The Final Cut by Catherine Coulter
Mike nodded. “Of course. Thanks for the information.”
When she left, Mike said, “I can’t allow you to punch her out, no matter what she says, all right?”
Nicholas paced Bo’s office. “She has all the answers, doesn’t she?” He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “It’s been a long day.”
“Yes, it has. Look, neither one of us has had much sleep, and you’ve lost a friend.”
He was silent, continued to pace. He looked down at the communications center every time he walked past her, as if the answer might magically appear on the bank of screens on the wall in front of them.
“Tell me about the Anatoly crime family.”
Mike glanced at the still-running facial-recognition database and wondered if Kochen had been Elaine’s accomplice, if he’d been the one to plant the device that knocked out all the power. “They’re a pretty typical Russian Mob, loosely organized, not structured like the Italians, and half the time they spend fighting with other parts of the Bratva—the Brotherhood. We’ve gotten them under control in New York, more than three hundred indictments in the past few years, but they’re like rats, they breed in the dark corners. Smuggling, arms dealing, credit card fraud, cyber-crime. They’re opportunistic and lethal—they never hesitate to kill if they’re crossed.
“Anatoly, the big boss—I’ll admit it—he’s scary, smart, and brutal to those who cross him. He has seven sons from two wives who run the various syndicates, all physically bigger than he is, and twice as vicious. Anatoly, at least, has some semblance of culture, a sheen of respectability; on occasions like tonight, he likes to present himself as a wealthy philanthropic businessman. He’s big into the art scene in New York. Likes to get all shined up and come out in public, throw money at things. He’s slick, too. We haven’t gotten anything to stick to him; he lets the others do his dirty work for him.”
“And Kochen?”
“Like I told you, Kochen is one of the foot soldiers, has a rap sheet a mile long. He’s been approached to be an informant a few times, and he’s been cooperative on the surface but hasn’t ever given anything of use. He likes money, and bars and floozies.”
“You said Savich wants to talk to Anatoly about the theft of The Night Tower from the Prado. He’s known for art crimes, yet he supports the Met?”
Mike said, “Yeah, isn’t that a kick? Fact is, though, Anatoly is better known for diamond smuggling. It’s the best way to move large amounts of money around. Diamonds are valuable and portable. Like I said, we haven’t been able to break him. He’s been under almost constant investigation since I joined the New York Field Office.”
“Sounds like Anatoly indeed has the money to finance stealing the Koh-i-Noor. Do you have a dress, by the way?”
“What?”
“A gown. For the gala. It’s black tie. You’re going to stand out in that outfit.”
She glanced down at her jeans and boots. “Oh. Well, yes, I have one at home.”
“You’d best send one of your people for it, then.”
He was right about that; time was growing short. She sent a text message, then looked up at him. “Tell me you don’t have a tux hidden beneath your clothes, like Superman.”
He laughed. “Not this trip. No, my tux is in my bag. I never leave home without it.”
“Just like James Bond, are you?”
“I don’t think Bond ever has to press his tux.”
“Probably not. Look, there’s Victoria, back with my crime scene techs Paulie and Louisa. They look good as caterers, don’t you think? Let’s get this party started, then we can remotely access the interview with Kochen.”
22
Nicholas was impressed with Paulie Jernigan and Louisa Barry. Both were clearly competent, both listened carefully to Dr. Browning’s detailed instructions on how the jewels, the room, and the cases should be processed without ruining them. Or upsetting the curator.
When Victoria finished, Paulie said, “Ma’am, no disrespect, but we’ve already got it figured out. We’re gonna use Lightning Spray Redwop on the cases. It leaves almost zero residue and we can clean it off easy with Rain-X glass cleaner.”
Louisa said, “It will work perfectly on the jewels. There’s a cone we spray into that eliminates excess so nothing else will be touched.”
Victoria had one hand on her hip. “Show me how it works.”
They gave her a quick demonstration. “All right, fine by me. We’ll need to work fast, though; the gala will be starting soon. Perhaps we should start with the cases to the side of the Koh-i-Noor and work our way in.”
She turned to Nicholas. “The thief probably leaned here”—she made a motion toward the vitrine to the right of the center case—“and opened the case from behind, like so.”
She unlocked the case, and he could see exactly what she meant.
Victoria continued. “If there are prints to be found, my bet would be on the inside of the vitrine, and on the pavilion—that’s the angled area of the diamond right before the bottom point.”
Paulie said, “Dr. Browning, we’ll need prints from everyone who had access to this room, too. I have my portable fingerprint scanner with me. We need to exclude the people who’ve been in the room today. Mike, did either you or Detective Chief Inspector Drummond touch any of the cases?”
“Probably, without thinking about it,” Nicholas said.
“Mine are on file, as you know,” Mike said. She cocked a finger at him. “Fingerprint him, Paulie.”
Nicholas held out his hands, palms up. “This is easier than waking up a print tech in London to have my card sent over.”
Paulie was quick and thorough, and within five minutes, they were done and back in Bo’s office, Nicholas rubbing the ink off his fingers with an alcohol hand wipe.
