Slav Lily believed in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, but she also believed in a Glock 42 slimline subcompact. Sixteen ounces with the six-round clip fully loaded. She wore it strapped against her T-shirt, concealed by her short red leather jacket. You couldn’t leave everything to God. She would have liked a nine-round clip, but fewer shots was a trade-off she accepted for a gun you could practically hide in your bra. If you couldn’t put somebody down with six rounds of .380 Fiocchi Extrema, a really dependable hollow-point bullet Lily liked, you deserved what you got.
She sat in the eighth pew from the front and bent her head in prayer to her patron saint. There is no saint named Lily, but she had a special devotion for Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks. Extremely chic in a beaded deerskin way, as Lily saw it, plus she was a princess, plus knew how to float through the forest like a phantom. That last part about the forest Lily had made up. She felt that her own piety, as demonstrated by the $1,000 in twenties that she gave the priest for every diamond drop, gave her the right to add a few qualities that the saint must have had anyway but had escaped the notice of the seventeenth-century French Jesuits who’d written the history of that part of North America in between having their fingernails pulled out.
The ability to reconcile religious devotion with a utilitarian attitude to homicide is not uniquely Russian. But Lily had other attributes—a maniacal devotion to the Bolshoi Ballet, madly slanted eyes, a fondness for an expensive Siberian vodka called Beluga Noble Gold—that, taken all together, accounted for her nickname in certain twilit parts of the diamond world.
With her body turned at a slight angle, Slav Lily could see the whole interior of the Church of the Guardian Angel.
So could I. We had cameras in the church. I was running surveillance for a Treasury operation. There was a high-end money laundry rinsing dirty cash into the United States in diamonds. I had been planning to spring the trap, but not until I knew more about how it worked. Then I got an order in the middle of the night: The operation had been moved up. So here I was.
At 7:00 A.M. Mass, the sound of early traffic on Ocean Parkway was a light hiss of tires in the rain.
“Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,” the priest continued with his recitation of the Apostles’ Creed.
The traffic noise got louder when the main door opened for a moment, then subsided when it closed. Lily heard the light pad of sneakers on the terrazzo floor. That was another thing she liked about Guardian Angel. With terrazzo, you could hear a fly.
“He descended into Hell,” she intoned in time to the priest and the seven regulars. Always the same seven. That was good. No surprises. Today there was an eighth, a guy in his thirties in a denim jacket. Younger than the regulars. But Lily had watched him closely when he came in and had apparently decided he was OK. He’d dipped his hand in the holy water and made the sign of the cross. Knew when to stand and when to kneel.
The only other people in the church were the paymaster Lavrov and his wife. They sat ten rows behind Lily with their mouths open, a matched pair of trolls with lantern jaws and squished-on noses like lumps of putty. Square yellow teeth showed in their open mouths. Lavrov had problems with his circulation, and his blue nose and large blue ears were the color of his cheap suit. A plastic penholder crammed with ballpoints protruded from his breast pocket. His wife wore a floral print dress. She had enormous breasts that strained the buttons at the front, but the dress would have been tight anyway because of the Kevlar vest. With both hands she gripped a canvas purse the size of a knapsack. The money was in the purse.
Everybody in the church was older than Lily, who was twenty-nine. She stood out because of her youth, her red jacket, and her striking appearance—the spiky black hair cut short, black eyebrows, and white skin so pale that the down on her lip showed as a faint shadow. She had stormy dark gray eyes and pointy, elvish ears. Strands of dark hair writhed around these delicate, strange shells like eels after prey.
“On the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.”
The man came up the side aisle: medium height, big chest, wrinkled khaki pants. and a light blue button-down shirt with a logo on the pocket. His shirt wasn’t tucked in, so he was probably carrying. People in the diamond trade like to tell you it’s a handshake business. Sure, except sometimes the hand has a gun in it.
“Give me a better shot of him,” I said, and the screen in front of me flicked to a different angle.
We were parked a mile away in an equipment bay at Coney Island. An NYPD command vehicle is basically a windowless bus with a TV control room inside. A capsule sealed off from the outside world, filled with dim green light and whatever smells the occupants brought in with them.
