The Last Witness

[TWO]

Players Corner Lounge

Front and Master Streets, Philadelphia

Monday, November 17, 5:15 P.M.

Dmitri Gurnov was back down on his knees, looking again inside the door of the old steel safe. It was three feet tall, about that wide, and bolted to the concrete floor in the corner of the small, dirty office. He had to use his cell phone as a makeshift flashlight because the dim light from the bare bulb hanging from the power cord overhead was worthless.

He first had gone in the safe to make sure that there was enough cash before he sent the message to the woman saying that he had the money she demanded. It wasn’t the entire two hundred grand-more like fifty grand-but he never intended on delivering it all. He was getting just enough, if it came to that point, to look to her like he had the full amount.

She won’t know because she will be dead.

And this problem will go away for good.

Then I have to deal with Carlos Perez. And eventually Ricky.

Gurnov’s go-phone had then vibrated. Its small screen showed a message from Julio:

215-555-3582

CAPT J WANTS TO KNOW IF MULE DELIVERED

WHAT DO I TELL HIM?

And I have to pay for that damn lost coke!

He texted back:

NOTHING! COME TO BAR. WE NEED TO TALK.

It was more or less quiet in the office, the only sound the heavy bass beat thumping through the walls from the lounge’s sound system. The bar crowd was already building.

On the floor near Gurnov were four clear plastic 750-milliliter bottles-the labels had “Viktor Vodka” in large red Cyrillic-like lettering, suggesting it was genuine imported Russian, but the very small print on the back stated it was made in a Kensington distillery-that he had tossed from a cardboard box imprinted with the same cheap vodka’s typeface.

Gurnov had put a five-gallon brown garbage bag inside the box, and into that he was carefully stacking the cash he was taking from the safe.

Some of the money was in crisp, large-denomination bills and neatly banded in Federal Reserve Bank inch-wide currency straps. The color-coded kraft paper bands that wrapped around the fifty-dollar bills were printed with brown stripes and “$5,000”; the bands printed with mustard yellow stripes and “$10,000” held one-hundred-dollar bills that appeared to be new.

The majority of the money, however, was in tall stacks of rumpled ten- and twenty-dollar bills. These were bound by thick red rubber bands, under which were yellow sticky-back notes with a hand-scrawled “$2k.”

After closing the garbage bag, he looked back in the safe. There were three spiral notebook ledgers, and he wondered why Ricky Ramirez had not taken at least one with him to Atlantic City and Florida.

On top of the ledgers was an unmarked brown paperboard box. A clear plastic box with a label bearing a CVS Pharmacy logotype was near it. The label read “Insulin Syringes-25 count,” and the plastic box held maybe twenty. He tossed the syringes into the vodka box, then opened the unmarked brown box. In it were four glass vials, each about the size of a roll of dimes and labeled “Succinylcholine.” He removed one.

I could just shoot her. But Nick said the muscle relaxant leaves no trace.

He was right how fast it took out the holdouts.

Half a needle and their heart stopped in minutes.

When Nick Antonov had given Gurnov the assignment two weeks earlier, he had told him only a little about who it was that Gurnov was to inject-and even less as to why. Antonov had simply announced that they were troublemakers, ones who had been evicted from-but refused to leave-the last few row houses that stood in a large section of Northern Liberties. Antonov added that they were holding up a Diamond Development project and had to go. And that was it.

Gurnov had figured out the rest, a lot of it from information Antonov had shared piecemeal over time. The most important part being: Yuri Tikhonov.

Gurnov knew that the forty-eight-year-old businessman had not become a billionaire by being a nice guy. He had served in the SVR as an intelligence officer with men who also went on to become wealthy beyond belief-as well as the highest officials in the Kremlin.

“Including the president and prime minister,” Antonov had said, his tone boastful. “That is why the drug cartels fear Yuri, even as they invest in his projects.”

Gurnov did not know if that last part was in fact true. He saw the Colombians and Mexicans as irrational and fearless-savages mad with power and money. But it did not matter what he thought. He was a foot soldier who had been sent to solve a problem. And, more or less effortlessly, he had.

But the information he had pieced together he thought could one day be beneficial.

What he learned was that Yuri Tikhonov was heavily invested in a Philadelphia company called Diamond Development-As are maybe the drug cartels, he thought, but who is to know? — and that Diamond was behind the Lucky Stars Casino on eighty acres of prime riverfront and the giant new coliseum to be built in Northern Liberties. And that those were part of a city program called PEGI.

