Dale Brown - Puppet Master

Japanese, she answered, taken off guard.

Sushi or hibachi?

Neither.

But that wasn’t a good answer.

Sushi, of course. I don’t like to hang out with people who throw food and knives around.

Flores met her at Sushi Z, a trendy place not far from downtown that served all-you-can-eat plates of sushi for twenty-eight bucks a pop. The menu consisted of two pieces of paper, on which you marked what you wanted; the one caveat was that you had to finish all you ordered, or be charged for it. Flores ordered a pair of dragon rolls and spiced crab sushi; Chelsea, not impressed by the frenetic pace of the waitresses, ordered tuna sashimi.

The warm sake Flores recommended was good, and very easy going down — too easy, thought Chelsea after her first few sips, and she resolved to go more slowly.

She wasn’t sure about Flores. He wasn’t the sort of guy she had gone out with before. She couldn’t decide whether the fact that he worked for the FBI made him more or less interesting.

He was white, but that wasn’t necessarily a big hang-up; she’d gone out with white guys before. And her father was white — though anyone seeing her just automatically checked the black box.

They talked about movies and then their food, light chatter without commitment or pressure. She was feeling good — partly a function of the sake — until their plates were cleared.

“So what’s the daughter like?” asked Flores out of the blue.

“Daughter?”

“Tolevi. You met his daughter, right?”

“The ATM guy?”

“Yeah. I heard you made friends with her.”

“How’d you hear that?”

“Just heard it.”

Chelsea refilled her sake cup without commenting.

“You know, if you guys are still working on that, we could possibly trade information,” said Flores.

“How so?”

“I don’t know. It might be useful. If you talk to the daughter, maybe she can tell us about her father. What he’s up to.”

Oh, so he’s pumping me for information. This isn’t a date.

She felt both relief and disappointment — mild disappointment. This was business, not romance.

Trade information. But what?

“Do you know how the scam worked?” he asked.

“Do you?”

“We haven’t been able to find the key,” he confessed. “The code — there’s nothing there.”

“Your boss told my boss to drop everything,” said Chelsea.

“My boss says a lot of things. That doesn’t mean you and I can’t work on it.”

Chelsea finished her sake. “I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it.” Flores looked up as the waiter approached with the check. “I got it,” he said, holding out his hand.

Jenkins was just leaving the task force headquarters when Flores called him on his cell phone.

“How did it go?” he asked Flores.

“She didn’t really say much about the girl.”

“Nothing? They totally dropped it?”

“She only said you told her boss to back off. That was pretty much all I could get out of her.”

“Keep at it.”

“This isn’t really the kind of thing I’m comfortable with.”

“I know Massina. He’s not going to drop this. If one of his people is talking to the girl, they’re definitely working on it.”

“You’re the boss.”

“That’s right.”

For hours, Tolevi drifted between sleep and wakefulness. Every time he started to slip off, his mind threw up something that spiked his attention just enough to keep him from drifting off: possible problems at the border, possible trouble getting into Donetsk, how to get out of the country if the airport was suddenly closed.

And the identity of the people who had stopped him in the restroom. Clearly they were Russian, aiming to help the rebels even though they’d tried to provoke him with the clumsy reference.

SVR, then. He had contacts, he could check.

Not wise.

He tried moving his mind away from those thoughts, but nothing was safe: thinking of home, he began fretting about Borya, worrying how she was getting on with the babysitter. Nothing was safe: he thought of a baseball game between the Red Sox and the hated Yankees he’d been to recently…

For some reason it triggered a memory of the goons who had trapped him in the restroom.

Yankees fans, no doubt.

Around 3:00 a.m. he heard a noise at the door. He rolled out of bed, grabbing for the piece of iron he’d put on the nightstand to use as a weapon. Twenty-four inches long, the flat bar was part of his suitcase frame, specially installed to be used as a last-resort weapon in places like Moscow, where obtaining a real weapon was either not worth the effort or too dangerous. It was solid and heavy, more than enough to disable someone temporarily, if not break their neck — something he had done some years before in Brazil, of all places.

Bar in hand, he slipped to the side of the wall and waited, expecting someone to come in. Within moments he realized that wasn’t going to be the case; a clerk had only walked by and slipped in the bill.

And another envelope, just as the goons had promised.

Tolevi stood by the door, listening. The only thing he could hear was his own breathing. Finally he bent and took the envelopes, then tiptoed back to his bed. He used the small light on his keychain to open the envelope. His import papers had been perfectly duplicated, with two exceptions — the stamp now indicated that the import had been approved, and two zeroes had been added to the number of tractor trailers he was authorized to import.

Two hundred containers’ worth of aspirin and cough medicine? The profits would be considerable — but so was the up-front cost. And that was if he could make the necessary arrangements, both to buy and to sell.

But his new “partners” had probably taken care of at least one half of that equation. The question was how to avoid getting stuck with the bill, since a shipment this size would require hefty deposits.

Opening the other envelope, he saw that his bill had been paid, undoubtedly by his new “partners.” There was a note attached with a Post-it.

G sends his regards.

One of his SVR contacts. So at least he was sure about whom he was dealing with.

Despite the fact that Russia and the Ukraine were fighting a war in all but name, trains and airplanes still traveled regularly between Moscow and Kiev. Getting to Donetsk was a little more complicated — all airplane flights were officially canceled, though it was still possible to charter something if you had the right connections. The train took some twenty-one hours and traveled across three borders, if one counted the rebel area; while Tolevi had the requisite papers, driving was far faster and at least arguably more reliable.

This was not without its own complications. Tolevi left the hotel at five for Moscow airport; he boarded a plane three hours later for Rostov-on-Don in the south. There he had arranged to meet a driver he trusted because of prior arrangements. But when he got to the bus station where they’d agreed to meet, neither the driver nor the car was there. Though this was uncharacteristic, Russians in general were not exactly known as paragons of timeliness. Tolevi stood near the curb at the corner of the building, not far from the closed ticket window, waiting in the cold. After half an hour, he concluded that his driver was not going to show. He was just walking toward the terminal door, intending to call a taxi so he could get to a rental car, when a Mercedes C class sedan drove up alongside him.

“Mr. T?” asked the driver as the window rolled down. He spoke in broken English. “So sorry late. Needed petrol.”