Requiem For a Glass Heart (7 page)

Cate raised her eyebrows.

“You thought this was FCI.” Hain nodded. “Well, it is and it isn’t. I’m from FCI, Washington office. Ann’s with the Bureau’s New York field office, organized crime. She’s worked closely with NYPD’s organized crime/Russian squad.”

He paused. “Would you like something to drink? We’ve got soft drinks in the kitchen in there, iced tea—”

“No, I’m fine,” Gate said.

“You come highly recommended.”

“I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m not sure I understand why.”

“Did Ennis tell you that he and I are old friends?” Hain asked, ignoring her last remark.

“He mentioned it.”

“Yeah, from college.”

Cate studied him during this little exchange. He had a square face with blue eyes and full cheeks. He was good-looking, but not in a handsome, rugged way. Rather, he was a
clean-cut, ail-American kid who somehow hadn’t entirely lost that self-assured collegiate look on his way to fifty.

“What we have in common here,” he said, motioning to Jaeger and Ometov and himself, “is an interest in a Russian
mafiya
figure named Sergei Krupatin. This man has been a big player in Russia for nearly two decades, for nearly a decade in Germany. Obviously, his influence in the world of international crime is enormous, or we wouldn’t be here. We’ve received some intelligence that we think provides us with an unusual opportunity to get a closer look at the way Krupatin operates. This task force was assembled to take advantage of that opportunity. And with your help, that’s what we intend to do.”

S
ERGEI
K
RUPATIN WAS A HANDSOME MAN IN HIS EARLY FORTIES.
He had thick hair which was prematurely gray and which he wore full and carefully barbered. He had a neatly trimmed mustache which, like his eyebrows, was much darker than his gray hair and showed the brindled color his hair had been before it had turned. He was a sad-eyed man, his eyes sloping gently at the outside, which gave him a poignant, soulful appearance. His nose was strong and straight, his face oval.

Delicate cups of English china sat between them on the table. They drank rich, strong tea, to which Krupatin was addicted. For the fourth time he put a sugar cube in his mouth and sipped the dark cream-cut tea, sucking it through the dissolving cube.

Also on the table beside Krupatin, who sat in precisely the same chair as the German forger had used the day before, were two thick notebooks. Sometimes he would reach over and idly line up the corners of the notebooks as he spoke. He was a very tidy man, even unconsciously.

“And finally, I made the deposit in the Crédit Suisse in Bern this morning.”

She nodded. “And?”

Krupatin smiled sweetly in a deferential manner, opening
and closing his sad eyes. “And another in the Banca Svizzera Italiana in Zurich.”

“In her name?”

“Of course. Yes, yes.”

Irina said nothing but put out a hand, palm up, on the table. Krupatin smirked, reached into the breast pocket of his suit, and produced two wire receipts, which he put into her hand. She read them. Later, when he was gone, she would call and verify the receipts.

This was a stupid game of Krupatin’s. He always made her ask for the money, toyed with her. She never really understood why he did that, what he got out of it, but she never asked.

She picked up her own cup of tea, which she drank without cream or sugar.

Krupatin was dressed in a custom-made English suit of dark summer worsted wool, double-breasted, chalk stripe. Being a vain and intelligent: man, he did not want to look like the dull-witted Russian mafiosi who had become known for their brutality, for their use of violence when guile would have served as well, if not better. He wanted to be thought of as shrewd, so he tried to look shrewd and paid close attention to his dress, which was meticulously and classically stylish. But the truth was, he really did understand violence better than anything else. It had got him where he was, and it was taking him where he was going.

“Now, to the next thing,” he said, washing down the last bit of the sugar cube with more tea. “I want you to read these files.” He rested a well-tailored forearm on the two thick binders, his hand hanging limply at the wrist. “These are the files on the next two targets. These you will have to know intimately before we can move to the next step. This time, Irina, we are not dealing with our lamebrain comrades.”

He raised his dark eyebrows and widened his eyes at her, the visual equivalent of a trumpet fanfare. He did not smile, but he wanted to.

