by David Pepper
“Yes, in fifteen minutes. Twenty at most.”
I was racing west on I-80 at eighty-five miles per hour, Tori in the passenger seat. Having just passed the hulking skeleton of the old GM plant in Lordstown, we’d be there in fifty minutes if I didn’t hit traffic. Not soon enough.
“I’m at the paper now, so I can get there on time. What am I looking for?”
After arriving at the Vindicator, I’d logged on to the website one last time. The Gulfstream’s flight plan had been modified en route, rerouting to Burke instead of Youngstown.
“It’s called a Gulfstream G650. Sleek plane, eight windows on each side. Its wings are extra-long and have outsized wingtips. Tail number will be G-M1M.”
“That should do it.”
“A tall woman. Long brown hair, likely dressed to the nines.”
“Wow. Sounds nice. Is this some kind of long-distance stalking, Sharpe?” he asked, cackling.
Tori cringed.
“Uh, no, Billy. This is deadly serious.”
“Chill, man. I get it. What do you need me to do?”
“See what car she gets into. Get the driver’s license if possible.”
“That’s it? You want me to follow her?”
“Too dangerous. Plus, I’m pretty sure I know where she’s going.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Clinic.”
“Jack, I’m game to follow. I’ve got writer’s block anyway.”
CHAPTER 118
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
As Cassie cracked the door open, entered, and tiptoed up a few short stairs to the back, dozens of young eyes looked her way. Most gazed curiously from behind the curved desks that encircled the small auditorium. But one set of bleary eyes at the center of the room studied her longer, then widened.
Professor Miguel Mercurio knew exactly why she was there.
When Jack had informed her that the mystery plane with the British tail number had flown from Aspen to Trenton, New Jersey, she looked up a map of the Garden State. The small airport was only thirteen miles from the Princeton campus. If the professor had already met with the president several times, maybe he’d done so again.
His look of alarm confirmed Cassie’s hunch.
She waited through the final minutes of the class as he lectured passionately about the growing monopolization of big tech. Like his book, his words were compelling, even if half the laptops in front of Cassie were logged on to Facebook or Instagram as he spoke. A bell rang and most of the kids rushed out the door Cassie had entered.
A few students lined up to talk to the professor as class let out, so Cassie waited behind them. After answering the last question, the professor hustled toward the door.
“Professor Mercurio, we need to talk.”
“I’ve got to run to a meeting. I really don’t have time.” Blinking rapidly, he looked frazzled, his ease from their first meeting gone.
Cassie lunged forward four quick steps, maneuvering between him and the door.
“Professor, I need five minutes. I’ll walk with you to your meeting.”
“Okay, but I can’t say much.”
“You were in Aspen again this weekend, weren’t you?” Cassie asked as they walked down the steps to the first floor.
“Now, how would you know that?”
“You landed Sunday evening at the Trenton airport on a private flight from Aspen.”
He stopped abruptly, then glared at her.
“What the hell? Why are you—”
“Why are you flying to Aspen in mysterious planes? And why the secrecy? From what I can gather, you flew out Friday on a charter, then back on a fancy Gulfstream owned by some British guy.”
“British? I wasn’t with anyone British.”
Even better. He had just conceded a lot.
“Well, a British-registered plane.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The catch in his voice underscored the lie.
“Listen, you already told me you’ve advised the president on economic policy, both during the campaign and after. The fact that you were doing so over the weekend should not be a state secret. In fact, it has enormous national implications.”
Reaching the building’s main entrance, he pushed open the thick wooden door, sighing as he let Cassie pass through.
“Look, are we off the record?”
“Sure.”
“She wanted to talk through my recommendations one last time. You’re right: What’s the big deal in that?”
“Nothing. Except that she’s doing it in secret.”
“It definitely is hush-hush. But it’s urgent that my ideas happen, so I play by the rules I’m given.”
“And who else joined you out there? Who flew you back?”
“What do you mean?” The strain in his voice returned.
“Don’t play coy. As I said, a plane flew you out from New Jersey Friday, and another flew you back Sunday. What British Gulfstream owner did you hitch a ride home with?”
“Listen, I really can’t get into that.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a major recent benefactor to this place . . . to my work here. But he insists on anonymity. If his name got out, my funding would go belly-up. And it’s not like there are a bunch of billionaires eager to bankroll research on breaking up the monopolies that made them billionaires in the first place. In fact, some of the school’s biggest donors have pulled funding because of my work.”
“Did this benefactor attend the meeting with the president?”
The professor chuckled uncomfortably. “Someone of his means is not going to wait in the hallway, that’s for sure.”
Cassie’s mind raced as they walked down an elegant bluestone walkway between two manicured lawns. She’d pursued the Aspen story to keep her bosses happy, always treating it separately from Jack’s story. But Jack’s latest theory was that a foreign cartel was attempting to seize the vast economic opportunities that would arise from breaking up America’s monopolies. And here some foreigner was flying to Aspen to meet with the president, accompanied by an antitrust expert whose work he was funding. Did it all connect up?
