Politika

TEN

The floor-to-ceiling mirror occupying an entire wall of Nick Roma’s office was without a speck of dust, without a smudge, nearly without a flaw of any kind on its gleaming silvery surface. Nick would have one of the boys — he liked using that phrase, “the boys”—clean the mirror with Windex two, maybe three, times a day, occasionally more often if he noticed even the slightest blemish marring his reflection. Once there had been a small scratch in the glass and he’d had the panel replaced that same morning.

Nick didn’t think this was being compulsive. He paid close attention to his appearance and the mirror was extremely important to him. Certainly it was the most important thing in his office here at the Platinum Club, more important than his multimedia center, his telephone, or his scratch pad. At least as important as his MP5K.

Now Nicky stood at his mirror making minute adjustments to his clothing — pulling up the collar of his black turtleneck shirt, smoothing the shirt over his chest, being careful that it was tucked into his black designer jeans just right. Every detail had to be perfect.

Outside his window, a truck was backing into the loading area, rumbling out there by the freight door two stories down on Fifteenth Avenue.

He glanced at his Rolex.

11 A.M.

The delivery had arrived exactly on time. He was sure the pickup would, too. The people he was dealing with paid close attention to that sort of thing.

He looked down at his boots and checked that their shine was as flawless as the mirror’s. The boots were black Justins, some kind of lizard skin, and they required special care — much more than leather, anyway. One of the boys would clean and shine them every day, same as they did the mirror. But you had to keep an eye on them, make sure they used neutral wax on the boots instead of black polish. The polish would ruin the skin, and he’d wind up looking like some newly arrived immigrant from Little Odessa. And the mere prospect of that was something that filled him with anger and disgust.

Six months ago, he had been tried for gasoline boot-legging in a federal district court, the specific charge being that he had defrauded the IRS out of three million dollars in income taxes through the use of complicated paper transactions. When they made their closing arguments, prosecutors had told the jury he was vory v. zakone, a godfather in the Eastern European underworld. They had used words like bochya—“big man,” in Russian — to describe him. He had been accused of managing the American arm of a criminal syndicate they had alternately called organizatsiya and mafiya. At one point they had claimed its influence was on the way to becoming as powerful as that of the Cosa Nostra families and Asian gangs.

On the way, he thought with annoyance, pulling his comb from the back pocket of his jeans and sweeping it through his shock of wavy hair.

The trial had lasted two months but he had beaten the indictment, been acquitted of all counts. It had proven somewhat tricky, because the identities of the jurors had been closely guarded. They had been shuttled to and from the courthouse in unmarked vans, escorted by a swarm of cops from the Organized Crime Task Force, and addressed only by number in the courtroom. The blonde with the good legs whom Nick had smiled and winked at throughout the trial was Juror Number One. The fat man who sat with his arms crossed over his belly was Juror Number Nine. Everything top secret. But Nick had sneered at the government’s secrets. Nick had been persistent. His people knew clerks in the U.S. Attorney’s Office with access to what were laughably called “high-security” databases, and had gotten the information they needed to reach two members of the panel.

Fifty thousand dollars — along with guarantees that the jurors’ families would be protected from sudden accidents and disappearances — had bought Nick Roma an acquittal. He had thought that a fair deal. In fact, he considered himself primarily a dealmaker. At thirty-five years old, he had already forged reciprocal arrangements with the Italians, the Chinese triads, the Colombian cartels, even the Yakuza. He’d built steadily and creatively upon street-level enterprises such as prostitution and narcotics trafficking, gaining footholds in the banking system, launching elaborate financial schemes, cracking open new markets wherever he’d seen a dollar. He had made contacts in the legitimate corporate and political communities, and set up clearinghouses for his activities in over a dozen states… which was why he’d taken personal affront at the government attorneys’ characterization of him as a greenhorn thug, the leader of a ring of ethnic wannabes.

In his mind, nothing could have been further from the truth.

He had immigrated from Russia with his parents when he was six years old and since then had never been out of the country, never even been away from New York City. When he was twelve, his mother had successfully gone through naturalization proceedings, gaining citizenship for him as well. He had worked on his pronunciation until he spoke without any trace of an accent. At twenty-one he had altered the spelling of his first name and dropped the last syllable from his surname. Thus, Nikita Romanov had become Nick Roma.

He was as solidly American as anyone in that courtroom. And every time he thought of the prosecutors he promised himself that their insult would be repaid with interest. He was nobody’s joke. He—

Nicky heard a knock on his door, put the finishing touch to his hair, and returned the comb to his back pocket.

“What is it?” He turned to look out the window. The truck downstairs was empty now, its small load wheeled into the nightclub on a handcart. He watched the driver lower the rear panel, hop back into his cab, and then start pulling out into the street.

The door inched open and one of Nick’s crew, a muscular kid named Bakach, leaned his head inside.

“The Arab woman is here,” he said in thickly accented English. “With her friend.”

Nicky shifted his attention back to the mirror and gave himself a final inspection. She was even earlier than he’d expected. Whatever her ultimate plans for the merchandise, she obviously wasn’t wasting a minute.

“Send them in,” he said, satisfied with his appearance. “And tell Janos and Kos I want the packages.”

