Judge & Jury Page 17

  Maybe both of us just needed the thrill of feeling excited again. After our long, inward thaw, I couldn’t take my hands off Andie. I couldn’t wait to feel her body next to me, merged with me. I didn’t want to be separated from her. Cavello could wait for a while, just this once. It was like the tap was wide open and the water kept pouring out. We both needed it. But the reprieve didn’t last very long.

  I hadn’t checked my messages for days. When a call came in, we’d listen to the voice on the machine and pretend it was a million miles away.

  Until this one call. The caller’s voice froze me with surprise.

  “Hey, Pellisante.” The smirking Jersey accent was about the last one I expected to hear.

  I spun over to the side of the bed and fumbled for the phone. “Frankie?”

  “Nicky Smiles.” Frank Delsavio acted as if he were talking to a long-lost friend. “You know that postcard I was talking about, from that mutual friend of ours?”

  “I know who you’re talking about, Frank.”

  “Well, wouldn’t ya know, I got one after all. How ’bout that?”

  I stood up. “Where is he, Frank?” It was more of a demand than a question.

  “Where is he?” Delsavio chuckled, clearly finding amusement in twisting me on a string. “He’s at the end of the earth, Nicky-boy! He told me to tell you that.” The scumbag started laughing. “That’s what he said to say, ‘the end of the fucking earth, Nicky Smiles.’ ”

  Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew I was out of the game—that I couldn’t touch him, whatever he said or did. I clenched my fists and felt the blood surging through my veins.

  “I told him you needed to know and it was urgent,” Frank Delsavio said, still chuckling. “He told me to send you his regards. He said to make sure I said that—those exact words. End of the earth. ‘Come and get me, Nicky Smiles.’ ”

  Part Three

  THE EEL

  Chapter 85

  YOU NEVER QUITE KNOW when the breakthrough comes, that one, case-altering clue. Usually it’s not an ahha! Just someone talking to someone else, rolling over to escape prison time. Sometimes it’s one of those moments, though. A blur in a sky full of shining stars that all at once takes shape and becomes stunningly clear.

  For me, that moment came while watching the courthouse tape. Those forty-seven seconds I’d been over so many times.

  A buddy in C-10 kept me going with updates on the case for old times’ sake. A female court employee named Monica Ann Romano had been found murdered the day after Cavello’s escape, and they were looking into it. Her mother said she’d been seeing someone. She’d never met him—nor had Monica Ann’s friends at work—but she knew he had an accent of some kind. The cops were thinking she may have been blackmailed into planting a gun inside the courthouse.

  The getaway Bronco had been ripped apart for prints and DNA. The house where Denunziatta’s sister had been killed turned up nothing. The neighborhood around Paterson, New Jersey, was being canvassed. Every toll camera on I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike was being reviewed.

  It was the middle of the night when I found it. I hadn’t been able to sleep.

  I was at my desk on my computer, going through the courthouse tape for maybe the thousandth time. I had printed off the face of the guy with the beard to show to Ogilov, running over what leverage I could apply. Which was basically none.

  I’d let the tape roll to the end. My eyes were growing heavy. It was after two in the morning. I needed a little sleep. I made a move to rewind.

  Then suddenly, I stopped.

  I blinked. It was a eureka sensation, as though I’d just found a cure for cancer or a deadly virus. There it was.

  I leaned forward, panning in with the remote on the accomplice with the beard. But not his face this time—or the gun or his watch—things that were already burned into my memory.

  On the sonovabitch’s shoes.

  I pressed the remote, zooming in on the shoes. I was wide-eyed now. There was a distinct rubber logo above the heel.

  Some kind of circle—with a wavy line bisecting it.

  Jesus, Nick! Why hadn’t I seen this before?

  I knew those shoes.

  My chest started to pound. Three years before I had made a special trip to the Middle East, to train inspectors.

  The shoes were Israeli-made. For the Israeli Army. For extra support.

  I had even worn them when I was there.

  Chapter 86

  CAVELLO’S ACCOMPLICE had to be Israeli. I actually had something.

