Puppet Master Page 27

  “I know I have a lot to do,” Chelsea started. “I’ll make up for it tomorrow.”

  “No one works on Sunday,” he said. “And relax. Peter is on schedule. I was impressed with the demonstration today. The bot will be fine for the demos.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll have to get the ATM proposals into shape for a new team to take over,” he told her. “Make that your priority Monday.”

  “Right, boss.”

  He frowned. “So you trust her?”

  “I think so.”

  “I suppose I should ask you what your confidence level is,” he said. There was the slightest hint of wryness in his voice—the term was one they used when assessing the likely outcome of an experiment. “Have a good night.”

  72

  Starobeshevskaya village—first light

  The hotel Dan and the butcher’s brother found in Starobeshevskaya was a scurvy place, filled with rats and smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Tolevi managed a few hours of sleep on sheets that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in months. Between that and the aftereffects of the scotch he’d had to consume with the deputy mayor, he felt as if he’d been dragged through a field at the back of a bulldozer, then run over a few times.

  But there was work to be done. And now with the lay of the land exposed, he felt energized. He went downstairs and found Dan and the butcher’s brother sitting in the hotel’s small dining area, waiting for food.

  “We’re getting eggs,” said Dan in his accented Ukrainian.

  The kitchen was through a door to the left. Tolevi could see an old woman working at a stove. She was wearing a housedress; her gray hair was tied in a long braid that reached halfway down her back.

  “I wouldn’t trust it,” Tolevi told them. “How’s the coffee?”

  “Terrible.”

  At that, he smiled.

  The old woman walked out, wiping her hands on a towel. “For breakfast?”

  “I’ll have some coffee,” he told her.

  “Yes, yes. And what else?”

  “Just that.”

  “You must eat. You are skin and bones.”

  “Just coffee. Where do you get your coffee?” he asked.

  “Ahhh. Our troubles! We once had the finest coffee in the world. Now look at us. Nowhere can we find any that is good. We buy from Russia.”

  She spit, shook her head, then went back to the kitchen.

  “She’s right,” said the butcher’s brother. “This is terrible.”

  “Opportunity knocks,” said Tolevi. “In the meantime, a full agenda today. Tell her I’ll take a rain check.”

  “What are we doing?” asked Dan, starting to rise.

  “You, not a thing. I have to talk to some people.”

  “You need backup.”

  “No, I don’t,” Tolevi told him. “Let me do what I do.”

  Ten minutes later, Tolevi pushed a business card across the desk of the young man sitting at the entrance to the deputy mayor’s office. Though he was already losing his hair, the young man couldn’t have been a day past twenty-one. His face was a blotch of pimples, which ranged in color from bright pink to crusty red, and in size from microdots to a jagged mass about the size of an American dime. The latter had the misfortune of sitting on the young man’s forehead and was a great distraction as Tolevi explained that he had come to talk business with the kid’s boss.

  “You’re far too early,” he said, studying Tolevi’s card. “He is never here before noon.”

  “He told me eight.”

  “Ha. You can never trust what he says after five.”

  Five drinks or five o’clock? Tolevi wondered.

  “We were going to the prison to visit the warden,” he told the young man. “Can you arrange that?”

  “I am not sure.”

  “Try. It has to do with a business deal the warden may be interested in.”

  “It wouldn’t have been the warden. The warden is in Donetsk.”

  “Who would it be then?”

  The young man simply frowned and picked up the phone. Tolevi listened as he spoke to his counterpart at the prison.

  “Olga Uvenski will see you in a half hour,” announced the aide. “If you leave now, you may get there in time. Security takes a while.”

  It did, though not because it was thorough, which it was. The problem was that Tolevi had to run through the gamut of pat downs and metal detectors three different times, and more importantly had to be escorted from each by different guards, each of whom could be summoned only after a successful search. The guards took their time coming, responding from somewhere deep inside the complex—a cave perhaps, as they looked like Neanderthals and smelled not a little like sewage.

  The prison was relatively new, with thick cement block walls, heavy steel gates, and generous rolls of razor wire even in the interior hallways. You couldn’t run in a straight line for more than twenty meters due to either barriers or the wire; there was even one twist-back on the large main stairway that led to the administrative section. Dozens of guards were scattered around, armed with long riot batons. Most were dressed in ill-fitting uniforms, and Tolevi got the sense that they were here more as a make-work project than out of any real need for security. A few joked, many listened to music on their phones, and nearly all were smoking cigarettes when he passed.

  “You’re late,” said Olga Uvenski’s assistant when Tolevi finally arrived. The assistant was about the same age as the deputy mayor’s, but that was all they had in common. His skin was clear; tall and trim, he could have passed as a model.

  “I apologize,” said Tolevi. “Is Ms. Uvenski in?”

  “Wait.”

  Tolevi sat in a leather seat at the side and folded his arms. The office was a few ticks above what he had expected, the furniture on par with what you’d find in the waiting room of a prosperous law firm in Boston.

