Carmen held Babe’s gaze and sat unmoving. She looked at that weird little Zen bird sitting before her—her red hair and yellow caftan clashing against this room she had sheathed in gold—and couldn’t help feeling her gut sink. Go on, she thought. Just say it.
“Don’t you see?” Babe McAdoo said. “Gird your loins, Carmen. We’re going to take down the syndicate.”
CHAPTER ELEV
EN
While Carmen met with Babe McAdoo, Illarion Katzev prepared to address the syndicate.
On the massive stainless steel wall before him were thirteen flatscreen monitors. In the center, one was left dark out of respect for Jean-Georges Laurent, whose face was blown off at the Four Seasons several weeks ago in ways that demanded a closed casket at his funeral, where people clucked their tongues in pity not because he was dead, but, some felt, because they were cheated out of seeing the ruined nature of what rested within.
The other twelve monitors, on the other hand, were alive with images of unhappy people from around the world, all locked in their safe rooms and transmitting across secure lines.
In the wake of Laurent’s death, these people comprised what was left of the syndicate—three women and nine men. None was pleased to be here now, though at least they understood the importance of why they were asked to leave behind their heady lives to deal with a potentially dangerous situation before it became too late to do so.
For Illarion Katzev, that understanding would make the meeting more productive and, when decisions were made, easier to deal with when plans were put into motion.
In the wake of Carmen Gragera’s escape from the Waldorf Astoria the night before, Katzev decided to call the meeting in an effort to get in front of the situation before Carmen got in front of it herself.
Each person who looked back at him now knew the extent of Gragera’s skills, which were impressive. She wasn’t somebody they took lightly—some feared her—which is one of the few reasons they marked her for death several weeks ago, thinking it was time to destroy her connection with them and sow fresh talent elsewhere.
But what concerned them most was her romantic relationship with Alex Williams, whom they also considered a threat because a respected third party informed them that for whatever reason, Williams had been gathering intelligence on them.
In Bora Bora, they successfully killed Williams, but Carmen escaped, which all agreed left them in danger because Alex likely shared his intelligence with her. And if he had, with enough investigative work, that knowledge could lead her straight to them, which was a concern because with her lover dead due to them, all believed she’d seek revenge soon.
So, Illarion Katzev, a formidable man not yet fifty who made his fortune the old-fashioned way—through murder and with ruthless calculation—read over his notes a final time while the others prepared themselves for his recommendation on how best to handle the elusive Gragera now.
“Colleagues,” he said, glancing up at the monitors.
“Katzev,” came a dozen replies.
“Since last night, I’ve been reading over our files on Carmen Gragera and our seven-year history with her. There’s no question that she must go, as many of us agreed upon weeks ago due to the potential threat she invites via her relationship with Alex Williams. The good news is that in researching the information we’ve compiled on her over the years, I’ve found a possible Achille’s heel.”
He let a beat of silence pass and watched the impatience on some of their faces turn to interest. “Carmen loves children,” he said. “I have no idea why, since I can’t stand them myself. But Carmen loves them in ways that are almost...unnatural.”
“How do you know this?”
The question came from Conrad Bates, who owned more of Las Vegas than he probably should given the financial straits that city was in. Still, for balance, his portfolio offered a wealth of other properties, mostly hotels located in Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and throughout Europe, with particular attention paid to London and Paris, where his businesses thrived.
He was younger than Katzev, a product of one of the better Boston families who took his sizable inheritance and actually did something with it. He was aggressive and unethical, which were fine traits the syndicate embraced, though Katzev had never liked the man, not that his feelings for him mattered much. What mattered was the money Bates brought to the syndicate, which like everyone else here, was substantial. It also was critical to achieving what each desired as they moved forward not just into greater wealth, but into what they really wanted—unfathomable power.
“Hello, Conrad,” he said.
“Illarion.”
“How’s Vegas treating you these days?”
“I’m hoping we can address that at our next meeting.”
“I’ll bet.”
“But if you could answer my question now, I think we’d all agree that’s more pressing. Or at least it seems to be given the urgency of this meeting.”
“In reading over Carmen’s files, one thing became clear. Each time she was assigned a job that involved killing a child, she turned it down flat. She gave no reason why. She simply refused to do it. In her files, there are seventeen instances of her doing so over our time with her.”
“Who cares?” Bates said. “So, she likes kids. Some of us do. What’s your point?”
Katzev kept his features neutral even though he wanted to call the man an idiot for not having the imagination to see something so obvious. “If Carmen loves children so much, then we threaten her with them.”
“Does she have children?”
This time, it was the eighty-year-old Greek shipping heiress Hera Hallas who asked the question. Katzev looked up at the elegant woman with the tan skin and the chic, pure white hair pulled away from her face in a blunt ponytail and knew again that in her youth, she must have been a great beauty.
“She doesn’t have children,” he said.
“If she loves them so much, why not?”
