The Hunted, page 37
She moved closer, almost in his face. “Why?”
He refused to look at her. “An hour later, I was hugging a CIA man from your embassy and begging for help. I cried, Kim. I promised anything his bosses wanted—anything. I was about to get what I had done to so many others, and I was suffocating with fear. No level of betrayal was ruled out. They whisked me out the next morning.” In a sad, resigned tone Petri added, “So I never asked my old friend, you see.”
“You must have some idea.”
“Competition, I suppose. You see, I was the best, Kim. I could turn a saint into a whore, a pope into a pimp, whatever I wanted them to be. The chief-of-section job was coming open. We were both vying for the job and all that came with it. A larger apartment, a chauffeured car, two weeks a year in a seedy KGB guest-house in Ukraine. That’s how KGB people operate.”
“I see.”
He rolled forward in his chair and planted his skinny elbows on his bony knees. “Don’t look down your nose at my work. You have no idea the expertise or artistry it requires. Everything must be perfect, Kim. Documents forged with just the right dates, matching fonts, identical signatures, all the witnesses coached and carefully choreographed. It’s police work and lawyer work and theater work rolled into one. You have to imagine the crime, Kim, dream it up out of thin air. Then dig a moat and build a castle nobody can assail. No detail can be overlooked, no knot untied. I must tell you, Kim, it’s so much more difficult than constructing a real case with real facts.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”
Petri lifted the document and began reading it again. He floated out of his past, back to the present. Nearly an hour passed before he looked up and asked casually, “How do you consider this case against Konevitch?”
“You know what?” She put aside the document she was reading and glanced over at him. “I’m impressed. I thought those four clowns were just drunken miscreants. Totally useless.”
“But now?”
“Well, I was wrong. They’re good. Very, very good. They’ve really delivered the goods.”
“Will your judge be persuaded?”
Kim smiled. “The Konevitches will be back in Moscow faster than they can blink.” After a moment, she asked, “What do you think?”
“Probably so.”
“I just wish I had all this material at the first trial.”
Petri nodded as if to say: Of course you do. “And what do you believe will happen to them at home?”
“Not my problem, Petri.”
“My apologies. I offended you. Of course you can’t worry about the people you kick out.”
They returned to their work. They fell back into their normal pattern and quietly ignored each other for another hour. Petri thumbed through his beloved dictionaries and scrawled long, messy notes in the margins of a document. Kim pecked away on her keyboard, forcing yet another translated document into her hard drive—or trying to, at least. She began making mistake after mistake. She corrected, then corrected the correction, then repeated the first mistake again. Her brain and her fingers seemed to be coming unglued from each other.
With a loud curse, she finally pushed away from her desk. She wheeled her chair across the floor until she ended up less than a foot from Petri. “All right. What will happen to them?”
He quietly closed the thick dictionary. “Tell me what you think.”
“All right. They’ll be tried in court. Probably convicted. They didn’t kill anybody, so probably they’ll end up in prison.”
Petri made no reply.
“Look,” Kim said, more forcefully and with a show of considerable indignation, “all these crates of evidence from the Russians. Proof of intention, right? Why go to such enormous lengths and trouble if they don’t intend to put them on trial?”
“As you say,” Petri replied with a slight grin. The answer was now so obvious, it was staring her in the eye. She knew it. After all these months of sweat and hard work, and of unrelenting pressure from her bosses, it was only natural for her to suppress it. But pieces of it kept bubbling to the surface. Little fragments. Niggling doubts and caustic uncertainties.
The frustration was killing her. “Damn it, Petri, Konevitch stole the money. He’s guilty. He plundered his own bank, he ripped off hundreds of millions.”
“Is that so?”
She waved a hand at the crates stacked neatly in the corner. “Bank records. Statements from his own employees. Computer printouts of his transactions, police reports, three full investigations from three different government agencies. What more do you want?”
“You’re absolutely right, Kim. Who could want more? It’s all here.”
