The Russian's Greed

by Cap Daniels

  The instant she rounded the corner, the echo of the woman’s second scream pierced the otherwise silent corridor. Anya sighed as the reality reached her. The determined cop had obviously made his way through the open window, as well. The maid was going to need another blessing to keep the heart attack at bay.

  The policeman was a problem, but not the immediate concern. At least a dozen seconds separated him from Anya, giving her plenty of time to form a plan. Still running, she saw a mop bucket with the long, rigid handle of a commercial-grade mop protruding from the soapy water. As she sprinted past the bucket, she yanked the mop from its rest, spilling the water across the floor and creating a minefield of the slickest substance the cop would ever try to run across. With the mop in her hand, she turned another corner and kicked open a heavy wooden door. Behind the door was exactly what she’d hope to find: a stairwell leading down to the first floor and up to whatever waited above.

  As the door closed behind her on its pneumatic arm, she shoved the mophead against the first step and the tip of the handle beneath the handle of the door. It wasn’t an impenetrable obstacle, but it would certainly add a few more precious seconds to the distance between her and her pursuer.

  She took the descending stairs six at a time and slowly peered into the hallway. A man wearing the dress of a man of the cloth strolled nonchalantly down the hall with a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Confident the man presented no threat, Anya pulled the elastic band from her ponytail and drew her long hair forward, hiding most of her face. She stepped from the stairwell with her head low and her face mostly obscured by her hair.

  Walking unhurriedly, she passed the man without a word and continued down the hallway toward an illuminated exit sign hanging above the door to her freedom.

  15

  CHELOVEK OKHOTA

  (MAN HUNT)

  Back at Seventh Avenue and Sixteenth Street, a pair of EMTs loaded their gurney onto the waiting ambulance. The gurney’s occupant, Razmik Sahakyan, an Armenian immigrant, writhed in pain and struggled against the handcuffs holding his wrists to the rails of the bed. His right leg lay twisted, destroyed at the knee.

  Finally outside the store, Special Agent Gwynn Davis stood at the edge of the crowd, listening intently to the chatter over the NYPD radio. Her interest had nothing to do with the Armenian who’d never again walk without a limp. She was only interested in the other Eastern European immigrant who’d made a hit-and-run appearance on the scene. The fear she’d experienced the previous night over the possibility of losing the Russian and spending the rest of her career locked in the basement of the Justice Department reared its ugly head again. The perfect avenue to escape had presented itself, and Anastasia Burinkova had taken it. As much as she dreaded the call to her boss, Supervisory Special Agent Ray White, the thought of never seeing Anya again tore at her very soul.

  Protocol and standard operating procedure dictated that she must immediately report Anya’s escape, but the lingering hope that Anya may simply be well hidden and biding her time until the melee ended was too much to resist. She watched as, one by one, the police cars, both unmarked and otherwise, pulled away from the scene. One patrol car remained, and leaning against the trunk, stood a middle-aged officer with a few too many pounds hanging over his gun belt.

  Gwynn approached the officer, who still looked as if he’d just tried to run a marathon. “Excuse me, officer. I’m Special Agent Davis with Justice. Were you able to apprehend the person who ran?”

  The officer didn’t look up to check the DOJ agent’s credentials. Instead, he caught his breath and said, “No, she was too fast. My partner continued the foot pursuit, but she escaped through the church down the block.” After panting for thirty seconds, the cop finally looked up and tilted his head. “What does the DOJ have to do with any of this? I thought the FBI handled kidnappings.”

  “They do, but I just happened to be in the area. Did you get a good enough look at the runner to give me a description?”

  The officer held up one finger and pulled a water bottle from inside his cruiser. After a long drink, he said, “I didn’t get a good look at the guy, but whoever he was, he had his shirt pulled up over his head, and he was wicked fast. Hang on a minute, and I’ll call my partner.”

  Gwynn pulled a small pad and pen from her bag in an attempt to appear more official. Without her credentials, she was treading on thin ice by sticking her nose any deeper into an NYPD chase.

