The Pandora Key

by Lynne Heitman

  “That kind of defeats the purpose.”

  “Maybe, but you weren’t exactly burning up the course. I just wanted to ask you about this.”

  He pulled a photo from an envelope and held it up. It was a picture of Bo, ever the gentleman, holding the door for me at Grigorii’s, the morning we had gone to meet Drazen Tishchenko.

  He pointed at Bo. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Who says he’s my friend?”

  “We’ve been trying to identify him. We ran his plates, but that was a dead end.”

  That helped me feel marginally better. There was no end to the tricks Bo knew. It also explained why he was feeling so much heat.

  Ling put the picture back into the envelope, then reached over and popped the door open. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  I looked down the path I wouldn’t be running that morning and felt…relief. I opened the door and climbed in. He waited until I was buckled in, checked his side mirror, and pulled away from the curb. He turned at the next side street. There was no place to park, so he pulled up to a hydrant and killed the engine.

  “Government plates,” he said, not seeming all that bashful about it.

  “I knew you had a team on me,” I said.

  “Sure.” He twisted around in his seat so he was more or less facing me. “The Bureau has unlimited funds and manpower to spend following around a private investigator. That would be an easy sell.”

  He didn’t actually say “two-bit private investigator,” but it was implied. I knew they weren’t up on Bo, and there had been only three people in the meeting. “Are you set up on Tishchenko?”

  “We’re up on Grigorii’s. We have been for months. I got a call that an unknown female had wandered into the picture, which is pretty unusual for that place. I thought it must be Rachel, but it was you, and I asked myself, ‘What would she be doing there?’ I thought about it. Want to know what I came up with?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “It all comes back to Betelco. Everyone is connected through Betelco, including your partner. Harvey is connected through his ex-wife. His ex-wife is connected personally through Roger and professionally as the company’s auditor. Tishchenko is connected because he was running dirty money through there. Right?”

  “If you say so.” I didn’t see anything to argue with in there but didn’t want to just agree with him. He could be tricky.

  “Four years ago, Roger Fratello disappeared. He took Drazen’s money with him. There’s some indication he also killed Drazen’s brother Vladi, but that’s mostly rumor coming from his people. Drazen’s been looking for Roger ever since. Are you with me?”

  “I’m following along nicely, thank you.”

  “Good, because here’s where you come in. Cut to right now. Traces of Roger start to show up again. Drazen Tishchenko ends up in Boston, and your partner gets grabbed.”

  “Didn’t he say he was out shopping for a new wheelchair?”

  He smiled, indulging me. “Then I saw this.” He tapped the envelope with the picture in it. “Lew and I started tossing around a few ideas for why you, a person with no prior connections to ROC, would be meeting with a high-priority ROC target.”

  “ROC?”

  “Russian organized crime. That’s what I do. I’m with a special unit.”

  I wanted to mention that Drazen was Ukrainian, but if he chased Russians for a living, it was a good bet he already knew.

  “Anyway, even after all this time, Drazen is looking for Roger. If he thinks, for some reason, that Harvey can tell him where to find him, that’s a good reason to snatch him up. If you want Harvey back, that’s a good reason for you to visit with Drazen.”

  “That’s a theory,” I said. A pretty darn close theory.

  “As you know, new information came up leading us to believe Roger had resurfaced, so we’ve also been looking for him.”

  “Right,” I said. “He popped out of a terrorist’s closet in Zormat.”

  “Well, I see that you have been following along nicely.” Ling didn’t look exactly impressed, more that I might not have been as two-bit as he’d thought. “We got a call from State. They had some items they couldn’t identify. We started running prints for them and came up with a wallet belonging to fugitive Roger Fratello. We were pretty psyched about that development. Then we tracked a key from inside the wallet to the safety deposit box in Brussels, which is where we found your partner’s prints. You see how that all works together?”

  “I do.”

  “We came to see Harvey. We almost killed you. We left. We got the call from Harvey to come back. That’s the part where the two of you lied to federal agents.”

  “Do you have some proof that we lied?”

  “No, but I don’t need it, because I don’t really care about that. What I care about is Drazen Tishchenko, and since Harvey came back from his time out with head and hands intact, I have to think that you and Drazen worked something out. That’s what I’m interested in.”

  “You’re not after Harvey?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You’re not after Roger?”

  “We were,” he said, “but he’s dead. He died in the hijacking.”

  “You knew that?”

  “We figured it out.”

  “How?”

  “Probably the same way you did. We started asking some people.”

  “How come you guys didn’t already know about that? The government is supposed to know things like that.”

  He shrugged. “We don’t know a fraction of what we should know. Besides, we never knew he was on the Salanna plane until we got the prints from Zormat. Then we put it together. It’s a bummer, too, because Roger was our best shot at getting Drazen.”

  I pointed at the envelope. “You obviously know where the guy is. Why don’t you just go and pick him up?”

  “Because I have nothing to charge him with, and if I did, no one would testify against him, and if they tried to, he would do the whole head-and-hands thing. We told you what happened to Walter Herald, and he did that knowing he was killing a fed. That sent a pretty strong message. Everyone at Betelco went running for cover after that.”

