Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“If you say so.” I didn’t see anything to argue with in there but didn’t want to just agree with him. He could be tricky.

“Four years ago, Roger Fratello disappeared. He took Drazen’s money with him. There’s some indication he also killed Drazen’s brother Vladi, but that’s mostly rumor coming from his people. Drazen’s been looking for Roger ever since. Are you with me?”

“I’m following along nicely, thank you.”

“Good, because here’s where you come in. Cut to right now. Traces of Roger start to show up again. Drazen Tishchenko ends up in Boston, and your partner gets grabbed.”

“Didn’t he say he was out shopping for a new wheelchair?”

He smiled, indulging me. “Then I saw this.” He tapped the envelope with the picture in it. “Lew and I started tossing around a few ideas for why you, a person with no prior connections to ROC, would be meeting with a high-priority ROC target.”

“ROC?”

“Russian organized crime. That’s what I do. I’m with a special unit.”

I wanted to mention that Drazen was Ukrainian, but if he chased Russians for a living, it was a good bet he already knew.

“Anyway, even after all this time, Drazen is looking for Roger. If he thinks, for some reason, that Harvey can tell him where to find him, that’s a good reason to snatch him up. If you want Harvey back, that’s a good reason for you to visit with Drazen.”

“That’s a theory,” I said. A pretty darn close theory.

“As you know, new information came up leading us to believe Roger had resurfaced, so we’ve also been looking for him.”

“Right,” I said. “He popped out of a terrorist’s closet in Zormat.”

“Well, I see that you have been following along nicely.” Ling didn’t look exactly impressed, more that I might not have been as two-bit as he’d thought. “We got a call from State. They had some items they couldn’t identify. We started running prints for them and came up with a wallet belonging to fugitive Roger Fratello. We were pretty psyched about that development. Then we tracked a key from inside the wallet to the safety deposit box in Brussels, which is where we found your partner’s prints. You see how that all works together?”

“I do.”

“We came to see Harvey. We almost killed you. We left. We got the call from Harvey to come back. That’s the part where the two of you lied to federal agents.”

“Do you have some proof that we lied?”

“No, but I don’t need it, because I don’t really care about that. What I care about is Drazen Tishchenko, and since Harvey came back from his time out with head and hands intact, I have to think that you and Drazen worked something out. That’s what I’m interested in.”

“You’re not after Harvey?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re not after Roger?”

“We were,” he said, “but he’s dead. He died in the hijacking.”

“You knew that?”

“We figured it out.”

“How?”

“Probably the same way you did. We started asking some people.”

“How come you guys didn’t already know about that? The government is supposed to know things like that.”

He shrugged. “We don’t know a fraction of what we should know. Besides, we never knew he was on the Salanna plane until we got the prints from Zormat. Then we put it together. It’s a bummer, too, because Roger was our best shot at getting Drazen.”

I pointed at the envelope. “You obviously know where the guy is. Why don’t you just go and pick him up?”

“Because I have nothing to charge him with, and if I did, no one would testify against him, and if they tried to, he would do the whole head-and-hands thing. We told you what happened to Walter Herald, and he did that knowing he was killing a fed. That sent a pretty strong message. Everyone at Betelco went running for cover after that.”

“I could see how that would be discouraging to people.”

“But let’s be generous for the purpose of this exercise and assume I could pick him up and charge him with something. Do you know what he would do?”

“Call a lawyer?”

“Call the CIA.”

“For what?”

“He has strong ties to the organization formerly known as the KGB. He knows state secrets. He says he does, anyway. The CIA swoops in, whispers something about the greater good, spirits him away, and the next time we see him, he’s back doing exactly what we left him doing. Roger was our best chance. Not even the spooks would have had the guts to pull him out from under felony murder of a federal agent.” He shook his head. He had the look of Charlie Brown after he’d tried again to kick the football, only to have the CIA snatch it away at the last minute. “I would have finally had him.”

“All right, so your job is hard. What are we doing now? Right here, you and me?”

“We’re talking about how you can help me with my job.”

“Let me see if I’m following. Drazen is your big prize. You want him for the murder of Walter Herald. You needed Roger Fratello to get him. You wanted Harvey to get you to Roger, which, by the way, raises this question: How come you’re just skipping over Rachel in this whole thing? Why aren’t you after her?”

“We don’t have Rachel’s prints on Roger’s money.”

“You have pictures of her kissing Roger.”

“That’s not against the law.”

“But you have to think she’s involved.” I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

“We think she was responsible for bringing the Tishchenkos into Betelco and a number of companies in the area. Again, there aren’t too many victims in this town-actually, in any town-willing to testify against the Russians.”

“All right, fine. But now we all agree that Roger is ashes in Sudan.” I looked for validation on that point. He gave me the nod. “Unless you want to nail him for lying about buying a wheelchair, doesn’t that mean that Harvey is off the hook? He can’t help you get Drazen on the agent’s murder, because he had nothing to do with that. If he’s off the hook, why would I help you?”

“Let me ask you something.” His lighter tone suggested a new turn in the conversation. “How much do you know about the fall of the Soviet Union?”

Definitely a new turn. “Let’s see, communism failed, the USSR crumbled and split apart. Now we have 220 countries competing at the Olympics instead of 180.”

“The last time I checked in with Drazen Tishchenko, he was trying to sell a diesel-powered, ninety-foot-long, Foxtrot-class attack submarine to Pablo Escobar. Pablo needed a little something to run his product up and down the West Coast. Do you know where Drazen got it?”

“I’d have to think the only navy that wouldn’t miss a sub would be the old Soviet navy, whatever it was called.”

“He bought it in Kronstadt, which is where the Baltic fleet of the Red Navy went to die. We’re taking about a hundred-million-dollar military vessel. Drazen paid five for it and had a deal to sell it for twenty.”

“That would have been a fair return on investment.”

“The thing about Russians is, they love money, they’re scared of absolutely nothing, and they will sell anything. If you need it and you’re willing to pay for it, Drazen Tishchenko will get it for you, and being who he is, he’s plugged in. He knows party officials who know things. You know, like where the stocks of weaponized smallpox are kept. Where all the tactical nuclear weapons happen to be. They know where the weapons-grade fissionable material is, and they know how to get all that stuff out and into the hands of the people willing to pay for it and willing to use it. Any idea who those people might be?”

“People who don’t like us?”

“That’s correct. The submarine deal never happened, but only because the local mafiya back home blocked it. Drazen forgot to cut them in. Otherwise, the U.S. Navy would be chasing drug-running subs up and down the Pacific Coast. Are you starting to get my drift?”