  The frustration of losing that black Bronco was fading away.

  It was almost morning. It took another cup of strong coffee to keep me focused, but I started going back through the books of terror suspects I had gotten from Homeland Security. I felt I had something to fix on. The needle in the haystack had just gotten a bit larger. Most faces appeared to be Middle Eastern, but I leafed past those. I was looking for a European. I had an approximate height and weight.

  Three o’clock turned into three thirty. Then four. There were books and books of faces to scan through. Hundreds. Pakistanis, Basque separatists, al Qaeda sympathizers, FALN. IRA. All were on some kind of terror-watch radar. All had been thought to be in the country at some time. Many had explosives knowledge. Four started to bump up to five. I never even noticed when the first rays of light hit my window.

  Then something made me stop. I came upon someone else. Maybe I’d passed him before. Maybe I’d passed the face a dozen times.

  The man had short brown-gray hair and Slavic features, serious, slate-gray eyes.

  Russian—and that wasn’t all that interested me.

  He was an ex-member of the Spetsnaz Brigade. Army Special Forces. He’d been stationed in Chechnya. In 1997 he went AWOL. For a long time he had simply disappeared. He was thought to have gone over to the rebel side.

  Remlikov. Kolya.

  I pulled out the file.

  He’d been implicated in several Mafia-type slayings throughout Russia and Europe. A corrupt police inspector in St. Petersburg. A testifying gangster in Moscow. He was also being sought for questioning in the very public killing of a Venezuelan oil minister a year ago in Paris.

  But what really stopped me wasn’t just his résumé. Which had promise. Or even those brooding, dark eyes.

  It was that he’d been wounded—in Chechnya. His right leg had been struck by shrapnel from an exploding grenade. He was thought to still walk with a slight limp.

  I was thinking about those shoes.

  I put the small file photo close to the screen, side by side against a frame from the courthouse tape.

  Holy shit! It was a long shot, but it just could be.

  I glanced at the clock. It was already after five. Nothing was going to happen here, but that meant it was lunchtime halfway around the world.

  I opened my desk and leafed through packets of business cards I had held together with rubber bands. I had a number, somewhere, for the antiterror desk at the Russian Security Service in Moscow. I’d used it when we wanted to extradite a contract killer who had worked for the Russian mob and had fled back home. I frantically searched through my files and found it. Lt. Yuri Plakhov. Federal Security Service. FSS. I dialed the thirteen-digit European number. I was praying to find him at his desk. It was a prayer answered when I heard his voice.

  “Plakhov, vot.”

  “Yuri, hello. You may remember me.” I reintroduced myself, reminding the Russian official who I was. It was a bonus to be able to keep this call this far away from the Bureau.

  “Sure I recall you, Inspector.” Yuri Plakhov’s English was well practiced and colloquial. “We tracked down that mafioso of yours. Federev, right?”

  “Good memory, Yuri,” I congratulated him. “Now I need you to run someone else through your files.” I read him off the name.

  “Rem-li-kov?” He stretched it out. “Rings a bell.” I gave him a moment while he punched it in. “A little early back there, is it not, Inspector?”<
br />
  “Yes,” I answered quickly, not into small talk. “It is.”

  “Here it is, Inspector. Remlikov, Kolya. Wanted in questioning with several murders throughout Russia and Europe. Quite a dossier. Among his credits, he’s suspected of taking part in bringing down an entire apartment building in Volgodonsk, in which a government official resided. Twenty-four people were killed.”

  My adrenaline was pumping. “How do I find this man, Yuri?”

  “I’m afraid I’m unable to give you his mobile number, Inspector.” Plakhov chuckled. “It’s clear here he’s used several aliases and passports. Estonian, Bulgarian. Names of Kristich. Danilov. Mastarch. We think he was in Paris last year, when that Venezuelan oil minister was killed. The trail is very gray. I doubt he is in Russia. It says he is known here, Inspector, as the eh-oop, the Eel. Very slippery, yes? I can send a facsimile of his fingerprints, if you like.”

