Blood Brothers (25 page)

She left the theater, walked back to the hotel parking garage, and got her car. The sun was nearing the southwestern horizon and was in her eyes as she drove toward Bjornsen Norge. She squinted at first, but as she got close to her destination, a column of smoke obscured the sun and relieved the strain on her eyes. She assumed the plume came from one of the factories and power plants that dotted Oslo’s industrial waterfront, but then an ambulance screamed past her and drove off toward the smoke at double the posted speed limit. A cold wave of fear washed over Elena, and she floored the accelerator.

Her fear grew into panic as she turned the corner onto the street leading to Norge’s parking lot and got her first view of her destination. Flames licked out of the windows of the office portion of the building, and thick clouds of black smoke billowed skyward. In the middle of the parking lot stood the Haugelands’ green Volvo station wagon. Beyond it, closer to the building, two fire trucks were surrounded by a crowd of firefighters pouring thousands of gallons of water onto the fire from high-pressure hoses. And a few yards from the fire trucks, the ambulance that had passed Elena had just pulled to a stop in front of two bloody forms lying on stretchers on the grass outside the building. Between the stretchers sat Henrik Haugeland, a dazed and vacant look on his face. As Elena drove up, she caught a glimpse of Noelle’s thick, auburn-brown hair tumbling over the side of one of the stretchers.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

T
HE
A
FTERMATH

Elena stood in the hospital lobby, staring at her cell phone. She had already dialed the number but had trouble bringing herself to push the “Call” button. She took a deep breath to calm herself and pressed it. She brought the phone to her ear and listened. It rang twice and she almost hoped her call would go into voice mail, but it didn’t. There was a click followed by a familiar voice. “Hello. Ben Corbin.”

“Ben, it’s Elena.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m at the hospital. I—”

“What happened?” asked Ben urgently. “Where’s Noelle?”

“She’s been shot in the leg and she has smoke-inhalation injuries, but the doctor says she’ll be okay. She’s in preterm labor, though. They’re trying to stop it, but they don’t know if they can.”

“Shot? Smoke inhalation?” repeated Ben, his voice rising.
“What happened?”

“I’m not really sure. I . . .” Elena closed her eyes and forced the words out. “I wasn’t there.”

“Where were you?”

“I was, well, I dropped off Noelle and then I went out shopping for my family,” she confessed, fighting back tears. “Then I went—”

Ben cut her off. “Never mind. I’m going to get over there as fast as I can. Call me if there’s any news.” There was a click and the phone went dead.

Elena reflexively dropped the phone into her purse. She found an isolated seat near a window where the last light of the dying day cast a fading glow on the nearly empty interior of the Rikshospitalet lobby. She put her face in her hands and started to cry.

“Takk. Hvis jeg husker noe videre skal jeg ringe deg.”
Karl hung up the phone and gazed blankly at his computer monitor for several minutes, his mind whirling. The last thing he’d been expecting was a call from the Oslo Police District. What the officer had told him seemed surreal—Noelle Corbin apparently had made a secret visit to Bjornsen Norge with Gunnar’s old conspirator, Henrik Haugeland. Someone had shot her and Haugeland’s son and then set fire to the building. After the Cleverlad fiasco at the preliminary-injunction trial, Karl had no difficulty guessing what Noelle and Henrik had been doing, but who had attacked them?

A loyal employee who discovered what they were up to? No, too extreme. Plus, that didn’t explain the fire. A random criminal who broke into the building intending burglary, but was surprised to find someone there? That was possible; drug warehouses often had theft problems. Having found people—witnesses—in what he thought was an unoccupied building, the thief might have decided to kill them to avoid detection and then set fire to the building to destroy the evidence of his crimes. The police were leaning toward that theory, but Karl suspected that murder had been the intruder’s main objective from the start.

Was Cleverlad responsible? Karl had expected that George would eventually discover that the “Neurostim” he had received was fake, but the magnitude of his retaliation—if that’s what this was—surprised Karl.

Karl was half inclined to let the matter lie, at least for the time being. Insurance would cover the fire damage, and the Norwegian police probably would do a reasonably competent investigation, though he doubted they would catch the perpetrator.

Unfortunately, however, the perpetrator needed to be caught. Karl had no doubt whom Ben Corbin and Gunnar would suspect, and he could not afford to let them lay those suspicions out for a jury—or the Norwegian police. And how would that play out if the perpetrator was George or one of his henchmen? Karl frowned for a moment. Then his expression brightened as a new idea occurred to him. There was an opportunity here to make some real progress if the situation was handled right.

The phone rang again. This time, Gunnar’s number appeared on the caller ID. Karl let it go to voice mail, then played his brother’s message. “Karl, it’s Gunnar. I need to talk to you. Call me at home. It’s not about the lawsuit.”

Karl grinned humorlessly. Sure. Of course it wasn’t about the lawsuit; it was about the fire and shootings. And of course it would never occur to Gunnar or his lawyer to try to tell the jury about those. And Gunnar would certainly never use the threat of that prospect to pressure his little brother ahead of the trial. Well, Gunnar and his threats could wait. Karl would call him back when events had unfolded a little further.

Ben stood in the neonatal-intensive-care unit, looking down at his son. Eric Benjamin Corbin had been born while Ben was somewhere over the North Atlantic. He weighed barely four pounds and was pitifully thin and fragile-looking. Wires were attached to his tiny body in various places and ran through an opening in his incubator to a bank of monitors that displayed his pulse, respiration rate, body temperature, blood oxygenation, and several other vital statistics that Ben couldn’t immediately identify. Ben reached out and touched the hard plastic of the incubator. It was blood-warm, since Eric’s body could not maintain its temperature.

