The Hunted, page 26
Another van, similarly equipped, and also filled with Russian “press aides,” was parked half a block up from their lawyer’s office. His phones, too, both at home and at work, were riddled with bugs. His house had been burgled the day before. While he, his wife, and two kids were doing the prayer thing at church, a team had entered through the broken back door. It was easy. A bad, decaying neighborhood. His neighbors generally stayed inside and very specifically ignored what happened outside their doors. His office, too, was wired like a sound studio.
So they knew the lawyer hadn’t come in yet, was apparently still wandering the halls at INS, trying to fathom how bad his client’s situation was.
Bad, pal. Real bad.
Neither the lawyer nor the Konevitches had the slightest idea how awful this was about to get.
19
The loud knock on the door came that night, slightly after midnight. Elena was sleeping with a pillow over her head, and never budged. Alex tried to ignore it, but the hammering grew more obnoxiously insistent, until he could stand it no longer. He slipped on his bathrobe and tiptoed quietly to the door.
He peered through the peephole. A middle-aged stranger in a cheap blue suit stood there, nervously looking around. Definitely FBI, Alex thought, though the demeanor was flagrantly different than the agents who tumbled their apartment on Saturday. This man appeared tentative, actually afraid. Alex opened the door.
The man inspected Alex’s face, then asked in a low, raspy whisper, “You’re Konevitch, right?”
“You know that or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, guess I do.”
“Should I invite you in or would you rather just burst inside like your comrades? There’s not much left to damage. A few chairs in the dining room. Two pictures we put back on the walls. I’ll point them out for you. Take your pick.”
“Lower your voice, all right? Step into the hall. Please.”
“I’d rather make you come inside and drag me out.”
The mysterious man leaned closer and lowered his voice to barely a whisper. “Trust me. We can’t talk… not here, definitely not inside your apartment.” His hand did something funny with his left ear, apparently trying to signal something.
Alex took a chance and stepped out. The agent reached over and gently eased the door shut behind him. He walked about ten steps and Alex followed. He turned around and they faced each other less than a foot apart. “Who are you?” Alex demanded.
“Hold your voice down. I’d rather not say. Did you do what they say you did?”
“Why ask? Your people already convicted me.”
“Because I’m asking, okay?” The sour odor of a recently smoked cigar was on the man’s breath. It mixed badly with the cheap aftershave.
“All right. No, I’m being framed. I swear it.”
The agent almost smiled. Right, how pitiful. Why couldn’t anybody come up with something original? “Tell you what. I really don’t care if you did, or you didn’t. I just don’t like what’s going down.”
“Which is what?”
He played with the top button on his jacket and appeared indecisive for a moment. Then he apparently resigned himself to tell Alex everything. “A bunch of Russkis working in our headquarters. Tromble, the director, arranged it. I worked counterintelligence for ten years, right? I can smell it. These guys have former KGB written all over them.”
“Colonel Volevodz?”
“Yeah… him and about three of his guys. Your apartment’s bugged, you know.”
“No… I… I had no idea.”
“Probably your phones, too. Be careful.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m a career guy, okay.”
“So what? Volevodz is also a career guy.”
“Yeah, but it’s different.” He wiped a hand across his forehead in frustration, apparently annoyed by being compared with some cold-eyed KGB thug. “Look, I’m taking a big risk coming here. But whatever you did back there don’t justify what’s happening here. I’m just warning you, be real careful.”
“All right, I’m warned.”
If anything, the agent suddenly became more agitated. He glanced down the long hallway, a long, searching look that indicated a high level of paranoia. He avoided Alex’s eyes. After a moment he whispered, “One last thing.”
“I’m listening.”
“The Russian mob’s got a contract on you. Don’t ask how I know, I just know.”
Alex should not have been surprised by this unwelcome news, but he was. Surprised and deeply unnerved. A long day of disasters was just capped by the Mount Vesuvius of bad news. He leaned against the wall and stared down at the red-and-black carpet.
“It’s a serious contract,” the agent continued, shuffling his feet and avoiding Alex’s eyes. “Over a million bucks,” he claimed, looking up. “These guys usually get people whacked for about five thousand. Apparently, you’re quite valuable to them.”
“Should I feel honored?”
“Scared shitless is how you should feel, Konevitch.”
“All right, I do.”
“Best we can tell, three teams flew in over the past week. That don’t even account for the local players, of which there are too many to count.”
“Your people know this for a fact?”
“Wouldn’t be telling you otherwise.”
“Where did this information come from? Do you have a source inside the syndicates?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s real, okay? Believe me or not, it’s your ass.”
“If your people know, why don’t you protect us?”
“Because people high up don’t believe you deserve it. They figure you did something to piss off the mob. It’s your problem, not ours.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
“Thank you.”
