Goodbye girl, p.16
Goodbye Girl, page 16
“No comment.”
“Sounds like the fact that my dad was a cop before he became a politician only gets me so much love.”
“Courtesy, I’d call it. Not love.”
A gray-haired man dressed in plaid golf knickers approached from the bar, a drink in each hand. “Cruz! Let’s go! We’re starting another game.”
Cruz rose and shook Jack’s hand. “Say hi to your dad, Jack. But don’t come calling on me again.”
Jack watched as the retired detective regrouped with his friends and stepped into the elevator. Getting anything of value from a retired homicide detective had been a long shot, so Jack couldn’t be too disappointed in himself. He got a diet soda in a go-cup, took the elevator to the ground floor, and was in the parking lot, walking to his car, when his cellphone rang. It was Imani.
The three-day expiration deadline on the FBI’s offer to Imani was fast approaching. Jack and Imani had talked about it several times, considering all angles. If it became public that she performed a private concert for an oligarch, it could affect her trial. The judge might decide to revoke bail and it ran the risk of prejudicing the potential jury pool. Beyond that, if something went wrong and the oligarch found out she was wearing a wire, she’d be on her own without an FBI agent present to protect her.
“It’s decision time,” Jack said into the phone.
“I think I’ve made up my mind. There’s just one thing.”
It was always one more thing. “Talk to me,” he said.
“If I’m going to tell Kava’s people that I’ll do the concert only if I have a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Kava, I can’t have a B.S. reason for a condition like that. It has to be solid.”
“The FBI says the explanation they created for you is solid.”
“Do you think it rings true?”
Jack got into his car and closed the door. “It is true that pop stars are extra cautious about doing these events ever since J.Lo’s concert in Turkmenistan turned into a public relations nightmare.”
“Definitely. But insisting on a private meeting with Grandpa Oligarch in order to get his personal assurance that he’ll give a million dollars to charity—that just seems lame. There’s no way he’ll go for it.”
“The pretext is that if the public finds out about the event, you have plausible deniability. You can say you did it for charity, not for an oligarch.”
“But that doesn’t mean I need a one-on-one sit-down meeting with him. He could just donate the money without the meeting.”
“I understand your point. But do you have a better idea?”
“I do.”
Jack started the car and turned on the A/C, but he stayed parked. “Let’s hear it.”
“Is it true that Vladimir Kava named his superyacht after his late mother?”
“That’s what people say. I guess even a ruthless tyrant can love his mother.”
“Then here’s my idea. My people talk to Kava’s people and tell them Imani is not going on stage until Vladimir Kava looks her in the eye and swears on his dead mother’s soul that no one is going to lay a hand on Theo Knight.”
Jack’s feelings had blown hot and cold on Imani. At that moment, he liked her better than he ever thought he would.
“That’s better.”
“You think?”
“Definitely better.”
“Can you call the FBI and tell them we have a deal?”
“I will,” said Jack.
And when they hung up, he did.
Chapter 26
Vladimir Kava watched from the beach of his superyacht, as a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter touched down on the helipad. The “beach” was actually a mechanically retractable platform that, upon the push of a button, slid out over the sea from just below the main deck, complete with sand, palm trees, and deck chairs. It was just one of the many extras on what Kava called the most “pimped-out” vessel afloat.
The oligarch’s son climbed out of the helicopter, his hair whipping in the wind of the whirring blades overhead. Sergei had returned to Russia after winning his extradition hearing in London. He was dressed casually, having flown by private jet from Moscow to Malé before catching the chopper. A deckhand escorted him past the wave pool and down a flight of stairs. Kava wrapped his handsome son in a bear hug.
“Shoes off,” said Kava, and he led a barefoot Sergei across the sugar-white sand to the lounge chairs. A server brought them an ice-cold bottle of vodka and poured each of them a drink, which they enjoyed while talking business in Russian on a makeshift beach in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“That was a close call you had in London,” said Kava.
Sergei sighed deeply, though Kava guessed his exaggerated reaction was more jet lag than anything. The time change from Moscow to the Maldives was just two hours, but the flight took nearly all day.
“Too close,” said Sergei.
“You need to be more careful in choosing your staff, son. I’ve been chauffeured around every country in the world for over forty years. Not once has a driver betrayed me.”
“Mine will never betray anyone ever again,” said Sergei. “Guaranteed.”
Kava nodded approvingly. “How much did MAP pay him to set you up?”
“We never found out.”
Kava did a double take, surprised. “Starikova always finds out.”
Starikova was among the most vicious mercenaries in the Wagner Group. Kava considered him the go-to contractor for private special-ops.
“My coward of a driver stuck a gun in his mouth the second he found out Starikova was on his heels,” said Sergei.
Kava chuckled. “Starikova has that effect. We had to pull him from the Bucha Building interrogations. Too many prisoners took the quick way out after seeing what Starikova did to the defiant ones.”