“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” said Noelle from her wheelchair at Ben’s side.

“He is,” said Ben. “It’s such a relief to see him lying there and breathing and to have you here beside me. I was scared to death after Elena called. I prayed the whole way over on the plane. The guy sitting next to me asked the flight attendant for a different seat. I think he figured I was a terrorist or something.”

Noelle smiled up at her husband and took his hand. “Thanks—for praying for me and for getting over here so fast. I love you.”

He smiled back and squeezed her hand. “I know. I love you too. Is there anything I can do for you now that I’m here?”

She leaned her head against his arm. “You’re doing it now.”

They watched Eric in silence. He opened his eyes and stretched and moved his arms and legs randomly for a few seconds. Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. “He’s so tiny,” said Ben. “He looks like he would break if I touched him.”

“Dr. Bakke says he’ll grow a lot over the next couple of weeks,” replied Noelle. “She’s pretty sure that he’ll be fine, but for right now they want to be extra careful with him. He’s been through a lot.”

“So have you.” Ben glanced at the armed police guards outside the nursery door. “I haven’t heard much about what happened. Are you up for talking about it?”

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Sure. I’ve already talked about it twice with the police. Last night, I was marking documents for Einar—Henrik Haugeland’s son—to copy. Henrik was in back looking at archived files. I heard Einar shouting and I went into the hallway to see what was going on. Einar was wrestling with some guy I’d never seen before and yelling at the top of his lungs. I ran back to look for a phone where I could call the police and try to get someone who spoke English, fast. I heard some shots from the hallway and then a few seconds later the guy burst into the room where I was. He pointed his gun at me from about five feet away. Just as the gun went off, Einar came through the door and hit the guy’s arm. The bullet hit me in the leg and I fell down. He and Einar started fighting for the gun again. Einar had already been shot; I could see blood on his clothes. Then the gun went off again and Einar was down too.” Her composure started to crack and her voice shook. “I could see the hole in his back where the bullet had just come out. It was awful.” She began to cry.

Ben bent down and put his arm around her. “That’s okay, babe. Sergei’s talking to the police right now. I’ll get a report from him. I shouldn’t have brought it up with you. Let’s talk about something that makes you happy.”

She sniffed and smiled through her tears. “Well, it would make me happy to hear you promise to change half of Eric’s dirty diapers and get up with him on half the nights.”

Karl sat in a wrought-iron chair on the balcony of his apartment, a glass of iced tea on a little table at his elbow. A light breeze ruffled the pages of the dossier he held, which had arrived an hour ago from Alex Geist’s firm. The first section contained a detailed biography of George Kulish. He had been born in Kiev twenty-six years ago to an unremarkable family. His father was an engineer and his mother managed a local grocery store. George’s teachers and parents had soon realized he was exceptionally bright and had done their best to give him a good education. They did a good-enough job for George to receive a scholarship to MIT when he was sixteen.

George’s years at MIT had been troubled. He got straight As, but he routinely violated school rules. At first, the school tolerated his misbehavior on the theory that he was having difficulty adjusting to life away from home and living in an alien culture. But eventually they cracked down on him. He was expelled and deported in the middle of his junior year, when the school caught him hacking into the registrar’s computer system—a feat that the registrar’s office had thought impossible—and changing other students’ grades for money.

Back in Ukraine, George promptly landed a job with a computer-security company. He worked there for two years and apparently did good work. He received large bonuses each year and was promoted twice. However, his employer ran into legal difficulties for helping some of their customers build security systems specifically designed to prevent government surveillance. The company shut down its Ukrainian unit as a result, and George found himself unemployed.

Next, he began doing freelance consulting. His services were in high demand, particularly in the Ukrainian and Russian underworlds. He already had prodigious talents for both creating and hacking into computer security systems. He now branched out and began doing electronic money laundering and website design for several of the more sophisticated drug gangs and their front operations.

The turning point in George’s career came three years ago. A smuggling ring hired him to hack into the system of a financially troubled drug wholesaler in northern Russia and make its computers crash on the eve of a crucial shipment. The wholesaler would go bankrupt, and George’s clients could buy it for a song at the bankruptcy auction. They could then use it as a front for their business, and it would probably even make some money on its own if competently run. All went as planned at first—George successfully wrecked the company’s computer system and it missed the shipment deadline, losing a key customer in the process. It went bankrupt shortly thereafter.

But then George learned that the smugglers had decided not to pay his fee. Geist’s report was unclear on how George had made this discovery, but the results were soon obvious. Less than a week later, the head of the ring died when the electric fence at his dacha malfunctioned. The coroner ruled the death accidental and blamed a bug in the software that operated the fence. The police anonymously received copies of the other members’ bank statements the same day and arrested them for tax evasion.

Meanwhile, the bankruptcy proceeded and George made it known that he intended to submit a bid for the wholesaler he had ruined. No one bid against him. He took possession of the company’s assets and relaunched the business as Cleverlad.ru. He moved from Moscow to Yuragorsk and made it his base of operations. He quickly reached agreements with the local
militsiya
—law-enforcement authorities—and within a few months, Cleverlad.ru and a cluster of affiliated entities were doing brisk business. George stayed away from traditional drugs like heroin and meth, which would have brought him into conflict with his former clients. Instead, he focused on selling prescription drugs without prescriptions.