The Hunted, page 39
“Stop it.”
“And the smell. All that bulk. He comes back from his workouts in the yard, the paint falls off the walls.”
Like Alex was an Irish rose himself. All the prisoners stank. They were oblivious to their own odors, but Elena was nearly flattened by the stench in the prison visitors’ room. She wanted to bring Alex home and scrub a year of prison stink out of his skin. Then take him to bed and heal a year’s worth of fear and misery and frustration and loneliness.
“Alex, are you sure you’re okay?” she pressed, more emphatically this time. She was his wife. All this jokiness was an attempt to conceal something. He was far from okay.
Alex looked down and played with his fingers a moment—a slight twitch around his left eye, an almost imperceptible shift of tiny muscles, and she knew.
She bent forward until her face was pressed against the glass. “Stop lying. What’s happening?”
“All right. Somebody tried to kill me yesterday.”
“Yesterday… what happened?”
“In the yard, I was playing basketball when a man made a run at me. He was carrying a crude hatchet constructed in the prison shop. As attempts go it was stupid and clumsy. It had no chance.”
Elena was perfectly motionless. This was the nightmare she had long dreaded. She watched him and waited.
“I was lucky,” Alex informed her, trying to make it sound trifling, little more than a bad hand of cards. “Two of the cons on my team are investors in the fund. I threw the ball in his face, his nose shattered, he slowed down, they disarmed him. It wasn’t all that dramatic.” He left off the part about how his friends mauled the killer, stomping his hands and breaking both arms to be sure he wouldn’t try again.
“Who was he? Why did he want to kill you?”
“A Russian. A former Mafiya gunman who obviously wasn’t as handy with an axe.”
“I asked why he wanted to kill you.”
A momentary pause. “Apparently, the people in Moscow are offering big money to whoever gets me.” Then a more prolonged pause before he made the painful decision to tell Elena everything. “It was the second attempt.”
“I see. And when was the first?”
“Two months ago.”
“Two months? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I’ve been quite careful since then. Benny follows me everywhere he can. I’m surrounded at every meal by a squad of our investors. A few of the guys watch over me when I shower, use the bathroom, use the library. They don’t want their golden goose hauled out in a coffin. I’m only in danger when I leave my cell.”
Elena reeled backward into her seat and struggled to fight her horror—she couldn’t. “I’ll call MP and have him insist on moving you to another prison. We’ll raise hell. Hold a big obnoxious press conference. We’ll—”
Before she could finish, Alex was already shaking his head. “I’ve already considered that. Don’t. Don’t even try.”
“Why not?”
“I’m alive only because I’ve established a network here. At each new place, it takes three weeks to a month, at a minimum. I’d be completely naked.”
“And if the investment fund for some reason has a bad month? A sudden market correction, for instance. That happens, Alex. How good will your protection be then?”
He forced a smile. “Believe me, I think about that every day. It certainly helps focus the mind.”
She crossed her arms and did not acknowledge the smile. “And if you stay here, it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? Say one of your new friends becomes distracted, or at the wrong moment bends over to tie a shoe. Maybe somebody slips a little poison in your food, or a little knife in your back.”
“A lot could happen,” Alex admitted, rubbing his temples. “They’ve been scared off a few times. A week ago, in the library, before some of my friends made a threatening move. Five days ago, in the shower, three men were approaching me when a guard showed up.”
“I see.”
“Look, I won’t pretend I’m not worried. These are rough people, killers. They’re watching me every day, looking for an opening. I know the odds.”
“You have to get out of here, Alex.”
“Believe me, that thought has crossed my mind. The past few weeks, I’ve lived in the law section of the library.”
“There has to be something. You can’t just let these people kill you.”