“Damn right it is.”
“A perfect little package, gift-wrapped, and handed to you on a silver platter.” This skinny little lawyer who once made his living building perfect cases just wouldn’t let go.
“Too perfect, isn’t it?” she asked, bending forward and rubbing her forehead.
“Tell me how many cases you’ve tried.”
“Hundreds. I don’t know.”
“Any cases where every detail matched up so well? Every date coincides, every witness saw exactly the same thing, every investigator came to identical conclusions? Everything so perfectly, so amazingly lined up? For a supposedly brilliant man, Konevitch left behind an astonishing ocean of evidence.”
She was suddenly more deeply miserable than she had ever felt. It was inescapable now. She was fighting back a flood of tears. “No case is ever perfect.”
She had reached the end of the journey. Petri sat back for a moment, allowing her to ponder the ugly magnitude of her discovery. Americans were so naïve about these things.
He then commented, “We never actually tried the cases in court, you know. Not our job, Kim. We built the perfect little cases and handed them off to others. Those trial lawyers, they all loved us. Such flawless gifts we gave them. They couldn’t lose.”
“I don’t understand. Why hand them off? You said you were a great lawyer. Since you created it, you knew the material better than anybody.”
“I often wondered that, you know. They never told us why. Perhaps they thought the man who designs the guillotine shouldn’t actually be forced to pull the lever and have to stare at the head in the basket. Communists. They could be so incoherently humane in completely inhumane ways.”
Kim wanted to jump out of her chair and bolt. Just run away from this case. Run as fast and as far as her feet could carry her.
He rolled forward in his chair and placed a hand on her knee. “They’ll murder them, Kim. Oh, they might go through the motions of a trial… or they might not. They’ll kill them, though, as sure as you and I are sitting here.”
There was one question left for her to ask, one dark mystery to solve. “But Konevitch could be guilty, couldn’t he, Petri?”
“You know the golden rule of my old KGB section?”
She forced herself to stare into his dark, sad eyes, to hear the wisdom of a soul soiled and ruined long before they ever met.
“Never frame a guilty man.”
The first run at Alex Konevitch came shortly after sunrise. It came three weeks to the day after he stepped out of the dark prison van in Yuma. It came in a large sweltering room filled with sweaty men, less than a minute after Alex loaded his tray with his usual selection of soggy French toast and watery scrambled eggs, only seconds after he sat in his usual seat, at his usual table.
The offer had been smuggled in to the Russians a week before by a balding, nervous-looking guard named Tim. A double divorcé drowning under a serious gambling addiction, Tim owed his bookie, Marty, five thousand bucks after a sure-thing pony did the big choke on the backstretch. Before he placed the bet, Tim had vaguely wondered if his bookie had mob connections. Good guess. Turned out Anthony “the Crusher” Cardozzi was Marty’s second cousin, a lifelong business associate, and quite serious about men honoring their debts. A month overdue on his vig, Tim now was seriously wondering if his state medical insurance would cover the destruction. Thus, when Marty relayed the offer—a favor for a friend, Marty intimated—Tim almost suffocated with relief.
Five thousand bucks forgiven, and two perfectly functional kneecaps—incredible generosity, just for delivering a simple message. Sure, no problem, Tim replied, vowing to give up gambling, and knowing he wouldn’t.
The offer ignited a bitter quarrel among the Russians. Day to day a loose-knit group, they were bound by two common traits—they all spoke Russian, and all had ties of one sort or another to the Russian underworld. The big question—indeed, the only question—was, who would get first crack at Alex Konevitch?
After two days of passing increasingly malicious notes back and forth, the Russians gathered in a tight swarthy huddle in a remote corner of the yard to discuss the offer—a cool half million to whomever killed him within thirty days, declining in value with each passing month. They spoke in Russian, and they sparred loudly and heatedly, with no concern at all about being overheard.
