Rasputin's Shadow (6 page)

Then another realization hit him.

If they don’t know who I really am, then they must think I’m a murderer
.

A wanted man. A fugitive, on the run—even if they’re not saying it yet.

Were they just trying to lull him into handing himself in?

Maybe they know
.

His quivering increased.

No, he couldn’t go to the cops.

Which didn’t leave him many other options. None at all, in fact. He was on his own, cast out of his home in the darkening city, on a citywide alert, the Costa Rica holiday picture they took from his apartment popping up on computer screens in police cruisers all over town, a man wanted for questioning in the suspicious death of a Russian government official.

He was on his own.

The thought tightened around him, and the city felt darker and meaner than it ever had before.

He had to make things right. For Daphne’s sake. He had to do everything he could to save her. Nothing else mattered. She was the one beacon in his life, the one good thing to have ever happened to him. An outlier in a life that had been plagued by bad choices.

He wondered what shape she was in right then. His imagination veered into horrific territory and he tried to rein it in. His throat tightened at the thought that Daphne would have no idea why she was being held. She would be scared, terrified even—though she wouldn’t give her captors the gratification of showing it. Thirty-eight years as a nurse—the last eleven at Mount Sinai in Queens—had given his wife the toughened exterior of a Marine, even though Sokolov knew that inside she was still the delicate, sweet-hearted girl that he’d first met thirty years ago.

He needed to toughen up too.

He’d done it before. He needed to draw on those instincts again and make the impossible happen.

He’d brought this calamity upon himself. All of it. Right from the start. Right from the day when, as a curious fourteen-year-old, he’d made that fateful discovery in the cellar of his ancestral home.

The day that set everything else in motion.

***

I
T
WASN’T A GRAND HOME
. There was no such thing in Soviet Russia, not unless you were part of the ruling Politburo. Sokolov’s family wasn’t anything like that. He had grown up in a farming lodge on a small plot of land in Karovo, eight miles away from the nearest village and a hundred miles south of Moscow.

His grandfather had lived and died in that same cottage. Sokolov knew all about their family history. At least, he thought he did, until that day.

His father had told him how Sokolov’s grandfather Misha had arrived there shortly after the 1917 revolution. He’d settled there after a harrowing journey from St. Petersburg across a country ravaged by civil war. He’d found a haven in its idyllic landscape of birch forests, bluffs, and lush flood meadows that hugged the meandering Oka River. In better days, Karovo had been an estate comprised of a manor house, six villages, and good land. There was a gravity pump to bring water up from the spring; a steam mill where rye, barley, and buckwheat were ground; and a distillery where spirits were produced from potatoes. Then the Bolsheviks had taken over. The landowner was kicked out and his estate was turned into a
kolkhoz
—a collective farm. The manor house was turned into a teachers’ training institute and, after World War II, it became an orphanage for the hordes of children who had been left homeless by the war. By the time Sokolov was a young boy, it had become a run-down weekend rest house for the workers of the giant turbine plant at Kaluga, some forty kilometers to the west, a far cry from its former glory.

Misha had worked the fields. He’d married a laundress, a former employee of the estate’s owner. They’d had seven children, more able bodies to toil the land and feed the masses. Two of them had died during the hardships of Stalin’s Great Purge, and the second world war almost finished off the rest. Four of Sokolov’s uncles had died in various battles. His father, though, had survived, and he’d managed to return safely to Karovo, where he resumed working the fields, like his father. Men were in short supply after the war, and he’d had his pick of the town’s prettiest girls. He’d ended up marrying the daughter of a schoolteacher, Alina, who had given him four children, all boys. The youngest of them was Sokolov, who was born in 1951.

As in the rest of Soviet Russia, life in Karovo was hard. Sokolov’s parents worked long hours for little pay. He and his brothers had to work hard too, from a young age. Life under Soviet rule offered few treats, and there was little comfort to be had. The soil was tough and difficult to work. The huge wood-burning stoves were hard to keep alive. Drinking water needed to be brought over in buckets from a distant well. And at the cottage, the outhouse was mired in ankle-deep mud for most of the year. Food was scarce, the collective farm inefficient and badly run. The village shop was almost always bare. Frost-bitten potatoes, beets, cabbage, and onions were often the only nourishment available to stave off starvation.

