The Hunted

20

The three men sat in the white van, swapping American girlie magazines, sucking on cigarettes, sipping stale coffee, bored out of their wits. After that initial day of heart-thumping surprises and emotional terror, things had quickly retreated to a dull grind.

During the days, surprisingly little took place in the Konevitch apartment. Long bouts of silence, broken occasionally by tedious discussions about incredibly inane things-the laundry, the latest stupid game show on TV, Oprah, and so on. On Tuesday, the wife, Elena, read to her husband, out loud, a stream of interminable passages from War and Peace. Wednesday was Anna Karenina's turn, which proved even worse. The men inside the van contemplated suicide, or rushing upstairs to drive a gag down her throat.

The Konevitches never left their building, or even their apartment, the best the men could tell. This had been a sore topic with Volevodz, who popped by occasionally to gather updates. As long as the couple stayed inside, the three listeners were trapped inside the van, crammed in with all the electronic equipment and debris from their meals. It seemed to shrink by the day; they were peeing in bottles, for God's sake. Theories and conjectures rumbled around the rear of the van. It was unnatural to stay penned up so long inside that cramped apartment. On the other hand, the Konevitches no longer had jobs. And money-actually the sudden lack of it-was undoubtedly a serious factor in their minds. Wasn't like they could afford to splurge on the theater or an expensive restaurant. Why not a movie, though? Better yet, a nice long stroll along the canal, like they used to? How much could that cost?

When it turned dark, things picked up and turned slightly more interesting. The Konevitches were like rabbits. Every night, for hours, groans and giggles, sheets rustling, and an occasional scream or "oh my God" to cap off the festivities. The first few times the volume had been kicked up full blast. The three men tried to imagine what was going on in that bed. Why hadn't Volevodz been thoughtful enough to plant a camera? It would have been so easy, they whispered among themselves. Eventually, the constant lovemaking only contributed to the enveloping air of misery.

It was almost as if the Konevitches knew all about the three listeners, that they were taunting and rubbing it in.

The phone action had turned virtually nonexistent. A few frustrated calls from their lawyer, who complained constantly about being stonewalled by his old friends in the INS.

An occasional call to order pizza and Chinese deliveries-that was it. "What are they doing out there?" asked the note Elena passed over the dining room table to Alex.

A glance at his watch-8:00 p.m.-and he scribbled a hasty response and flashed it to her. "Going nuts, I hope." After days of corresponding like this they had finally mastered the awkward art of balancing two conversations at once-inane verbal ramblings to mollify their listeners while they scrawled brief messages back and forth. It was tedious and slow, and absolutely necessary. They chatted in English and they wrote in Russian.

"Why didn't we buy a bigger place?!!!!" she scribbled back. "It's closing in on me, Alex. I can barely breathe."

Alex wrote, "At least the company's better in here than out there." Who knew how many Mafiya thugs were prowling nearby, trying their damnedest to collect the bounty? Volevodz knew their address-they had to assume he had somehow passed it along to the cabal in Moscow. So the thugs now had a firm fix on their location and Alex was sure they were huddled somewhere nearby, waiting. Going outside was out of the question. The first few days they had tried to suppress their terror, to find ways to cope with their anxiety and rearrange and repair their living conditions. Day three Elena had gone on a mad hunt for electronic bugs. She discovered six. They suspected there were more, plenty more, and they were right.

On day four, they agreed upon a strategy-they would work overtime to appear like they were going through the motions of a normal life, battling boredom, praying, and waiting for MP to whip a legal rabbit out of his hat and end this miserable nightmare.

They weren't fooling themselves, though. MP was a gnat battling giants. This was way over his head-over any lawyer's head, probably. At any moment, the people outside would become tired of this, and the next hammer would fall. And Alex, ever the clearheaded businessman, was sure things would become worse, whatever that meant.

