The Icon Thief (12 page)

“Not exactly,” the student said, blinking rapidly at the sudden attention. “It’s a form of Syriac spoken by the Assyrian diaspora. There are fewer than two hundred thousand speakers worldwide. The recording I was given is a conversation between two men. One of them asks if a package is ready. The other says it will be finished in time for the party—”

“For the party.” Barlow did not speak again for a few seconds. When he did, his tone was decisive. “Listen up. You’re about to get the world’s fastest background check. Then you’re coming to work for us. Congratulations.”

Before the student could reply, he was hustled out of the office by the agent from the wire room. As they settled in to wait, Powell and Wolfe returned to their desks, where he explained how he had made the connection. “Does the name Vyacheslav Ivankov mean anything to you?”

“Sure, I’ve heard of him,” Wolfe said. They were seated in her cubicle, nursing cups of cocoa, the only hot
beverage that she would allow herself to drink. “They called him Yaponchik, right? The Bureau got him back in the nineties. He was deported a few years ago—”

“But before that, he spent some time in Lewisburg. While he was in jail, he continued to run criminal operations in his old neighborhood, speaking in dialects that the guards couldn’t understand. I read his file. According to the report, one of the languages he used was Assyrian.”

Wolfe looked at Powell as if he were an interesting freak of nature. “How did you remember that?”

“It’s a gift, I suppose.” Powell tried for an offhand tone, but he was glad to have made the connection. For much of the past year, he had been watching his thought processes with more than usual attentiveness, wary of the forgotten facts or misremembered names that might signal a mental decline. So far, he had noticed no loss of acuity, but each moment of insight was still a cause for relief.

“Well, I’m impressed,” Wolfe said, draining her cocoa. “But it doesn’t mean that Barlow will let you on the wire.”

“It doesn’t matter what he does. From now on, I’ve got a source in the wire room.”

Powell grinned at her over the rim of his mug. Wolfe only stared at him. A hour later, after the student had finished a provisional translation, the agents filed into the office and listened to what he had found:

“There are four men on these calls,” the student said. “One is called by two names, which confused me at first. When he’s on the phone, he’s called Ilya. But in his absence, the others refer to him as the Scythian.”

This nickname got Powell’s attention. In Russian literature, the Scythian was an archetypal wanderer, caught halfway between civilization and savagery. “But what are they actually talking about?”

The student checked his notes. “The calls fall into a few different categories. In some, which go primarily to Misha, Sharkovsky wants to discuss a shipment from Leninakan, although I’m not quite sure what that means. In another call, Sharkovsky asks Zhenya about their weekend plans, which have something to do with a house by the sea. Later, they talk about a man they’re supposed to meet there. They call him a mutual friend. At one point, Zhenya lets a name slip, but Sharkovsky shuts him up right away. The name is Archvadze.”

Something clicked in Powell’s head, as sweetly as the last pin of a combination lock. As soon as the student had been dismissed with the promise of more work to come, Powell absently began to clean his glasses. “I know who he is. Anzor Archvadze. An oligarch with a place in the Hamptons.”

Kandinsky wrote the name down. “You think he’s working with these guys? They called him a friend—”

“It could be a code,” Wolfe said. “Maybe they’re planning a robbery. Or extortion.”

Barlow leaned back in his chair, his neatly combed head brushing a child’s drawing behind his desk, where an oily spot was already visible. “If that’s all they’re doing, forget it. I’m not going to shut these guys down over a fucking extortion case. What about this party?”

Powell felt the pieces fall into place. He put on his glasses, then looked at the others. “A party this weekend. At a house by the sea—”

O
n the day of his arrival, Ilya had been given the keys to a row house in Brighton Beach. A green pickup was parked by the rear garage, out of sight of the street. Its bed was long and capacious, big enough to carry cordwood or scrap metal, and its hood was the size of a double bed. Unlike most of Sharkovsky’s trophy trucks, it looked street legal, although it was decidedly not.