A young cop beside me did the switching and controlled the audio. A captain in a starched white shirt surveyed the operation from a high-backed leather chair bolted to a dais in the corner. The chair creaked when he moved. He wore a sour expression in case I’d missed the fact that he hated civilians.
Slav Lily stiffened as the man approached. She didn’t like the loose shirt either. He kept his hands in sight, holding them slightly away from his body.
He had thick, curly gray hair and sallow skin. I recognized him. A Brazilian diamond trader. Not too careful about where he got his goods.
He walked up the aisle with a limp, pit-PAT, pit-PAT on the terrazzo floor.
He slid into the pew two rows behind Lily. That was one of her rules: two rows. Close enough, not too close.
When he was in his seat he looked around the church. Finally he knelt and bowed his head, clasping his hands as if in prayer and extending his arms into the empty pew between him and Lily. A three-inch-long rectangular white shape slid into view between his thumbs. She plucked the folded-paper packet from his hands and took a long, slow look around the church.
She flicked the packet open with the fingers of the hand that held it, a display of deftness that revealed practice with the way diamond people fold their paper packets.
“I believe in the Holy Ghost.”
A mist of pink light fizzed out of the paper and lapped at Lily’s face.
She gazed at the contents of the package, her face softened by the rosy luminescence.
“Tighten up on that angle,” I told the young cop.
The packet held a single pink diamond. It was shaped like a dagger, long and thin and pointed at one end. It glowed against the paper with a fiery intensity.
Suddenly the crackle of a radio pierced the quiet of the church.
Lily twitched the packet shut with a flurry of her fingers. She leaned back against the pew and looked across the church. The priest recited the last few lines of the prayer. Tight on Lily’s face, I could see a bead of perspiration above her lip. It glistened in the soft dawn. She was looking straight at the guy in the denim jacket, who was fiddling frantically with his ear.
“Is that your guy?” I snapped at the captain.
“Not one of ours,” the young cop muttered while the captain gaped at the screen, plainly uncertain what was going on.
The Brazilian reached forward and tried to snatch the parcel back, but Lily held it away from him.
“Please tell me you didn’t add a backup,” she said in her husky voice. It came rasping over the speaker.
He joined his hands together again and watched her, his black eyes steady.
“Darling,” Lily growled reproachfully, “have you gone Brazilian on me?” She spoke English with a mid-Atlantic accent, too polished to be American and too slick with Russian vowels to be British.
“That backup whose radio betrayed him,” she continued in an angry whisper. “That’s very bad. We had no agreement. What are you doing?” She slipped the packet into an inside pocket. “Who else have you got here?”
“What’s going on?” said the captain. His chair gave a loud squeak as he stepped off his perch and stood behind the young cop.
“It’s going sour,” I told him. “She thinks the courier is pulling a double-cross. He was supposed to come with a single backup.” I glanced at a monitor. “That’s him there, waiting outside the main door. I don’t see anybody else, but this is not going well. Where are the arrest teams?”
“Here and here,” the young cop tapped a screen that showed the grid of streets around the church. “There’s a third over here. That’s the on-ramp to the Belt Parkway.”
We had two cars of our own but he didn’t know where they were. That was another thing that pissed off the captain: NYPD teams would take out the Russians, and Treasury agents would swoop in for the collar.
“Where are the Russians’ cars?”
“Black Escalade out front. That’s it.”
I didn’t think that was all they had, but I let it go because things were starting to go off the rails inside the church.
The Brazilian shook his head. He held his right hand out toward Slav Lily. His left hand was no longer in sight.
“I take it back,” he growled.
The pretense of a meeting under cover had evaporated. Neither took pains to keep a low voice. At the altar, the old priest soldiered on through the Mass. His flock, alarmed by the angry voices, stayed with him.
“Body of Christ,” he said, and the congregation bowed their heads.
I hadn’t seen Lavrov move until the young cop said, “the old guy.” Lavrov was already out of his seat and halfway to the Brazilian’s pew, hauling out an old Red Army Makarov semi-automatic as he went. It looked small in his enormous paw.
