Operator - 01 (27 page)

I’m already moving, and the shot misses me. In a fluid motion, I draw the Sig-Sauer from a holster on my hip I’ve rigged underneath the raincoat and put six rounds high into a wall-to-ceiling window on a finished floor just above the sniper. The glass shatters and I hear screams as I bend down over Drubich. I know without looking that everyone in this section of the park, even those who’ve seen the Orthodox man and Drubich get shot, are now looking up at the hotel, more or less at the spot the sniper is firing from. I’m hoping that this attention will force the sniper to move, if he doesn’t want his muzzle flash to be witnessed by a hundred onlookers. It may give me a few precious seconds with Drubich. It’s a long shot, but I have to take the chance.

Constantine Drubich is in shock, and he’s losing blood quickly. I grab him by the collar of his beautiful overcoat and bring my face to within a few inches of his. Speaking Russian, I say, “You’ve been sold out. Your own people are murdering you. This is your only chance to get even. Tell me the name of the redheaded American.”

He looks into my eyes and he smiles for a moment. Then the cloud starts to come back over his eyes and I can see that he’s scared. His mortality is confronting him, but he just shakes his head and smiles. I know that I won’t get anything from him. A mental timer goes off in my head and I jump to the side upright just as a high-velocity round smashes into Constantine’s chest, ending his life instantly. I jump onto the railing, take three steps along it and then leap off of the viaduct, hitting the roof of a city bus emerging from under the bridge on 14
^th
Street, heading toward the West Side Highway. I roll sideways and regain my feet. Then I make a six-foot leap to the roof of a second bus, going the other way into Manhattan. I have to drop down immediately to avoid being knocked over by the trestle. When I’m under the High Line and out of sight of the sniper, I slide off the side of the bus.

“What the fuck just happened?!” I hear in the earpiece. I can’t tell if it’s Holland or Brennan, but I ignore them both. I suddenly have a very bad feeling. I pull out the Blackberry and dial into voicemail. I hear my mother’s voice on the message. It sounds strained.

“Michael, this is your mother. There are some men in the house waiting for you, some foreigners. I told them you’ve gone home to Washington D.C. but they are insisting on waiting and it’s already almost eight now. Virginia is here and Amelia is supposed to stop by as well. I don’t like the look of…” and here her voice cuts out abruptly as the line goes dead. I suddenly realize that I’m sweating.

* * *

A red Toyota 4Runner with tinted windows is parked in the driveway of my mother’s house. The porch lights are on, and pale yellow light leaks from a narrow slit in the door. As I unlatch the gate on the white picket fence and tread along the slate path to the house, I notice details that didn’t catch my eye on Saturday. The shutters are painted blue, a light robin’s egg color that makes the house look a little like a bed and breakfast. Someone has put new stairs up to the porch, but the off-white paint on the wood planks doesn’t quite match the rest of the porch. There is a bike with a triangular saddle, twist gearshifts and old-fashioned candy-colored streamers spouting from the handlebars leaning against a column on the porch, probably Ginny’s. I remember teaching her to ride on a spring afternoon when my father was passed out on the couch after a bender. As I step up to the porch, I see a little hole in the screen that I made as a nine-year-old when I slipped the hook lock with a pen. I got five smacks with a leather belt for that one.

I pull open the screen door and knock.

The door swings open and I’m greeted by the business end of a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver, a very serious piece of iron. The man connected to the gun has shoulder-length dark hair, a scruffy beard and familiar tattoos creeping up his neck. I recognize his face from one of the photos that Dmitriev handed me at lunch. His name is Maxim Petrov and he’s a goon from Kyzyl, a frozen little Russian town about a thousand miles from anywhere. He linked up with the Tambov Gang after spending a decade in Kresty prison on drug charges. Like the rest of the Tambov thugs, he’s in the U.S. on an H1-B visa.