With each succeeding day, the situation became more intolerable. Elena tried reading, watching TV, meditating-nothing worked. Nothing. Alex walked endlessly around the apartment, doing laps and searching for a solution. He thought best on his feet, and was wearing out shoe leather to find a way out of this.

They had no money. They were trapped inside this building. Unable to escape. Unable to communicate with anybody outside without the mice listening in. If there was a way out, it was up to them to find it. Alex patted Elena's knee and wrote, "Time for the bedroom."

They got up and together made the short trek down the hall. Alex loaded the tape they had produced the first night, carefully and quietly inserted it into the cassette player, then cranked the volume knob to maximum. He said to Elena, "Get your clothes off. I'm in the mood again." Neither of them had been in anything close to the mood since the visit from Agent Hanrahan with the terrifying news about all the bugs and the thugs waiting outside to kill them.

The idea that their every word was being overheard was sickening.

Elena kicked off her shoes, flung them hard against the wall, and made a point to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, with an accompanying groan from the springs. She opened the nightly banter. "You're always in the mood."

"And you're always beautiful."

"You're insatiable."

"And you're a doll." Then, "Take off your blouse."

"You first, with the shirt… that's it. Now the pants."

They went back and forth, trying their best to make the listeners gag, then Alex sat heavily on the bed, right beside her.

They stared at each other a moment. Without another word, Alex pushed start and the tape kicked in. The sounds of the two of them sexually mauling each other shot full-blast into the listening devices.

They had nearly killed each other producing that tape.

Elena leaned close to Alex and whispered, "How many more days do you think we have?"

"One… twenty. Who knows?"

"What are they waiting for?"

"For us to break. Or run out of money and start starving."

"Why? What do they hope to gain?"

"They want us desperate. They have our money, and they've made us too terrified to step outside. It's a box, and the only way out is to accept their condition. A one-way trip to Russia."

"Maybe we should try to just make a run for it."

"How?"

"Disguise ourselves. Sneak out. Early in the morning when they're tired and their senses are dull. Create a diversion of some kind." She pecked him on the cheek, then pulled back. "You pulled it off in Budapest. We'll do it again."

"And go where, Elena? They have our passports."

"Montana, Idaho, Nevada. I'm past caring, Alex. A town in the middle of nowhere. Hot, cold, dry, wet, it no longer matters. Someplace small, neglected. America has millions of illegal immigrants. We'll live in the underground economy, find a way to blend in."

"I'll open a lawn service, and you'll be a maid. Is that the idea?"

"We'll be alive, Alex. And free."

He leaned over and touched her shoulder. "Listen to me. All of those millions of illegal immigrants don't have the FBI hunting them. The FBI doesn't know their names, doesn't have their physical descriptions, and could care less about them. We'd be looking over our shoulder every day. One day we'd wake up to a bunch of men in gray suits."

"But I'm tired of sitting here, waiting."

"Well, I have an idea."

"I'm willing to try anything.

"Unfortunately, it will take time."

"How much time?"

"Probably a lot. Probably too much. It's a complete gamble, anyway, an outside shot with a million things that can go wrong."

She stared up at the ceiling. "A million things can go wrong here. Tell me about it."

They whispered back and forth, while the men in the van, tired of the monotony of love and lust in the Konevitch place, squelched the volume and napped. One block away, the lady and two men stayed hunched inside the car and, through a pair of powerful binoculars, kept a close eye on the front entrance of the Watergate. The year of hunting for Alex in Chicago had not agreed with Katya.

Nicky had a modest, not overly prosperous operation in Chicago run by a half-crazy, doped-out boss who put up the hunter-killer team, along with five of his own people, in a cramped, run-down rowhouse in one of the most crime-infested sections of the South Side. He called it a safehouse. It was barely a house, and anything but safe. Black and Hispanic gangs roamed the surrounding streets at will. They did not particularly cater to these Russians who were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to muscle into the local action.