“Young lady, I appreciate your persistence, but I’ve got to run.” Mercurio loped away on a perpendicular walkway.
Cassie suddenly remembered Katrina’s yearbook: Dyadya. Russian for Uncle.
“Professor?” she asked, jogging four quick steps to pass him before wheeling around to face him. “Your benefactor is Russian, isn’t he?”
His eyes blazed as he heard the question, answering it without saying a word.
CHAPTER 119
I-80, NEAR AKRON
Cassie called when I was halfway across Portage County, forty-five minutes from Cleveland.
“Jack, you’re not gonna believe this, but that plane from New Jersey may have belonged to Katrina’s uncle. I think he met with the president over the weekend.”
I cracked the car’s window a few inches, claustrophobia setting in as Cassie edged closer to my Kazarov secret.
“What makes you say that?”
“Remember that Princeton professor? The one who wrote about monopolies I talked to? He was on the flight. He had been in Aspen with some anonymous benefactor, meeting with the president.”
“How do you know that? And how does that have anything to do with Katrina?”
“I pushed him hard and he more or less gave away that the benefactor was Russian.”
“Pushed him?”
“Yeah. I’m at Princeton now. I took the train up and confronted him in person after his class.”
She was good. “Cassie, ‘more or less gave away’ sounds flimsy to me.”
“Well, my gut says that’s exactly who he was with. And you know what that means? That our two stories are tied togeth
er—and that the president is connected to the plot to rig these elections.”
“That’s a pretty wild theory. It will take a boatload of proof to convince my editors to print that. Did the professor tell you what they discussed?”
“Yeah. The president is really interested in the details of his work.”
“What work?”
“His proposal to set hard industry limits on corporate concentration. Apparently they were reviewing the specifics at the meeting.”
My mind shuddered. Kazarov was discussing with the president of the United States the exact policy that would result if his operation succeeded. But that begged the question: What the hell was the president doing?
“Cassie, she’s always been passionate about this anti-monopoly stuff. I’m unemployed because of it.”
“Jack, if I’m right, this means she’s in on the plot that you guys have uncovered.”
“And if you’re wrong, she’s merely consulting with an academic expert about a critical economic issue.”
Cassie sighed through the phone, frustrated by my roadblocks.
“Jack, there’s one other development.”
“What’s that?”
She filled me in on the Brooklyn detective’s visit and how Katrina was under the wrong impression about her mother’s death.
I shivered at her words. Kazarov was capable of terrible things, but why would he lie to his own niece about her mother’s murder?
“Jack, I messaged her.”
“You did what? What the hell did you tell her?”
“The truth. I figured it might shake her up—maybe throw a wrench in this whole plot.”
I recalled the diverted flight path. The Gulfstream heading to Youngstown, then suddenly rerouting south to Cleveland. Katrina’s urgency to nab us had been replaced by a higher priority.
Now that priority was clear.
“Cassie, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you back.”
After hanging up, I dug up the old number for Oleg Kazarov and sent him a text.
CHAPTER 120
CLEVELAND
Stay here. I will be an hour.”
Katrina opened the rear passenger door of the black Mercedes SUV and planted her black stiletto on the wet sidewalk. She walked several yards through a light drizzle and entered the nondescript building on the busy street east of downtown Cleveland.
Minutes later the wide silver elevator door closed behind her, the first time she’d been alone since she read the message.
As the elevator lifted, she clenched her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Her entire body trembled.
The sender not only knew her real name but was taunting her by using it as a Facebook profile. But it was the yearbook photo itself that packed the most jarring punch. She hadn’t seen it in years. How young she looked. How innocent. The pale skin, the thin gray lips, the inelegant way her hair was pulled back. All the long-buried emotions of her young life were now rushing back in a torrent.
She’d been so complicated at that vulnerable age. Confident in her intellect and committed to making the world a more just place after the poverty and hunger of her childhood. But too quiet to make friends or attract boys. Too shy to show people the passion that burned inside her. And always mortified by her doting mother, embracing her so tightly, she couldn’t breathe.
She wasn’t sufficiently self-aware back then to see it. But now she could. That yearbook photo captured perfectly the mix of emotions buffeting young Katrina Rivers.
And then she’d read the message.
Katrina, your brother killed your parents. And he is still alive today.
Dizziness had swamped her as the horror of the worst ten minutes of her life returned.
The two phone calls.
First was the Brooklyn detective. Kozlov—a name she recalled to this day, along with every word he’d shared in the first-generation accent so common in Brighton Beach. He’d encouraged her to sit down, so she sat on the small futon in her Oxford dorm room. Then he explained that her father had forced his way into her mother’s house, an argument had erupted into violence, and that he’d killed both her mother and Mikhail before taking his own life.
