She didn’t reply.
LARISA WAS AT HER apartment on East Seventy-eighth Street, restlessly waiting for news, when her phone lit up.
She snatched it and checked its screen, then took the call.
“Have you heard anything?” the man asked bluntly.
“Should I?”
“There’s been a shoot-out in Brooklyn. Several bratki dead. One in the hospital. The FBI’s got a man down too.”
She felt a prickle of concern. “Reilly?”
“No. Someone else.”
“What about Sokolov?” she asked.
“Gone. Taken.”
A rush of variables tumbled across her mind.
“This is bad,” the man said. “More than bad. It’s a fucking disaster. You need to find out where he is.”
“I’m being kept out of the loop,” she said. “Strictly need-to-know. I can’t get inside this, not since Monday night.”
“You’re going to have to. ’Cause right now, it’s looking like we might have lost him. For good. You have to find a way in. Find out where he is. Do whatever you have to do, but find him. At all costs. And I mean all costs. Do you understand?”
“Got it.”
She clicked off, stared at the screen, and brooded over her next move in silence.
She didn’t like it.
She’d been walking a tightrope for years, treading carefully across a ruthlessly perilous landscape. And it sounded to her like her handler had just asked her to jump off.
SEVEN DEAD AT THE motel last night. Three dead, one mangled up, and a fellow agent with a chunk of his leg missing in this godforsaken wasteland tonight.
I wasn’t too crazy about this new nightly routine we seemed to be settling into.
A bunch of paramedics were already on the scene. They were tending to Kubert, stabilizing him and getting ready to move him into the ambulance. I was with a couple of others, who were busy with the guy who was driving the SUV when I’d shot his tires out from under him. He was a mess of blood and bruises and looked like he’d been mauled by a Transformer.
“I need to talk to him,” I told the brunette who seemed to be running the show.
“And you probably will,” she snapped back tersely as she worked on him. “Just not right now.”
“When?” I asked.
“Does it look like he’s in a chatty mood?”
She had a point.
I stepped away and took in the scene around me. This was a disaster. While we’d been lured out here for an evening at the O.K. Corral, the real meet was probably taking place somewhere else. With consequences unknown for all involved. I wondered if we’d be finding more bodies there, and if they’d each also have one round through the forehead.
I was crossing over to where Kubert was being treated when my phone rang. It was a detective by the name of O’Neil, calling from the 114th Precinct. Adams’s and Giordano’s precinct.
“I think you need to come down here,” he told me. “We’ve got a walk-in here you’ll want to talk to. Daphne Sokolov.”
34
It was just after ten o’clock when O’Neil and another detective showed Aparo and me into the interview room where Daphne Sokolov had been settled.
She was the same woman I’d seen in the framed holiday pictures at the apartment, only any trace of that happiness had been sapped right out of her features. She looked scared, tired, and several years older as she sat hunched on the uncomfortable chair, her hands cupped around a steaming mug of coffee. But she wasn’t shy. Before we even got to tell her who we were, she said, “They’ve got my husband. They’ve got Leo. You’ve got to find him.”
I reassured her and tried to calm her down, but she ignored me and launched into her tale, her words frantic but precise and to the point. This was a woman who was used to being around life-and-death situations, although, admittedly, not ones that involved her husband of thirty years. So we listened as she told us about how she’d been abducted on her way home from work; tied up at the motel; grabbed by the other Russian; taken somewhere she couldn’t identify, as she’d been blindfolded and locked up in the trunk; then finally driven to the docks, where they grabbed Leo just before the shooting broke out.
Which was where I stopped her.
“Where was this? What docks?”
“I’m not sure. I was also blindfolded on the way there.” She paused, concentrating, then added, “Not far from Prospect Avenue. I could see on the way back.”
“Be more specific,” I pressed her. “What else do you remember seeing?”
She thought about it for a brief moment, then said, “There were these big tanks, like oil drums. You know, the kind they have at refineries.”
O’Neil said, “There’s an old fuel depot on Gowanus Bay, just before the IKEA. I can’t think of any other ones in the area.”
I felt a stir of acid in my gut. It couldn’t be more than a couple of miles from where we’d been faked out. The bastard hadn’t bothered sending us halfway across town. He was cool enough to have us that close. Sending us a message, showing us how in control he was. Toying with us.
“Let’s get some people out there,” I told O’Neil, knowing we’d probably be too late. Then I turned back to Daphne. “Tell us what happened.”
KOSCHEY TOOK ANOTHER LOOK outside the front of the warehouse and made sure no one had followed them there, then locked the door and walked back to where he’d left Sokolov.
The Internet had made his life much simpler. There was no need to rely on local intermediaries to arrange safe houses for him and others like him, not anymore. Websites like Craigslist made it incredibly easy to find and secure all kinds of last-minute, short-term rentals at a day’s notice. Which is what Koschey had done as soon as he knew he was coming to New York. In addition, arranging his own safe houses made them far safer, since no one but him knew their location.
Hotels were not an option for him. Too many people going in and out. Too much potential interaction with other guests and hotel staff. Not ideal, especially when you were carrying weapons or ferrying a hostage or two. A suburban house was good. The more secluded, the better. Or a ground-floor office space in some kind of second-tier commercial development. Those were better, as they tended to be deserted at night, which was when Koschey did a lot of his work. In this case, he’d gone with a bottom-tier warehouse by Jamaica, Queens. One month’s rent paid in advance, not too many questions asked. It had electricity and a bathroom with running water, and it was big enough for him to park inside. And right then, in the middle of the night, it was totally quiet, with no one else around but him and his guest.
He’d dumped the sniper’s garish road racer where he’d left his Yukon before the Sledgehammer’s men picked him up in their Escalade en route to the shipyard. The black Chevy had been safely stashed inside the warehouse, facing out. Behind it, in the office, Sokolov was on the floor, his wrists tied behind him, the nylon restraint looped around the wall mount of a low radiator.
Koschey went up to the back of the SUV and popped its lid open. He pulled out his travel case and set it on the floor, by the wall. He unlocked it and retrieved his toiletries pouch from it, as well as a couple more zip ties, then he went into the office and got down on his haunches, facing his captive.
Sokolov glared at him defiantly. “Was Daphne here?” he asked him in Russian. “Is this where you brought her?”
Koschey nodded, slowly, as he set the small pouch on the floor. “She was. She doesn’t know where it is, though. So I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high about any cavalry charging in here soon to rescue you.”
He studied Sokolov and his immediate surroundings for a second. He suspected the scientist wouldn’t be as compliant as his wife had been, and decided he’d need to use a different method. He reached behind the teacher’s head and tied one of the nylon restraints to the radiator. Then he picked up the other, and, without warning, his left arm lashed out and clasped Sokolov by the chin, jamming his head right back against the radiator and holding it there with such firmness that Sokolov couldn’t move his head left or right.