The Hunted

11

The two taxis arrived at the terminal thirty minutes apart.

Alex was dropped off first, at 6:45.

Elena stepped out onto the curb at 7:14, a minute earlier than she'd been instructed, though it turned out not to be relevant.

Her instructions were clear and precise: Drive by the front of the terminal. If Alex wasn't standing and waving, alone, then howl at her driver to keep going and don't look back. Once they had Alex, they wouldn't care about her anymore. They wanted her only to get to him; if they had him, she was old baggage they could care less about. What was left of Eugene's 2,000 American dollars was wadded up and folded inside her bra. Use it, he told her, to find her own way to America, then contact her parents for help. Start a new life and don't look back.

But Alex was there, about twenty feet from the doors, waving, not directly at her, it seemed, but at some invisible person off in the distance. She tried hard not to stare at Alex as she walked right past him, then through the glass door and straight to the Continental Air counter. Yes, she had a reservation, she assured the smiling lady behind the counter. She held her breath and handed her passport across the counter. She was reaching into her bra for the money when the woman politely announced that the ticket was already reserved and prepaid, first class-and did she care for an aisle seat or window? Boarding started in fifteen minutes; she was welcome to use the VIP lounge until then. She had no idea how Alex arranged this, it wasn't part of the plan, but she smiled with relief and pleasure as the lady behind the counter ruffled papers and prepared her boarding pass.

First class? After all they'd been through, the idea of making a grand escape sipping champagne and munching on caviar seemed too good to be true. She felt like crying.

She sensed him before she saw him. A middle-aged man in a nice gray wool suit was staring at her. A quick glance in his direction, and he looked away. She took the ticket envelope from the smiling Continental representative and walked briskly in the direction of the VIP room. She kept her back turned to him for a few moments, then performed a pirouette that would earn a standing ovation. She looked him dead in the eye. The man almost jumped, before, suddenly, he discovered something on the magazine rack more interesting than her.

Her first thought was to scream. Just aim her arm at the man in the suit and scream full blast until her lungs hurt, until airport security rushed over to see what the fuss was about.

She kept walking instead. There was a knot in her throat and she tried hard to ignore it. She was an attractive woman, after all. Men stared at her: so what? She usually just ignored them. She was just on edge, she told herself. Paranoid people see big toothy monsters with lethal claws where others see squirrels. Maybe that's all it was, a sad, lonely little squirrel checking out the talent and dreaming of what would never be. She arrived at the door to the VIP room, looked back over her shoulder again, and there he was again, brazenly walking toward her! A little smarter, because his face was covered with a magazine. But the gray suit was a dead giveaway.

She was just raising her arm and preparing an earthshaking scream, when a firm hand grabbed her from behind. Panic enveloped her chest. She spun around, ready to kick and slap and howl like hell-it was Alex. "Don't worry about him, honey. Come on, step inside."

She stepped through the doorway and followed Alex to a table by the near wall, far away from the windows. Another man, this one in a blue wool suit, was seated, with his back against the wall, looping peanuts into his mouth. "Good morning, Mrs. Konevitch," he said, grinning between hard crunches. "I'm Eric. That fella outside's Jacob. I don't want to imagine what you've been through the past eighteen hours, but your worries are over." Another peanut in the mouth. "Jacob's watching the door and inside this VIP lounge is my territory. No bragging, but we can handle whatever comes up." A gentle slap on his forehead for effect. "Oh yeah, we're your Malcolm Street boys." The accent and demeanor were obscenely American-a thick twang ruthlessly tortured the vowels, broad, confident smile, black hair, tall and well built. Eric was leaning back on the chair, trying to appear relaxed and carefree. But Elena, the dancer, missed nothing about the human form. The body was coiled, ready to leap the length of the room and snap necks if the situation required. Ruthless blue eyes that never stopped wandering even as he spoke to her.

