Authors: Brian Haig
“Then Russia, right?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t see that you have a choice, pal. You better get back there fast,” Eugene advised.
“Do you think?”
“You better rescind those letters before anybody can act on them.”
“I have other worries right now,” Alex replied almost absently. He reached up and switched on the overhead light, which thankfully
seemed to be the one thing in the car that functioned properly. He began flipping through passports and thumbing the pages.
“You know what?” Eugene announced, lurching forward in his seat.
“I think you’re about to tell me what.”
“Damn right I am. I think you got conked on the head harder than you realize. You’re not thinking clearly. They could empty
out your bank accounts in hours and, in a day or so, swipe all the investors’ money in your banks.”
“Don’t you think that’s a lot of cash to haul away?” Alex replied, curiously indifferent.
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. Come on, pal. They’ll wire it all to a bank in the Azores or Switzerland. Then
it’ll shuttle around to a hundred banks and fall off the radar.”
With no small amount of pleasure, Alex said, “I don’t think so.”
“Think harder.”
“The people who forced me to sign those letters know nothing about banking. To move even a dollar they need my account numbers
and the security codes.”
“Oh.”
“And those are all locked away in a safe in my office, guarded around the clock. They didn’t know enough to ask about the
numbers and I wasn’t in the mood to educate them.”
Elena reached over and patted her husband on the leg. “You’re a genius.”
His nose was stuffed back inside the passports.
Sergei Golitsin sat behind Alex Konevitch’s massive hand-carved desk and stared across it at the ten hungry faces around the
long conference table. The irony of using Alex’s own office as a command post to track him down and kill him was too delicious.
A phone was positioned directly in front of each man. A yellow notepad and a slew of satphones were poised within arm’s reach.
Empty coffee mugs littered the table. Ashtrays overflowed with snuffed-out butts. A large, 10,000-to-1 map of Hungary was
taped to a wall, with dozens of little yellow and red pins stuck here and there. Another map, even larger, displaying the
entire European continent and punctured with a similar mixture of multicolored pins, was fastened to the adjoining wall.
The men inside the room knew the address of Konevitch’s unpretentious but nicely located Parisian apartment. They knew what
hotels he preferred when he traveled, as well as the address of each and every office and subsidiary of Konevitch Associates
outside the Russian border. A pin for each one, with a man or two now lurking at each destination. A mushroom of cigarette
smoke rose from the table and swirled in cancerous eddies just below the ceiling.
Below them, the six floors of Konevitch Associates were nearly deserted. A handpicked crew of security guards ambled around
the building; otherwise, the employees were home, cleaning up after dinner, mixing it up with their lovers, or snoring loudly
in their beds. A few hyperambitious souls had tried to work late, but the guards had chased them out and shut down their phones
and computers.
A sign was posted on the front door downstairs announcing a two-day holiday. A squad of burly guards would be placed there
in the morning to make sure everybody got the message.
At that second, for the first time in two frantic hours, only one noise interrupted the sound of breathing—a buzzing that
emanated from a specialist and his assistant employing a noisy instrument of some sort to crack a wall safe. The specialist
had twice reassured everybody it was going “super splendidly.” No hitches. No surprises, and Golitsin had good reason not
to doubt him.
Six months before, when Alex Konevitch had ordered a personal safe to be installed in his office, the job naturally landed
on the desk of his corporate security chief. Golitsin promptly handed it off to a black job specialist who once worked under
him at the KGB, a master thief with an encyclopedic knowledge of safes and locks. Golitsin’s instructions were precise and
contradictory.
Nothing but the best brand on the market for the boss. Something sturdy, something imposing in appearance, something with
a tidy reputation for quality, he’d emphasized; in other words, something that would duly impress its owner.
Just be damn sure the model was one he was sure he could crack; within two hours or less would do the trick nicely.
Golitsin’s top deputy, Felix Glebov, eventually broke the awkward silence. “It’s been three hours. Where is he?”
“Still running,” Golitsin said, eyes blazing down the table with a look that could curdle bowels. “A scared rabbit, fleeing
for his life.” He paused briefly to scratch his chin. “Successfully, apparently, because he’s up against a bunch of incompetent
twits.”