There was no logical reason, no actual knowledge that caused her to experience the emotion she felt at that moment. It came unexpectedly and inexplicably, a disturbing and at first subtle anxiety.

Krupatin looked at his china cup and pushed the handle back and forth a bit. This was his townhouse, furnished impeccably
with British antiques, a foreigner’s idea of what an English gentleman’s city home should be. There was a small garden in the rear with paths of bricks in a herringbone pattern and rosebushes, all carefully tended by an old couple whom Krupatin retained on salary. Like all men whose criminal enterprises have yielded them fortunes, he was preoccupied with putting a great deal of distance between himself and the negative images of his past, hoping to push them all the way into oblivion.

“Just read the files,” he said. “We have some time.”

“How much?”

“A few days, a week. Something like that.” He looked at her dowdy summer dress. “And please, buy some damn clothes.”

“What kind?”

“Get some things for the next few days here, something nice. As for the trip … I’m not sure yet.”

She sat with her legs crossed at the knee under the table, her thick, buttery hair pulled back and fastened with a clasp at the nape of her neck. These meetings, when she received the information about her targets, were never witnessed by anyone. From the beginning it had been that way, and she knew it would remain that way. There were often files, but never anything like this. Usually he briefed her himself.

“Why don’t you tell me about these men yourself, like always?”

“Because I spent a fortune to get these damn things,” he said, patting the binders. “Information like this on men like these is like platinum. We’ll talk, ‘like always,’ but first I want you to read every damn word of this. The fact is, Irina,” Krupatin said, softening his voice, a self-satisfied look settling over his handsome face, “this … situation has been in the planning for many months already. We are now entering the final stages. Many people have been carefully constructing this building for a long time, stopping to measure every individual brick to see that it is perfect, checking the consistency of the mortar to make sure it is strong and will not crumble”-—he held up a flattened hand, turned it edgewise to her, fingers pointed up, and canted it slightly this way and that— “checking the plumb line every few moments to make sure we do not make a mistake, not even by a millimeter.” He carefully lowered his hand and let it rest on the table again. “With
these people, a miscalculation even by a few hairs would be fatal.”

“‘Men like these,’” she said. “And we have to take special care.”

He nodded.

“Because they are important men.” He nodded.

“And you believe this is necessary.”

“It is imperative.”

It sounded to her like Krupatin was getting ready to make big trouble for himself and maybe for many others as well. The vague anxiety she had experienced a few minutes earlier now became a distinct, well-defined fear. It suddenly seemed that all the risks she had escaped during the last four years were gathering together and turning on her, forming a phalanx of old debts wanting their due at last.

“Listen, Sergei,” she said, slowly dropping her eyes, wrinkling her brow as she began to shake her head. “This doesn’t sound like something that I would be good for. If it is this delicate, I don’t think I am up to it, to the tension. The truth is, you’ve used me too much already. I should tell you … I don’t … the last few times … Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.” She swallowed. She should tell him; she should let him see her state of mind. “Sergei … I don’t believe …”

Krupatin shook his own head slowly, looking at her with a serious expression that said he would not listen to this.

“Irina, the fact is you are
perfect
for this.
The
perfect one. You have the best English. You have your fancy university degrees—and in
art
, for God’s sake! You will see how perfect this is when you read the files.” He sat back in his chair and stretched out his arms, opening his hands to her. “And you’re beautiful!”

There was silence.

“Sergei …”

“What are you talking about, dammit!” he blurted fiercely, slapping the Regency table so hard his spoon leapt off the saucer and hit her hand. His face was tumid with anger.

It was futile for her to say anything else. She stared at her teacup, her finger lightly touching the thin gold rim, the intricate cobalt pattern.

Krupatin was silent. The house was silent, and then a
wall creaked, the way a house will do when one is alone, and Irina clung to that sound as though it were an actual piece of wood, a plank of drifting wreckage to keep her afloat in the deep, ominous sea of her disconsolation.

“Irina, what are you talking about?” The tension had vanished from his voice, which now conveyed only a cajoling irritation.

“Nothing,” she said. They both knew she would not bring it up again, and she would not talk about it even if begged to do so.

