The Traitor's Story (11 page)

History

There was a side door, but Finn and his colleagues almost always called in on business visits when the club was open, using the main door. It was mid-afternoon, but Finn did the same now, ringing the bell insistently until he heard someone approaching, an ever-louder stream of Estonian expletives.

The guy who opened the door was young and sinewy. Finn wasn’t sure if he’d seen him before, but the guy recognized him and simply nodded grudgingly as he stepped aside. He closed the door behind him, and escorted Finn through the club to the stairs that led up to Karasek’s office suite.

It had been cleaned since the previous night, but Klub X
was the kind of place that smelled and felt sordid even when empty. But then, he thought, maybe all nightclubs were like that in the daytime, maybe he was allowing his knowledge of Karasek to color his thoughts.

At the top of the stairs the young guy stopped, realizing he’d made a mistake, and gestured for Finn to strike a pose. He patted him down, then opened the door into the green room where Karasek’s guys seemed to spend most of their time.

They were sitting around a table now, smoking, drinking coffee, playing cards, like a cliché they were aping from American TV shows. Karasek was with them, but looked up as Finn was ushered into the room.

Very few people, asked to pick the boss out of that group, would have included Karasek in their first three choices. He looked like a hanger-on. He was average height, average build—Jack had once told Finn of Karasek’s constant but futile attempts to bulk up—with nondescript looks. He wore his hair cropped, but even that backfired, the odd shape of his head and the babyish face combining to make the style completely unthreatening. He was older than Finn but looked in his mid-twenties at most.

But if Karasek’s looks had robbed him of the natural gravitas he craved, marking him out not as an alpha male but as someone to be patronized, his actions made up for those shortcomings. Finn had never known him to throw a punch, but he also knew that some people didn’t need to.

Finn raised the brown envelope in his hand, as if that explained the reason for his visit. Karasek responded by asking the young guy a question: whether Finn was armed. He nodded to one of the men at the table, who reluctantly got up, crossed the room, and came back with a scanner. Finn submitted again, and even stood patiently as the guy double-checked, pulling Finn’s shirt up to look for wires.

Once satisfied, the guy took his seat again, and Karasek got up and came over. The young guy melted away, back out of the door.

“What can I do for you?” He knew Finn’s name, but it was a typical ploy of Karasek’s not to use it.

Finn played him back, saying, “We were hoping we might be able to do something for each other. We understand you mislaid something a couple of days ago.”

One of the guys called over, asking in Estonian if he wanted to be dealt in. Karasek waved his hand dismissively. He looked at Finn, suspicious, brimming with an anger that played out on his face like teenage petulance.

“What about it?”

“Mr. Karasek, we don’t approve of trafficking, and we have every reason to distrust your motives with regard to this girl.” Karasek’s jaw was clenched shut. “But we have some information, and on this occasion, we might be able to help with the return of the girl if you can fill in some of the details for us.” Finn allowed a slight pause to creep in before holding up the envelope again and saying, “This is a surveillance photo, taken outside the church just after your man was murdered.”

Karasek’s expression changed from anger to one of desperation and longing—it made Finn want to hit him.

“Let’s go through to my office.”

Finn smiled. One of his men called out something again and Karasek answered, the sentences too quick and too complex for Finn to understand with his basic Estonian, but he guessed it was about the card game. One of the guys said something else and they laughed among themselves, then one said in English, “Relax, we get you a hundred girls.”

There was no laughter this time. Maybe if he hadn’t spoken in English—showing off for Finn’s benefit—it would have been different, but the guy had chipped away a little too much at Karasek’s authority, and everyone else at the table knew it.

Karasek turned on his heel and took three or four quick steps back to the table. Finn didn’t see him pull his gun, heard only the guy shouting out some plea, the deafening report of the shot. The guy’s face burst open and those around him cried out, not in shock or in anger at their boss, just in irritation at having been soiled with the blood and viscera that sprayed out of their unfortunate colleague, as if Karasek had done no more than spill a drink across the card table.