The rowhouse quickly became a prison, a quite miserable one. The gangs were large, mean, and tough. A tiny bodega was positioned on a corner across the street. They hung there, blacks and spics in variously colored bandanas, mixing freely together, never less than fifteen of them. They sipped from canned beers, rapped back and forth, shared menthols, and glowered at the rowhouse across the street. They seemed to be honoring a local cease-fire among themselves, a temporary alliance against a common foe. For decades, they had battled and scrapped with one another for these streets-every inch of concrete, every crackhouse and whore's corner was a victory, paid in blood. No way were they going to let these Ivan-come-latelys have a piece of the action. At night they sometimes sprayed the rowhouse with bullets. They scattered when the cops arrived, only to reappear the instant the last blue suit departed. Once, a pair of Molotov cocktails sailed through the windows.

The Russians slept on the floors, and crawled on their bellies every time they passed a window. A stack of portable fire extinguishers was stored in the kitchen. First aid kits were in every room in the house.

Katya and her crew ventured outside as infrequently as possible. Two left on a grocery run one night and never returned. They may have fled. Nobody blamed them.

A few weeks later, a box with four ears was left on the doorstep. They studied the shriveled things and debated at length, but nobody could be entirely certain they belonged to Dmitri and Josef. Dmitri did in fact have two earrings. And okay, yes, Josef's ears were sort of large and floppy; but no one knew for sure.

It constipated the search for the Konevitches terribly. The first few months, Katya and her comrades snuck out only in the wee hours of the morning, trying to elude the gangs. Their car had been shot at more than they could count as they sped down the street. Nicky's locals had a firm fix on the Russian immigrant pockets of the city; naturally, this was where the bulk of effort was placed. At some point, inevitably, the Konevitches would turn up.

Occasionally, they got word that Alex Konevitch had been seen cruising a few local Russian clubs, flashing a wad of bills and bragging about the flourishing real estate empire he was establishing in the city. It sounded like Mr. Big Shot. And after flashing photos at various witnesses, they were sure it was him. Queries to the local phone companies had revealed a cell service account, though the number was unlisted and the phone service stubbornly refused to provide the billing address. That was it. No matter how hard they dug, no matter how many cops they paid for information, this was all they had.

Additional pictures of the couple were plastered everywhere. Hundreds more were pressed into the hands of Russian expats with vile threats about what would happen should they fail to snitch on first sight.

After those first few months, the hunters became dispirited-and worse, seriously frightened. The party outside the bodega seemed to grow bigger by the day. The Russians took to cowering in the rowhouse, contriving false reports back to Moscow, manufacturing hopeful leads that never existed. The lies would never be caught, they were confident of this. Nobody would dare run the gauntlet and pay them a visit.

Massive quantities of food and beer and vodka were stockpiled. They watched the same tired porn flicks, ate and drank heavily, and bickered among themselves. The men outnumbered Katya, and they cruelly exploited this advantage against her. They pressed her into service as their cook, their laundry lady, their maid.

Even the long year of killing in the Congo, her previous record for unadulterated wretchedness, paled in comparison.

Oh, how she hated the Konevitches. The last iota of icy detachment had melted months before. Her pouched eyes now burned with a scary intensity. It was all their fault, that awful couple. Why couldn't they just let themselves be killed? It would've been so much easier for everybody. How could they be so selfish?

When the call came from Moscow that the Konevitches had been found, living in Washington-and in a luxury co-op, of all places-she nearly cried. At four that morning, she and the rest of her team eased out of the bullet-pocked rowhouse, hauling their bags, and dodging a few farewell bullets.

The first day in Washington, she made six furtive passes around the Watergate and the busy streets surrounding the huge complex. To her trained eyes, the competition stood out like sore thumbs. The unmarked white van with too many antennas. The dark FBI cars splayed around like a drive-in movie theater, everybody watching, everybody waiting for the Konevitches to make a move.

They were all going to be sorely disappointed. They couldn't have them, not even a piece of them: the Konevitches were hers.