  Regaining his composure and catching his breath, the officer pressed the push-to-talk button on his shoulder mic. “Sixty-six fifty-four to sixty-six fifty-five, say location.”

  The reply came, not over the radio, but through the air. “I’m right here, you fat moron. What do you want?”

  The officer turned to see his partner jogging to a stop on the sidewalk fifteen feet away. “Oh, yeah, whatever. This is Special Agent . . .” He pointed toward Gwynn. “What did you say your name was?”

  “It’s Davis. Special Agent Gwynn Davis with Justice.”

  He turned back to his much younger partner. “Yeah, Davis. That’s it. She don’t care nothin’ about the perp with the busted leg. Alls she wants to know is if we got a description of the rabbit.”

  The younger officer eyed her thoughtfully. “I didn’t get a good look at her face.”

  “Her?” yelled the first officer. “You mean that guy was a girl?”

  “Yes, she was a blonde female, probably five feet nine or ten and a hundred thirty-five pounds. That’s the best I can do, but why does the Justice Department care about a runaway good Samaritan?”

  Gwynn put on her government-issue stern face. “I’m sorry, officer, but I’m not at liberty to say. Where did you last see the subject?”

  He gave her a frown before pointing down the block. “She ran out the back of the church right down there. After that, she was in the wind.”

  Gwynn pretended to make a note on her pad. “Thank you, officers. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Before either man could protest, Gwynn tucked her pad and pen back into her bag and headed east on Sixteenth. At the top of the stairs to the church, she checked her watch and sighed. It had been eighteen minutes since Anya sprinted from the scene. She could’ve been three miles away on foot by then, and God only knew how far she could be if she’d stolen a bike or a car.

  Gwynn pulled her cell phone from her bag and dialed her boss’s number, but she couldn’t garner the strength to press the send button. Still torn, she shoved the phone back into her bag and pulled open the old oak doors to the church. Inside, a smattering of parishioners milled about, some of them praying while others whispered to each other. The massive church would take a team of agents hours to adequately search, but the police officer hadn’t said Anya was hiding in the church. He said she’d escaped out the back. If out the back was, indeed, where Anya had gone, then there was no place Gwynn would rather be. Wasting time searching a massive church would only give the former SVR assassin more time to vanish.

  The courtyard behind the church was massive on a scale Gwynn had not imagined possible in Manhattan. Other than Central Park, open-landscaped real estate was almost unheard of. The southern edge of the courtyard was walled by numerous shops with signs threatening anyone who dared trespass. If Gwynn didn’t find her favorite Russian before Washington, D.C. found out she was missing, trespassing would be the least of her concerns. Homelessness and prosecution would claim the top two spots on that list.

  Trying to think like an assassin, she scoured the area, hoping against hope that Anya was only hiding from the NYPD and not running from the Justice Department. She concluded that hiding, even doing so in a courtyard of this magnitude, would be a terrible plan in case the police continued their search for the mysterious leg breaker. At that point, searching the courtyard became a search for exits from the courtyard.

  All of the shops could serve as an escape route if the doors weren’t securely locked. Anya likely didn’t have a set of lockpicks i
n her pocket, so she’d have to rely on the absentmindedness of a shopkeeper to make use of one of the back doors. Gwynn ran along the row of shops, pulling on every door, but none budged.

  A gazebo, with a collection of smokers huddled beneath, rested on the only high ground in the courtyard. Gwynn trotted toward the structure, leapt to the rail, and propelled herself onto the roof. The height gave her ten feet of advantage over the ground, so she scanned the area in all directions. There was no exit from the space except through its surrounding building. Gwynn stood exasperated on the roof of the gazebo as the collection of smoke-filled onlookers beneath fired questions and curses toward the crazy woman on top of their shelter.

  Resigned to press send on her cell phone, Gwynn let her legs hang over the edge and sat on the sloping, octagonal roof. With her phone in hand, she cast one final look around the courtyard and caught a glimpse of something that didn’t quite fit its surroundings. She pocketed the phone and slid from the roof, landing like a cat beside a filthy cigarette butt can. The thirty-second sprint that delivered her to the site of what she’d seen from her previous perch felt like it took hours. Finally standing at the base of a tree six feet from the low-roofed shops, she gazed upward at the broken tree limb with its splintered joint at the trunk, glaring white from the interior wood that had never seen the sun.

