The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

25

I OPENED MY EYES THE NEXT MORNING AND DECIDED THE world wouldn’t end while I went for a run. I hadn’t been out in days, and the muscles in my back and shoulders felt as if they’d baked in a kiln. I got up and dressed and spent a good fifteen seconds stretching my hamstrings. When I got outside, I was pleased to find one of the first warm mornings of spring. I was not pleased to find that I had the lung capacity of a small bird. That’s what happened when I slacked off.

Just past the turn to Memorial Drive, I noticed a car lingering off my left shoulder. It was easy to spot, keeping pace with me and not the rest of the vehicle traffic. No one trying to be stealthy would be caught dead following at that range. When the driver pulled up alongside and I saw who it was, I was annoyed more than anything. I couldn’t even go running in peace. I was also on the verge of fainting, so I stopped and went over to lean in the window and see what Special Agent Eric Ling wanted.

“Hi there,” he said. “How’s it going?” He offered a steaming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

“Never touch the stuff. Thanks anyway.”

He shrugged and fit the cup into a holder in the console between the seats. Government vehicles had all the snazzy features. He dropped his cool surfer shades and looked at me over the rims. “Get in. I’ll drive you back.”

“That kind of defeats the purpose.”

“Maybe, but you weren’t exactly burning up the course. I just wanted to ask you about this.”

He pulled a photo from an envelope and held it up. It was a picture of Bo, ever the gentleman, holding the door for me at Grigorii’s, the morning we had gone to meet Drazen Tishchenko.

He pointed at Bo. “Who’s your friend?”

“Who says he’s my friend?”

“We’ve been trying to identify him. We ran his plates, but that was a dead end.”

That helped me feel marginally better. There was no end to the tricks Bo knew. It also explained why he was feeling so much heat.

Ling put the picture back into the envelope, then reached over and popped the door open. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

I looked down the path I wouldn’t be running that morning and felt…relief. I opened the door and climbed in. He waited until I was buckled in, checked his side mirror, and pulled away from the curb. He turned at the next side street. There was no place to park, so he pulled up to a hydrant and killed the engine.

“Government plates,” he said, not seeming all that bashful about it.

“I knew you had a team on me,” I said.

“Sure.” He twisted around in his seat so he was more or less facing me. “The Bureau has unlimited funds and manpower to spend following around a private investigator. That would be an easy sell.”

He didn’t actually say “two-bit private investigator,” but it was implied. I knew they weren’t up on Bo, and there had been only three people in the meeting. “Are you set up on Tishchenko?”

“We’re up on Grigorii’s. We have been for months. I got a call that an unknown female had wandered into the picture, which is pretty unusual for that place. I thought it must be Rachel, but it was you, and I asked myself, ‘What would she be doing there?’ I thought about it. Want to know what I came up with?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It all comes back to Betelco. Everyone is connected through Betelco, including your partner. Harvey is connected through his ex-wife. His ex-wife is connected personally through Roger and professionally as the company’s auditor. Tishchenko is connected because he was running dirty money through there. Right?”

“If you say so.” I didn’t see anything to argue with in there but didn’t want to just agree with him. He could be tricky.

“Four years ago, Roger Fratello disappeared. He took Drazen’s money with him. There’s some indication he also killed Drazen’s brother Vladi, but that’s mostly rumor coming from his people. Drazen’s been looking for Roger ever since. Are you with me?”

“I’m following along nicely, thank you.”

“Good, because here’s where you come in. Cut to right now. Traces of Roger start to show up again. Drazen Tishchenko ends up in Boston, and your partner gets grabbed.”

“Didn’t he say he was out shopping for a new wheelchair?”

He smiled, indulging me. “Then I saw this.” He tapped the envelope with the picture in it. “Lew and I started tossing around a few ideas for why you, a person with no prior connections to ROC, would be meeting with a high-priority ROC target.”

“ROC?”

“Russian organized crime. That’s what I do. I’m with a special unit.”

I wanted to mention that Drazen was Ukrainian, but if he chased Russians for a living, it was a good bet he already knew.

“Anyway, even after all this time, Drazen is looking for Roger. If he thinks, for some reason, that Harvey can tell him where to find him, that’s a good reason to snatch him up. If you want Harvey back, that’s a good reason for you to visit with Drazen.”

“That’s a theory,” I said. A pretty darn close theory.

“As you know, new information came up leading us to believe Roger had resurfaced, so we’ve also been looking for him.”

“Right,” I said. “He popped out of a terrorist’s closet in Zormat.”

