Puppet Master Read online

  “Just an overnight bag to do business in Europe?” asked Hightower. “I don’t know . . . I think I’d take more luggage than that.”

  “Thin,” said Jenkins.

  “You have anything else?”

  Jenkins shrugged. “Let’s play that angle. And ask if we can examine the card. Then Dryfus can analyze it.”

  Tolevi focused his attention on his hands, staring at his fingers as if he had never seen them before. It was a technique he had learned in college, from an alleged “mind master,” a sort of discipline guru who claimed to have wormed eternal wisdom from a Zen master in Tibet. The man was later unmasked as a fraud, something Tolevi had suspected from the speed at which he bedded female devotees, but the technique itself was a good one. Focus your thoughts so they do not stray—a good strategy in many situations.

  His knuckles seemed particularly large and wrinkled. That was where age showed, in the hands. Even the hands of a man such as Tolevi, whose last stint of heavy physical labor dated to a construction job in his early twenties, bore the marks of time.

  Breaks as well as wrinkles. A torn ligament. Even now, stiffness that would surely grow as time moved on.

  The door to the interrogation room opened and Tolevi’s interrogators reentered. Tolevi thought of the airport in Crimea and what might have happened if the SRV agents had understood what to look for—the flash drive embedded in the handle. But these two were even more clueless.

  Perhaps. It could easily be an act.

  Don’t underestimate your enemy.

  “So, Mr. Tolevi. You’re Russian?” asked Jenkins.

  “I’m an American, as you can see from my passport.”

  “But you’re of Russian extraction.”

  “And Ukrainian,” added Tolevi. “What’s your background?”

  Hightower ignored the question. “Did you visit Russia?”

  “Did you visit Russia?” asked Hightower.

  “I told you my entire itinerary,” answered Tolevi, trying to puzzle out where they were going with their questions.

  “A week in the Netherlands,” said Hightower. “Nice.”

  “You’ve been?” Tolevi asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I rode my bike there.”

  Tolevi remained silent. She didn’t look like the bike-riding type, or a person who exercised fairly regularly at all.

  “There are a lot of things to see in the Netherlands,” continued the female agent. “And places to go.”

  “You smoke pot?” asked Jenkins.

  “Do I look like someone who smokes pot?”

  “What does that look like these days?” said Hightower. “I think just about everyone does.”

  “I do not.”

  Tolevi wondered if they were going to set him up—plant marijuana in his bag and hold him on a bogus charge. But wouldn’t they have done that at Customs?

  Nothing about this was making sense. What exactly were they up to? And where the hell was Johansen?

  Maybe behind the glass, gauging his responses.

  Tolevi lowered his gaze, looking at his hands again.

  “You didn’t take much clothes for a week’s stay,” said Hightower.

  “You’re detaining me because I didn’t pack an extra pair of underwear?”

  “Why did you stop at that ATM?” Jenkins’s voice was sharp; he was back to playing bad cop.

  “Why does anyone stop at an ATM?” asked Tolevi.

  “Tell me about that card,” said Jenkins.

  “It’s a bank card.”

  “What’s special about your card?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Would you mind if I had it analyzed?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” said Hightower.

  One of the agents poked his head inside the room.

  “Mr. Jenkins, you’re wanted on the phone.”

  Jenkins paused inside the observation room to watch Tolevi before picking up the phone. He was a cool one, unshakeable. But it figured that a mafya member would be like that. They had no conscience, which made it easy for them to lie.

  Still staring at Tolevi through the two-way mirror, he picked up the handset. “Jenkins.”

  “Agent Jenkins? This is Yuri Johansen. I’m with the Agency.”

  “What agency?” asked Jenkins. He’d thought it was a call from one of his people back at the Watertown site.

  “Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Jenkins. I understand you’re questioning a Gabor Tolevi.”

  “That’s right,” said Jenkins.

  “What exactly has he done?”

  Jenkins hesitated. Was this really a CIA agent on the line? He thought of tracing the call, but there was no one else in the room he could ask to initiate it. And the phone set didn’t include a caller ID screen.

  “I’m not understanding why it would be your business,” said Jenkins.

  “The Agency is very interested in everything Mr. Tolevi does,” said Johansen matter-of-factly. “So what has he done?”

  “We’re—he’s part of an investigation.”

  “I gathered that. Into what, exactly?”

  Surely this must be a member of Tolevi’s mafya clan, posing as a spy to try and get him off. That was a good thing—he could get this asshole, too. Surely he’d be easier to break than Tolevi, who right now was staring blankly at the mirror.

  “I’m not going to discuss this over the phone,” said Jenkins. “If you want to come down and talk about it in person, I’d be happy to share what I can.”

  “I’m afraid it would be difficult for me to do that. I’m in Europe at the moment.”

  “Well, I guess that’s that, then.” Jenkins hung up.