“You’re tired,” he said, his voice lilting to sympathetic tones, “and you should be. Of course. I should have waited a few days to bring these to you. But I was so eager—I just didn’t think. Look, why don’t you just sleep tomorrow, then, in another day or so, look at the files. I’m asking too much of you. I’m sorry.”

He reached across the table and took her hand from the teacup and gently held it in his own.

God, how she hated his condescension, his door-to-door salesmanship that was so insultingly transparent. She didn’t know whether he was mocking her or he really believed that this pots-and-pans psychology was effective.

She had known Krupatin a long time, had seen him emerge from the human debris of the Russian criminal world by sheer will and unrelenting cunning, and she had benefited from and suffered with him as his fortunes rose and he had dragged her along by his cruelty. He could buy all the expensive suits that the British tailors could make, he could become more handsome than a film star and accumulate even more wealth to separate him further from his former poverty, but she always would see Satan in those sad eyes. And always she would fear that he would carry out the only threat he had ever made against her, which had served to bind her more closely to him than the acts of sexual intercourse of the past, and which reached further into her being than she ever could have imagined, even into her own death and beyond.

She thought of this now as he looked at her, and she thought she could see a glimmering of his old desires. She had learned that they were complicated desires, fueled by ambition and power and the erotic aura of what she had come to represent to him. She was afraid that in his mind she had
come full circle: the Red Angel of Desire and the Black Angel of Death were beating their great wings in the back of Krupatin’s soul. There they were engaged in a tumultuous struggle, like two celestial cocks who in the frenzy of their carnage had become indistinguishable.

“A
LMOST TWO WEEKS AGO
,” H
AIN BEGAN, SPEAKING DIRECTLY
to Cate, “I got a teletype lead in my office in Washington from legat Moscow. He had received pretty good source information that Krupatin’s going to be making a trip to the U.S. and that he’s probably headed here, to Houston. Now, this isn’t the first time he’s been to the States. There’s a sizable Russian émigré community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Russian organized crime is well established there. Krupatin’s been to Brighton Beach three times in the last two years—that we know about. We think he’s also been in under false documents on a number of occasions.”

“The Russian
mafiya
gangs operating there now are not actually organized,” Loder picked up. She was sitting with her purse in her lap as she brushed her hair, pulling it back in a ponytail. “They’re a bunch of bad guys, street-wise, smart, and getting smarter. Even though the
mafiya’s
been around in one form or another since the beginning of communism, it’s never been organized in the sense we’re used to thinking of. In fact, it’s been notoriously disorganized—and fractious. That’s why Krupatin’s appearance on the scene is a big deal. He’s the type of operator we’re going to be seeing more of, the future face of Russian crime. And the future face of international crime. Even though his games are the traditional stuff—fraud,
including gasoline taxes, Medicare payments, counterfeit credit cards; narcotics; counterfeiting; extortion—the difference is that Krupatin
is
organized. A lot of his people are educated. They’re making alliances with certain Sicilian groups and with some of the Asians, just like they did a few years ago in Europe. The important thing is, these different ethnic groups are not warring. They’re cooperating.”

She paused, took a rubber band out of her lap, and wrapped it a couple of times around a handful of jet hair.

“And they kill at the drop of a hat,” she went on, leaning over and crossing her arms on her knees. “On each of his three visits to Brighton Beach, Krupatin held a number of meetings with men who had been running the most lucrative rackets there. Krupatin left and within a few weeks these guys turned up dead. New faces took over, things started being done a little differently. All the operations are slicker now, and we’ve found it more difficult to tell what’s going on. In each situation we think the organization is branching out. The details are in the files there,” she concluded, nodding at the paper-cluttered card table.

“The Russians’ willingness to use violence is pretty damn impressive,” Hain continued. “The Italians and the Asians go through periods of violence when they fight over turf, but they also know the value of keeping peace when it’s to their advantage. Russians see violence as
being
the advantage. We know that they’ve assembled hit teams of ex-KGB agents they’ve hired out to the Sicilians in Europe. Contract killing is a staple service wherever the Russian
mafiya
establishes itself, or wants to establish itself. Probably our best file on these people has come out of Germany, where these hit teams have been operating for a long time.”