“Caring for a child while gunning down adults is probably a lot to handle,” Conrad Bates said. “I’d imagine changing diapers and changing gun magazines would be a challenge for any single mother. But I still don’t see the significance, Illarion. So what if she loves children?”
Patience, he told himself. Patience.
“In going through the intelligence, what also came to the fore is that she gives to only one charity.”
“Crying Toddlers Anonymous?” Bates said. “Early Onset Childhood Dementia? The Skinned Knees Institute of Montana? The Boogieman Fund?”
Hera Hallas rolled her eyes in reaction to the juvenile comments. In the monitor next to her, another member of the syndicate, who was in Paris, where it was evening, was wearing black tie and starting to look annoyed. Katzev saw him check his watch. Since they all could see each other, he wondered if Bates also caught the man’s impatience.
“Actually, Conrad,” Katzev said, “regardless of the disrespect you bring to the table, not to mention your cynicism, which is unwarranted, you’re not that far off as the charity does have to do with children. Under Franco’s leadership, Carmen Gragera’s father became an unintended adopted orphan.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Bates asked.
“If you pay attention to the news—and I hope that you do, Conrad, beyond the truncated information wedged into the CNN crawl—you’ll remember the scandal that broke out in Spain in 1989, when it was revealed that three hundred thousand babies were stolen after their mothers gave birth to them. Does anyone remember that?”
“I do,” Hera Hallas said. “It was awful.”
“The mothers—often young and unmarried and thus considered worthless under Franco’s regime—were told that their child was stillborn. Or that it died soon after birth. When the mother asked to see the child, she was shown, at a distance, a baby’s corpse the hospital kept in a freezer. Why? Because her child already had been sold by the Catholic Church. That adopting couple who paid for the child was generally
affluent and a member of the church, and thus deemed more suitable to raise the child than a single mother considered a disgrace to Franco and naturally to the church. Franco died in 1975. The church continued this practice for another fourteen years, only stopping when the scandal came to light because a man on his deathbed revealed the truth to his son that he bought him for two hundred thousand pesetas. Or about fifteen hundred dollars. It became a sensation. Worldwide news. Another bullet to the heart of the Catholic Church. Certainly, you heard of it, Conrad.”
Bates hesitated, but then said of course he had.
Bullshit, thought Katzev. But he pressed on. “For Carmen’s father, the problem went beyond the mere kidnapping. The parents who bought and raised him were Christian zealots. Monsters. They bought him with the sole intent to abuse him, thinking that if they beat this child born to a woman they considered a whore, then certainly they’d be rewarded for their efforts when their time came to enter heaven’s gates.” He waved his hand. “Or something like that. They were horrific to him. They did unspeakable things to him. It wasn’t until Neron Gragera was sixteen that he managed to free himself by stabbing them to death while they slept. He disappeared for years. No one knew where he went. It was during that time that he fell in with the right people—at least as far as he was concerned—and was trained to become an assassin.”
“So, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Bates said. “Fantastic. But what does this have to do with why we’re here now?”
“Carmen Gragera is a wealthy woman,” Katzev said. “She and her father were close. It’s no coincidence that a great deal of her money goes to one particular orphanage in Madrid and also to St. Vincent’s Services’ seven group homes in Queens and Staten Island. Each caters to troubled children, all emotionally scarred. She gives millions each year to make certain each organization gives its charges the best care, from living quarters to schools to access to doctors, including psychiatrists trained to deal specifically with troubled children and teens. When she can, she visits the children. She has grown attached to many of them, especially those here in New York because here is where Carmen often finds herself. I think she gives so much because she wants to honor what her father endured. She took his experience, dipped deep into her own money, and is actively supporting two organizations that need her to succeed. I think Carmen takes care of these children because she knows that by doing so, they will be properly cared for and won’t suffer her father’s fate.”
“How did you find this out?” Hera Hallas said.
“There’s nothing I can’t find out, Hera. If you read between the lines, much of it is here in the files. Some of it is investigative work I did on my part. With it, I started to piece everything together. Whatever I couldn’t fill in on my own was a few phone calls away.”
“But to what end?” Bates asked.
“Can’t you figure it out?” The person who spoke was the Parisian, Marius Aubert. Katzev looked up at him and saw that he was looking down at Bates, his impatience with the man as high as the tension in the room. “Obviously, Illarion plans to target one of the organizations. I’m assuming St. Vincent’s because of its close proximity to him and because Carmen is now in New York. He’ll threaten Carmen with those children. He’ll tell her that if she doesn’t come in, he’ll kill them one-by-one until she does.” Aubert’s eyes lifted to Katzev’s. “Am I right, Illarion? Is that what you plan to do? Exchange their lives for hers?”
“Something like that, Marius.”
“And then what?” Hera Hallas said. “I’m no angel,” the octogenarian said. “But killing innocent children, especially in the numbers you’re talking about, seems extreme, cruel and unnecessary.”