About two cubicles down, a loud argument suddenly exploded between a prisoner and his wife. The woman was barely more than a child, maybe nineteen, dressed in a scant black leather skirt, black net stockings, a halter top that did more to reveal than conceal, false eyelashes that flopped like gigantic butterflies, and enough cosmetics to camouflage a battleship or capsize it. Only a moment before, she and the hubby had their faces pressed tightly against the glass panel, whispering sweet nothings back and forth, like they were ready to disrobe and grope each other through the divider. The husband suddenly recoiled backward, nearly tipping his chair to the floor.
“Oh yeah, you heard right. Your twin brother,” the woman roared.
“My own brother. You’re sleeping with my own brother,” the husband wailed, slamming both fists like noisy gavels against the glass panel.
“Yeah, well… least I kept it in the family, since I know how much that word means to you. This time, anyways.”
“You’re a bitch. A whore. A backstabbin’ whore.”
She stood up and jammed her face up against the divider. “Hey, you noticed, finally. Guess what, idiot? I’m givin’ it away to any fool who looks twice. They’re thinkin’ of naming a mattress after me. So what are you gonna do about it, huh?” she taunted.
Until this moment, the three guards in the room had looked on with an air of bemused boredom. Old hat, old story, happy days again in the visitors’ room. A wife cheating on a locked-up hubby: what’s new? A tired old scene the guards had observed a thousand times with few variations. Many marriages lasted a year, some more than two, very, very few beyond the third year of separation.
There was one inviolate rule, though, and this prisoner bashed it to pieces. He snapped, leaped to his feet, and, howling at the top of his voice, began trying to crawl and claw his way over the divider. Two guards lost their look of boredom and sprang into action. They yanked him off the glass, jerked his arms behind his back, and slapped cuffs on him. They began dragging him out as he hollered a bewildering array of curses at his wife.
His wife stood and loitered, arms crossed, watching it all with a smile that smacked of huge contentment.
Then, at the final moment before they yanked her husband through the door, she whipped down her halter, exposing two rather impressive breasts. With two hands, she cupped and then began juggling them. “Hey,” she yelled at her husband, “remember these? Tonight your brother’s gonna have a field day with ’em. And once I get bored with him, you know what? I’ll bet I can get your father in the sack.”
She tugged the halter back up, spun on her heels, and with a loud triumphant clack of high heels departed the room.
“Poor man,” Elena remarked with a sympathetic frown after the tumult died down.
Alex bent forward and shook his head. “That’s Eddie Carminza. He’s up for bigamy. Five years in the joint, the max. She’s one of four wives.”
“My God, this place is crazy, Alex. You have to get out.”
“Well, there is one thing we can try. Move the case out of immigration channels into a federal court. It’s premature, though, and incredibly risky.”
“You might prematurely die in here if we don’t try something.”
“I know. But there are two problems. Serious problems. One, federal court means different rules and procedures. MP isn’t a criminal lawyer. Also he has no experience in the federal system. The rules of evidence and admissibility are stricter. It’s too late to replace him, though.”
“Can he handle it?”
“I’m not sure any lawyer can and MP is already holding a bad hand. And who knows how much ammunition our friends in Russia have provided the prosecutor over the past year.”
“But Mikhail—”
“Mikhail hasn’t found us the silver bullet. There’s no legally acceptable proof that my money was stolen. No proof I’m being framed. Nothing to keep me from being shipped back to Russia.”
“All right, what’s two?”
“If we rush into federal court, and I lose, I’ll be shipped right back here. We can try an appeal, and we will. But that takes time. I’ll probably be dead long before.”
“So it’s a choice between very bad and awful?”
“More like between certain death and probable death.”
“So what’s this idea?”
“It’s called a motion for habeas corpus. Technically, by shoving me into the federal prison system, they’ve created a loophole we should be able to exploit. It forces the government to show cause for my imprisonment. If a judge accepts it, the process happens very fast.”
“How fast?”
“Three days after we launch it, we’ll be in court.”
“Oh… that fast.” Elena stared at her shoes a moment. She began fidgeting with her hands. “Is it too fast?”