Stuck in this harsh reality, Sokolov escaped into a fantasy life whenever he could. His mother, in particular, had been a wonderful storyteller. She was a font of knowledge, and while his father would drink himself to sleep every night, she would regale Sokolov and his brothers with all kinds of stories and folktales. In the centralized Marxist-Leninist education system Sokolov grew up in, the collective took precedence over the interests of the individual, and creativity and imagination were frowned upon. Sokolov’s mother quietly disagreed and encouraged his whimsy and his ravenous curiosity. Sokolov’s imagination was his escape from the dire conditions of his daily life, especially after the untimely death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was twelve.

One of the stories his mother had told them was about a grisly discovery at the Yusupov Palace, the former home of one of Russia’s wealthiest families and once the home of Felix Yusupov, one of the self-confessed murderers of Grigory Rasputin. The discovery had taken place after the revolution, when the Bolsheviks had taken power and sent the Yusupovs, along with the rest of the aristocracy, off to rot in prison or face the firing squads. A secret room had been discovered in the apartment of Felix’s great-grandmother, who had been reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe. In the room, they found a coffin containing the rotting bones of a man who turned out to be a lover of hers, a revolutionary she had helped escape from prison. She’d kept him hidden in her palace for years, even after his death. Sokolov had heard stories about how secret chambers filled with chests of jewelry and all kinds of valuables were discovered in the homes and palaces of the aristocracy after the revolution, chambers they had hastily covered up with plaster and paint before fleeing the uprising. He would often sneak into the old manor house and look for such secret rooms, imagining what it would be like to find a hidden treasure of his own.

As it happened, what he found wasn’t a treasure, and neither was it in the manor house.

It was in a small, hidden alcove buried deep in the cellar of his family’s cottage. An alcove that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in decades. He’d stumbled upon it by accident while hiding from his brothers, and at first it didn’t seem like much: not gold, silver, or anything like that. Just three rotting old journals, each bound in soft leather, the bundle wrapped tightly with a piece of string.

Sokolov had no idea that what he’d found would be far more valuable—and far-reaching—than any treasure.

He didn’t share his discovery with anyone. Had his mother still been alive, he would have told her about it, without a doubt. But she was long gone, and his drunkard, cynical father wasn’t worthy of it. He didn’t tell his brothers about it either. Not until he knew what it was. It was his secret, and Sokolov knew he had something very special when, on the second page, a notorious name jumped out at him:

Rasputin.

He couldn’t read it fast enough.

H
ey.”

It was, I don’t know, three or four in the morning. Really late, in any case. I was lying in, with Tess next to me, asleep, or so I thought, her head still buried in her pillow, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Why are you still up?” Her tone was all warm and dreamy.

I didn’t say anything. I just leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder.

“You worried about something?” she asked.

I gave her another kiss, softly. “Go back to sleep.”

She moaned, equally softly. “I can’t. Not if I know you’re awake.” She sat up a little, propping herself on one elbow. “You thinking about Alex?”

I didn’t answer.

She sighed. “He’s doing better, Sean. But it’s like Stacey says. It’s going to take time.”

I shrugged. “More time since we don’t know what they did exactly.” I turned to face her. “He only gets one childhood. He shouldn’t have to have it ruined like this.”

“It’s not ruined. He’s got you now. And me. And Kim. He’s settling in well at school. He’s going to be fine.” She reached out and stroked my cheek. “I hate seeing you like this. Every week, it’s like our visits to Stacey just bring it all out in you again. You’ve done all you can.”

I just nodded. The plan was still creeping around in my head, feeding on ideas. Growing.

Which Tess spotted.

We’d lived through enough wild adventures together for her to know how my brain worked. It made her sit up a little more and give me that inquisitor’s look.

“Sean. What are you planning?”

If I was going to go ahead with it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Tess in on it. Or Aparo, for that matter. In both cases, I didn’t have a choice. Not knowing would protect them, given that I was about to break the law.

With Tess, it was an easy decision. I didn’t tell her everything about the job, and she didn’t necessarily want me to. I didn’t exactly work at Willy Wonka’s, and there was no need to bring that ugliness into our private lives. We’d already had more than our fair share of that. In fact, Tess, who’s an archaeologist, had also recently become a bestselling novelist whose first books were based on some of those wild adventures. I hoped her next oeuvres would come out of her imagination, but knowing her and the kind of stuff she liked digging her nose into, I wasn’t holding my breath.

With Aparo, it was a different matter. Nick was my partner. If and when I ever got to a place where I needed help, there was no one else I’d want riding shotgun with me. But initially, keeping him in the dark would also protect him if it all went belly-up. I knew that when I eventually did tell him, assuming I did go ahead with it, he wouldn’t see it that way at all and he’d be all pissed off at me for not sharing with him from minute one. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” I told Tess.

