CHAPTER 18

Karen Armstrong loved going home on the weekends. Cold Spring was a beautiful village right on the Hudson River in Putnam County, New York. She’d adored the summers there, and even the winters, when the wind was howling and the rain sleeting. Being in the house now made her feel comfortable and secure. Especially when she watched her family.

Her mother looked like a slightly older version of herself, long blond hair, blue cornflower eyes, crow’s feet around them, pale skin, lots of freckles across her face and chest. She described herself as an aging hippie who’d actually missed the hippie era of the sixties, although Karen was convinced she’d been conceived at a free outdoor Grateful Dead concert in Golden Gate Park where her mom had first met her dad. That chance sexual encounter had led to twenty-five years of marriage and three kids, Karen being the first, followed by her brother Todd, two years younger, and her sister Kelly, who was fourteen and had been a surprise. Karen’s mother, whom everyone called Mandy, including her children, always wore soft silk blouses and long diaphanous skirts and enough jewellery to make Mr. T in that old A-Team TV series jealous. Her dad looked like that guy who played the leading role in Picket Fences—Karen could never remember his name—lean and tanned with a lot of lines etching his face and a terrific smile.

Karen watched her family playing flag football on the front lawn. Her brother, Todd, was very aggressive and her sister, Kelly, looked like she wanted to roll her eyes and be anywhere else, but then her competitive spirit took over and she tackled her brother to the ground. He jumped up and tried to patiently explain to her there was no tackling in flag football. Her mom and dad just laughed. The family golden retriever, Maggie, was romping around, but somehow she could never quite catch the football. She only managed to trip up the players who shouted at her.

The Gleasons from next door had joined in the game. Karen couldn’t remember a summer when the Gleasons hadn’t played flag football with her family on her front lawn. Ali Gleason was her mom’s best friend and they’d lived next door to the Armstrongs forever. Ali and Tim Gleason had four children, two boys and two girls. The girls were away at American University in D.C., but both boys were older, in their mid-twenties, Jerry and Blake, both of them attorneys in New York City. They were like her older brothers, that’s how close the two families were. They were in the thick of the football game.

Karen looked at Blake now, leaping up to catch the football that her dad had thrown across the lawn—interception!—avoiding being tackled again by Kelly, who either didn’t understand the rules or chose to ignore them. Karen smiled to herself. Good thing these two strapping Gleason youths weren’t her real brothers, as she and Blake had mutually discovered all about sex in an overturned rowboat on the sand on the beach when they were both fourteen. No one ever knew about it. Neither of them had ever told their siblings or their parents. It was their secret. It had happened quite a few more times after that, but once they’d gone to high school, other lustful crushes had happened, and the two of them remained just great friends. How couldn’t they be? They had grown up within a few yards of each other.

Karen looked out at the beautiful Hudson River beyond their mansion. Her father told her they did not have a mansion, it was a nice Colonial four-bedroom on the river, but Karen had seen the square footage of most Manhattan apartments, and to her their Cold Spring home was a mansion.

She knew where her father kept his gun.

Karen walked back inside the house into the kitchen. She picked up her dad’s ring of keys off the counter and moved quickly to her dad’s office. She had left the windows open in the living room so she could hear the football game in progress. She didn’t want to be caught and have to explain. On her dad’s desk was a laptop and overflowing manila files with sketches in them. He was an architect.

She tried a small silver key in the lock of the bottom drawer. It was tricky at first, because it was slightly bent, but then it turned and she slid the drawer open. It was filled with old pens and batteries and crap. In the bottom of the drawer was a Smith & Wesson SD9 VE pistol with a 10 + 1 capacity. There was a box of ammunition beside it. She checked that the gun was unloaded, then set it onto the desk chair along with the box of ammo. She closed the drawer and locked it again. And straightened.

And thought she was going to have a coronary.

Her sister Kelly was standing in the doorway.

She couldn’t see the gun and the box of ammo from where she was standing. The chair was blocked by the desk.

