Steal, page 8
“Seriously?” I said.
Ivan looked at his boss. Grigoryev’s neck had just enough space at the crook of my elbow for him to talk.
“Prosto sdelay eto,” he said, invoking the Nike slogan in Russian. Just do it.
Ivan put on the cuffs. As soon as he did, I turned the gun on Grigoryev, placing the barrel on the back of his head. “Your turn,” I said.
“That won’t be necessary. Leave. I won’t be coming after you,” he said. “Not today.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s another day.”
I removed my arm from his neck and gave him a push toward Ivan. “Wrong answer,” I said. “Put ’em on. Loop them around Ivan’s.”
I was fairly certain that making Grigoryev put handcuffs on himself was even worse than meddling in his business affairs. There’s not enough rubles in the world to repair a Russian man’s pride.
Sure enough. “You’re going to have to kill me before I do that,” he said.
I believed him. So did Jade. Without my saying a word she walked over to her suitcase, zipped it up, and made a beeline for the door. I fell in line right behind her, although never once turning my back. Out the apartment. Down the hallway. Down the stairs.
I didn’t kill Grigoryev. He didn’t come after me.
But tomorrow was another day.
BOOK TWO
The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
CHAPTER 28
A sudden jolt of attraction mixed with a slight twinge of guilt. That’s what Elizabeth felt when she originally met agent Danny Sullivan.
It was the day after the attempted Times Square bombing, the entire JTTF building was in full panic mode, and yet the first thought to cross her mind while shaking his hand was that he was a really good-looking guy. If Ryan Gosling had a brother, she thought to herself. She couldn’t help it. She was only human, and the thought was like a doctor’s tap to the knee. Pure reflex.
They’d become friendly as fellow agents but never outwardly flirted, which in a way was a form of flirtation because—as their boss, Evan Pritchard, had picked up on—they certainly were attracted to each other. There were the occasional stealth glances during group briefings and staff meetings, and if Elizabeth leaned a little to her left while sitting behind her desk, she could see Danny at his desk. His profile, at least. She liked his high cheekbones.
She didn’t know much more about him beyond what would normally be on his résumé. That and a few other tidbits picked up from conversations with other agents. Danny was in his midthirties and graduated from Middlebury, where he played hockey; he joined the FBI after deciding that the analyst training program at First Boston wasn’t for him. Nor was any other career in finance. He certainly had the head for it. Just not the heart.
That was maybe the most attractive thing about him, as far as Elizabeth was concerned. His desire to make a difference. Every agent possessed that to some degree, but Danny seemed to embody it. Except not loudly. He had this undercurrent of determination, an aura about him. Those who worked with him always seemed to pick up their game. It was infectious.
All the more reason why Elizabeth was dreading his call. She was sure it was coming. She’d let him down.
Well, technically, Dylan had let both of them down. Dylan’s call was why she knew Danny’s was only a matter of time.
“Where are you?” she’d asked Dylan, standing outside of the Moncler boutique in SoHo. She needed a new winter coat, a would-be Christmas gift to herself. She pressed the phone harder against her ear. She could hear a whooshing sound. Movement. “Are you in a car?”
“Yeah.”
If he was doing the driving, he was driving fast. “Where are you going?”
“I’m not telling you,” said Dylan.
“What? Why not?”
“Because whoever did you the favor and arranged that meeting with Grigoryev is going to be asking you where I am. This way you won’t have to lie. You don’t know.”
“Shit,” said Elizabeth.
“Yeah, it didn’t go so well.”
Dylan quickly told her what happened. “So the girl’s with you?” she asked.
“Best if I don’t tell you that, either.” But that was as good as a yes. “I’m going to need another favor,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“If only I were. Who’s your friend who arranged the meeting?”
“That’s not fair, Dylan. You know it’s not.”
“What I know—what I need to know—is how many people want the girl dead right now. Is it just Grigoryev?”
“Are you really asking me that? Who do you think my friends are?”
“Grigoryev is more valuable to the Bureau than the girl. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Think about it. The only person Grigoryev wants to kill more than the girl right now is you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Dylan. “I’ll be fine.”
“No you won’t.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. But it sounded pretty good, didn’t it?”
CHAPTER 29
Elizabeth got the call from Danny less than twenty minutes after she hung up with Dylan. News travels fast. Bad news even faster.
So much for her Christmas shopping. She’d been sitting and staring at her phone in a Starbucks, waiting for Danny’s number to pop up. She hated Starbucks. She hated the tone of his voice even more when she answered.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“I know.”
“In person.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She offered to go to him, but he was in the office, the one place they couldn’t talk. He left his desk, grabbed a cab, and came to her.
There were two things she noticed when he walked in and spotted her at a corner table. First, he looked as angry as he sounded over the phone. Second, he was still really good looking when he was angry.
“So you already spoke to Dylan,” he said, sitting down across from her.
