Coercion Read online

  “I cannot do that.”

  The mechanical voice did not waiver at the rebuff. “Of course you can, Leo. It is a simple choice, a trade really. You give me the codes, and I let your daughter live.”

  Leo’s heart jumped back into his throat as the percussion recommenced in his ears. He threw down the phone and raced to the front door, his finger poised on the Makarov’s trigger. All was quiet. He checked and double-checked the black-and-white screen of the intercom, unsure if he should trust the fuzzy image. The guard appeared to be at his post. Leo pushed the talk button. “Anything unusual to report, Arkady?”

  “Nothing, Sir.”

  “Thank you. Keep a watchful eye; I think something may be up.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Enough with diplomacy. Leo returned to his daughter’s room and picked up the receiver. Maya was still sleeping so he spoke softly, but firmly. “K chortoo! Go to Hell!”

  “No, Deputy Antsiferov, it is your daughter who is going to Hell, and you are the one who is sending her there … Last chance Leo. The codes. Do not make me do it.”

  The speaker sounded sober and sincere. Leo clenched his jaw. He was by his daughter’s bed, gun in hand, guard at door. In all probability it was a Ministry security check—severe but not without precedent.

  “No.”

  Three simple words followed, words that made it difficult for him to ask for anything ever again: “As you wish.”

  The scene that followed burned itself into Leo’s retinas. It would be there every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life. Little Maya suddenly lifted her curly locks and opened her big blue eyes to look up at him with a scared look on her angelic face. She said “Papa” in her sweet soprano, and then she died.

  Leo stared in disbelief. It was as though someone had turned out a light, Maya’s light, the light of his life. His angel was dead.

  Some time later—whether seconds or hours he was not sure—Leo remembered the telephone. He peeled himself off his daughter’s corpse and picked up the receiver.

  “I’ll get you! I’ll get you if—”

  “Listen, Leo! Listen!” The mechanical voice cut him off with its icy command. “Go to Georgy’s room.”

  Chapter 2

  Siberia, August 1990

  This is no time for self-pity, Leo thought. You have a problem to solve.

  Problem to solve? More like disaster to avert. With one careless slip of the tongue, just a few superfluous words in a bar, he had set his friend Andrey up to receive a similar midnight call. Leo had to undo what he had done, and quickly. Each sweep of the helicopter’s rotors brought Andrey that much closer to sharing his hell. The question was how.

  Cruel coincidence had landed both Leo and Andrey in Krasnoyarsk on the same evening. Fate had picked up the job from there. Somewhere in the endless stream of vodka and war stories Leo had let it slip that he was piloting a helicopter to Novosibirsk early in the morning. Then, as if prompted by the Devil’s own cue, Foreign Minister Sugurov had called his Chief of Staff: he needed Andrey in Moscow.

  “We’re in luck sir. Leo is here with me and he happens to be flying to Novosibirsk in a few hours. If I go with him, I can catch the early flight from there. That will get me to the Ministry by ten.”

  Leo had choked on his drink as he heard those words. That was six hours ago. He still tasted the vodka.

  What Leo had not let slip was how or why he was flying. That story could never just slip out. The truth was, he had used rank, intimidation, and lies to gain the use of a military helicopter to smuggle a briefcase of God-knows-what to a dead-drop in Novosibirsk. He was playing messenger for his merciless masters.

  Leo suspected that his masters had many clever ways of circumventing Soviet security, but he had few details on how they worked or even what they wanted, and he didn’t care to speculate. One bugbear, however, managed to gnaw at his dreams: In all likelihood, there were dozens if not hundreds of slaves like him out there, a plague of conscripts secretly ravaging Russia—perhaps even the world. Who were they? What did they want? Where would it end?

  Although Leo had no clue who his masters were, he knew they expected him to be alone in the helicopter. They would likely interpret Andrey’s presence on this secret mission as an offensive maneuver, and act accordingly. If it were not so serious, the outlandish coincidence would almost be funny. Leo wasn’t laughing.