“Possibly,” Alex told her. “We have a lot of enemies, here and in Russia. Everything has to happen at once. And everything has to succeed, or as my friend Benny puts it, it’s game over. Also Mikhail will have to move up his time schedule. And we’ll have to pray for a legal miracle.”
“We’re overdue for a miracle.”
“I don’t think it works that way. We’ll have to produce our own.”
“I’ll call Mikhail the second I’m out of here.”
“You have a busy weekend ahead of you. It’s time to share everything with MP, then pray it’s enough.”
30
On September 18, 1996, one year and two months to the day since Alex’s incarceration in federal prison, MP Jones bounced up the steps of the D.C. Federal Courthouse, one of the loveliest, most impressive buildings in a city littered to the gills with marble monuments. The day alternated between warmth and chill, the first hint that another long, humid summer in a city built in a swamp was coming to a close. Elena, along with a stout paralegal hauling a box of documents, accompanied him.
Two days before, Elena had called and frantically insisted on an emergency meeting. MP dropped everything and Elena arrived, pale, tired, angry, upset, and wildly determined. She told him Alex’s idea and MP instantly launched a hundred objections.
It was too fast. Too risky. Federal court wasn’t his thing. Besides, who knew what the Russian prosecutors and INS had cooked up, how much damning material they could throw at Alex? Elena insisted that she and Alex had entertained all the same reservations, told him about the four attempts on Alex’s life, and that ended the discussion. MP called his clients with pressing cases over the next week and foisted their files off on other immigration specialists around town.
So they moved with deep nervousness through the wide, well-lit corridors, straight to the office of the federal clerk. MP signed in at the front desk, moved to the rear of the room, and waited patiently with Elena and his paralegal amid a clutter of other nervous lawyers until the clerk called his name.
He nearly sprinted to her desk. He proudly threw down a document and with a show of intense formality informed her, “I am introducing a motion for habeas corpus on behalf of my client Alex Konevitch. I ask the court for expeditious handling on behalf of said client, who has been incarcerated beyond any reasonable length and forced to endure immeasurable suffering.”
The clerk, a large, feisty black woman, lifted up MP’s motion and automatically plunked it into a deep wooden in-box, a vast reservoir filled to capacity with other such requests, motions, and lawyerly stuff. “First time here?” she asked without looking up.
“Uh… yes.”
“This ain’t no courtroom. Plain English works fine in here.”
MP looked slightly deflated. “It’s a habeas corpus motion.” She chewed a stick of gum with great energy and stared intently into a computer screen. The sign on her desk suggested she was named Thelma Parker.
“I heard what you said,” Thelma noted. “How long’s your guy been in?”
“A year and two months.”
“Uh-huh.” Thelma did not appear overly impressed. “What facility he at?”
“At the moment, based on a federal contract, the state prison in Yuma. It’s his third prison.”
The reaction was delayed, but she slowly shifted her gaze from the screen and directed it at MP. “His third? Inside a year? That what you sayin’?”
“To be precise, inside fourteen months.”
“What’d he do? Kill a warden?”
“An alleged visa violation.”
“Come on, you bullshittin’ me.”
“On my momma’s grave.”
“That’s an immigration matter. What’s your guy doin’ in a federal joint?”
“That’s what we’d like the government to explain.”
“He a U.S. resident?”
“That’s one point of contention. The government said yes. Now it’s saying no.”
She poised her chin on a pencil. “That prison in Yuma, it’s a badass place.”
“So Alex tells me. He’s locked up in D Wing, mixed in with the most rotten apples.”
She leaned forward, almost across the desk. In a low, conspiring, all-knowing whisper, she said, “Truth now. Who’d your boy piss off?”
MP played along. He bent over and whispered back, “John Tromble.”
“Figures.” She picked MP’s motion out of the pile and smacked it down on her blotter. She paged through it, frowning and considering the request with some care for a moment. “Gotta cousin works over at the Bureau,” she eventually remarked.
A sharp pain suddenly erupted in MP’s chest. Idiot. Why hadn’t he just kept his big mouth shut?
