Authors: James Patterson,Andrew Gross
Through the lens I could see an expensive house. Murder was always a business that paid handsomely. I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t see any activity inside. There was a blue minivan parked in the driveway, a European model.
I squinted through the lens.
After a few minutes, I knew I’d better move on. Someone would drive by. The area was affluent, probably well patrolled. I could always say I was up here for the view, but I couldn’t keep hanging around.
The garage door suddenly started to open.
A white Audi backed out. I focused closely. The glass was tinted, but the driver’s window was rolled down. I could see.
It was him.
Remlikov!
He was wearing sunglasses, but I recognized him immediately. My heart jumped as if it had been jolted with an electric shock.
And someone else was in the car with him. I shifted the lens. It was a boy. In the passenger seat. He looked about ten, maybe younger. The Audi backed out and turned around in the driveway. I could clearly see Remlikov now.
I found you, Remlikov. I found you, you bastard!
The Audi pulled out onto Yehudi Street and drove away.
I remained there for a few minutes, making notes about the house. Today, I didn’t want to follow. I had promised Andie. I got back in the car and drove away.
As I went by the house, I paused for a second in front of the mailbox. I pulled the latch. Quickly, I filtered through and grabbed the most innocuous-looking junk mail I could find. They had junk mail here, too, in Israel.
Back at the hotel, I opened the door to find Andie on the bed taking a nap. She stirred. “What’d you find?”
“I found the house. It’s nearby. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”
Andie sat up. She nodded, a little tentatively.
“And
this,
” I said, tossing the piece of junk mail, a solicitation from a local rug cleaner, on the bed. “Souvenir. His name isn’t Remlikov or Kollich.
“It’s Richard Nordeshenko.”
“LOOK!” NICK POINTED toward the modern, glass-ringed house a hundred feet below. “That’s him! That’s Remlikov.”
Andie focused the binoculars. She spied the man—thin, dark, not so large, not so scary. A surge of anger tightened her chest.
She hadn’t known how she would feel when she saw the man who killed her son. And now that it was happening, now that he was only a few yards away, she knew it wasn’t what she wanted. It made her stomach cramp.
“I see him.” Andie’s fingers gripped the binoculars even more tightly. Behind her, Nick squeezed her arm.
“Does he look familiar?”
“No.” She wished he did. She wanted to feel deep hatred for him. Revulsion.
Something.
So this was the killer? The man who took her whole world away? She shook her head again. “No. I’ve never seen him before.”
“He lives with his wife and son.”
“He has a
boy?
” That, Andie hadn’t expected. Did his family know? The terrible things he’d done? When they were sitting at their meals or kicking a ball between them or whatever the hell they did? How could someone with a child do these horrible things?
“He goes out every day around this time,” Nick said, gazing through his own binoculars. “At four, he drives his son.”
“Nick.” Andie put down the glasses and looked at him, teary-eyed. “I don’t think I can do this. I know I’m supposed to hate this man. Look what he did to me. I know what we need from him. I know what we have to do. It’s just that. . . .
You sonovabitch,
” she spat toward the house. She turned her eyes away.
“Just do what you have to do,” she said angrily. “You were right. You
are
right.”
Suddenly the garage doors started to open again. Nick glanced at his watch. “There he goes.”
The man who had killed her son stepped out of a door from inside the garage. He was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, tan slacks, and sunglasses. He looked around for a second, then climbed in the Audi and started the car.
“Every day. Same time. There’s the boy.”
Andie turned and brought the glasses up again. The boy couldn’t have been much more than eleven or twelve. A little older than Jarrod. He was innocent, she told herself, of whatever the father had done. “Where are they going?”
“I don’t know. I want to follow them. Are you okay with that?”
Andie nodded. This scum. This bastard.
How could he play the loving father when he knew what he had done?
The boy stepped out of the house and met the car, which was backing around in the driveway.
Andie focused closer. He was carrying a book and what looked like a portable computer. The cover of the book came into view. She didn’t know why she was even interested.