  Gazing through the helicopter windshield toward the black horizon, thinking about the void that occupied the place where his future had been, Leo was ready to be honest with himself. He had gotten drunk and let his plans slip because subconsciously, he wanted Andrey to probe.

  Leo had kept his dreadful secret for a year, but he would not be able to hold it together for much longer. The stress of constantly deceiving everyone he loved and continually betraying everything he believed in was killing him: cancer of the soul. Ironically, in some regards it wasn’t killing him fast enough. Not knowing who his Masters were, what they had in mind, when they were watching him, or where this would lead, was literally driving him mad. He did not want to go out that way. If only he could find some release, some way to share his pain…

  Leo wiped his eyes. As much as he had longed to do so, he had not told his wife the truth about Maya’s death or Georgy’s imminent peril. He knew Oxana would not be able to handle it. She, like everyone else, still believed that five-year-old Maya had died of a rare heart condition.

  Leo’s was in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. By withholding such crucial information from his wife, he was choking off the intimacy that fed their marriage. Yet all he could do was watch in helpless horror while it slowly suffocated before his eyes. The only alternative was to tell Oxana the truth. But then she would share his hell and Georgy would lose his mother. That was no alternative at all.

  Leo was desperate for the opportunity to win back his life and his wife’s heart. He needed to find a way out. If anyone could contrive a solution to his predicament, Leo thought, Andrey Demerko could.

  Andrey was the best strategist Leo knew, and a powerful operative as well. Even with Andrey’s help, however, he feared the situation was hopeless. Leo was no fool himself, and he couldn’t even fathom how to begin to fight. The problem was the absolute anonymity of the powerful people who controlled him.

  How do you attack an invisible enemy? Sure, he could try to uncover them, but how could he possibly avoid all the conscripted eyes and wary ears while scouring the darkness for his masters? How could he wipe them all out before they counterattacked? How do you thrust a sword when you don’t know who is friend and who is foe? Where do you turn when you can’t trust anybody? If they could reach a Deputy-Minister, why not a Minister? Why not a President? Gorbachev has a daughter. It was an agonizing situation for a soldier and a patriot to be in, to have the knowledge that the Devil was at work in your beloved country, and yet be powerless to crusade against him.

  Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Leo hesitated in turning to his friend only because he knew that Andrey had a profound sense of duty. Whatever Leo’s excuse, and regardless of his circumstance, with all that he had done for his masters, Leo was now a traitor and a criminal, and Andrey would feel duty-bound to turn him in.

  Leo clung to the hope that Andrey would not choose that course. He was counting on his friend to find another means of satisfying honor, gambling that Andrey would defer to a duty that came before career and country. Andrey also had two children, children the same ages as Maya and Georgy. Because of them, Leo figured that his chances of enlisting Andrey were fifty-fifty, and he knew that those were the best odds he would get.

  Leo had been on the verge of broaching the subject in the bar, and found himself feeling like Eve about to hand Adam the apple. Then Sugurov’s call had disrupted the collegial atmosphere, crumbling his will and providing a welcome chance to procrastinate.

  Perhaps now was the time? They were still three hundred kilometers from Novosibirsk. It woul
d normally take the Mi-28 only an hour to cover that distance at full throttle, but to avoid radar Leo was flying contour to the ground at low-altitude so their flight time would be closer to ninety minutes. Would that be long enough?

  His alternatives were very limited at this point. To save his friend, Leo had to find a way to make sure his masters did not see Andrey arrive with him. One option Leo had was to tell Andrey the truth, hoping to enlist his help but at least gaining enough understanding that he could then drop Andrey off somewhere before anyone saw them together. Alternatively, if Leo did not confide in Andrey, he would then have to contrive some inevitably far-fetched reason for getting his colleague out of the helicopter prior to reaching the airport. What could that possibly be? Leo started to brainstorm, but stopped himself abruptly. Who was he fooling? The time to talk had arrived.

