Levon's Trade (Levon Cade Book 1) (14 page)

The two men were taking him with them. It sounded like a long drive ahead.

They’d decided to keep him. He rushed to the bathroom to take his shower. The days ahead held adventures for him unimagined.

49

The first suspect was a gas explosion. One of the firemen hosing down the smoldering wreckage called bullshit on that. He’d done three deployments in Iraq and knew the stink of discharged C-4 when he smelled it. Someone was pissed at somebody and letting them know it.

Just in case that somebody missed the point, a second pawn shop, this one in Port Richey north of Tampa exploded. Another standalone blasted hollow within twenty minutes of the first explosion.

The following morning, Symon Kharchenko received a FedEx package addressed to him at his condo. Inside was a cellphone with a note on a Post-It in marker.

CALL ME
.

Symon hit send.

“Yeah.” A male voice. An American.

“You have balls, my friend. I tell you that,” Symon said. He paced the great room of the condo.

“You know what I want. Give me the girl and this ends.”

“This is never going to end. Not for you. We know who you are.”

“And I know who you are, Kharchenko. I know what you have. I know how to take it away.”

“You have already taken my sons.”

“Give me the girl and this ends. Keep this phone so you can tell me when you have her.”

“You give me orders? Tell me what to do? Fuck your mother!” This last was shouted in Ukrainian as Symon strode out onto his balcony and sent the phone flying out into space to fall into the water of the marina many stories below.

It was still early morning. He was dressed in a silk robe only. His own house phone rang. He snatched it from his dresser. It was Soshi with the latest he’d heard. The Georgian had special contacts inside the county sheriff departments where the two pawnshops once stood. Both were brought down by strategically placed charges. Officially the motive was robbery and the blasts were meant to cover any evidence.

“Robbery?” Symon said.

“The under counter safes are both gone. Torn out and carried away,” Soshi said.

Together over a million dollars in cash at least.

Both pawnshops were money laundries for the Vor. It was easy to move ill-gotten cash through a shop that bought and sold items using cash; items that were all aftermarket. The meticulously kept sales records of each store were almost entirely fiction. On paper they were going concerns. In reality the only car on the lots most days belonged to each shop’s manager.

They were separately owned through two different holding companies with no connection to one another. Even the managers, and paper-only owners, of each shop had no idea their businesses were connected in any way. This Levon Cade knew they were connected and struck at them to send a message. He knew more about the brotherhood’s operations than they knew about him.

“He has no family but a young daughter and she has disappeared,” Symon said.

“The man is alone? What man is alone?” Soshi said.

Symon did not tell the fat Georgian about the missing girl and her building contractor father who’d paid this Cade to find her. Soshi would be on the phone to everyone. There was no need for all to know what had brought this curse upon them. And the father-in-law. Symon needed to think on that one.

“We should give Cade’s name to the police. Let them find him,” Soshi said.

“No. We will not do that. That is not our way,” Symon said.

“How do we find him?”

“We are many. He is one.”

“Exactly, Symon. How do we find one man in a city? It is like finding one louse in your bed. Remember the lice in the camps?”

Symon grunted that he did.

“This man knows where to strike us, how to hurt us. We can use all our men to look for him and leave our interests unguarded.”

“Then what do I do, Soshi?”

“Give him what he wants and be rid of him.”

“And let Danya and Vanko’s deaths go unanswered,” Symon said.

“Give him Dimi. It is Dimi who brought this on us. Let Dimi pay for all.”

Symon ended the call without a farewell.

50

He was up from Honduras with papers that identified him as a fully licensed transport driver named Isaac Birnbaum of Circe, Arkansas. He worked for Don White Freight. He didn’t know who Don White was. He didn’t know Don White was a total fiction created as the founder for a company owned by Bayside Transit through a Delaware corporation called Morgantown Trucking and all of those bodies a part of Stoneforge Ltd, a closely held limited partnership in which all the partners were named Yuri Baghdasarian, a member of the same Vor brotherhood as the Kharchenkos and Kolisnyks.

The container inched lower and lower onto the chassis until it was in place and secured.

The import manifest described the contents of the container as organic fertilizer. According to its paperwork, the forty foot cargo container was filled with stacks of bagged primo cattle feces from Brazil.

In truth the steel box was packed floor to ceiling, back to front, with cases of counterfeit Marlboros from China. Manufactured in a hidden factory in rural and remote Yunxiao province, each pack cost under twenty cents to produce. Even with shipping, bribes and distribution there was a two thousand percent profit to be made. And the profits got sweeter the further north the cigarettes travelled. The taxes on a carton of butts rose astronomically depending on where the truck wound up. The contents of the container on Isaac Birnbaum’s truck was worth twenty million dollars in New York.

The truck pulled away from the gantry area and made its way around to the checkpoint where it stopped for radiation scanning as ordered by Homeland Security. Isaac’s paperwork was glanced at by a customs agent and waved through. The load of Fauxboros was on its way to New Jersey and then into delis, drugstores, convenience stores, hotel lobbies and markets all over the five boroughs.

The driver geared up and took the truck down the long lane lined either side by a mile of stacked Conex boxes rising either side of the road like steel Matterhorns.

He was out on a surface road heading for the on-ramp that would take him to I-4 and then I-75 for the two-day straight haul north.

