Chapter 21: Dirty Work
Rudy hit his bed around 2 a.m., Saturday morning. He didn’t wake up, really really wake up, until dawn Wednesday. He vaguely remembered Dr. Armanyak’s visit and the knockout pills the campus physician had left on the bedside table. Rudy knew he’d lurched out of bed and staggered across the apartment a few times, used the bathroom, refilled his water glass and set it on the table next to his bed, and taken a few of those pills, but he couldn’t count or distinguish those wakings. But he knew this time was different. This time it didn’t hurt to be awake. He could make out the details of his room—the two cracks in the plaster he planned to mud and repaint this fall; the small white television with its rounded corners sitting on the wooden Fanta crate, next to the Zoshchenko book he’d left out and not touched since Vitaly told him his plan; his work boots, his bike boots, and his sneakers lined up by the door—all waiting in the pre-dawn indoor blue that usually made him want to run and see downtown and the park and the river in magical morning desertion. Don’t be fooled: no running yet, but he didn’t reel at the thought of a walk, or at least breakfast.
Rudy sat up, stood up, testing each elevation. He was weak but not sick. His ribs stretched around a full breath with only faint complaint. His head felt clear, steady, ready to take hold of the world again. He leaned against his window and saw far up the street the small van turning hard around a corner and roaring up his street with a cloud of blue exhaust. Another van followed closely, and Rudy saw bursts of light from the pursuer, then heard pop pop pop, bang bang, toward and then right past his building. A man was leaning out the window of the pursuing van, leveling an assault rifle on the van in front, firing, blasting out rear glass. From four stories up, Rudy clearly and calmly envisioned possible ricochet paths, bullets caroming off the rear edge of the van and turning upward and right, shattering his window, skinning his nose and entering his brain. A night or two or ten ago, he might have welcomed such relief. Rudy’s head was clear enough to recognize the weirdness of his non-reaction, the failure of the full horror of what he was witnessing, so violent, so close, but he kept thinking with strange calm of possibilities: Drug deal gone bad? Kidnappers? Undercover police?
No bullets zinged near Rudy’s window. The target van sideswiped a couple parked cars, then tried to swing hard left. The chase van fired a quick volley that tracked up the side of the van toward the driver’s window. Glass burst again, and the lead van followed an arc through the intersection, over the curb, and into the travel office. The pursuing van executed the turn its target had attempted and more, squealing around fully so its passenger side faced the wreck. The gunman popped out, rifle and fresh clip in gloved hand. He reloaded, pulled open the rear door of the target van, and emptied his magazine into the vehicle, the close shots echoing as if in a barrel. After firing the last round, the gunman jumped back into the hunter van, and that vehicle, sleek, clean, undamaged, tore across the street and headed east, out of sight.
A large piece of glass fell from the travel office window and shattered on the sidewalk. A smaller piece, a smaller shatter followed. No alarm went off in the office. No one emerged from the wreck. The street fell dawn-silent again.
Only when silence resumed did it occur to Rudy that maybe he ought to get down, get out of sight. He turned, folded his legs beneath himself, and sat on the floor, back to the wall. He leaned over to take his watch from beside his pens and keys on the bedside table. 05:22… Wednesday.
Vitaly’s program was to be deployed on Monday at 17:00. It was to make three withdrawals—one initial test, then two larger sums—from the Leonov accounts under aliases that would point sloppily to cash accounts under the control of the Dmitris and their boss. The program would forge cash withdrawals from the Dmitris’ accounts, then slice the actual transfer into a cascade of tinier and tinier packets—ultimately over a million—that would cycle through multiple European and American accounts. Vitaly’s program would then piece those fractions back together over the coming week into five shadow accounts, each aliased to a different bank in a different country, each able to register valid when accessed but invisible to the banks.
Rudy heard heavy, hasty footsteps in the hall and a quick, soft, intent knock on his door. Rudy’s calm evaporated as a dozen thoughts crashed together—Dmitris, Leonovs, gunmen, they knew, Kolya Vitaly Galya dead too—and coalesced in one mad impulse, to escape the only way possible, out the window—
“Rudy!” Vitaly gasped from outside. “Rudy! Get up!”
Rudy had already started to get up and was alarmed to find he couldn’t move as quickly as instinct demanded. His headache was gone, and he hardly noticed his mending ribs, but his muscles were stiff and slow. He hadn’t moved, not with any determination, for days. Stifled by his own lassitude, the flight impulse gave way to Rudy’s effort to back away from the window, to shamble to the hall and fumble with the bolt and chain. Vitaly slipped in, sweating, leaning on his knees, struggling to catch his breath.
“You’re up!” Vitaly huffed. “Did you… did you hear it?”
“The shooting? The crash?”
“Yes, right outside. The van that crashed—the Dmitris. I came… from home, other direction. I heard the shooting… hid in a doorway. Okalev, Zenko—they’re dead.”
They moved to the window, standing back a step so they could look down at the wreck without being seen. “Who killed them?” Rudy asked.
“Leonov’s men. We’ve been tracking police calls since Monday. Last night—”
Suddenly unaware of his aches and stiffness, Rudy grabbed Vitaly’s arms. “Monday—did you launch?”
Vitaly shrugged away—”Yes, yes, launched, worked, exactly as designed”—as if the success of their plan was inevitable, predictable, anything but unusual.
“How much?”
Vitaly sat on the edge of the folded-out couch. “Fifteen million dollars total; three million for us. Leonov followed the crumbs we left to the Dmitris. Last night, he sent squads out to the Dmitris’ auto shop, their boss’s club, and two warehouses. Police got calls ahead of each hit, warning them away.”
“And this morning… the Dmitris… this street?”