  “Please,” I answered. The Eel. A slimy fucking eel. Things were starting to add up. “Where would I start to look, Yuri?”

  The Russian paused, scrolling farther down the file. “Perhaps with your own State Department, Inspector. Judging from what I see, they may be better help than us.”

  The State Department, our State Department. “Why is that?”

  “Remlikov’s last-known whereabouts. He is thought to be in Israel, Inspector.”

  Chapter 87

  FINALLY I WAS ONTO something. The bearded face now had a name, and a history. Remlikov’s prints came in over the fax a short time later, but my eyes had started to close.

  I dozed off until nine. Then I shaved and showered, and called a colleague I had worked with at the FBI. I asked if I could meet him around ten.

  Senil Chumra was a plump, likable Indian whose office wasn’t in the Bureau’s official place downtown. He was in a nondescript warehouse building up on Eighteenth and Tenth, overlooking the river. Chumra headed up a specialized area of the department we called CAF.

  Computer Assisted Forensics.

  These were the guys who could trace e-mails, hack into computers, worm their way through coded passwords, track the complicated movements of cash overseas. I had last worked with him tracking the flow of Cavello’s union paybacks to the Cayman Islands. Senil’s other talent was manipulating digital images.

  “Hello, Nick.” The techie lit up as I walked through the door of his lab. The technical guys always liked it when one of the so-called glamour boys showed up. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What have you been up to?”

  “I’m good, Chummie,” I lied. “Busy.” These technical whizzes worked in their own little specialized cocoon up here. No reason he’d know what I was up to—or in this case, wasn’t. “You got that e-mail I sent over?”

  “I got it.” The Indian wheeled over to a Mac screen down the line, maybe a little disappointed. “Got it uploaded right here.”

  Senil touched a mouse, and the image of Cavello’s bearded accomplice jumped onto the screen. “Okay, Nick, tell me—what is it you want me to do?”

  “I want to change around the image, Chummie. See if it matches someone I know.”

  He nodded, hunching over the screen and cracking his knuckles. He clicked the mouse again. A grid appeared over the image. “Shoot.”

  “First, I want to lose the beard.”

  “Easy.” Senil typed in a few coordinates, and the image immediately narrowed in to just a square of the suspect’s face. Then, using a cursor, he outlined the area of the beard. Gently, he moved his cursor back and forth, as if he was airbrushing.

  “What are you onto these days?” he asked while he worked, his fingers guiding the cursor like a surgeon’s. “Things have to be pretty hot up there for you C-10 boys, what with Cavello and all. What’re you thinking, he changed his face on you?”

  “Sort of,” I said, not picking up on his inquisitiveness. “Just a hunch.”

  “A hunch.” He sighed, dropping the conversation. “This process is called grafting and displacement,” he said, continuing to carve away the facial hair, tracing it around the chin. “Essentially, we eliminate a field: skin tone, a scar, in this case, a beard.” In a moment the facial area was blank, and Senil retrieved a section of skin from another part of the image and filled in the space. “Then we just graft onto it.” He smoothed out the facial lines. “Cut and paste.”

  “That’s good,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. “Now what do you say we try and alter the hair. Make it short and close to the skull. A little darker.”

  “You mean like this?” He pressed an icon, and a file of various hairstyles came up. Then he chose one fitting my description and basically transplanted it over the newly configured face.

  “Now set the hairline back a bit. Around the sides.”

  Chummie started playing around with the cursor again.

  “Yes, like that. Now, can we ditch the eyeglasses?”

  “Faster than Lasik.” He grinned. “Cheaper, too.” It took about a minute of more grafting and displacement.

  The man’s dark glasses disappeared.

  “Fucking A!” I exclaimed. The image on the screen almost knocked me on the floor.

  “Anything else, Nick? If you’re not satisfied, give me the word. I’ll make him look like anyone you like.”

  “No, Chummie.” I patted his shoulder. “I think we’re done.”

  I pulled out the file of Kolya Remlikov that Yuri Plakhov had faxed me. I put Remlikov’s face side by side against the altered image of Cavello’s accomplice.

  “Bingo,” Senil Chumra said.