“I’m going to be very serious,” Lily said to the Brazilian. “I need you to not do anything too completely stupid.”
Lavrov’s pistol pointed at his ear.
With a flourish the priest removed a cover from the chalice and turned in a swirl of vestments to come around the altar to distribute communion. The old people at the front got to their feet and began to shuffle from the pews into the main aisle. Distracted by the movement, Lavrov’s attention flickered for the briefest moment. The Brazilian spun like a cat, leaning his head away from the gun and swiping his arm upward in a blur of speed. A bright red stripe opened from Lavrov’s chin to his forehead across the center of his left eye. The Makarov boomed and behind the altar a flight of angels exploded in a shower of stained glass.
“Tackle One,” the captain said into a microphone. “Disable suspect vehicle.” His voice was calm.
Lavrov slapped at his face. A piece of his eye slid out onto his cheek. He lost his balance and toppled backward. He fired the Makarov again and a statue of the Blessed Virgin beneath the wrecked window burst into a cloud of white powder.
Outside, a matte-black NYPD Crown Vic with no insignia, unless you counted the ramming grid on the front, shot out of a side street and accelerated toward the church. On the wide-angle view we had from a building two blocks away it didn’t look dramatic, but I wouldn’t want to have been sitting in that Escalade when the Crown Vic torpedoed its ass.
“Fucking Russians,” said the captain. “It’s always an Escalade.”
Lily was on her feet with her hand inside her jacket when the Brazilian’s hand flashed again. It swiped across her forearm. She got herself out of the way of the next slash, and by then she had the Glock in her good hand. The Brazilian tried to duck, but a round of Fiocchi Extrema comes out at a muzzle velocity of 975 feet per second. You’d have to be pretty fast. A dime-sized hole appeared in the Brazilian’s forehead and the back of his head blew off.
The priest stood rooted to the sanctuary steps, the chalice in one hand and the pale disk of a communion wafer in the other. He was still staring back over his shoulder at the blown-out window and the haze of plaster dust.
Holding her injured arm Lily staggered into the aisle and ran to a side entrance.
“She’s screwed,” the captain said. “That door is permanently locked. I checked it myself,” he added. Unwisely. She disappeared through the door.
Lavrov’s wife climbed to her feet and hobbled to her husband’s side. She had swollen ankles and wore elastic compression stockings. She stooped and picked up the Makarov and handed it to him, giving him a little pat on the arm as she did. He struggled to his feet and they made their way up the aisle to the main door. Lavrov had one hand over his eye and blood streaming onto his neck, but other than that they looked like any elderly couple coming out of a church to find cops hauling Russians out of an SUV and spreading them face down on the road. I could see the Portuguese backup disappearing around a corner. Lavrov waved the Makarov in the direction of the street and fired. A cop with his knee on a captive’s back rolled away in a spasm of agony. Lavrov’s wife opened her big purse and pulled out a Stechkin machine pistol. Those big Stechkins have twenty rounds in the magazine and can fire them all in 1.6 seconds flat. You have to pull the trigger, though, and before she could, she caught a high-impact round from a sniper on a roof across the street. It’s true that she wore a Kevlar vest, but, fatally, not a Kevlar hat.
Slav Lily came out the side of the church and disappeared behind the white rectory next door.
“Tackle Two,” the captain said beside me, “target exited church south side. Apprehend target rear of house.”
“Copy that,” the speaker crackled, and the second Crown Vic appeared, gunning out of Ocean View Avenue and bouncing up onto the rectory lawn. It slewed badly on the rain-slicked grass. The driver twisted the wheel and tried to accelerate out of the spin, but the front end smacked sideways into a thick maple and erupted in a cloud of steam.
“Tackle Two—what the fuck?” the captain screamed.
The doors sprang open and four guys in full tac tumbled out and sprinted for the house.
“Have we got a camera behind that house?” I asked the young cop.
“Negative,” he said, stunned by the disaster snowballing out of control on the screens.
“There’s no way out back there,” the captain said, but I think we both knew how much faith to put in that.
“Close the net,” I told him as I tossed my headset on the console and hurried outside.
