Rasputin's Shadow

10

Who took this?” I asked.

It was around eleven in the morning on a fine Tuesday, and we were all huddled around Aparo’s desk: Nick, me, and the two other agents assigned to the case with us, Kubert and Kanigher, watching a video clip on my partner’s laptop.

Someone called Cuppycake12 had filmed it on a smart phone outside the Sokolovs’ apartment building and uploaded it to YouTube during the night. And a good thing they had, too, since so far, the clips and images we’d collected from our canvassing hadn’t revealed anything new.

Background checks on Leo and Daphne Sokolov also hadn’t kicked up anything noteworthy. The two of them seemed to be living normal, uncomplicated lives. No runs-ins with the law, no financial problems. Nothing. The apartment was rent controlled, they’d never missed a payment. Credit scoring was fine. They seemed like model citizens in every way.

We’d also gone through the CCTV footage from the hospital, and hadn’t spotted anything suspicious or helpful on it. Daphne had left the hospital and headed in the direction of her bus stop pretty much as she did on every other day. There was also nothing about her body language that indicated any kind of stress or furtiveness going on. The footage we’d collected off a few cams on ATMs and such hadn’t yielded any epiphanies either, and neither had the statements that Adams, Giordano, and their troops had collected off the people at the scene.

This clip, however, was interesting-and gruesome. Gruesome, because whoever took it wasn’t squeamish. It began at what must have been only seconds after Yakovlev hit the ground. The clip starts with the kind of breathless, shaky footage of someone who’s just switched on his camera and is rushing across the street and down the sidewalk to get to the scene itself.

There, he lingers on the dead man’s body. You can hear horrified wails coming from other bystanders, a lot of sobs and “Oh my God” and “Is he dead” and “Someone call an ambulance”-all of it punctuated by Cuppycake12’s own breathless commentary. Cuppy also tilts up and pans across to show us the people standing around ogling the body, some turning away, others unable to tear their eyes off him, the whole thing filmed with the frenzied visceral energy that these off-the-cuff clips often bring with them.

“Right here. Watch this,” Aparo said as he hit the Pause button. “This guy right here,” he added, tapping the screen.

He was pointing out a figure-adult, male. I couldn’t really tell much more because the image was grainy due to the jittery cinematography. The man had appeared behind some of the people who had congregated around the body.

“Keep your eye on him,” he told us before resuming the playback.

The guy looks over the shoulders of the first row of bystanders. He lingers there for a beat. Then he looks up, toward Sokolov’s apartment, which is where the body obviously fell from. Then he looks at the body again, and turns away and drops out of view behind the wall of people.

“He disappears for a while,” Aparo explained. “But watch this.”

Cuppy gets bored of his gruesome shot and goes around to try to get a more comprehensive reportage of what had happened. So he steps out onto the street and tilts the camera up, taking in the building before zooming in on the sixth-floor window that, from way down there, you can just about tell is broken. Cuppy has a good eye. Then a car surprises him, there’s a nudge of a horn that makes him jump, and Cuppy’s camera angle drops away from the window and goes all over the place as he hustles out of the car’s way. Clearly, this doesn’t go down well with Cuppy, who lets rip with some colorful language directed at the impatient driver before following him down the street with his zoom.

Which is when Cuppy captures the bit that caught Aparo’s eye.

The guy he’d pointed out is also in the frame. We see him come around a parked SUV, get in, and drive off. In a hurry, just charging out and almost colliding with a passing car. Like he just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Which I thought merited closer inspection. Not because he was leaving in a rush. He could well have been distraught, freaked out by what he’d seen. Anyone would. That would be a healthy response. But it was his body language that made us take notice. He was all business, focused. Not distraught. More like furtive. Which wasn’t as wholesome, response-wise.

“Nice,” Kubert chortled. “Maybe the guy’s squeamish. Maybe he wet himself.”

“Very likely,” I said. “On the other hand, maybe he was waiting for Yakovlev and decided to bail fast when the diplomat took the shortcut down.”

