Moscow Sting f-2

by Alex Dryden

  “Thank you.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m all right. Just a bit faint.”

  The Chinese man led her through to a room at the rear of the café, with a bare cement floor, a desk and chair, and a couple of old, stained armchairs.

  “Here,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied, but he had gone.

  She quickly took in a metal door that led to the outside. She opened it and stepped out into a tiny concrete courtyard, covered with snow that had iced over on the surface. She surveyed the mildewed walls and saw a fire escape that led down from a building abutting the rear of the yard. But for her it led upwards.

  She waited. Finally, the older chef opened the door, looking for her when he hadn’t found her in the room.

  “I just need some air, I think. I’ll only be a few minutes. Please.”

  He looked at her and seemed easily to overcome his suspicion. “Mind how you go,” he said. “I gotta get back.”

  He shut the door behind him, and she waited a couple more minutes until she knew he’d gone. Then she climbed the iron fire escape, which zigzagged several floors until, on the third floor, she saw an open-plan office that had maps of the world on the walls—maybe some kind of trading company, she thought.

  There was no one sitting at the nearest desk, which had a view of the fire escape door. Outside the door, cigarette butts were scattered in the snow. It was a door in use. She opened it, stepped inside, and walked briskly into the centre of the room. A secretary looked up abruptly.

  “I thought I’d left my coat,” Anna said, “but it isn’t here.”

  It wasn’t much of a reason, but saying it got her past the secretary, and she sailed through to a far door that led onto a corridor with an elevator and stairs that ran beside it. She took the stairs. In a few minutes she found herself in a dead-end street, with the noise of traffic on Broadway at the far end. She guessed it was a block, maybe more, from the entrance to the gym she had entered earlier.

  She looked left, down towards the entrance. Burt would have someone outside the gym, no doubt. The crowd on the sidewalk was sparse in the icy weather as she turned out onto Broadway and away from the gym to the right. She began to walk steadily, without a coat but with her hat now pulled over her ears.

  Larry watched from the inside of a clothing store directly across the street from the café. His point men were, variously, in one of Burt’s yellow cabs, another stamping his feet and blowing on his hands at a bus stop, a third on the other side of the café just inside the doorway of a stationery shop and apparently making a phone call.

  There were two others out there at a greater distance, who he couldn’t see from this angle.

  He looked back at the café and watched as Vladimir exited, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a herringbone coat, just as he’d arrived nearly an hour before.

  “We’re almost through,” he breathed into a mike on his coat. “Solomon is leaving,” he explained, using the code name for Vladimir.

  She’s decided to let him leave first, he thought, and after trying to find any significance attached to that, dismissed it as one of those unnecessary complexities that plague an operative and fog an otherwise transparent situation.

  He put his weight on the other foot and waited.

  After nearly ten minutes he began to be agitated and radioed to the point man at the bus stop to get himself inside the café.

  There was another wait.

  Finally the words came through. “She must be in the bathroom,” the point man said. “Her coat’s here.”

  But it was the words “must be” that alerted Larry’s senses to a complexity that, this time, might be worth taking notice of.

  “I’m coming over.”

  He entered the café, saw the coat, and immediately sensed something missing other than her.

  “Where’s her hat?” he said.

  “Her hat?”

  “Yes, where’s her fucking hat?” He checked the pockets of her coat and found nothing. Without waiting for an answer, he pushed his way past and into the corridor towards the kitchen and bathrooms. He found the ladies’ bathroom and roughly pushed open the door, to find it empty. He immediately radioed the operative outside the gym.

  “Get up north on Broadway. Fast. She’ll be on the sidewalk. No coat, just a hat and whatever she was wearing underneath.” He realised he couldn’t remember.

  He then radioed the man in the taxi, ordered him to get out four streets up and come back down Broadway in the other direction, and gave the same description.

  Larry went past the bathrooms, opened a door into a back room, and saw the metal door on the far side. He yanked it open and saw footsteps in the crystalline snow, leading to a fire escape.

  He ignored the man who seemed to be asking what the hell he thought he was doing and ran across the yard and up the stairs two at a time until he found where the steps entered an office.

  Chapter 29

  BURT SAT AT A desk in one of the anterooms at the apartment. He was mystified and—for the first time—troubled now by Anna’s behaviour. There seemed no reason for her disappearance. He’d given her everything she asked for.

  He was surrounded by activity, but deep in thought. Electronic surveillance monitors were up and running within half an hour of her disappearance. Young men in T-shirts and with headphones over long, unkempt, and in some cases dirty hair pored over data that crept in multicoloured lines, like cracks in a rock, across half a dozen screens.

  Burt himself was a river of apparent calm among the choppiness of his many tributaries. He sat puffing on a cigar that choked up his immediate surroundings, and if anyone objected, you couldn’t tell. Working for Burt Miller was an honour his employees equated with working for one of the more public legends of the American dream. He didn’t demand anything from these men and women except an almost holy dedication, but for them, it was also a secret pleasure to belong to Burt.

  “Anything?” he barked across the room in a voice that travelled right through the apartment.

