In for a Ruble (34 page)

“Carpe diem.”

“Carpe my ass. Who’s Salomé?”

I resisted the temptation to carpe the obvious comeback. “Salomé is Andras’s girlfriend, Irina. What else is there on franky?”

Foos worked the keys. Franky was a regular. He’d paid for “private auditions,” mostly with Salomé, about once a week for the last six months. All recorded.

One of the worst things about this kind of investigation, it makes you question your own motives. Are they based on prurience? How much do I need to see? We all have tendencies, I’m told, but most of us keep them buried. For those who don’t, and have the funds, here was a menu, just like a diner. Cute underaged Russian blowjobs in column A. Sweet-faced American boy pulling his pud in column B. For kiddie doggy, choose column C. Got a thing for teenaged lesbians …

Victoria muttered, “Jesus, I can’t believe this. You weren’t kidding about the swamp. I’ll take that drink now.”

She reached for the bottle.

“Pick one at random,” I said to Foos.

Foos pointed and clicked. We got Irina/Salomé doing a solo masturbation act, at the direction of frankyfun, who’d paid $699 for the privilege. It took a short minute to figure out how it worked. Irina was on the bed in one of the rooms I’d seen that morning. She stared out at the camera, clothed in a vintage velvet dress with lace collar, made up to look like an even younger girl, pigtails and all. She shed velvet to reveal underwear that was decidedly twenty-first century, then she removed that piece by piece and went into her self-pleasuring act. She received direction from franky via e-mail, which someone was reading at the computer on the desk and relaying to her. One of her fellow players, no doubt. Andras? Boyfriend as virtual pimp? That was more depressing than I wanted to contemplate.

“I’ve had enough,” Foos said.

“So have I,” Victoria echoed.

“One more thing,” I said. “What’s the date on the scene we just watched?”

“Last May,” Foos said.

“See any sign of a scar on Irina’s neck?”

“Nope.”

“Neither do I. Pick a more current one.”

He found another private audition, ordered up by frankyfun just two weeks ago. She used a lot of pancake, but the rough skin was difficult to hide. The scar was there.

“Enough,” I said.

“What’s that about?” Victoria asked.

“I don’t know. Noticed it on the drive from Gibbet. I’m going to check it out.”

“How’re you going to do that?”

“Spy sources.”

That got me a look, but she didn’t press it. “How many clients you think these kids have?” she asked.

A quick survey indicated almost three hundred, with an average monthly tab of two grand.

“They’ve been pulling down north of seven mil a year, minus ConnectPay’s cut.”

“This can’t be about money,” Victoria said. “These are rich kids, right? They have money. They have futures.”

“Another question we still don’t have an answer for. Go back to that frankyfun e-mail,” I said to Foos.

He scrolled through the full exchange—four messages, franky arranging a tryst with Salomé at the Black Horse.

“I’m betting that’s not Salomé. It’s Andras using her account.”

“Can’t check that, if he logged on with her user name.”

“No need to. Only way it fits. The junkies said he was shouting, ‘Where is he?’ and she said, ‘This was your plan.’”

“Junkies?” Victoria asked.

“Witnesses,” I said. “They weren’t stoned. I caught them just before their morning fix.”

“Great!”

“The guy in the playhouse this morning? He try to hide his tracks?”

“Uh-uh,” Foos said.

“He knew Nosferatu was going to blow the joint.”

“What?!” Victoria shouted.

I told her about the playhouse and the explosives.

“Jesus Christ! You’re a one-man wrecking crew. You didn’t call the … Shit, never mind, why am I asking?”

“I removed the gas. Put it in my car. Nobody got hurt.”

“Oh great. You could have been … What makes you think…?”

“Once a Fed…,” Foos said. I guess he couldn’t resist.

Victoria got ready to belt him. He grinned. They hadn’t bonded as much as I thought.

“Do either of you realize how many laws … Of course you do. And you’re happy about it.”

She stood, knocking her chair over backward.

“Nobody’s any worse off than they were before,” I said. “We haven’t changed the dynamics here one bit. The kids were in danger, they’re still in danger—all of their own making. Coryell’s dead. He was already dead—also his fault. You know more than you did four nights ago, when you were ready to trade anything for help. I’m out a night’s sleep, but I picked up some free gas in the deal. And—even though we can’t take credit for it—it appears one of the truly nasty players on the Internet has been knocked offline. This is where I need your help.”

