Requiem For a Glass Heart (38 page)

“Two, those two guys used sandpaper on Cate. By her own account she wasn’t really bruised, not really pounded on. Just scraped up.” He paused again. “That’s an old trick, Leo. It makes it look like there’s been a lot of damage done when actually there hasn’t been.” Hain shook his head. “Shit, Leo, you set her up, didn’t you?”

Ometov stared at him. He lifted his cigarette and pulled on it, continuing to stare at Hain as he exhaled, expelling a stream of white breath.

“Yes,” he said, “I did. Early this morning, when I went out to breakfast with you, I called Valentin from a telephone in the men’s toilet. He arranged it.”

“Good God, man. You can’t do shit like that.”

Ometov dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the stones with the toe of his shoe.

“Tell me honestly, Curtis, that you wish I had not done it,” he said. His eyes were flat. When Hain did not respond, he went on. “It had to be done. They didn’t hurt her. She had to be shaken, genuinely shaken. So I did it.”

“It may have worked, Leo, but you’re not the one who’s going to get busted if this ever gets out.”

“I am not going to tell anyone,” Ometov said coldly.

Hain shook his head. He knew Ometov was right about the effect of Cate’s pummeling. It was an inspired maneuver. It worked for Cate. It worked on Irina. It moved their relationship farther along faster than would have been possible otherwise in the short time available to them. And it was entirely unethical. It was even risky. It had been a gamble that paid off.

But it was done. And yes, Hain couldn’t say he was disappointed with the results.

“This is not a time to be squeamish,” Ometov said. “I already have seen too many people die because I could not stop Krupatin. I lost my faith in proper conduct a long time ago. What we have gained by having Cate knocked around was worth it. I would not hesitate to do it again. I am sorry. But I would not hesitate a moment.”

He took out his cigarettes, shook one up from the pack, and put it in his mouth. He lighted it.

“My friend,” Ometov said, “you will not get your hands on Sergei Krupatin by drawing a line on the ground and saying, ‘I will not step over this.’ No. Impossible. If the line is there, well then, eventually you will have to make the decision to step over it. Do you know why? Because that is where he lives—and kills. On the other side of the line.”

T
HE CONFUSION
C
ATE FELT IN REGARD TO
I
RINA, THE INHERENT
eroticism in the strip search, the compassion that it seemed anyone would feel for a woman who had been through what Irina had been through, the intuitive fear of her that Gate felt—all these conflicting emotions were only compounded by the events that immediately followed. Not only did her feelings grow more complex, but the imaginary tightrope she walked as an undercover agent metamorphosed into something entirely unrecognizable. Rather than a hard thin line, the tightrope changed by the minute, broadening, flattening out, until the demarcation formed by the sharp line of the wire blended with the territories on either side of it and Cate no longer could tell what was the wire and what were the two spaces it divided. The colors to the left and right faded and intermingled, depth perception flattened out, dimensions flowed together; everything became so much a part of everything else that variations were indistinguishable, and the only discernible element was an immense barren plain with no differentiating features with which to establish orientation.

Having suspended her own reality, she was finding it difficult to locate another to take its place. Irina’s reality was unacceptable, Cate’s old reality was forfeit. And that which lay between was ill-defined and amorphous.

Once Cate agreed to help, Irina’s melancholy vanished, and she was immediately buoyant.

“Look,” she said, “we don’t have much time. If you want to bathe before we dress why don’t you go ahead. I’ll pour us another drink.”

Cate stood under the shower and tried to calm her nerves. She could not imagine what she might have just agreed to do but somehow she felt incapable of coming up with a logical scenario for finding out. In fact, she was afraid to ask, afraid that what she learned would be more than she could handle. Somehow she wanted to believe what this woman promised, that it wouldn’t be difficult, that it wouldn’t be dangerous, that Cate could trust her. She wanted to believe her, but the emptiness in her stomach carried a stronger warning than Irina’s assurances could overcome.

When she got out of the shower Irina was already in the dressing room with their drinks. As Cate dried her hair Irina chatted animatedly, one woman to another, as though across a backyard fence. She talked about the cities she had seen and what she liked about them and what she didn’t, where there was the best Turkish bath in the world, the best coffee, the best pastries, the best spas, the best shopping. She talked of art galleries and museums, of the burgeoning market in East European and Baltic icons, of the latent market for Latin American art, of the slippery, changing scene in contemporary art.

