Collision Read online

“Will I be allowed to question you?”

  “Yes, of course. But … I don’t see what I can add. You were the witness, the guy who stopped a massacre.”

  “I may have to ask you some questions about Davidson, about his clients.”

  “Of course. I’ll cooperate in every way, Sean. Now I have to go talk to the detectives.”

  “I assume that Ursula is shredding that yellow pad with Hamilton’s name on it.”

  “Don’t make assumptions, Sean. Just ask questions and get answers. But remember, Ursula is my confidential assistant and the firm’s rules say she doesn’t have to answer to anyone but me.”

  11

  Viktor Yazov saw two police cars blocking the intersection half a block ahead and decided to take a chance. His black Mercedes-Benz S600 was conspicuous, and if he tried a U-turn, he’d be even more conspicuous. He was not carrying a weapon, but within a hidden compartment in the driver’s door was a Sig Sauer P226 that had been stolen from a Navy SEAL during a brawl at a bar in lower Manhattan.

  The police-scanning radio was invisible, concealed within the wiring of the regular dashboard radio. He had a New York chauffeur’s license in his wallet, a chauffeur’s black cap on his head, and a New York registration in the glove compartment. He knew from experience that a routine police-car computer check would not turn up any criminal record for him. The armor and the bulletproof glass were discreet. And these were street cops, not feds nosing around.

  He stopped behind a taxi whose driver was giving the cop a hard time. When the taxi was waved through, Viktor moved slowly up to an officer standing at the side of his car. Viktor showed his license and registration, doffed his wraparound sunglasses to show his friendly eyes, and produced a grin gleaming with two gold teeth. He could truthfully say that he had not seen a young man in a black coat. The Mercedes rolled on, turning right at the next intersection.

  *

  Viktor had begun his career in Moscow, when, following in his father’s footsteps, he was accepted into a pool of drivers who specialized in providing safe, high-speed service for young oligarchs. They enjoyed the status of a flashy, armored vehicle driven by someone who knew exactly when to offer a bribe and how to make himself invaluable as a guide to the seamier side of Moscow life. One of his clients called the Mercedes his whoremobile.

  One night, a client, high on cocaine, began engaging in sexual play with a young woman he had picked up at one of the hottest clubs in Moscow. Viktor was used to having the ample backseat turned into a playground. But this time the play became lethal when the client lost control while experimenting with sexual strangulation. The client was a middle-echelon member of the Foundation for Social Assistance to Athletes, also known as the Orekhovskaya gang, and Viktor realized he was at a crossroad: Call the police or help the client dispose of the body and become a driver for the gang.

  He made his choice and became well known as the best driver in the Moscow underworld. Soon he was hired as the principal driver for one of Russia’s richest and most powerful oligarchs, Kuri Basayev.

  Dukka gone. Now what? To stay alive in Basayev’s organization, you could not make a mistake. Viktor knew Basayev as a man to be feared, a man who killed his enemies, a man who punished mistakes with exile or, sometimes, death sentences. What happened today would not please Basayev.

  12

  While Viktor was in Washington in a near panic, Kuri Basayev was far away. When what Basayev called “a special operation” was going on, he always was far away—usually somewhere at sea aboard his yacht. Special operations were relatively rare, and Basayev regretted them, especially on American soil. But sometimes they had to happen.

  Like other Russian oligarchs, Basayev had acquired a fortune by having the political connections that provided the inside knowledge needed to be at the right place at the right time. Even with that advantage, however, the oligarchs were hit hard by the financial crisis in 2008. Kuri Basayev’s investment losses forced him to expand his underworld empire in Russia and in the United States.

  On a day about two weeks before the Sullivan & Ford shootings, Basayev had shown that his wealth was ample enough for him to acquire a new residence in New York. Accompanied by the manager of his principal hedge fund, Basayev had appeared twenty minutes late for his meeting with the president of the city’s largest real-estate firm. The meeting was in the penthouse atop the eighty-five-story NYNY on Fifth, the latest Manhattan aerie built to provide appropriate New York City shelters for billionaires like Basayev.