"Come on, Mrs. Konevitch, relax. You're safe. Take a load off your feet, please." He shoved a chair back with one hand, while the other hand plopped another peanut into the air; it sailed a full six feet before it fell and landed effortlessly in his mouth. His eyes never stopped darting around the room.

Elena nearly fell on her knees and kissed him. Eric in the nicely tailored blue suit could probably shoot with both hands simultaneously, hurl knives with his feet, and work an impossibly difficult crossword puzzle without missing a vowel. Let the bad guys try anything now. Eric would stack their bodies like cordwood.

The peanut fling was Eric's favorite trick, one that never failed to put the client at ease. That big lapdog smile again. "Fix yourself a cup of coffee. Don't skip them pastries, either," he suggested. Another peanut in the air-whoosh, it landed and was instantly compacted between two fierce incisors.

Alex took her arm. "Let's get a cup of coffee and talk."

They moved hand in hand to another wall where a wooden table sagged under the weight of coffee and tea urns, an enormous stack of pastries, and large containers loaded with eggs, bacon, flatcakes, and a few mushy concoctions unidentifiable to anybody but a Slovakian native. The smell of fresh-ground coffee was impossible to ignore. The only thing keeping her on her feet was the five cups she had swallowed at the cafe.

That half-life had expired an hour before.

Alex handed her a cup and saucer. "When I called the headquarters of Malcolm Street last night, they were in the midst of a meeting about our situation. A witness claimed I murdered my own security escort back at the Budapest Airport. It's-"

"What? That's ridiculous, Alex. Who claimed that?"

"A woman. A Russian woman. Her story was corroborated by her Russian boyfriend."

"Ridiculous. They murdered your bodyguard and now they're blaming it on you?"

"Yes, with a poisoned dagger, probably at the same moment as the kidnap. The security firm is dispatching a team to clear this up with the Hungarian authorities. There are big holes in the story. The woman's passport is a phony. The hit was professional and I'm an amateur. They're confident they can make this disappear."

Elena filled a cup with coffee. She snatched a Danish off the tray, stole a tentative nibble, and followed it with a deep sip. She couldn't remember anything tasting better in her life. "And they sent Eric and his friend to watch over us?"

"Eric and Jacob were covering a client in Prague; they were ordered to drop everything and rush here. That was them in the white Jaguar sedan last night."

The careful nibbling was over. She took a powerful bite from the Danish, neatly amputating half of it. "That was them? Smoking inside the car?"

"Not exactly."

"Then who?" she asked.

"You don't want to know."

"If you ever expect to sleep with me again, you'll tell me." The other half of the Danish disappeared into her mouth and she chewed it with vigor.

"Okay. Eric and his partner arrived about an hour before us. They drove by, just like we did. Two men were loitering outside the terminal. At nearly two o'clock, in front of a closed building, the killers couldn't have been more conspicuous or sloppy. Whoever's behind this apparently doesn't hold a high opinion of us. So Eric snuck back on foot, surprised the two men, and forced them at gunpoint into their car. The cigarettes belonged to the pair of thugs he captured. Eric was interrogating them."

"And what did they say?"

"They claimed they had no idea why. Just had orders from their boss to kill us."

"Who was this boss?"

"A name neither of us would recognize. It's irrelevant. They're part of a crime syndicate, gunmen at the bottom of a long chain doing what they were told."

"Where are they now?" At the bottom of a deep river, she hoped. After murdering one man, brutally torturing her husband, and trying their best to add three more kills to the tally, she hoped the weasels died slowly and horribly.

"I didn't ask," Alex replied. "I don't think either of us want to know."

"Don't be so civilized. I'd love to know."

"I doubt we would hear the truth, anyway."

Eric was suddenly standing at their side, as if he had materialized out of thin air. Tell me, did you kill them, she wanted to demand, and don't go light on the details. "Time to board," he said with that reassuring grin. "Jacob and I are on the flight, too. We don't get first-class freight, but we'll be tucked in the back in seats where we can observe you. So don't you worry. Kick back, drink all the champagne you can stand, eat till your stomachs are sore, then nap till that pilot says you're in New York."