“It won’t come to that,” Katzev said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know Carmen, and she knows me. She knows I’ll go through with it if she forces my hand. She won’t second-guess it. She knows I’ll even set fire to one or more of those group homes if that’s what it takes to bring her in. I expect to hear from her. She’ll do what she has to do to protect those children.”
“Will she risk her own life?” Hera Hallas said.
“I think she will.”
“Carmen Gragera is not without her own army of contacts,” Hallas said. “Tip her off, and she’ll have those homes surrounded.”
“Let her.”
“You’re being awfully glib, Illarion. How do you propose to pull this off?”
“Just watch me,” he said.
“I’d rather hear your plan, not what Marius thinks you’ll do. I think we’d all like to hear it.”
He knew this was coming and so he told them his plan. He watched the faces first shift into skepticism, he saw them think it through, and then he watched their eyes meet his with what looked like a trace of either admiration or respect. He decided he’d take either.
“Any questions?” he asked.
The room went silent.
Katzev looked over at Conrad Bates, who was staring back at him. He cocked his head at him and waited for a sarcastic reply, but when he realized that even Bates had nothing to say, he knew his instincts were correct and that if he was going to succeed, he needed to act fast.
CHAPTER TW
ELVE
Illarion Katzev, born Iver Kester in Aberdeen, Scotland, before he assumed the identity of a Russian for the sake of secrecy within the syndicate he helped to create with Jean-George Laurent, had homes in Aberdeen, Moscow and Manhattan.
It was only in Aberdeen, where friends and family knew him as the boy who came from modest means and a broken home shattered by an alcoholic father, that he went by his real name. In his hometown, he was celebrated as a successful entrepreneur in the States and an example of what could be achieved through risk, luck and hard work.
With his father long since dead, but with his mother still alive and thriving in her seventies, he visited his hometown once each year, generally for a week, whereupon he was feted by his mother, his old friends, his aunts, uncles and cousins. They knew him only as Iver, who left Aberdeen when he was twenty to go to America, where he worked long hours to carve out a fortune in buying and selling real estate while much of his family remained in Aberdeen to work on the family farm.
What his family and friends didn’t know was the secret life he led.
They didn’t know that he went by Illarion Katzev, they didn’t know that he spent years with a tutor to become fluent in Russian and they also didn’t know that he had spent the same amount of years with the same tutor to perfect how a Russian accent would sound when spoken in English.
There was more.
They didn’t know that he owned a home in Moscow to galvanize the belief that he was, in fact, Russian. They knew about the apartment in Manhattan, but because they couldn’t afford to visit him, they had no idea that the apartment was a lavish penthouse on Fifth Avenue. They knew he had done well, but they’d never suspect that he had amassed a net worth of millions. And they certainly didn’t know about the syndicate, which grew those millions exponentially.
To him, he always would be their Iver, who worked hard when he was young at any random job he could find in Aberdeen, all in an effort to buy a one-way ticket to America, where he was determined to change the course of his life in Manhattan. He succeeded, only in ways they’d never know or understand.
Now, in his penthouse, Illarion returned from his office on Madison, where he had addressed the syndicate, who agreed to his plan to root out Carmen Gragera and have her assassinated. In his living room, which overlooked Central Park, he fixed himself a Scotch and soda, and thought through his plan.
St. Vincent’s group home services is where Carmen chose to give a significant chunk of her money. Through Google, he learned that St. Vincent’s served more than seventy adolescents who directly benefitted from Carmen’s generosity. Earlier, he called St. Vincent’s and spoke to a woman about making a donation. “I want to make sure that this is where my friend, Carmen G
ragera, makes donations. We were talking about it at dinner the other night. I’m fairly certain she said St. Vincent’s.”
The woman brightened at the sound of Carmen’s name. She said that they had a close relationship with her and that she was instrumental in the lives of many of their charges.
“We know Carmen well,” the woman said. “She’s an angel, that one. She treats the children, regardless of their age or what they might have done in their pasts, with respect and kindness. I can’t tell you how many lives she’s changed. We’d be so grateful for your support.”
“Is there any child in particular that Carmen has ‘adopted’ as her own?” Katzev asked.
“That’s easy,” the woman said. “There are three. All young women who at this point in their lives are probably too old for adoption. Two are fifteen, one is one the cusp of turning seventeen. They’ll likely be with us until they graduate high school, which won’t be long now. Carmen writes to them monthly and she visits them when she can. I think she sees elements of herself in them, especially Chloe, whom she’s closest to. I know she thinks she can help them just by being close to them and offering advice about how best to go forward with their lives.”
“And who better than Carmen for that?” he said without a trace of sarcasm, though within, he wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. “What are the names of the other two girls?” he asked.
“First names?”
“Sure.”
Giving out first names didn’t rub against the rules of confidentiality set forth by St. Vincent’s board of directors. She gave him the names, which he wrote down.
From Manhattan With Revenge Boxed Set Page 13
