In for a Ruble (43 page)

I don’t know much about bleeding. I called 911 and held his arms above his head, hoping somehow he’d bleed to death more slowly, or maybe the ambulance would arrive in time. I fought to hold down lunch as my shoes squished in the red-soaked rug.

Movement from Leitz. He opened his eyes, ever so slowly, as if the effort was almost more than he could manage. Probably was. He struggled to focus. I think he recognized me because he tried to speak.

“Rest easy,” I said. “Help’s on the way.”

The lips fought to work themselves around a word.

“Just hold on,” I said.

“An … Andras?”

“He’s okay. I still have him. Don’t worry.”

“Tha … That’s who…”

“That’s who they were after, right? Is that what you mean?”

I think he nodded before he slipped into unconsciousness.

Victoria said the cops would get there quickly. She was wrong. But the ambulance was fast, and a second one arrived a minute after the first. I heard the EMS guys shouting downstairs. I yelled, and a man and a woman rushed in and took over. I found the other team and took them to Jenny’s office in the back and the kitchen below.

I went through the rest of the house, still carrying the kitchen knife, but found nothing. While I searched, I called Victoria to tell her I was okay, then Foos.

“What should I say to Andras?” he asked.

“He’s going to blame himself, and he won’t be all wrong this time. But don’t spare the details. He’s got to face up to some ugly realities, one of which is Irina’s been playing him like a well-stocked hand. Tell him another thing—she’s out of cards now. She’s a dead woman unless he wants to try to save her.”

CHAPTER
49

I made the Super 8 just before 3:00. Four inches of snow on the ground, gusty wind whipping the blanket of flakes in the air. The radio promised five inches more. “Local accumulations could be higher,” the announcer added for good measure. Traffic moved at the pace of a cold snail. I was feeling the lack of sleep, but adrenalin was keeping exhaustion at bay, at least for the moment. I told it to keep pumping.

“How’s my dad?” Andras was in my face as soon as I opened the door. His eyes were red, his face full of fear and worry.

“I don’t know—that’s the truth,” I said. “They were taking him to the hospital. He was still hanging on and I’m sure the docs will do the best they can.”

“Which hospital? I’ve got to get there.”

“I understand how you feel, but no go. The one thing your dad was able to ask was about your safety. I told him you were okay. We’re going to keep it that way.”

“Turbo’s right,” Foos said. “Nothing you could do. We got other things to worry about. Tell him what you told me.”

He looked from Foos to me and back again. He had to be struggling with a hundred conflicting emotions.

“Let’s sit down,” I said.

I took the corner of the bed, and he sat on the desk chair.

“You can’t change what’s happened,” I said with a gentleness I hardly felt. “You can change what’s going to happen. That’s what your dad would want you to do. Think about that before you answer the questions I’m going to ask.”

He looked away.

“PAY ATTENTION, MAN!”

I’m not sure I’d ever heard Foos yell before. Andras jumped like a cornered fox.

“It’s Irina, isn’t it? She got you to hack into ConnectPay, right?”

“NO!” he shouted. The force of his own voice took him aback.

“Okay,” I said. “She didn’t. I believe you. Tell me what happened.”

“I hacked ConnectPay. That was my idea. But…”

I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I looked at Foos, who nodded.

“It was Irina’s idea to steal the money?”

I took the absence of protest as assent.

“And again in November?”

He dipped his head slightly.

“She got you to place the worm that corrupted the BEC’s data?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“And when you found Uncle Walter in his office, you called her? She said, ‘Take the servers’?”

“Yes.”

I could have asked, what was he thinking? His uncle was dead, he’d stolen eight million dollars from organized crime. Did he really think he could just go back to Gibbet School and pretend nothing had happened? No point—he hadn’t thought. He hadn’t thought at all. He’d just done as she told him. Maybe it was youth and naïveté, maybe it was first love or blind love, maybe it was just plain stupidity. Two kids, each for their own reasons, had taken down one of the Internet’s top criminal enterprises. In some eyes, they might have been heroes, but in the ones that counted now, they were just targets to be eliminated, the sooner, the better.