Chess.
The boy climbed into the Audi.
“Come on,” Nick said. He tossed his binoculars into the backseat. “Let’s go. I don’t want to fall too far behind.”
Andie nodded, about to put down the lens, taking one more sweep of the car backing up to the front of the house.
Then, as if she’d been plunged into an icy pool of water, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, Nick!”
The shock of what she had just seen sent a violent, nauseating force through her. She became covered in perspiration as flashes of the horrible memory invaded her brain. “Oh, Jesus Christ, no.”
“What?” Nick put the car back in park.
“Look in the house!” Her jaw tightened, and her mouth was so dry she could barely spit out the words. “You see that man?”
Nick grabbed the binoculars from her.
He saw the man standing near the front window, hands on hips, in sweatpants and a white Guinness T-shirt, watching Remlikov drive away.
“That’s him!” The blood drained out of Andie’s face. She could see his long blond hair in her mind’s eye.
“That’s the same man I saw running from the van!”
THE NEXT DAY, Andie stayed back at the hotel while I tracked Remlikov’s movements. I followed him and his son down the mountain to his chess lessons on Hassan Street, in the center of town.
At night, I held on to her tightly. Seeing that man had brought everything back—the bus, the explosion, Jarrod. I saw in her face the same pain as that day in the ER after it all happened: the events suddenly fresh and vivid again.
That night I was sure she was asleep, but she was just lying there in the darkness, wide awake. Once or twice, I felt her shudder, then she turned away from me and buried her head into the pillow. “It’s okay,” I whispered, and wrapped my arms around her, trying to make her strong. But I knew it wasn’t okay. I knew the hurt was fresh and new. This face from the past complicated everything.
On the next night, just before dawn, I was lying in bed thinking, tracing the first rays of light as they washed over the room.
“Do you know how you’re going to do this?” Andie asked, surprising me.
“Yes.” I turned to her.
I had a plan. I was just afraid to share it. I knew it wouldn’t go over well with her.
We had to get to Remlikov. The problem was, he rarely left the house. I couldn’t burst in there, guns blazing. We needed Remlikov alive. I knew there was only one way—one leverage.
The boy.
There was no way around it, and I knew how troubling this would be for her. Also, I needed Andie’s help. So I told Andie what had to be done—that it involved the boy.
“It’s going to be dangerous,” I said, shifting onto my elbow.
I knew precisely what I was asking. The boy was innocent, just as Jarrod was. But we had to get at Remlikov through the one thing that he loved most—just as he had taken the one thing from her that she loved most.
“Nick.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“We’re not looking for a favor from him, Andie. We’re squeezing a killer for a piece of information that could get us all killed. It’s the only way he’s vulnerable. I told you before we came how hard this was going to be.”
“Do you know what you’re asking? You’re asking me to do the same thing to another mother that’s just happened to me.”
“I know what I’m asking, Andie.” I reached for her. “I’m not a killer, Andie. But these people are.”
She stared back at me, thinking I was suddenly capable of the same violence and evil that had taken her son.
“I give you my word, whatever happens, the boy won’t be harmed.”
“Oh, yes he will.
He will.
”
I ran my hand through her hair, pulling a few strands away from her face. “I need you to say yes, Andie. I need your help to get it done.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then we walk away. We get on that plane and go back home. We forget about Cavello.”
Andie sucked in a breath, wrapping her arms around her knees. “And if I say yes? Afterward, what happens?”
“We let the boy go, Andie.
We let the boy go.
”
She shook her head. “I meant with Remlikov. And the blond man.”
I told the truth. “I don’t know.”
She nodded, and after a while her body just sank into mine. “He can’t be harmed,” she said. “The boy . . .”
“Of course not.” I squeezed her. “I promise.”
PAVEL NORDESHENKO WAS twelve years old, and he no longer liked that his father still insisted on driving him to his lessons in the center of town.