A few seconds passed. The agent seemed to be arguing with himself before he blurted, “Look, forget about it. If things get tough, though, if you want advice or help, call me. Just not from your apartment. This is our little secret, okay?” He pressed a business card into Alex’s palm. Special Agent Terrence Hanrahan, it read, with the usual array of office, cell, and fax numbers. “Remember, anytime you step outside, look both ways before you cross the street.”
Alex nodded. The hand dropped and Special Agent Hanrahan walked quickly back down the hall, straight to the elevator. Alex returned to the apartment, stopped momentarily in his office, and rushed directly to the bedroom. Gently shaking her, he quietly awoke Elena. Placing a forefinger to his lip he handed her a notepad and pencil, keeping another of each for himself.
They spent the rest of the night writing each other notes.
Agent Terrence Hanrahan stepped off the elevator on the ground floor. The Watergate doorman watched as he was quickly surrounded by five agents of the Bureau; they pinned his arms behind his back and roughly hustled him out through the door. No words were exchanged. A shiny black limo idled beside the curb.
A rear door opened and Hanrahan was shoved inside. A lean figure was slumped on the other side of the seat. The overhead reading lamp was on: the figure was paging through a stack of documents with blistering speed. Hanrahan found it hard to believe the man understood a tenth of what he was reading.
Tromble finally looked up. “Well?”
“Went down perfect. He’s scared out of his wits.”
“And he trusts you?”
“He’s a smart guy, so I doubt it.”
“But he at least believed you?”
“No question about that.”
“And you think he’ll call you?”
“Maybe. Depends, I guess, on how desperate he gets.”
“You warned him about the contracts?”
“I did. Is it true?”
“Absolutely. My Russian friends say he not only embezzled from his own bank, he also stole millions more, from the mob. As if he didn’t have enough enemies already. They want him as badly as the Russian government.” He scratched his nose. “You remembered to mention the bugs?”
Hanrahan nodded. “His face turned white as a baby’s ass. Why let him in on that, though?”
A slight smile. “We don’t want Volevodz and his people to have an unfair advantage, do we?”
“Jesus, his own government, and now the Russian mob. I guess the only question is who’ll get him first.”
“Not really,” Tromble said, glancing out the darkened window. “We’ll beat them to him. Your job’s to make that happen, Terrence. Don’t let me down.”
“He and that wife are going to be paranoid.”
“Yes, I believe they will. That’s the idea. You just make sure they realize America is more dangerous for them than Russia. I want them so hopeless they’ll be more than ready for our offer, when it comes. We’ll be their only help.”
Hanrahan thought about it a moment. He had been an agent for eighteen years; Tromble was the fifth director he had served. By far, he was the toughest and most heavy-handed, but there was no question he got results. “And if they don’t fold?”
“No problem. We’ll turn up the heat. Pull out the stops and ship them back.”
20
The three men sat in the white van, swapping American girlie magazines, sucking on cigarettes, sipping stale coffee, bored out of their wits. After that initial day of heart-thumping surprises and emotional terror, things had quickly retreated to a dull grind.
During the days, surprisingly little took place in the Konevitch apartment. Long bouts of silence, broken occasionally by tedious discussions about incredibly inane things—the laundry, the latest stupid game show on TV, Oprah, and so on. On Tuesday, the wife, Elena, read to her husband, out loud, a stream of interminable passages from War and Peace. Wednesday was Anna Karenina’s turn, which proved even worse. The men inside the van contemplated suicide, or rushing upstairs to drive a gag down her throat.
The Konevitches never left their building, or even their apartment, the best the men could tell. This had been a sore topic with Volevodz, who popped by occasionally to gather updates. As long as the couple stayed inside, the three listeners were trapped inside the van, crammed in with all the electronic equipment and debris from their meals. It seemed to shrink by the day; they were peeing in bottles, for God’s sake. Theories and conjectures rumbled around the rear of the van. It was unnatural to stay penned up so long inside that cramped apartment. On the other hand, the Konevitches no longer had jobs. And money—actually the sudden lack of it—was undoubtedly a serious factor in their minds. Wasn’t like they could afford to splurge on the theater or an expensive restaurant. Why not a movie, though? Better yet, a nice long stroll along the canal, like they used to? How much could that cost?
When it turned dark, things picked up and turned slightly more interesting. The Konevitches were like rabbits. Every night, for hours, groans and giggles, sheets rustling, and an occasional scream or “oh my God” to cap off the festivities. The first few times the volume had been kicked up full blast. The three men tried to imagine what was going on in that bed. Why hadn’t Volevodz been thoughtful enough to plant a camera? It would have been so easy, they whispered among themselves. Eventually, the constant lovemaking only contributed to the enveloping air of misery.
It was almost as if the Konevitches knew all about the three listeners, that they were taunting and rubbing it in.
The phone action had turned virtually nonexistent. A few frustrated calls from their lawyer, who complained constantly about being stonewalled by his old friends in the INS.
An occasional call to order pizza and Chinese deliveries—that was it.
“What are they doing out there?” asked the note Elena passed over the dining room table to Alex.
