Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Ali went off through the maze, hunting. He pointed to several live tanks by the fish counter and said, “Okay, that’s weird.”

“Live crabs?”

“No, the eels,” he said, and he shivered. “I couldn’t eat those.”

I saw them slithering about in the tank next to the crabs and lobsters. “Yeah, I’m not big on eels either.”

“I’d eat just about anything else, though,” Ali said.

That lasted until he spotted a sign for Burmese peppers, five thousand degrees of heat.

“Okay, so I wouldn’t eat those either,” he said. “Why do some people like their food so hot that it makes them cry?”

“I don’t really know. Ask your grandfather.”

“Yeah, he’s always putting hot sauce on things.”

We found a nice clerk in her twenties named Pam Pan and showed her Song’s list of ingredients.

“Judging by the ingredients, those are going to be yummy rolls,” Pan said.

“Old Hong Kong family recipe,” Ali said.

“Really?” Pan said.

“My girlfriend-in-law’s grandmother’s recipe.”

“Your girlfriend-in-law?”

“My brother’s girlfriend,” Ali said, smiling. “Makes sense, right?”

The clerk laughed and looked at me. “Is he like this all the time?”

“Twenty-four/seven.”

Ali went on to prove it as the clerk took us around, peppering her with questions about the ingredients and whether there were any “really weird” foods in the store. He got a kick out of pickled chicken’s feet, which, to his credit, he tried.

The faces he made caused Pan and me to crack up, and I felt like we’d made a friend by the time she’d found every ingredient in the recipe. Ali and I left the market and called for an Uber to take us home.

“I like that place,” Ali said as we stood out on the sidewalk.

“I could see that, especially when you ate that chicken foot.”

“I did it.”

“You did it. With style, I might add.”

He liked that and gave me a hug. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, buddy,” I said, hugging him back. “Pickled chicken feet and all.”

An hour later, Nana Mama’s kitchen was smelling outrageously good as she and Ali stir-fried the stuffing for the rolls. My cell phone rang.

It was Ned Mahoney.

“Alex?” he said before I could greet him. “You alone?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, and I hit mute. “I have to take this.”

“Dinner’s at seven,” my grandmother said. “Bree said she’d be here by then.”

I went down to my office and shut the door behind me.

“Okay, I’m good,” I said.

“We’ve got a new potential suspect in Senator Walker’s murder case.”

Mahoney went on to describe Viktor Kasimov, a Russian businessman closely allied with the Kremlin. Kasimov acted as an envoy between Washington and Moscow from time to time. Back-channel stuff carried out under a diplomatic passport.

“He’s also a degenerate, a hypocrite, and possibly a rapist.”

Ned said that Kasimov had been a suspect in a string of rapes in the United States and Europe, starting during his graduate years at UCLA. Kasimov was smart, cunning, and unafraid to use cash and lawyers to shut women up, and he used the diplomatic passport to keep himself out of the hands of authorities.

Kasimov was also believed to be a liaison between Moscow and factions in the Middle East who were looking for an arms deal, an accusation he had emphatically denied.

“He’s slippery,” Mahoney said. “Half the time he lives out on a yacht in international waters where he can’t be arrested or detained. Two weeks ago, he made a mistake. After a night of partying in Mexico City, he flew on a private jet to Los Angeles. Guess who was waiting for him.”

“I can’t answer that.”

“California state troopers, the California state attorney general, and Senator Betsy Walker. Seems the last time Kasimov was in town, he forcibly raped Senator Walker’s best friend’s daughter after giving her a date-rape drug.”

I said nothing.

“He squealed diplomatic immunity, but he ended up in LA County Jail. He spent almost a week in there until his army of attorneys paid for by the Russians got some state judge to grant him a two-million-dollar bail.”

“There’s an idiot savant born every minute.”

“You know it. Kasimov came up with a check for the whole nut. No bondsman. But here’s the thing. He left jail seriously pissed off at Betsy Walker. He said that in Russia, she’d be in jail or shot.”

“In that same Russia, he should have his balls chopped off,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” Mahoney said.

“So, let me guess. He skipped bail on the full two million?”

“That’s the thing, Alex. He hasn’t left the country.”

“No surveillance post-release?”

“Sure,” he said. “Kasimov and a small entourage flew domestic charter from LA to DC last week. He had a meeting at the Russian embassy and took a suite at the Mandarin Oriental. He hasn’t been seen outside since. Six days. His people claim he’s fighting a nasty flu he picked up in jail courtesy of Senator Walker.”

“He’s not wearing an ankle bracelet?”

“Not a stipulation of bail.”

“An even more savant judge.”

“Or more corrupt.”

“You think Kasimov was angry enough at Betsy Walker to have killed her?”

“Or have her killed? Yes. That’s the word I’m getting. And there’s another thing.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s a hell of a marksman with rifle and pistol. He came in eleventh overall at the last Olympic Games.”

“Was he in town when Betsy Walker died?”

“He was indeed.”

“Then I think we need to talk with him sooner rather than later.”

“Meet me at the Mandarin in an hour?”

I looked at my watch. It was 6:20.

“Ali and Nana are making a special dinner, and I know Bree would like to be there. Better make it two.”

At twenty past eight that evening, Ned Mahoney used a key card we’d gotten from the head of security at the Mandarin Oriental hotel to unlock elevator access to the suites-only fourteenth floor.

The doors shut. My mind was still processing what the security chief had told us.

Kasimov and his entourage of four were occupying the Jefferson Suite: three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a stunning view of the Jefferson Memorial. The Russian businessman had evidently been sick for days with an intestinal bug. A concierge doctor had been making twice-daily calls to his suite, and he was up there now.

Ned, Bree, and I got off on the fourteenth floor. The carpet was lush, like walking on spongy wool, and the air was scented from flowers in a vase on a table opposite the elevator.

“I kind of like this,” Mahoney said. “The ambience.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I said.

Bree laughed and shook her head.

We found the door to the Jefferson Suite and saw that the light near the bell was red, indicating the inhabitants did not wish to be disturbed. Mahoney rang it anyway.

When there was no answer, he rang it again, and then a third time, until a man barked in a thick accent, “Go away.”

“FBI. Open up please,” Mahoney said, showing his credentials through the peephole.

The locks were thrown open and the door moved to reveal a shaved-headed man built like an Olympic weight lifter wearing a pair of bulging gray slacks and a blue dress shirt.

“What do want?” he asked in the same thick accent.

“Who are you, sir?” Mahoney said.

“Boris,” he said.

“We’d like to speak with Mr. Kasimov, Boris.”

“Impossible. He has medical issues. Contagious.”