The next man, introduced by Golitsin to the others earlier that evening as Nicky-no last name, no formal introduction, just plain Nicky-sat for a moment, sucking deeply from a black che-root, bored out of his mind, trying to entertain himself watching the safecrackers at work. Dressed head to toe in shiny black leather, down to his dapper biker boots, he was the only man present who did not get the executive-suite dress code. He was also the only non-employee of Konevitch Associates, the only one not hired by Golitsin over the past year for what they brought to this table.
Lacking a KGB background, he was also happily clueless about the reporting procedures.
Eventually the silence grabbed his attention and he noticed everybody staring at him. He crushed his cigarette on the tabletop, flashed an amused sneer, then held it long enough for everybody to get the message. Nicky came from a different world, one without silly protocols, a world with but one simple rule: rules are meant to be broken.
But even without the last name-despite never having seen him face-to-face-half the men around the table were sure they knew who he was. A photo of his face had hung in a place of honor on KGB walls long enough to grow mold. A much younger face, certainly. A little thinner, maybe, without the cute ponytail laced with gray that bounced when he strutted. One with considerably less scars, absent the gallery of tattoos on the neck, and certainly before the huge nose had been rearranged into a bent banana.
Nicky, aka Igor, aka Leon, or a half dozen other transient aliases he had used and thrown away in his illustrious career, was in fact one Nickolas Kozyrev, head of the largest crime syndicate in Russia.
How ironic that they were all now sharing the same table, smoking and sipping coffee like old pals. In their previous lives, they had spent countless hours chasing Nicky around the shadows. Typical gruntwork for the police ordinarily, except Nicky's kingdom had tentacles in every Russian city, webs that stretched across Europe and Asia, and bustling branch offices in Brighton Beach and Miami. Nicky was known and wanted by police forces from New York to Timbuktu. Three different American presidents and an army of other world leaders had bombarded two different general secretaries with strong requests to get Nicky off the street.
Among assorted other enterprises, Nicky wholesaled kidnapped girls to whorehouses, owned a string of porn studios, blackmarketed, smuggled arms, traded in stolen cars, gems, artwork, pushed heroin and an assortment of other illegal pharmaceuticals, and most recently, was making a loud splash in Russia's burgeoning executive kidnapping market. Wherever there was illicit profit to be made, Nicky pushed his sticky fingers in. Contract murder had long been a mainstay of his repertoire. The sheer breadth, expanse, and outright violence of his operation proved too considerable for the police to handle; not to mention wildly exaggerated suspicions that Nicky owned half the senior police officers in the country.
A quarter was more like it.
Thus the KBG was brought into the hunt and encouraged to use every filthy trick in its arsenal.
And despite every effort, despite years of exhausting work, they had never come close. Not even close.
"Tell me again," Nicky opened, his eyes dancing playfully around the table, "exactly how this guy got away."
He knew damn well how Konevitch escaped. They had already been over it, in detail. Twice. But he despised these former KGB boys. He would keep asking again and again, because it amused him to rub their faces in it.
Making no effort to disguise his irritation, Golitsin said, "Why does it matter? He got away. Now we'll find him."
"It matters because I say it does."
"Is that right?"
"Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out how all your morons got made asses of." His lips curled and he watched Golitsin. "Remind me, how old is this Konevitch guy? Who trained him to be such a Houdini? The KGB? The army?"
"Vladimir was the moron who let this happen. He was your man, last time I checked."
"Yeah, on loan to you for the past year, last time I checked. When I sent you Vladimir, he was a real killing machine. Your cretins polluted him, turned him stupid and clumsy."
Golitsin held his breath and counted to ten. An hour before, they had sniped back and forth like this for a full fifteen minutes. He gathered as much patience as he could muster and said, "Tell me what your people are doing."
Nicky had broken his spell of boredom and gotten his blood; he could wait until the next opportunity rolled around. He fought back a smile and said, "All right. Word's been passed to all my guys in East Europe. Since we got their passports, they'll need new ones, right? So what are they gonna do? Try and buy phonies, right? Every counterfeiter and half-assed fabricator in Hungary's been warned to pass word the second they make contact."
Golitsin nodded. Sounded good.