They stood in front of the long vanity mirror in their underwear and did their hair together, Irina continuing to talk as though she did not realize that this was the strangest of circumstances, while Cate tried not to succumb to a grim and growing sense of foreboding. When they were finished, Irina helped Cate select the right dress for the evening, and then they slipped them on, each helping the other with her zipper. Then Irina helped Cate apply just the right amount of makeup to cover her scrapes, which in truth had proved minimal once the redness had faded. Again Cate found herself all too aware of the difference in quality of their clothes. Irina appeared oblivious to this, oblivious even to the luxury that surrounded her, taking everything for granted: the outrageously priced suite of rooms, the lavishly costly clothes, the once-in-a-life-time jewelry, the ridiculously expensive perfume. She took it all for granted, or—and Cate found it difficult to determine
which—she didn’t really care one way or the other. Something told Cate that a simple cotton summer dress would have satisfied Irina just as well. It was an attitude that she wore with the same grace with which she wore her beauty. Perhaps it was not that she took it for granted after all. Rather, it seemed that she long ago had put it all into a larger perspective and had assigned it to an inferior place in her own secret world of valuable intangibles.

But all of this quickly came to an end. Irina stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom of the suite. Her thick and slightly wavy golden hair was pulled back from her face and fastened in a chignon at the nape of her neck. A large smoky black pearl adorned each ear. Her evening dress, also black, was cut low over her breasts, with only spaghetti straps scoring her otherwise bare shoulders; the material hugged her rib cage and waist, then fell over her stomach and hips to just below her knees in a loose and liquid intimacy. She was drop-dead beautiful.

She turned from the mirror, looked at her bracelet watch, picked up her black clutch purse, and squared her shoulders. Then she formed the same shushing shape with her lips as she had done before and held up the long fingers of one hand in a cautioning gesture, and the sudden hollow feeling sucked at Cate’s stomach once again.

She motioned for Cate to follow her, and they walked out of the bedroom, into the sitting room, and then to the living room. Throwing a look back at Cate, Irina opened the door of the suite carefully, and they walked out into the hallway, where Irina cautiously closed the door behind them. Then, to Cate’s surprise, she walked across the broad corridor and down a few steps to the next suite on the other side. She knocked twice. The door quickly opened, and they went inside.

They stood in the middle of the living room of yet another elegant suite and listened to four fashionably dressed young men carry on a sober, soft-spoken dialogue in Sicilian. They did not argue; they did not engage in the mannerisms of cinematic stereotype; they did not appear confused or indecisive. Their discussion seemed to deal with strategic concerns, with logistics; it did not seem to be about making choices but about timing. There was cautionary head-tilting, watch-checking.
Dark eyes bored into dark eyes to confirm issues, and finally there were nods of consensus all around.

Irina said nothing during all this. In fact, she seemed hardly concerned. There were two men in the room besides the Italians and themselves, both Americans. One, in his thirties, wore headphones on his crewcut head and sat at a bank of electronic equipment not unlike the one set up at the FBI’s off-site. The other man was middle-aged and sat in an armchair, smoking, a notepad resting on his lap. He was flanked by two telephones, one balanced on either arm of his chair. He didn’t listen to the Sicilians either, but his eyes never stopped slithering over every square inch of Irina’s thinly covered body. Irina ignored him, as though he were part of the chair in which he was sitting. Her concentration was interior, and Cate doubted if this man’s silent lechery would matter to her even if she were aware of it.

Cate’s senses worked greedily, trying to take in as much as possible, as many details as possible: the faces, the nationalities, the equipment, the appearances, the mannerisms, the attitudes, the overriding tenor of the moment. It couldn’t have been more than three or four minutes before she saw Irina looking at her. When their eyes met, Irina took her by the arm and the two of them moved aside, farther away from the lecher, of whom Irina obviously had been aware all along. There was very little of which Irina was unaware.

“Listen to me, Catherine,” Irina said, their arms interlaced. “You must be very clever tonight. You must be an actress. You must go along with everything I do as naturally as if you had known in advance what was going to happen. I cannot tell you ahead of time what that will be. I don’t even know everything myself, but you must put your total faith in me and do as I say. This is absolutely essential. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, I do,” Cate said. And she did understand. She understood that she was on the lip of a maelstrom, looking down into its constricting coil, feeling the sinister drag of its dark gravity.