She gave me the narrowed eyes for a moment longer. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Because your imagination’s way too active and the wheels in there are always going loco,” I said, gently tapping her forehead. “Now, go back to sleep.”

She leaned over so her face was inches from mine, and let her body curl into me. “Too late,” she whispered.

I could feel her warm skin on mine—any kind of bedwear was verboten in our household, by mutual decree. It was a lovely and highly addictive feeling that never failed to get all kinds of endorphins going haywire inside me.

“You’re not helping me fall asleep,” I said.

“I wasn’t trying,” she replied as her hand reached over and settled on my chest. “Far from it, truth be told.”

I chuckled, then dove in.

It felt good to give my mind a break and consign everything back to the vault and enjoy the kind of shared, carefree moment that made life worth living. It was also good to let go, since my mind was already made up.

I was going to follow through with my plan.

Regardless of the consequences.

W
ho took this?” I asked.

It was around eleven in the morning on a fine Tuesday, and we were all huddled around Aparo’s desk: Nick, me, and the two other agents assigned to the case with us, Kubert and Kanigher, watching a video clip on my partner’s laptop.

Someone called Cuppycake12 had filmed it on a smart phone outside the Sokolovs’ apartment building and uploaded it to YouTube during the night. And a good thing they had, too, since so far, the clips and images we’d collected from our canvassing hadn’t revealed anything new.

Background checks on Leo and Daphne Sokolov also hadn’t kicked up anything noteworthy. The two of them seemed to be living normal, uncomplicated lives. No runs-ins with the law, no financial problems. Nothing. The apartment was rent controlled, they’d never missed a payment. Credit scoring was fine. They seemed like model citizens in every way.

We’d also gone through the CCTV footage from the hospital, and hadn’t spotted anything suspicious or helpful on it. Daphne had left the hospital and headed in the direction of her bus stop pretty much as she did on every other day. There was also nothing about her body language that indicated any kind of stress or furtiveness going on. The footage we’d collected off a few cams on ATMs and such hadn’t yielded any epiphanies either, and neither had the statements that Adams, Giordano, and their troops had collected off the people at the scene.

This clip, however, was interesting—and gruesome. Gruesome, because whoever took it wasn’t squeamish. It began at what must have been only seconds after Yakovlev hit the ground. The clip starts with the kind of breathless, shaky footage of someone who’s just switched on his camera and is rushing across the street and down the sidewalk to get to the scene itself.

There, he lingers on the dead man’s body. You can hear horrified wails coming from other bystanders, a lot of sobs and “Oh my God” and “Is he dead” and “Someone call an ambulance”—all of it punctuated by Cuppycake12’s own breathless commentary. Cuppy also tilts up and pans across to show us the people standing around ogling the body, some turning away, others unable to tear their eyes off him, the whole thing filmed with the frenzied visceral energy that these off-the-cuff clips often bring with them.

“Right here. Watch this,” Aparo said as he hit the Pause button. “This guy right here,” he added, tapping the screen.

He was pointing out a figure—adult, male. I couldn’t really tell much more because the image was grainy due to the jittery cinematography. The man had appeared behind some of the people who had congregated around the body.

“Keep your eye on him,” he told us before resuming the playback.

The guy looks over the shoulders of the first row of bystanders. He lingers there for a beat. Then he looks up, toward Sokolov’s apartment, which is where the body obviously fell from. Then he looks at the body again, and turns away and drops out of view behind the wall of people.

“He disappears for a while,” Aparo explained. “But watch this.”

Cuppy gets bored of his gruesome shot and goes around to try to get a more comprehensive reportage of what had happened. So he steps out onto the street and tilts the camera up, taking in the building before zooming in on the sixth-floor window that, from way down there, you can just about tell is broken. Cuppy has a good eye. Then a car surprises him, there’s a nudge of a horn that makes him jump, and Cuppy’s camera angle drops away from the window and goes all over the place as he hustles out of the car’s way. Clearly, this doesn’t go down well with Cuppy, who lets rip with some colorful language directed at the impatient driver before following him down the street with his zoom.

Which is when Cuppy captures the bit that caught Aparo’s eye.

The guy he’d pointed out is also in the frame. We see him come around a parked SUV, get in, and drive off. In a hurry, just charging out and almost colliding with a passing car. Like he just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Which I thought merited closer inspection. Not because he was leaving in a rush. He could well have been distraught, freaked out by what he’d seen. Anyone would. That would be a healthy response. But it was his body language that made us take notice. He was all business, focused. Not distraught. More like furtive. Which wasn’t as wholesome, response-wise.