“Ah, here’s a text message from Ben. They’ve arrived at Federal Plaza. Evidently Anatoly came quietly enough, outward goodwill, all cooperative. He already had his lawyer with him, since they were headed to the gala together. Ben will set us up to watch and communicate with him remotely.”
Nicholas would rather talk to the man in person, but there was too much happening here at the Met, a tense undercurrent he recognized from his many field assignments. His gut told him something was wrong, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what.
Mike dialed Ben’s number, and when he answered, Nicholas heard him say, “I’ll be sending you a remote link in a couple of minutes. Oh, yeah, Anatoly’s lawyer’s making noises about filing a writ of habeas corpus.”
“Let him. Take Anatoly apart, Ben,” Mike said, and punched off. She said to Nicholas, “Five more minutes and we’ll be all set up.”
Nicholas said, “I’m going to do some snooping.” He reached into his leather bag and pulled out his laptop.
“Into?”
He eyed her. “The truth? I know you’d rather wait for your people, but time’s running out. I’m going into Elaine’s journal. Like I said, she used an online diary, has for many years. With any luck, she’ll have recorded what she was doing in the days leading up to her death.”
“You don’t need her computer?”
“Nope.”
“You can really break into her journal using this program?”
“Yes. Elaine’s data will be under a basic encryption. Won’t take me but a minute.”
Nicholas didn’t bother mentioning he’d been a competent hacker since he was nine, and this would hardly pose a problem.
Mike inclined her head. Sometimes the camel’s nose under the tent was useful. “Then have at it. We need all the information we can get.”
He hesitated for a moment over the keyboard. Elaine. He’d been forcing her from his mind all day, but now she came back, smiling, teasing, arguing in that clipped Oxford accent. His friend. His colleague. Now he would invade her private thou
With three keystrokes, he launched his program and remotely hacked into her system.
Elaine was fastidiously organized, so he had no trouble finding her journal. It was her habit to write in the morning, stream of consciousness, whatever came to mind.
He browsed straight to the end, saw the entries ended nearly a week before her murder, which was strange, considering how religious she was about recording her thoughts.
He started tracking backward in time.
“You’re frowning. What’s wrong?”
He glanced up. “Some of her posts seem to have words and sentences blacked out, or missing entirely. Sentences drop off mid-thought.” And that made no sense. Why would Elaine black anything out? Or delete sentences? He flipped through entries going back a couple of months and saw the same strange blackouts. She wouldn’t have done this. No, someone else had already hacked in, someone who knew exactly what to erase from Elaine’s journal, and how to cover his tracks.
Someone very, very good, and that someone had also probably killed her and taken her laptop.
But Nicholas was better. He might be able to reconstruct the pages. And the entire journal would be cached on Elaine’s laptop, if they ever found it.
He felt his adrenaline spike. He hit three keys together and took a screen shot of the journal displayed and copied it to his laptop, then did it twice more, collecting all the information he could for the month leading up to her death.
He flipped back to the screen with her journal to capture another week. It was gone.
“Oh, bugger.”
“What’s wrong? What did you find, Nicholas?”
He couldn’t believe his eyes. The entries were disappearing, one by one. He tried everything, but his actions only made the words delete faster.
“I didn’t realize there was a self-destruct built into the system. I thought there were blackouts, but it was the virus deleting the entries. They’re all gone.”
Mike said, “Why would Elaine have a self-destruct program on her journal?”
“I don’t know.”
But they both knew that was a lie. Obviously there was something important in Elaine’s journals she didn’t want strangers to see. He couldn’t stand it.
“I captured a bit of it before it deleted itself. Let me see what’s here.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard. “Here’s a fragment from a week ago. Brought VK on board. And the day before that, Vlad, then two blank words, 1:00 p.m.”
“A meeting? And there was nothing more?”
“Victoria said she saw Vladimir Kochen with Elaine at the museum café at lunchtime. It must have been a scheduled meeting.”
Mike leaned over his shoulder, reading his screen. “Brought VK on board. After a meeting with him the day before? Does it sound to you like she hired him?”
He hated it, hated it. There it was, in black and white. Proof, in her own words, that Elaine was directly involved with Anatoly’s soldier.
Mike’s phone buzzed. “It’s Ben. He’s run into a couple of snags, but it won’t be long now before he’ll have the remote feed up and running.” She found herself patting his shoulder, probably the last thing Mr. Super-Spy wanted or needed. “Look, we’ll see what Ben gets out of Anatoly. Soon I’ll have Elaine’s bank records, so we’ll know if there are any money transfers to Kochen.”
Nicholas scanned the rest of the screen shots he’d captured. Words stood out here and there, fragments, but they made no sense.
He tried a program he’d written to reconstruct coded messages received from assets in the field during his time with the Foreign Office. He fed the copied screenshots into it and watched the words reassemble themselves on the screen in the correct order. He slammed back in the chair, his eyes never leaving the screen.
“Bloody hell. Look at this, Mike.”
23
Mike looked at the screen, but it made no sense, and she said so.
Nicholas pointed at the screen. “It’s garbled, but there are several key phrases, fragments of thoughts. Scared something is going to happen. I need to keep myself safe. She clearly knew something was up.”
