Rasputin's Shadow

39

Who the hell was he?

I didn’t have a clue.

None of us did.

Was he a sleeper? If so, what had he been up to all these years? Or was he running from something? If so, what was it and who was he hiding from? And why was this all happening now, thirty years or so after he’d taken on the Sokolov name?

It was easier to pull off back then. Things weren’t that computerized, you didn’t have the level of electronic databases we have these days. It wasn’t that hard to get yourself a driver’s license, Social Security card and bank account, either by getting a doctor to sign a fake birth certificate or, as seemed to be the case with Sokolov, using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a teenager.

We didn’t know who he was. We didn’t know where he was from. We didn’t know why he was valuable, valuable enough for someone to kill this many people over him without hesitating. There was a hidden history here that we knew nothing about. Old secrets that had sprung back to life with a vengeance. And the most frustrating thing about it was that maybe it was all over before we even got started. Now that Ivan had him, maybe that was the last we’d ever hear of Leo Sokolov, and we wouldn’t know what the hell it was all about.

I hated this feeling.

I hated having so many open questions, not just about Sokolov, but about Ivan. We knew our shooter was either a high-level Mafiya enforcer or a state-sanctioned operative. I was hoping for the former. If it was the latter and if this wasn’t over, then things were going to get complicated, politically. A Russian agent gunning down several American agents on our soil-not exactly a misdemeanor. Either way, we’d need to bring in other agencies to find out more about Sokolov’s background: CIA and ICE, for starters. There wasn’t much we could tell them beyond giving them a set of his prints that we’d sourced in his apartment. Maybe that would be enough. If he had a secret Soviet history, they might know. Whether they’d want to share it with us was another story.

Then, of course, there was the lovely Ms. Tchoumitcheva. If Ivan was one of theirs, I wondered if she was now taking part in a private celebration deep within the consulate, now that Sokolov was in their hands. I was convinced the Russians had to know who he really was-but whether she was fully in the loop was another matter.

I’d also need to ask Daphne about this, although my gut told me that it would come as much as a surprise to her as it did to us.

As I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass and looked down across Foley Square from our twenty-third-floor offices at the magnificent criminal courts buildings, I found myself churning over everything from the very beginning, yet again, and wondering how a high school science teacher ended up being the centrifugal force of an escalating situation with a body count that was already in double figures. And why an unassuming and quiet guy in his early sixties would trust a young Korean gangster over New York’s finest with his wife’s safety. And why he’d insisted on using his old van for their rescue mission.

Kanigher’s voice broke through the synaptic maelstrom that was raging inside my skull.

“Check this out,” he said as he rushed over, waving a couple of sheets in his hand.

They were printouts from some kind of traffic camera. The grainy pictures showed a panel van driving toward it. “We’ve got Sokolov’s ride. I figured they’d have taken either the Brooklyn Bridge or the Battery Tunnel to get from the restaurant to the docks. Location and time stamps match, and that sure as hell looks like Jonny boy in the passenger seat.”

I took a closer look. I could make out Jonny, no question. Then I noticed the air-conditioning unit on the roof. “You sure? It’s a refrigerated van.”

“I know.”

I studied the picture more closely and got the distinct feeling I was missing something. “Why would he need that?”

“Who knows. Maybe it was just a cheap buy. Especially if the AC’s shot. It’s not exactly fresh off the showroom floor, is it?”

I was still baffled by it when Aparo appeared and cut in. “I just got a call from the NYPD guys we sent to bring back the van,” he said. “They can’t find it.”

“Jonny said he only left it there, what, a couple of hours ago?”

Aparo said, “If that.”

It didn’t compute. In fact, nothing about that van made sense. And it sounded like Jonny had been less than forthcoming about it too. Everything about that van was suddenly bothering me. Everyone seemed to be lying about it. And right at the moment, it wasn’t a lot, but it was all I had, and I didn’t feel like spending the rest of the night lost in my own questions.

“Put out a priority APB on the van,” I told Kanigher, handing him back the printouts. Then I turned to Aparo as I grabbed my jacket. “Let’s get some Korean takeout.”