Richard Montanari - The Devil_s Garden

Tommy handed him the 2005 disk, and a blank. Michael crossed the living room, sat down in the old desk chair in front of the computer. A puff of dust rose into the air as he sat down. He turned on the monitor, pressed the ON button on the old Gateway desktop. The boot-up process seemed to take forever. As the screens scrolled by, Michael realized he had not seen DOS prompts in a long time.

As he waited, Tommy walked over to the window overlooking 21st Avenue. He parted the curtains an inch or so.

When the screen finally reached the desktop, Michael inserted the disk. Moments later, he clicked on the file that read TAYEMNYY. The file opened – launching a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program. Michael’s eye scanned the data. His heart began to race. It was a list of adoptions from 2005. The list was only six entries long. Michael knew that Viktor Harkov brokered dozens of adoptions each year. This was a separate list. A private list. This was a list of people who had adopted illegally. He scrolled down.

There. He saw it. Michael and Abigail Roman. So there was a record, a record separate from the legal record.

“Mickey,” Tommy said.

Michael looked up. “What?”

“Powell just pulled up across the street.”

Michael pushed the blank floppy into the 3.5 drive. He heard the hard drive turn, heard the disk click into place. Each click was a beat of his heart.

“She just got out of the car,” Tommy said. “She’s headed this way. Fontova’s with her.”

Michael watched the progress bar move glacially to the right. It seemed to take forever.

Tommy tiptoed across the room, put his ear to the door.

“Let’s go,” he whispered.

“It’s not done yet.”

“Just take it then,” Tommy said. “Let’s go.”

Michael looked at the remaining disks in the drawer. He wondered what data was contained on them. Were there back-up files of the disk he was trying to copy? This was more than simple breaking and entering, he thought. Making a copy was one thing – no one would ever know – but taking the actual disk was a felony. They were stealing someone’s personal data.

There was no time for debate. He popped the disk from the drive, then unplugged the computer. It shut down with a loud whirring sound, one Michael was sure could be heard from the hallway.

There was suddenly a loud knock on the door.

“New York Police Department,” Fontova said. “We have a search warrant.”

Michael and Tommy crossed the living room, into the small bedroom. They looked onto the alley behind the building. There were no policemen. None that they could see.

A second knock. Louder. It seemed to shake the entire apartment.

“Police! Search warrant! Open the door!”

Michael tried to open the window, but it was painted shut. Tommy took out his pen knife and began to cut away the dried paint, but Michael stopped him. If they cut away the paint, then closed the window behind them, police would know what happened. There would be paint slivers all over the sill, the floor. And it would be fresh.

Behind them, Michael heard a key enter a lock.

The two men slipped out of the bedroom, into the bathroom. There it was clear that the window had been opened and closed many times. Michael reached over, slipped it open. The window was small, but it looked big enough for them to fit through.

A second key turned in a second lock and the front door opened just as Tommy crawled out of the window behind Michael.

“NYPD!” Michael heard as he and Tommy made their way down the fire escape. They’d had to leave the window open, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Moments later they were in the alley behind the apartment. Shortly after that they were out on the busy street.

They circled the block to Tommy’s car.

Michael arrived at Kew Gardens at one forty-five. He had fifteen minutes to get changed and get to the courtroom. He had no fewer than twenty phone messages on his desk. He stepped into his office, closed and locked the door.

There was something he had to do first.

He sat at his desk, opened his laptop. He did not have a built-in floppy drive, but he had an external USB 3.5 floppy drive. Somewhere. He did not use it often and had stuffed it somewhere in his office. After a few minutes he found it, jammed behind a box of old files in the closet.

It was 1:46.

He connected the floppy drive, slipped in the disk. The screen came up much more quickly than it had on Viktor Harkov’s PC. In seconds he was looking at the spreadsheet. There were six rows, eight columns. Across the top were the expected entries – First Name H, First name W, Last name, Address, etc. The final entry was A. Michael figured this to mean “Adoptee,” for when his eye ran down the column, the entries were F and M. Two entries leapt out. One entry for a couple in Putnam County and the entry for Michael and Abigail Roman. Both had an entry for 2F in the last column.

Two females. Twins.

One other couple had adopted twins through Viktor’s office in 2005. Michael clicked on the printer icon. Seconds later he had a hard copy of the file.

At 1:49 there was knock on the door, followed by someone jiggling the doorknob. Michael instantly hit the eject button, removed the floppy. He then held the floppy, slid over the protective window on the diskette, took out a pair of scissors, and snipped the plastic disk inside, cutting it into three pieces, irretrievably destroying the data. He tossed it all into the wastebasket. Another knock.

“Hang on,” Michael said.

He put the scissors in the drawer, turned off the computer, rose, opened the door.

It was Nicole Lanier, his tireless and overworked paralegal. Nicole was a petite and trim forty, a veteran of the office, birdlike in her movements, ursine in her protective nature. If you weren’t expected, you did not run the gauntlet that was Nicole Lanier. She looked at Michael, at the casual way he was dressed. “Okay. Why was the door locked?”

“Where am I supposed to smoke my crack, in the hall?”

“Why not?” Nicole said. “The rest of us do.” She looked at the clock. “Um, aren’t you supposed to be in court?”

“I’m on it.” He pulled off his QDA windbreaker, took his suit out of the dry cleaner’s plastic bag. “Running late.”

“Want me to call over there?”

“No, I’m good.”

“You don’t look good.”

“Sweet talker.” He handed Nicole his briefcase. “Just get this in some kind of order for me. Outline on top. I’m going to change and be out of here in two minutes.”

Nicole took the briefcase, but didn’t move. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Nicole.”

“Okay, okay, boss.” She took the briefcase from him, but still didn’t leave.

“You know, if you don’t leave right now you’re going to see me naked.”

“Beats looking through the keyhole.”

Michael shooed her away. Nicole winked, spun on her sensible heels, closed the door.

Michael took a deep breath, looked around his office. Everything was where it was supposed to be: his desk, his bookcases, his apartment-sized fridge, the framed articles on the wall, even the 8? 10 photograph of him and Tommy at ground zero, a picture taken on September 13, 2001. Everything was the same, but suddenly looked completely different, as if he were a stranger in this place he knew so well, as if the comfortable, well-worn things that made up his life had now been replaced by duplicates.

Focus, Michael.

Yes, Viktor Harkov’s murder changed everything. And yes it was entirely possible that the state of New York might discover the illegalities surrounding the adoption, and start proceedings to take his daughters away. But that did not change the fact that the state of New York – and more importantly, a girl named Falynn Harris – was depending on him today.