Bakach nodded, disappeared, and returned a minute later with Nick’s two visitors.

Nick turned toward the woman as she entered.

“Hello, Gilea,” he said, looking at her. She was beautiful, really very sexy, her shoulder-length black hair cut at a neat angle, her large slanting eyes reminding him of an exotic cat. Her tweed coat was open and revealed fine long legs below a short leather skirt.

He wondered fleetingly whether she might be interested in something more than a professional relationship.

“Nick,” she said, her high-heeled boots clicking on the floor as she came farther into the room. The tall man who had arrived with her had a thin scar curling down his cheek under a scruffy growth of beard. He followed a step behind her and stopped moving when she stopped. Nick saw the slight bulge of a pistol beneath his car jacket.

“I saw the truck outside,” she said. “Can 1 assume my delivery has arrived?”

“My men are bringing it up right now,” he said, and motioned to a chair by his desk. “Why don’t you relax while you wait?”

She stared coldly into his face.

“I’ll stand,” she said.

Minutes later there was another knock on the door. Nick opened it and a couple of his men came in carrying a medium-sized wooden shipping crate between them. There were two more crates in the outer corridor. The men carefully set the first crate on the floor and brought the others in one at a time, putting them down beside it. The third box had a crowbar resting on its lid.

Gilea stood there in silence, her dark brown eyes trained on the crates.

“I want to have a look,” she said.

Nick gave Kos a nod.

Kos lifted the crowbar, slid its flat edge between the lid and the upper corner of the box, and began prying it open. While he waited, Nick glanced over at Gilea. Her eyes had narrowed, and the tip of her tongue was gliding back and forth across her bottom lip.

The lid finally came loose. Gilea bent over the crate and reached inside, her hand burrowing through a layer of Styrofoam packing material.

The crate was filled with mirrored globes of the sort that would throw off whirling spangles of light in theaters and dance halls. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Nick had a much larger one suspended from the ceiling in his own club and usually referred to it as a “disco ball.”

“Give me the crowbar.” Gilea extended her hand toward Kos, still looking raptly down into the wooden box.

He passed her the tool without a word.

She studied the reflective globes a moment, then lifted one of them out of the crate and brought the edge of the crowbar sharply down against it. A crack spread across its circumference. She hit it again, splitting it into several pieces, letting them drop to the floor in a small avalanche of glitter dust.

Leaving only the smuggled contents of the globe in her hand.

The flat, rectangular packet had Chinese markings on one side. Its transparent wrapping contained a white, waxy substance that resembled a stick of modeling clay.

“The plastique,” Gilea said. She closed her eyes and stood with her head cocked back, her lips trembling a little, her fingers tightly gripping the packet.

Watching her, Nick thought she almost looked like a woman in ecstasy.

“You do nice work,” she said, turning to him after a long moment. Her eyes gleamed.

He smiled and met her gaze with his own.

“Always,” he said.

Nick Roma watched through the window in his office and waited. Finally Kos stuck his head inside the door and confirmed what Nick already knew. Gilea and her henchman had gone. He nodded to Kos. Kos left, shutting the door behind him.

It was time to check his insurance.

Nick walked across to his mirror, pulled his comb from his back pocket, and straightened his hair. He’d mussed it bowing over the beautiful hand of a dangerous lady.

Then he put his comb up and pressed a small button on the lower left panel of his mirror — a button so completely unobtrusive you had to know it was there to see it.

The giant mirrored panel slowly opened before his eyes. Behind that panel were banks of VCRs, each recording its assigned sector of the building. The tapes in the machines were endless loops, recording for twenty-four hours, then overtaping onto the previous material. That way, he only had to pull them if something worth saving was likely to be on them.

Like insurance.

He reached into the cavity behind the mirror and pulled the tape that recorded events in his office. That tape — of Gilea opening the disco ball and rubbing the C-4 inside like it was a sex toy she couldn’t wait to take home and try out — was a keeper. Not that he’d ever be caught. But if he was, he was betting that that tape, and a library of tapes much like it that he’d stashed in a very secret location, would buy him a really nice “get out of jail free” card.

After he reloaded the tape machine with a new blank tape, he pushed a button inset in the mirror’s inner frame. He watched a giant ultra-thin TV screen pop out of the ceiling at the back of his office, along with eight Bose speakers placed at strategic points throughout the room. Nothing but the best for Nick Roma. As he waited, he couldn’t help thinking of the other uses his mirror could be put to with such a beautiful lady. It made for a very pleasant picture.

Unlikely as such a scene was, a man needed his fantasies.

They kept him young.

He popped the tape into the VCR/DVD reader inset behind a hidden panel in his office wall, then settled back in his desk chair to watch the show.

Halfway across the city, in an abandoned warehouse whose ownership was shrouded by so many shell companies that even the most motivated searcher would never sniff it out, a remote feed of the very same footage that Nick was watching loaded itself in digital format into a powerful computer. Stamped electronically with the date the footage was taken and the location it was taped from, the information existed quietly, secretly, almost invisibly. Nick’s system performed its job perfectly.

In its own way, the scene just recorded, and all the others like it stored on the hard drive, were as explosive as the C-4 Nick had just sold Gilea.

Information, like plastique, could kill.

And, soon, it would.