Beyond Suspicion, page 25
When the housekeeper was gone, Rosa turned to face her guests. Her expression was noticeably more relaxed, as if Felix the Artist had done his job, but her delivery was still quite serious. “I’m told we could see target letters as early as tomorrow, indictments by the end of the week. Two defendants, one basic charge: Murder for hire.”
Theo said, “I heard that on the news two hours ago. You sure you’re getting your money’s worth here, Jacko?”
“Just listen.”
Rosa continued, “It’s important for us all to agree that anything we say in this room is privileged. This is one setting in which it’s worth stating the obvious. This is all joint defense.”
“Of course,” said Jack.
“Theo?” asked Rosa.
“Whatever Jack says.”
“Wrong answer,” said Rick. “Jack’s not your lawyer. I am.”
“Like I said. Whatever Jack says.”
Rick grumbled. “I can’t represent someone under those circumstances.”
Jack looked at his friend and said, “You have to listen to your own lawyer. Not Rosa, and not even me. Those are the rules.”
“If you say so.”
“Good,” said Rosa. “Now that that’s settled, let’s talk turkey. Rick, tell Jack and Theo what you found out.”
Rick scooted to the edge of his chair, as if sharing a national-security secret. “Dr. Marsh is represented by Hugo Zamora. I know Hugo pretty well, pretty good guy. I called him up and just asked him point-blank, hey, what did your client tell the grand jury?”
“I thought grand-jury testimony was secret,” said Theo.
“It is, in the sense that grand jurors and the prosecutor can’t divulge it. But a witness can disclose his own testimony, which means that his lawyer can, too.”
Jack asked, “What did Hugo tell you?”
“The most important thing has to do with Dr. Marsh’s testimony about the threats against Jessie Merrill. Marsh did testify that Jessie was in fact threatened before her death.”
“That’s fantastic,” said Jack. “That corroborates exactly what I’ve been saying all along. The viatical investors threatened her.”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Marsh didn’t say that it was the viatical investors who threatened Jessie. He said it was Theo.”
“Theo? What kind of crock is that?”
Rick continued. “Marsh claims that Theo met with Jessie the night before she died and told her straight out that if she said or did anything to hurt Jack Swyteck, there would be hell to pay.”
Jack popped from his chair, paced across the room angrily. “That is so ridiculous. The man is a pathological liar. The very idea that Theo would go to Jessie and threaten her like that is… well, you tell him, Theo. That’s crazy.”
All eyes were on Theo, who was noticeably silent.
“Theo?”
Finally, he looked Jack in the eye and said, “You remember that night we met in Tobacco Road?”
“Yeah. You were playing the sax that night.”
“And you said Jessie Merrill admitted to the scam but told you to back off or she’d tell the world that you were part of it, too. You were all upset because she and her doctor boyfriend were so damn smug. And so I says maybe we should threaten her right back. Remember?”
“What are you telling me, Theo?”
A pained expression came over his face. “I was just trying to scare her, that’s all. Just get her and Swampy to back down and realize they can’t push my friend Jack Swyteck around.”
Jack felt chills. “So what did you do?”
“That’s enough,” said Rick.
Theo stopped, startled by the interruption. His lawyer continued, “This discussion is taking a completely different track from what I expected. As Theo’s lawyer, I say this meeting’s over. Theo, don’t say another word.”
“Theo, come on, now,” said Jack.
“I said that’s enough,” said Rick. “I don’t care if you are his friend. I won’t stand for anyone pressuring my client into saying something against his own best interest. You told him to listen to his lawyer, not to you or to Rosa. At least play by your own rules.”
“Let them go,” said Rosa.
Theo rose and said, “We’ll get this straightened out, man. Don’t worry.”
Jack nodded, but it wasn’t very convincing. “We’ll talk.”
Rick handed Jack a business card and said, “Only if I’m present. Theo has counsel now, and you talk to him through me. Those are the new rules.”
