“Anya Ivanovna really was not a bad actress at all,” he said. “But she was not, shall we say, Meryl Streep. Clearly she needed to do more research into the State of Georgia.”
I had no reason to think that Marshall Marcus was lying about how he met the woman who called herself Belinda Jackson. He was the victim, after all. And when he’d met her at the Ritz-Carlton bar in Atlanta, he must have known she was an escort. A horny old goat like Marcus could tell, the way a spaniel can smell game.
He just didn’t know that she was no longer employed in that capacity by VIP Exxxecutive Service.
She was employed by Roman Navrozov.
My cyber-investigator had checked on the dates of her employment by the escort service and confirmed my gut instinct. Then, as he traced her background, he was able to dig much deeper than Dorothy ever could, since he had access to certain archives and records in New Jersey that she didn’t.
The woman who changed her name to Belinda Jackson, who’d dropped out of the School for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, had in fact enrolled under her real name. The name on her birth certificate: Anya Ivanovna Afanasyeva. She’d grown up in a Russian enclave in Woodbine, New Jersey, the daughter of Russian émigrés. Her father had been an engineer in the Soviet Union but could only get some low-level desk job at an insurance company here.
That was about the sum total of the facts I knew. Everything else was informed guesswork. I imagined that Anya sought work as a call girl only when she couldn’t get work as an actress. Or maybe out of some sort of rebellion against her old-fashioned émigré parents.
“I assume you provided Anya with a complete dossier on Marshall Marcus,” I said. “His likes and dislikes, his tastes in movies and music. Maybe even his sexual peccadilloes.”
Navrozov burst out laughing. “Do you really think an attractive and sexually talented woman like Anya needs a dossier to capture the heart of such a foolish old man? It takes very little. Most men have very simple needs. And Anya more than met those needs.”
“Your needs were simple too,” I said. “His account numbers and passwords, the way his fund was structured, where the critical vulnerabilities were.”
He gave a snort of derision that I assumed was meant to be a denial.
“Look, I’m familiar with the history of your career. The way you secretly seized control of the second-largest bank in Russia, then used it to take over the aluminum industry. It was clever.”
He blinked, nodded, unwilling to show me how much he enjoyed the blandishment. But men like that were unusually susceptible to flattery. It was often their greatest vulnerability. And I could see that it was working.
“The way you stole Marcus Capital Management was nothing short of brilliant. You seized control of the bank that handled all of Marcus’s trades. You actually bought the Banco Transnacional de Panamá. Their broker-dealer. It was… genius.”
I waited a few seconds.
Strategic deception, in war or in espionage, is just another form of applied psychology. The thing is, you never actually deceive your target-you induce him to deceive himself. You reinforce beliefs he already has.
Roman Navrozov lived in a state of paranoia and suspicion. So he was automatically inclined to believe that I actually had a shooter positioned in an empty office across the street-not just a remote-controlled light switch that I could turn on and off by hitting a pre-programmed key on my cell phone. George Devlin, of course, had designed it for me and had a colleague in New York set it up: That kind of technology was far beyond my capabilities.
And he had no reason to doubt that I had people in the adjoining rooms. Why not? He’d do it too.
Same for the staged video that Darryl had taped earlier, with the help of a buddy of his who’d agreed to wear a straitjacket wired with a squib and a condom full of blood. A buddy who trusted Darryl’s assurance that his H &K was loaded with blanks, not real rounds.
Roman Navrozov believed the whole charade was real. After all, he’d done far worse to the spouses and children of his opponents; such cruelty came naturally to him.
But what I was attempting now-to pull information out of him by convincing him I knew more than I did-was much riskier. Because at any moment I might slip and say something that would tip him off that I was just plain lying.
He watched me for a few seconds through the haze of his cigarette smoke. I saw the subtle change in his eyes, a softening of his features, a relaxing of his facial muscles.
“Well,” he said, and there it was, the proud smile that I’d been hoping to provoke.
In truth, it was sort of genius, in a twisted way.
If there’s some hedge fund you want to loot, all you have to do is buy the bank that controls its portfolio. Obviously that’s not going to happen with most normal hedge funds, which use the big investment banks in the U.S. But Marcus Capital wasn’t a normal hedge fund.
“So tell me something,” I said. “Why did you need to kidnap Marshall’s daughter?”
“It was a salvage operation. A desperation move. Because the original plan didn’t work at all.”
“And the original plan…?”
He sucked in a lungful of smoke, let it out even more slowly. Then fell silent.
“You wanted the Mercury files,” I said.
“Obviously.”
It made sense. Roman Navrozov was a businessman, and certain businessmen at the highest levels traffic in the most valuable commodities. And was there any commodity rare than the deepest darkest intelligence secrets of the world’s sole remaining superpower?
“So were you planning on selling the black-budget files to the Russian government?”
“Black budget?”
“Maybe that’s a term you’re not familiar with.”
“Please. I know what black budget is. But you think the Mercury files have something to do with America’s secret military budget? I am a businessman, not an information broker.”
“They contain the operational details of our most classified intelligence operations.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Is that what you were told? Next you will tell me you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as well.”
Then his mobile phone rang, emitting that annoying default Nokia ringtone you used to hear everywhere until people figured out how to select a different one.
He glanced at the display. “The cutout,” he said.
My heart began to thud.
78.
Kirill Aleksandrovich Chuzhoi drove up the long dirt road, chest tight with anticipation.
He didn’t enjoy wet work, but sometimes he had no choice, and he did it efficiently and without hesitation. Roman Navrozov paid him extremely well, and if he wanted loose ends tied up, Chuzhoi would do whatever it took. For God’s sake, he’d even gone down to Boston to take out a low-level drug dealer inside FBI headquarters! He had attracted too much attention and would very soon have to leave the country. He could work for Navrozov elsewhere in the world.
No, he didn’t much enjoy that kind of job. Whereas the contractor-the zek, the convict who’d done time in Kopeisk, was reputed to enjoy killing so much that he preferred to draw out the process, in order to make it last.
In this man’s line of work, such a disturbing streak of sadism was a qualification. Maybe even necessary. He was capable of doing anything.
He made Chuzhoi extremely uncomfortable.
Chuzhoi knew very little about the zek beyond this. And of course the owl tattoo that disfigured the back of his head and neck. He knew that the Sova gang recruited the most brutal inmates at Kopeisk.
Chuzhoi, who had trained in the old KGB and later climbed the greasy rungs of its main successor, the FSB, had encountered this type on a few occasions and had put a few in prison. The most successful serial killers were like that, but they rarely got caught.