She took a sip of her drink, then sat back and studied me for a moment with her head tilted slightly. After a long second, she sighed with exasperation. “We don’t have anything on Sokolov, and that’s the truth. Nothing. Which in itself is curious.” She paused, then asked, “What do you know about his background? Do you know when he came to this country?”
I remembered what Daphne’s sister had told me. “He got married in 1983, and I don’t think he’d been here that long. A couple of years, maybe.”
She nodded like it confirmed something that was burgeoning in her mind. “So if he came to America in ’81 or ’82, the questions we need to ask are, where did he come from and how did he get here?”
“His sister-in-law said he came from Russia.”
“Well, that’s why I ask. Because it wasn’t that easy to leave the Soviet Union back then. Under the Communists, no one was allowed to leave. The only people who made it here were dissidents and defectors who managed to escape and were granted political asylum after they got out-and they’re all on record. We know who they are, and Sokolov isn’t one of them. Then in 1970, after Kuznetsov and his gang of refuseniks tried to hijack their way out of there, Brezhnev agreed to allow some Jews, but only Jews, to leave-and only to Israel. But a lot of them never intended to stay on in Israel. They just used it as a way out and ended up here, in New York.”
Actually, I knew it wasn’t a humanitarian move by the Politburo chiefs, nor were its consequences that great for us. This vast exodus wasn’t just made up of innocent, persecuted Jews. The KGB simultaneously and quietly released thousands of hard-core criminals from the Soviet gulags, the ones who happened to be Jewish, and let them leave. In one swift move that probably gave rise to a lot of mirth in the Kremlin, the KGB dumped these ex-cons on an unsuspecting world-knowing most of them would end up here. We didn’t know which of the immigrants we were taking in had been in jail and if so, for what reason, since the Russians never shared their criminal records with us. Still don’t, for that matter. Fidel Castro, ever the faithful follower of his Soviet mentors, took a page out of the same playbook several years later during the Mariel boatlift, emptying a lot of his jails and shipping them our way, with the ensuing effect it had on crime in South Florida.
“And that policy didn’t change until 1985,” Larisa continued, “when Gorbachev relaxed controls and opened the borders. But you’re saying Sokolov came here around 1981, before Gorby’s policy shift, and I don’t remember seeing a mezuzah or anything like that in the Sokolovs’ apartment. Do we know if Sokolov is Jewish?”
“I don’t. I know his wife is Greek. And they had icons in the entrance hall.”
“Christian icons,” she noted pointedly.
“Yes.”
“Which matches the fact that he’s not on any of our lists either. So if he didn’t defect and if he wasn’t part of the Jewish exodus, then how did he manage to get out of the Soviet Union at a time when no one was allowed out?”
I pondered her words and realized we needed to do a lot more digging into Sokolov.
Assuming that was even his real name.
“Okay. We’ll have a look at that.”
She nodded, then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and I need your help on something. We can’t get hold of the coroner’s report on Yakovlev. Can you get them to release it to us?”
I couldn’t see any harm in that. “Sure.”
“Did it show anything unexpected? Was he drugged?”
I smiled. Just the kind of thing a “counselor for public affairs” would think of asking. “Nothing unusual in his system,” I told her. “He was clean.”
“Look into Sokolov’s background,” she told me. “I’ll keep digging on my end. But let’s agree on something. If we’re going to contain this and bring it to a swift and mutually agreeable conclusion, we need to work together. Even though, like you said, there will be things we can’t tell each other. But we have to try and get past that. We need to be open with each other. Keep each other informed. If this is going to work, we need to share-maybe more than what would normally be considered acceptable.”
I wasn’t sure if she was toying with me or not, if watching what effect she had on men was just a personal little thrill for her or if it was a deliberate tactic to get our brains steamed up and our tongues loosened. Either way, it was breathtakingly effective. On other guys, of course.
“Okay,” I finally said with staggering eloquence. And despite the tumult in my mind, one thing was becoming clearer by the minute: this was all about Sokolov.
They obviously wanted him.
Which meant we had to find him first.
LARISA WATCHED REILLY AND Aparo drive off, then pulled out her phone as she headed home.
“Where is he on Sokolov?” her boss asked.
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“Did you help him along?”
“I gave him something. Pointed him in the right direction.”
“Good,” he told her. “Build on that. Get closer to him. We’ll use whatever resources we have available to help track Sokolov down. But if the FBI manages to find him before we do, you’ll need to make sure we have enough time to get there first.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” she told him. Then she hung up.
She turned down Seventy-eighth, feeling a bit hollow inside. This was definitely turning into the most significant assignment of her career, but not knowing the full story was really starting to grate at her. She hadn’t signed up for this in order to just be a pawn in someone else’s game, and she didn’t like playing a role without knowing the full backstory. Her line of work was all about judgment calls, and she was starting to question why they weren’t telling her the full story, with the obvious answer-the one that piqued her curiosity even more-being that they thought she might act differently if they did.
She had to get the entire story on who Sokolov really was. And given how her access to that information seemed to be blocked from all sides, she hoped Reilly would prove to be as good as they made him out to be.
Until then, she had no choice but to keep playing the game.
23
Daphne Sokolov flinched as she felt the man’s presence close in on her. She was on a hard, cold floor, her hands tied behind her back and attached to some kind of pipe, a replay of what she’d been through at the hotel. Only this time, she was the prisoner of someone else.
She felt the man bend down, heard his clothes crease as he leaned into her. She sensed his hands reaching out to her, then he was pulling off the balaclava he’d covered her head with. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the light, and the man’s face came into focus.
He looked the same, only this time, up close, she could tell that the beard was fake and the glasses too clear to be anything more than a prop.
He stayed uncomfortably close, studying her.
Her eyes darted around to get a look at where he was keeping her. She was in a bare, windowless room, like an office in a light industrial warehouse that hadn’t been used for a while. The floor wasn’t carpeted, just a cold, bare screed. Then she noticed something on the floor next to her captor: a small toiletries pouch, the kind used for travel.
She didn’t quite know why, but the sight alarmed her.
He stayed unnervingly silent. After a moment, she summoned up the courage to speak.
“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do you want from me?”
He just stared at her quietly, then his eyes dropped to his pouch and he unzipped it. He reached in and pulled out a couple of small plastic ampoules. They were like the ones used for eye drops, with the snap-off tips. And these did have eye drops in them, but they were not intended for soothing dry or sore eyes.