One of the twits, large, with a neck that moved like a tank turret, spoke up, a nervous attempt to deflect blame from his
overgrown shoulders. “I have ten good people at the Budapest train station. Twenty more at the airport, a man at each ticket
counter. All former KGB or Hungarian secret police. Another squad is hanging out at the arrival gate at Sheremetyevo Airport
in the event they make it this far.” Eager to impress everybody with his efficiency, he added, “They all have color pictures.”
“Good for you,” replied the next twit in line, a man with a skinny, pockmarked face and puffy eyes who lost no time launching
his own accomplishments. “Only two minutes ago I got off the phone with the deputy minister of Hungarian Security. He has
two children in private school and is cracking heads to collect the hundred thousand bounty I promised if he catches them.
An hour ago, a red alert went out to all customs offices. They and the police have been notified a murderer and his accomplices
are trying to flee.”
He paused to be sure everybody heard the next point. “Katya and one her people gave statements to the police. Said they witnessed
Konevitch stick a knife in a man’s back at the airport. Said they thought they recognized his face from photos in a Russian
magazine, but couldn’t remember if he was a movie star or what. Took them a while to figure it out, so now they’re reporting
it.”
That last clever move was Katya’s brainchild. Of course he felt no obligation to mention it now.
The next man, introduced by Golitsin to the others earlier that evening as Nicky—no last name, no formal introduction, just
plain Nicky—sat for a moment, sucking deeply from a black che-root, bored out of his mind, trying to entertain himself watching
the safecrackers at work. Dressed head to toe in shiny black leather, down to his dapper biker boots, he was the only man
present who did not get the executive-suite dress code. He was also the only non-employee of Konevitch Associates, the only
one not hired by Golitsin over the past year for what they brought to this table.
Lacking a KGB background, he was also happily clueless about the reporting procedures.
Eventually the silence grabbed his attention and he noticed everybody staring at him. He crushed his cigarette on the tabletop,
flashed an amused sneer, then held it long enough for everybody to get the message. Nicky came from a different world, one
without silly protocols, a world with but one simple rule: rules are meant to be broken.
But even without the last name—despite never having seen him face-to-face—half the men around the table were sure they knew
who he was. A photo of his face had hung in a place of honor on KGB walls long enough to grow mold. A much younger face, certainly.
A little thinner, maybe, without the cute ponytail laced with gray that bounced when he strutted. One with considerably less
scars, absent the gallery of tattoos on the neck, and certainly before the huge nose had been rearranged into a bent banana.
Nicky, aka Igor, aka Leon, or a half dozen other transient aliases he had used and thrown away in his illustrious career,
was in fact one Nickolas Kozyrev, head of the largest crime syndicate in Russia.
How ironic that they were all now sharing the same table, smoking and sipping coffee like old pals. In their previous lives,
they had spent countless hours chasing Nicky around the shadows. Typical gruntwork for the police ordinarily, except Nicky’s
kingdom had tentacles in every Russian city, webs that stretched across Europe and Asia, and bustling branch offices in Brighton
Beach and Miami. Nicky was known and wanted by police forces from New York to Timbuktu. Three different American presidents
and an army of other world leaders had bombarded two different general secretaries with strong requests to get Nicky off the
street.
Among assorted other enterprises, Nicky wholesaled kidnapped girls to whorehouses, owned a string of porn studios, blackmarketed,
smuggled arms, traded in stolen cars, gems, artwork, pushed heroin and an assortment of other illegal pharmaceuticals, and
most recently, was making a loud splash in Russia’s burgeoning executive kidnapping market. Wherever there was illicit profit
to be made, Nicky pushed his sticky fingers in. Contract murder had long been a mainstay of his repertoire. The sheer breadth,
expanse, and outright violence of his operation proved too considerable for the police to handle; not to mention wildly exaggerated
suspicions that Nicky owned half the senior police officers in the country.
A quarter was more like it.
Thus the KBG was brought into the hunt and encouraged to use every filthy trick in its arsenal.