“Signora,” said one of the young Sicilians, who had come up behind them, “we have to go now.”

The Sicilians didn’t use an evasive departure as they had earlier, but merely took both women out through the discreet
route of interior stairs and back doors to a large Mercedes in one of the chateau’s rear drives. Apparently they were going to rely entirely on their dry-cleaning talents to protect their route and destination.

“Okay, this is what we wanted,” Hain said, the strain discernible in his voice, though he was forcing a calm manner. Ometov, Ann, and Erika were all hunched over their notepads around the tables laden with technology, their eyes fixed on an invisible spot, their concentration welded to the audio of Cate’s transmissions.

“Jernigan,” he added, “do not leave the hotel with these people. Stay clear. Let ’em go. We don’t want to throw this away.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Jernigan said. “That’s Sicilian. They’re talking Sicilian, that’s for sure. You get any kind of ID on these guys?”

“We’re pretty sure they’re Carlo Bontate’s people, but the computers didn’t give us any hits on the photographs, so we’re not sure about it. Strey, you getting some of your agents who speak Sicilian? We don’t know shit here.”

“I’m already on it,” Strey said.

“She’s not saying much,” Ann said. “She’s not talking.…”

“Hell, she can’t talk,” Hain said impatiently. “Think about it.”

“What about Stepanov and the other two?” Erika asked.

“We’ve got them,” Jernigan said. “They’re busy dry-cleaning.”

Two hours earlier Valery Volkov had suddenly appeared back at the hotel. After half an hour, both Volkov and Izvarin had appeared at Stepanov’s suite and told him they had to go check on some friends—a lame excuse to get him out of bugged territory—and they had all left together. This brief conversation had been picked up on the FBI bug in the living room of Stepanov’s suite. The three men had immediately left the hotel, so that Stepanov had not been able to contact Hain.

“What if they end up going to the same place?” Jernigan asked. “What do you want us to do then?”

“Drop back. Stay the hell away. Gate and Irina are priority. We do not want to spook Irina.”

“What if Krupatin shows up?”

“We’ll get back to you.”

During the next hour there was minimal transmission from Cate’s implants, which indicated that the Sicilians were probably still intensely involved with their dry-cleaning duties. In the meantime Jernigan’s team stayed with the Russians, who seemed to be taking their own dry-cleaning efforts to extremes.

D
ESPITE THE BALD FEAR SHE FELT AT HER SITUATION
, C
ATE SAT IN
silence and tried to take in as much of what was happening to her as she could. The Sicilians were utilizing a surprising amount of state-of-the-art electronic technology in their countersurveillance, and their evasion techniques, as far as she could tell, were much the same as the ones practiced by the FBI.

For the first forty-five minutes, they remained in the huge Mercedes, working a pattern of routes around Houston. The driver was clearly familiar with the city. The front seat of the car was equipped with a console of electronic technology manned by a thin young man who was very intent on his work. They had a police scanner with some electronic devices attached to it, which the young Sicilian was playing with the virtuosity of a musician, managing after fifteen minutes to find—incredibly—secure channels. They had countersurveillance cars on the street spotting for them.

A crucial juncture came at the forty-five-minute mark. They drove downtown and entered one of the countless parking garages. They descended several floors underground and pulled up beside a dark Lincoln. Cate and Irina and their escorts got out of the Mercedes, and two women from another car got into the Mercedes with the same number of
escorts. A couple of the automatic windows came down in the Lincoln so the men could talk among themselves, and Cate saw two women in the back seat of that car as well. An exchange of vehicles, or a feigned exchange of vehicles, was a routine evasion action, so one car was a decoy. But in this case two cars were going to be decoys. Cate and Irina did not enter a car at all.

Together with their escorts, they walked to the elevators, which took them up several floors to the underground tunnel system that honeycombed beneath the streets and buildings of downtown Houston. When they entered the first tunnel juncture, two electric carts were waiting for them. There were miles and miles of tunnels, and walking would have been impractical. With their young escorts wearing earpieces and keeping in constant communication with someone, they moved through the tunnel system, passing silently through the nether regions of several skyscrapers. The tunnels were bright and silent and empty at this hour of the night. Finally they arrived at another elevator stop. This elevator took them to another parking level and another Lincoln, which was as electronically well equipped as the Mercedes. They got into the Lincoln and the driver coiled up to the street level, emerging into the city a mile from where they had entered.