She sat, gazing hatefully through the binos, dreaming up unpleasant ways to kill them. Mrs. Edna Clarke was ninety-two and still sprightly. She had lived in the Watergate from the day it was built. Her husband, Arthur, had been a managing partner of a large, prestigious law firm, before he passed, God bless him, at the youthful age of eighty-two. The past decade, she had stayed in her apartment, alone but for the kindred company of her three precious cats. She read and knitted and waited patiently for the good Lord to call her. Her children had pleaded with her to consider a nursing home. She wouldn't hear of it. This was her home, a place filled with wonderful memories of Arthur and the family they had bred and raised, through good times and bad, but mostly good. She would leave in a hearse, she vowed.

She just adored that lovely young Russian couple across the hall. The day they moved in, she had promptly rapped on their door, gripping a bottle of good red wine wrapped in a bright red bow. A housewarming gift. Not that young people practiced such things these days: they knew nothing about good manners. The Konevitches, though, were certainly different. They uncorked the bottle on the spot and insisted she come in and share a glass. And afterward, on weekends, they frequently invited her over for quiet dinners.

She and Arthur had led interesting lives. They had met in Europe during the war, where Arthur had been a legal star at the Nuremberg trials. They had dined with presidents and senators, as Arthur went on to work in civil rights and dozens of other things that were important and fascinating. At least fascinating at that time. Now they were just rotten old memories to most people. A pathetic old attic nobody cared to peek into. Not that Alex, though. He was so bright, so curious, such an accommodating listener. He sat on the edge of his chair and peppered her with questions until her brain grew tired and she creaked back across the hall to her bed.

On Edna's ninety-second birthday, they sprang for a ballet at the Kennedy Center-the Bolshoi on tour, no less! Edna had pushed and squeezed herself into a gown she hadn't worn since Arthur's death. Elena was friendly with a number of the dancers, and afterward she had escorted Edna backstage and introduced her around. What a lovely, lovely birthday. Her own children hadn't even sent gifts. Hadn't called, either.

So she did not think twice when Alex knocked and asked to borrow her cell phone. He promised to pay her back for any expenses incurred. Edna wouldn't hear of it, of course. Arthur had left her a bigger fortune than she could ever hope to spend. She had a perfectly good house phone, anyway. What did she need with that shrunken little excuse for a squawk box? She only bought it to see what all the fuss was about: a lot of hype and ado about nothing, she quickly decided. She could barely hear through it. Had to scream into it just to hear her own voice.

But Alex certainly seemed to be attached to that thing. She felt nosy, and guilty, but couldn't keep her eye away from that spyhole on her door. All day, day after day, it seemed, Alex was out there in the hallway, pacing back and forth, chattering like mad into that silly little device. Occasionally, he popped back into his apartment, only to reappear after a few minutes with that stupid thing nudged up against his ear again.

Odd behavior. A little suspicious, maybe; the way a man might behave were he, say, maybe having a secret affair. She drove that thought straight out of her mind. Such a nice, loving couple. He had to be talking business, she concluded; he was enough of a gentleman not to do it in front of his wife. Lord knew she hated when Arthur spent hours on the phone talking all that legal mumbo-jumbo with his partners and clients like she wasn't even there. Shortly after midnight, the apartment door was opened with a skillful thrust of the pick, and gently pushed open.

Two men quietly entered, Mikhail Borosky first, then Igor Markashvili, a fellow PI whom Mikhail trusted devoutly, and occasionally employed for special jobs. Throughout the previous week, Mikhail and his client Alex had spoken over the phone every day, sometimes for hours. Things were getting ugly for the Konevitches back in America. Alex's patience with the people chasing him was exhausted. He had tried peaceful coexistence, forgive and forget, and they, apparently, wouldn't hear of it. Also they were targeting Alex's beloved Elena again. Mikhail could sense a deep change in his old friend. In place of Alex's cool, sober intelligence simmered a quiet rage. After a long dialogue, after many desperate ideas were thrown back and forth, they finally settled on a plan.