“Well, I see that you have been following along nicely.” Ling didn’t look exactly impressed, more that I might not have been as two-bit as he’d thought. “We got a call from State. They had some items they couldn’t identify. We started running prints for them and came up with a wallet belonging to fugitive Roger Fratello. We were pretty psyched about that development. Then we tracked a key from inside the wallet to the safety deposit box in Brussels, which is where we found your partner’s prints. You see how that all works together?”

“I do.”

“We came to see Harvey. We almost killed you. We left. We got the call from Harvey to come back. That’s the part where the two of you lied to federal agents.”

“Do you have some proof that we lied?”

“No, but I don’t need it, because I don’t really care about that. What I care about is Drazen Tishchenko, and since Harvey came back from his time out with head and hands intact, I have to think that you and Drazen worked something out. That’s what I’m interested in.”

“You’re not after Harvey?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re not after Roger?”

“We were,” he said, “but he’s dead. He died in the hijacking.”

“You knew that?”

“We figured it out.”

“How?”

“Probably the same way you did. We started asking some people.”

“How come you guys didn’t already know about that? The government is supposed to know things like that.”

He shrugged. “We don’t know a fraction of what we should know. Besides, we never knew he was on the Salanna plane until we got the prints from Zormat. Then we put it together. It’s a bummer, too, because Roger was our best shot at getting Drazen.”

I pointed at the envelope. “You obviously know where the guy is. Why don’t you just go and pick him up?”

“Because I have nothing to charge him with, and if I did, no one would testify against him, and if they tried to, he would do the whole head-and-hands thing. We told you what happened to Walter Herald, and he did that knowing he was killing a fed. That sent a pretty strong message. Everyone at Betelco went running for cover after that.”

“I could see how that would be discouraging to people.”

“But let’s be generous for the purpose of this exercise and assume I could pick him up and charge him with something. Do you know what he would do?”

“Call a lawyer?”

“Call the CIA.”

“For what?”

“He has strong ties to the organization formerly known as the KGB. He knows state secrets. He says he does, anyway. The CIA swoops in, whispers something about the greater good, spirits him away, and the next time we see him, he’s back doing exactly what we left him doing. Roger was our best chance. Not even the spooks would have had the guts to pull him out from under felony murder of a federal agent.” He shook his head. He had the look of Charlie Brown after he’d tried again to kick the football, only to have the CIA snatch it away at the last minute. “I would have finally had him.”

“All right, so your job is hard. What are we doing now? Right here, you and me?”

“We’re talking about how you can help me with my job.”

“Let me see if I’m following. Drazen is your big prize. You want him for the murder of Walter Herald. You needed Roger Fratello to get him. You wanted Harvey to get you to Roger, which, by the way, raises this question: How come you’re just skipping over Rachel in this whole thing? Why aren’t you after her?”

“We don’t have Rachel’s prints on Roger’s money.”

“You have pictures of her kissing Roger.”

“That’s not against the law.”

“But you have to think she’s involved.” I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

“We think she was responsible for bringing the Tishchenkos into Betelco and a number of companies in the area. Again, there aren’t too many victims in this town-actually, in any town-willing to testify against the Russians.”

“All right, fine. But now we all agree that Roger is ashes in Sudan.” I looked for validation on that point. He gave me the nod. “Unless you want to nail him for lying about buying a wheelchair, doesn’t that mean that Harvey is off the hook? He can’t help you get Drazen on the agent’s murder, because he had nothing to do with that. If he’s off the hook, why would I help you?”

“Let me ask you something.” His lighter tone suggested a new turn in the conversation. “How much do you know about the fall of the Soviet Union?”

Definitely a new turn. “Let’s see, communism failed, the USSR crumbled and split apart. Now we have 220 countries competing at the Olympics instead of 180.”

“The last time I checked in with Drazen Tishchenko, he was trying to sell a diesel-powered, ninety-foot-long, Foxtrot-class attack submarine to Pablo Escobar. Pablo needed a little something to run his product up and down the West Coast. Do you know where Drazen got it?”

“I’d have to think the only navy that wouldn’t miss a sub would be the old Soviet navy, whatever it was called.”

“He bought it in Kronstadt, which is where the Baltic fleet of the Red Navy went to die. We’re taking about a hundred-million-dollar military vessel. Drazen paid five for it and had a deal to sell it for twenty.”

“That would have been a fair return on investment.”