If they had been under surveillance, this maneuver would have been a difficult one to follow. It would have been, that is, if not for the crucial fact of Cate’s presence.

After the downtown maneuvering, the dark Lincoln began cruising the hundreds of miles of freeways and tollways that threaded through and encircled the city. They followed these arteries west out of the city and then back in again. They followed them south and back in, then north and back in. The radios crackled; sapphire, ruby, and emerald lights winked on the console in the front seat, with one bank of lights undulating in a glittering pattern, drifting waves like sonar.

Once, as they were coming back into the city from Galveston Bay, they pulled onto a dirt road that ran out into the flat plains of coastal grasses and turned off their lights. In the distance all around them the lights of the city and the suburbs glittered on the black horizon. Two of the men took a small box the size of a car battery out of the trunk of the car, attached a convex, disk-shaped antenna to it, and set it on the
hood of the car. As the antenna rotated, they studied an instrument panel, occasionally looking up to the night sky.

They left the Lincoln running for the air conditioning, but even so, when they opened the doors the rich, verdant smell of damp grasses invaded the car. All of this time Irina sat in silence. Occasionally she glanced at her watch or looked out at the darkness on the black stretches of gulf grass, lost in her thoughts.

The back door of the car opened, and one of the young Italians looked in.

“Signora,” he said, speaking to Irina, “we think it is okay to go to the meeting.”

“Good. Very good,” Irina said.

The man closed the door. He and his partner disassembled the device on the roof of the car and put it in the trunk, and they drove away, the low, dark Lincoln creeping through the tall grasses like a heavy feral cat.

“Anything on the Russians?”

Jernigan’s voice could not disguise his chagrin. “We lost them.”

“Oh, shit. For Christ’s sake, Neil—”

“Listen,” Jernigan snapped back. “You want airtight coverage, give me the manpower. That’s pretty much common sense, you know that.”

“Okay, okay,” Hain apologized.

“They went to a goddamn Rockets game at the Summit,” Jernigan explained. “Parked in one of the garages and split up. That’s the last we saw of them.”

“These guys are from out of town, Neil. How the hell do they know how to get around—”

“Yeah, right, well, we think they’re each hooking up with one of the Aulovs or Semenyakos who’ve been working with Stepanov here. Must’ve had it worked out beforehand. We have all the registrations for their vehicles and we’re watching for them. We’re monitoring all the cab calls for this area. We’ve contacted all the security operations in a five-block area, so they’re watching all the entrances and exits with their security cameras. I mean, we’re on it, but …”

“But what?”

“Well, shit, when they split up like that, Curtis, they’re just too damn spread out.”

Stepanov and Pavel Aulov were the first to arrive at the Global Maritime wharves east of the Turning Basin on the Houston Ship Channel, a muddy, odorous waterway that ran fifty miles inland from Galveston Bay and terminated in the eastern end of the city. The flat bayou bottoms that flanked the Ship Channel were the equivalent of the dirt underneath the fingernails of international mercantilism, which presented a much prettier face a few miles away in the glittering skyscrapers downtown. Here the paper-shuffling and the billions of bits of data zipping through bright, sterile fiber optics turned into sober reality amid miles and miles of shipyards and railyards, acres and acres of petroleum storage terminals, city-size refineries, chemical plants, industrial storage yards, and worlds of wharves.

Global Maritime consisted of a warren of warehouses on the south side of the channel, where a collection of tankers always berthed, leviathan hulks lying up against the wharves pissing rusty bilge into the soupy water of the channel while gantries groaned in the wharf-lighted night, tending to unknown cargoes.

Valentin Stepanov stood on the grimy cement floor and looked into the cavernous bowels of a warehouse leased by TransEuro Shipping Ltd. The stench in this particular depot was overwhelming, because it was the holding platform for hundreds of pallets of animal hides shipped in from Brazil and destined for Europe. The hides, shipped raw from freshly slaughtered cattle, were stacked flat one on top of another, each one generously salted to prevent it from rotting. Blood serum and adipocere oozed from each hide and mixed with the salt to create an unctuous seepage that soaked into the hair of the hide beneath it, leaked to the edges of the hide “cake,” and dripped off in a thick, syrupy exudate that threw off a nauseating smell. It was this stench that made the hide pallets valuable to Stepanov’s drug trafficking operations. This particular operation was one he had managed to keep hidden from his new FBI partners.