With the gun planted firmly in my cheek, Petrov grabs a handful of jacket and yanks me into the foyer. As he shoves me over the banister to frisk me, I inventory the room. The staircase in my mother’s house divides the living and dining areas on the left side of the house from the family room and kitchen on the right. The left side of the house is open but on the right, doors separate the kitchen from the dining room and the family room from the entry foyer. The door to the family room is open, however, and there’s a man with an MP5 lurking in the doorway. He’s in the shadow but his face and background are familiar to me; Arkady Tchayka is a step up the Tambov food chain from Petrov. This guy is the only one of the remaining mobsters with any military training other than Yuri. Arkady served as a sergeant in the Russian Army and did a tour in Chechnya. He was just regular army, but the guy has seen combat. I can tell by his bearing, even from the millisecond glimpse I get while I’m being spun around. I won’t underestimate him.

As hands probe my pockets, I get a better look at the living room. The blinds are all pulled down tightly and the room itself has been rearranged. The couch has found a new home against the living room window that overlooks the porch, far from the fireplace, and the stuffed chairs are parked up against the wall next to the TV. Two plain wooden chairs have been dragged from the dining room. My mother and Ginny are in the chairs, sitting in the middle of the bare living room, their hands bound behind them with duct tape. My mother eyes me coldly as Petrov slides his hands down my legs. Tellingly, she is gagged, while Ginny is not. There are marks on my mother’s face, including a fading handprint where she has recently been slapped. She has that effect on people.

She must also feel the imprint of the double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun stuck in the small of her neck for my benefit. A giant, an albino with straight long gray hair and cold eyes, handles the shotgun. He’s the real degenerate of the group – his name is Oleg Golovkin. Until three years ago, Oleg was imprisoned in the infamous Ognenny Ostrov, an island prison like Alcatraz on Lake Novozero, 400 miles north of Moscow. Ognenny Ostrov was exclusively reserved for death row inmates until Russia instituted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996. His crime was the rape, torture and murder of a dozen little girls, which makes him notorious even for the Tambov gang. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had any word of his escape before they ran the stack of photos through a database search. He must have come into the country with forged papers.

The fourth man I spot is bald on top, but compensates for the lack of hair on his scalp with muttonchops and a piratical earring. He’s holding an even bigger handgun than the Ruger sticking in my back – a Desert Eagle .50 Magnum automag. That gun can blow a softball-sized hole in you at close range and do something much worse at twenty or thirty yards. It’s absurdly hard to control the recoil, however, so the only shot that really counts is the first. Not that you’d need more than one. His name is Valery Pichushkin and he’s holding that very big handgun to the head of my sister Ginny. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are faintly streaked with mascara.

The main thing I notice in my glance around the living room is who is not there. There’s one person missing from this picture, which changes the entire situation. I don’t see Yuri. He may be lurking in the kitchen, waiting to make a dramatic entrance, but he doesn’t strike me as the type. The wheels in my head start spinning, trying to figure out why he’s not here. Then Petrov stands me up, apparently satisfied that I am weaponless and therefore defenseless.

Arkady attempts to address me in English and I cut him off sharply in Russian. “Speak Russian please, Arkady Sergeivich,” I say. He looks for a second as if I’ve slapped him and I see Pichushkin and Petrov quickly exchange startled glances. This confirms my first suspicion. These guys don’t know my background. Yuri is too much of a professional not to have checked me out after our run-in at the steel mill, so that means he’s kept them in the dark for a reason. That’s assuming he’s behind this little hostage situation, but I am convinced that he is. Arkady blanches a little more as he realizes that not only have I spoken Russian, I’ve addressed him by his name and his patronymic – an archaic form that he’s probably only heard his grandmother use. The men look visibly uncomfortable, even the giant Golovkin. They are wondering what else I know. I need to keep them off-balance. I step away from Petrov, gently pushing the .44 away from my cheek while keeping my eyes on Arkady. I lift my left hand and hold it out straight with my finger extended like an accusation and point to my mother, raising my voice a notch as I do. “That’s my mother sitting there next to my sister. That’s my mother that someone has slapped, gagged and tied to a chair. You have a mother, don’t you Arkady Sergeivich? A sister too, if I’m right. Her name is Natalia and she lives in Komarovo with her husband, and a baby boy, your nephew Anatoly. They live in a little wood house with red shutters, do they not? How would you feel if someone were to treat them with this same lack of respect you’ve shown to my family?” Arkady steps back as if I’ve slapped him. It’s a huge gambit challenging Arkady in this roomful of armed gangsters. Threatening the Slav’s mother and sister is especially dangerous, even while they’re holding my own mother and sister at gunpoint. But my audacity is also what is holding them back. These gangsters have been conditioned to respect power and I’m throwing around information and threats like a serious player. Before they can regroup I press my advantage.

