David Duffy - Last to Fold

“Keep going.”

“He was clever. Took a couple of months to catch up. We pegged him in Moscow last month, right before he came back here. I took the next flight and went to the place on Greene Street. That’s where you came in.”

I checked my vest and came out of the pipe. “You shot him, didn’t you?” I said as I came close. “He was going to put the bite on you. You didn’t follow him. He invited you. You gambled that the file was on his computer, or if it wasn’t, no one would find it with him dead. So you killed him as soon as he opened the door.”

“If I did, where was the gun? And who shot me?”

“Polina’s husband’s driver. He arrived at just the wrong time. You’d pulled Ratko into the back hall. Left the door open. He came in after, saw the blood, just like I did. He surprised you, you shot at him, missed, he shot you. He was taking your gun when Eva fired through the door and hit him. They exchanged blind fire, and he left while he still could. You passed out until, as you say, I came in.”

“That’s a fanciful story.”

I was a few feet away. He looked old. He looked tired. The blue eyes still burned defiant.

“You shot Ratko, yes or no?”

“If it makes you happy, yes. Cheka honor was at stake. The only person who will truly miss him is Lachko. That should make you happy.”

Lachko and Eva. “Move to last night.”

“What about it?”

“The scene at the fallout shelter—why? You tortured her, you destroyed her life, then you set it up for her daughter to finish her off—and burn to death herself, too. You hated her, I understand that. She crossed the Cheka, I understand that, too. But why go to all that trouble?”

“I believe this interrogation is over. I have nothing more to say, and I do have a plane to catch. I’ll take the records now. How did you find them, by the way?”

“Not quite yet.” I took the SIG Pro from my vest pocket. “Raise your hands.”

He laughed. “Turbo, such melodrama. You’ve been in this decadent country too long. You think you’re Clint Eastwood.”

“No drama, Iakov. Hands up.”

He raised them slowly, still smiling. I ran my free hand over his suit. A Beretta in the waistband, which I tossed aside. The cell phone was in his breast pocket.

“Hands down now,” I said as I dialed the office. Foos answered right away. “This the phone that called Eva last night?”

“Give me thirty seconds.” He came back on in twenty-five. “That’s it.”

“From Front and Dover?” I said, eyes on Iakov. The smile narrowed.

“That’s right,” Foos said.

“Can you testify to that, under oath?”

“If that’s what you need, sure. He used a carrier that’s easy to track.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

I pocketed the phone. “There’ll never be a trial in Moscow, that’s true—but there will be one here, maybe two. One for the murder of Ratko Risly. You’ve confessed to that. And one for the murder of Polina.”

The grin was back. “You left out Eva.”

“Eva didn’t die. I was with her. I opened the door and triggered the booby trap. I tried to save Polina, but she was already too far gone.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Turbo. You were in Brighton Beach.”

“That was a good trick you pulled, with Mulholland. But I got back early, and I had help. Eva would have opened that door. Someone stopped her.”

“Help? Who?”

Iakov didn’t know about Petrovin. That was good for Petrovin. “A friend, a Russian friend. He’s close to Ivanov.”

The smile disappeared.

“That piece today…”

“I can play tricks, too.”

“This is pointless, Turbo. Like a Politburo debate. We all knew the outcome before we started. A phone call is nothing. Give me those records. I want to catch my plane.”

“You shouldn’t have come here, Iakov. You should have stayed at home, where you’re untouchable—but there was too much at stake, wasn’t there?”

“I told you, Cheka honor.”

“No. That’s not it. Never was. This is about the Cheka, but it’s more about you. The apartment bombings were never Patrushev’s operation—they were yours. Gorbenko didn’t report to him, he reported to you. You didn’t have Putin’s okay—you were too wily to ask for it, he was too cautious to give it. All went well until Gorbenko realized he was on a one-way trip to his grave. Somebody must’ve made a mistake. Could even have been you. Doesn’t matter now. It all began to come apart with Ryazan. You had to fix it—to save your own skin. You went back to cover your tracks. You got most of them—Kosokov, the bank, Gorbenko, you probably doctored the files to make Patrushev appear responsible—but you missed two. Kosokov copied the records. And Eva. She was in the barn. She saw you. She watched you set the fire that killed Kosokov and almost killed her. That night at Greene Street was the first time she’d seen you since she was nine years old. No wonder she was terrified. Even doped up silly, she knew you’d come back for her.

“You can’t prove—”

“It’s the reason you worked over Polina the way you did. You needed the girl. You needed Polina to make that call. From what I could see, she held out as long as she could—longer. Whatever else you say about her, she loved Eva.”

“You still can’t prove anything.”

“You forget. I have Kosokov’s records. The one unmolested set. The ones he hid, you couldn’t find, and Polina took with her. The ones that made her go to you in December when she needed money. She saw what I saw. Kosokov covered his ass. He made sure every transaction was client-approved. The client doing the approving is you, Iakov. ChK22—that’s your Cheka designation. She knew enough to recognize it. So did I.”

He took a step back. It might have been the darkness, or my imagination, but the blue eyes turned color, closer to Lachko’s gray. “What do you want? Money? Position? Rehabilitation?”

I shook my head. “I’m not a Chekist anymore, Iakov. I’m just an old zek trying to make my way. I was reminded recently about the light of day. I want this whole affair to be seen in the light of day. That’s why there’s going to be a trial. Here. A jury may well decide there’s not enough evidence to convict, but the world—including Russia—will get to see what happened, in 1999, in those apartment buildings, at Rosnobank, in that barn, at Greene Street, last night under the Brooklyn Bridge. Russians will gain a little better idea who runs their country and how they came to be there. I’m not naive, I don’t expect much to change—but we’ve spent too long hiding under a cloak of secrecy and deceit. Tsarist cloak, Bolshevik, Stalinist, Chekist, doesn’t matter. They’re all the same. I’m pulling this one off so everyone can see. That’s what I want.”

“SERGEI!”

“I’m right here,” a new voice said from behind. “Drop the gun, shit-for-brains. Only thing pulled gonna be this trigger.”

Sergei stepped out of the same pipe section I’d been standing in a few minutes before, his big frame just visible against the wall of darkness behind. He held a silenced machine pistol at his hip, like the ones in the car. I let the SIG fall from my hand.

“Move away from him,” Sergei said. “Over there.”

“No.”

“Turbo, don’t be stupid,” Iakov said. “There’s no point now. You played out your hand. You lost. Game over.”

He ran his hands over me and pulled out the hard drive, the recording device in my vest, the detonator, and his cell phone and mine. He picked up my gun and moved away.

“Clint Eastwood,” he said. “Nobility is a fool’s pursuit. If you’re lucky, you end up a dead hero. Usually you just end up dead. Especially when you’re stubborn.