John F. Kennedy Airport, three days later
Shoved on a plane to Moscow by the SVR in Donetsk, Tolevi was met at Domodedovo International Airport by a mousy woman holding up a sign with his name on it. He considered just walking by, but realized that was foolish; the Russians could grab him any time they wanted. The woman looked at his ear, shook her head, then walked him to a car in the terminal’s no parking area, all without a word. They drove about fifteen minutes before arriving at a clinic; patched up by an elderly doctor whose Far Eastern Russian was difficult to decipher, Tolevi emerged to find an envelope with his name on it at the receptionist’s desk. Inside was his ticket, a baggage check claim for his luggage, and a stamped visa that expired three hours after the flight boarded.
He knew better than to dawdle, let alone ask questions. His ride was gone, but a cab to the airport easily arranged. It turned out that the visa’s timing was prescient; they sat at the gate for exactly two hours and fifty-five minutes past boarding time for reasons never announced; then they spent another half hour on the tarmac due to “air traffic controller problems.”
Flying coach nonstop from Moscow to New York—if it wasn’t the worst flight Tolevi had ever taken, it certainly ranked close. The plane itself wasn’t horrible—Aeroflot used an Airbus 330 for long-distance flights—but he was stuck in a middle seat with a snorer on his right and a woman who prayed to herself the entire time she wasn’t eating.
But when he landed, he was in the States, finally.
The first order of business after collecting his bag would be to find a pay phone. He hadn’t been able to call Borya the whole time he’d been gone. She’d be worried, as would Martyak.
Assuming Borya hadn’t killed Martyak by now. A definite possibility.
“Gabor Tolevi?”
Tolevi turned to see a tall, middle-aged man in a suit standing next to the rope at the gate exit.
He looked familiar.
“You’ll come with us,” said the man, flashing an ID. “Trevor Jenkins. FBI. We met in Boston. Come along with us.”
Another man in a suit rose from a chair at the front of the gate. Tolevi spotted two more men in suits rising at the edge of the waiting area.
“I have to call my daughter,” he said.
“You can do that from the car.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“We’re going to drive you,” said Jenkins. “We’ll take care of the luggage.”
The biggest surprise was waiting in the car, actually a large SUV with three rows of seats: Yuri Johansen.
“Good evening, Gabe,” said Johansen, sitting in the first row behind the driver. “Have a good flight?”
“The flight was terrible.” Tolevi had no option but to slide next to him. “My stay was worse.”
“You didn’t get our guy,” said Johansen.
Outside the truck, Jenkins shouted to some men boarding a vehicle behind them. Another vehicle pulled up in front. It was a regular caravan.
“I’m lucky I got out with my life,” Tolevi told Johansen. “One of the Russians in charge down there decided he liked me so much he cut off part of my ear as souvenir.”
Tolevi turned his head toward his CIA handler.
“I bet that hurts.”
“Jenkins said I could call my daughter. Is he FBI, or is he with you?”
“Bureau. Use his phone when he gets in.”
“I met Dan,” said Tolevi. “If you were going to have people there, you should have had more.”
“If we had access to more,” said Johansen, “do you think we would have sent you?”
Jenkins tapped the back of the driver’s seat and they pulled out, a three-vehicle parade to Boston. He didn’t particularly like the CIA officer, Johansen, let alone the arrangement the bosses had come to, but “make the best of it” was now the clear order of the day.
National interest and all that.
They were at the precipice of a huge bust, breaking not only the back of the Russian mob in Boston and New England but also some of its connections back to Russia and the Ukraine. Even if Tolevi didn’t cooperate and the CIA chose to keep him off limits, major criminals were going down. This meant cybercrime, prostitution, drugs, cigarette and vodka smuggling.
But the big prize was the Russian intelligence service connection.
Stratowich wasn’t talking yet, but he would. It was just a matter of time. They’d already gotten information from his apartment, his phone records, even his girlfriend.
The day before he broke into Smart Metal, he’d met with Maarav Medved, a known mafya chieftain; from him he’d received instructions on how to get into Smart Metal. Twenty minutes before that meeting, which had taken place at a restaurant in downtown Boston, two members of the Russian SVR had gone into the restaurant and sat with Medved—something the FBI knew from routine surveillance, and now a security video from a store just across the street.
