“Your call,” Tommy said.
Beeks had his cell phone out.
“Put that away,” Nico said.
Beeks looked at him, surprised, but he folded it closed.
“No surprises,” Nico said to Tommy.
“Six K, Tommy gets ten percent,” Beeks told DiMello.
Babs nodded. It would be marked money, of course, and Nico wasn’t going to have it for long, but they needed the full amount to make the buy or there’d be no case. “Can we shake it out of 100 Centre?” she asked the lieutenant.
Shorthand for Police Plaza, NYPD headquarters. “It’s worth a shot,” the lieutenant said.
Babs figured the odds were good they’d get it. If they could break the Kennedy heist, there’d be plenty of credit to go around, and everybody involved would be rolling in clover.
“You run the numbers?” the lieutenant asked.
Lydie Temple had downloaded the image from Beeks’s cell. There was a control code stamped on the ammo box, and she compared it to the manifest from Holloman AFB. She got a match. Nico was fencing military supplies.
“Twenty ammo canisters out of five hundred,” the lieutenant said. “Who’s bidding on the rest?”
Babs looked at Phoebe Kreuz. “ATF in Phoenix thinks it’s going to be sold to the Mexican cartels,” she said. “That’s an educated guess.”
“I’m not saying Jerry Chapin’s wrong,” Phoebe said, “but if the cartels were the end buyer, it would be a done deal.”
“I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Nico Constantine’s not a big enough player to swing a million-dollar sale.”
“If he can lay his hands on it and piece out a part of the shipment, then it’s still in New York.”
“We have surveillance on Nico?” the lieutenant asked.
“We do,” Phoebe said, meaning ATF.
“Either he picks up the munitions or, more likely, arranges a physical meet, because he can’t front the money, he needs his buyer there,” the lieutenant said. “So a warehouse, a pallet on the back of a truck, whatever. He has to make contact.”
“Nice to get a photo op with Guzenko,” Babs said.
“They won’t meet face-to-face, not until the buy, if then,” Phoebe said. “It’ll be the other guy, Guzenko’s bagman.”
“Can you monitor his phone calls?” the lieutenant asked.
“Nico? Not if he’s using a throwaway cell.”
Lydie Temple cleared her throat.
“Ma’am?” the lieutenant asked her.
“I know somebody who might help,” she said.
“And who would that be?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” she told him.
The lieutenant raised his eyebrows.
“Is this the same source that gave us Ludmilla Shevardnadze and the computer shop?” Phoebe Kreuz asked.
Lydie nodded.
“I’d trust it,” Phoebe told the lieutenant.
“Okay,” he said. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, people. We’ve got what’s-her-butt, so we know how they hacked into the shippers’ websites, and she’ll roll over on Guzenko to avoid deportation. We’ve also got Nico Constantine, who’s ready to sell us stolen goods. What we’re missing is a direct connection between Guzenko and the contraband. Let’s find it.”
They broke up to work the phones.
Nico called at seven. Tommy was at a bar off Ocean Parkway, watching a rerun of Highlander on cable, playing with a plate of Buffalo wings and nursing a beer. Nico gave him a location, a time, and very specific instructions. Then he hung up. The chicken wings had gotten cold and gummy. Tommy didn’t have much appetite. His stomach was sour.
Truth be told, he really didn’t want to make the meet. He was setting Nico up, and when it went down, you wouldn’t have to be a particle physicist to read Tommy’s part in all of it. But he didn’t have a choice. The cops had him over a barrel, and who knew from the Russians? Maybe it was back to front, and Nico was the one setting Tommy up. Word on the street was already out about what had happened to Kaufman, turned skinside inside, his guts in his lap, and a Colombian necktie, his throat cut and his tongue hanging out underneath his jaw.
A lesson for a fink. If you eat with the devil, use a long spoon.
No help for it. Tommy pushed the plate of wings away uneaten and settled his tab. On the sidewalk outside, he called Beeks. They had forty-five minutes.
“Is there enough time for you to make this happen?” Lydie asked.
She was on an unsecured line to Felix Soto.
Felix wasn’t happy talking on an open phone, but it was a calculated risk. Chances were nobody was intercepting their conversation, except for NSA, of course. “Satellite uplink,” he said.
“Neither of these guys is going to be wearing a wire.”
“Understood. All we need is a cell phone.”
She gave him Beeks’s number. “They’ll be frisked when they go in,” she said, “and Guzenko’s security will disable the cells first thing. You’ll lose the signal.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Once we triangulate the meeting place, we can monitor the EM radiation. The other guys, cell or landline.”
She knew Felix controlled the technology.
“Any idea of the general neighborhood?” he asked.
“Brighton Beach,” she told him.
“So it’s not the actual handover.”
“Guzenko doesn’t want to buy a pig in a poke.”
“They bury their mistakes, the Georgians,” Felix said.
Café Kavkaz was in the shadow of the elevated tracks, the Q line that took you to Coney Island a couple of stops down.
The restaurant on the ground floor was long and low, with pressed-tin ceilings and old wooden paddle fans that stirred the air only slightly. The lighting was subdued but not dim. At the front, there were booths along one wall, the seats furnished in worn burgundy leather, and a bar along the other. Table seating was toward the back. There was a small stage and a three-piece balalaika band. The room’s acoustics were hard, and the noise level high, the place better than half full.
Nico was waiting at the bar when Tommy and Beeks walked in. He waved them over. He was drinking Moskovskaya, straight up in a chilled glass, with lemon peel. He signaled the bartender for two more. Not that it would have been Tommy’s choice. His guts were churning with anxiety.
They clicked rims.
Nico knocked his drink back. “Check out those two cougars on the prowl,” he said, grinning, lifting his chin.
Tommy glanced over his shoulder.
DiMello and Kreuz looked the part, he thought, sharp pants suits, good haircuts, neither one of them a dog. Kreuz was teasing the bartender, talking the virtues of a flight of vodka, a tasting. DiMello was babbling away mindlessly on her cell.
“We’re not here to talk pussy,” Beeks said.
Nico shrugged. “They’ll still be here when we’re done, and maybe drunk enough by then to handle a twofer.”
If you wanted your back broken and your limp dick handed to you, Tommy thought.
The headwaiter came over. “Your table is ready,” he said.
They followed him. He took them to a stairway next to the kitchen.
“Private room,” Nico said.
The headwaiter tipped his head. They went upstairs without him.
The muscle was waiting for them on the second floor. They patted them down, as Lydie had predicted, and took their cell phones, Nico’s too. They shook out the batteries and handed them back. Nico suddenly seemed less confident about where this was all going. Tommy had no confidence at all.
It was a long railroad corridor. There were in fact a couple of private dining rooms to either side, which they passed, but the office was at the very back of the building, and they went in.
Bagratyön was waiting.
It was very basic. A desk, a phone. No computer. Some old oak filing cabinets that might have dated back to the Truman administration. It wasn’t a command post. It was a trap.