  We were staring at the same man.

  Chapter 88

  THIRTEEN YEARS OF working my way up through one of the most bureaucratic law enforcement agencies in the world told me to go straight to the Javits Building and drop what I had right on ADIC Cioffi’s desk.

  There wasn’t much doubt that Kolya Remlikov was the man who had sprung Cavello.

  I got as far as hailing a cab on the corner. Then something made me hold back. I wasn’t sure exactly what.

  Maybe it was the thought of handing Remlikov over to the very people who had let him escape. Or the sudden realization of just how difficult this could prove to be—getting through channels, interrogating him. Which agencies would be involved? Would I be involved? One leak and Remlikov could disappear. And with him, Cavello. Then where would we be?

  I’d spent so many years doing the right thing. Suddenly the right thing didn’t seem so right anymore.

  I waved the taxi on.

  I just went back and leaned against the building for a while, holding the photos, trying to decide what the right thing was. When it hit me, I told myself, For a professor of criminal ethics, Nick, you’re about to do one very stupid thing.

  I looked up a number in my BlackBerry and placed a call. I asked Steve Bushnagel if he had plans for lunch. Steve was a partner in a private law firm now, but he used to advise the FBI. He was an expert on matters of extradition and international law.

  “Lunch? Where?” Bushnagel asked.

  “Cheap and fast,” I said. “I’m buying.”

  “How fast?” the lawyer asked.

  “Hop into the elevator. I’ll be right outside.”

  When he stepped out of the lobby of the big glass tower on Sixth Avenue, I was leaning on a parked car, holding out a couple of hot dogs. “Ketchup or mustard?”

  “Not to be particularly lawyerly about it—but how ’bout both.”

  We sat on a ledge on the busy corner, the lunch-hour crowds streaming by. “Steve, I’ve got someone I want to get to who’s fled to Israel.”

  “Get to?”

  “I need to get him back.”

  Bushnagel took a bite. “Are we talking fugitive or citizen, here?”

  “Citizen, I suspect. He’s been there awhile.”

  “And what you want him for, these are crimes committed in the United States, not Israel, right?”

  “We’re just talking, right, Steve?”

  He waved his
dog at me. “I assure you, you’re not paying me enough for anything more specific.”

  I grinned. “Okay. Then we might be talking some other things in Russia and France as well.”

  “Hmmph.” Bushnagel grunted. “The Israelis are cooperative—to a degree. You remember Jonathan Pollard? We arrested him for espionage in 1985—in the Israelis’ eyes, unjustly. They’ve been trying to get him back unsuccessfully for twenty years. And that electronics guy who fled there? ‘Crazy Eddie’ Antar? Look at how long it took to get him back. Of course, it all depends on what we’re really talking here.”

  “Talking?”

  “In the post-9/11 world.” The lawyer shrugged. “Do the Israelis want something from us? Are the other governments involved? Look, Nick, I didn’t become a complete dummy when I left the government. I know we’re not chasing tax cheats here.

  “If the evidence is solid, you could definitely get the guy held for questioning. But what kind of access you’d have, and how long that would take, that’s all up for grabs. How time sensitive is this?”

  “The highest.” I shrugged glumly. “Off the charts.”

  “Always is. Well, factor into this the matters of state, too. Does this have any rhythm for the Israelis? Do they want to make a deal with us? Do they want to make a deal with the Russians or the French before they turn him over? It’s delicate, Nick—and I don’t think that’s a word that sits particularly well with you.”

  I nodded.

  “Look, you’d get him held. You get a lot of people involved. But what happens next is anybody’s guess. Then there’s always the chance they drag their feet, the guy slips away, and you never hear from him again.”

  “I can’t take that risk,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I understand.” Bushnagel nodded. “Problem is, though, it’s still the only game in town.”

  “In the real world, yes.” I nodded. I balled up my wrapper.

  I knew Steve was wondering why I had come to him. He had left the government long ago. There were plenty of lawyers on staff who could handle this kind of matter. “Just for the record, Nick”—he looked closely at me—“is there any other?”