How much they could make of the connection remained to be seen. The U.S. attorney had asked for a wiretap warrant on Medved; thus far the most interesting tidbit was information about which Russian prostitutes were the best in bed. But it was early days; Jenkins had no doubt they would end up with considerably more dirt, and undoubtedly have enough hard evidence to expose SVR operations. A serious win for him, even though his task group hadn’t been assigned to do that.
Getting Tolevi to play along would be useful. It was difficult, however, to judge exactly what the CIA’s attitude toward him was. They were as cagey as ever, barely admitting that they ran him, though it was obvious they had sent him to the Ukraine. He was a black marketer, flouting, if not breaking, U.S. laws on exporting goods to both Russia and the breakaway areas of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He had connections to the mafya—Johansen insisted he wasn’t a member, though Jenkins was sure he was, even if it was a few rungs below Medved.
The one good thing about the SVR case—the CIA wouldn’t try to hound in on the glory. In fact, the Agency would stay as far away publically as possible, fearing they’d get into a tit-for-tat fight with their Russian rivals. That gave Jenkins’s bosses plenty of room to work with the locals, who of course wanted some measure of glory for having been lucky enough to be there when Jenkins’s man got Massina down.
Glory all around.
But he still didn’t have his brother’s murderer.
“I want to call my daughter,” said Tolevi.
“You’ll call her,” said Jenkins. “It’s a long ride.”
“Am I under arrest here?”
“No. Not at all.” Jenkins leaned forward. “If you want to get out, we can stop right here.”
They were on the Van Wyck Expressway; traffic was actually moving at a decent clip, unusual even for the middle of the day.
“What exactly do I owe this honor to?” said Tolevi.
“We’re all trying to cooperate,” said Jenkins. “We picked up a friend of yours, a Mr. Stratowich, who has been giving us a lot of information.”
“Stratowich.” Tolevi pronounced the name to rhyme with garbage, which completely synched with his tone.
“He speaks highly of you,” said Jenkins.
“I doubt that. He’s talking to you?”
Jenkins shrugged. No, Stratowich was many things, but not a squealer. Still, if you had him, you could get a lot of information, make connections.
“Stratowich is an asshole,” Tolevi told them. “I want to talk to my daughter.”
“If you’re so concerned about Borya,” said Jenkins, “why did you set her up to take the fall for your ATM scam?”
“What ATM scam? What is the obsession with ATMs?”
“You had nothing to do with that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. No. Listen, Stratowich is a goon. Strictly low level. He doesn’t have the brains to rob a candy store, let alone diddle with banks, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“A bag guy for Russian intelligence?” asked Jenkins.
Tolevi turned to Johansen. “What’s the game here?”
Johansen didn’t answer, pretending to stare out the window. Tolevi decided that he could use a little silence himself, so he sat back between them, feeling more than a little cramped in.
Middle seat blues: The theme of the last forty-eight hours.
It wasn’t until they were on the New England Thruway nearly a half hour later that Johansen broke the silence.
“So, you could not recover our friend the butcher,” said the CIA agent. “Tell me what happened.”
Tolevi glanced at Jenkins. Obviously these guys were working together.
“The Russians moved in,” Tolevi said. “They were apparently sweeping up the rebels who were corrupt. I got caught in the middle of that. The brother wasn’t much help. Nor, frankly, was Dan. I lost track of them.”
“How?”
Tolevi described what had happened, leaving out the SVR connection. If Johansen knew about it, he’d bring it up. Otherwise, it would open him up to too many questions, most of which he preferred not to answer.
“The man who cut your ear off is a colonel in the Spetsnaz,” Johansen told him. “He has a reputation for being honest. And ruthless.”
“I figured he was a colonel. He had that f-u look in his eyes they get when they’ve been in the army too long.”
“Where is your prize now?”
“Still in jail, as far as I know.”
“Describe it.”
Tolevi slumped back in the seat, trying to force a replay of his visit through his mind. But thoughts of his daughter kept getting in the way.
What am I going to tell her about my ear?
“Oh that . . . cut myself shaving.”
And the damn thing was throbbing out of control.
Times like this he really missed his wife. He missed her always, but right now even more. She would have soothed the way somehow, absorbed some of Borya’s shock.