A Range Rover pulled out from the lot of a derelict Tire Kingdom and fell into the truck’s slipstream. The truck driver, bouncing to the Garifunka coming from his radio, never saw the SUV following at a discreet distance. Not even when the Rover followed him into a rest stop north of Wesley Chapel.

Hours later, county deputies and state troopers responded to calls about an explosion and fire out at the end of an unpaved road above Dade City. A truck and Conex container sat in a sandy area far from any houses yet the blast was heard and felt for miles around. The whole mess was burning now, sending a thick pall of white smoke into the sky.

The cops sniffed the air. The smokers among them recognized the smell. Even the committed ex-smokers felt the old cravings returning.

The registered driver was found duct taped to a toilet in a stall at a rest stop down on 75. The two staties who took his statement understood enough of his frantic Spanish to understand that he didn’t see anything. Isaac “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” Birnbaum swore that he was taking a piss at the urinals and that’s the last thing he remembered before he came to bound and gagged on the cold porcelain of the
excusado
.

51

“Yeah.” The voice on the other end answered. The same man.

“All you are doing is digging a deeper grave for yourself,” Symon said. He bit off every word.

“You have to ask yourself how much Dimi Kolisnyk is worth to you. My guess is that he’s already cost you too much.”

“You are a dead man.”

“Give me the girl. Or give me Dimi.”

“You think you will walk away from this?”

“Will you?”

The call ended.

Symon gripped the phone in his fist until the blood drained from his hand. He then set the phone down on the kitchen table.

His own phone rang. He keyed the cordless to talk. It was Yuri.

“We must meet. Now.” Yuri was speaking between clenched teeth.

Yuri disconnected.

The meeting was in a private dining room at the back of a diner near the Clearwater causeway. About the table there were only old men this time. Soshi, Yuri and Oreske were already there when Symon arrived. There was a chair for Wolo. A glass of vodka set at the empty place.

They dispensed with the usual etiquette and niceties.

“How will you pay me?” Yuri demanded, a fisted hand on the table.

“I will buy you a new truck,” Symon shrugged.

“Fuck the truck! I am down fifteen million! Where is that? Where is my money?”

“You will get it. You have my word,” Symon said.

“Your word!” Yuri struck the table top. Vodka sloshed from the glass before Wolo’s chair.

“Give this man what he wants,” Oreske said, his voice like stones grinding together.

“I would give him what he wants. What then? He goes away? We will never find him again.”

“Who gives a fuck?” Yuri said in English.

“He killed my sons!” Symon protested.

“Were your idiot sons worth fifteen million? Or your pawn shops? How much did he take from you? How much more will he take from us?”

Symon’s vision went white. He rose from his chair, palms flat on the table top.

Fat Soshi stood to press him back into the chair. The Georgian remained by him, a ham-sized hand on his shoulder. The man spoke slowly and deliberately, his voice resonant behind Symon.

“Call him, Symon. Give him the girl. Give him Dimi. The money is bad to lose. Worse is the police. They will connect these explosions and fires. They will not connect them to this Cade. They will connect them to us. This must end. It is what is best for all.”

Symon nodded slowly. He picked up his own glass and drained it, eyes locked on Yuri across the table.

“Yes, this business with Levon Cade must end,” Symon said to the table.

But our business is only beginning, Yuri Baghdasarian, he thought to himself.

52

They drove behind a long stable building to the place the American told them to park. A farm show had closed the day before. There were still wranglers here loading trucks with horses. The place smelled of animal shit and caramel corn. The rest of the park was a colorful, festive ghost town of fluttering banners and empty rides.

Tupo opened the back door of the BMW and pulled Dimi out by the arm. Dimi looked like a child in oversized sweats that still had the price sticker on them. Yvan bought them at Walmart to replace the clothes they’d cut off of their prisoner. Tupo gripped Dimi’s elbow and guided him after Yvan who was walking away from the barn buildings toward the towering amusements at the other end of the grounds.

The walk toward their designated rendezvous took them far from the car. Tupo was nearly carrying Dimi by the time they reached a row of benches that sat at the foot of a sloping water slide. Yvan studied the area for any sign of the American. There was nothing here but a shuttered beer garden standing against the rear of a large exhibition hall. The only other structure in sight was a Holiday Inn the other side of Martin Luther King, easily a half kilometer away.

Tupo sat Dimi down on the bench third from the left as directed. The big man stooped to run a hand under the bench and found a plastic bag attached with duct tape. The bag held a cell phone. Tupo tapped the send button twice.

53

On the roof of the Holiday Inn, Levon Cade lay prone atop an air conditioner housing. He swung the Model 70 slightly to the right to focus on the target bench. He looked up over the top of the rifle. The south parking lot of the fairgrounds and a long exhibition building lay between him and the foot of the slide. The lot was empty. Sparse early morning traffic drifted along this section of Martin Luther King. The rush and rumble of heavier traffic reached him from the raised length of I-4 audible through the trees behind him.

Dimi was lowered onto a bench by a guy built like a wrestler. The other guy, who looked like a Mongol warrior disguised in a designer running suit, stood scanning the surroundings with a professional eye. The man’s hard eyes met Levon’s through the scope.

The big man came up with the plastic bag that Levon planted there the night before. The cell in the pocket of his windbreaker shivered. Levon touched the button on his ear piece with a gloved finger.

“Yeah.”

“We are here. What do you want us to do?”

“No girl.”

“No girl. We have Dimi. What do you want us to do now?”

“Give Dimi the phone and walk away.”

“That is all?”