  “We think we have her cell phone,” a voice came from the room next door.

  Burt hauled himself out of the chair and walked next door, cigar clamped between his teeth and his jacket swinging as if he had a cosh in the pocket.

  “Where?” Burt demanded.

  The young man in green combat pants and yellow T-shirt with “Animal Lighthouse” written on it replied without taking his eyes away from the screen, even though the information was coming through headphones.

  “It seems she dropped it down a drain when she came out on Broadway,” he said.

  Good girl, Burt thought, and damned her gently in the same thought.

  “Do you want it retrieved? is the message, sir.”

  “Not now. It won’t tell us anything. I want everyone on standby, on every block from Ninth down,” Burt said.

  Bob Dupont came up behind Burt.

  “Have we got more resources?” Burt asked him.

  “We’ll have over two hundred men on the streets before nightfall,” he said. “And then more as the night goes on.”

  Burt didn’t answer.

  “Why this area, Burt?” Dupont said.

  “She’ll have to stay somewhere,” Burt replied. “Even though she’s Russian, she doesn’t seem the type who sleeps on the streets. Anywhere north of here, there’ll be nowhere that’ll take anything but a credit card. We have to narrow it down to the ethnic districts, the places where being American doesn’t mean much more than wearing a baseball cap and flak pants. And where they’ll take her cash, no questions asked, unless they think they can earn more by turning her in.”

  “It’s a long shot.”

  “Of course it’s a long shot, Bob. But they’re always the big prize bets.” Burt grinned at his security chief, who, not for the first time, found his boss’s eternal enthusiasm and optimism something he would never understand.

  “You think she’ll meet Mikhail?” This time
Dupont whispered in Burt’s ear.

  As he had done several times that afternoon, Burt erupted with laughter, but he didn’t say it was because a whisper in a room full of detection devices, albeit aimed out there, was what amused him.

  “She will,” he said loudly.

  “Why?”

  “Because she needs me as much as I need her.”

  “The kid,” Dupont said in agreement.

  “If you wish to be so indelicate,” Burt replied.

  At just after five thirty that afternoon, when darkness had descended over the city—“She’ll wait for the darkness,” Burt had prophesied—a call was picked up from a monitor in one of the smaller rooms. A twenty-two-year-old female graduate from Columbia, wearing an impossibly short skirt, called it through. It was relayed at once to the ops room.

  But before Burt answered, he walked the corridor, exhorting his troops to work like they’d never even dreamed of working.

  “Find the location, children,” he said. “Think ‘bonus,’ the size of which is beyond your wildest dreams.”

  When he returned to the ops room, she’d been on the line for nearly a minute. Burt took a pair of phones. A coin box, Burt thought, not three miles from here I’ll bet.

  “I’ll do the talking,” she said.

  “Sure,” Burt answered.

  “We’ve a minute less thanks to your delay. I know about Logan and the photographs. I know of your deception in France. I know the Russians never had my boy. So from here we have a shared aim. I’ll follow through with Mikhail tomorrow, and then we make a deal.”

  One of the kids from the corridor room ran in with a slip of paper, which was a zeroed map with a large “X.” Burt thrust it at Dupont, who ran from the room, all sixty-three years of him rejuvenated into a silver-haired sophomore athlete.

  Burt remained silent.

  “The deal is that whatever Mikhail says goes to the CIA,” she said. “Immediately.”

  “Mistake,” Burt said, but she had already gone.

  “Coin box on Ninth, right next to the subway,” Dupont breathed. “They all have it. All of them out there.”

  “Jesus,” Burt said. “She’s stayed right on top of her exit point, just as we fanned away from it.”

  They identified the subway station. Burt looked at the single line that ran north to south.

  “That’s where she’ll head,” he said. “Somewhere down that line.” His finger followed the subway line downtown. “She’s going there. She’s picked a route with only a north and south, one line. No exit route to Brooklyn, just Manhattan. I guess she doesn’t know the New York subway.”

  “We don’t know that,” Dupont said. “Maybe she’s been studying it for months.”

  “I don’t think so, Bob. She’s improvising.”

  “That’s the worst,” Dupont replied.

  Then everyone in the room fell silent at Burt’s raised arm command, and in everyone’s mind, there was a picture of teams descending towards the Ninth Street subway from all directions.

  They waited. Dupont had left the room. He was setting teams at the stations to the south and north, three to the north and every single one to the south, as Burt had ordered.

  Eleven men on foot and three cars arrived at the subway almost simultaneously. They began to fan down the blocks in four directions. Others arrived and hurled themselves down the stairs under the street. She’d picked the commuter hour, and the platforms were five deep.

  Larry was the sole figure who entered the phone box. He didn’t expect to find anything and was surprised to see, among the cards and phone numbers of hookers, a new one written in bold handwriting that just said, “Logan, watch your back. That is where I’ll be.”

  Larry grinned, for the first time in days. He flipped the card into the pocket of his coat; a souvenir of her for now, and one he would take great pleasure in delivering to Logan personally.