  Imagining where the limb would’ve reached before being broken, she drew a line with her eyes to the edge of the roof over the shop. The gutter was bent into itself as if the knee of a fleeing Russian had landed there only minutes before. She scampered up the tree to the next higher limb and made her way to its limit toward the shop. With a powerful lunge, she launched herself through the air and performed a perfect parachute-landing fall on the metal roof, just as she’d been taught at the Academy. Back on her feet, she ran to the front edge and peered downward onto the sidewalk some fifteen feet below. Not even Anya was crazy enough to attempt that fall. Broken ankles have a way of becoming the premature ending of an escape. Glances left and right provided the answer she’d been seeking. A construction scaffold was secured to the roofline fifty feet away. Gwynn covered the distance before she’d realized she was moving. Seconds later, she was on the sidewalk in a crowd of ecstatic tourists and disgruntled New Yorkers. If the courtyard and church were too large to search efficiently, the borough of Manhattan might as well have been the surface of the moon. The Russian was a ghost—a spirit on the wind—and forever gone.

  Instead of dialing Agent White, Gwynn redialed the last call made from her phone, and the car appeared in minutes.

  The driver stepped from the car and held open her door. “How did you get all the way over here?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The driver closed the door and took his place behind the wheel. “And where’s your friend?”

  “That’s an even longer story. Just take me back to the apartment, please.”

  They pulled from the curb and crawled along with the snail’s-pace traffic.

  The driver checked the mirror. “You missed all the excitement outside Barney’s. Apparently, there was a guy who stole a kid or whatever. I couldn’t see it all from where I was sitting, but somebody said a dude ran out of the crowd and kicked the guy’s ass. The kid is okay, but they carried the dude out in an ambulance. Can you believe that?”

  “Yeah, I can believe almost anything in New York City.”

  The driver huffed. “You can say that again, lady.”

  Throughout the ride back to Times Square, Gwynn eyed her phone as if it were her ticket into Hell. Perhaps it was, but the longer she waited, the worse the repercussions would be.

  Soon, the massive stories-tall electronic billboards filled the windshield, and Gwynn stepped from the car and climbed the stairs into the building where she’d likely never again sleep down the hall from her partner and friend.

  16

  SOBYTIYE CHERNOGO GALSTUKA

  (BLACK TIE)

  After practicing the conversation a dozen times, Special Agent Gwynn Davis finally gained the courage to dial the phone and press the green button.

  A confident, almost perturbed voice filled her ear. “Special Agent White.”

  “Uh, Agent White, it’s Davis. We’ve got a problem.”

  “We’ve got a problem, or you’ve got a problem?”

  “Both, sir.”

  His exasperated sigh sounded like the cold north wind. “Let’s hear it.”

  “She’s missing, sir.”

  “Quit with the sir, Davis. Who’s missing?”

  “Uh, Anya, sir.”

  The sound of White’s feet hitting the floor and the creaking cry of his office chair thundered through the phone. “What? What do you mean Anya’s missing? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You see, there was a kidnapping outside Barney’s this morning, and—”

  “Are you telling me someone kidnapped Anya?”

  “No, no, sir. It wasn’t Anya. It was a little boy. There was a standoff with police, and Anya snuck out behind the guard at Barney’s and saved the boy.”

  White’s palm landed with a smack against his forehead. “Why didn’t you stop her, Davis? You know we can’t let her face hit TV screens. That’s the worst possible outcome.”

  Gwynn cleared her throat. “Well, there’s one thing that could be worse.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “She escaped from the scene. The NYPD chased her, but she was too fast for them.”

  “Escaped? I’m not following. Slow down, and tell me exactly what happened.”

  Gwynn told the story, play-by-play.

  Ray White’s head didn’t explode, but the pressure was building. “You let her get away, and you didn’t immediately report it to me?”

  “Well, I was trying to find her, sir, and . . .”

