The president took a deep breath.
"Okay, Ellen. I heard from the others last night about the Ukrainian economic collapse. Are you up to speed on that?"
"The hryvnia, their currency, is collapsing in value, right?" Huxley-Laffer said. She had read about it on Bloomberg on her way in.
"Yes, it"s completely tanking. Down twenty-four percent in the last three days. We have a friendly high up in their department of finance, as you well know. They"ve tapped us for a loan to stop the bleeding. I"d love to go forward with that, or anything else that will help the Ukraine stand up to the Russians after their annexation of Crimea. What"s your take?"
Huxley-Laffer looked up in the air to her left and pursed her lips as she thought.
"I think, truthfully, that we need to back off a little, Mr. President. You know, calling them out on the false flag attempt last week was a really good move. It was very effective and needed to be done, but I think a loan or any other direct backing and involvement in the Ukraine on the heels of it is really going to be seen seriously as a threat to some of the hard-line higher-ups in Russia."
"You think so?" the president said.
"Well, we know through our sources that they"re already spooked by the increase in the military budget you made. And besides, we already have economic sanctions and help from our European friends to limit trade and especially credit to them. We have enough pressure already on them. It"s time to let it do its work."
The president squinted pensively at Huxley-Laffer.
"So let this one go?" he said.
"Yes, sir. I think you should let this one go."
The president smiled.
"Slow and steady wins the race?"
"That"s what they say," Huxley-Laffer affirmed.
"On another topic, you think I should go to New York for this UN summit?"
"What does John say?"
The president rolled his eyes and smiled.
"The head of the Secret Service? What do you think?"
"They"re still looking for the shooter?"
The president nodded.
"What do you want to do?"
"Go, of course."
"I agree," Huxley-Laffer said.
"Show of strength, Ellen."
"Yes," Huxley-Laffer said with a smile. Then she lifted a finger.
"But remember. Not too much."
Chapter 43.
With its old gray prewar tenement buildings and rusting fire escapes and garbage bags piled high at the curbs, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, looked like a dilapidated chunk of inner-city blight plopped down beside the ocean.
Noon Tuesday, I was in a fed surveillance car in the heart of the heavily Russian neighborhood on Ocean View Avenue. In the car with me was Paul Ernenwein and two of his best guys from the FBI New York office"s Russian mob squad. A second car with two more agents sat around the block.
The object of our attention was the gaudy red-and-gold awning of a popular Russian restaurant called Sochi"s that was a block to the north.
We"d finally gotten a decent lead. The feds had scoured Pavel Levkov"s Riverdale place while he was still at the hospital. They"d found a cell phone in a false panel in the attic. And one of the numbers on it belonged to a well-known Russian mobster named Maxim Kuznetsov.
Kuznetsov, in addition to being a former professional heavyweight boxer, had been a suspect in over a dozen brutal murders of Russian nationals and Russian American immigrants in the last ten years. He had ties through his older brother to Russia"s military intelligence organization, the GRU. He was also one of Sochi"s owners.
As we sat there, staring at the restaurant, it started to lightly snow. You could see snow on the boardwalk down the side street and even a half-melted snowman on the beach, under the lead-colored sky.
"Call me crazy, but whenever I hear the word beach, it usually evokes images of sunshine and pastel-colored hotels and bikinis," I said.
"Yeah, well, welcome to Siberia by the sea," Paul mumbled as he looked through his binocs.
"Wait," he said a moment later. "There"s a car slowing out in front. A BMW SUV."
Paul"s radio crackled.
"We see him. It"s Kuznetsov," said the feds in the other car.
Busboys were Windexing tabletops and a vacuum whirred loudly from somewhere as the five agents and I, in raid jackets, stormed into the restaurant ten minutes later.
There was gold everywhere. On the covers on the chairs, the bra.s.s railings, and the mirror frames. From the gilt ceiling hung ma.s.sive, glittering chandeliers that were about as demure as Cleopatra"s earrings.
We found Kuznetsov in the very clean and bright stainless steel kitchen. He was a tall man, about six foot four, in his fifties, wearing an ap.r.o.n over a stylish white dress shirt and gray silk suit pants. He was expertly chiffonading cl.u.s.ters of basil on a butcher block with a ten-inch chef"s knife.
"Maxim Kuznetsov?" Paul Ernenwein said.
The beefy, gravely handsome dark-haired man glanced up at us, then slowly set down the huge knife. He blotted at his broad forehead with a paper napkin. Something good was cooking in a pan on the stove behind him. Some kind of chicken in a thick brown b.u.t.ter sauce.
"Yes. How can I help you?" he said in, surprisingly, completely unaccented English.
"We"d like to ask you a few questions about a national security matter," Paul said. "Could you come with us, please?"
He stared at us steadily with his dark eyes.
"Will I need a lawyer?" he said.
Paul smiled.
"I guess we"ll just have to see," he said.
Chapter 44.
The next morning at around ten, Paul Ernenwein and I were walking south down bright and bl.u.s.tery Park Avenue, heading to a surprise meeting with the Secret Service at their forward team HQ.
The invite was quite sudden, and even more curious since this was the very same Secret Service who"d said they wanted to run their own separate departmental investigation in the search for the president"s shooter instead of teaming up with us.
"So I heard our Russian friend, Kuznetsov, didn"t bite," I said to Paul as we crossed East 31st with steaming doughnut cart coffees.