Jack could only watch in silence as Theo and his new lawyer turned and walked out, together.
51
•
Katrina switched on the lights at 8:00 A.M. As usual, she was the first to reach the combined offices of Viatical Solutions and Bio-Research, Inc. That hour to herself before nine o’clock was always the best time to get work done.
And it was the best time to snoop.
She walked by her work station in the back, past the filing cabinets, and down the hall to Vladimir’s office. The door was locked, but a little finesse and a duplicate key solved that problem. She was sure she was alone, but it still gave her butterflies to turn the knob and open the door.
Over the past eight months she’d had her share of close calls. Rifling through the files of a money-laundering operation was dangerous work. Sam Drayton was a prick, and she hadn’t gone undercover with any illusion that the U.S. government would bail her out of trouble. Truth be told, she’d gotten everything she’d wanted from the feds, which was nothing more than a chance to get inside the Russian mob without risk of going to jail. Katrina had her own agenda, and she was closer than ever to reaching it-at least until Theo Knight had come along. With him sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, time was truly of the essence.
She walked carefully around Vladimir’s massive desk to the computer on his credenza. It had taken nearly sixteen weeks of casual conversations about his mother’s birthday, his dog’s name, his old street-number in Moscow, but finally she’d cracked his password.
She typed it once on the blue screen, then again at the prompt: kamikaze.
It stood for “Kamikaze Club,” a Moscow bar where Russian mobsters used to gather with their well-dressed mistresses to get smashed on vodka and bet on the fights. Young men were pulled off the streets, thrown into the ring, and ordered to slug it out with their bare hands. Only one would walk out alive. The loser ended up in a landfill, eyes gouged out, jaw torn off. After five impressive victories, Vladimir earned himself a job as a bodyguard for a vor v zakone, “thief in law,” the highest order of made men in the Mafiya.
Katrina logged on to his Internet server and scrolled down the e-mails he’d sent over the last week. She recognized the usual money-laundering contacts, but this morning her focus was on that shipment of blood to Sydney. The buyers had requested a specimen from an AIDS-infected white female, but the only blood in their vault was typical of junkies, filled not just with AIDS but also hepatitis, and any number of parasites and street illnesses that made their blood unsuitable for strict AIDS research. Somehow, Vladimir had come up with three liters of AIDS-infected blood from an otherwise clean source.
Only then did Swyteck’s theory about that woman in Georgia seem not so cockeyed.
The fifth e-mail confirmed it. The message was to an investor in Brighton Beach, written in Vladimir’s typical bare-bones style, the less said, the better. “Insurer: Northeastern Life and Casualty. Policy Number: 113855-A. Benefit: $2,500,000. Decedent: Jody Falder, Macon, Georgia. Maturity date…”
The date chilled her. All within a matter of days, Vladimir had fresh, AIDS-infected blood to ship to Sydney, and his viatical investors were in line for a big payday. It hardly seemed coincidental.
Swyteck was right. This isn’t just about money laundering anymore.
A door slammed, and her heart skipped a beat. It was the main entrance, and she was no longer alone. She switched off the computer, ran to Vladimir’s office door, and fumbled for her key.
A man was singing to himself in the kitchen, fixing himself a morning coffee.
Vladimir! Her hand was shaking too much to insert the key and lock the door.
“That you, Katrina?” he said, calling from the kitchen.
His voice startled her, but on her fifth frantic attempt at the lock she felt the tumblers fall into place. She thanked God, hurried down the hallway, and forced herself to smile as she entered the kitchen. “Good morning.”
“Coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I had some invoicing work to do.” She could have kicked herself. He hadn’t even expressed any surprise at seeing her, and she was already offering some knee-jerk justification for being in the office a little early.
“Good.” He sipped his coffee. It was so strong, the aroma nearly overwhelmed her from across the room. Then he stepped toward her and said, “Let’s you and me take a walk.”
