Dead or Alive (19 page)

“Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe ...”

“Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just . . . poof. Be gone. Nothing.”

“Good Christ, Gennady ...”

“Come on, play along.”

Rosikhina sighed. “I guess I’d rather go in my sleep—a hundred years old and lying next to Natalia.”

“Pavel, Pavel . . . You never humor me.”

“Sorry. I don’t like this. Something’s off. It feels like and looks like your standard Mafia hit, but this sure isn’t your standard victim—not sitting in a place like this, at least.”

“He was either very brave or very stupid,” Oleksei said.

“Or desperate.” To come into a place like this, their Caucasian Russian victim had to be in search of something more than a good bowl of
djepelgesh
and some of that god-awful pondur music—music that sounded to Pavel like cats in heat.

“Or really hungry,” Oleksei added. “Another boss, maybe? He doesn’t look familiar, but he could be on the books.”

“I doubt it. They never travel without their own little army. Even if somebody had managed to get to him here and put a bullet into his head at this range, his bodyguards would have started a god-awful firefight. There’d be holes everywhere, and a lot more bodies. No, we’ve got one bullet and one dead man. Very deliberate. An ambush, professionally done. The question is, who is he and why was he important enough to kill?”

“Well, we’re not going to get any answers out of this bunch.”

Rosikhina knew his partner was right. Fear of, or loyalty to, the Obshina tended to silence even the most helpful of souls. The witness reports would invariably fall into one of three general categories: I saw nothing; someone in a mask ran in, shot the man, and ran out, it all happened so fast; and Rosikhina’s favorite,
Ya ne govo’ryu po russki.
I don’t speak Russian.

And of those accounts, the only true statement they’d get was likely the last one: It all happened so fast. Not that he blamed any of them. The Krasnaya Mafiya, or Bratva (brotherhood), or Obshina—whatever the name or denomination—was ruthless beyond compare. Witnesses and their entire families were often targeted for death simply because some boss in some dark basement somewhere had decided the person might have information they might disclose to authorities. And it wasn’t merely a matter of dying, Rosikhina reminded himself. The Mafia was often ingenious and unhurried in its execution methods. What, he wondered, would he do in similar circumstances? Though the Mafia generally refrained from killing militia officers—it was bad for business—it had happened in the past. Armed and trained as they were, cops could protect themselves, but the average citizen, the teacher or factory worker or accountant, what chance did they have? None, really. The militia had neither the money nor the manpower to protect every witness, and the average citizen knew it, so they kept their mouths shut and kept their heads down. Even now, some of the restaurant’s patrons were terrified for their lives, having simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a wonder places like this managed to stay open at all.

It was that kind of fear, Rosikhina thought, that made people wish for the old days, the return of Stalinesque control of the country, and in many ways Putin was doing just that with his “reform programs.” There was no middle ground with that, though. As long as there were political freedoms, personal rights, and an open market in Russia, there would be crime, both large and small—and there was in Stalin’s time, too, but not nearly as much. But that argument was something of a straw man, wasn’t it? Something that old communist hard-liners and ultranationalists used to decry democracy and capitalism, all the while forgetting or ignoring that the iron-fisted control of Soviet Russia had come at a high price indeed. What was that old saying? Hardship truncates memory? Rosikhina’s father, a Yakut fisherman by birth, had his own take on the concept: “When you’ve got a shrew for a wife, even the ugliest ex-girlfriend looks enticing.” And that, he knew, was what Soviet Russia really was, an ugly ex-girlfriend. Certainly she had her positive traits, but nothing you’d like to be reunited with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an opinion many of his fellow citizens—some forty percent of them, according to the latest polls, suspect as they may be—shared. Or maybe it was what Oleksei had once accused him of being, a cockeyed optimist. Or was it “blind optimist”?

Now he gazed out the front windows of the restaurant, watching the grim-faced customers standing in tight clusters, their breath steaming in the cold night air, and wondered if his optimism was in fact unwarranted. A restaurant of thirty or so people who’d just twenty minutes earlier watched a man’s brains get blown out the side of his skull, and not a one would probably lift a finger to help them catch the killer.

“True, but you never know,” Rosikhina replied. “Better to ask and be surprised than the converse, don’t you think?”

Oleksei shrugged and smiled as only a Russian fatalist can. What can you do? Not much excited Oleksei; his composure was as permanent as the cigarette he seemed to always be smoking.

Then again, on rare occasions a few useful witness details would inadvertently slip through and give them something to pick at. More often, though, the statements were vague or contradictory, or both, leaving investigators with nothing but what they could glean from the body or bodies left behind.

“Besides,” Rosikhina said, “without all those useless witness statements to process, we won’t have four glorious hours of paperwork and bad coffee ahead of us.”

“Four hours? If we’re lucky.”

“Damn it, where’s the coroner?”

Until the victim was officially pronounced dead, the body would remain where it was, dead and glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.

“He’s on his way,” Oleksei said. “I checked before I came. Busy night, I guess.”

Rosikhina leaned over and snagged the gun’s trigger guard with his index finger and lifted it from the seat. “Nine millimeter.” He ejected the magazine and cycled back the slide. A bullet tumbled out of the chamber and clinked onto the floor.

“Well, he was ready for something. Any missing?”

Rosikhina shook his head and sniffed the barrel. “Happened too fast, I suspect. Recently cleaned. Well, I’ll be damned. . . . Look, of all things, Gennady, the serial number’s been erased.”