  The towering palaces were not homes. They were places where foreign visitors could spend a few days and nights enjoying New York and the great wealth that buys the city’s splendor. They were not part of the New York society. They never appeared at charity galas, museum fund-raisers, or gallery openings. They tried to play in the shadows, unseen by the eyes of the media.

  The realtor reverently greeted Basayev and led him and his trailing advisor to a large, glass-walled room called the library lounge. Its shelved walls already contained dozens of books selected for their jacket colors by the room’s designer. They sat in high-winged chairs around a table that was a polished slice of redwood. A slight echo bounced off the twenty-two-foot ceiling as the realtor described the penthouse’s panoramic views, its rosewood flooring, and its walls of Italian marble.

  “NYNY on Fifth,” he continued, “will become a classic landmark, one that is not eccentric or bizarre, but an intelligent building that is in dialogue with the outstanding cityscape it is entering. In this architectural gem, magnificent but discreetly opulent, you’ll discover…”

  “I am aware of this building’s many virtues,” Basayev interrupted. Swinging his right arm around in an encompassing gesture, he said, “I will buy this place.” He nodded to the advisor, who opened his slim briefcase and extracted a check for $90 million, drawn on a Belgium bank owned by Basayev.

  He rose and walked around the room, leaving the advisor and the realtor to go over the details of the purchase contract. He stopped for a few moments before a floor-to-ceiling window that framed Central Park, a skyline silhouette, and a patch of clear blue sky. Then he turned and said, “Fine view. Goodbye.”

  Quickening his step, he walked toward the hall that opened to the elevator, where his security men awaited him. One spoke into a cell phone. The two men were both over six feet, unusually tall for Chechens, though they had been shaped by Chechen genes that made them black-haired, black-bearded, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested. They wore black leather jackets, black jeans, and black Air Jordans.

  They followed Basayev into the elevator and flanked him when they emerged and crossed the long, blue-carpeted lobby. At the bronze door that opened onto Fifth Avenue, the two men shouldered aside the doorman and stood for a moment, scanning the sidewalk’s swirling currents of people. One of them pointed toward a man standing nearby, looking conspicuous as the only person standing in a flow of people on the go. The bodyguard said something in Chechen and laughed. He nodded to Basayev, and the three men stepped out.

  They walked ahead of him as they strode toward a black limousine that slipped out of the traffic and pulled up parallel to them; three cars behind was a dark blue Chevrolet. The man who had been pointed out by the Chechen walked rapidly toward the Chevrolet.

  At that moment, another man dashed across Fifth Avenue, cut in front of the limousine, stepped before the advancing trio, and stopped. The bodyguards had seen him and chased him before. He was a paparazzo—but he did not have a camera. For a moment, they were puzzled. Then one of them noticed something attached to the right lens of his sunglasses—and realized, Google Glass!

  As one of the bodyguards ran forward, the paparazzo rapidly blinked. The bodyguard towered over the paparazzo, snatched his Google Glass off with one hand, and punched him with the other. As the smaller man fell, the bodyguard hurled the Google Glass to the ground and stomped on the tiny computer built into the frame of the sunglasses.

  While the paparazzo writhed on the sidewa
lk, Basayev and his guardians entered the limousine, which pulled into the Fifth Avenue traffic and began crawling south.

  Each time the paparazzo had blinked, the Google Glass had recorded the image and transmitted it to his cell phone in a pocket in his suit. The cell phone transmitted the images to a computer in his office in SoHo. Three days later, two of the images appeared in the New York Post, accompanying a story about the Russian oligarchs’ “invasion of superposh Manhattan real estate.”

  One photo showed Basayev, a handsome middle-aged man, tanned and fit, with a beard that was little more than a five-o’clock shadow. His close-cropped hair was graying and receding. He wore Top-Siders, a half-buttoned white shirt, and dark blue slacks. Basayev was frowning, his right arm raised as if warding off a blow. The Post caption noted that he had just “emerged from a new Fifth Avenue skyscraper, whose lavish penthouse he had bought for a reputed $120 million.”

  The other photo showed one of the bodyguards charging toward the camera, his jacket flaring open and revealing a shoulder holster.