The plane lifted off ten minutes after they boarded, at which point Alex and Elena were downing their second champagne, with plans to keep sipping until New York or they passed out, whichever came first.

Elena eased back into her seat and asked, "Will the bodyguards stay with us in New York?"

"No," Alex said, waving at the stewardess for a refill. "My company paid the bills. Somebody in the security division last night faxed a termination order to Malcolm Street, effective upon delivery. The people after us are thinking of everything."

Elena paused to think about that. "That's not a good sign, is it?"

"It's a terrible sign. Whoever's behind this obviously has control over my companies, for the moment anyway. But Eric and Jacob will stay with us until we're safely checked into a hotel. After that, we're on our own."

"And the crooks have all our money, right?"

Alex pushed back his seat, extending it fully to the reclined position; the champagne was working its medicinal magic and taking the edge off his physical pain. He closed his eyes. "Not without my account numbers and security codes, they don't. They're locked in my office safe. Until we get this cleared up, though, I can't access that money," he said. "Except for $2 million tucked in a Bermudan bank. A rainy-day fund I never imagined I would have to use. The account numbers for that fund are in my head, so no matter what, they can't touch it."

"Was that the best you could do?" she asked, laughing.

Alex was asleep already. Three sets of steady fingers punched the keys in unison. The clack of computer keys was the loveliest sound Golitsin could remember, a rich symphony in synchronized harmony.

The operation lasted ten minutes. He stood, arms crossed over his stomach, watched over their shoulders, and enjoyed every minute of it. Clack, clack, clack-another five million sent here, another ten million there. Money was flying everywhere, massive electronic whirls of cash, shuttling from Konevitch's accounts to banks in Switzerland, Bermuda, the Caymans, and a few Pacific islands with tortuous names nobody could pronounce. Who cared to? The money would barely touch down, gather no dust, then clack, clack, clack-scatter off to the next bank. The wonderful process would proceed for hours.

Within ten minutes after opening time that morning, Alex Konevitch's immense personal hoard of cash was gone. Nearly two hundred million sprinkled around the world like fairy dust. The operation had been planned with exacting precision and rehearsed until the fingers of the pianists peering into the terminals ached and stiffened.

At noon, it would all be bundled back together in a dark Swiss vault where nobody could touch it but Golitsin.

In his pocket was the secret code for a new account at yet another Swiss bank only he had access to. He would sneak upstairs, punch the number into a computer he would dispose of afterward, and transfer all that money into a hole nobody could find but him.

A thirty-minute break for lunch. At one o'clock, the computer wizards would reassemble and the process would start again. This time on the hoards of savers' money in Alex's banks. Clack, clack, clack-not all of it, only fifty million, but enough that Alex Konevitch would be charged with looting his own bank and absconding into the sunset with that pretty little girl bride of his.

Two business reporters from Kommersant, the Russian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, were at that moment cooling their heels downstairs. They had been promised the story of the year, how that wunderkind Konevitch had proved to be a rotten crook but was thoughtful enough to leave behind a letter transferring his businesses and properties to his trusted former chief of security.

"Yes," Golitsin would tell them with an appropriately grave nod, "for the sake of the twenty thousand employees, and for our valued customers everywhere," he, General Sergei Golitsin, "would restore the blemished reputation and keep the business up and running." Maybe you noticed the new sign over the headquarters entrance?

Golitsin Enterprises-it has a nice ring, don't you think?

By close of business the haul would be complete. Two hundred million of Alex's cash, plus fifty million more stolen from his banks-$250 million in liquid cash. Then, Alex's shares in his companies would be split with his co-conspirators, leaving Golitsin with probably another hundred million in stock. A moving van was already parked in front of Alex's Moscow home, unloading the new owner's possessions.