Hain lowered his head toward the BKA agent sitting across from him.

“Erika, give us a quick picture of the situation in Germany.”

Jaeger nodded and sat forward on her chair. Though she seemed to be wound up tight, her face showed the strain of jet lag.

“Well, of course, you must know that after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we were overrun with East Europeans,” she said. Her accent was heavy, but she had no trouble expressing herself in English. “Everybody-—Romanians, Czechs, Bulgarians,
Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Poles—they all came. We were overwhelmed; it became a nightmare. Already we had a large Russian émigré population that had drifted into Germany over the years. Criminals quickly established protection rackets among their own people. When the new, younger criminals arrived after the wall came down, they moved in on the older gangs, selling their own protection to the émigrés, ‘protecting’ them from the people they were already paying protection money to in the first place.

“Car thefts exploded.” Jaeger shook her head. “You can drive to Moscow in twenty hours from Berlin. That first year, twenty-four thousand Audis, Mercedes Benzes, and BMWs made the trip out of Germany, going north. Within a few years the car thefts were up to a hundred and thirty thousand annually. It was absurd.”

Jaeger leaned her forearms on her knees, her feet apart on the floor—a distinctly masculine posture—and clasped her hands. She did not try to hide the fact that the situation she described agitated her. She took it personally.

“In Germany we have had the Sicilians since the 1960s, with the yakuza and the Colombians following close behind. But they established themselves gradually, a little here, a little there, and before we knew it we were infected with another parasite. But not the Russians. No. These people unleashed a blitzkrieg. Within
three years
they illegally transferred into German banks and businesses more than $7 billion that they had pillaged from their disintegrating homeland. And in that same period of time they became directly involved in one third of the organized crime in our country. There are many Russian gangs, and like here, they are not organized, they do not always cooperate. Very quickly there were … what, ground wars?”

“Turf wars,” Loder said.

“Yes, these turf wars between the Georgians and the Chechens. Very bloody. Suddenly we had dead Russians turning up everywhere, not just in Germany but all over Europe. By 1993 Krupatin and his Chechens had become the leading crime group, and they had allied with the Cali cartel and with Israeli traffickers. Through these connections, tons of cocaine poured into Europe. Krupatin had import-export companies headquartered in Berlin, with daughter companies in Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, South Korea, New York,
Los Angeles. What traveled between these companies were diamonds and cocaine and heroin, cash of every kind of currency to clean—to launder—stolen antiques, radioactive materials, chemicals for processing drugs, stolen arms. A blizzard of forged documents supported these companies and moved goods all around the world.

“In short,” Jaeger concluded, sitting up straight again and offering her open hands in a gesture of frustration, “we woke up one morning and discovered we were at war once again, this time with criminals. In the world of organized crime, Krupatin’s operation stands out. His financial empire is awesome. He is now involved with legitimate business, and his illegal systems are so complex and powerful that it scares us.” She paused and looked around. “When the Americans came to us with ideas of cooperation against the Russian
mafiya
, we were ready to talk.”

Hain didn’t even allow a pause.

“Okay, good,” he said. “Now, a few days after this first teletype from legat Moscow, we got another one: Krupatin had left St. Petersburg. A few days after that we got a teletype from legat London: Scotland Yard’s computers flagged Krupatin coming through Gatwick. We were looking for that. The guy loves London, but for him it’s neutral territory. Aside from Berlin”—he glanced at Jaeger—“it’s his most frequently visited city outside Russia. A lot of his money is there, and he uses it as a home away from home. Only thing is, Scotland Yard never knows where the hell he is. They suspect he owns as many as half a dozen houses in the city—all deeds in somebody else’s name—that he and his people use when they’re in London.”

Hain shifted in his chair; his big frame seemed to require periodic adjustments in position. Cate guessed he had been an athlete in college and it was about time for his muscles and bones to begin paying him back for former abuses.