“That’s not the point, and you know it.” She stomped her feet and walked around the office. Foos watched, stifling a chuckle. She stopped in front of me. “What help?”

“I need the FBI or somebody trustworthy—not the local cops—to go to Crestview tonight and retrieve the WildeTime servers, before Konychev or Batkin or someone else gets them. Even though those kids are already all over the Internet, let’s not make it worse by having all that content fall into the wrong hands. They may be useful to you too.”

She took another walk around the office and came back and looked me straight in the eyes. Annoyance, concern, fear, and love were duking it out in hers.

“This is what it’s going to be like, isn’t it?”

“Welcome to the inside.”

“I should’ve stayed in Marathon—maybe even that reform school. I’ll make the call. Then let’s go home.”

Foos winked.

CHAPTER
35

“That kid has to be a suspect in his uncle’s murder.”

“I don’t think he did it.”

“What you think isn’t relevant. What you know—about him, about the uncle—that’s material.”

“It’s all there for the cops to find, if they look.”

“That’s not the point either. And one thing isn’t there, and that’s the kid, thanks to you.”

“He won’t do you any good dead.”

We sat across from each other at my kitchen counter, eating a late meal of bread and cheese and vodka and wine. I’d washed off most of Coryell’s corpse’s stench, to her approval, but I was resisting her admonishments to tell my tale to the police, which had her increasingly pissed off.

We’d checked Ibansk.com before leaving the office. As expected, Ivanov was already on the Lishin story.

Gone Lishin?

I provided a rough translation.

“I take it back. He’s worse than you are,” Victoria said.

Terminal troubles at the Baltic Enterprise Commission, Ivanov can report, of both the technical and personal persuasion.

The service is offline again, as dead as one of its founding partners, Alexander Lishin, found yesterday, his decomposing corpse adding its own peculiar pollution to the Moscova.

Not much is known about Lishin’s demise—yet. The body was clearly dumped, and the cause of death is a well-protected secret—for the moment. Ivanov has learned that the stiff has been stiff for several weeks.

As for the BEC, it appears the glitch a few days ago was only a harbinger of things to come. A mysterious cyber-attack has blown through the vaunted defenses and torched everything it could reach—which is to say, everything. Restoration, if even possible, is expected to take months.

Retribution, however, is another matter. But against whom? And who’s calling the shots? Lishin sleeps with the fishes. Efim Konychev remains in hiding, except to venture out for sustenance, in New York. Taras Batkin has played no active management role in recent years. He’s employing his considerable talents feathering his nest—and those of his Cheka colleagues—also in New York. Maybe Ivanov should plan a trip to that trans-Atlantic Ibanskian playground.

One more question (well, two) occupies Ivanov above all others. Who has it in for the BEC—and why?

“I’ve got the same question, shug. Why’d he do it? Andras.”

“The girl put him up to it.”

“Typical. Blame the woman. Why?”

“Don’t know. But after eight hours with them, I can tell you she’s running the show.”

“Merle Haggard said the same thing about Bonnie and Clyde. History’s on your side for once. What’s her motivation?”

“That I don’t know. I wonder whether it has to do with the death of her father, but the timing doesn’t line up. She and Andras started in on the BEC back last year—months before Lishin got run through.”

“I need my people to talk to her.”

“I’ll ask Batkin, but I won’t cross him.”

“You cannot hide behind your client.”

“I’m not hiding. Nosferatu doesn’t care about laws or rules of evidence, neither do his bosses. You heard Foos—the guy I saw this morning spent enough time on the WildeTime servers to finger Andras for the BEC worm. Maybe Irina too. That’s why Nosferatu wired that place to blow, taking everyone inside with it—including, as it turns out, me. He’ll know by now he failed—and he’ll be looking for the kids. He won’t be reading them their Miranda rights.”

“That’s not the goddamned point. It’s the cops’ job—my job—now. Can’t you get that through your hairless head?”

The green eyes were afire. For my part, exhaustion and vodka were overcoming good sense.

