“Drinks first?”
“Many. Whiskey. You know what he’s like when he’s had a few.”
“I do.” She laughed grimly.
The doorbell rang, startling her. She looked at her watch. It was five thirty. Yes: the FinCEN guy. Half an hour late.
She went to answer the door, just as Duncan was coming down the stairs.
The man standing on the porch was a tall, stern-looking, black-haired man, wearing a blue windbreaker. He had a heavy brow and looked to be in his late thirties.
“Judge Brody, I’m Alex Venkovsky, from Treasury.”
“Right. Come on in.”
She saw a large black government-looking vehicle, a Cadillac Escalade, parked in the driveway behind Duncan’s car.
“So much for punctuality,” Juliana said, glancing at her iPhone.
“Sorry. We spent the last two hours sterilizing the whole neighborhood. Making sure nobody had eyes on the ground.”
“Okay. So what’s the schedule?”
“Well, ma’am, our plane is leaving earlier than anticipated, so we’re going to need to get on the road. Like now. Uh, are we going like this?”
She smiled, glancing down at her sweats and bare feet. “Right, hope you don’t mind if I change,” she said, opening the door and backing up to let him enter.
“We don’t have a lot of time. Mr. McNamer’s plane leaves at nine on the dot.”
“McNamer, huh? We’re talking Giles McNamer?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s a friend of the Treasury Secretary’s, and he happens to be going to Nantucket this morning and is very kindly letting us hitch a ride. But he’s apparently trying to make a ten A.M. tee time. So he wants us there no later than nine at his FBO at Logan.”
Giles McNamer was the co-founder of a huge private equity firm and had been a special adviser on economic policy to President Obama. You couldn’t find anyone more Establishment. He sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; he graduated from the Dalton School in Manhattan, and Harvard, and Harvard Business School; was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group; and he went to Davos every year.
“We’re flying on his private jet?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s a Gulfstream G650.” He said it like that meant something.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“Oh, no, ma’am, I’m good. I can’t have coffee when I fly. It gives me a nervous stomach.”
“How are we getting downtown? You’re driving?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll be back down in a couple of minutes.” She went upstairs and changed into the burgundy Armani suit she’d found at Nordstrom Rack, her go-to outfit, the one that always drew raves. It gave her confidence. She needed it. She put on makeup. Because of her exhaustion, everything looked pasty on her. Her lipstick looked too strong against her tired, whitish face.
A car pulled up in front of the house. Duncan’s Lyft. It would take him to the Back Bay train station. Duncan was taking the Acela, the express train, to New York.
She put her arms around him and kissed him. Then he said, into her hair, “Please be careful, Jules.”
“You know I will.”
“I know. But still.” And he hugged her, hard.
Venkovsky drove the Escalade into Boston.
“So, Alex Venkovsky,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a Russian name.”
“You’re Russian?”
“I lived in Moscow until my parents emigrated when I was six. That a problem for you? Are you one of those Russophobes? Think we’re all in cahoots with the Kremlin?”
“Seriously?”
“Sorry to be touchy. The circles I move in — I sometimes wonder. German-Americans got the hairy eyeball during the First World War. Japanese-Americans got rounded up in the Second. Now, with all these news stories about Russian mischief, I meet people who think I must keep a nerve agent next to the allspice in my kitchen.”
“You ever have reason to use it?”
“The nerve agent?”
“The allspice. Because I’m pretty sure I never have.”
Venkovsky let out a laugh. “Okay, apologies. I’m a little hypersensitive on the subject. Moving on.”
Half an hour later, they pulled up outside a large, ugly government building on Causeway Street. Venkovsky put a blank parking ticket on his windshield and put on the emergency flashers.
He escorted her into the building, took her up the elevator to the sixth floor. It opened on a bleak expanse of cubicles. He signed her in, took her to a conference room, and introduced her to a man named Glenn Hawkins, a chunky redheaded man in his twenties, wearing jeans and a green polo shirt. In the middle of the conference table was a big box of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a couple of cartons of doughnuts.
Venkovsky poured them both coffee, and he took a doughnut. “Glenn’s going to wire you up,” he said.
The redheaded guy lifted a ridged aluminum briefcase and opened it on the table near the doughnuts. It was lined with black foam and held various electronic-looking components. Then he put down a canvas tote bag.
“I understand you’ve arranged to get into his estate?” Hawkins said.
“That’s right.” Juliana thought briefly of Nazarov and the favor she’d called in.
“Well, that’s the hard part. I’m not going to ask you how you did that.” He smiled. “Protasov’s spread on Nantucket is more than sixty acres, and it’s protected. Fenced in. We can’t possibly get close enough to use wireless bugs.”
“Okay,” she said.
“That leaves us with covert recording devices, which is what we got here. This belt?” He reached into the canvas tote bag and pulled out a skinny black leather belt with a simple silver buckle.
“The recorder’s in the buckle. Good quality too. Do you have a Tesla?”
“No.”
Hawkins smiled. “Well, now you do.” He handed her a small black-and-silver key fob with the Tesla logo on it. He was making a joke, sort of. “This records. Or there’s a pen. Which does write. And records.” He held up a ceremonial-looking pen with a black lacquer body.
“Do I choose one of these devices, or—”
“How about you take a few of them? As backups.”
“Why not?”
“Of course, they might not let you keep your purse with you.”
“Who, Protasov’s security people?”
“Right. His guys take precautions.”
“Okay, and what if they take away my purse?”
“Ma’am, you’re a size nine, right? Shoe?”
She nodded.
The door to the conference room burst open and a portly middle-aged man in a white shirt and tie, no suit jacket, barged in, red-faced with anger. He had a bristly mustache and thick glasses and was waving a piece of paper.
“I just read the op report!” he shouted. “This is not happening!”
“Yeah, it is,” Venkovsky said quietly.
“You realize this is insane, right? It’s totally irresponsible. You’re throwing a duckling into a raccoon den!”
“It’s what she wants,” Alex Venkovsky cut in. “And Brennan said it’s happening. So.”
The guy in the white shirt kept going. “The idea of sending a civilian on an op with stakes this high, wiring her up — and no backup? Are you out of your freakin’ mind? Confidential informants get killed that way! I want you to mark it down in the log that I objected to this op. I want it on the record.” Red-faced, he said to Juliana, “Do you know about this dude? Do you know what he does to his enemies?”
“I have no choice,” Juliana said. She swallowed hard. She didn’t want to hear it.
“You think he’s just, like, this guy who gives libraries and hospital wings? Yeah, that’s the public image. But you wanna know the truth? People who cross him tend to die.”