The First Order

by Jeff Abbott

  “What?” Sam stared up at the clouded sky. He braced himself for the accusation.

  “I need to pick up a package from Miami. And I’d prefer there not be a record that I was there.”

  He stared at her. “What record?”

  “An entry point in my passport. It’s watched. And I don’t want a record that I was here.”

  He waited.

  “I need to retrieve a package. The Svetlana will anchor several miles off Miami. We could take the Vikal limousine tender boat—it’s down in the yacht’s garage—go to Florida, get the package, get back. No one knows we’ve gone to land.”

  “You want us to illegally enter the US, pick up a package, and bring it back to the Svetlana.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  He laughed and she laughed. She said, “Also, there will be a party. Did you bring a suit?”

  He stared up again at the sky. Something illegal? This could be the fast road to finding his brother, if it gave him more information, a final confirmation that Kirov was Firebird.

  “I don’t take stupid risks,” he said, ignoring the historical catalog of stupid things he had done.

  “Neither do I.”

  She was asking him to break the law. If they were caught, it could end his search for Danny. Being questioned by the police would force him into an impossible choice: let the assassination proceed or put a target on his brother’s back. But he had to go with Irina. He remembered the family saying: The first order is you don’t leave your brother behind.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did bring a suit.”

  The night had fallen, the stars aglow in the clear sky. The Svetlana dropped anchor, and Irina and two crewmen launched the thirty-one-foot Vikal limousine tender from its garage. The Svetlana’s garage held the Vikal, an array of jet skis, and a wall of snorkeling and scuba equipment. The Vikal was a handsome boat in its own right and Irina handled it like an expert. They pulled away from the Svetlana and rode through the choppy waves toward Florida. One had to navigate multiple patrols, he knew. The Coast Guard kept an eye out for two hundred miles from the coast. Customs, twelve miles. The state of Florida, three. But despite those rings of security, no one stopped them.

  Seaforth, he wondered. Is he following me? Does he know I’m here? Watching from afar, and maybe letting this play out since he covered up Claybourne’s death? Or maybe he and Irina were just lucky. He hoped the luck would hold returning to the Svetlana.

  They pulled into a private marina next to a beachside high-rise. A membership card was produced from Irina’s clutch purse, and they docked. Well-dressed people mingled on the back terrace overlooking the stretch of the beach. A party was going on at the club facility on the ground floor of the high-rise and an invitation to the party—written in English and Russian—was also produced from Irina’s purse. No one asked for a passport or ID.

  They illegally set foot onto American soil in well-made shoes.

  “I’ve never quite arrived at a party this way,” he said.

  “Never say I’m not fun,” Irina said back.

  It was hard sometimes to believe what he’d heard about her—that she had hunted down and killed the families of the men who had blown up Sergei. He remembered that murderers could smile, too.

  They went inside. No one paid special attention to them but he saw a few people nod toward Irina, one a tall man with a shaved head and a gaunt face.

  “Friend of yours?” Sam asked.

  “Not particularly,” she said, and tension strained her voice.

  Sam snagged them both glasses of champagne offered from a server’s tray. He heard as much Russian in the conversations as English, and Sam realized then they were in Sunny Isles. He had been here before, an area north of Miami Beach with a high percentage of Russian immigrants. He had made a mortal enemy here his last time, and he glanced around to be sure he did not see a bent, broken man in a wheelchair. But there was no such man. No one gave him a glance.

  “I do love a good party,” he said. “But why are we here?”

  “We’re not staying,” she said, smiling over her glass of Moët.

  He could see that many of the émigrés were older, people who had grown up under communism and then escaped it once the walls fell. The other group consisted of younger people, some of them dressed subtly and tastefully, others trying too hard to impress or cajole or seduce.