The Soviet-era Bucha Building, located just outside Kiev in the sleepy town of Bucha, was one of the first interrogation sites set up by the Wagner Group to support the Russian invasion. In the dark basement of a four-story office building at 144 Yablunska—a tree-lined lane that translates to “Apple Tree Street”—Wagner’s most trusted and ruthless operatives questioned, tortured, and executed in grisly fashion the local politicians and residents rounded up by the Russian army as leaders of the resistance.
“Is Starikova on the trail of that Black guy, too?” asked Kava.
“Yes, Theo Knight is his name,” said Sergei. “But there has been a development as to him, which is the reason I came here to talk.”
“What sort of development?”
“It turns out that this Theo Knight is friends with Imani, the pop star Natasha is crazy about,” he said, meaning his daughter. “I’ve been trying for months to get her to do a private concert for Natasha and her friends.”
“What my granddaughter wants, my granddaughter gets.”
“And it finally looks like she will get it. Imani’s people reached out this week. Between telling her fans to pirate her music and the legal fees she’s racked up lately, I think Imani needs some quick cash.”
“How much?”
“Money is not the issue. It’s the location. My original plan was to have her perform for Natasha and her friends in London.”
“You should avoid going back to London for a while,” said Kava.
“Understood. Her people have proposed your estate in Miami Beach.”
“That’s ridiculous. I just spent three weeks fighting your extradition to America in the London courts. Now you want to show up in Miami Beach at a party for your daughter? Have you lost your mind?”
“You’re right,” said Sergei. “I can’t go. But Natasha can. And so can you.”
Kava smiled. One advantage of having passed control of the piracy business to his son was that Vladimir Kava was no longer on the front line of extradition efforts under U.S. law.
“You didn’t have to fly all the way out here to ask me to take my granddaughter to a party,” he said.
“There’s more to it than that,” said Sergei. “Imani has a certain condition that must be met before she will go onstage.”
“Let me guess. She wants two cases of 1959 Dom Pérignon delivered to her room so she can bathe in it?”
“That would be easier,” said Sergei, laughing. Then he turned serious. “She wants a private, face-to-face conversation with you. She wants to hear it straight from your mouth that if she performs the concert, we will rescind the hit order on Theo Knight.”
“After this Mr. Knight and his MAP friends kidnapped my son and tried to put him in prison for the rest of his life?”
“That is Imani’s demand,” said Sergei.
Kava looked out toward the open sea. “Do you want me to make this deal?”
“Natasha wants the concert.”
“That was not my question,” he said, giving his son an assessing look. “I asked if you want me to make this deal for Theo Knight?”
“Yes. Make it.”
“Done,” said Kava.
“But . . .”
Sergei finished his glass of vodka and poured both him and his father another from the bottle on ice.
“But what?”
“No one can guarantee that another man will live forever. Accidents happen.”
Vladimir smiled widely, raising his glass. “I’ve taught you well, Sergei.”
Chapter 27
The rhythmic steel-on-steel clap of a train moving through London’s Underground was rocking Theo to sleep in his seat.
The death threat from Kava had been keeping him up at night, so a few moments of shut-eye on the train were “makeup winks.” He’d told Uncle Cy he was staying in London to look after Gigi, and that was mostly true. It was also true that, with a Russian hit man looking for a Black American man alone on the run, moving around London with a teenage girl was decent cover.
Theo was also intrigued by the man Gigi called her “ex-boyfriend.” She’d mentioned his clothes, his car, his money. His age was perhaps most telling. “Thirtysomething,” she’d said. He sounded more like a sex trafficker than a boyfriend, and if there was one thing Theo had carried with him from four years at Florida State Prison, it was an intense hatred for a sex-trafficking pedophile. Theo wasn’t sure what he would do if he found this scum. But it wouldn’t take more than one encounter with Theo Knight to convince him to leave Gigi alone.
“Our stop is next,” said Gigi, nudging him partly awake. The crackle of the conductor’s voice over the loudspeaker shook off any remaining slumber:
“King’s Cross St. Pancras.”
The blur of the platform whizzed past in the train’s window, slowing steadily to a stop. He and Gigi were the first riders to exit when the doors parted.
The largest Tube station in central London was so named because it served two rail stations: King’s Cross and St. Pancras. Forty million riders coursed through the complex each year. Gigi led him to the suburban building, platforms 9 and 10 to be exact.
“Right there is where I met him,” said Gigi, meaning her “boyfriend.”
In the Harry Potter series, King’s Cross is the starting point of the Hogwarts Express. Riders enter secret platform 93/4 by passing through the brick-wall barrier between platforms 9 and 10. Real-life muggles capitalized on the phenomenon, erecting a cast-iron platform 93/4 sign on a wall next to the world’s first Harry Potter store. Part of a luggage trolley is mounted below the sign, half of it seeming to have disappeared into the wall. It’s the ultimate photo op for fans of the series, one after another taking turns at pretending to push the cart through the wall.
Theo’s quick take was that, for a guy like Gigi’s “ex,” this was exactly the right place to find girls of a certain age.
Definitely a fucking trafficker.
“So now you’ll take me shopping?” said Gigi.