  Leo tried to imagine how he would cold-start the discussion without a vodka-lubricant. Andrey, you probably think I’m flying this way for practice, but actually it’s to avoid radar. You see, this is an un-logged flight and I’m… No, that was no good. He would just have to open his heart and let it all tumble out.

  Admittedly, the setting was ideal for such a discussion. With Andrey down in the gunner’s seat and Leo above in the pilot’s, neither could see the other’s face. And it was dark. All in all the conditions mimicked those of a church confessional. So why not?

  Leo took a deep breath and began. “Andrey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s time I told you how Maya died.”

  For a second there was a silence as, Leo assumed, Andrey tried to digest the implication of what he had just heard. Then the world erupted around them.

  After an explosive crash somewhere behind them, a proverbial starter’s cannon, the helicopter shook violently and then dropped into a plummeting spin. Time slowed down as Leo’s mind raced and the rotors passed one by one. Had another aircraft hit them? Did a fuel leak catch fire? Were they fired upon? The helicopter was behaving as though the whole tail were gone. It was uncontrollable. He knew it didn’t matter at this point what was causing the ground to come up so fast, what counted was the effect.

  As a veteran pilot, Leo knew that the only thing you could do without a tail was brace for impact. He thought of Oxana and Georgy, and how he loved them. He thought of Andrey and Sugurov, and how he had betrayed them. He thought of Maya, and how he would see her now. Strangely enough, it occurred to Leo that he was not scared. Perhaps he had no fear left for himself. Perhaps he just welcomed death. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and thought about how sad it was for a man to go to his death knowing that he had failed.

  Chapter 3

  Three months later. San Francisco, California

  Alex smiled so hard he cracked his pen light between his teeth. So the money’s back in the US... He folded the bank statement twice and slipped it into his coveralls. Six weeks of virtual dead ends, of endless interviews in faltering Portuguese, and—

  Click.

  The sound was as sweet and subtle as a divorce attorney. Alex closed his eyes for a moment of Zen before spinning his chair around to look into the barrel of a Smith & Wesson. Then he looked up into the eyes of the murderer who wielded it. Alex wasn’t sure which was uglier, but he definitely knew which one he wanted to hear from first.

  Until two seconds ago, this had been the first case that Alex had really enjoyed since placing International Private Investigations in the San Diego phone book five months earlier. The preceding string of inter-spousal espionage and missing-person cases had paid his modest rent, but none had engaged his hungry heart. Fortunately, The Case of the Brazilian Boomerang came along and reminded Alex of the dream he had left the CIA to pursue. Fortunately?

  Brazilian Boomerang seemed to be a typical take-the-money-and-run case at first. Ethan Harper had embezzled 2.8 million dollars from his partners, Alex’s clients, and run off to Sao Paulo with his Brazilian girlfriend. Typical case or not, Alex was pleased to be back in the international arena, and to have something more than a divorce settlement at stake. It only got better from there.

  For starters, Ethan-the-embezzler and his breathtaking Brazilian belle Rosa appeared to be a clever couple. Rosa, Alex discovered, had been insightful enough to pre-arrange a new identity for Ethan in Brazil—or so it seemed at first. She had even taught Ethan to sign a corresponding new signature that bore no resemblance to his own. Accordingly, between stepping off the plane in Sao Paulo and passing through customs at Guarulhos International, Ethan Harper became Carlos Ramos, the Brazilian equivalent of Bill Smith. That was when the chase became a hunt and Alex became inspired.

  After piecing back together what truly happened during Ethan’s first forty-eight hours in Brazil, Alex understood that his first impression was incorrect. Only half of the couple was truly clever, that half being Rosa.

  Rosa used Ethan to steal and launder his partnership’s funds. Then she disposed of him like a condom whose dirty job was done. She had not flushed him down the toilet, but close enough. Rosa and her bona fide Brazilian husband, the real Carlos Ramos, had used Ethan to establish a false trail that could be easily tracked to Sao Paulo, but then followed no further than Carlos’s mistress’s flowerbed.