“Where is Yuri?” I ask, shifting my attention to Golovkin, whom I peg as the dimmest bulb in the group. His eyes dart towards the front door, confirming my intuition. I don’t wait for an answer from Arkady. “He’s not here, is he?” I spit on the floor, trying not to make eye contact with my mother as I do. “He ordered you to hold my mother and sister as hostage then left? And I suppose he told you I’d come alone without involving the authorities?” I ask, showing outrage. There’s more shifting around from the three goons, especially Petrov, who grabs me again and sticks the .44 Magnum I’ve brushed aside right into the back of my neck. Then I notice Golovkin frowning at Arkady. These men cannot have failed to notice the roadblocks at either end of Green Farms Hollow or the multiple FBI vehicles with flashing lights manning them. Arkady himself has kept his poker face after his initial reaction and is standing stock-still and staring at me.

“You know that I’m unarmed,” I say, addressing my comments only to Arkady, the leader. “I’m taking an ice pack out of my pocket,” I stick two fingers into my jacket pocket and slowly remove a chemical ice pack. “Let me look at my mother and my sister and then we can talk.” The stunned silence in the room stretches on as I pull my arm free of Petrov and calmly walk over to my mother. With a twist I break the pack and dab it on her cheek. She looks like she wants to spit in my face and I’m actually relieved that the Russians have gagged her. When I‘ve gotten both of her cheeks good and cold, I move on to Ginny.

“Just stay calm and don’t move,” I whisper to Ginny without moving my lips as I rub the pack on her cheeks. Then I straighten up.

“So is this a hostage trade – me for them?” I ask. Seeing Arkady’s expression I try again. “Or perhaps you’re supposed to kill me in front of them?” Still no reaction. “Or is it kill them in front of me?” and here Arkady involuntarily arches an eyebrow.

“Don’t you think the situation has changed? If you fire a gun in here, the FBI will knock down the door and we’ll all be dead in minutes. An American prison is still better than getting planted in an unmarked grave,” I say.

“Let’s kill them all and be done with this,” Petrov growls impatiently. Arkady steps past me and, leaning into Petrov, hisses furiously into his ear. When Arkady steps back in front of me, he’s flushed. I’ve managed to cause a little dissension in the ranks, at least.

“You will have the police withdraw immediately or we will kill your mother,” Arkady pronounces calmly.

“If the FBI pulls back they’ll move just outside of your sight range and you know it. You’re bluffing. Yuri ordered you to kill my mother and sister in front of me and then bring me to him so he could finish the job personally. But Yuri was smart enough to know that I’d never walk into this kind of situation alone, so that means he set you up. He put you in a position where you’ll certainly be killed. Then there will be nobody left to tie him back to everything he’s done in this town. Do you really want to die today? Because if you touch my mother or my sister again, I can guarantee that not one of you will leave this house alive.” I stop talking to catch a breath and let the four Russians think about what I’ve said. I’m having some effect on Arkady because he doesn’t speak.

“On the other hand, if you put down your arms and walk out of this house with me right now, I can promise that you will live and that you’ll be treated fairly. If you deliver Yuri, you might even escape with something less than a life sentence.” In fact I have no idea what the penalties are for the multiple crimes that these men have committed but I suspect they’ll never see daylight if they surrender.

For a second – a moment that stretches to eternity – I see that I have him. Arkady knows the score. Maybe he was already wondering why there hasn’t been any traffic on the street for the last hour, or why the neighboring houses have all gone dark. Possibly he doesn’t completely trust Yuri anyway. Maybe, like me, he’s learned somewhere along the way to recognize the truth when it is spoken to him. But then, just as he seems to decide, just as I think he’s going to tell his men to put down their weapons, Oleg Golovkin, the serial killer, interrupts.

“Don’t listen to him, Arkady! He’s just trying to save his precious little family. You know what we have to do.”

“Oleg,” I turn to address him, keeping my tone even, “I was surprised to learn that you were in the United States. I was under the impression that recreation time at Ognenny Ostrov was limited to the prison yard.”