmoil in the Middle East kept the price of oil up—a major source of revenue for Russia, a lot of it ending up in the hands of those above him who’d raped the country. It was also about silencing any dissident voices or potential headaches for the regime, whether in Moscow, Georgia, or in London, to make sure his superiors stayed in power and continued to enjoy their newly acquired wealth.

Koschey’s disillusionment had taken time to set in. He’d been too focused on staying alive while carrying out his missions all over the world to notice what was happening back home. But the disillusionment was now well and truly entrenched, and he’d grown more bitter with each passing day. More than bitter.

His work made him feel dirty.

It made him feel used.

He needed to change. To adapt. To accept the new reality on the ground and redefine his life.

And the more he thought about it all, the more he sensed that Sokolov would be the key to his rebirth.

He just had to find him first.