“I’m beat. Let’s go to bed. Nothing’s going to change in the next few hours. We can pick up the argument in the morning.”

The fire ebbed. “Good idea. Tomorrow is another day.”

“It certainly is.”

It certainly was.

Starting first thing in the morning when, while we were warming up the argument over breakfast, someone tried to assassinate Taras Batkin.

CHAPTER
36

They didn’t get him. And in the confusion, Irina did a runner.

Batkin had his own armored Mercedes. This was New York, not Moscow, but Ibansk knows no formal borders, as Ivanov often points out. Despite the snow that had buried the city, Batkin and Irina emerged early Friday morning. He told me later they were going to church, St. Nicholas, the Russian Orthodox cathedral on East Ninety-seventh Street. That sounded an unlikely destination for either of them, but I didn’t argue the point.

At 7:30, two bodyguards checked the street. It had been plowed twice in the last thirty-six hours, but the asphalt was still covered with a layer of slush and ice, on top of which was two inches of snow. That didn’t stop the guards from calling the driver to bring the car. Usually, the parking space in front of the house was kept clear by the city, and one of the guards would hold the door while two more escorted Batkin from the house across twelve feet of sidewalk into the rolling fortress.

This morning, four feet of packed snow occupied the limousine’s parking spot, deposited there by the Department of Sanitation’s snow plow garbage trucks. Batkin’s bodyguards had hacked a narrow, slush-filled channel from sidewalk to street, not unlike the Gulag laborers who dug Stalin’s canals in the 1930s with exactly the same tools. When the guards checked the street, all they saw were neighbors shoveling the sidewalk. The armored limo pulled up at the end of the snowbank canal. One guard opened the door. Two others brought Batkin and the girl out. As they picked their way toward the car, one “neighbor” to the east and another across the street opened up with mini–Uzi machine pistols hidden beneath their overcoats. The guns fire nine-hundred-fifty rounds a minute, although each magazine holds only thirty-two. It looked like the shooters got off a couple of clips each when I surveyed the damage a few hours later. Two bodyguards died in an instant. Batkin was lucky. He pushed Irina to the ground and his leather-soled Italian loafers slipped on the ice. He ended up on top of her in the slush, bullets pummeling the packed snow all around. One more bodyguard was wounded, and another hit the eastern “neighbor” square in the chest with four nine-millimeter slugs. The other shooter ran for it, the Mercedes in hot pursuit, but the car was as useless as the Potemkin on the slippery pavement. The driver lost control and piled into a row of parked vehicles, totaling two Range Rovers. The man disappeared down Madison Avenue. When Batkin pulled Irina up, she bolted in the other direction. He tried to chase her, but she was hightailing it down Fifth before he got halfway to the corner.

I know how it happened from the news reports—four TV crews, with helicopters, were on the scene in minutes—and from Batkin himself. Once he’d recovered, he called me.

*   *   *

I wasn’t aware of any of this until Foos phoned at 8:50 and said in his usual succinct style, “Better turn on your TV.”

Victoria was explaining the finer points of obstructing justice. To be fair, her concern for me and the law she was sworn to uphold was equally genuine. That didn’t stop it from grating. I hadn’t had near enough sleep to make up for the night spent watching the playhouse, the events of the day and last night’s vodka, which left a dull thudding at the back of my head. I’d hoped the combination of exercise and cold air would clear it away, but the downtown streets were too slippery to run without risking broken bones. I’d settled for a chilly walk around southern Manhattan that cleared nothing. I was in no mood to argue my case over breakfast—aware I didn’t have much of a case to argue. I tried to hide behind the position that I couldn’t do much of anything until I knew more about what was going on, even though I didn’t have any immediate idea how I was going to find that out.

Victoria wasn’t buying any of it, which had her on the subject of obstruction when Foos called.

“Somebody took a shot at your ambassador buddy.”

“He’s not a buddy. You mean shot, like murder shot?”

“I mean a hundred of them. He’s lucky to be alive.”

I turned on the TV and was treated to an aerial view of East Ninety-second Street. Both ends of the block were jammed with police cars. I could see what looked like a limo piled into parked cars on one side. A breathless voice-over announcer recounted sketchy details of the assassination attempt.

“He wants you up there, ASAP,” Foos said.