That was the deal. If she showed him where she first met this boyfriend of hers, Theo would buy her an age-appropriate outfit that didn’t make her coltlike legs and still-growing body look for sale. They took the escalator up to the mall level. Gigi made a beeline to the Forever 21 store. Theo wasn’t about to go inside with her. He gave her some shopping money, and she was happy to go it alone. Theo found a bench outside the store and put to good use a newspaper someone had left behind. The story above the fold was yet another sex scandal involving a minister of parliament. Theo’s eyes were drawn below the fold to a photograph of Imani and Shaky Nichols outside the criminal courthouse in Miami.
imani murder trial to begin this month, the headline read. Theo continued reading. None of it was news to him, until he got to the part about Jack’s unsuccessful efforts to depose the retired homicide detective:
“Judge Cookson’s ruling is fundamentally unfair,” said Imani’s defense lawyer, Jack Swyteck. “Detective Cruz was among the first on the scene. He discovered the message that was written on the victim’s body, presumably by the killer. It was his decision to release that message to the media twelve years ago.” According to Mr. Swyteck, unless the defense is allowed to depose former Detective Cruz before trial, “we will be cut off from critical evidence that there is no connection between my client and this signature-like message from the real killer, ‘goodbye girl.’”
Theo stared at the words a moment longer—goodbye girl—and then laid the newspaper aside. Just then, Gigi rushed out of the store, shopping bags in hand and brimming with excitement.
“I got the coolest skirt,” she said. “And the top was on sale, two-for-one, so I got both the red one and the black one.”
“That’s great,” said Theo. “Hey, you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry.”
Theo coached basketball at the Coconut Grove rec center, and he could spot a kid on the verge of a growth spurt in an instant. Gigi had all the signs.
“How about pizza?” he said.
“Yum.”
They started walking toward the exit. “I know I wasn’t going to ask any more questions about your old boyfriend.”
“But you lied,” she said, seeming to know one was coming.
“Yeah, I kinda did. Do you have any idea why he called you ‘Goodbye Girl’?”
“Nope. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious,” he said. They walked a little farther, pushed through the turnstiles, and exited to the street.
“You think you could show me where your ex lives?” asked Theo.
“No,” she said firmly. “He said I should never, ever go back there.”
“I’m not saying you should go back. I just want you to show me where it is.”
Gigi stopped on the sidewalk. “Theo, no! I don’t want to get near that place! I don’t even want to think about that place! Do you understand?”
It was the harshest she’d ever spoken to him, and Theo could see the fear in her eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “I definitely get it.”
Chapter 28
It was early Friday evening, and Jack was inside the operations cabin of an unmarked FBI surveillance van. Two FBI tech agents from the Miami field office were with him. They were parked on a residential street in Miami Beach near Vladimir Kava’s estate on scenic Pine Tree Drive. As the name implied, the street was famous for the towering Australian pine trees that divided northbound from southbound traffic, but perhaps it was better known for the speeding ticket Justin Bieber got for seeing how quickly his red Ferrari could get from zero to a hundred.
“Can you hear us?” the tech agent said into his microphone.
“Roger that,” came the reply.
Listening remotely, via an encrypted digital audio connection, were the assistant special agent in charge of the Miami office and the FBI’s legal attaché from London.
“How is your client going to hold up, Jack?” asked Coffey.
Jack was outfitted with a headset, and her question had come through loud and clear.
“Imani’s a performer,” said Jack. “She has ice water in her veins.”
Jack was slightly overstating things, but the technology had gone a long way to ease Imani’s nerves. Had she been forced to strap a bulky tape recorder to her chest, à la an old episode of The Sopranos, and heave her breasts into Kava’s face to make sure the hidden microphone picked up his every word, Imani would have surely said “fuggedaboutit.” A “wire” still had the basic mechanics of old—a transmitter, microphone, and battery pack—but the modern device was small enough to hide in Imani’s undergarments, light enough to attach by Velcro, and sensitive enough to pick up even whispers.
“How far away is SWAT?” asked Jack.
The risk of detection was real whenever an informant wore a wire. Sending in SWAT was a last resort, but the FBI had to prepare for the worst.
“Less than a minute,” said Coffey.
The ASAC spoke up, also remotely. “I won’t hesitate to make that call if Imani is in danger,” he said.
Jack turned his attention to the A/V equipment. The operations cabin was divided into a seating area, which was directly behind the driver’s seat, and the equipment station, which was behind the driver. An image appeared on the center LCD screen.
“I have a visual,” said the tech agent.
Like all the residences on the east side of Pine Tree Drive, the back of the Kava estate faced the Intracoastal Waterway and the bay. The FBI had deployed drones over the waterway to capture real-time video of the estate. Imani had been coached to conduct her pre-concert conversation with Kava outdoors, and it appeared that she had managed to follow instructions. She and Vladimir Kava could be seen together, seated at a patio table near the swimming pool. The guests had yet to arrive for the performance, but the stage was fully set, and a dozen or more workers and servants were on the grounds, making final preparations.
“We have audio,” said the tech agent.
The surveillance team went silent. Jack watched and listened, pleased that Imani had put first things first. She laid out the condition of her performance: Theo’s safety. Kava’s reply was given with a heavy Russian accent.