  “I could see how that would be discouraging to people.”

  “But let’s be generous for the purpose of this exercise and assume I could pick him up and charge him with something. Do you know what he would do?”

  “Call a lawyer?”

  “Call the CIA.”

  “For what?”

  “He has strong ties to the organization formerly known as the KGB. He knows state secrets. He says he does, anyway. The CIA swoops in, whispers something about the greater good, spirits him away, and the next time we see him, he’s back doing exactly what we left him doing. Roger was our best chance. Not even the spooks would have had the guts to pull him out from under felony murder of a federal agent.” He shook his head. He had the look of Charlie Brown after he’d tried again to kick the football, only to have the CIA snatch it away at the last minute. “I would have finally had him.”

  “All right, so your job is hard. What are we doing now? Right here, you and me?”

  “We’re talking about how you can help me with my job.”

  “Let me see if I’m following. Drazen is your big prize. You want him for the murder of Walter Herald. You needed Roger Fratello to get him. You wanted Harvey to get you to Roger, which, by the way, raises this question: How come you’re just skipping over Rachel in this whole thing? Why aren’t you after her?”

  “We don’t have Rachel’s prints on Roger’s money.”

  “You have pictures of her kissing Roger.”

  “That’s not against the law.”

  “But you have to think she’s involved.” I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

  “We think she was responsible for bringing the Tishchenkos into Betelco and a number of companies in the area. Again, there aren’t too many victims in this town—actually, in any town—wil
ling to testify against the Russians.”

  “All right, fine. But now we all agree that Roger is ashes in Sudan.” I looked for validation on that point. He gave me the nod. “Unless you want to nail him for lying about buying a wheelchair, doesn’t that mean that Harvey is off the hook? He can’t help you get Drazen on the agent’s murder, because he had nothing to do with that. If he’s off the hook, why would I help you?”

  “Let me ask you something.” His lighter tone suggested a new turn in the conversation. “How much do you know about the fall of the Soviet Union?”

  Definitely a new turn. “Let’s see, communism failed, the USSR crumbled and split apart. Now we have 220 countries competing at the Olympics instead of 180.”

  “The last time I checked in with Drazen Tishchenko, he was trying to sell a diesel-powered, ninety-foot-long, Foxtrot-class attack submarine to Pablo Escobar. Pablo needed a little something to run his product up and down the West Coast. Do you know where Drazen got it?”

  “I’d have to think the only navy that wouldn’t miss a sub would be the old Soviet navy, whatever it was called.”

  “He bought it in Kronstadt, which is where the Baltic fleet of the Red Navy went to die. We’re taking about a hundred-million-dollar military vessel. Drazen paid five for it and had a deal to sell it for twenty.”

  “That would have been a fair return on investment.”

  “The thing about Russians is, they love money, they’re scared of absolutely nothing, and they will sell anything. If you need it and you’re willing to pay for it, Drazen Tishchenko will get it for you, and being who he is, he’s plugged in. He knows party officials who know things. You know, like where the stocks of weaponized smallpox are kept. Where all the tactical nuclear weapons happen to be. They know where the weapons-grade fissionable material is, and they know how to get all that stuff out and into the hands of the people willing to pay for it and willing to use it. Any idea who those people might be?”

  “People who don’t like us?”

  “That’s correct. The submarine deal never happened, but only because the local mafiya back home blocked it. Drazen forgot to cut them in. Otherwise, the U.S. Navy would be chasing drug-running subs up and down the Pacific Coast. Are you starting to get my drift?”

  We were still chatting amiably, but an undercurrent had crept in, something in his usually imperturbable tone that carried more weight than the words he was saying. That, by itself, felt like a pretty good case for helping him out.

  He went on. “When Tishchenko decides to put a few tactical nukes out there, there’s nothing to say we’ll catch him then, either. Wouldn’t it be better to just nip it in the bud?”

  “I still don’t know how I’m supposed to help you do that.”

  “I think you know where the fortune is.”

  “The what?”

  “The lost fortune.”

  “His money has a name?”

  “That’s what people say when they talk about it.” Having finished his own coffee, he reached down for the cup he’d brought for me and started peeling back the plastic flap. “According to legend, it’s a billion dollars.”

  This was getting interesting, enough so that I couldn’t hide it. “How does anyone misplace a billion dollars?”

  “The better story is how he got it in the first place. Drazen owned a bank in Russia.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the banker type.”

  “I didn’t say he was a banker. He’s a gangster who owned a bank. That’s all the rage in Russia these days. There’s no real regulation of banks over there, so they buy them and use them as mattresses.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mattresses. Places to keep their cash. Then they use the U.S. banking system to turn all that dirty money into clean U.S. currency. It’s a beautiful thing. No one can accuse these gangsters of being stupid.”

  “I have to believe he didn’t earn a billion dollars from ATM charges.”

  “He stole it from KGB agents.”

  “He stole it from the KGB? First of all, that sounds like a bad strategy. Second, where does the KGB get a billion dollars?”