Beyond the sheer horror, overwhelming guilt besieged her that day and for years to come. Her mother and father, never legally divorced, had first spoken again that spring. And she’d been skeptical. But her mother assured her he’d become a different man—sober and modestly successful, loving and fun, as he’d been when they were teenagers in St. Petersburg.
Katrina had kept her doubts to herself. Her mother had been so lonely, which was why she’d spent most days of her life smothering Katrina. Maybe a reunion with her father would be a healthy thing, for both mother and daughter. So she said nothing. And now they were all dead.
She was still planted on the futon, in shock, when the second call had come through. Dyadya. He shared the same news but added the wrinkle that her father had had well-known mob ties. There’d be no funeral and no obituary in the local papers.
“This was an attempt to get at me, I’m afraid,” he had warned her. “And they may try to get to you as well.”
A ping sounded. Katrina opened her eyes as the elevator doors separated, then took a step forward.
“Excuse me.” A gray-haired woman in blue nurse scrubs wheeled an empty cot into the elevator, the cot’s front corner almost colliding with Katrina. The nurse pushed the button for the eighth floor.
Confused, Katrina looked up. They were only on the sixth floor. She was going to the twelfth.
Lips pursed, still shaking, she took three steps back to the rear corner of the elevator, positioning herself behind the nurse as they both faced forward. The elevator jumped a few inches, then continued its climb.
Dyadya had always been supportive from afar. He’d visit for a few weeks each year, and she and Mikhail would visit his St. Petersburg dacha for a week every summer. But Mother had insisted that be the extent of it—that, despite his generosity, they should not become too close. And she’d cautioned Katrina not to let his largesse spoil her.
But all that changed after the murders. Dyadya had kept a close watch on her. “We must keep you safe,” he urged. Feeling vulnerable and scared, she acceded. Without family left, where else would she have turned?
Another ping. They stopped on the eighth floor, and the nurse pushed the cot out of the widening elevator doors as quickly as she’d wheeled it in. The doors closed and the elevator lifted again.
She mouthed the words to herself: Katrina, your brother killed your parents. And he is still alive today.
She’d stared at them for minutes. Although the plane’s cabin was empty, the pilots could see her through a small cockpit monitor, so she hadn’t moved.
The short, crisp sentences declared the news with authority. Not a word wasted. Not a doubt projected—neither about the earth-shattering claim nor about the sender’s underlying assumption that Katrina didn’t know.
And then she’d scanned the sender’s profile page. Bare except for the photo and the birth date—the day of the murders. Again, a detail nobody else knew. That was when she knocked on the cockpit door and requested they divert to Cleveland instead of landing in Youngstown. The Youngstown reporter and Victoria Justice could wait.
She closed her eyes again.
If the words were true, it meant Dyadya had lied to her. On the phone call eleven years earlier and every day since, including the annual check-in call on the anniversary of the murders. It meant the entire trajectory of her life since the murders had been based on a lie.
A final ping sounded in her ear as the elevator came to a stop on the twelfth and top floor, the wing housing the hospital’s most elite patients. A walk-through metal detector greeted her beyond the elevator doors, a beefy security guard sitting behind a desk to her right.
“Hey there, yo
ung lady.” His salt-and-pepper eyebrows danced up and down with feigned flirtation. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
She glowered back.
“I’m here to visit Oleg Kazarov. He’s expecting me.”
CHAPTER 121
CLEVELAND
You weren’t kidding, Jack,” Billy Luna said with enthusiasm. “That was one vixen of a woman, and she sure travels in style.”
“Did she go to the clinic?” I asked, ignoring his gawking.
“Close. She got out down the street from the Clinic and walked into some bland building. Then the Mercedes SUV she rode in parked a few blocks away.”
We were now only fifteen minutes from the Cleveland Clinic’s east side campus.
“It’s probably an annex or something.” No doubt they kept their foreign VIP wing unit disguised.
After hanging up, I turned to Tori. “It looks like she’s visiting her uncle.”
But I kept to myself what that meant.
CHAPTER 122
CLEVELAND
Welcome, Katyusha.”
Dyadya’s whispered greeting, using her childhood nickname, was so faint she had to bow forward to hear him.
Lying back in the propped-up bed, crisscrossed by a jumble of wires and tubes, he was in worse shape than he’d let on. A white blanket covered him up to his waist and a light blue smock covered the rest, up to his emaciated, wrinkled neck. Two thin white bands encircled his head, holding a translucent mask over his nose. A tube ran from the mask to a toaster-sized machine to his left. With each breath he took, a whoosh, followed by two light thumps, echoed from the machine.
But the most jarring sight of all were his eyes. Usually bright with fire, they were now a dull, smoky yellow, laced with spiderwebs of crimson red. Exhausted. Defeated.
She pulled a small chair close to his bedside, sat down, and placed her hand over his. His fingers felt as thin as pencils, his skin cold and flaky.
“Dyadya, you should not have made that trip. The doctor said you have a serious infection.”