For a moment, the body looked as if it might topple over backward, but the chair held in place and he fell to the side. The guy next to him pushed back, and the bloodied face fell onto the table with a soft thud. A couple of the guys stood now, but one was quick to reassure Karasek, perhaps telling him that they’d clean up the mess.

Karasek turned back to Finn, gun arm swinging wildly, as if he didn’t know what to do with the weapon now. He used it to gesture toward his office with the look of someone who’d just had to reprimand a secretary in front of a visiting client.

Finn took one last look at the subdued hive of activity around the table, and followed Karasek into the trashy opulence of his office—white leather, gold, mirrors. He dropped the envelope onto the desk in front of him and sat down.

Karasek still seemed unsure what to do with the gun, but the sight of the envelope focused his attention and he slipped it back beneath his jacket. He pulled the photograph free and studied it for a long time in silence, a slight smile creeping onto his lips as he spotted the girl’s legs, almost but not quite hidden as she walked alongside the man.

He looked up. “You’re sure this is him?”

Finn nodded. “Look at the time and date. I assume that tallies with when your man was killed? Besides, we’re certain. What we don’t know is his identity—that’s what we were hoping you might be able to help with.”

Karasek didn’t look down, saying instead, “Why do you need to know?”

Finn smiled but didn’t answer. Karasek shrugged and looked at the photo again, holding it up to the light, studying the figure of the man in it.

“I don’t know him.” He looked more closely still, and Finn knew he was focusing on the tiny visible details of the girl, either to reassure himself it was her, or perhaps out of that same longing Finn had spotted earlier.

“This girl means a lot to you, doesn’t she?”

He looked up at Finn. “It’s not what you think.”

“It’s not really my job to think anything. I was ordered to help you get her back if you could help us to identify the man in the picture.”

“You know where she is?”

“We have a lead. But you don’t know who he is so—”

“I can ask around.” It was odd seeing him this compliant. From what Finn understood, Karasek had never had any direct contact with the girl, and yet he’d clearly seen enough of her to become completely smitten. That didn’t mean it would be any easier to work him over, though.

Finn stood up. “Well, you know where I am.”

Karasek stood, too, and walked with him to the door, but instead of showing him back into the green room, he led him along the corridor, heading for the side door.

Finn said, “If it’s not in the next couple of weeks, it might be better to contact Harry Simons—you know Harry.”

Karasek nodded, uneasy in some way with this new spirit of collaboration, then something clicked and he said, “Of course, you’re leaving. I heard you were leaving.”

“Did you?”

Karasek smiled, trying to look superior, coming across as a pre
cocious but unpopular schoolboy.

“What will you do?”

Finn shook his head, making a show of looking at a loss. They took a couple of steps and Finn stopped, his expression betraying the desperate calculations he wanted Karasek to believe he was making.

“What is it?”

“There might be something else I want to discuss with you. Something unofficial.”

There was a pause—Karasek reading him, Finn making a show of being on the verge of changing his mind.

“Okay,” said Karasek with a shrug. “We go back into my office.”

“No.” Karasek was surprised by the urgency of Finn’s response. “Is there another office? I’ll explain.”

Karasek looked him in the eye, making calculations of his own, then said, “Okay. This way.”

They walked through to the general office, less ostentatious than Karasek’s private space, but still plush by most standards. Finn sat down and waited for him to do the same.

Karasek made a show of finding the office chair uncomfortable, then looked Finn in the eye again and said, “Why not my office?”

“What I have to say is private and unofficial.”

There was that fragile, superior smile again as he said, “My office is clean—the whole club is clean.”

“No,” said Finn, enjoying seeing the smile crumble. “You found what we wanted you to find. Don’t make a big thing of it—maybe in a couple of days you can decide to redecorate your office. In the process, you’ll find a total of five devices, including two cameras. They’ve been there for over a year.”

Karasek was staring at him hard now, his face full of questions, and Finn guessed that chief among them was the question of why Perry hadn’t told him about this. The answer was that Perry didn’t know, because they’d actually been there less than a week.