“Nice,” Kubert chortled. “Maybe the guy’s squeamish. Maybe he wet himself.”

“Very likely,” I said. “On the other hand, maybe he was waiting for Yakovlev and decided to bail fast when the diplomat took the shortcut down.”

“If he was with him, why not go upstairs and get whoever did it? Or at least call the cops?” Kanigher asked.

“Maybe their little visit wasn’t official,” Aparo speculated.

“Maybe.” I nodded. “Anyway, we’ll know more if the lab can get a decent close-up of the guy’s face and his license plate. And we need to try and marry it up with traffic-cam footage and see if we can get a fix on which way he went.”

“I’ll ship it down to them,” Aparo said. “Oh, and get a load of this. The couple who live just below the Sokolovs in 5C? Seems their dog went loco that morning and bit the husband. Like, mangled him, got him in the forearm and wouldn’t let go. Right about the time Yankovich—”

“Yakovlev,” Kubert corrected him.

“—took his swan dive.”

“Did they hear a fight?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Just a small thud, maybe the vase hitting the floor, then the screams from the street.”

“So what are they doing with the dog?” Kubert asked.

“Nothing. She’s back to normal. They’ve had her for years, never bit anyone before.”

Kubert’s face took on that familiar, pensive expression, like he was about to reveal another great secret of the universe to us. “Dogs sense things, you know. They have these powers . . . what we know about how their minds work doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”

And before Kubert segued into another fascinating episode of his
Twilight Zone
take on the animal kingdom, I decided to take my leave.

The lab had some work to do on our little YouTube clip, and I had a date with a large man and a whole lot of maple syrup.

***

A
BOUT A HUNDRED BLOCKS
uptown from Federal Plaza, Larisa Tchoumitcheva stepped out of her boss’s office on the third floor of the Russian consulate and pondered the crisis that had been thrust upon her unexpectedly.

It was a crisis, but it was also an opportunity. A chance for her to make a difference, which is why she had taken that job in the first place. But this situation had been sprung on her without warning. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare, to think things through. Which meant she was vulnerable to something going wrong. In her line of work, that carried some serious health implications.

Further complicating matters was that her boss at the consulate, Oleg Vrabinek—officially the vice consul, unofficially the city’s senior SVR operative—wasn’t sharing. She’d been frozen out of what he and the now-deceased Yakovlev had been up to. All she’d been told before heading off to Sokolov’s apartment was to deny, to deflect, and to report back. After what she’d seen, she’d decided this had to be her first priority: to get inside Vrabinek’s circle of trust. She needed to know what was going on if she was going to have any chance at making that difference—to say nothing of staying alive.

One thing she did know, however, was that Sokolov was important. To her people, and to the Americans. They were both desperate to get hold of him. And Vrabinek had been less than forthcoming about Sokolov when Larisa had asked who he was.

“That’s not relevant here,” was all Vrabinek had said.

When she’d prodded him—gently, deferentially, as was expected—he’d added, “You’ll get more information if and when it becomes necessary. Right now, it isn’t.”

Which gave Larisa her next priority: to find out who Sokolov was and why he was so important. She needed to get access to his file, but she had to do it without Vrabinek or anyone else at the consulate finding out.

Easier said than done. And not great on the health-implications front.

Then there was the FBI agent, Sean Reilly. She’d been told he’d be like a Rottweiler in tracking down Sokolov, and in that sense he’d be very useful. She’d been ordered to get close to him and report back about his progress on everything he was working on. She’d also been warned about his intuitiveness. In the flesh, though, she found that he was different from the adversary they’d made him out to be. She sensed something else in him. An honesty, a decency that surprised her. Which was dangerous.

She had her orders. Her superiors knew what they were doing, and they had their reasons for setting her those tasks, regardless of what she saw in him. She needed to stay on target and see things through.

Vrabinek hadn’t been any more forthcoming in the meeting she’d just had with him. She hadn’t learned any more information about Sokolov. He had, however, generously bestowed one new piece of information on her, but it wasn’t in any way reassuring.

He told her they were sending someone over. A special operative, flown in to deal with the situation.

That didn’t sound good.

It sounded a lot worse when he told her it would be Koschey.

She’d never met him. Very few had. And though the little information she had about him was sketchy, one thing was certain: his involvement was seriously bad news on the health-implications front.

For her, and for everyone else involved.