“If he was with him, why not go upstairs and get whoever did it? Or at least call the cops?” Kanigher asked.

“Maybe their little visit wasn’t official,” Aparo speculated.

“Maybe.” I nodded. “Anyway, we’ll know more if the lab can get a decent close-up of the guy’s face and his license plate. And we need to try and marry it up with traffic-cam footage and see if we can get a fix on which way he went.”

“I’ll ship it down to them,” Aparo said. “Oh, and get a load of this. The couple who live just below the Sokolovs in 5C? Seems their dog went loco that morning and bit the husband. Like, mangled him, got him in the forearm and wouldn’t let go. Right about the time Yankovich-”

“Yakovlev,” Kubert corrected him.

“-took his swan dive.”

“Did they hear a fight?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Just a small thud, maybe the vase hitting the floor, then the screams from the street.”

“So what are they doing with the dog?” Kubert asked.

“Nothing. She’s back to normal. They’ve had her for years, never bit anyone before.”

Kubert’s face took on that familiar, pensive expression, like he was about to reveal another great secret of the universe to us. “Dogs sense things, you know. They have these powers… what we know about how their minds work doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”

And before Kubert segued into another fascinating episode of his Twilight Zone take on the animal kingdom, I decided to take my leave.

The lab had some work to do on our little YouTube clip, and I had a date with a large man and a whole lot of maple syrup.

ABOUT A HUNDRED BLOCKS uptown from Federal Plaza, Larisa Tchoumitcheva stepped out of her boss’s office on the third floor of the Russian consulate and pondered the crisis that had been thrust upon her unexpectedly.

It was a crisis, but it was also an opportunity. A chance for her to make a difference, which is why she had taken that job in the first place. But this situation had been sprung on her without warning. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare, to think things through. Which meant she was vulnerable to something going wrong. In her line of work, that carried some serious health implications.

Further complicating matters was that her boss at the consulate, Oleg Vrabinek-officially the vice consul, unofficially the city’s senior SVR operative-wasn’t sharing. She’d been frozen out of what he and the now-deceased Yakovlev had been up to. All she’d been told before heading off to Sokolov’s apartment was to deny, to deflect, and to report back. After what she’d seen, she’d decided this had to be her first priority: to get inside Vrabinek’s circle of trust. She needed to know what was going on if she was going to have any chance at making that difference-to say nothing of staying alive.

One thing she did know, however, was that Sokolov was important. To her people, and to the Americans. They were both desperate to get hold of him. And Vrabinek had been less than forthcoming about Sokolov when Larisa had asked who he was.

“That’s not relevant here,” was all Vrabinek had said.

When she’d prodded him-gently, deferentially, as was expected-he’d added, “You’ll get more information if and when it becomes necessary. Right now, it isn’t.”

Which gave Larisa her next priority: to find out who Sokolov was and why he was so important. She needed to get access to his file, but she had to do it without Vrabinek or anyone else at the consulate finding out.

Easier said than done. And not great on the health-implications front.

Then there was the FBI agent, Sean Reilly. She’d been told he’d be like a Rottweiler in tracking down Sokolov, and in that sense he’d be very useful. She’d been ordered to get close to him and report back about his progress on everything he was working on. She’d also been warned about his intuitiveness. In the flesh, though, she found that he was different from the adversary they’d made him out to be. She sensed something else in him. An honesty, a decency that surprised her. Which was dangerous.

She had her orders. Her superiors knew what they were doing, and they had their reasons for setting her those tasks, regardless of what she saw in him. She needed to stay on target and see things through.

Vrabinek hadn’t been any more forthcoming in the meeting she’d just had with him. She hadn’t learned any more information about Sokolov. He had, however, generously bestowed one new piece of information on her, but it wasn’t in any way reassuring.

He told her they were sending someone over. A special operative, flown in to deal with the situation.

That didn’t sound good.

It sounded a lot worse when he told her it would be Koschey.

She’d never met him. Very few had. And though the little information she had about him was sketchy, one thing was certain: his involvement was seriously bad news on the health-implications front.

For her, and for everyone else involved.