Gurnov figured there probably were other Diamond projects, as PEGI was under the City of Philadelphia’s Housing and Urban Development. Its chairman, a councilman named Badde, was pushing the master plan of rebuilding the area-including the riverfront casinos, the high-end mix of luxury condominiums and restaurants, theaters and upscale retailers. And of course what would be the area’s iconic anchor: the entertainment complex with sixty thousand seats under a retractable roof.

PEGI, using Title 26 Eminent Domain, had seized the necessary properties. As that was happening, the troublemakers went all over Northern Liberties and Fishtown plastering handbills. They were home-printed with a crude image of a black politician wearing a tiny black bow tie and “Councilman Rapp Badde WANTED for Crimes Against the Poor amp; Disadvantaged of Philly! Last Seen Stealing Homes amp; Tearing Down Neighborhoods! Help Stop Him, Or Yours Is Next!”

Then the troublemakers, ignoring the eviction notices, stood their ground. It brought Turco Demolition amp; Excavation-which had been tearing down all but those few remaining properties and scraping the multi-block area back to bare dirt-to a halt.

Yuri Tikhonov had not been pleased-neither with the delay nor with Badde’s inability to deal with it.

Thus, early on the first day of November, Gurnov found himself knocking on the door of each holdout. He had offered his hand as he introduced himself as one supporting their cause-and when they shook it, he jabbed the needle of the syringe that was in his left hand into their forearm. After injecting the muscle relaxer, he removed the needle, pushed them back in the house, and closed the door.

Shortly thereafter, the demolition crew had gotten a call from someone saying they were with HUD: “You’re good to go.” The bright yellow nine-ton bulldozers and the red-and-white Link-Belt crane swinging a two-ton forged steel wrecking ball went back to work. Almost immediately, the massive steel wrecking ball broke through one of the row houses-and came out with one of the dead troublemakers snagged on it. Police then discovered the bodies of the other holdouts.

It had been messy, and caused another day’s delay in the demolition, but the troublemakers were gone, the news media calling their cause of death a mystery.

And, knowing all this, Gurnov had what he considered a hole card to play if ever he fell out of Antonov’s graces.

Gurnov removed one of the glass vials labeled “Succinylcholine” from the brown paperboard box and put it in with the syringes in the plastic box. He placed the paperboard box of vials back in the safe and closed and locked it. Then he stood and carried the vodka box containing the cash and succinylcholine and needles to the battered wooden desk, his foot finding a plastic bottle of vodka as he went.

There the light of the overhead bulb was better. But he had to make room on the messy desktop. In the process he knocked some forms to the floor. Then he saw that the small box of used cell phones was still there-and next to it Ricky’s black laptop computer and small digital camera he’d used for posting the online ads for the girls.

I wonder why he did not take them to Florida?

Did he forget?

I could call him again, but it is too late.

He will have to figure out what to do when he is there.

The light from the bulb flickered, and when he looked up, he saw it swaying slightly. He then heard, in addition to the heavy driving beat from the sound system, the headboard banging in a bedroom above the office.

If that is Ricky’s new one, it is only a matter of time before she causes some problem.

I need out of this business.

His cell phone rang. The caller ID announced that it was Antonov.

“Everything okay, Nick?” he answered in Russian.

“Did you get in touch with Carlos?”

“Yes,” Gurnov lied. “It is all set.”

“When and where?”

Gurnov sighed audibly.

“You have a problem with me asking about an important shipment?”

“No, Nick. But are you going to micromanage this? Or can I do my damn job?”

“You have any more of the muscle relaxer?”

Gurnov almost dropped his phone. What?

“Why, Nick?”

“Yes or no?”

“I’ll have to check the safe. But it should be there.”

“Get it. I will let you know if it will be necessary.”

“Carlos?”

Antonov ignored the question and said, “Call me when you know how much there is.”

Gurnov, shaking his head in wonder, looked at his cell phone as the screen went dark.

Then it suddenly lit back up with a text message box:

831-555-6235

HAVE THE CASH READY BY 10 TONIGHT.

I WILL TELL YOU WHERE TO MEET IN CENTER CITY.

Center City?

He looked at the cardboard vodka box.

He texted back: “Okay.”