“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.

Younger sisters always demanded.

“I was looking for some Wite-Out. Dad’s only got dried-up tubes he’s kept for God knows why. What’s up?”

“Mandy wants you on our team. We’re getting out butts kicked.”

She rushed out of the doorway. Karen knew her sister. If she had seen the gun, she would have said something. She wouldn’t have let it go to chat about it with Big Sis at a later time. Kelly wore her heart on her sleeve.

Karen picked up the Smith & Wesson gun and the box of ammo and walked quickly out into the ground-floor hallway. The front door was still ajar. No one locked their doors in Cold Spring. Karen could hear the football game continuing with more cries and falling and laughter. She ran back into the kitchen and dropped her father’s ring of keys on the counter exactly where she’d found them. Then she ran up the stairs to her old room on the second floor. She grabbed her backpack from the floor, stuffed the Smith & Wesson SD9 way down in the bottom, with the box of ammo, and zipped it up.

Then she ran downstairs and out the front door into the brilliant sunshine to play flag football.

*   *   *

The Dakota building is on Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. When Kostmayer told the cab to pull up there, Katia thought this must be where McCall lived. A very expensive residence for a bartender. But then, she knew that was not who the true Robert McCall was. Who he really was she didn’t know. But she clutched her daughter’s hand and thanked God for him.

Kostmayer paid the cabbie. Katia looked up at the fabulous high gables of the Dakota, the balconies, balustrades, dormas, and terra-cotta spandrels and panels. It echoed a way of life for the rich and famous she could not even dream about. If there was a doorman, he was not outside at this moment. Katia saw a woman of about fifty, long blond hair in a ponytail, kneel down and set a rose in front of the gated entrance. She was crying.

Kostmayer walked up beside Katia.

“That’s where John Lennon was shot.”

Kostmayer ushered Katia and Natalya into the building. He thought it was a shame the grand Old Lady, with all of its history and splendor, was best known as a murder scene. They walked through the ornate lobby, like a golden tunnel, to the elevators.

“They called it the Dakota,” Kostmayer said, “because in the old days the idea of going to the Upper West Side of New York was like going to the Dakotas.” He could see Katia was not tracking with him. “The Dakotas, North Dakota, South Dakota? Very far away, across the country. Never mind. It was only amusing in 1880.”

They stepped into an elevator and it took them up to the fourth floor. Kostmayer shook out a ring of keys from his coat pocket, put one of them into the door of a corner apartment, and pushed it open. He waited for Katia and Natalya to go in first.

The hallway had a table by the door, an ornate bureau in one corner, and a gorgeous old grandfather clock in another that ticked softly to itself. Katia walked through into the living room and stopped dead.

She gasped.

It was not the forty-foot ceiling, or the big windows that overlooked Central Park with a view to die for that took her breath away. It was the furniture in the big room.

It was hers.

Her couch, her armchairs, her heavy oak table, an heirloom that she had carted all the way from Chechnya fearful it would arrive in pieces. Her paintings were on the walls. A copy of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and a Sergei Tkachev portrait of a young girl with close-cropped brunette hair leaning on a fence rail. She looked like Natalya might have looked at ten years old. There were her bookcase and all of her books. There were fresh flowers in crystal vases everywhere. The furniture looked austere in the big room—there wasn’t much of it.

“Your beds are in the two main bedrooms,” Kostmayer said. “I put your Evgeniy Shibanov Anatoly Razumov, The Fisherman over the bed in the master bedroom. McCall supplied the bureau and table in the hall and the grandfather clock. He’s also put a bed and a bureau and table for clothes in each of the guest rooms. It’s a six-room apartment, moderate by Dakota standards, some have ten rooms, but he didn’t think you’d want that many.”

“I thought he must live here,” Katia said.