“Two days ago,” Hain said, holding his thigh just above the knee as he extended and bent his leg to work the stiff joint, “a Russian male showed up at a travel agency on Cromwell Road in London and bought two British Airways first-class tickets to Houston in the names of Nikolai Yelyutin and Vasily Matveyenko. Probably false names, forged passports. The departure date is tomorrow morning, nine fifty-five London time. That’ll put them into Houston at two-thirty tomorrow
afternoon. In addition, these two guys applied for business visas. London legat sent us their passport photos, but we don’t recognize them from any of Krupatin’s known associates. So we don’t know exactly who they are or what their specialties are within Krupatin’s organization.”

“We know your OC people have opened preliminary inquiry files on three Russian groups here within the past year,” Loder said, nodding at Cate. “But these guys, they’re insignificant. It doesn’t seem logical that Krupatin would be coming here to bother with them—unless they represent something we don’t know anything about yet. But we’re not convinced of that. We think he’s up to something else.”

“So here we are,” Hain said. “We don’t know what the hell for, but we’re here because he’s here—or will be. He may be on an extended visit, or he may touch down for a few days and
poom
, he’s gone. Whatever he does, the five of us”—he swung his arm around the room at the others—“are gonna be his closest friends as long as he’s here.”

“And what about surveillance?” Cate asked.

“Your people. I’ll be working on that with Ennis. Everyone’s scrambling to get all that straight now.”

“What about wires? Isn’t this kind of short notice?”

“Covered. FCI guidelines apply here. We can put up a wire on anything the guy thinks about while he’s in the States.”

Hain paused, furrowed his brow, and leaned forward in his chair. He seemed to want to choose his words carefully.

“We know you haven’t had this kind of undercover experience,” he said. “But we know you’re no stranger to the stresses of the job.” He studied his big loafers.

“If Krupatin should decide to stay here for a while,” he said, “we want to become a part of his scenery.” He looked up. “I want to be able to get closer to him than just sitting in a car with a camera or in a tech van listening to them ordering takeout food. We know from the Germans’ experience that Krupatin has first-rate counterintelligence of his own, but we also know he doesn’t always bring that with him when he comes here. He did once. The other two times he didn’t. So we may have an edge on him. Surveillance against him will be expensive and hard to sustain over the long haul. So if he does settle in, we want people who can become part of his environment.”

Hain tilted his head in the general direction of the others without taking his eyes off Cate.

“You, Ann, and Erika are going to be a part of Krupatin’s background,” he said. “But we don’t know exactly how yet. We’ll have to work that out as soon as we see what kind of situation we’re going to have.”

There was a pause. Ometov hadn’t said a word, and it appeared that he wasn’t going to—yet. This breathing space, it seemed, was for her benefit. How was she feeling about this? She wasn’t sure, but she did have one question, which had lodged at the back of her mind the moment she walked into the barren living room.

“Three women,” Cate observed. “That’s no coincidence.”

“That’s right,” Hain said. “My preference. The fact is, for these kinds of guys this is still a man’s world. That goes for whatever ethnic group you’re dealing with—Italians, Asians, Russians, whatever. Criminal organizations are not a hotbed of equal opportunity employment. It’s man’s work. Men do all the important doing and women have their place, usually flat on their backs or in other interesting positions. Otherwise they’re pretty much disregarded. Clerks, maids, cashiers, waitresses, housewives, secretaries—as long as they’re not so good-looking as to attract attention, they’re invisible.”

“Curtis’s dream team is five postmenopausal women with gray hair, bifocals, no makeup, no tits, and lots of undercover experience,” Loder explained, laughing.

“Damn right,” Hain said. “I’d love that. Those guys wouldn’t have any secrets. Anyway, when Krupatin’s men are scanning for surveillance, they’re going to be looking for other men. They know all about camouflage surveillance, men posing as telephone repairmen or plumbers or maintenance workers, service station attendants, delivery people, all that kind of thing. The only time they’ll be especially leery of women is when it comes down to sex. The honey trap. They do a pretty good job of using it themselves.”

Cate felt her face burn. If Hain knew about the circumstances of Tavio’s death, or of the events of the previous evening, he certainly wasn’t showing it.

“If the opportunity even remotely presents itself,” he said, “we’re going to put you three right under Krupatin’s nose.”