Suarez would pay big.
Duggin had gone away happy too. The “backhoe” was a year’s worth of monthly reports on when and where the NYPD vice and drug teams would conduct raids. Duggin’s specialty was sex trafficking, and his crew ran more than a dozen massage parlors in the city. Buryak had been amused when, after he won the auction, Duggin had brayed a laugh. “Bought myself a back-hoe. Damn.”
As a cover, yes, VB did move industrial machinery and made a fair profit doing so. But the golden kernel of the operation was what took up ninety percent of the time, resources and space: the research department, which operated much like a corporate espionage/private eye/data-mining firm. His people conducted interviews and performed surveillance and collected data. But they dug much, much deeper to unearth sensitive information that no one else could provide.
Admittedly, some of the practices were questionable — using Bulgarian and Czech Republic hackers (they were the masters). And then there was always the ever-popular business model of extortion, blackmail and broken limbs or threatened children.
Knowledge is power, and armed with Buryak’s facts and figures, the crime bosses in the New York area were thriving. Arrests were down by thirty percent and an outfit paying for Buryak’s services could count on hobbling an upstart competitor before they got a toehold in the territory. And the products and services that Buryak didn’t deal in, but that his clients did, proliferated all the more abundantly on the streets of New York, Bridgewater, Newark, Trenton and every other supermarket catering to consumers with that insatiable need for drugs, guns, sex, stolen credit cards and merchandise.
His success, he knew, put a figurative price on his head. The police and FBI wanted desperately to stop him. Look at that bullshit Leon Murphy case. Utterly trumped up. But no one was more security minded than he was, a lesson learned early, on the streets in Kiev when his father — a loud and proud organized criminal — was arrested in front of the family home by police who decided that lifting his hands and crying “Ne zachepy moho syna!” warranted bullets in his head.
At least they heeded his plea and did not in fact hurt his son. They told the boy to stick to the straight and narrow — well, an equivalent Ukrainian cliché.
But, of course, he did not. The fourteen-year-old knew only his father’s calling, but from that blood-spattered moment on, he followed what he called “prophylactic practices” to stay safe, alive and out of prison.
He convinced his mother to move to the U.S., where at least due process would give you a fighting chance and lawyers could be miracle workers. He identified a pretty and moderately sexy woman who was Ukrainian American and he became a citizen of the country. On the surface he was a legitimate businessman, running a successful company. He was active in church. He donated to good causes and served on charitable boards.
None of which fooled a single soul. There was no doubt among the authorities he was data-miner-in-chief to the gangs — the “Godfather of Information,” some paper dubbed him — but proving it was another matter. This, he knew, was why the prosecutor clutched at straws and tried to bring him down with that bogus murder charge.
He himself never stepped over into the dark side of his operation. He had minions for that. They were well paid for their loyalty. But more important they were mostly married or had children. There was the unspoken whip: that if they broke the watertight seal and Buryak got damp, very bad things would happen. (Only once had he transgressed, murdering a contractor who’d come across a stash of unaccounted millions in his country house and tried to extort him. He’d successfully turned the man’s death into an accident, but the effort that took, and the anxiety it caused, told him he would never take matters into his own hands again.)
This was why he’d been mortified and infuriated to have been arrested — and tried, no less — for the death of a punk like Leon Murphy. Killing someone for trying to sell protection at one of Buryak’s warehouses? No point. He would’ve sent a lieutenant to sit down with Murphy in a bar and explain about the dangers of identity theft. “Such a problem, such a hassle... People lose everything. They even end up on the street, Leon.”
Why waste ammunition?
His phone — an encrypted satellite — hummed.
It was his head of research department. “Willem.”
“Sir. Are you free?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I need to talk to you about the Chemist. Our reception team picked up some information you need to know about. The tap in the courthouse prosecution room.”
“All right.”
“They didn’t get as much as they’d hoped. He doesn’t talk much. At least the audio quality’s good. He said that if you were acquitted, he would find some evidence to quote ‘nail you’ for something.”
“The Chemist said that?”
“That’s right.”
“I see. Anything specific?”
“No.”
“That was it. He left the room. After that, we powered down the bugs. They sweep occasionally and we couldn’t afford for them to be found.”
“Thank you, Willem.”
“You need anything more, sir, let me know.”
They disconnected.
He rose and walked into the huge Mediterranean-style kitchen, the cats following like dolphins beside a cruise ship. His wife was not home to make him tea, so he boiled water and made a fresh pot himself. He took it and a porcelain cup back to his office.
So. The Chemist would continue to be a problem. This wasn’t a surprise to Viktor Buryak. He’d seen in the man’s eyes humiliation and the pain of defeat when the clever lawyer, Coughlin, cut him to pieces on the stand. And the man couldn’t get him for Murphy’s death again; double jeopardy guaranteed that. So he would come after him some other way.
Would he go so far as to plant evidence against him, set him up for another crime, even another homicide he didn’t commit?
This didn’t seem far-fetched.
He now took a sip of the delightfully hot tea and sent an encrypted message to Aaron Douglass. If anyone could make a problem like Lincoln Rhyme, aka the Chemist, go away, he was the man to do it.
Part Two
Master Key
[May 27, 4 A.M.]
20
Intent.
That’s the main thing — the “key,” you might say — that defines the crime of possessing lock-picking tools. In New York, the law is clear:
Possession of burglar’s tools. A person is guilty of possession of burglar’s tools when he possesses any tool, instrument or other article adapted, designed or commonly used for committing or facilitating offenses involving forcible entry into premises, or offenses involving larceny by a physical taking, or offenses involving theft of services... under circumstances evincing an intent to use... the same in the commission of an offense of such character.
Nearly all states have laws like New York’s. You can buy whatever you need to pick locks, provided you do not plan to use them in furtherance of a crime. It’s the prosecutor’s job to prove that and it’s a task that can be difficult.
If for some reason an officer of the law were to have stopped me as I was walking down the street toward Carrie Noelle’s apartment and poked through my backpack, noting the tools, I would simply hand him the business card that reads Day & Night Locksmith Services, which is a complete fake, by the way. He might be suspicious and call the number. An answering service would pick up, taking the sting out of the suspicion. And he’d be thinking: Hard to prove intent, so the DA won’t be interested.