“The thing about Russians is, they love money, they’re scared of absolutely nothing, and they will sell anything. If you need it and you’re willing to pay for it, Drazen Tishchenko will get it for you, and being who he is, he’s plugged in. He knows party officials who know things. You know, like where the stocks of weaponized smallpox are kept. Where all the tactical nuclear weapons happen to be. They know where the weapons-grade fissionable material is, and they know how to get all that stuff out and into the hands of the people willing to pay for it and willing to use it. Any idea who those people might be?”

“People who don’t like us?”

“That’s correct. The submarine deal never happened, but only because the local mafiya back home blocked it. Drazen forgot to cut them in. Otherwise, the U.S. Navy would be chasing drug-running subs up and down the Pacific Coast. Are you starting to get my drift?”

We were still chatting amiably, but an undercurrent had crept in, something in his usually imperturbable tone that carried more weight than the words he was saying. That, by itself, felt like a pretty good case for helping him out.

He went on. “When Tishchenko decides to put a few tactical nukes out there, there’s nothing to say we’ll catch him then, either. Wouldn’t it be better to just nip it in the bud?”

“I still don’t know how I’m supposed to help you do that.”

“I think you know where the fortune is.”

“The what?”

“The lost fortune.”

“His money has a name?”

“That’s what people say when they talk about it.” Having finished his own coffee, he reached down for the cup he’d brought for me and started peeling back the plastic flap. “According to legend, it’s a billion dollars.”

This was getting interesting, enough so that I couldn’t hide it. “How does anyone misplace a billion dollars?”

“The better story is how he got it in the first place. Drazen owned a bank in Russia.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the banker type.”

“I didn’t say he was a banker. He’s a gangster who owned a bank. That’s all the rage in Russia these days. There’s no real regulation of banks over there, so they buy them and use them as mattresses.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mattresses. Places to keep their cash. Then they use the U.S. banking system to turn all that dirty money into clean U.S. currency. It’s a beautiful thing. No one can accuse these gangsters of being stupid.”

“I have to believe he didn’t earn a billion dollars from ATM charges.”

“He stole it from KGB agents.”

“He stole it from the KGB? First of all, that sounds like a bad strategy. Second, where does the KGB get a billion dollars?”

“They stole it.”

“From whom?”

“The Russian treasury.” He glanced over, maybe to gauge my interest. This was probably the sort of thing that made most people’s eyes glaze over. But I had a personal stake.

“I’m listening.”

“The people who were most pissed off by the unraveling of the Soviet Union were KGB and party officials.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “The ones who benefited most from a corrupt system would be the ones with the most to lose. What did they do?”

“They stole the country.”

“Stole the country?”

“Starting in 1992, for about eleven years, the KGB and other party officials pulled off the greatest looting of a country that the world has ever seen. It’s hard to say how much money they took, but estimates run around six hundred billion.”

“Jesus. How do you steal that much money?”

“The same way most people steal from their employers. They set up shell companies and false-flag bank accounts all over the world and sneak money into them. But there was so much money the KGB ran out of places to put it. They turned to the mafiya. But at that time, the mafiya wasn’t sophisticated enough to handle it, so the KGB bought them what they needed to keep up.”

“New BlackBerrys?”

“Computers and communications equipment. They gave them the most sophisticated and cutting-edge technical equipment available. It was a transforming moment for the bad guys.”

“Bad guys? I don’t hear any good guys in this tale.”

“The worse guys. One of the worst is Drazen Tishchenko. The KGB gave him their money, and he took it.”

“These KGB agents just sat around and let him take their hard-earned dough?”

“There was so much money moving so fast through so many accounts and countries and currencies that it was hard for anyone to keep up. By the time they figured it out, it was too late.”

“Drazen was smart enough to do all that?”

“He had a guy.”

Didn’t they always? “Even if it was too late to get the money back, it wouldn’t necessarily keep the KGB out of the complaint department, would it?”

“Anyone who came to the complaint department had to deal with his brother.”

“Vladi?”

“In the Ukraine, Vladi was known as the man who couldn’t be killed. He was shot seven times in four different incidents. Twice he took bullets for his brother. No one ever managed to kill him.”

That was only because he had yet to run into Rachel. “Okay, but still, it’s the KGB.”

“When it got too hot, Drazen got his guy to give him a couple of maps-one for him and one for Vladi, so he could find the money.”

“What kind of maps?”

“They’re criminals, so he didn’t put anything anywhere in their real names. It was in numbered accounts in places like Turks and Caicos, Liberia, the Seychelles, Nauru. Wherever he stashed it, he used fake names or numbered accounts. If he did have to stash some cash, he put it in safety deposit boxes, again under fake names. The map wasn’t really a map but a list of files with the locations of accounts, names on the accounts, account numbers, passwords…things like that. After he got that, Drazen no longer needed his guy, so he killed him. Drazen and Vladi popped up in Israel next, where they offered to help Mossad track down former KGB agents.”