Kostmayer smiled. “McCall live at the Dakota? A little flamboyant for his taste. He’s a monk at heart. Everything from your old apartment is here, all of your photographs, mementos, clothes hung up in the closets, lingerie and shirts and sweaters in the bureau drawers. You might want to rearrange them. All of your kitchen stuff is in the kitchen, probably in the wrong places. You’ve also got a seventy-two-inch television over there, hooked up to cable, and a new wraparound sound system, stereo player, DVD player, a second TV in the main bedroom. If anything’s missing from your old place, let me know.”

Katia was looking around, almost in horror, shaking her head.

“This is not my home!”

“McCall thought it was too dangerous for you and your daughter to go back to that walk-up apartment. You don’t have to tell your handler where you live now. Or anyone else. Let the folks at Dolls assume you’re still in the same apartment.”

“But I could never afford an apartment like this!”

“McCall’s paid the rent for a year. With what you would normally save for rent, you’ll be able to stay here for another few months after that. A lot can happen in that time.”

Kostmayer looked over at Natalya. She was also in shock. Or was she? It was hard to tell because she never spoke. But she was looking around and, unlike her mother, her eyes were wide with wonder.

And hope.

At least, that’s the way Kostmayer read it.

Katia shook her head again. Her voice had dropped to almost a hoarse whisper.

“I cannot accept this.”

“It’s for your protection.”

“What does Robert McCall want from me?”

Kostmayer thought about that, choosing his words carefully. “McCall doesn’t usually want. He does.”

“But he must want something from me to repay him for this generosity.”

“You can talk to him about it.”

Katia’s laugh was harsh. “Let’s cut the crap. He’s just like the men at the club. He sets me up in a swanky apartment, so now I am his mistress. That is the price I pay.”

Kostmayer shook his head.

“Not McCall’s style.”

“What does he expect from me?”

“He might want a hug on occasion. I try not to indulge him.” Kostmayer moved closer to her. “He wants you and your daughter to be safe. To take a deep breath and relax and start to live the new life you believed you were getting when you came to New York.”

“But why? There must be a reason. He must want something.”

“Maybe. I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure he does.” Kostmayer pressed a slip of paper into Katia’s hand. “You’ve got McCall’s cell number. Here’s mine. If you can’t reach him, call me.”

“I have to go back to work. Natalya has to go to school.”

“She can do that. You can go back to Dolls tomorrow night. No one is going to talk to you about what happened to Natalya. If they do, let McCall know. I ordered in a pizza, by the way, everything on it, box is on the kitchen table. You can heat it up in the microwave. Best to stay in tonight. I’ll leave these keys, which are yours, on the hall table.”

Kostmayer walked into the hallway and dropped the keys on the table. Natalya ran after him. She took his hand. Didn’t speak. He didn’t expect her to. Her eyes said everything he needed to hear. Katia walked into the hallway and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “You risked your life for strangers.”

“McCall took all the risk. I was just there for moral support.”

“You are a good friend to him.”

“He doesn’t have friends.”

Slowly Katia nodded. “I don’t believe he is doing this for me. Perhaps he is doing it for himself?”

“With McCall, you never know. Still waters run deep. Except with him, they’re never still. If there’s a knock on the apartment door tonight, don’t answer it. You’re not expecting company. Call one of us. Good night, Katia. Natalya.”

Kostmayer walked out of the Dakota apartment. He glanced back as he shut the door gently behind him.

Mother and daughter had walked back into the living room, in something of a daze, and were looking out at Central Park.

They were holding hands.

*   *   *

Borislav Kirov looked at the monitors in the small communications room on the second floor. Kuzbec flipped through the various surveillance cameras using the keyboard on a laptop. The bigger monitors covered the main floor of the Dolls nightclub. There was no one on the dance floor yet, of course. It was lunchtime. A couple of Kirov’s boys were still working on that damned kaleidoscopic ball. Something about its rotation being off. Abuse was already at his DJ station, lining up the music for that night. Kirov liked the young man; he was a wild spirit and was very deferential to all of the dancers. He only flirted with them. His sexual predilections were much younger: girls between the ages of seven and ten. They all had to be blond, beautiful, and untouched before he put his hands on them. He found them on the Internet. It disgusted Kirov, but as long as Abuse did not bring any of these innocents anywhere near the club, he turned a blind eye to it.