  Maybe one of them is Firebird? He realized with a shock that his brother’s funder could easily be an expatriate American who might want Morozov dead, not one of the inner circle. An Americanized Russian—especially in Miami, where the CIA had once operated an office that treated the city like foreign soil during the long secret war with Cuba—might have the connections and the drive to rid Russia of Morozov. Not because he was a tyrant of sorts but because it would be good for Russia, and Russian business. He might have horribly miscalculated. If she was bringing him to Firebird—he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t armed and he had no resources here to force Firebird to recall his brother from his job. He’d have to improvise.

  “Let’s go,” Irina urged, and she and Sam walked into the lobby, using an electronic passkey she drew from a beaded clutch to access the elevator. The guard smiled at them, but with their passkey he didn’t challenge them or ask for ID.

  Irina turned to him. “Kiss me.”

  He didn’t ask why. He took her into his arms and gave her a gentle kiss, not too showy, just to show affection while they waited for the elevator. Her fingertips touched his jaw, her other hand curled in his dark blond hair.

  The elevator arrived and they broke apart and boarded, the only passengers. The doors slid shut.

  “That was for the benefit of the guard,” he guessed.

  “Yes, and you did well,” she said. “People who kiss in a place look like they belong. He’ll remember only that he saw a couple.” Her face was slightly flushed and she wasn’t looking at him. “You’re a good kisser; you should have a girlfriend.”

  “I should,” he said.

  The elevator arrived at the penthouse floor. He followed her to the doorway of an ocean-facing room. He tensed, wondering if Firebird might be on the other side of that door.

  She unlocked it with a key.

  The view was spectacular. The door opened into a large living room that faced out onto the bay, silver steel in the clouded moonlight. She walked to an alarm pad and entered a code, and a soft beeping that had started the moment the door opened stopped.

  Guard downstairs, card key to elevator, alarmed room. A lot of security.

  Elegant furnishings: clean, modern—lots of white, black, and silver—filled the room. But the air seemed stale. She turned on lights and walked through with purpose. There was a kitchen, large, with an elaborate island. Then a hallway, with bedrooms. All were furnished with magazine-level taste. But they had an emptiness to them, as though people had never lived in their calculated beauty.

  He saw no pictures of people, no photographs, no papers, nothing to indicate who owned this place.

  He followed her to the master bedroom. She opened a closet that was empty of clothes. Inside the floor of the closet were two large green duffel bags, the kind a long-term traveler might take on a trip.

  She picked one up—it was clearly heavy—and gestured at him to pick up the other one. He did. The bag felt as if it weighed one hundred pounds.

  “What’s in here?” he asked.

  “The money to invest in your clubs,” she said. “American cash.”

  “No. Really.”

  “Really,” she said, and she met him with a hard stare.

  “What, I unzip this and it’s stacks of cash?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s highly illegal to take large amounts of cash out of the country without declaring it.”

  “I know, but there were no customs forms on the Vikal.” She stepped close to him and tried a smile.

  “What is this? A test? If I say no, no investment?”

  “The Var
ros and Kirovs like to know that they can trust their business partners, even with delicate matters. That you can keep your mouth shut. There’s all the money here to turn your dream of launching the Tsar Lounges into a success, Sam. This is how they work.”

  If he had sense he would say that he wasn’t comfortable with this. But this could get him to Danny. So he had to do it.

  “All right,” he said. He stepped closer to her. He could smell her skin, light floral perfume, a slightly salty smell of the sea. “I understand how they work. I work the same.”

  Her eyes seemed fixed on his mouth and she started to nod, but then her face went blank as she looked over Sam’s shoulder. He turned.

  In the bedroom doorway there stood a man with a gun.

  44

  Miami

  ROLAN IGOROVICH,” IRINA said. “No need for the gun.”

  He stepped forward and Sam recognized him: the balding man from downstairs with the gaunt face, who’d watched them arrive at the party. “I thought I’d help you with your pickup,” he said in Russian. He told Sam, in accented English, to raise his hands. Sam obeyed, because the gun was pointed at him. He searched Sam but found nothing but Sam’s phone, which he put in his pocket. Then he searched Irina, and took her phone from her purse as well.

