David Duffy - Last to Fold

My stomach was rumbling, but I kept at it. Another forty minutes and I’d found the contents of several of Marko’s e-mails logged into various workbooks. Sure enough, on the five-column side, every entry had a match a day or two later. The three-column entries were singles. I was pretty sure I was looking at the inner workings of the money laundry Ivanov said Ratko was building for Barsukov, but it beat the hell out of me how it worked.

My eyes, head, and stomach were all angry. I checked my e-mail before heading out in search of sustenance and almost cried aloud when I saw Sasha’s name in my in-box with the subject “Vacation.” That was code—he wasn’t writing under any duress. The message read “Weather lousy here. Thinking of a trip. Always wanted to visit Istanbul. Can you recommend hotels?” More code—something had happened (he couldn’t know I knew what), and he was going incommunicado for a while. I tapped out, “Try the Four Seasons, in an old prison, you’ll like it,” to tell him I understood.

Food forgotten for the moment, I placed another call to Brighton Beach. “Tell Lachko I’m going to visit Iakov. I’ll leave the computer with him.”

Iakov had a Central Park view he couldn’t use from the top floor of the Guggenheim Pavilion at Mount Sinai. The place felt more like hotel than hospital—carpeted hallways, fancy wallpaper, mahogany doors, private rooms, and, no doubt, room service. No private insurer was footing this tab. Still, all the ersatz luxury couldn’t quite excise the commingled smells of illness and death.

Two of Lachko’s thugs stood guard. One blocked the door while the other put his pockmarked face a few inches from mine. Tobacco and vodka on his breath. “Lachko said one visit and don’t come back, don’t call, they don’t want to know you exist. I’ll take the laptop.”

“Iakov asked first.” I pushed past them into the room.

Iakov was sleeping, his head lolled over, the back of his bed propped up in a sitting position. His shoulder was wrapped in white gauze under the hospital gown. His color looked good, or as good as a pale-faced Russian’s can, and his breathing was slow and even. He had an IV in the back of one hand. A machine beeped electronic indications of life. He hadn’t changed much in the twenty-plus years since our last meeting. Permanently thin as well as tall, he’d always looked old for his age, and the years were finally catching up. His bones made their own mountain range beneath the hospital sheet. The face wasn’t wrinkled, but it had deep creases I didn’t remember from the eyes to the flare of the upturned nose, then down to the corners of his mouth. The white hair flopped over his forehead. It was thinning, patches of scalp beneath. I sat beside the bed and took his hand.

There was a time when I would have walked the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway barefoot if he’d told me to—no questions asked. Even today, I probably wouldn’t dismiss the request out of hand. Iakov was at once savior, mentor, guiding light, and surrogate father. Each of us is responsible for our own destiny, but he was the reason I had any destiny at all. I’ve often wondered whether his father knew mine—they would have been young officers in the Cheka’s early days. I’ve asked the question but never received a satisfactory answer. Nor has he been forthcoming about how he found me among the hundreds of thousands still in the Gulag in the early 1970s. I’ve never felt in a position to press either point. Find me he did, though, and one day when I was seventeen, a weak, hungry, tired, calloused kid, clad in rags, I was brought to the office of the commandant of the Vorkuta camps and interviewed by a man in a captain’s uniform, first in Russian, then in Ukrainian, then Hungarian and Polish, and finally in broken English. His skills were passable. Mine were better. Two days later, still digesting my first real meal in years, I was on a train to Moscow.

I was installed in a small apartment with seven other students at the Foreign Language Institute, where I studied English and French. I didn’t know it, but this was a training ground for the Cheka. In time, I was taught the basics of intelligence—building agent networks, surveillance, agent communication, etc. Seems funny looking back, but this would comprise most of my formal training. The rest I had to learn on my own—overseen, sometimes firsthand, others from a distance, but consistently, by Iakov.

The eyelashes flickered once or twice before opening to reveal piercing sky blue. Where Lachko and his brother got their hostile gray, I’ll never know.

“Turbo!”

“Hello, Iakov. How do you feel?”

He waited a minute, taking stock. “Pretty fit, for a seventy-four-year-old Russian with bronchitis and a bullet wound.”

“You look good.”

“They tell me I can probably leave tomorrow. That would never happen in Moscow.”

“You wouldn’t get this room in Moscow, either. Well, maybe you would.”

“Don’t start. Capitalism has its faults, too.”

“I didn’t come here to argue. I just wanted to see that you’re okay.”

“Thanks, if I remember, to you.”

“Fate was kind, for once.”

He smiled.

“What happened in that loft, Iakov?”

“The American police want to know the same thing. They were here this morning.”

“They don’t know about me, do they?”

“Turbo, what kind of jackass do you take me for, after all these years?” His eyes sparkled, showing the rebuke was half in jest.

“I’ve never doubted you. But what were you doing there?”

“I told you—Cheka business.”

“Am I permitted to ask what kind?”

He smiled up at me, but he didn’t answer.

“I’m guessing it involves this computer you want so badly.” I held out the laptop.

He took the machine. “Rislyakov was working on something for me.”

“Did that something involve Eva?”

“No!” He spoke too fast. His voice softened again. “I didn’t know she was there. How is she?”

“Alive. Near overdose of a bad drug—Rohypnol. Not sure whether she took it or Ratko gave it to her.”

“Ratko wouldn’t…” He stopped. “I shouldn’t say. I don’t know. Where is she?”

Something told me to be careful. “A friend took her to a hospital. Your Cheka business, does it involve Polina?”

“Polina?” He nearly spat out the name. “I never… Why these questions?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“This is none of your affair. At least, I don’t see how it could be. But perhaps you should tell me what you were doing there last night.”

“I wanted to talk to Rislyakov.”

“Why? What’s he have to do with you?”

I’d thought about this on the way uptown. How much was I willing to give? I decided to stick with the truth—or the truth as I knew it before Foos erased the inner workings of Ratko’s computer.

“Rislyakov, and maybe Eva, hatched a stupid fake kidnap scheme. They were hitting on Eva’s father, her adoptive father. He hired me to take care of the kidnappers.”

“Kidnapping? What the devil for?”

“Not clear. How well did you know Rislyakov?”

“Not well. He was Lachko’s protégé.”

“You aware he had a gambling problem?”

That came as a clear surprise. “No.”

“Was Lachko?”

“I don’t believe so. I don’t know. Lachko and I… We don’t talk much anymore. He doesn’t confide in me, hasn’t since… you know.”

“You still blame me for that?”

“At my age, I don’t blame anyone, except life and fate.”

“Lachko does.”

“You ruined his career.”

“He hasn’t done badly.”

“You know what I mean. He was going to run the Cheka.”