He stood with Aulov, hands in pockets, and looked at hundreds of pallets of hides stacked five feet high and arranged in long rows forming narrow aisles a hundred yards long.

“So the cavities were larger this time,” he said.

“Oh, yes, two thirds of a meter deep, nearly two meters long, and well over a meter wide.” Aulov grinned. “Almost like a coffin.” Aulov could be described by two words that rhymed in English: crude and shrewd. “These were loaded in Maracaibo, Venezuela. I was there myself when it was loaded on. They removed about a dozen hides, cut out the center of the stack in those dimensions, and laid in the plastic bags of cocaine. They are using thicker plastic bags, too. We kept having punctures. We fill the void to the top, make it good and solid, replace the dozen hides, and fasten the lot to the pallet with metal bands, like lumber. It makes a tight package.”

“And still no problem with the dogs?”

“Shit.” Aulov laughed. “They don’t even bother anymore. A dog’s nose is ruined before he finishes half a row. This is one of the safest means of shipping we have ever used.”

“That’s 1.36 cubic meters of cocaine,” Stepanov said, quickly calculating the street value and savoring the results.

“Per pallet,” Aulov said. “There are over two hundred pallets here, and twenty-five of them, scattered throughout the warehouse, are carrying cocaine.”

“And how much cash are you able to put into the holes after you remove the cocaine here?”

“Well, we are disappointed in this. Oddly enough, the portion of hides we remove to make the hole weighs almost as much as the cocaine we put in. This causes only a slight variation in the customs weighing. They allow a fifteen percent variation per pallet, because of the varying weights of the hides. So we have a little wiggling room there. But cash is heavier, meter for meter. We can only get three million per pallet. So … only seventy-five million here now, headed for Europoort, the Netherlands.”

“How long has it been here?”

“The hides arrived two weeks ago. We can unpack the cocaine and repack with cash at the rate of just two pallets a night, so we only finished two nights ago.”

“When does it sail?”

“In three days. The day after tomorrow they will load the pallets on that ship sitting right out there. It’s a French freighter.”.

Hearing voices near the front doors of the warehouse,
they turned and walked back a few aisles to meet Izvarin and Volkov, who were arriving with their separate escorts.

“Good God.” Izvarin gasped, standing in the wide opening of the wharfside doorway and covering his nose with his hand. His dapper clothes made him look like a pale flower against the drab hull of the freighter behind him.

Volkov walked up behind him. “Jesus.” He frowned.

Izvarin turned. “This is your brilliant idea, Valery. I’ll wait out here.”

“I want to see how it’s done,” Volkov said. “I’m the one who’s got to move it at the other end. And you’re bloody well going to see it too.”

Stepanov turned to Aulov. “We want to see inside one.”

Aulov nodded at one of the escorts who had come with Volkov. He was carrying a pair of long-handled band cutters and was slipping on work gloves.

“Let’s go to a pallet at the back, away from the doorway,” Aulov said.

In single file they followed the man with the band cutters down a series of cross aisles to the farthest part of the warehouse. They slowed as the man checked the pallet numbers and then stopped.

“This one,” he said, looking at Stepanov.

“Okay.”

The man wedged the jaws of the snippers under the first flat metal band and pressed the handles closed, snapping the tight metal band with a sharp ping. He walked around the pallet and snapped the second band, and then, together with another of Aulov’s men, who was also wearing work gloves, he grabbed the first several hides, pulled them off the pallet, and laid them on top of an adjacent pallet. The stench suddenly intensified as the long-stored raw flesh was exposed, ropy strings of exudate running from the lifted hides.

Izvarin gasped, coughed, and almost gagged.

They grabbed another handful of hides and pulled them, sliding them off to expose a rectilinear cavity cut into the center, of the pallet of hides.

Stepanov and Volkov moved forward and peered into the cavity.

“What the hell is this?” Stepanov said, straightening up and turning. “It’s empty.”

There were two quick spits from Volkov’s silenced Smith
& Wesson, fired pointblank. They struck Stepanov in the bridge of the nose and blew out the back of his head. Izvarin didn’t even have time to take his hand down from his nose before Aulov’s two shots blasted into his right ear, removing the left side of his skull.