  “Stop this, Rolan Igorovich,” she said.

  “This is not your place to be, your money to take.”

  “I have my orders.”

  “You do not mind if I ask you to sit and wait while I make some phone calls.”

  “I do mind. Sometimes I am told to solve a problem without being given the reason. You know what the Kirovs and the Varros are like.”

  He stared at her.

  “If you interfere, you will be the one in trouble. You are making a mistake. It’s not your concern,” she said. “Because of what this money is meant for.”

  “I know what you’ve been doing,” he said. “And you’re…”

  He wasn’t expecting Irina to throw herself toward him. She went straight for his eyes, fingers hooked into claws, and he yelled and slammed an arm across her shoulders, knocking her hard into the wall. With his right hand he kept the gun up, aimed at Sam.

  Sam charged him, leveling a kick hard into the gun. It was an unexpected move and Sam followed it up with a barrage of muay thai blows—sharp, fast strikes to eyes, jaw, throat.

  Rolan took two hard hits but parried the other blows. He retreated. He seized Irina by the hair and brought her in front of him, trying to use her as a shield. Sam stopped and Igor aimed the gun at Sam’s head. Irina elbowed him hard in the face; blood spurted from his nose, and Rolan hammered the gun across the back of her head and she went down.

  A cold fury filled Sam. As Irina fell, Rolan lost his shield and Sam threw an item at hand—a small, sad vase of artificial flowers—right at Rolan’s face. Rolan tried to dodge the blow and now Sam wrenched the gun out of his grip, grabbed Rolan by the throat, and threw him into a wall.

  “Irina? Are you OK?” Sam called. He didn’t want to risk a backward glance.

  No answer.

  “You know about this money?” He jabbed the gun against Rolan’s cheekbone, just below the eyes. Rolan’s throat tensed in terror.

  “I keep watch for Mr. Kirov on his Western properties. He owns this condo. Through a holding company.”

  “And he hides cash here?”

  “Yes. And she’s been taking it all.”

  “All? He has other houses…”

  “Yes. In the Bahamas, in the Virgin Islands, in Puerto Rico. This week. Please, put the gun away.”

  The places where the Svetlana had cruised this week. “This same amount?”

  “Yes, usually.”

  “Maybe three to four million. It’s not much to them,” Sam said, almost to himself. “These are all billionaires with dozens of accounts in places like Switzerland and the Caymans. They can hide and move money how they like. They…”

  Except a payment that could never be tracked. Like the one that Firebird was making to Danny. Twenty million…the money to pay Danny for Morozov’s assassination was being put, kept, and amassed on Kirov’s yacht. A place that could move the money easily internationally, to wherever Danny might need it delivered over time. In bits and pieces, because a twenty-million wire transfer moved out of a Russian account in the days before or after Morozov’s death would be a huge red flag.

  It meant…yes, finally: Kirov was Firebird.

  He turned Rolan so he could see Irina, past the man’s shoulder. She was sitting up, groggy, dazed. Did she even know what this was for? She’d said it was money for his bars. Did she know the truth or was she just Kirov’s errand girl? Sam, or any investment, might be a convenient lie.

  Kirov is paranoid right now for one simple reason: He’s behind the hit on Morozov. And his nerves are shattered. Maybe I can use that.

  Sam stuck the gun into Rolan’s mouth and spoke in Russian. The man shuddered. “I am not as nice as Irina. If Mr. Kirov wanted you to know about this, and what it’s being used for, he would have told you. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  Where on the ship was she hiding the money? Did anyone besides Kirov know? Did Irina know what this was for, or was she paid to turn a blind eye? She was no doubt loyal to her customers, but she was loyal to her nation, too, and Morozov was Russia to many of his countrymen. Her husband and Morozov had been close. So he had to think what to tell Irina.