The words chilled her. She’d known Vladimir to take many a walk with employees and even a few customers. None of them ever came back smiling.
“Sure.”
He grabbed his briefcase, took it with him.
This is it, she thought. Although she’d never been caught snooping, the scenarios had played out in her mind many times. Never did it turn out well for her. Vladimir didn’t take chances with a suspected musor.
He led her out the back door, the warehouse entrance. It was a hot, sunny morning, and the smell of baked asphalt-sealant stung her nostrils. They crossed the parking lot and walked side by side beneath the black-olive trees that lined the sidewalk, heading toward the discount gasoline station and the perpetual roar of I-95. Rush-hour traffic clogged all eight lanes on Pembroke Pines Boulevard.
“I’ve been thinking about your friend Theo.”
She caught her breath, relieved to hear that someone else was on his mind. “I figured.”
“The three of us talked openly at the Brown Bear.”
“Of course. Talk among friends.”
“He seemed to have the viatical settlements all figured out.”
“He’s a pretty smart guy.”
“Yuri thinks maybe he’s not so smart. He thinks maybe you told him something.”
“I told him nothing.”
Vladimir stopped. The traffic light changed and a stream of cars and huge tractor trucks raced toward the I-95 on ramp. “I believe you,” he said. “But Yuri has his questions. So there is some repair work that needs to be done there.”
“Repair work?”
“Rebuilding of trust.”
“Vladimir, I’ve worked here like a dog for eight months. Guys come and go all the time. But I’m right here at your side, day in and day out.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t want you to look at this as a test of your loyalty. Think of it as an opportunity to prove yourself worthy of advancement.”
“What are you asking me to do?”
“Your friend Theo got himself in some serious trouble.”
“I know. I saw the news last night.”
“So we both know this prosecutor is going to lean hard on him.”
“Theo’s no musor.”
“I wish I could believe that. But the good ol’ days are gone. No more honor among thieves, the old code of silence. These days, people get caught, they talk. We can’t risk Theo cutting a deal and telling that prosecutor what we talked about at the Brown Bear. Hell, I think I even mentioned Yuri and Fate by name.”
Katrina knew this was coming. She’d even shared those exact fears with Drayton. “Like I said, what are you asking me to do?”
He lit a cigarette, then flipped his lighter shut. But he just looked at her, saying nothing.
“Please. Theo is my friend. Don’t ask me to be part of any setup.”
He took a long drag, exhaled. “All the time you’ve worked here, I’ve never once so much as seen you hold a gun.”
“Never had a need to.”
“Seems like a waste. Two years in the U.S. Marines, you must be a decent shot.”
“Sure, I can shoot.”
He handed her his briefcase. “Take it.”
She hesitated, knowing full well what was inside.
He narrowed his eyes and said, “Friend or no, Theo has to go. And the job is yours.”
“You… you want me to take out my friend?”
“We’ve all taken out friends. We make new ones.”
She couldn’t speak.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
She fought to keep her composure, then took the briefcase and said, “No. None at all.”
He put his arm around her, and they started back to the office. “This is a good move for you. An important step. I can feel it.”
With each footfall, the briefcase seemed to get heavier in her hand. “I feel it, too,” she said.
52
•
Katrina was crouched low behind the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen Jetta, waiting. The floor mats smelled of spilled beers, and the upholstery bore telltale burn marks of many a dropped joint. She was dressed entirely in black, and with a push of a button the green numbers on her wristwatch glowed in the darkness.
One-fifty A.M., just ten minutes till the end of Theo’s bartending shift at Sparky’s.
Laughter in the parking lot forced her closer to the floor. A typical ending to another “Ladies’ Night,” a totally drunk chick and three horny guys offering to drive her home. Their home. It was almost enough to make Katrina jump from the car and spring for cab fare, but she didn’t dare give herself away.
She had a job to do.