Other boys his age were riding the Metro. Sometimes, when his father was away on his many trips, his mother let him take the bus lines. He liked to spend a few minutes in the bustling streets of the Old Town, far away from the sprawling vistas of Carmel Center and the heights.
Down here, where Abhramov’s academy was, the streets were narrow and busier.
Alive!
The smells were of leather goods and spices and Arab bakeries. The sounds of merchants hawking their goods in the bazaar.
His father was always overprotective. Pavel wanted to go with his friends to the cinema or the beach, but Father always said, “You can’t be too safe. Too careful.” What was he always so afraid of? Sometimes his mother would let him take a day off, but his father always made him go to his lessons, as if it were religious study.
“There is a tournament next month, in Tel Aviv,” his father said as they drove quietly through the crowded streets. “Would you like to go?”
Pavel shrugged. Tournaments meant work, more studying to prepare.
“There will be masters from other countries there. Sergei thinks you are ready. What do you say?”
“I guess.” Pavel shrugged. “If he says I’m ready.”
The car turned onto Allenby Street. The Baha’i Gardens were in full spring bloom.
“There is a casino in Caesaria. On the way back, we might stop. I’m told they play a little poker there. Just like the Americans. I know a man there who owes me a favor. He might get you in. Just to watch.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know,” his father said, hiding a smile. “I’ve been known to have a few connections here and there.”
They made the turn on crowded Hassan Street. Down here, the traffic was mostly mopeds and small delivery trucks. And taxis filled with tourists making their way up from the port.
Master Abhramov’s studio was over a pita bakery. The place always smelled sweetly of dough. Their car slowed in front of the run-down building.
“Study hard.” His father winked. “There’s a lot at stake.”
Pavel gathered up his notebook and computer, and opened the door. He ran inside Abhramov’s building, on cloud nine. As he headed for the narrow stairs, a man was standing in his way.
“I’m afraid that I’m lost,” he said. “Do you know where Haaretz Street is?”
The man was large and handsome, in a blue shirt and khakis, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. He spoke English like a tourist. American, perhaps.
“Haaretz? I think it’s just down there. At the end of the street.”
“Can you show me?” the man asked. “I’m not from around here.”
Abhramov would be expecting him. They had an hour and a half, and the grumpy old master didn’t like him to be late.
“Just here.” Pavel pushed back through the door and pointed. “At the end. The bakery. You see?”
That was one of the last things he remembered.
Other than a hand wrapping around his mouth, and the damp, acrid cloth that smelled of chemicals. And the feeling of total weightlessness, of being carried away.
And the fear that his father would be angry when he came to pick him up and he wasn’t there.
“MIRA, LISTEN CLOSELY.
I can’t find Pavel!
”
Nordeshenko’s heart was beating wildly. The chess instructor said his son had never arrived for his lesson. It had happened a few times before—always when Nordeshenko was away on business. He combed the streets around the studio. He checked the ice-cream stalls, the bakeries, Pavel’s favorite places. No one had seen the boy.
“He wasn’t there when I went to pick him up at Abhramov’s. I was hoping he had called.”
“What do you mean?” His wife became alarmed. “He always waits there. He knows not to stray.”
“He didn’t go to his lesson. Is there anywhere he might go that you can think of? Someplace he’s spoken of? A friend?” How many times had he told the boy he had to be careful?
“No!” Mira’s voice began to get excited. “Maybe he took the bus. I’ve let him once or twice.”
“He wouldn’t let us know?”
Over the years, Nordeshenko had experienced the hollow feeling when a job didn’t go right. He had that feeling now.
“We’ve got to call the police,” Mira said.
“No!”
The police!
That was exactly what he could
not
do. Draw attention to himself. Now—with Reichardt in his house. What if they looked into him? He’d have to explain where he’d been overseas. And who this visitor was.
No, he had to think. “You could be right about the bus. I’ll follow the line. I’ll call you closer to home.”
Nordeshenko switched off and wound the Audi through the streets of the Old Town, frantically searching for his son’s face amid the crowds.
This is payback,
he thought,
for the things I have done.