  That was a good sign.

  Even better was the spring in Olga Uvenski’s step as she came out to meet him.

  “A friend of Victor’s is a friend of mine,” she said, ushering himself inside.

  Her office was decked out in enough fresh flowers to make a florist weep for joy. The furniture was even more impressive than what was in the waiting room. Her desk’s front featured an eagle head inlaid in cherry and oak, so highly polished that Tolevi could see a reflection of his shoes.

  This was definitely his world, a place that knew no nationalities, where greed and weakness made anything possible. They were the counter to power, the remedy to the brutal Darwinian way of the universe, and even to the laws of physics. If you had money and wiles, you could escape any tyranny, or at least turn it to your advantage.

  “And so, why did Victor send you?” Uvenski asked after her assistant brought them a tray of fresh tea.

  “I notice that you offer tea rather than coffee,” said Tolevi, holding up his cup.

  “You prefer coffee?”

  “I suspect that you would, too, if the coffee were good.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Let me be frank. The deputy mayor and I are working on an arrangement that would provide coffee, among other things, to the area,” said Tolevi, launching into his pitch. “Good coffee, from South America. He is, well, I think of him as a franchisee. I import different things to parts of the world where they are sometimes not available. As you can tell from my accent, I am American, in a way.”

  “You speak well. Your accent led me to believe you were Russian.”

  “I have family there and in what is now west Ukraine, as well as the Donetsk People’s Republic.” He stepped lightly here, moving quickly. “A facility such as yours must need many items. I can supply them. I need to be able to bring things in bulk,” he added as an explanation. “To cover my costs. Unfortunately, they are significant, as you might guess.”

  “What items would we need here?”

  “Perhaps you would tell me.”

  Uvenski, until now very neutral, leaned fo
rward and, with a few words, showed why she ruled this domain. “I purchase items for the prison and the plant,” she told him with a sharp edge. “All items. Luxuries such as coffee are not needed here.”

  “Ah well then, I guess my friend was simply making conversation.” Tolevi rose. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Tolevi. And let’s talk business. Meat. Beef. And yes, coffee. Fifty percent to me.”

  “That’s a heavy percentage.”

  “Half in goods, half cash.”

  “Still. I have so many expenses. If those are taken into account—”

  “Sit. Drink some more tea. Forty percent in cash, the rest in goods.”

  “At that price, then I would need favors,” said Tolevi. “Another way for me to earn money, perhaps in a way you can’t. Some old employees are kept here. They would save me costs if they were on my payroll.”

  “I do not think that is possible.”

  “What if their parole were purchased? As part of the payment, one or two thrown in, for good will.”

  “My good will or yours?”

  “I have many high expenses. Forty percent—I doubt I can get a contract worth enough if the Russians oversee it. And without them, importation is too dangerous.”

  “They don’t oversee anything. My budget comes from the Republic’s government, and with the power plant, we have a lot of leeway. I can guarantee the goods will arrive.”

  “Forty percent then, and a dozen men.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll supply a list.”

  “If I wanted to make money that way, their families could pay me directly,” said Uvenski.

  “Until one complained. Then you would find yourself accused of blackmail. Whereas if I did it, I am to blame.”

  “Forty percent. I give you ten prisoners. You pay ten thousand euros per prisoner up front. I pick them.”

  “You’ll pick people who can’t pay. I make the list. That’s a deal breaker. And you have to come down in price. My margins are very slim.”

  Johansen would consider ten thousand euros to bail out the butcher a bargain. But one had to bargain.

  “That’s my final offer.”

  “Forget the prisoners,” he told her. “I don’t really know that business anyway. It was Victor who mentioned it, as a possible way of paying for the arrangements. I don’t need complications.”

  “So, we have a deal?”

  “I can’t afford it, even at forty percent. I’m sorry.” Tolevi rose to go. “Maybe some small shipments, something easy like aspirin or Band-Aids. But beyond that, to get coffee. I only get the best, because I drink it, and so it’s absurdly expensive. Everyone holds you up. So many payoffs just getting it on the ship.”

  “Sit, Mr. Tolevi. Certainly we can work this out.”

  By the time Tolevi emerged from the office, he had a tentative deal to supply the prison with medicine, coffee, and cigarettes at regular intervals for the next six months. To seal the deal, he would provide an up-front payment of ten thousand euros, to be transferred by wire to an account in Crete by the end of the week. In return, he would receive two prisoners, both of whom she said he could choose.

  She then gave him a few suggestions, along with an idea of what he could probably get for them.

  The butcher was not on her list, a minor matter—or so he hoped.

  Tolevi got a tour of the facility on the way out. His guide—Uvenski’s assistant—walked him across a bridge that ran on the border of the exercise yard into an older brick building used as a storehouse for supplies. There was no direct connection between the building and the outside world; supplies had to be hand-carried past the outer wall and the rows of razor wire.

  The aide was quite proud of this. Tolevi suppressed his disappointment.