Kneeling by the truck, Ilya used several strips of masking tape to secure a stencil to the driver’s side door. The revolver holstered inside his waistband made it awkward to bend down, but he did not remove it. Around the stencil, he taped sheets of newspaper to protect the paint. Then he went around to the passenger side and affixed a second stencil, identical to the first.

An air compressor rested on the ground nearby, next to a spray gun. Ilya switched on the compressor, then inserted a rubber hose into a matching socket in the gun’s base. A quick hiss of air escaped from the nozzle in the split second before he secured it. Once the hose was in place, he tied a respirator mask around his nose and mouth and got to work.

When he was done, he stowed the equipment in the
garage, then went into the basement. The workbench in the corner was covered with odds and ends. Two sheets of vinyl wallpaper were unrolled in the center. He set the wallpaper aside, placing the sheets on a pile of other materials, which included a photograph of an alarm system, its serial number clearly visible.

A computer’s optical drive sat nearby, still in its original packaging. Ilya sliced open the box and withdrew the disc burner, which was a rectangular object the size of a trade paperback. Removing the screws, he took the case apart, lifting off the cover like the lid to a casket of secrets.

Inside the case lay a plastic drawer with a circular depression in which a disc could be placed. He removed the drawer, exposing the carriage assembly, a dense mosaic of gears and transistors. At the center of the assembly, like a blue jewel, was the diode used to inscribe data on the surface of the disc.

He took out the laser assembly, sliding it off the metal rails on which it was threaded. With a smaller screwdriver, he removed the fine screws in the assembly to get at the laser diode at its heart. When he was done, the diode lay in the palm of his hand, no larger than the nail of his little finger.

Ilya set the diode aside, mindful of how fragile it was. From another package, he took a laser housing, a silver cylinder the size of a lipstick tube. Taking it apart, he tapped out the existing diode with a ballpoint pen, then installed the diode from the optical drive into the housing, soldering two pins onto the terminals.

The final step was the easiest one. The day before, he had dismantled an aluminum penlight, removing the
ring, the reflector, and the bulb. He had also drilled out the reflector so that the laser housing would fit comfortably inside. Now he inserted the housing into the reflector, put all of the pieces back together again, and loaded the batteries into the flashlight.

When he was finished, he checked the assembled device, then switched it on, careful to point it away from his face. A red dot appeared on the far wall, a tight amoeba of light no larger than a pencil eraser. He held the beam in place for a few seconds, then turned it off. The dot disappeared.

Ilya rose from his chair and approached the spot where he had aimed the laser. Where the dot had been, there was a tiny scorched circle, no more than a few millimeters across, where the laser had burned through the paint.

Satisfied by the sight, he cleared the materials from the worktable, tossing the rest of the optical drive into the wastebasket. The flashlight went into his pocket, where it made a reassuring bulge as he went upstairs.

He was a few steps away from the closed basement door when he heard the creak of a floorboard overhead. Instantly, he flattened himself against the stairwell and drew his gun. Someone was moving from the kitchen into the living room. As he listened, another series of creaks came from above.

Ilya reached out with his left hand. Moving very deliberately, he turned the knob. The latch clicked softly as it slid out of the strike plate, so that the door was held shut only by the tension of the jamb.

He counted to three, pulse rising, then kicked the door open. It flew backward and hit the wall as he moved into the kitchen in a combat stance, the gun pointed toward the next room.

A man was there, his back turned, examining something on the table by the foyer. At the sound of the door striking the kitchen wall, he spun around, then broke into a sheepish smile. It was Zhenya.

Ilya, disgusted, slid the revolver back into its holster. As his pulse returned to its normal rate, he noticed two things. The first was that Zhenya had cut his hair, his ponytail replaced by a neat professional cut identical to Ilya’s own. The other realization was that the younger man had been toying with the camera on the hall table. He entered the living room. “What have you been doing?”

“Since we’re going through all this fucking trouble, I wanted to practice.” Zhenya grinned harmlessly. “I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t just shoot the
suka
. It would be easier—”

Ilya slid the camera back into its shoulder bag. “We aren’t here to do things the easy way. We’re here to send a message.”