After a moment Thelma Parker added, “He hates that Tromble. Says he’s the worst thing happened since J. Edgar pranced around in a skirt. Tell you what, you done this before?”
After manning this desk for fifteen years, she had seen thousands of lawyers pass in and out of her office. One sniff and she could smell a cherry a mile away.
MP allowed as, “My usual cases are in immigration court.”
“Thought so. You never done this before?”
“Pretty much.”
A large, plump elbow landed on her desk and her large chin ended up poised on a curled fist. “Now, don’t you worry. Way this works is, your motion goes to a judge. Now, you could maybe get lucky and it might end up in the box of, say, oh, Judge Elton Willis. He’s a fair and judicious man. Then, assuming this thing gets stamped expeditious”—she winked at MP—“which might maybe happen about three seconds after you walk outta here… well, then the government gets three days to respond. Got all that?”
“Three days,” MP said, winking back.
“Then it’s show-and-tell time. This kinda motion moves fast. You got your stuff together?”
With all the humility he could muster, MP replied, “It’s going to be an ass-kicking of historical proportions. They’ll carry Tromble out on a stretcher.”
“Uh-huh.” A slow nod. “You got help? Sure hope you do.”
“Pacevitch, Knowlton and Rivers. A classmate from law school’s a partner over there. They’re lending a hand, pro bono.”
“Well, that’s nice.” Her eyes hung for a moment on the JCPenney polyester threads that hung loosely on MP’s narrow frame. She smacked her lips and said, “No offense, but you gonna need a few thousand-dollar suits at your table.”
In a career that alternated between roaring barn burners and droning recitations of intolerable boredom, Boris Yeltsin was producing the biggest thud yet. At least he was sober this time—what a rare and welcome change, his chief of staff was thinking, as he rocked back on his heels and briefly scanned the crowd. Nearly all of them were staring edgily at their watches. A few seemed to be asleep on their feet. He looked longer and harder, and for the life of him could not find one person who seemed to be listening to Yeltsin.
His boss liked him along for these things. Principally it gave him a reliable drinking partner for the long ride back to the Kremlin. Plus he could always rely on his trusted chief of staff to lie and say the speech was stirring and deeply inspiring. They were a pair of wicked old politicians. The lies flowed easily and landed comfortably.
A man in a black leather jacket bumped up against him. He took a quick step sideways, to get some room. The man edged closer.
The man suddenly turned and looked at him with a spark of vague recognition. “Hey, didn’t I see you with Tatyana Lukin the other night?”
“Who?”
“Tatyana Lukin. You know, she works for you.” The man studied his face more intently and continued, “I’m sure it was you. Walking into a hotel together on Tverskoy Boulevard. Same place you and she spend every Tuesday and Thursday together.”
“You’re mistaken,” he replied in as much a hiss as a whisper. He tried unsuccessfully once more to edge away.
“No, there’s no mistake. Here.” The mysterious man pushed a plastic case into the hands of the chief of staff. All trace of phony uncertainty was gone. With a mocking smile, the mystery man whispered, “You’ll want to listen to these alone. Believe me, you won’t want company. You’re mentioned a lot on these tapes.”
Before he could reply, Mikhail jogged away in the direction of the road, where he jumped into an automobile with the engine running and sped off.
The chief thought about just tossing the case away. Fling it as far and as hard as he could; forget about it and walk away. Instead he opened the lid and peeked inside—just two unmarked cassette tapes and a few photographs. He tucked it into his inside coat pocket and decided he’d get rid of it after he got home. Who knew what was on those tapes? Why risk having some stranger find them? Who knows how bad it might be?
He arrived home at nine that night, fixed a tall glass of vodka, and removed his jacket. He felt the weight of the plastic packet; he had nearly forgotten it. He withdrew it from the inside pocket and walked directly to the trash can. He promptly dropped it inside, then stared down at the case for a moment. He should listen to it, he decided: maybe the man that afternoon was a blackmailer. Who knew?
