Dale Brown - Puppet Master

The biggest surprise was waiting in the car, actually a large SUV with three rows of seats: Yuri Johansen.

“Good evening, Gabe,” said Johansen, sitting in the first row behind the driver. “Have a good flight?”

“The flight was terrible.” Tolevi had no option but to slide next to him. “My stay was worse.”

“You didn’t get our guy,” said Johansen.

Outside the truck, Jenkins shouted to some men boarding a vehicle behind them. Another vehicle pulled up in front. It was a regular caravan.

“I’m lucky I got out with my life,” Tolevi told Johansen. “One of the Russians in charge down there decided he liked me so much he cut off part of my ear as souvenir.”

Tolevi turned his head toward his CIA handler.

“I bet that hurts.”

“Jenkins said I could call my daughter. Is he FBI, or is he with you?”

“Bureau. Use his phone when he gets in.”

“I met Dan,” said Tolevi. “If you were going to have people there, you should have had more.”

“If we had access to more,” said Johansen, “do you think we would have sent you?”

Jenkins tapped the back of the driver’s seat and they pulled out, a three-vehicle parade to Boston. He didn’t particularly like the CIA officer, Johansen, let alone the arrangement the bosses had come to, but “make the best of it” was now the clear order of the day.

National interest and all that.

They were at the precipice of a huge bust, breaking not only the back of the Russian mob in Boston and New England but also some of its connections back to Russia and the Ukraine. Even if Tolevi didn’t cooperate and the CIA chose to keep him off limits, major criminals were going down. This meant cybercrime, prostitution, drugs, cigarette and vodka smuggling.

But the big prize was the Russian intelligence service connection.

Stratowich wasn’t talking yet, but he would. It was just a matter of time. They’d already gotten information from his apartment, his phone records, even his girlfriend.

The day before he broke into Smart Metal, he’d met with Maarav Medved, a known mafya chieftain; from him he’d received instructions on how to get into Smart Metal. Twenty minutes before that meeting, which had taken place at a restaurant in downtown Boston, two members of the Russian SVR had gone into the restaurant and sat with Medved — something the FBI knew from routine surveillance, and now a security video from a store just across the street.

How much they could make of the connection remained to be seen. The U.S. attorney had asked for a wiretap warrant on Medved; thus far the most interesting tidbit was information about which Russian prostitutes were the best in bed. But it was early days; Jenkins had no doubt they would end up with considerably more dirt, and undoubtedly have enough hard evidence to expose SVR operations. A serious win for him, even though his task group hadn’t been assigned to do that.

Getting Tolevi to play along would be useful. It was difficult, however, to judge exactly what the CIA’s attitude toward him was. They were as cagey as ever, barely admitting that they ran him, though it was obvious they had sent him to the Ukraine. He was a black marketer, flouting, if not breaking, U.S. laws on exporting goods to both Russia and the breakaway areas of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He had connections to the mafya —Johansen insisted he wasn’t a member, though Jenkins was sure he was, even if it was a few rungs below Medved.

The one good thing about the SVR case — the CIA wouldn’t try to hound in on the glory. In fact, the Agency would stay as far away publically as possible, fearing they’d get into a tit-for-tat fight with their Russian rivals. That gave Jenkins’s bosses plenty of room to work with the locals, who of course wanted some measure of glory for having been lucky enough to be there when Jenkins’s man got Massina down.

Glory all around.

But he still didn’t have his brother’s murderer.

“I want to call my daughter,” said Tolevi.

“You’ll call her,” said Jenkins. “It’s a long ride.”

“Am I under arrest here?”

“No. Not at all.” Jenkins leaned forward. “If you want to get out, we can stop right here.”

They were on the Van Wyck Expressway; traffic was actually moving at a decent clip, unusual even for the middle of the day.

“What exactly do I owe this honor to?” said Tolevi.

“We’re all trying to cooperate,” said Jenkins. “We picked up a friend of yours, a Mr. Stratowich, who has been giving us a lot of information.”

“Stratowich.” Tolevi pronounced the name to rhyme with garbage, which completely synched with his tone.

“He speaks highly of you,” said Jenkins.

“I doubt that. He’s talking to you?”

Jenkins shrugged. No, Stratowich was many things, but not a squealer. Still, if you had him, you could get a lot of information, make connections.

“Stratowich is an asshole,” Tolevi told them. “I want to talk to my daughter.”

“If you’re so concerned about Borya,” said Jenkins, “why did you set her up to take the fall for your ATM scam?”

“What ATM scam? What is the obsession with ATMs?”

“You had nothing to do with that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. No. Listen, Stratowich is a goon. Strictly low level. He doesn’t have the brains to rob a candy store, let alone diddle with banks, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“A bag guy for Russian intelligence?” asked Jenkins.

Tolevi turned to Johansen. “What’s the game here?”

Johansen didn’t answer, pretending to stare out the window. Tolevi decided that he could use a little silence himself, so he sat back between them, feeling more than a little cramped in.

Middle seat blues: The theme of the last forty-eight hours.

It wasn’t until they were on the New England Thruway nearly a half hour later that Johansen broke the silence.

“So, you could not recover our friend the butcher,” said the CIA agent. “Tell me what happened.”

Tolevi glanced at Jenkins. Obviously these guys were working together.

“The Russians moved in,” Tolevi said. “They were apparently sweeping up the rebels who were corrupt. I got caught in the middle of that. The brother wasn’t much help. Nor, frankly, was Dan. I lost track of them.”

“How?”

Tolevi described what had happened, leaving out the SVR connection. If Johansen knew about it, he’d bring it up. Otherwise, it would open him up to too many questions, most of which he preferred not to answer.

“The man who cut your ear off is a colonel in the Spetsnaz,” Johansen told him. “He has a reputation for being honest. And ruthless.”

“I figured he was a colonel. He had that f-u look in his eyes they get when they’ve been in the army too long.”

“Where is your prize now?”

“Still in jail, as far as I know.”

“Describe it.”

Tolevi slumped back in the seat, trying to force a replay of his visit through his mind. But thoughts of his daughter kept getting in the way.

What am I going to tell her about my ear?

“Oh that… cut myself shaving .”

And the damn thing was throbbing out of control.

Times like this he really missed his wife. He missed her always, but right now even more. She would have soothed the way somehow, absorbed some of Borya’s shock.

The girl will freak. She thinks of me as indestructible. She is such a good kid .

“You’re describing an impenetrable fortress,” said Jenkins. It was the first sign that he was listening. Johansen shot him a look.