It would take time, though. Months, probably, if not longer. Mikhail encouraged his friend and client to just stay alive long enough to see it through.

The apartment was spacious, and also dark and empty. They tiptoed quietly in their sneakers, flipped on small flashlights, and fanned out. Nice place, high-ceilinged, wood-floored, furnished with expensive antiques, and kept neat as a pin by the lady of the house. The lady in question, Tatyana, was spending the night with her boss. Mikhail went to work on the phones, while Igor began littering listening devices at strategic locations around the apartment. Mikhail inserted a bug inside the phone in the living room, then another inside the phone on the bedside table. In less than fifteen minutes the job was done.

They slipped out as quietly as they entered.

The bugs were manufactured by a German electronics firm, highly sensitive, sound-activated little things that fed the noise to a small recording box hidden in the basement of the apartment building. There would be no need for Mikhail to conceal himself in a cubbyhole somewhere, battling sleep and boredom with an earphone pressed against his ear. He would stop in every few days, collect the old tape, reload a fresh one, then sit back in comfort over a cigar and scotch and listen for the dirt.

Only a few hours before, the two men had magnetically attached a small tracking device on the undercarriage of Golitsin's limo. Another, as well, was slapped on that cute little BMW convertible Golitsin had bought himself.

Breaking through the high-tech security system into Golitsin's mansion was close to impossible; also, frankly unnecessary. Who cared what the old man said, anyway?

At this stage of the operation, all that mattered was where he went. Illya Mechoukov was soaking up the sun on a fold-out beach chair and gazing, without a serious thought in his head, through his shades at the Caribbean beach from the commanding perch of his balcony. In the four years since he founded Orangutan Media, he had not taken a single day of vacation. Not one. Just work, work, work. And even more work once Alex and Elena started roping in all those big U.S. firms.

He had no idea how exhausted he was, until this forced vacation landed in his lap. And this glorious little sun-drenched island filled with all manner of pleasantries was such a perfect place to unwind and forget all that pressure. The sun, the rum, the beaches, all those native girls and American tourist girls romping in the surf, competing to see who could show off the tinier bikini. At that moment, his eyes were feasting on two of the lovely little things down below, flaunting their bronzed bodies in little more than thin strings.

He never heard them enter his hotel room. Never knew of their presence until the garrote landed around his neck and was pulled back. The pain was vicious and unbearable. The garrote was held firmly in place for over a minute. His eyes bulged, his lips turned purple, as his hands clawed desperately at the rope.

Then darkness. He passed out, though he hadn't died. He was sure of this when they threw cold water on his body and revived him.

"What-" he tried to say before a big fist smashed against his lips.

He spit out two front teeth. He was on a bed, gagging and coughing up blood.

"We'll talk and you'll listen," a man told him in Russian. The man was a terrifying giant, nearly six and a half feet, with swollen muscles that stretched against his silly Bahamian shirt. Black curly hair covered his arms and half-exposed chest. In fact there were three men, Illya realized. The other two were dressed similarly in pink and yellow shorts, flowered shirts, dark socks, and leather sandals.

"Nice outfits," Illya mumbled, and was quickly rewarded with another fist.

"This is very easy. We have nothing against you," the one in pink shorts informed him. "All you have to do is sign a simple statement and you're free."

"A statement? What kind of statement?"

"Do you want to live?"

"Of course."

"Then what do you care what the statement says?"

He really didn't. Not at all. A sheet of paper, official-looking and typed neatly in Russian, was shoved in front of Illya's face. A pen was propped in his hand.

He barely had time for a brief glance before the garrote around his neck suddenly tightened-something about a confession that Orangutan Media was a front for criminal activities. And something more, something about Alex Konevitch, before the world around Illya became a gathering blur. Somehow he scrawled his name at the bottom of the page before he subsided into darkness again.

When he awoke, the bad men were gone.