The sooner the better—this point seemed elemental and was quickly agreed among the ten men. Why wait and waste a hundred grand? Point two was almost as easily settled—the first crack would be their best shot. Catch Konevitch before he knew of their intention to kill him. Catch him before he had his guard up. Catch him at his most vulnerable.
If that flopped, future efforts would become increasingly difficult.
The experienced hit men raucously laid claim to the honor. The killing game wasn’t as easy as it seemed, one explained, and the other killers nodded with great gravity and solemn agreement. An amateur making his first plunge was likely to do something unfathomably stupid. Two of the veterans confessed how they had choked on their first jobs. Seemingly insignificant details that suddenly ballooned into big problems. A wrong glance here, a careless stutter there, that alerted the target. A case of last-minute jitters that turned paralytic. A lot could go wrong, and often did.
The thieves and pushers and kidnappers weren’t buying it. What was so hard? Bring something sharp, pick a vital organ, and poke it. No problem, as easy as cutting steak. The bickering intensified and verged on violence, before Igor, a clever accountant with a talent for money laundering, came to the rescue with a way to buy peace. One hundred grand from the bounty would be carved off and split among the nine Russians who didn’t get to stab a hole in Alex.
Everybody wanted to argue about this for a while, but the compromise was irresistible, and inevitably accepted.
Now everybody benefited. And now everybody had a stake in doing it right.
Thus the lottery rapidly whittled down to four. Three had made a handsome living on the outside, killing people. Number four was a blowhard who loudly proclaimed two murders and launched into vulgar, descriptive bragging about his handiwork. They suspected he was lying, and they were right. Nobody could prove it, though; thus he had a tenuous, shaky seat at the table. But having settled on this logic, it was a short bounce to the next argument.
To nobody’s surprise, this proposal came from the lips of Lev Titov, hands down the most productive killer in the group, if not the entire prison. It was plain common sense, Lev argued—the one with the most scalps on his belt should have the first shot. Having jumped off to an early start, at age fourteen, fulfilling every schoolboy’s dream by strangling his math teacher, Lev went on to compile an impressive pedigree of homicides. He was legendary among certain circles, a remorseless assassin who killed without flair or even a telltale method. He had slain for himself, for the Russian army, for the Mafiya, and occasionally, when his short fuse got the better of him, for the hell of it. He was fussy and painstaking, and able to murder with a bewildering variety of weapons, from a deck of cards to sophisticated bombs. He once killed a man he suspected of cheating at chess by stuffing the checkmated king down his throat. Unpredictability and a certain amount of messiness were his only signatures.
A quick show of hands. Eight for. One puzzling abstention. Only the blowhard against.
Lev was the man.
One hundred grand would be split nine ways; the other four hundred would go into an account of Lev’s choosing. A man who smiled rarely, Lev could not wipe the grin off his face. With seven years left on his sentence, he could at least look forward to a little gold at the end of the rainbow.
And so it was that at the moment Alex placed his tray on the table and casually fell onto the hard metal bench, Lev never even turned around. Why bother? After watching and studying his target for four days, he could write a book on Alex’s culinary habits. He knew Alex would quietly sip his lukewarm coffee and wait for his big cellmate. Alex liked eggs, his cellmate adored French toast. It was a routine they shared, like an old married couple. The roommate would pour and scrape his runny eggs onto Alex’s tray, and the French toast would land on the big guy’s before they launched into their breakfasts.
The other nine Russians were strategically situated in a rough concentric pattern, precisely in accordance with the neat diagram Lev had meticulously sketched and handed out. Lev raised a clenched fist to signal the start. Immediately the other nine launched their trays in the air, then began indiscriminately pummeling every prisoner within reach. In a claustrophobic chamber filled with sweaty, grumpy men with a strong penchant toward violence, the spark was volcanic, the result horrific. It opened with an artillery duel of hundreds of hurled trays. Then four hundred men commenced an orgy of punching, kicking, tackling, biting, hollering, shoving, and general havoc.