  31

  Boston—two hours later

  Borya woke with a start, disoriented. The sheet and blankets had tied themselves around her so tightly that her right arm was numb.

  She stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom, trying to regain her sense of where she was. The tiny LED on the power button of her laptop was blinking next to her, half obscured by the edge of the covers.

  Her father must not be home if the laptop was still here. He always turned it off and put it on the desk, generally with a murmured lecture about how expensive it would be to fix when it fell off the bed as she slept.

  Not home yet?

  Borya raised her head to look at the clock. It was a little past three.

  What was he doing?

  Whatever it was, it represented only a temporary reprieve, the calm before the storm as her ELA teacher said when discussing Moby Dick.

  That made her father the whale. But he was more like Captain Ahab, relentless.

  Not cruel, though he would definitely yell when he got home.

  The account. She had to kill the account.

  Borya unraveled the covers. Was her father home already? No lights were on in the hallway—he habitually turned them off—but hadn’t she done that when she got home, part of the ruse to pretend she was sleeping?

  “Daddy?” she heard herself say. “Papa?”

  No answer. Don’t push it.

  Borya retrieved her laptop and typed in the password. She hated to kill the account, but there was no other choice. Besides, it was time to move on to the next thing. Maybe she’d write her own video game, something she’d never tried. Or maybe hack an airplane control system. She’d read that it could be done.

  Borya typed furiously, her fingers pounding the plastic keys of the laptop. Finally she stopped and stared at the screen, where a cursor blinked in the open program box. There was a long delay between when a command was given and when it was acknowledged as executed, due to the need to traffic the commands through a set of anonymous servers.

  Executed

  A sudden shiver ran through her. It was cold in the house.

  Where was her father?

  “Daddy?” she said again, this time louder, though she sensed th
ere would be no answer. “Daddy, where are you?”

  32

  Boston—around the same time

  “. . . backward and forward, every which way you can think of and a few I’m sure you can’t. There is no special coding on that ATM card. Zilch. It is no different than any other bank card. Including mine.”

  Jenkins pushed the receiver closer to his ear. “What are you saying, Dryfus? We got the wrong guy?”

  “I’m saying there’s nothing on this bank card that makes it different than any other bank card.”

  “But Chelsea Goodman showed you the string of extra commands.”

  “There’s nothing special on the card.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Well . . . maybe the theory was wrong.”

  “Can you access the account?” asked Jenkins.

  “Well . . . Technically, I need a warrant.”

  “Forget about that. Just access it.”

  “Boss.”

  “We have a card used in the commission of a crime. We’re investigating the crime.”

  “The ATM owner hasn’t reported any unusual activity. There is no complaint. There’s no crime—I can’t.”

  “Just take a look at the account.”

  “Boss, really. I need a warrant. Otherwise I’m hacking into an account. Even if I find something, until there’s a complaint—”

  “Where are you now?” asked Jenkins.

  “Our lab.”

  “Wait there for me. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

  “But, Trev—”

  “You want coffee? I’ll stop at Dunkin’ on the way over.” Jenkins hung up without even bothering to hear the answer. He looked through the mirror into the interview room. Tolevi was still sitting there, staring at the table. Every so often he flexed his fingers, but otherwise he was a stone Buddha, without emotion or movement.

  “So what are we doing?” asked Hightower. She was leaning against the wall next to the door, eyes drooping.

  “I’m going to try to figure out a way to access his account,” said Jenkins.

  “How?”

  “Maybe he’ll do it for us. He’s cooperating. Kind of.”

  “Maybe because he knows there’s nothing there.”

  He was so close. It was just a matter of time before he came up with something he could use as leverage to break him. If they could only get the god damn search warrant.

  “He told me I could examine the card,” said Jenkins. “That means I can see if it works.”

  “You didn’t ask specifically if you could look at the account.”

  “I don’t think I have to.”

  More importantly, thought Jenkins, he hadn’t been told he couldn’t.

  I’ll look at the account, then go from there.

  “I’ll be back in a half hour or so,” he told Hightower. “You want something?”

  “We can’t keep him forever.”

  “We’re not going to.”

  “He has a kid.”

  “I realize that. But he left her here in the country, right? She’s what? Seventeen?”

  “I think fifteen.” They’d used a commercial credit-rating database to look up Tolevi’s personal details, and they’d filled out more of the information with a simple Google search. The information was not definitive, but a girl with the same last name had been pictured in the newspaper the year before, after being elected to the Honor Society as a freshman.

  Borya Tolevi.

  “We could be accused of endangering the welfare of a child,” added Hightower.

  “Come on,” said Jenkins. “That’s not going to happen. I’ll be back.”

  He stalked from the room, determined to break Tolevi, break this case. And when he did that, when he finally got the scumbag Buddha in there to talk, he was going to find the bastard who had killed his brother.

  Jenkins was nearly to the front hall when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and saw that the number belonged to Paul Smith, his boss in D.C.