Even as he spoke, he knew that there was no way that Zhenya could appreciate the elegance of what they had in mind. For a second, he found himself thinking of the man from Yekaterinburg, a scientist whose hair had been bleached blond, in patches, by the peroxide sprayed from the ceiling of his lab. Years of research had destroyed his immune system, leaving him prone to colds, and he claimed to have lost his sense of smell entirely.

At the exchange, the scientist had not remembered him, but Ilya had known his face. At Vladimir, there had been a research ward, a row of cells facing a long hallway. In each door, a peephole of thick glass had been installed. The holes, no larger than a letterbox, had allowed men in
the corridor to look into the cells, which were bare except for a mattress and toilet. The toilets had not been connected to the central plumbing system, allowing the waste to accumulate.

In their hotel room, the scientist had given Ilya a toiletries case. Opening it, Ilya had seen two small containers in separate plastic bags. “As promised,” the scientist had said, applying lotion to his skin. “And the money?”

Ilya had handed over the bag. Opening it, the scientist had riffled through a bundle of currency with his raw fingers. Just as he had time to see that only the first few bills were real, Ilya had been behind him with the knife.

On that night, if only for a moment, he had felt like one of the righteous men. For most of his life, a war had raged between the tzaddik and the Scythian, and only rarely did the two halves fall into line. Tomorrow, he hoped, it would happen again. “We’ll practice later,” Ilya said now. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” Zhenya said. “I have a present for you. We want to be sure of something.”

They went outside, where a station wagon was parked at the curb. In the cargo area, inside a carrier, a mongrel puppy was sleeping. It was an ugly dog with chewed ears, its fur patchy and coarse. When Zhenya lifted the rear door, it raised its head and began to whine.

As he considered the dog, Ilya felt a flicker of pity, which he was careful to put out at once. Thinking again of the tzaddikim, he reminded himself that a just man was sometimes required to do unjust things.

“All right,” Ilya said, regarding the dog with deliberate coldness. “Let’s bring him inside—”

W
hen Maddy emerged from the train at Southampton, she was one of the only passengers to disembark. She had traveled for more than three hours, passing towns with names like Massapequa, Babylon, and Hampton Bays, in order to reach this ramshackle station, where a girl in a sundress and with an orange chemical tan was waiting for her in the parking lot. Opening the door of the hybrid, Maddy slid inside. “Thanks for picking me up. I haven’t seen you in so long—”

“I know,” the girl said, backing uncertainly out of her parking space. She had been one of Maddy’s classmates at art school, and currently worked for a firm that specialized in creating Pop Art canvases from photos of grandchildren and beloved pets. “I want to hear all about this new job of yours.”

“What about the share?” Maddy asked. “Did everything work out like we wanted?”

“It’s all set.” The girl pulled noiselessly into the street. “To be honest, I’m glad you’re here. This isn’t as fun as it used to be—”

Maddy saw what she meant as soon as they arrived at the share house, an imitation saltbox girded by a low
hedge. Ten cars were parked in the driveway, which was asking for trouble. If the police caught wind of the share, which was unambiguously illegal, they wouldn’t hesitate to shut it down.

Around back, a dozen shapely bodies were lounging by the pool. The house manager was drinking a beer nearby. With his sheriff’s sunglasses, he might have been a suburban weed dealer, although his actual profession was far more lucrative. He shook hands with Maddy, his palm cooled by the beer can. “Glad you could make it. Let me show you around.”

Maddy followed him through the sliding glass door, sidestepping a pile of empty bottles. “How many people are here?”

“It’s been a pretty good weekend,” the manager said. “Maybe forty or so. Last week we had more than sixty—”

Inside the house, backpacks and jackets were heaped in the corners, and every surface was covered with cans and cigarette butts. They went upstairs to one of the bedrooms, in which five beds were wedged side by side. A male guest was passed out, snoring. The air smelled faintly of amyl nitrate.

“You’re lucky,” the manager said. “You’ve got a space of your own.” Stepping over a mound of dirty laundry, he slid open the closet door. “Plenty of privacy. You even have your own light.”

Maddy peered inside. An inflatable mattress was rolled up in one corner. “Perfect.”