"You heard right," the stocky Boston FBI agent said as he pulled up the sleeve of his trench to check his watch. "We released him around eleven p.m., when his lawyer showed. He maintains that he had no knowledge of Pavel Levkov and that his number on Pavel"s phone could have been from any one of the patrons of his restaurant, to whom, he claims, he often loans his phone."
"Oh, so that explains his connection to the attempted presidential a.s.sa.s.sination," I said, rolling my eyes. "Just a simple case of loaning out his cell phone. Our bad."
"Don"t worry," the feisty redheaded agent said with a grin. "Before we let him go, we let it be known that we were going to put full-court pressure on him and his entire organization until he decides to be more cooperative. He didn"t exactly seem to be shaking in his boots, but we"ll see what happens."
Up the block, I followed Paul into the marble lobby of a prewar office building, and we badged our way past the desk. Through a buzzed-open and unmarked door on the eighth floor, I counted about two dozen stressed-out T-men among the laptops and file cabinets and paper shredders.
Paul said h.e.l.lo to one of the agents, who led us to the back of the office. Inside the briefing room, a dark-haired woman sat at a desk, biting on a pen as she stared alternately at the two laptops open in front of her.
"Paul, Mike-I"m Margaret Foley. Thanks for coming," the tall, attractive, intense thirtysomething brunette said as she stood and smiled and shook our hands.
Paul had already told me that Foley was the Service"s newly a.s.signed agent in charge in New York. He"d heard she was supposed to be a pretty straight shooter, ambitious but fair. Her people seemed to like her.
Foley gestured at her laptops.
"I"ll be blunt, fellas. We"re getting absolutely nowhere in our own investigation on the president"s shooter, and I was hoping we could maybe pool our resources in tracking him down. Does that sound like it makes sense?"
"Yes," Paul said as he unb.u.t.toned his coat. "Finally."
Foley laughed as she rolled up her shirtsleeves.
"Yeah, I heard my predecessor didn"t play that well with others. I"m hoping I can change that."
She uncapped a marker with a sharp pop and brought us over to the whiteboard she had set up in the corner.
"Okay. Maybe you can help bring me up to speed on all of this," she said, gesturing at the collage of printouts and photographs.
"Basically, the morning the president came to the UN, the FBI New York office got a call from a confidential informant," Paul said as he sat down.
"Our counterintel division has had a pretty high-up guy in the Russian emba.s.sy for years who we trust. He told us six months ago that he had heard a rumor that a big hit was about to go down in the States and that it was being authorized by the Russian government. But he didn"t know the target. Then, the morning of the president"s visit, he called, frantically saying he had just found out it was the president."
"That"s insane. Just incredible," Foley said. "Do the Russians want a world war? Who"s the shooter supposed to be? A Russian?"
"No, we think the Russians probably opted for a professional killer for hire," Paul said. "Why bring one of your own people in when you can use a world-cla.s.s sniper turned mercenary?"
"Where did you come into all this, Mike?" Foley said, turning toward me.
"I was put on a task force with Paul"s guys on the morning of the president"s arrival to find the shooter. It didn"t take long. I was part of the aerial countersniper surveillance covering the presidential motorcade coming in from Kennedy, and as we came into Manhattan with the motorcade, I spotted something under the lip of the MetLife Building."
"The sniper"s blind," Foley said, tapping the crime scene photos on her board that showed the blind. "Okay. So you crash-land on the roof and attempt an arrest, but the a.s.sa.s.sin shoots the cop with you and escapes. Then what happened?"
"Our Russian confidential informant from the emba.s.sy went missing," Paul said. "But not before he gave us a lead on a guy named Pavel Levkov."
"Levkov," Foley said, pointing to a picture of him. "That"s the guy who was shot in the kneecap?"
"One and the same," I said. "We think he was the shooter"s handler. We also think that we"re not the only ones looking for the shooter."
"Who"s the guy, Kuznetsov, that you picked up yesterday? How does he fit in?"
"Kuznetsov"s the head of the Russian mob in New York," I said. "We found his number on Levkov"s phone. What makes things even more interesting is that Kuznetsov also has ties to Russian intelligence. He has an older brother in the GRU, the Russian army"s military intelligence."
"So more Russians again," Foley said, shaking her head.
"We figure maybe that Kuznetsov got the order from the Kremlin to do the hit, then hired Levkov as a middleman to hire an a.s.sa.s.sin," I said.
"It"s a theory, at least," Paul said with a shrug. "We actually had a talk with Kuznetsov last night, but his lawyer sprung him after ten minutes of getting nowhere. We have surveillance on him and Levkov, so hopefully something will break."
"What"s the deal with the president?" I said, peeking out the meeting room"s blinds.
I looked up at a jaw-dropping view of the Empire State Building two blocks northwest, then back at Foley. It was getting cloudy now, darker, threatening to snow.
"Is he actually coming back for this next round of UN meetings?" I said.
Margaret Foley popped the cap back on the marker.
"We advised against it, of course, since this shooter might very well still be around," she said.
She clicked the marker to the magnetic whiteboard and crossed her arms.
"But the president insists. He"s stubborn," she said.
"Stubborn," Paul said as he drummed his fingers on the table.
"Sounds like our job just got a whole lot harder," I said.
Chapter 45.