Robin Cook - Death Benefit

Edmund traveled again to the Bronx, and was again driven away in a van, this time of a different color. Again, he was bound and stripped, but his clothes were returned more quickly this time and his mouth wasn’t taped, a small mercy for which Edmund was grateful. He could feel that the envelope with the $50,000 was no longer in his jacket pocket.

“Thank you for the money,” the same voice said. “A more cautious man would throw you out of the van now and be happy with good takings for one day’s work. But I read about you, Mr. Mathews, and I am intrigued. Then I read about the people you say you want to die and I think, What are they doing? I don’t understand, I am a stupid peasant . Then I think, This guy must be for real . I don’t know why but I do. I also think this is a very expensive idea. Someone has to go to Russia, buy this radioactive material from some very bad men and not get caught. They have to give this material to the marks, plus the bacteria, and not get caught. We can do it, but not for one million dollars.”

“How much, then?”

“Two. And a half.”

“Jesus.”

“Mr. money guy, I see where you live, how much money you make. You are not doing a trade, here, on Wall Street. I don’t negotiate-that is the price. And tomorrow, the price is more.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, speak up, please.”

“Okay,” said Edmund.

The two men met once more, three days later. Edmund told Russell he needed a huge amount of cash but not what it was for. Russell asked once, and Edmund bit his head off so Russell just did what he was told. It took Russell two and a half days to assemble one and a half million dollars from various business and personal accounts. Edmund packed it into a large baseball equipment bag and drove to the address he had been given on the phone. It was the same parking lot where he had been let out the first day. Once more, Edmund got in the van and went through the same degrading procedure.

“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”

The man gave instructions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.

“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”

“No.”

“So, who was it?”

Edmund was silent.

“I really want to know.”

So Edmund told him.

“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”

From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.

“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”

The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.

Aleksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.

“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”

The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?

“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.

“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”

“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”

“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”

Buda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.

“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”

“You see,” Genti said to Prek, “we should have done her when we had the chance. Like I said last night, knocking her around wasn’t going to be enough.” He turned to Buda. “She’s a tough bitch.”

“I can see that,” Buda said. Genti had been nursing a black eye all day. “Now this whole thing is about to go down the drain because of her. She knows what happened, God knows how. You gotta get back over there right now and take out her boyfriend and grab her off the street.”

“Boyfriend?” Prek said. “What boyfriend? You mean the kid she was hanging around with last night? Unless he’s with her when we grab her, I don’t know if we’d recognize him.”

“He’s the guy with his tongue in her ear!” Buda snapped. He was steaming, but he quickly realized Prek was right to be cautious. Killing the wrong man would be counterproductive.

“I’ll get a picture of him from the medical school database and send it to your phones. His name is . . . George Wilson,” he said, referring to a note.

“And remember, pick up the Grazdani woman,” Buda said. “And don’t touch her, you animal, unless she’s not related to anyone important, in which case she’s all yours. Understand, Genti? Word is she was in Rothman’s lab just a few minutes ago, poking around. Take her to the summer house and call me when you get there. And take Neri Krasnigi with you. It seems like the two of you can’t handle her.”

Krasnigi was relatively new to the crew, younger, inexperienced, and more vicious than either Genti or Prek. The two men were affronted by the order but didn’t show it.

As the men exited the trailer, Buda shouted after them, “Use the white van for the pickup and then dump it. Take the blue one to the house.”

Prek gave a thumbs-up sign and walked away.

Prek and Genti found Neri Krasnigi sitting in a battered old armchair at the back of the warehouse reading a German Playboy . Prek told him to follow, and the three men got into the white van. The plates were obscured with what appeared to be dried mud but which was actually cleverly painted plaster.

As they pulled out into Lorillard Place, heading quickly toward East Fordham Road, Prek filled Neri in on the afternoon’s operation. What they had in mind to pull off was a pair of Albanian specialties: a blindingly fast hit and snatch, in broad daylight if necessary. In the Albanian mind-set, it didn’t matter. Neri was excited; this would be his first official hit. They checked that their automatic pistols were loaded. Duct tape, blankets, balaclavas, two Columbia University Medical Center police uniforms, and a can of Ultane, a volatile, rapid-induction anesthetic, were piled into the back of the van.