  Sam took back his and Irina’s phones and pushed him away. “Leave. Clean up your nose. Go back to the party. Be a good employee and keep your mouth shut.”

  Rolan left. Sam kept the man’s gun.

  He went to the kitchen and found a cloth and wet it with cold water.

  “I cannot believe I let him…take me down…” she said. “How embarrassing. Are you all right?” she asked him, as if forgetting she was the one lying out on the floor.

  “Yes. How do you feel?”

  “My head hurts.”

  “It’s not cut badly. You’ll have a lump on your head.” He gave her an improvised field concussion test, using his hands and asking her questions, and she seemed all right but shaken. “I think you’re fine, but you need a doctor.”

  She waved off the idea. “I’ll be fine. Where is…”

  “Rolan, was that his name? He left,” Sam said.

  “You let him leave? He…”

  “I told him to mind his own business. I have friends in Miami, too.”

  “He means well but he’s an idiot. What did he say?”

  “He thinks you are stealing money from Kirov’s houses. And he either wants to stop you or he wants a cut.”

  “He truly is a fool.”

  “Is this money for my bars?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think I’d take dirty money?”

  “It’s not dirty. Just hidden. Because of the sanctions. Cash on hand, in case they needed to leave Russia, and not in a bank account where it could be frozen. Or they needed money to spend in America. This way it’s already here.”

  When you had billions and billions you needed escape routes, he thought.

  She sat up slowly. She managed a smile. Then she leaned over and unzipped the bag and he saw the bills, in neatly organized stacks. He picked up a stack and paged through it. The bills were not consecutively numbered. The bills were not new. This money had been collected, and kept, maybe over a long, long while.

  Assassin’s pay. Money that could not be traced. A nondigital financial trail. Because when a Russian president dies on American soil, the Americans investigate as well, and the financial trail would be the first place they’d start.

  So don’t leave a trail. Money that no one would miss. Slowly collected, hidden aboard Kirov’s yacht. It was a variation on the old KGB trick of how the men like Kirov raided the spy agency’s overseas cash reserves, hidden troves of money spent to buy up Russian industry. History, repeating itself, on a smaller scale—but with possibly more devastati
ng results.

  “That’s a lot of money, Irina.”

  “What kind of consultant were you in London? After your time at Harvard?”

  He smiled. “You checked up on me.”

  “We had to.”

  “I was a security consultant.”

  “And where did you get the money to acquire all these bars?”

  He was silent.

  “Sam?”

  “My mother’s family has money. An uncle left it to me.”

  “So much money for so many bars, owned by front companies. Did it really come from a dead uncle?” She sounded like she didn’t quite believe him.

  “No,” he said after a long pause, which was the truth. But it was good for her to believe they knew each other’s secrets. It bound them. This was why she’d picked him for this. To see if he was comfortable beyond the borders of the law. “I help you get this money back to the yacht, then what?”

  She put her face a little closer to his. “We invest in you and your bars, and all your dreams come true.”

  “Will we go to Russia soon?” he asked.

  The question seemed to surprise her. “Yes.”

  He took the damp washcloth and again cleaned the scrape on her scalp, the smear of blood drying in her beautiful red hair. Hair like fire. “Did you kill the people that killed your husband?”

  The sheer shock of the question made her eyes widen. But she stayed close to him. “What do you think?”

  “I think you are capable of it. But I don’t think you did it.”

  Her gaze lowered for a moment. “I wasn’t capable of much right after Sergei died. I was too distraught. He was everything to me.”

  “And revenge came in a matter of days.”

  Now her gaze fixed on him. “That was the Morozovs. They used government informants, hired guns; they exacted Sergei’s revenge on the Chechens.”

  “Did the Chechens kill Sergei?”

  “Of course they did.”

  The circle, he thought. Or the Morozovs. What if Sergei outlived his usefulness? And what had Danny done after his sponsor, his mentor, was blown apart in a car bomb?