On six smaller monitors were the rooms on the second floor where the dancers took their special guests. That was the way Kirov liked to think of them. The rooms were spartan: a large bed, a table, an armchair, a thick carpet, a bathroom off each one. All of them were deserted and in semidarkness in the middle of the afternoon.

Kuzbec was concentrating on the monitor right in front of him, running through footage from the various surveillance cameras inside and outside the club. Kirov spotted a congressman from the night before. He was a regular. He liked Kalena, a dark-haired exotic beauty from Kosovo, or, at least, that’s where she told the congressman she was from. Perhaps where she was born. Kirov had picked her up at a slave auction in Istanbul when she was sixteen. She had been very grateful. He had rehabilitated her life. She would dance for him, sleep with whomever he chose for her. Sometimes he indulged in sex with her himself, but those occasions were rare and known only to them. It bothered him. He didn’t like anyone to hold a secret that could be turned against him. He knew she would never betray him.

But he might have to slit her throat one night to be sure.

Kuzbec’s fingers froze a frame on the monitor. Robert McCall could be seen walking from the cocktail area toward the alcove from the night before.

“This man is not some private citizen playing the white knight.”

“And why do you believe that?” Kirov asked contemptuously. “Because he crept up behind you at Daudov’s town house and took you out? My mother could do that. And she’s eighty-seven and in a nursing home in Grozny.”

Kuzbec controlled his temper. Kirov was always belittling him. He would not rise to the bait with a retort that might get him killed. But he couldn’t control his hands from gripping the table on either side of the laptop.

“Sharpen the image,” Kirov said, “and move it closer.”

Kuzbec’s hands flashed over the keyboard. McCall moved forward in jerky frames, until he was almost at the alcove. Kuzbec switched to another surveillance camera, within the alcove, which caught McCall as he entered. Here he was in a medium close-up.

“Run him through facial recognition,” Kirov said.

“I already have,” Kuzbec said tensely. “Nothing came up. His face is in no police or FBI databank.”

“What about the CIA?”

“I have not been able to hack into that database as yet.”

“Then why do I keep you alive if you’re so useless?”

A sharp intake of breath, the tightening of his fingers, the rigidity of his body.

Kirov smiled to himself. He wondered how long it would take for the young bodyguard to make a rash move in defense of his honor. It didn’t matter. He’d be dead before the retaliatory thought had fully formed in his mind.

“Their firewalls are more complicated,” Kuzbec said.

“Keep working on it. I have confidence you will succeed.”

Throw him a bone. No need to cut off his balls quite yet.

“I can find no record of a Robert, or Bobby, Maclain that fits our man’s description,” Kuzbec said. “No social, no driver’s license, no address, no military service record. He’s a ghost.”

Kirov did find that interesting.

“Send that frame to my iPhone. Keep searching. There are no ghosts, except of the mind. I want to know who he is.”

“He is no one of any importance.”

Kuzbec muttered it, and knew it was a mistake. Kirov looked down at him. Young and angry. But ruthless and loyal. Two attributes that kept men like him alive in Kirov’s world. Until one of those qualities was compromised.

“All men have importance,” Kirov said quietly. “You didn’t look into the man’s eyes when he walked up to the alcove last night or you wouldn’t have tried to stop him. But I did look into them. What I saw was a dangerous man. But whether he’s dangerous to us, or merely misguided, remains to be seen.”

“I can kill him.”

Kuzbec made the offer sound casual, as if it was a small service.

Kirov finally allowed the inward smile to touch his lips.

“Let’s hope you’re never put to the test. Find his ID.”

Kuzbec hands clenched into fists as Kirov’s dismissed him and left.