The girl will freak. She thinks of me as indestructible. She is such a good kid.
“You’re describing an impenetrable fortress,” said Jenkins. It was the first sign that he was listening. Johansen shot him a look.
“It’s not easy to get into,” admitted Tolevi. “But I went through the front door. I would have been able to get him out. The money was all lined up. We need to take care of that.”
“The Russian took it over?” asked Johansen.
“It looked that way. There’s some sort of power struggle going on. I’d guess the Russians are in the middle of it.”
Johansen, satisfied for now, leaned back on the seat.
They really need me, thought Tolevi. He’s playing it too cool.
But do they need me as a patsy? Or because I’m the only hope they have?
Either way, there wasn’t enough in it for him to risk his life going back.
“What was your role in all this?” asked Jenkins. “Why are you involved?”
“Ask Yuri.”
“You can tell him,” said Johansen. “He knows you work with us.”
“I’m just trying to make a living. Sometimes I help an old friend out.”
“You make a living by smuggling things.”
“It’s not necessarily smuggling. I just find a way to get things people need from point A to point B, with a lot of interference in the middle.”
“You corrupt people.”
“No. I make my living off of other people’s greed,” said Tolevi. “They’re the ones who are corrupt.”
“Which explains why you had your daughter rip off those ATM machines.”
“You keep talking about ATM machines. I have no idea what you mean.”
“You know nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“The night we arrested you—”
“He wasn’t technically arrested,” interrupted Johansen.
“The night we found you outside the bank with your daughter,” said Jenkins, correcting himself. “Why was she there?”
“She found an ATM card. Being a teenager, she wanted to try it. I punished her, don’t worry. She knows it was wrong.”
“She reprogrammed that ATM card as part of a scam.”
“What?”
“She programmed that card so it would put money into her account.”
“There’s no way my daughter would have done that.”
“That’s my point,” said Jenkins. “No fifteen-year-old girl is doing that. But she confessed. She took the fall for you.”
“Are we talking about my daughter?”
“Someone funneled over two hundred thousand dollars from people all across the city. Borya claims it was her.”
“Get away.”
“You know nothing about that?” asked Johansen.
“Borya did that? No way. She’s a good girl. There’s no way she did that.”
They stopped for a bathroom break and something to eat about two hours out of New York. On the way out of the restroom, Tolevi spotted a pay phone.
“I’m calling my daughter,” he told Jenkins.
Tolevi went to the phone and put in a quarter, then all his change to make the call.
He was still twenty-five cents short and had to borrow it from the agent.
He went straight to voice mail.
“Borya, this is your father. What the hell have you been doing with the banks? You are to talk to no one until I get there. Do you hear me? No one! And . . . do your damn homework.”
He slammed the phone into the receiver.
“Teenagers are tough, huh,” said Jenkins.
Tolevi gave him a death stare before starting back toward the car.
“I have a kid about the same age as yours,” said Jenkins, trailing along.
“I told her never to lie to me,” said Tolevi. “Never. How did she do this?”
“She claims she found some of the information on the Web and adapted the rest.”
“Bull. Someone put her up to it.”
“Who?”
“I’ll break his legs when I find out. I’ll feed him his balls. Was it Medved, one of his people? He’s a slime.”
“Not having your wife is hard, huh? I don’t think I could raise my girl on my own. She’s not as smart as yours, but she’s still a handful.”
“Everything is a test,” said Tolevi. “Everything.”
Johansen was waiting in the parking lot.
“I have to go deal with something,” he told Tolevi. “I’ll be back in touch.”
“When do I get my money?” said Tolevi. “I borrowed money to get the butcher out. It needs to be paid back with interest right away.”
“You didn’t get the butcher out. There’s no payment.”
“I need that money.”
“Get us the butcher.”
“The place is impenetrable,” said Tolevi. “You said it yourself.”
“Jenkins said it, not me. If you can’t do it, that’s not a problem. But we’re not going to pay you.”
“I really need the money.”
Johansen stared at him.
“I can’t go back to Donetsk,” said Tolevi. “Maybe not even Russia. Not for a while.”
“Then you have a lot of problems that I can’t solve, Gabe.” Johansen looked at Jenkins. “I’ll be in touch.”