And despite every effort, despite years of exhausting work, they had never come close. Not even close.
“Tell me again,” Nicky opened, his eyes dancing playfully around the table, “exactly how this guy got away.”
He knew damn well how Konevitch escaped. They had already been over it, in detail. Twice. But he despised these former KGB
boys. He would keep asking again and again, because it amused him to rub their faces in it.
Making no effort to disguise his irritation, Golitsin said, “Why does it matter? He got away. Now we’ll find him.”
“It matters because I say it does.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to figure out how all your morons got made asses of.” His lips curled and he watched Golitsin. “Remind
me, how old is this Konevitch guy? Who trained him to be such a Houdini? The KGB? The army?”
“Vladimir was the moron who let this happen. He was your man, last time I checked.”
“Yeah, on loan to you for the past year, last time I checked. When I sent you Vladimir, he was a real killing machine. Your
cretins polluted him, turned him stupid and clumsy.”
Golitsin held his breath and counted to ten. An hour before, they had sniped back and forth like this for a full fifteen minutes.
He gathered as much patience as he could muster and said, “Tell me what your people are doing.”
Nicky had broken his spell of boredom and gotten his blood; he could wait until the next opportunity rolled around. He fought
back a smile and said, “All right. Word’s been passed to all my guys in East Europe. Since we got their passports, they’ll
need new ones, right? So what are they gonna do? Try and buy phonies, right? Every counterfeiter and half-assed fabricator
in Hungary’s been warned to pass word the second they make contact.”
Golitsin nodded. Sounded good.
Nicky pulled out another black cheroot and lit up. “I got pick-pocket teams working every train and plane station in Europe.
They been told to keep a good eye out for a gimpy giant, a blonde runt, and a rich American fatty.”
The twit who had just detailed his own efforts at corralling Alex at transportation terminals leaned forward and advised Nicky,
“Consider giving them photographs instead. Our experience shows that visual representations always work better than verbal
descriptions.” He produced a crooked smile. “If you have fax machines, I’ll provide copies.”
He instantly regretted that he had opened his mouth. “Fax machines?” Nicky roared. He looked ready to bounce out of his seat
and strangle the twit. “Oh, sure, moron. Hell, every pickpocket’s got one. You know, stuffed in his back pocket.” The other
former agents at the table instantly hated the thick-necked dolt for his stupid remark. Little wonder they never caught Nicky.
Nicky planted his leather elbows on the table. “Listen up, ass-hole. They don’t need no pictures. Pickpockets are… what? Observant,
right? It’s what they do. All day, staring at people, sizing ’em up. They can tell in a blink if a mark’s got ten bucks in
their pocket and who’s got a thousand.”
Another withering glare at the fool and Nicky clammed up. Why cast pearls before swine? He lit another cigarette and collapsed
back into his chair.
The next man in line, in an earlier life the Ministry of Interior’s liaison to Interpol, squirmed for a moment, stared down
at the table, picked at a scab on his nose, then as quietly as he could, mumbled, “I called my former colleagues and alerted
them that a warrant for Alex’s arrest would be coming their way within hours.”
Time for the next man in line to speak up. Nobody did, and the silence quickly turned deafening.
The man stole a quick sideways peek at Golitsin, who was staring back with a mean scowl. “And what are they doing about it?”
Golitsin snapped, his scowl deepening.
This was not the question the man wanted to hear. “And they… they listened.”
“Listened?”
“Well… umh, yes. Interpol won’t do anything until a formal request is launched through appropriate legal channels. Can’t really.
The protocol is written in stone. It’s a very bureaucratic and—”
“You’re saying Interpol won’t do anything?”
“No. I’m… I’m not saying that.”
The other sharks around the table were edging forward in their seats, waiting for the fireworks to erupt. Oh yeah, pal, that’s
what you’re saying, no question about it. “Then explain to me what you meant,” Golitsin barked.
“We… that is, we, as executives of Konevitch Associates, we don’t, well… we don’t exactly have the legal authority to demand
an arrest. Interpol wants to see a legitimate warrant before it will act.”