  Worse was the isolated building at the back end of the compound. This was a small, cubelike structure surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence and numerous warning signs indicating that the ground was mined on both sides of the fence.

  “What’s in there?” Tolevi asked.

  “Traitors.”

  Back at municipal hall, the deputy mayor had not yet reported for work.

  “You might have better luck looking for him where you found him last night,” suggested the young man.

  “I’ll give that a try,” said Tolevi, anxious to close the deal.

  73

  Boston—around 1:30 a.m., Sunday

  Even the most insanely dedicated Smart Metal worker—and the description would apply to just about everyone—did not work on Sundays. That was an unbreakable rule set by Massina himself, and often enforced by a personal walkthrough shortly after midnight. As hard as he pushed his people, he thought the day off was critical for creativity—as well as religious observance, though this was unstated in his company’s policies.

  He also liked having the building entirely to himself for a few hours.

  The no-work policy was well known and absolute, so when he heard what sounded like footsteps below as he walked through the third-floor hallway, he dismissed the sound at first, thinking it just ambient echo of his own steps. But then the noise grew louder, and he thought he heard a whisper.

  “Who is that?” he said aloud. “What’s going on?”

  There was no answer.

  Foolish. Massina walked to the security station near the elevator and tapped the screen. Everyone’s tag was coded, and the system kept track of everyone in the building. So it was a simple matter of typing a command to identify who was here.

  It was him. With two guests.

  “But I’m on the third floor, and they’re on the first,” Massina told the machine.

  He clicked the rescan command, unsure whether he had typed a wrong command. But the system repeated the information. It was showing two Louis Massinas were in the building.

  Which ought to have been an impossibility.

  Massina lost himself in the problem for a moment. He was sure duplicate employees would set off an alarm within the system; both sets of IDs would be locked down and an alert would be sounded. But his ID superseded the system: he could go anywhere at any time, without being blocked.

  The error must have to do with the way that part of the program was written—my ID overrides everything. And it has never been tested for two Louis Massinas.

  The simplest things were always what tripped you up.

  Massina got hold of himself. The first thing to do was to turn off his own transponder. That could only be done from one of the two master stations—one at the security control downstairs, and the other in his office.

  Upstairs. Quickly.

  “Someone is upstairs,” Stratowich told his two accomplices. “I thought the place was empty Sundays. Didn’t that article make a deal of that? The one Medved gave us?”

  Neither man answered. Medved had supplied both men and the IDs, along with the schematic and information on the place’s layouts and security procedures. Clearly the intelligence had its limitations.

  “Go take care of whoever it is,” Stratowich told the men. “I’ll get the robot thing.”

  Fearing that the elevator would give him away, Massina decided to take the stairs to his office, moving as quickly as he dared without resorting to running, fearing it would make too much noise.

  The door to the stairwell slipped from his hands as he went to shut it; it wasn’t a slam, but to him it sounded almost as loud as a firecracker.

  It was too late to do anything about it. He bolted up the stairs, two at a time, running now for all he was worth until he reached the final landing. Nearly out of breath, he put his hand on the door and pulled it open, trying as hard as he could to be quiet. He squeezed out into the hall and this time held the door as it closed, holding it back so it wouldn’t slam.

  The elevator was moving upward.

  Massina let go of the door handle and bolted toward his office.

  He heard the elevator opening behind him as he reached the outer door. He
took his ID from his pocket and tapped it against the reader.

  “Hey!” yelled one of the men who’d been in the elevator. “Hey!”

  The door opened. Massina threw himself inside, then reached to hit the auto-close switch.

  Something whizzed past as the door closed.

  A bullet.

  Jesus.

  He ran to his office and shut the door. This was just a regular door, with an old-fashioned lock—something he guessed wouldn’t withstand a bullet.

  How long would the outer door hold? Or the glass front of the office?

  Stratowich cursed as soon as he heard the gunshots. His simple job was suddenly extremely complicated.

  Get the robot thing and get the hell out!

  He tapped the card on the door reader, but the door didn’t open. Instead, an alarm began to sound in the building.

  What the hell?

  “Shots fired, floor four,” said a mechanical voice. “Lockdown in effect.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” he cursed. “Where the hell are the damn stairs?”

  Once it detected the gunshots through audio analysis, the security system was designed to shut all of the doors and contact the police. The labs were locked as a precaution. These could not be opened except by coded overrides; simply swatting the card reader wouldn’t do—a PIN number had to be spoken and the voice recognized. The elevator also shut down, and an alarm periodically rang through the building.

  But any temptation to believe he was safe inside his office died in the fusillade of bullets that flew through the door at chest level. Massina’s insistence that his employees be able to see him was now a serious liability—the glass at the front of the office was thick, but not so thick that it couldn’t be shattered, as the two thugs in the hall were working to demonstrate.

  Massina felt trapped by his own errors—the glass at the front of his office, the security flaw—who to blame for those but himself?

  Kick yourself in the butt later. Right now, you need a way out.