  The murdering Ramoses firewalls didn’t stop with planting poor Ethan. They spent sixty thousand dollars of the scam’s proceeds on a couple of new identities, complete with US passports, and then they left Brazil behind. It was a very clever scheme they had conjured up; Alex almost admired them.

  When the nouveau riche eventually resurfaced, it was in San Francisco. That was a pleasant twist. Alex’s brother Frank lived in the Bay Area, and a visit was long overdue. The twins only had each other, and still they were letting their blossoming careers interfere. Alex made a silent vow and returned his thoughts to more pressing matters.

  The Ramos’s overnight move from a tenement in Sao Paulo to a high-rise in San Francisco was the equivalent of getting greedy—the trademark mistake of the rapidly rich. Nonetheless, had that been their only error Alex might never have caught up to Rosa and Carlos. Fortunately for Alex, however, people are never as flawless in person as on paper.

  Four months earlier, when the scam first began, the intoxicating allure of Ethan’s cash had stifled the jealous pangs that would otherwise have besieged Carlos—a man who had sent his beautiful wife to share another’s bed. A month after that, however, that buzz had worn off, and Carlos moved across the street to stay with Maria for the remainder of phase one.

  If Rosa had made a crucially shrewd move in choosing Ethan as her mark, then Carlos had made a critically foolish one in selecting Maria as his mistress. Already hot from the cold shoulder Carlos gave her upon Rosa’s return, Maria’s simmering Latin blood began to boil when she later found Ethan Harper planted in her flowerbed. By the time she walked into Alex’s temporary office in response to his missing-person advertisement, she was positively steaming. Alex learned the Portuguese word for vendetta that day, vingança, and had mimicked it to himself in raspy bass as though it were a classic line from The Godfather. Vingança.

  That had been three weeks ago. After tracking the Ramoses from Sao Paulo to Mexico City to LA, Alex followed the couple’s serpentine trail further north until it eventually stopped at a new high-rise in San Francisco. That was yesterday evening. The find meant that Alex would be paid and his clients would have their revenge, but revenge wasn’t their primary concern. They wanted their money back.

  Had Alex called in the authorities immediately, the money would likely have vanished. So he decided to locate it first, quickly and quietly. Alex earned a gold star for quick; it took him less than a day. But as his new predicament confirmed, he had flunked quiet.

  “Stay in the chair. Hands on the back of your head, fingers interlocked. Do it slowly,” Carlos said, inching his way forward from the doorway in shooter’s stance.

  Alex knew Carlos did not have a record, but he had obviously watched his share of cop shows. So much the better
.

  “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Alex Ferris. I’m with the FBI.”

  Carlos’s eyes darted left and right. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Down in the car.” They were on the eighteenth floor of the Marquis Towers, San Francisco’s newest luxury condominium complex. “Dave’s supposed to be watching out for your return. Guess he’s not doing a very good job.”

  As he spoke, Alex sized the man up. They were about the same height, a whisker shy of six feet, and at thirty-four Carlos was just two years older than Alex. The similarities stopped there. Carlos sported the telltale signs of a downward-spiraling beer lover: the last notch on the belt, the puffy face, the once-muscular frame now upholstered with fat. Alex could take Carlos, no problem there. It was Smith & Wesson that worried him.

  Carlos’s eyes continued darting as he analyzed this news, but Smith & Wesson didn’t waiver. “You’re dressed like a custodian, rather than a Fibbi. You got that look though. You got ID?”

  “Sure. It’s in my back pocket—”

  “Don’t move. Keep your right hand where it is. Left hand only, thumb and forefinger. First the piece, then the wallet.” Carlos crouched lower as he spoke.

  Alex did has he was told, laying down his Glock and his wallet, then he put his hand back behind his head. He didn’t interlock his fingers this time.

  “Kick ‘em forward.”

  Again, Alex did as he was told.

  Keeping the gun in his right hand, Carlos tossed the Glock behind him. Then he took the wallet in his left and flipped it open. “Alex Ferris, International Private Investigations.” He looked back at Alex. “There’s no partner downstairs.”