“And you’ve obviously spoken to Grigoryev,” she said. “I’m really sorry. This is all my fault.”
“You’re right, it is.” But he could only keep his stone face for a couple of seconds. He shook his head, even cracking a slight smile. “Damn,” he said. “You’re really hard to be mad at. It’s not fair. You suck, you know that?”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said to Elizabeth in years. At least, it felt that way to her. “Thanks for coming to meet me,” she said. “And I am really sorry.”
“It’s no more your fault than mine.”
“No good deed, right?”
“Yeah. Now we just have to see about the punishment,” he said.
“What did Grigoryev tell you?”
“He said what happened. His version, of course. Although I suspect it’s very similar to what Dylan told you.”
“Is that it?” she asked.
“Oh, and he added that only two other people have ever pointed a gun at him in his entire life, and they both ended up very, very dead.”
“What did you say in return?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“We didn’t actually talk,” said Danny. “This was all in a very, very pissed-off message. When he called I just had a feeling I shouldn’t pick up.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Us? Well, Grigoryev doesn’t want to kill you or me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m sure he wants to kill Dylan, and I’m not sure I can stop him.”
“But we have to,” she said. “We absolutely have to.”
“It won’t be for a lack of trying, I promise. There’s only so many cards to play with a guy like Grigoryev, but I did buy us a little time with him.”
“How?”
“A text,” he said. “I told him to give me until tomorrow morning because there’s something extremely important he needs to know before he does anything rash.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s going to start with what you’re about to tell me.”
Elizabeth knew what he meant. Danny had done her the favor, setting up the meeting with Grigoryev, based solely on trust. He never asked her why Dylan needed to meet with a Russian gangster. If Elizabeth vouched for Dylan, that was good enough for him.
Now, as the saying goes, the situation on the ground had changed.
“How much do you want to hear?” she asked.
Danny folded his arms on the table. “Let’s start with everything.”
Elizabeth drew a deep breath and sighed. “You know those things that you think you want to know, only to later realize once you know them that you were better off not knowing them in the first place? This might be one of those things.”
“I understand,” he said. “Now tell me anyway.”
CHAPTER 30
I drove out of Manhattan as fast as I could, and kept right on driving.
It was me and a high-priced call girl on the lam in a stolen bulletproof Range Rover that belonged to a Russian mob boss who surely wanted to kill us both with extreme prejudice. Forget finishing my next book. This had TV series written all over it.
Of course, in the TV series the call girl would surely have a heart of gold. In real life, she was a bit surly and apparently had a bladder the size of a garbanzo bean.
“I need to pee again,” said Jade.
Seriously? “We just stopped a half hour ago.”
“I have to goddamn pee. What do you want me to do?”
“You could start by showing a little more gratitude,” I said.
She huffed. “I said thank you at the gas station. Thank you for stopping.”
“I was talking about back at your apartment.”
Jade fell silent for a few seconds, the only sound in the car belonging to Steely Dan and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the radio. You don’t wanna call nobody else…
“He’s going to find me,” said Jade.
“No, he won’t.”
“He finds everybody.”
“You didn’t even know who Vladimir Grigoryev was before today.”
“I knew enough. I heard stories,” she said. “Wherever you’re taking me, he’s going to find me.”
I hadn’t told Jade where we were headed. I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Elizabeth. I wasn’t merely covering my tracks. I was eliminating them.
I’d removed the SIM card from Jade’s phone and disabled the GPS on the Range Rover. I had also yanked out the fuse for the emergency call button. As for any after-market tracking device, I was 99.9 percent confident there wasn’t one hidden anywhere on the car. The reason was simple. You don’t get to be a Russian mob boss in the United States without knowing that the FBI and NSA have easy access to them.
As for my biggest concern, I’d caught a break with Tracy taking Annabelle to his sister’s house in Marblehead. I didn’t know Grigoryev’s next move, but I didn’t want him looking for leverage with loved ones if he couldn’t find me.
I glanced over at Jade. I’d tried calling her by her actual name, Ingrid, when we first started driving, but she told me not to. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want any of this to be real,” she said.
A few miles later I took the next exit off I-91 and pulled into a McDonald’s so Jade could use the bathroom.
“I’m going to grab a soda,” I said as we pulled into a spot. “Do you want anything?”
“Yeah, a large Diet Coke.”
“Why don’t we make it a small,” I said.
It took her a moment. Small-bladder humor. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” she said. There was even a hint of a smile.
“It’s going to work out,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “And thank you—for back at my apartment. Saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Do you want a free one?”
“What?”
“A quickie in the backseat.”
“Uh—”
“I’m kidding!” She laughed. “I totally had you!”
She sort of did. “Good one,” I said.
“Besides, I can tell women aren’t your thing.”
I blinked. She wasn’t kidding about that. “Really? You can tell that?”
“In my line of work we tend to have pretty good gaydar,” she said, putting on the winter coat she’d packed in her suitcase. “You clearly prefer men.”