  White roared, “You were trying to find her. You, fresh-out-of-the-Academy, Junior Agent Guinevere Davis, were trying to find one of the most highly trained Russian assassins on the planet, by yourself, in New York City. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Determined to keep the tears at bay, Gwynn gritted her teeth. “I found her trail across the top of some shops and down a scaffold, but I couldn’t make any more progress.”

  White leaned back in his chair and tried to calm himself. “We’ll deal with your transgressions—multiple transgressions—later. For now, let’s cover the background. Did she say or do anything to make you believe she was going to run?”

  Gwynn replayed the previous night’s feigned attempt at a kiss by the front door and the morning’s sparring match in the living room. “No, sir, she didn’t. In fact, quite the opposite. She told me she would’ve helped us if we’d simply asked. She said we didn’t have to arrest her and threaten her. She believes what we’re doing is the right thing. I mean, that’s pretty much exactly what she said.”

  White let out a long, pained breath. “She was setting you up, Davis. She was trying to get you to talk me into changing the terms. Let me guess. She said if you’d get her a deal that didn’t include the threat of prison, she’d volunteer to stay on as long as we needed her. Does that sound familiar?”

  Gwynn’s heart sank into her stomach. “How could I have been such an idiot?”

  White slammed a hand onto his desk. “Would you look at that? CNN already has footage of your little train wreck. No, wait. It’s not a little train wreck. It’s a train wreck of nuclear waste in the streets of Manhattan.”

  Gwynn protested. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Shut up, Davis. Just shut up. I’m listening to the report.”

  “A bizarre event on the streets of New York City today. Thirty-four-year-old Razmik Sahakyan, an Armenian immigrant, is accused of kidnapping his son early this morning from Hell’s Kitchen in west Manhattan. A brief standoff with police on Seventh Avenue and Sixteenth Street in front of Barney’s, a person who is now being called “Barney Badass,” ran from the world-famous department store, assaulted and disarmed t
he kidnapper who was wielding a large knife, and saved the child, whose identity is being withheld at this time. After saving the child, the good Samaritan ran from the scene and evaded police, but the . . . excuse me for saying so . . . badass can be seen clearly in this video CNN acquired from a bystander at the scene. If anyone knows the identity or whereabouts of this do-gooder, NYPD asks that you notify them as soon as possible. It is likely a reward is in order for this brave citizen. From Manhattan, I’m Jodie Bellacourt, reporting live for CNN.”

  White said, “I don’t know how much of that you heard, Davis, but it may not be as bad as I feared.”

  Gwynn breathed a sigh of enormous relief. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Oh, your part in this is still as bad as it gets, and you’re going to pay for it, but at least there are no pictures of Anya’s face flooding the airwaves.”

  “I’m really sorry, Agent White. I had no way to know—”

  “Stop apologizing, Davis. You’re not making things any better.”

  “So, what do you want me to do now?”

  Ray White almost chuckled. “I want you to do exactly what you’ve been doing all day—absolutely nothing. I want you to sit your ass down in that apartment, and don’t get up. If my hunch is correct, Anya needs at least a few things she left inside the apartment, and she’ll be back to get them. So help me, God, Davis, if you let her leave that apartment again, I will hang you out to dry, and I’ll use your badge as a coaster. Do you understand me?”

  “Do you really think she’s coming back to the apartment?”

  “What’s wrong with you? Weren’t you listening? Yes, I think she’s coming back, but not while she thinks you’re there, so you’ll have to make sure the doorman knows you’re not home, even if it takes all the cash you own. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. Pay off the doorman, and hole up in the apartment. I’ve got it.”

  The line went dead, and Gwynn sat in disbelief as she stared down at the black screen of her cell phone. The trip to pad the doorman’s pocket took less than five minutes, and she was back inside the apartment locking the deadbolt behind her. As she stood staring at the chain hanging from the lock, it occurred to her that the chain could only be in place if someone were inside the apartment, and Anya would know the same thing, so she left the chain hanging free and turned off every light inside the apartment. The urge to stare out the window was almost too much to overcome, but she managed to stay clear of the glass overlooking the street below.