Mike said, “And you’re thinking she hired Kochen to keep her safe?”
“It looks like it. See here, Vlad escorting me to work. Feel safer already.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, Nicholas. I mean, if she felt like she was in danger, why wouldn’t she tell Bo? She was a cop, tough and smart—no, I don’t understand this at all. And why, of all things, hire one of Anatoly’s men?”
Nicholas was very afraid he did understand. The murdered Russian hadn’t only been her bodyguard, he’d also been her accomplice. He said, “She would have told Bo unless she was involved and Kochen was part of it.” Saying the words aloud somehow made them more than simply possible, it made them true. But why were they murdered? He knew to his gut there was something else going on here just as he knew time was running out.
Mike said, “Here’s a text from Ben. It’s starting. We can talk about it after the interview.”
Nicholas had to admit Andrei Anatoly wasn’t at all what he’d expected. With his mane of silver hair and black-framed glasses, he looked more like a diplomat or a university president than a crime boss. He was a big man, all buffed and polished, wearing an Armani tux if he didn’t miss his guess, being escorted into a small, white-walled, purely impersonal room to a table with four chairs, two on either side.
“He looks a treat, doesn’t he?” Mike said. “Talk about false advertising.”
Then came a tall, elegant man, slender, fit, tanned, not wearing Armani, but still a well-fitted tux. Both had clearly been intercepted on their way to the gala. Nicholas bet that had made Anatoly mad. Good.
The men took seats across from Special Agent Ben Houston. Three FBI agents stood leaning against the opposite wall, their arms crossed over their chests, their Glocks clearly in view of Anatoly, and they looked on with slitted eyes.
Anatoly leaned back in his hard metal seat like he didn’t have a care in the world and smiled pleasantly at Ben.
Mike said, “Poor Ben. He’s had no rest, and he looks whipped. He better perk up; Anatoly’s lawyer might look like a senator in that beautiful suit, but he’s got the personality and instincts of a great white. I’ve gone up against him before, and I didn’t like it a bit.”
Ben introduced himself, thanked the men for coming, then said, “Let’s get started. As you know—”
The lawyer interrupted him. “Agent Houston, my name is Lawrence Campbell, and I represent Mr. Anatoly. I want it on the record that Mr. Anatoly is here voluntarily, as a courtesy to the FBI. However, he is a very busy man and tonight is the gala at the Met. As you know, Mr. Anatoly is not only a lover of the arts, he is also one of the museum’s benefactors. He is naturally very involved in tonight’s gala unveiling England’s crown jewels. We hope you will not keep him or me long.”
Ben said smoothly, “We certainly appreciate Mr. Anatoly’s cooperation. Let me hurry right along, then. Mr. Anatoly, would you please tell the whereabouts of one of your men, Vladimir Kochen?”
Campbell said agreeably, “This sort of question is a waste of Mr. Anatoly’s time, Agent Houston. We know as well as you do that Mr. Kochen was found murdered yesterday, in, I believe, an English police officer’s apartment.”
Anatoly nodded. “I was very saddened to hear of Vlad’s unfortunate death. He was a valued employee until a year ago, when he left my employ. I have not seen him since.”
“May I ask why, then, sir, Mr. Kochen’s cell phone records show”—Ben glanced down at several sheets of paper at his elbow—“ah, yes, here it is, at least a half-dozen calls to both your home phone and your cell
Anatoly put a hand on Campbell’s arm to quiet him and said easily, “I said I had not seen him for a year, Agent Houston, not that I hadn’t spoken to him. If you would know, Vlad wished to return to my employ. We were conducting negotiations, I suppose you could say.”
Nicholas said, “Anatoly’s accent is vaguely European, certainly not Russian. I suppose he’s been able to smooth it out living in the States—how long?”
Mike cocked her head, “He came with his parents, at the tender age of twenty-two. It’s important to him to fit in, and that means getting rid of his Russian accent. He wants to be viewed as a pillar of the community.”
On the screen, Anatoly leaned forward, put his hands on the table. “I assure you, Agent Houston, I had nothing whatsoever to do with poor Vlad’s death. I am as mystified as you seem to be.”
“Tell me, why did Mr. Kochen quit, Mr. Anatoly? Or was he fired?”
“An unfortunate incident. He was not respectful to one of my sons. Yuri told me of it, and I had no choice but to fire him. Our negotiations involved Vlad apologizing to my son and asking his forgiveness. This would have happened if not—” He stopped, gave a creditable Gallic shrug.
Nicholas said to Mike, “This is going nowhere, and Anatoly knows it. He’s hardly going to walk in and admit to murdering Kochen and Elaine.”
As if Anatoly could hear through the video feed, he said, “If we are finished here, the gala will be starting soon, and I don’t wish to be late. Like every other guest tonight, I wish to see the crown jewels, especially the Koh-i-Noor.” And both Anatoly and his lawyer started to rise. Ben shook his head. “A few more questions, Mr. Anatoly.”
Mr. Campbell grunted in impatience. “What other questions would you possibly have to ask my client?”