  Anna stepped into the waiting cab. She knew she had a minute or so, maybe less. She told the driver to take her east, and then after several blocks to chase uptown along Park, all the way to midtown and beyond, until they reached the Carlyle Hotel.

  They would look for her back there, at the downtown end of Manhattan, in the poor areas near where she’d telephoned. She could have easily found a place for the night back there, and she trusted they’d fall for that.

  A doorman opened the back door of the cab, and she stepped out, giving him a tip the way she’d seen Logan do at the apartment two nights before when they were met by the porter. She walked up to the main door and tipped the uniformed flunkey, who smiled and spoke a welcome.

  Once inside, she made her way across the lobby to the bathrooms, where she spent twenty minutes ironing out the afternoon’s activities from her dishevelled appearance. Then she walked across the marble lobby to the long bar, looking at nobody, until she reached a suitable table, as she saw it, where she took a seat and ordered a glass of champagne.

  The bar was more than half full at this hour, and it was a large area. She looked around, without stopping on any of the faces.

  Don’t look at any of them, she thought. Wait for the one that comes to you.

  By six thirty she had turned down two offers and had then been invited to join a table of three businessmen away from the bar.

  She was, she told them, a beautician from Paris, on her first visit to New York, who had always wanted to see the Carlyle. Two of the men insisted they all have dinner, and she declined. She wanted just a quiet evening. She had an early start next day.

  But when the pecking order of her preference from among the three of them had been silently and subtly established, the other two left and the lucky winner, unable to believe his good fortune, suggested they dine alone. After a lengthy preamble, he finally suggested his room, a dinner for two, another bottle of whatever she wanted. Russian men would have taken half the time to get there, she thought.

  “Are you married?” she said, having already seen the ring.

  “Does it matter?” the man said.

  “I don’t want this unless you’re attached,” she said. “I’m not the committed type.”

  Ten minutes later she was in his room, with his key, while he picked up another from the concierge.

  Ten minutes after that, he was lying on the floor, bound and gagged with the cord that tied back the drapes. She just had time to drag him into the bathroom and switch on the shower when the dinner he’d ordered downstairs arrived.

  She ate from both plates, drank a bottle of water, and had the trays removed before dragging him back into the room. She checked his breathing, put a pillow under his head, and told him that if he moved from the floor in the night she’d kill him.

  Then she slept for nine hours.

  Chapter 30

  THE SUN CAUGHT THE half-sunken pier on Seventieth Street, and the flat dawn light whited out the glass of the high-rises across the Hudson River.

  Water dripped with a steady, pulsating monotony from the concrete pillars that supported the highway above her, and she jogged slowly in the damp, pillared arcade, observing with a steady eye the other, infrequent figures along the path: a couple of vagrants, another jogger, a man taking pictures in the dawn light who at first alerted her suspicions but was clearly on some project that didn’t include her. She knew she was alone, as much as it was possible to know.

  The river walk to her right was punctuated with steel benches, four seats to a bench, and a few ferries and harbour vessels plied the river beyond.

  She wore jogging pants and shoes and a hat and earmuffs she’d bought the day before with Vladimir’s money—less than a hundred dollars from a closeout sale on the Bowery for the whole ensemble—and, having jogged for a mile now, she was warm enough in the frozen morning that was breaking over New York City.

  She was where she needed to be—and where no one else but Mikhail would find her. But she would jog for another half mile and then return to the fourth bench beyond the pier, which she’d passed a few
minutes earlier. That way she could see the signs of anything untoward.

  On the way back, vigilant to both changes and similarities in the faces and behaviour of the few people she observed, she was satisfied that she could make her approach. The fourth bench was just visible about a hundred yards away. She could see nobody anywhere near it. She checked her watch. It was time.

  She jogged up to the bench and continued to jog on the spot, as she took a water bottle from her belt and drank. She then sat on the second seat from the left for a minute or so. The metal seat was icy through her jogging pants. After a few minutes had passed, she got up and moved to the seat on the far right. That was the signal.

  She began to wait, looking out across the river, her back to the highway and the arcade beneath it. The steam of her breath puffed in clouds around her in the still-freezing air. Before her body temperature dropped, she took a fleece jacket that had hung around her waist and put it on.

  After just over four and a half minutes, a man sat down on the seat at the far end. She saw him only in her peripheral vision, caught sight of a man’s coat, a man’s hands emerging from the pockets and being placed on his knees.

  “It’s not a morning for sitting still,” he said. She recognised the voice.

  “I have to keep walking,” she replied.

  The exchange was as arranged. She immediately got up from the seat and half walked, half jogged away from the view of the river and back into the concrete pillared arcade. Once there, she turned left and walked at a steady pace.

  There was the small workman’s hut Mikhail had told her about in his message. It was built of composite wood and ply, and the padlock on the door dangled open. He must have already been there before he sat down on the bench. He’d said the hut was unused at present, but if not, there was another fallback position farther along the river walk.

  She slipped the padlock out of the catch and went inside. It was hardly less cold inside the hut, but she knew he was right. Nobody would stand around chatting outside at dawn on a January morning at the Seventieth Street pier, not without attracting attention.