A glance at his watch—8:00 p.m.—and he scribbled a hasty response and flashed it to her. “Going nuts, I hope.” After days of corresponding like this they had finally mastered the awkward art of balancing two conversations at once—inane verbal ramblings to mollify their listeners while they scrawled brief messages back and forth. It was tedious and slow, and absolutely necessary. They chatted in English and they wrote in Russian.
“Why didn’t we buy a bigger place?!!!!” she scribbled back. “It’s closing in on me, Alex. I can barely breathe.”
Alex wrote, “At least the company’s better in here than out there.” Who knew how many Mafiya thugs were prowling nearby, trying their damnedest to collect the bounty? Volevodz knew their address—they had to assume he had somehow passed it along to the cabal in Moscow. So the thugs now had a firm fix on their location and Alex was sure they were huddled somewhere nearby, waiting. Going outside was out of the question. The first few days they had tried to suppress their terror, to find ways to cope with their anxiety and rearrange and repair their living conditions. Day three Elena had gone on a mad hunt for electronic bugs. She discovered six. They suspected there were more, plenty more, and they were right.
On day four, they agreed upon a strategy—they would work overtime to appear like they were going through the motions of a normal life, battling boredom, praying, and waiting for MP to whip a legal rabbit out of his hat and end this miserable nightmare.
They weren’t fooling themselves, though. MP was a gnat battling giants. This was way over his head—over any lawyer’s head, probably. At any moment, the people outside would become tired of this, and the next hammer would fall. And Alex, ever the clearheaded businessman, was sure things would become worse, whatever that meant.
With each succeeding day, the situation became more intolerable. Elena tried reading, watching TV, meditating—nothing worked. Nothing. Alex walked endlessly around the apartment, doing laps and searching for a solution. He thought best on his feet, and was wearing out shoe leather to find a way out of this.
They had no money. They were trapped inside this building. Unable to escape. Unable to communicate with anybody outside without the mice listening in. If there was a way out, it was up to them to find it. Alex patted Elena’s knee and wrote, “Time for the bedroom.”
They got up and together made the short trek down the hall. Alex loaded the tape they had produced the first night, carefully and quietly inserted it into the cassette player, then cranked the volume knob to maximum. He said to Elena, “Get your clothes off. I’m in the mood again.” Neither of them had been in anything close to the mood since the visit from Agent Hanrahan with the terrifying news about all the bugs and the thugs waiting outside to kill them.
The idea that their every word was being overheard was sickening.
Elena kicked off her shoes, flung them hard against the wall, and made a point to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, with an accompanying groan from the springs. She opened the nightly banter. “You’re always in the mood.”
“And you’re always beautiful.”
“You’re insatiable.”
“And you’re a doll.” Then, “Take off your blouse.”
“You first, with the shirt… that’s it. Now the pants.”
They went back and forth, trying their best to make the listeners gag, then Alex sat heavily on the bed, right beside her.
They stared at each other a moment. Without another word, Alex pushed start and the tape kicked in. The sounds of the two of them sexually mauling each other shot full-blast into the listening devices.
They had nearly killed each other producing that tape.
Elena leaned close to Alex and whispered, “How many more days do you think we have?”
“One… twenty. Who knows?”
“What are they waiting for?”
“For us to break. Or run out of money and start starving.”
“Why? What do they hope to gain?”
“They want us desperate. They have our money, and they’ve made us too terrified to step outside. It’s a box, and the only way out is to accept their condition. A one-way trip to Russia.”
“Maybe we should try to just make a run for it.”
“How?”
“Disguise ourselves. Sneak out. Early in the morning when they’re tired and their senses are dull. Create a diversion of some kind.” She pecked him on the cheek, then pulled back. “You pulled it off in Budapest. We’ll do it again.”
“And go where, Elena? They have our passports.”
“Montana, Idaho, Nevada. I’m past caring, Alex. A town in the middle of nowhere. Hot, cold, dry, wet, it no longer matters. Someplace small, neglected. America has millions of illegal immigrants. We’ll live in the underground economy, find a way to blend in.”
“I’ll open a lawn service, and you’ll be a maid. Is that the idea?”
“We’ll be alive, Alex. And free.”
He leaned over and touched her shoulder. “Listen to me. All of those millions of illegal immigrants don’t have the FBI hunting them. The FBI doesn’t know their names, doesn’t have their physical descriptions, and could care less about them. We’d be looking over our shoulder every day. One day we’d wake up to a bunch of men in gray suits.”
“But I’m tired of sitting here, waiting.”
“Well, I have an idea.”
“I’m willing to try anything.
“Unfortunately, it will take time.”
“How much time?”
“Probably a lot. Probably too much. It’s a complete gamble, anyway, an outside shot with a million things that can go wrong.”
She stared up at the ceiling. “A million things can go wrong here. Tell me about it.”
They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched the volume and napped.
One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.
