Louis Barlow, the assistant special agent in charge of the criminal division, had the build of a quarterback who had succumbed to a desk job, his heaviness not quite concealing the fact that he had once been a man of wicked handsomeness. As his office door opened, he glanced up. “What the fuck do you want?”
“We’ve narrowed down the window for the dead girl,” Powell said, tossing a printout onto the conference table. “Weather records suggest she was buried just over two years ago, probably in early May.” He sensed a distinct lack of interest in this information. “You want to tell me what the matter is?”
It was Friday afternoon. At the conference table, Barlow was seated with Mark Kandinsky, an agent from the wire room. Kandinsky was a pale slip of a redhead whose job, until recently, had consisted primarily of moving Barlow’s car from one parking space to another, and although he was clearly pleased to have been assigned to such an important case, the strain was already showing.
Kandinsky removed his headphones, which were plugged into his laptop. “The good news is that we have hours of calls on Sharkovsky’s phone. The bad news is that when he calls Misha, Zhenya, or a third phone belonging to our guy from overseas, half the time it’s in a language that none of our linguists can understand. And these are pertinent communications. He’ll start in Russian, then switch over to this other language, and rarely talks for more than thirty seconds.”
Powell considered this in silence. An idea began to form at the back of his mind, knocking faintly against something that he had heard before. “Can you give me one of the audio files?”
Barlow turned slowly to face him. “Why? You know something that we don’t?”
“I don’t know anything,” Powell said, not yet ready to show his hand. “I’m not even on the wire. So if you just want me to piss off—”
Barlow broke in. “Kandinsky, send him a file. Twenty seconds should be enough.”
“Thanks,” Powell said, already out the door. When he arrived at his desk, a message in his email account included the file as an attachment. He opened it. Two voices. Twenty seconds. He played it twice, then picked up his phone and dialed the switchboard operator.
An hour later, as afternoon was shading into evening, Powell led a stranger into Barlow’s office at the Javits Building. He was a slender kid in loafers and jeans, a visitor’s pass stuck to the front of his shirt. As they approached, Barlow looked up from the stack of line sheets on his desk. The wall behind him was covered in scores of his children’s crayoned drawings. “Who the hell is this?”
The stranger stuck out his hand. “Eric George. I’m a graduate student at Columbia.”
Barlow studied the hand, as if unsure what it was, then gave it a perfunctory shake. “A pleasure. What do you want?”
“It’s the recording,” the student said, glancing at Powell. “I know what language they were speaking. It’s Assyrian.”
When Barlow heard this, he went to the door and shouted down the hallway. A minute later, Kandinsky reappeared, along with Wolfe. Once they were all in the office, Barlow turned back to the student. “All right. Assyrian. But don’t tell me they’re discussing the Epic of Gilgamesh—”
“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—”