  “They stole it.”

  “From whom?”

  “The Russian treasury.” He glanced over, maybe to gauge my interest. This was probably the sort of thing that made most people’s eyes glaze over. But I had a personal stake.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The people who were most pissed off by the unraveling of the Soviet Union were KGB and party officials.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “The ones who benefited most from a corrupt system would be the ones with the most to lose. What did they do?”

  “They stole the country.”

  “Stole the country?”

  “Starting in 1992, for about eleven years, the KGB and other party officials pulled off the greatest looting of a country that the world has ever seen. It’s hard to say how much money they took, but estimates run around six hundred billion.”

  “Jesus. How do you steal that much money?”

  “The same way most people steal from their employers. They set up shell companies and false-flag bank accounts all over the world and sneak money into them. But there was so much money the KGB ran out of places to put it. They turned to the mafiya. But at that time, the mafiya wasn’t sophisticated enough to handle it, so the KGB bought them what they needed to keep up.”

  “New BlackBerrys?”

  “Computers and communications equipment. They gave them the most sophisticated and cutting-edge technical equipment available. It was a transforming moment for the bad guys.”

  “Bad guys? I don’t hear any good guys in this tale.”

  “The worse guys. One of the worst is Drazen Tishchenko. The KGB gave him their money, and he took it.”

  “These KGB agents just sat around and let him take their hard-earned dough?”

  “There was so much money moving so fast through so many accounts and countries and currencies that it was hard for anyone to keep up. By the time they figured it out, it was too late.”

  “Drazen was smart enough to do all that?”

  “He had a guy.”

  Didn’t they always? “Even if it was too late to get the money back, it wouldn’t necessarily keep the KGB out of the complaint department, would it?”

  “Anyone who came to the complaint department had to deal with his brother.”

  “Vladi?”

  “In the Ukraine, Vladi was known as the man who couldn’t be killed. He was shot seven times in four different incidents. Twice he took bullets for his brother. No one ever managed to kill him.”

  That was only because he had yet to run into Rachel. “Okay, but still, it’s the KGB.”

  “When it got too hot, Drazen got his guy to give him a couple of maps—one for him and one for Vladi, so he could find the money.”

  “What kind of maps?”

  “They’re criminals, so he didn’t put anything anywhere in their real names. It was in numbered accounts in places like Turks and Caicos, Liberia, the Seychelles, Nauru. Wherever he stashed it, he used fake names or numbered accounts. If he did have to stash some cash, he put it in safety deposit boxes, again under fake names. The map wasn’t really a map but a list of files with the locations of accounts, names on the accounts, account numbers, passwords…things like that. After he got that, Drazen no longer needed his guy, so he killed him. Drazen and Vladi popped up in Israel next, where they offered to help Mossad track down former KGB agents.”

  “So, they got Mossad to take out their enemies.” Crafty though not surprising that Drazen would be of the one-stone-two-birds school of criminal behavior. “And the computer that was stolen from Vladi had one of these financial maps on it?”

  “According to legend.”

  It was a good legend, but there was a hole in the plot. “If you had a billion bucks stashed and someone found out where it was, wouldn’t you move it? If the list was compromised, why wouldn’t Drazen ju
st move the money to new accounts?”

  “That’s never been explained, and it’s one reason some people don’t buy the story. Drazen had his own list, so it’s possible he did exactly what you’re suggesting.”

  “In which case the computer would be worthless.”

  “And yet Drazen is here, and here he stays. I have to think he’s waiting for something. Or someone?” He braced his arm against the sill of his door, leaned his head into the palm of his hand, and just stared at me.

  “Tell me exactly what it is you need, Ling.”

  “I need information. I want to know what he’s doing, why he’s here. Anything you can tell me.”

  “He’s here for his billion dollars. That’s why he took Harvey. That’s why he’s done everything he’s done while he’s been here. He says he’s looking for Roger, but I think it’s the money.”

  He took off his shades. “Are you saying you really did find it?”

  “I might know where it is, but I’m trying to make him go away happy, so I’m not sure we have the same objective. Besides that, I seem to have run into a hitch.”

  “What is it?”

  “Blackthorne. Do you know them?”

  “Yeah. They’ve done a lot of work for the military.” He angled in my direction, as focused as a hunting dog on the scent. “Why? Have they approached you?”

  I started to answer and stopped. Kraft had said that Thorne had supporters inside the government. I looked out my window at the college kids talking and laughing and hurrying to class. We were parked close to MIT. What was to say that Ling wasn’t one? Maybe he had gone over to the dark side. Life sucks when you don’t know whom to trust.

  “I don’t want you talking to them,” he said, coming out of his comfortable slouch. He was agitated, as animated as I had seen him. “I am not getting screwed over again by the real spooks or the pseudo-spooks or anyone else. Are they working for the CIA? I heard they’ve been doing covert intelligence stuff.”

  “They don’t want Drazen,” I said, “and I’m not sure who they’re working for on this one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Thorne told me.”

  He blinked a couple of times. “You met Cyrus Thorne?”

  “Yeah, why?”