“So, they got Mossad to take out their enemies.” Crafty though not surprising that Drazen would be of the one-stone-two-birds school of criminal behavior. “And the computer that was stolen from Vladi had one of these financial maps on it?”

“According to legend.”

It was a good legend, but there was a hole in the plot. “If you had a billion bucks stashed and someone found out where it was, wouldn’t you move it? If the list was compromised, why wouldn’t Drazen just move the money to new accounts?”

“That’s never been explained, and it’s one reason some people don’t buy the story. Drazen had his own list, so it’s possible he did exactly what you’re suggesting.”

“In which case the computer would be worthless.”

“And yet Drazen is here, and here he stays. I have to think he’s waiting for something. Or someone?” He braced his arm against the sill of his door, leaned his head into the palm of his hand, and just stared at me.

“Tell me exactly what it is you need, Ling.”

“I need information. I want to know what he’s doing, why he’s here. Anything you can tell me.”

“He’s here for his billion dollars. That’s why he took Harvey. That’s why he’s done everything he’s done while he’s been here. He says he’s looking for Roger, but I think it’s the money.”

He took off his shades. “Are you saying you really did find it?”

“I might know where it is, but I’m trying to make him go away happy, so I’m not sure we have the same objective. Besides that, I seem to have run into a hitch.”

“What is it?”

“Blackthorne. Do you know them?”

“Yeah. They’ve done a lot of work for the military.” He angled in my direction, as focused as a hunting dog on the scent. “Why? Have they approached you?”

I started to answer and stopped. Kraft had said that Thorne had supporters inside the government. I looked out my window at the college kids talking and laughing and hurrying to class. We were parked close to MIT. What was to say that Ling wasn’t one? Maybe he had gone over to the dark side. Life sucks when you don’t know whom to trust.

“I don’t want you talking to them,” he said, coming out of his comfortable slouch. He was agitated, as animated as I had seen him. “I am not getting screwed over again by the real spooks or the pseudo-spooks or anyone else. Are they working for the CIA? I heard they’ve been doing covert intelligence stuff.”

“They don’t want Drazen,” I said, “and I’m not sure who they’re working for on this one.”

“How do you know?”

“Thorne told me.”

He blinked a couple of times. “You met Cyrus Thorne?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Wow. He’s kind of a legend around the Bureau. No one I know has ever met him, though.”

“A legend in a good way or a bad way?”

“Good way. I don’t know much about his company, but Thorne was the best analyzer of intelligence anyone has ever known. All this stuff that’s happening now, the terrorism, attacks on the U.S., he saw it coming. What’s he like?”

“Commanding. Listen, I’ll do what I can to help you, but things are very complicated.”

He hooked an index finger over the inside curve at six o’clock position on the steering wheel. “Can you say where the money is?”

I had to think about that. I assumed Kraft had it, but I didn’t know for sure. I also didn’t want to give Kraft up to the FBI, even if we were off the record…if that’s what we were. After making such an issue out of protecting Lyle, I owed him that much. “I’m not sure where it is. I’m working on that.”

Ling was smart. He knew I was lying, but I was determined not to feel guilty about it.

“All right.” He straightened up, did as much of a stretch as the car would allow, and yawned. He put his cup back in the holder. He had downed two strong cups of Dunkin’ Donuts brew, and he still looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. “I have no leverage over you,” he said. “I probably never did. But if you have his money, then you have leverage over Drazen, probably more than you know. All I’m asking you to do is to use it to help me get Drazen. He’s a bad man. I think you know that.”

He didn’t wait for an answer before firing up the engine.

“Is that it?”

He put on his shades and turned to face me. With his dark glasses on, it was hard to read his expression. “I don’t want you talking to anyone at Blackthorne again without letting me know, even if it’s the man himself.”

“Why not?”

“Because if they’re working for the CIA, they could be playing you, and I’m not getting this close to Drazen just to have the goddamn Agency run in again and take my score.”

“I see nine-eleven has done a lot to bring you guys together.”

“Not really.”

Ling dropped me off at my place. My running clothes were just sweaty enough to have to wash, which didn’t seem fair given how far I hadn’t run. I tossed them into the hamper, showered, and was getting into jeans when my cell phone rang. I followed the sound to my backpack and dug it out.

“Hello?”