  He’d want an update. Jenkins considered putting it off—he had nothing to tell him. But maybe he could suggest a shortcut to getting the warrant. The warrant would make everything much, much easier.

  “This is Jenkins,” he said, sliding the answer bar on the touch screen.

  “What’s the status of your suspect?” barked Smith. He wasn’t happy.

  “We’re still working on him.”

  “What evidence do you have?”

  “He was at the ATM when the card was used.”

  “OK. And the card is definitely tied to the scam?”

  “We think so, yes.”

  “Think so?”

  Jenkins didn’t answer. “It’s just a matter of time now.”

  “Release him,” said Smith.

  “What?”

  “You have nothing to tie him to your case. That’s what you’re telling me. How can you hold him?”

  “I’m just questioning him. He’s suspect. And he’s cooperating. Voluntarily.”

  “What’s his crime? Using an ATM machine?”

  “There was an unusual string of . . . um . . . there was a code in the transaction request that was unusual.”

  “That ties him to the ATM scams.”

  “I . . .”

  “Did that code say ‘Give us all your money’?” Smith was even more sarcastic than usual. “Let him go.”

  “But—”

  “He’s a CIA asset, and an important one.”

  “He’s a thief.”

  “You have no proof. You just told me. You don’t even have anything to use a warrant. He could get up and walk out, and you can’t stop him.”

  “Some guy calls and claims to be CIA—that’s got to be one of his people, pretending. It’s a hoax. These guys are A-1 hackers, these Russians.”

  “The deputy director of the CIA called Lon personally a half hour ago to say release this guy. You think that’s a hoax?”

  Lon was Lon Phillips, the executive deputy director for intelligence—two levels above Jenkins’s boss.

  “That’s got to be phony,” said Jenkins.

  “Believe me, it’s not.”

  “You’re telling me the CIA is robbing banks?”

  “I’m telling you to release him. Now.”

  “I think we need to consider—”

  “We don’t need to consider anything. What was this company Smart Metal’s role?”

  “Smart Metal?”

  “Don’t play more games with me, Trev. I know you involved a local company called Smart Metal. They make robots, right? What did they have to do with this?”

  “They were robbed, and they were just trying to find their money.”

  “You didn’t have them hacking into accounts, did you?”

  “Hell no.” Jenkins hesitated, trying to organize his response. It was barely a moment, but it was more than enough of a hint for Smith to jump to conclusions.

  Unfortunately.

  “They are off, out, not to be involved,” said Smith. “You are way out of line. Way out of line.”

  “I did nothing illegal. They did not hack into accounts.”

  “We’re not having this conversation. Take care of things.”

  The line died before Jenkins could respond. Which maybe was the best for all concerned.

  33

  Boston—roughly the same time

  What was the sense of sleeping with someone if you couldn’t remember it?

  Chelsea slipped from the bed and tiptoed from the room, snagging her clothes along the way. Her head was pounding, her legs were stiff, and her mouth felt gummed up.

  Ballerina girl! What are you doing with your life?

  She waved her hand, trying to physically block her father’s voice from her head. But really, it was a hell of a good question.

  Why had she gone home with Flores? If her head hadn’t been pounding already, Chelsea would have pounded it a few times against the wall just to knock some sense into it.

&nbs
p; She wasn’t a prude, but this was absolutely not her style. Hookups with strangers were so far out of character that she was sure she wouldn’t recognize herself if she looked in a mirror.

  Fortunately, there were no mirrors in the small kitchen, where she stopped to get dressed. Pots and dishes were piled in the sink, and the garbage pail, without a top, was overflowing.

  Typical guy place.

  How many times have I told you . . . ?

  “Ssshhhh, Daddy. Please. I know you’re right,” she whispered.

  Chelsea needed to use the bathroom, but as she went to it, she heard Flores starting to stir down the hall. She decided she could hold it for a while and trotted to the front door, jamming on her shoes so quickly that she didn’t quite get the heel of her right foot all the way in. No matter. She paused at the door long enough to make sure her wallet and keys were still in her bag—they were—then made her getaway.

  It was not yet light out. That was fortunate. Chelsea walked for a block, her head clearing, before she managed to get her bearings. Miraculously, she was six blocks from her apartment.

  Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, she thought as she crossed the street. They were close enough that bumping into each other was inevitable.

  Then again, even with the arrest, they’d probably have to clean up odds and ends on the project; Flores had alluded to that last night.

  Several times. How drunk had he been?

  Maybe so drunk he wouldn’t remember her being there?

  Zero chance of that. And surely he’d been more sober than she was.

  Oh well, she thought to herself, angling toward a Starbucks that looked open. There were worse things in life than doing an FBI agent.

  Surely there were. She just couldn’t think of them at the moment.

  34

  Grace Sisters’ Hospital

  Boston—two hours later

  Johnny Givens struggled to lift his head.

  “Are you getting out of bed or what?” demanded the woman.