My driver’s black Yukon was backed up to the trailer with the passenger door already open. The Yukon was the model with the 6.2-liter V8 engine. The driver was a former wheelman for a smash-and-grab gang. We were going eighty-five down Surf Avenue by the time I got my seatbelt fastened.
“Tackle Three,” I heard on the speaker, “Tackle Three, come in,” followed by an unintelligible burst of noise.
“Where is she?” I said.
A terse crackle came from the police-band monitor mounted on the dash.
“There’s a motorcycle on the beach. They think it’s her.”
Over the radio came a staccato of laconic monosyllables as units moved to take up positions that transformed Brighton Beach into a trap. Picture Brooklyn sticking a sandy tongue into the Atlantic Ocean: that’s Brighton Beach. Two bridges and a neck of land is all that joins it to the mainland, and we had those choked tight. Speeding further out toward the tip of the tongue, Lily was moving ever deeper into the trap.
The Yukon had strobes in the grill and one of those fire-truck horns that are supposed to clear even New Yorkers out of the way. But Brighton Beach is to the Russian mob what Little Italy was to the Mafia. Flashing lights and a blaring horn made no impression on the stolid drivers plugging the road.
The driver cranked the Yukon into a sharp turn, banged across the sidewalk, and barreled up a flight of concrete steps. We blew across the boardwalk and onto the beach. Offshore, a sudden breeze was prying apart the overcast and piling it into stacks of cloud against the bright blue sky. A hard, silvery light enameled the surface of the ocean.
The truck wallowed and rocked through the sand. The driver’s face wore a beatific expression. His bejeweled hands gripped the steering wheel. Far ahead along the shore, two NYPD squad cars shot out of a street and onto the beach and churned off eastward, fishtailing through the sand. Ahead of them the red dot that was Slav Lily sped along the dark waterline and into a patch of light. The water shelving on the sand gleamed like polished glass.
I studied the map on the dashboard screen. There was no way out, the beach ended. After that there were some streets of houses, and then the channel out of Sheepshead Bay into the Atlantic.
“She might be able to dodge around in there for a while,” I said, “but she can’t get out. There aren’t any bridges across Sheepshead Bay. There’s a line across the water, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Line?” the driver said.
He stabbed the brakes and slewed the Yukon around in a hard turn that ended with the front wheels parked on the boardwalk.
“That line—it’s a footbridge.” A look of wonder transformed his sagging face. “Jeez, I forgot about that.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “Smart girl. She’s going to tie the pursuit into knots out there at the end of the beach, and then cut back to the bridge. It’s only a footbridge, but it could take a motorcycle.” He looked at me. “If she gets across that bridge, she’s out.”
We thumped down off the boardwalk and went racing back along the beach. Five minutes later we had rounded the bottom of Sheepshead Bay and come up the other side, just in time to see a red motorcycle fly into view on the far side of the water. She almost made it past a car that was coming toward her on the wet street, but at the crucial moment it went through a puddle, and the sheet of spray smacked Lily off the bike. She hit the pavement and slid along the surface. The motorcycle plunged over the seawall. Lily picked herself up and stumbled to the footbridge. She held her injured arm straight down by her side, and in that hand she had the Glock. Her other hand was clasped tight to her forearm where the Brazilian had cut her. I got out of the Yukon and headed for the bridge.
Just then a police car with its siren wailing skidded to a halt. Two cops jumped out with their weapons drawn. Lily had reached the middle of the wooden bridge. She stopped, put her back to the railing, and hooked a heel on the lowest rung. She looked like someone posing for an ad.
The rain was heavier now. Her hair was plastered to her head. Black tendrils curled around her elvish ears. Her lips were gray. She locked her eyes on mine and smiled wanly before she arched her back across the railing and toppled over, splashing into the water a few yards from a rigid inflatable with twin 150-horsepower Mercury outboards that slid out from under the bridge. I could see how weak she was when they dragged her in, but she had enough strength to fire three quick rounds. A wooden post disintegrated, spraying my face with splinters. Lily disappeared up the channel and into the thickening rain.