David Duffy - Last to Fold

As Eva wound down, I could sense him glancing in my direction, eager for action. I was forming a plan. It would require his help. But when the time came, he wasn’t going to have any part of it.

Cheka business, family business. My business to take care of.

Eva stopped talking and looked at the sandwich in her hand, as if she’d forgotten how it got there. She took a bite and chewed, took another and chewed that, but I doubt she tasted a thing. She’d kept her story bottled up for half her life, her secret—I wondered whether even Polina knew the whole tale. Now that she’d told it, she’d cut herself adrift. Disoriented, disconnected, she’d lost track of where she was. Petrovin sensed the same thing and went to the bed and put his arm around her again. She looked up at him, unsure at first—of him, of herself—then she buried her face in his chest and cried. He waited until the sobbing slowed, then disengaged himself. A few minutes later, she was asleep. He and I went next door.

“Murdering bastard,” Petrovin said, not bothering to hide his anger.

I couldn’t argue. I felt the dull ache of loss, as I had the previous night, mixed up with the pains of my other wounds. Friendship masks, loyalty blinds, and I was guilty of both.

“I have one question,” I said as calmly as I could. “He set that fire last night to mirror the fire in the barn. Eva was going to watch her mother burned alive, just like her father. If she didn’t die, the trauma would drive her over the edge.”

“The one person who can place him at the dacha that day. She knows he murdered Kosokov.”

“How did he know she was in the barn? How did he know to stage that fire?”

“Easy,” Petrovin said. “The Cheka had the whole place wired. We found the bugs in the house. I bet they did the barn, too. If he didn’t know at the time, he did when he listened to the tape.”

That sounded right. Suddenly I felt my own rage rising, as much at the calculated premeditation—against a child—as at the heinousness of the crimes themselves.

“I need a favor, some help from your pal Ivanov.”

He arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know. I can’t—”

“You can try. For Eva as well as for me. Tell him Polina’s dead. Eva, too. The papers reported one victim, in critical condition. Ivanov can break the story that there were two—and they didn’t make it. Tell him that fallout shelter was an old KGB meeting place in the 1980s.”

He gave me a long look. “I’ll try. But what are you hoping to achieve?”

“I would have thought that was obvious—flush a badger from his lair.”

“And then?”

“Haven’t got that far yet,” I lied. “Right now, we need to take Eva to talk to Coyle. She has to sooner or later, and I need her to support my story and get them off my back. Meet me downtown and we’ll figure out how to get into the hospital to see her mother, assuming she’s still alive.”

Or he could. I’d be doing something else entirely.

Bernie had yet another lawyer meet Eva and me at the FBI’s offices. Coyle was mildly surprised I’d delivered on my promise and was almost friendly until Bernie’s lawyer arrived and started making demands on behalf of his client. Coyle threw me out. I didn’t blame him.

“Russky! Where’s cutie?” Pig Pen squawked as soon as he saw me.

“Busy right now, Pig Pen. Maybe she’ll be by later.”

“Hot number!”

Petrovin had moved quickly and Ivanov even faster. A new post on Ibansk.com couldn’t have been more than a few minutes old. I took in the substance. They’d done their work well. The recipient would feel one step from liberation. He didn’t know I was that step. Not for sure—yet.

Anyone who had any doubt of the Cheka’s long reach (Ivanov’s not one), read on. The Sword and the Shield and the flamethrower claimed two more victims last night—in a former Cheka safe haven in New York City.

Ivanov’s network reports this particular inferno took place in a Cold War fallout shelter under one of New York’s most famous bridges—named after borough Brooklyn—that was once used by enterprising Chekist spies as a secret meeting hall. Polina Barsukova—long known to followers of Ibanskian intrigue—was one victim. Roasted on a kerosene-soaked funeral pyre. But wait! The Cheka’s cruelty knows no borders. Polina’s daughter, Eva, was lured into igniting the blaze. It roasted her mother—she made it through the night but died this morning—and snuffed her young life as well. New York authorities have clamped on a tight lid, but Ivanov’s sources know no borders either.

What does the Cheka want? Why take such chances? Murder in Moscow is an organizational right—at least in the eyes of its perpetrators—but American authorities won’t necessarily see it that way.

Then again, maybe the re-emboldened Sword and Shield is so confident that the flamethrower doesn’t care.

I had to admire Ivanov’s editorializing—“Murder in Moscow is an organizational right”—but it wouldn’t register where it counted. Ivanov spoke truth to the powers that couldn’t see it anymore. In a society where murder had long been an organizational right, that was one reason Ibansk.com had achieved the status it had among the rest of us.

On the other hand, the facts, the details, they would register—at least where I wanted them to. The shelter, the kerosene, the fire, the booby-trapped door—they comprised the message I was sending. He’d have to assume I was the source. Time to make sure my message was received.

I went down to the street and walked a few blocks north until I found a pay phone. I dialed Brighton Beach and put a folded paper towel over the mouthpiece.

“Read Ibansk.”

The empty construction site at John F. Kennedy International Airport wasn’t as cool or pretty as Central Park had been ten days before—but it was as good a place as any again to contemplate irony and fate. The roar of aircraft above the Valdez, parked in a rain-rutted access road, provided a backdrop of white noise. The airport hummed with early-evening activity, but my spot was empty and lifeless—the reason I’d chosen it. Whatever happened later, I didn’t want any witnesses.

Play the cards you’re dealt, I’d told Petrovin. Here’s one that’ll change your hand, he told me. Play it straight, Victoria said, and play according to Coyle. Sometimes the straight fills or you draw that fourth queen. This wasn’t one of them. However the hand played out tonight, nobody was going to be happy with the outcome, except perhaps to still be alive.

Ivanov turned out to be prescient in one respect—Polina hadn’t made it. She’d slipped off into her own netherworld, without regaining consciousness. Probably just as well. The pain would have been unbearable, and the sight of her mutilated face would have sent her screaming into lunacy. I felt more anger than sorrow. She’d done her best to ruin my life and done an excellent job, but no one deserved the fate she got, and neither God nor predetermination had a damned thing to do with it.

I’d called Petrovin with the news. There was a long pause before he said in a quiet voice that he’d tell Eva, if that was okay with me. I told him to go ahead and felt even worse when I lied about meeting them back at the Holiday Inn.

It was still light when I got to the airport. I drove around the loop road twice before I found what I wanted—a construction site for a new terminal, I didn’t care whose, locked up for the night. I pulled into the access road, cluttered with building materials and debris, parked to one side, and put a Homeland Security card—the companion to my forged ID—on the dashboard, just in case. The Basilisk had told me what I needed to know. Air France flight 9, departing JFK at 11:00 P.M., connecting at Charles de Gaulle with AF 2244 to Moscow, had a new passenger. I’d joined the evening rush hour into Queens.