  “Note that the bodyguard is carrying heat,” said the Post caption. “A New York Police Department spokesman revealed that the Glock in that holster is legal. The bodyguards have concealed-weapon licenses as employees of On Guard, the personal-security company owned by Basayev.”

  The story described Basayev as one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, ignoring his Chechen identity. That identity was especially important to American law-enforcement officials, who saw Basayev not only as an up-and-coming Russian mafia boss but also as a potential importer of Chechen terrorism. The man who jumped into the Chevrolet was an FBI agent assigned to the New York Police Department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

  *

  Kuri Basayev was a distant relative of Shamil Basayev, a notorious Chechen terrorist. But Kuri Basayev became one of the few successful Chechens who was accepted by the thin layer of the Russian ruling class that included financiers and killers. He was a man of two worlds with vague borders: finance and crime. On his legitimate side he had earned a reputation for shrewd investing that produced enormous fortune with a global reach. He had also played a veiled role in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000—a connection that led to Basayev’s control of oil companies, ore mines, and media corporations.

  His criminal career was more difficult to track. But the expansion of his underworld empire became known to New York police when they discovered signs that he had his own representation in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, headquarters of the American branch of the Russian mob. Residents with or without police records appreciated the way the swaggering Russians kept the streets safe from muggers and FBI informers.

  The latest newcomers were two young hit men who had arrived from a Chechen community in Idaho. Viktor showed them around what residents called “Russia by the Sea” and was impressed by the way the two cousins managed to fit into a place that did not welcome strangers, especially Chechen strangers.

  Through an arrangement that Basayev had made, his men lived and worked separately from the established mob. So far Viktor had been behind the wheel for five of the cousins’ hits—quick jobs in New York and New Jersey: shots to the back of the head for reasons unknown. Now Viktor wondered what would be the reward for this special operation.

  13

  Falcone was about to leave his office when his unlisted private phone rang. DC POLICE appeared on the caller ID screen and he picked up the phone. Private, my ass. Nothing’s private anymore.

  “Mr. Falcone. This is Sergeant Clarence Reed. Please open your e-mail. I urgently want to send you some surveillance-camera images.”

  Falcone sighed. I wonder what the NSA will do about these e-mails. Less than a minute later, on the monitor of his desktop computer he saw a dozen or so men and women walking rapidly or running. In the background he could see the entrance to the Sullivan & Ford Building. The image froze and the phone rang.

  “Sergeant Reed again,” the voice on the phone said. “You are looking at an image from a Starbucks exterior surveillance camera on First Street, about one hundred yards south of the Sullivan and Ford Building, just after the shooting. You can see, near the entrance, the first officers leaving their vehicle.”

  “Right. I see them,” Falcone said, leaning closer to the computer screen. “Hold it.… No … I don’t think that’s him.… I can’t be sure.”

  Falcone was wary of making any snap judgments, given the power of the new social media. He remembered how a false identification was made in the wake of the bombing in Boston two years ago. The young man, who was mistakenly identified, had his photo plastered all over the media. He got so much harassment that he ended up committing suicide.

  “I understand,” Reed said. “Thanks anyway. We’ll be doing a facial-recognition scan on this guy anyway and put him into match-up mode against our watch lists—FBI, CIA, Homeland Security. Please stand by for another image.”

  Falcone stared at the computer monitor, looking at the image, now no longer stopped in time. The man on the screen—he had to be in his early twenties—walked on, not hurrying, not drawing attention. Maybe he was the killer. Maybe he was already planning his next victim. “Possibly him. Still not sure. It’s just hard to say.”

  Reed, still on the phone, said, “Now here comes an enlarged image from the windshield video of a patrol car turning onto Second Street near D and heading north in response to the 911 call.”

  “Right,” Falcone said. “The police car passes a black car heading south. Can you read the license plate?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Very muddy back plate.”

  “On a Mercedes town car?” Falcone asked. “Very unlikely.”