I flashed my wedding band. “Only one in particular.”
Jade went off to the bathroom, and I grabbed two Diet Cokes, plus a couple orders of fries because it’s not humanly possible to enter a McDonald’s without ordering fries.
“Can you finally tell me where we’re going?” she asked, not long after we crossed the border into New Hampshire.
“Soon,” I said. “We’ll be there soon.”
CHAPTER 31
We went from a highway down to a two-lane road, then a one-lane road, and finally no road at all. At least not a paved one. After a few miles of what would generously be called a dirt trail, we arrived at a small clearing in the woods northwest of Concord.
“Whose cabin is this?” asked Jade.
“It belongs to Josiah Maxwell Reinhart, otherwise known as my father. He built it himself about twenty years ago.”
Jade only heard one word of that. “Your father?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be in good hands.”
She peered out the window again. “It’s the middle of nowhere, I’ll give you that.” She reached for the door handle.
“Not so fast,” I said. “Hold up a second.”
“Why?”
“Because he might blow your head off,” I said. “That’s why.”
I hadn’t tipped off my father that we were coming. Some jams you have to explain in person. So the odds that he had his Winchester 101 shotgun aimed at us at that very moment were somewhere between a sure thing and a damn sure thing. Cracking the window a couple of inches, I waved what was the best I could do for a white flag. Nothing says don’t shoot quite like a McDonald’s napkin.
My father opened his front door. He was wearing a red-and-black-plaid wool parka that looked like it came straight out of Field & Stream magazine, albeit an issue from 1964. His expression was far from happy, but at least the Winchester was pointed at the ground. A far friendlier greeting came from Diamond, his trusted vizsla, who immediately sprinted toward me and planted his front paws on my waist the second I stepped out of the car. “Hello, Diamond! Hey there, boy! I missed you, too!”
My father and I shook hands. He’s not a hugger, never was. Turning, he gave my very attractive five-foot-ten traveling companion a once-over, head to toe. “At least tell me she can cook,” he said.
“Dad, meet Jade. Jade, meet my dad,” I said.
“Perdoon stary,” Jade muttered under her breath. Not quietly enough. I should’ve given her the heads-up that my father had far more Russian language training than I did.
“Did she really just call me an old fart?” He laughed. “I like her. Now tell me what the hell you’re both doing here.”
It was a long story, all right, but I didn’t dare shorten it. You don’t cut corners with Josiah Maxwell Reinhart, especially when you need a favor from him. We went inside, and over cups of kettle coffee at his pine kitchen table I explained my working for Mathias von Oehson, which led me to Jade and to the man we now needed to protect her from, Vladimir Grigoryev.
“Yeah, I know who he is,” said my father. “He’s a rat for the Bureau.”
Which is not to say my father didn’t value informants and double agents who gave him intel during his years as a CIA operative. But valuing people and respecting them don’t always go hand in hand.
“Seems like everyone knew Grigoryev was an informant except me,” I said.
“Who originally told you?” my father asked.
“Elizabeth.”
“You roped her into the mess?”
“It wasn’t a mess at that point,” I said.
“I’m sure that distinction is doing her a lot of good right about now.” He’s had a soft spot for Elizabeth since the first day they met. “It makes sense she would know, though. She was your introduction to Grigoryev?”
“There was a middleman—or middlewoman. I’m assuming another agent at the JTTF. Elizabeth kept the name to herself.”
“You’ll need to change that.”
“Believe me, I will.”
“Still, there’s no telling if Grigoryev will back off just because this other agent goes to bat for you. Do you have a plan B?”
“Is that a question or an offer?”
My father turned to Jade. She’d been sitting silent between us, sipping her coffee from a chipped ceramic mug, her head on a swivel as if she were center court at Wimbledon. “What could I possibly do to help? I’m just an old fart, right?”
“Play nice, Dad,” I said. “She’s had a long day.”
“No, I deserved that,” said Jade. Her listening to the back-and-forth with my father was clearly an eye-opener for her. “You’re helping me. I apologize. Thanks for letting me stay here.”
“Na zdorovye,” said my father.
You’re welcome.
CHAPTER 32
I left Concord right after sunset and drove nonstop, straight back down to Manhattan, arriving at a twenty-four-hour parking garage in Chelsea, on the west side of the city, a few minutes after midnight. The attendant asked how long I intended to be gone as I handed him the key to Grigoryev’s Range Rover. “About ten hours,” I lied. I was never coming back for it.
The night temperature had sunk into the teens, and as I walked the few blocks over to Hudson River Park I could practically feel icicles forming in my lungs. You know it’s cold outside when your chance to thaw comes from walking into a hockey rink.
“You’re late,” said Elizabeth. The edge in her voice wasn’t because I was late. She was now tasked with cleaning up my mess—or, I should say, her friend was. That only made it worse for her. Her headache was now his headache. “He wanted to talk to you before his game started.”