Lev, seated almost directly to Alex’s rear, watched with quiet amusement. He wouldn’t budge until the riot approached full pitch. The sudden shift from order to madness overwhelmed the guards, who shuffled their feet and watched helplessly from the sidelines. From past riots, Lev knew he had three minutes before reinforcements equipped with batons and riot gear arrived to break up the fun.
Lev slowly stood and stretched. He drew a deep breath and steeled his nerves. From his right pant pocket he withdrew a ten-inch shaft, a masterpiece of lethal perfection he had lovingly honed in the prison shop. The tip was pointy as a pin. Edges that could shave a baby’s ass. The hilt was attractively bound in a coarse, fingerprint-resistant cotton fabric, a throwaway tool, a stab-and-leave-it special. And because of the commotion, a fast, quiet stabbing would be lost in the sea of violence. The odds of witnesses were about nil; the odds anyone would snitch on Lev even less.
Lev eased away from his table and through a series of short, stealthy steps quickly closed the seven feet to Alex. His target was standing now, back turned to Lev, thoroughly fixated on the raucous festivities, totally oblivious that this little party was all about him. Lev gripped the knife low. An upward thrust would be best, he promptly decided—up though the rib cage, then straight for the heart, or lungs.
But just as the blade was swinging up, something hard and powerful banged Lev’s forearm. A nasty cracking sound, and the arm snapped. The shiv popped out of his fist and was instantly lost in the wild scuffle of feet. The county coroner would later note that Lev’s radius and ulna bones had both snapped and shattered. Simultaneous breaks with lots of splinters. A blow from a sledgehammer might account for it. A one-in-a-million kick from one of those big-time karate guys was another possibility.
One thing was sure—the force had been a ten on the Richter scale.
Lev yelped with pain and barely had to time to look to his left. A defense of any kind was out of the question anyway. A giant with frightening speed and gargantuan hands lifted him off the floor by his head. A quick jerk to the right, another snapping noise, Lev’s neck this time, and he dropped to the floor like a discarded sack of disconnected bones.
His body was jerking involuntarily but Lev didn’t feel a thing. No pain, no tingling, not even a mild sense of relief as his bowels and bladder emptied.
The big man was leaning over him, looking down into his eyes. “Hey, Alex,” the man asked over his shoulder, “know this guy?”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
“He knows you, for damn sure. He was about to shiv you.”
In Russian, Lev managed to croak, “Call a doctor.”
The big man looked bewildered. “What?”
Alex eased the big man aside and bent down until his face was two inches from Lev’s. “Who are you?” he asked, also in Russian.
“Call a doctor. Please. My body’s not working.”
“Give me your name.”
“Can’t breathe,” he managed to gasp, and he was right. His spinal cord was severed; his face was turning bluer by the second as spinal shock settled in. “Hurry.”
“Why me?” Alex asked.
“Money,” Lev confessed.
“From who?” Alex asked, not budging, not making the slightest move to save him.
“I…” Lev tried to force a breath, but his lungs no longer functioned. “No idea.”
The big man tugged at Alex’s arm. “Let’s go. Don’t be standing here when the guards come.”
“One last question,” Alex promised the big man, then, staring into Lev’s dying eyes, asked, “Are there more of you?”
Lev did not answer. The final act of his miserable life would not include snitching on his colleagues. He would not give Konevitch the satisfaction.
It was in his eyes, though.
Oh yes, there were definitely more killers out there.
They waited until they were back in the privacy of their small cell before either said a word. They sat on the lower bunk, kicked off their shoes, and pretended for a moment that it had never happened. Benny had not just killed a man. Nobody was trying to execute Alex. Life was every bit as good as it was yesterday, and tomorrow would be the same.
Eventually, Alex started it off. “Benny, I owe you my life.”
“Just protecting my investment,” Bitchy grunted as though it was nothing. His face betrayed him; he was obviously quite pleased.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, that. Well, the riot. There’s usually one before a killing in here.”
“I meant how did you know I was his target?”