  “Yeah. Not the first time I’ve seen mud on the plates of a getaway car. So we have a black car—Mercedes. We blew up the image. No indication of a passenger. Driver has on what seemed to be a chauffeur cap. Maybe New York plates. But we can’t be sure. So that’s what we’ve got. The gunman was probably on foot, waiting a pickup. And God only knows where he is now. Well, Mr. Falcone, thank you for your help. We’ll keep in touch.”

  14

  When Viktor saw the road crew and the big orange DETOUR sign, he stopped and sighed. He was forced to turn left and go south, when he wanted to turn right and head north. Another turn around another block, another plea from Ahmed—Viktor. I’m on E Street, near Eleventh Street. Where the fuck are you? Cops all over. The GPS on Viktor’s dashboard showed he was not too far away from Interstate 395. Get to Ahmed, pick him up, head north … to New York Avenue, then out of this goddamn city. Basayev’s tech guy, who had wired the police scanner so that it worked inside the regular radio, had also added to the GPS an app that showed most surveillance-camera locations. Jesus! Cameras all over the fucking place.

  At Eleventh and D, Viktor spotted Ahmed leaning against a telephone poll, his head swiveling back and forth, back and forth. If a smart cop saw that nervous son of a bitch, he’d take out his gun, walk right up to him, and start asking questions.

  “Get in! Get in!” Viktor commanded. “In the back. Like a big shot.”

  Ahmed opened the rear door and hurled himself into the backseat. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he shouted.

  “We need to get that fuckin’ laptop,” Viktor said. “Show me—”

  “We need to get the fuck out of here,” Ahmed shouted. “Out! Out! Let’s go, for Christ sake.”

  Viktor had parked at a bus stop on E Street, engine purring. Cops usually ignored town cars that stopped to await clients.

  “Where the hell you put it?”

  “I put the bag and my coat behind a Dumpster in an alley on Second Street, near E Street.”

  “And the gun?”

  “Yes. And the gun.”

  Viktor looked at the GPS and ordered a new destination. “That alley is five, six minutes from here, if no big fuckin’ orange signs.” Viktor studied the GPS map and saw a parking garage two blocks away, off Pennsylvania Avenue. He steered into traffic, drove to the garage, p
lucked his ticket from the machine, drove down the ramp to a space, and backed into the space. “My father tell me, front out, always front out. Back in so you can move fast after.”

  Viktor looked at his Rolex, which once had been on the wrist of a hedge fund manager who had tried to cheat Kuri Basayev. “We sit here an hour, maybe two,” he said. “Things cool. Then we go to that alley and we get the goddamn laptop.” He patted the GPS map. “And we head north. On the turnpike we get hamburgers.”

  15

  Falcone walked down the corridor toward the restroom, looked around, and then took a few steps toward the stairway. He had had enough police for the day, and he didn’t intend to run into any of them on the elevator. At the fifth-floor landing he decided to give his weary legs a rest. He opened the door a crack, saw no one near the elevator doors, and headed toward them. An empty car arrived. He hit P1 for the basement parking garage.

  The Sullivan & Ford Building, as an architectural critic wrote, looked “glassy and classy” on the outside. The basement garage was just as clean and classy. And nearly deserted, Falcone was glad to note.

  He walked up the street-level ramp, which ended next to the building’s E Street entrance, around the corner from the entrance with the stanchions, the yellow tape, and the knot of police at the doors. Satisfied that he had eluded the police and the TV and print reporters, Falcone turned right and took his usual route to his apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  As he congratulated himself on his successful escape, the word persisted in his mind. Falcone suddenly realized that he might be stepping into the gunman’s escape route. For some reason, he misses the pickup car. He comes out of the building, maybe walking a little slower than the people who are fleeing. He sees that the car isn’t there. He goes to plan B, maybe talking to the driver to work out some place for a pickup.

  *

  Back in his days as a prosecutor, Falcone had a reputation for nailing criminals by making hunches come true. He tried to explain that his hunches arose from his attempts to get inside a felon’s brain—“soul-burrowing,” a Boston Globe feature writer called it. Falcone knew, deep in his soul, why he had become a relentless prosecutor who would never bargain, never make a deal: He kept making up for the fact that he had lost his first two cases—aggravated rape and vehicular manslaughter. He had vowed that never again would he allow law to thwart justice.