“The rest of the club?”

“No, just your office. We did have one in the green room which was accidentally removed by your odd-job man—I don’t think he even realized he’d done it—but the intelligence had been so poor we didn’t bother replacing it.” He could tell Karasek was rocked, all the more so because of the complete confidence he’d held until a few moments before. “My advice would be to do a thorough sweep of your office once a week, strip it down once a month.”

Karasek nodded, lost in thought, then concentrated again. “Why are you telling me?”

“You needed to know why I didn’t want to talk in there, and given what I’m about to discuss with you, I don’t think it makes much difference for me to tell you about the bugs.”

Karasek looked smug, his calm restored as he sensed the power balance moving back in his favor. This was one of the things Finn liked about Naumenko, because Naumenko, in the same situation, would have assumed he was being double-bluffed and that the room they were in now was also bugged. Karasek didn’t think that fast.

“What do you want to discuss?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment, and I’m going to place my trust in you, because I can give you something you want, but before I speak, I want an assurance from you that this will not be shared.”

“I share with my closest people, no one else.”

“Mr. Karasek, we know one of our people is working with you. I know who he is, you know who he is, we don’t have to mention his name, but under no circumstances can you tell him that we’ve had this conversation. If you do, it’s all off. And I have to say something else—before you have any more conversations with him, ask yourself why he never told you about the bugs in your office.” Karasek didn’t respond. “Likewise, I’m sure he always had a plausible explanation, but he never met you here at the club, did he, not when it was private business?”

“I’ll make my own decision on that, but thank you for pointing it out.”

“It’s nothing,” said Finn. “I won’t ask you to give your word, I’ll just reinforce to you that if you repeat any of this to Perry, none of it will happen and we’ll both be the losers.”

Karasek thought about it for a second before nodding his assent. Crucially, he hadn’t been surprised by the casual dropping of Perry’s name. It probably wasn’t enough on its own, but it was a start, something to work on over the coming days.

“Good. You know Demidov was arrested. I received some intelligence just this morning from somebody who only deals with me. Usually, I would pass this up the chain, but I’m leaving and I know a retirement fund when I see one.”

Karasek laughed and said, “Why are you leaving if you have no money?”

Finn ignored the question.

“A ship is due into St. Petersburg next week, and a reception committee will be waiting for it, but the ship will have made a stop beforehand. One of Demidov’s men and a couple of associates will meet it. Some cargo will be off-loaded, around enough to fill one shipping container—just over a ton of uncut cocaine, worth almost half a billion dollars on the street, and there’ll be no one there to fight you for it, just three guys, four at most. I want a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for the exact information.”

“Let me guess, you want half up front.”

“No. You’d be a fool to trust me, and you’re no fool. This is a onetime deal. If you want in, I’ll give you the details as soon as I get them. You pay me once you pick up the shipment.”

Karasek stared at him, a noncommittal smile playing on his lips. He knew something was wrong, but it was taking him a while to work it out. It was taking him so long, Finn was almost tempted to give him a clue.

Finally, though, he said, “You’re no fool either, Mr. Harrington, so why would you trust me to give you the money afterward?”

“Because you’re a man of honor, Mr. Karasek.” He didn’t like that, didn’t like the fact that Finn was teasing him with something Karasek probably believed to be true. “And because when the deal is done and I have my money, I’ll tell you where the girl is.”

“You know where she is?” He sounded frantic. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“What if I’m lying? You get a ton of cocaine for a quarter of a million dollars. But think about it—why would I lie? This is just a neat way of us all getting what we want, and all getting out safe.”

Karasek was only half listening, his mind snagged by the final part of this deal, and he sounded distracted as he said, “So you must also know the man in the photograph—why did you ask me?”

Finn shook his head, saying, “What I know and what we know are two different things, and for the sake of our private arrangement, should you decide to take me up on my offer, it’s best if you still ask around about the guy in the photograph.”