Vitaly pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and held it out to Rudy. Rudy took it and paced the narrow room. The notebook was open to a page on which Rudy’s street, building, and apartment number were scrawled beneath fresh speckles of blood.
“I checked the van before coming up. Okalev was still holding this notebook.”
“They… they knew it was us?”
“I don’t think the Dmitris knew anything. I monitored accounts all day yesterday; there’s no sign any of them visited the bank and checked their balances. They didn’t even know they were sitting on a pile of electrons that would get them killed. Suddenly, Leonov was hitting them hard. They couldn’t fight back. They could only lash out at someone weaker. They beat you up once, but they still smarted. You were the last man to humiliate them before Leonov struck, and they were going to get one more lick on you before they ran… or before they died.”
“They didn’t go to the Institute first? Or to Galina Filipovna’s?”
“No. She’s safe. Everyone is safe. And you are safe, thank God.”
Rudy started flipping back through the pages. There were no other familiar addresses before his. A stream of disjointed numbers, names, reminders, and a few grocery lists cluttered the notebook. Receipts were tucked among the pages. One worn page fell out. It listed banks and account numbers. He handed it to Vitaly. “Does any of this look familiar?”
Vitaly scrutinized the numbers. “We left crumbs to the first three. The others… hard to say. They may be cash accounts that didn’t show up on our scans. But we can find them with these numbers, monitor them, see who picks them up. If the money doesn’t move, maybe six months, or twelve months from now, we scoop them up. But we need to see what happens next, make sure our work goes undetected, before we do it again.”
“Do it again?” Rudy sat down beside Vitaly. He pulled his blanket up over his shoulders, but it did not affect the chill that ran down to his bones. “Is that what I’ve started?”
Abashed, Vitaly still managed to look back into Rudy’s eyes. “The Dmitris are gone. We have breathing room. We have three million dollars we can invest in new projects and new defenses to make sure no one lays a hand on you or Galya or anyone else in her Kremlin.”
Rudy dropped the small notebook on the floor. He felt his red-flecked address burning into his eyes. “The blood…”
Vitaly picked up the Dmitris’ notebook and tore out the page with Rudy’s address. Walking to the kitchen, Vitaly shredded that small paper. Rudy followed and watched Vitaly drop the fragments into the sink, take a matchbook from his pocket, and light the paper bits on fire. The confetti turned to ash, and Vitaly washed the ash down the drain. “The blood of bad men,” Vitaly said to the wall, “men who eventually would have done to us what Leonov did to them.”
Rudy went to the kitchen window. A police car and an ambulance—no sirens, no flashers—filed down the street and came to a slow, quiet stop beside the bullet-riddled wreck at the corner. Two cops got out and, after a brief glance inside the van, started scanning the street, taking notes and pacing off distances to the tire marks, the damaged vehicles up the street, and the debris and shell casings on the ground. Two paramedics, both young men, pulled open the driver’s door, wrestled the bloodied Dmitri Zenko out, and laid his body on the sidewalk.
Rudy looked away, up the street, toward the bright eastern sky. He couldn’t see the river or the hills or any of the countryside from the middle of the city, but he could feel it, as surely as he could from the bell tower, the endless continent out there, always beckoning, inviting him to disappear into its vastness, where things like this never happened. He could run, run again, this time do it right, this time not cross anyone’s path, this time not stop and help or do anything to make anyone mad, just run and run and find another cabin in the hills and this time never come down.
Rudy felt Vitaly’s hand on his shoulder. “You’ve recovered,” Vitaly said, “from whatever you came down with last week. I can see it in your color.” Then his voice turned raspy. “And you survived those sons of bitches.”
They both looked down one more time at the crime scene. The paramedics were mostly out of sight on the other side of the van, bending over what was left of Okalev. “We will talk more about… this,” Rudy said softly. “Later.”
“Yes, we will. Later. Now come.” Vitaly leaned close, hugged Rudy from the side. “To the Institute. Have breakfast with me. We’ll do some work. Galya will be glad to see you on your feet.”
Rudy took a deep breath and lowered his head. Breakfast… work… Galya… the words tugged him back, made the path of most resistance seem like the path of least resistance. He took a quick shower and dressed. Never mind escape—he followed Vitaly down the stairs, out the back, through the alley, to avoid the police and the wreck.
The kilometer-walk to the Institute restored Rudy’s balance; eggs, kasha and jam, and multiple cups of tea in the campus commissary restored his energy. And the sight of Galina Filipovna restored his direction. She met them as she strode in from the street to the steps of the Fizika building, reciting a formula of deltas to herself. Her blue eyes glowed at seeing Rudy up on his feet. She took Vitaly’s quiet mention of the Dmitris’ fate without blinking and asked for a full report in the afternoon after she had a few hours to catch up on the calculations that the weekend of programming and two days of monitoring and precautions had interrupted. Galina Filipovna reminded Rudy that he’d left the replumbing project in the chemistry labs on hold while working on the financial analysis (their out-in-the-open euphemism for robbing banks), then picked up the thread of her deltas and bounded up to her lab to chalk out the formulas bubbling back to the center of her attention.
“I should go down to the war room,” Vitaly said, “check those accounts we found. You want to come downstairs, see the final code?”
Rudy felt a knot in his throat. He looked around the campus, at the sunlight breaking over the Kremlin walls and setting the highest golden leaves afire. That basement was the last place he wanted to be today. “No, I… it sounds like Galina Filipovna wants me to get on that plumbing. I should use my hands today.”
Vitaly studied Rudy’s face for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Take it easy. I’ll check on you.”
They went opposite directions. Rudy walked to the shop. Never mind escape, he told himself as he grabbed his tool belt from the shop and headed toward the chemistry lab. There was danger everywhere, and here, amidst whatever danger remained, whatever danger was coming, there was work for him to do.