“Okay, I understand what you were doing,” I lied. “What about Irina? What was she up to?”

Silence.

I wanted to slap him, then drown his head in the sink. Jenny killed, his father hanging by a thread—because of him. I managed to stifle all that.

“Listen to me. This isn’t about you and your promises anymore. They killed Jenny. They tried to kill your father. They tried to kill Irina Sunday morning. She was the target, not her stepfather. Do you understand that?”

He looked at the ground.

“Do—you—know—where—she—is?”

He looked up. “We … we always agreed if there was a problem … if something happened, we’d meet at my dad’s house in Millbrook. No one ever goes there anymore.”

“Where in Millbrook?”

“White Horse Lane. Only house on the road. It’s more like … a farm. We used to have horses. But not since…”

Daria died, unless I missed my guess.

Foos was already at the computer, pulling up a map. I looked over his shoulder. White Horse Lane was a mile-long cul-de-sac that ran southeast off Route 44, several miles north of town. Foos switched to a satellite image. Rolling fields interspersed with patches of forest the fields had been carved out of. New York horse country. Few roads. He zoomed in on a large farmhouse with an equally large barn, garage, smaller house, pool, and tennis court. The main house, guesthouse, and garage were arranged like a backward “7” with woods north and west. The barn was a hundred yards to the east. The driveway, an extension of the road, split into a “Y,” one prong leading to the barn and the other hooking in front of the main house at the top of the “7,” the guesthouse, set back from the corner, and the garage at the bottom of the long side. The closest road to White Horse Lane, other than Route 44, was Caldecott Lane, another dead end, about a half mile south.

“Where exactly is she?” I asked Andras.

“Guesthouse. She has a key.”

“And you?”

He nodded.

“Hand it over.”

He hesitated.

I thought Foos was going to whack him. Andras must’ve thought so too. He reached into his pocket and took a key off a ring.

“Alarms?”

More reluctance.

Foos said, “Turbo’s on your side, man. But you’re losing me fast.”

“I’ll write down the code.”

“Somebody plow your driveway?” I asked.

“Dad has a caretaker.”

“And if he encounters Irina?”

“She has a letter to show him,” he said quietly.

With a forged signature. Not my concern.

“You set up a communications protocol—a means of contact, cell phone, a way she knows it’s you?”

His eyes bored through the cheap carpeting. If they were lasers, he’d be down to the Super 8’s basement by now.

“Goddammit! You’re wasting time, man,” Foos said.

“I call her three times. First time, four rings. Second time, two. Third time, she answers.”

“Phone has to be on for that.”

Foos banged at the keyboard.

“Back on.”

“Calls?”

“One incoming. Guess who?”

“She answer?”

“Uh-huh. Talked three and a half minutes.”

“Outgoing?”

“Two. One to the old country.”

“Russia?”

“You got it.” He read off a number.

“That’s Moscow. The other?”

“Seven-one-eight number … cell phone … in Brooklyn—Brighton Beach.”

“She’s setting up something—or someone.”

“Wait!” Andras cried.

“No time,” I said. “Foos, check the Yellow Pages—outdoor equipment or sporting goods.”

I was lucky—there was a store a mile away.

“See if there’s a Kinko’s nearby.”

“You’re on a roll. Looks like there’s one in the same strip mall.”

“E-mail a few pages from ConnectPay’s database for printing. They could come in handy.”

“On it.”

Andras shifted back and forth nervously.

“What are you going to do?” he finally blurted.

“First step, convince Irina we’re on her side,” I said.

“I can help,” he said. “I’ll call her right now.”

How do you tell a kid that not only has he been played for a sucker by his supposed girlfriend, but having got what she wanted, she no longer has any use for him?

You don’t. At least, not now.

“Let me get up there first, get the lay of the land. Then we’ll see.”

“But…”

“Turbo knows what he’s doing,” Foos said, shutting the door on discussion. “He calls the shots.”

I was calling the shots. Whether the first statement had merit was anybody’s guess.

CHAPTER
50

Slow going. Only good thing—Konychev couldn’t be moving any faster.