“You are one lying, scheming bitch.” Nothing like a friendly greeting from Max Kraft first thing in the morning.

“I guess you got my message. It’s good to hear that you made it out of France.”

“From what I hear, so did you. On the Blackthorne private jet.” This wasn’t how I’d envisioned our conversation starting off. It seemed he had spies of his own. “That whole thing in Paris where you pretended to save my life, what was that? A way to gain my trust?”

“Yeah. Also getting arrested and thrown in jail. Look, you’re the one who dragged me into the Blackthorne portion of the program. I had my own problems to deal with, and now, because of you, I have to deal with Cyrus Thorne, and I have to deal with him because he has a copy of the video, the one you promised I had the only copy of.”

“You asked for the video, I gave it to you. If you let it get away, that’s your problem.”

“I didn’t let it get away. He got it from your translator. He knows you and I have talked, and he’s willing to trade it back if I set you up. If I don’t, I’m pretty sure he’ll give it to Drazen. For a whole lot of reasons too tedious to go into, I can’t have that.”

“Is that-is that what this is?” He certainly wasn’t in Paris anymore, but that’s where I pictured Kraft, in his hotel on the Left Bank, peering out from behind closed curtains. That was what his voice sounded like. “Are they listening now? Are you setting me up right now?”

“I didn’t call to set you up. I called to talk about a way I think we can all get through this, but you have to help.”

“I’ll help you. Sure. Why wouldn’t I? You’re working for the organization that wants me dead. Do you even hear yourself? What do you take me for?”

“It costs you nothing to listen.”

“Unless Cyrus Thorne has someone triangulating the signal.” I heard the sound of him sucking on a bottle and wondered if he was having beer for breakfast. Then I realized I had no idea if it was breakfast time where he was. He didn’t hang up, so I forged ahead.

“We were right about Roger’s computer-Roger’s other computer, the one that belonged to Vladi. Rachel stole it. Roger took it from her because he knew there were files on it worth a billion dollars. The files are like a…” What was the term Ling had used? “A financial map. Directions to the money.” I waited for some sign that he was there. Talking on the phone to Kraft was a lot like talking to him over the Internet. He gave nothing away. “Grunt if you’re still alive.”

“You’re saying there really is a billion dollars that has just been sitting out there for four years because, what…the account numbers have been lost? I thought that story was bullshit when you told me. You’re saying it’s true?”

“The moral of the story is, always back up your files. Do you have the Dell or not?”

“What if I do? What would a billion dollars buy me?”

“Your life, for one thing. I might be able to swing it so that Drazen forgets about who killed Vladi in exchange for his money. That way, the video means nothing, and Thorne loses his leverage, and I don’t have to do what he says, and you can go on doing whatever it is you do.”

Measured pauses were not part of his speech pattern, so when I heard one, it felt significant. I knew the wheels were turning. “Let’s just say for the hell of it that I have a Dell. We can’t really know if it’s the right one-”

“We can if you open it up and find a game of Russian Solitaire on it.”

“Let me finish. The reason these laptops have value to me is not because John or Joe or Mary’s four-year-old grocery list is still on it.”

“A billion dollars that will save someone’s life is not a grocery list.”

“That’s not my point. It’s because they were taken to Afghanistan and used by the Martyr’s Brigade for years after the hijacking.”

“So?”

“So there are hundreds of e-mails on those machines, and those e-mails are the foundation of my story. There is no way I’m giving this stuff up to you.”

“I thought your story was on Blackthorne. Why would e-mails from the Martyrs be important?”

“If you knew that, you would have my story.”

“I’m not trying to steal your story, Max. I’m trying to help you with it and I have a proposal.”

“What?”

“You give me Vladi’s Dell, and I’ll give you the name of my Blackthorne source.”

There was another long silence. “I’ll think about it.” Click.

I sat for a long time with the phone in my hand, trying to figure out what to do. The good news was that he had the Dell. At least a Dell. The bad news was that Lyle Burquart had made it clear he never wanted to see me again, and I had made him that promise. But it had been just as clear to me that the Salanna 809 survivors did not want Max Kraft to have their contact data. I had given it to him anyway. Why had I done that? I went into the bathroom and thought about it while I brushed my teeth. While I was flossing, I figured it out. It was because of what was at stake. The Salanna 809 survivors were trying to protect their privacy. I was trying to save Rachel’s life. There had been too much at stake not to have used the manifest to get the video, just as there was too much at stake not to at least ask Lyle if he would speak to Kraft. It sounded as if Kraft and he were both after the same thing anyway. Besides, what was one more betrayal?