From her very first meeting with Vladimir, she’d decided that if it ever came down to a situation of either her or someone else, someone else would get it. But she’d always thought that the “someone else” would be another mob guy. She hadn’t figured on someone like Theo.
A rumbling noise rolled across the parking lot. Katrina could feel the vibration in the floor board. A moment later, diesel fumes were seeping in through the small opening in the passenger side window. She lifted her head just enough to see a huge tractor trailer parked two spaces down. The motor was running, and the fumes kept coming. But the driver was nowhere to be seen. The odor was making her nauseous. She had the sickening sensation that the truck wasn’t going anywhere soon, that the driver had simply climbed inside and started the engine to sleep off his liquor in the comfort of an air-conditioned rig.
The fumes thickened, and she could almost taste the soot in her mouth. A dizzying sensation buzzed through her brain. The noise, the odor, the steady vibration-it all had her desperate for a breath of fresh air, but she forced herself to stay put. The very act of telling herself to tough it out and stay alert was eerily reminiscent of her life in Prague, not the beautiful old city as a whole but the noisy textile mill where she’d worked more than a decade earlier.
Back when her name was Elena, not Katrina.
There, in an old factory that still bore the scars of Hitler’s bombs, the oldest machines ran on diesel fuel, not electricity. The engines were right outside the windows, and even in the dead of winter, enough fumes seeped in through cracks and crevices to give Katrina and her Cuban coworkers chronic coughs, headaches, and dizzy spells. It was just one more hazard in a fourteen-hour workday, six days a week. Katrina had often pushed herself to the verge of blacking out, but the fear of falling perilously onto one of the giant looms around her kept her on her feet. Safety guards and emergency shut-offs were nonexistent, and the machines were unforgiving. Hers was one of the newer ones, about thirty years old. The one beside her was much older, predating the Second World War and constantly breaking down. Each minute, countless meters of thread fed through the giant moving arms. At that rate, you didn’t want to be anywhere near one of those dinosaurs when it popped, and you could only hope to find the energy to duck when a loosened bolt or broken hunk of metal came flying out like shrapnel.
Katrina had prayed for the safety of her coworkers, but she also thanked the Lord that she wasn’t the poor soul working one of those man-eaters. Years later, she still felt guilty about that. One nightmare, in particular, still haunted her. Never would she forget what happened on that cold night in January when machine number eight turned against its master, when her name was still Elena.
•
A loud pop rattled the factory windows, rising above the steady drone of machinery. Instinctively, Elena dived to the floor. One by one, the machines shut down like falling dominoes. A wave of silence fell over the factory, save for the pathetic screams and groans emerging from somewhere behind machine number eight, a tortured soul with a frighteningly familiar voice.
Elena raced across the factory, pushed her way through the small gathering of workers around the accident, and then gasped at the sight. “Beatriz!”
She and her best friend Beatriz had joined Castro’s Eastern Bloc work program together, with plans to defect at the first opportunity. Each had pledged never to leave without the other.
Elena went to her, but Beatriz lay motionless on her side, a thick pool of blood encircling her head. She checked the pulse and found none. She tried to roll Beatriz onto her back, then froze. The left side of her face was gone. A sharp hunk of metal protruded from her shattered eye socket.
“My God, Beatriz!”
The ensuing moments were a blur, her own cries of anguish merging with the memory of Beatriz’s painful screams. Tears flowed, and words came in incoherent spurts. Beatriz never moved. Kneeling at her side, Elena lowered her head and sobbed, only to be ripped away by a team of men with a stretcher.
“It’s too late for that,” she heard someone say. But the men rolled the body onto the stretcher anyway, then hurried for the exit.
Elena followed right behind them, through a maze of machinery, passing one stunned worker after another. The doors flew open, and a blast of cold, winter air pelted her face. They put Beatriz in the back of a van, still on the stretcher. Elena tried to get in with her, but the doors slammed in her face. The tires spun on the icy pavement, then finally found traction. Elena stood ankle-deep in dirty snow as the van pulled away.