Snow kept falling, wind kept whipping, plows and sanders fought the highway to a standoff. Rush hour traffic inched along. Inevitably, some idiot trying to make time ended up impacted on a guard rail or the back of another car. The Explorer’s four-wheel drive held its own, but that was no protection against the impatient fools around me. One of their miscalculations, and I was done.

Konychev and I started out equidistant from Millbrook, I figured, and we had the same traffic to contend with. I needed to get there first, and I wasn’t planning on the direct route up the driveway. That put me at least an hour behind. I’d stopped at the outdoor equipment store and lucked into a pair of boots that fit. Better yet, snowshoes. Watching one more idiot in an Explorer like mine lose control and take a Honda Accord to the side made me tap the brake and wonder whether Konychev’s Escalade had any better four-wheel drive than my Ford’s.

I turned off I-287 and followed a back road route to the Taconic Parkway. The roads were in worse shape than the interstate, but I had them to myself. As I reached the parkway, 1010 WINS reported a four-car pileup where I-287 and the Taconic met, five miles behind. All lanes blocked. With a little luck, Konychev was caught in the backup and I had the head start I needed.

I checked messages at the office. One, from Aleksei, a few hours before. Call ASAP.

No time for coffee protocol. I used Brandeis’s phone and called his disposable number.

“Thought you’d want to know right away,” he said. “Irina Lishina was treated at a Moscow hospital for a bad wound and infection on December twenty-eighth. She told the doctor she’d fallen on a metal staircase, but he said she’d also been burned. He put her down as a tough kid. She had to be in severe pain the entire time. We’re checking DNA now but I’m betting what we found on the murder weapon matches hers.”

“You got a date of death for her father?”

“Guess. Good tip. I’m grateful.”

He sounded sincere—maybe even a little contrite. Time for that later, I hoped. “You’re welcome.”

“Think she killed him?” he asked.

“Don’t know, but I wouldn’t put much of anything past her.”

“Konychev’s nieces have a penchant for trouble.”

“Meaning?”

“See Ivanov yesterday?”

“No time.”

“He finally ran down the identity of the girl in Konychev’s car on Tverskaya. Tamara Konycheva, daughter of Oleg Konychev. Big wheel in the Barsukov syndicate. And Efim’s stepbrother.”

“Ivanov have any theories on what she was doing in the car, dressed for a night on the town?”

“He says Uncle Efim likes the girls young and younger and isn’t inhibited by family connections.”

I thought about that for a minute. Things continued to clarify. “Can you check a Moscow phone number for me?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. Time’s running out here for someone.” I read off the number Irina called.

“Hang on, this may take a minute.”

It took several. “You’ll never guess.”

“The aforementioned Oleg Konychev?”

“If you knew, what did you need me for?”

“Making sure what I’m getting myself into.”

“And?”

“I have a feeling I’ll meet up with Uncle Efim and his axman later tonight.”

“Be careful.”

“I plan to. But I’ve got another feeling that those two may be the least of my worries.”

I broke the connection and called Victoria. Voicemail. I did the right thing. I told her where I was and where I was headed and that I believed Konychev was headed there too. She’d send the cavalry—but in this weather they wouldn’t make it before I finished my business with Nosferatu.

The snow narrowed the Taconic to one lane, but the traffic thinned too. Impatient commuters turned off as they neared home. Eventually, a sparse parade of well-spaced cars marched north at a steady thirty miles per hour through Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. I kept two hands on the wheel, two eyes and half my attention on the road. The rest of me pondered how a seventeen-year-old girl could so successfully confound organized crime. I thought I understood why she’d want to, but not why she thought she could get away with it. Maybe she didn’t expect to.

A chicken’s hardly a bird, a woman’s hardly a person—one of our less appealing, but no less illuminating, sayings. It speaks more to the insecurity of Russian men than the tough-mindedness of our female counterparts. Still, I was unlikely to cite it to Victoria.

The women I knew in the camps were the strongest people there. They had to defend themselves, not only against the elements, the guards and the system—they had to keep other
zeks
at bay too. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to a corpse on the
sploshnye nary
—communal sleeping boards—with a knife wound in the chest or neck, next to where the object of his unwanted attention had spent the night.