“Will miracles never cease?”

Bad guys often acid-erased the serial numbers on murder weapons but rarely re-inscribed them. If that was the case here, the Makarov’s number might actually lead somewhere. Cockeyed optimism.

And probably misplaced,
Rosikhina reminded himself.

As often happened in homicide cases, whether in the West or in Moscow, Lieutenant Rosikhina and Oleksei would learn little either from those present in the restaurant at the time of the murder or from the canvass of the surrounding neighborhood. The Chechnyan community was tight-knit, distrusting of the police, and deeply afraid of the Obshina. And with good reason. Its brutality knew few bounds. A witness would pay not only with his own life but with those of his family as well, a spectacle which he’d likely be forced to watch before he, too, was killed. The prospect of seeing one’s children carved up with a hacksaw tended to close loose lips. Even so, Rosikhina had little choice but to go through the motions of taking statements, however unproductive, and tracking down leads, however insubstantial.

They would diligently work the murder, but in the end what few small leads they had would evaporate and they’d be forced to set the case aside. With this thought, Rosikhina looked sadly at the victim. “Sorry, my friend.”

I
T WAS A FUNNY THING, Jack Ryan Jr. thought, that there’d been no congratulatory replies to the birth announcement. Not one. He had everything cross-filed on his computer, all of it in the terabytes of RAM on The Campus’s monstrous server, and he called up the most recent documents, making a written note of initiator and recipient, but those were always nothing more than an alphanumeric handle that might or might not have a relationship to their real names. Jack extended his search of past e-mails to six months prior and ran a quick spreadsheet. Sure enough, the traffic had been steady, rarely varying more than five percent from month to month. And now, within days of the birth announcement, a precipitous drop. In fact, aside from a few routine messages that had probably been sent before the announcement and had been stuck in cyberspace, there were
no
e-mails. The Emir and his URC—the Umayyad Revolutionary Council—had in essence gone radio-silent, and that thought gave Jack a chill. There were three options: Either they’d switched communication protocols as a general security measure, or they’d somehow figured out someone was reading their mail, or this was an OpSec change, a zipping of the electronic lips prior to a high-level operation. The first two options were possible but unlikely. The URC had changed its procedures little in the last nine months, and The Campus had been careful not to tip its hand. So option three. There was precedent, of course. Just before 9/11, Al-Qaeda standard electronic chatter level dropped like a stone; so, too, with the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Part of Jack wanted his hypothesis to be proven out; another part hoped to hell he was wrong.

How, then, would the Emir get his messages out? Couriers were the most secure method, if not the quickest: Write up the messages, burn the disk, and have someone take it for a handoff rendezvous. With modern air travel, a man could get from Chicago to Calcutta in less than a day, so long as he didn’t mind airline food. Hell, international air travel was designed with that idea in mind, wasn’t it? It might have been designed with the “black” community in mind, not just the sales force of Frederick’s of Hollywood or Dow Chemical.

Chicago to Calcutta. What if the Emir was in Chicago, or New York, or Miami? What was to stop him from living there? Not a goddamned thing. The CIA and everyone else assumed he was somewhere in the Stans—why? Because that was the last place they’d known him to be. Not because of any evidence that would place him anywhere. And there was a good half of the United States government’s Special Forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan beating the bushes and looking into every hole in the rocks, asking endless questions, tossing money around, looking for the one man—or woman—who might know his face and might know where he might be. And still nothing. What were the odds of that? Jack wondered.

A man like the Emir could never feel secure enough, not with every intelligence agency in the world looking for him—even dedicated, patriotic intelligence officers could look at the public reward America had placed on his head and think of a nice house on the Riviera and a comfortable retirement, just for one phone call and a little bit of information. . . .

The Emir would know all of that. He’d limit the number of people who knew his location. He’d limit that number to people whom he could absolutely trust, and he’d take good care of them. The best of care. Money, comfort, such luxuries as circumstances permitted. He’d reinforce their desire to earn his trust. He’d reinforce their faith in Allah and in himself, be solicitous as hell to them. But he would also maintain his aura of command, because the source of that authority was always on a man-to-man basis, as with all the really important things in life, a thing of the mind.

So what would it take for the Emir to relocate beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan? How does one go about moving the most wanted man on the face of the earth?

The CIA’s master file on the Emir had mediocre photos, some of them raw and some digitally enhanced, all of which had been distributed to virtually every intelligence and police agency in the world. Same with the general public. If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can’t go out to Sunday brunch without being mobbed, the Emir would certainly find it difficult to travel beyond his regular stomping grounds.

The Emir couldn’t change his height, though it
was
technically possible, but it involved major and somewhat painful surgery, followed by a lengthy recovery period, which would necessitate being immobile for several weeks—bad joss for a guy on the run. He could change his face, his skin color, his hair. He could wear colored contact lenses to change his eye color and maybe improve his eyesight, which, the file said, was about average. He walked erectly, not slumped over, and the talk about how he suffered from Marfan syndrome had been shot down by a doc at Johns Hopkins who was an expert in the disorder, rather to Langley’s surprise, as that had become gospel to the intelligence community. So he did
not
need a dialysis machine in constant proximity.

Wait a second, Jack.
The intel community had been assuming a lot about the Emir. They’d gotten, what, one opinion on the Marfan angle? Was that enough to discount the theory? As far as Jack could tell, no one had ever laid hands on someone close enough to the Emir to know one way or another. Something to think about.