What concerned Alexei, consumed him, was the thought that he did not know these men though they now had a connection with him. The man Brinkley gave them a name that led nowhere before he died. The men he sent to find this Lee Hammond never came back. None of the marked money had appeared anywhere yet. Tens of millions of dollars and they spent none of it?
Alexei came up in the mafiya while the Soviet Union was still a thing. He was part of an active and successful criminal organization run inside of a police state. The first rule was always: know who you are dealing with. You must know more than your rivals and more than the police. You must see all and know all and yet remain invisible. Moving to the West after the fall of the communists was like coming to a thieves’ paradise. For an old school gangster from Odessa like Alexei, this world of ready money and open greed was a field of sheep waiting to be fleeced and quartered. For a man who could operate without discovery by the KGB, it was child’s play to establish layer after layer of legitimate business identities to hide his true interests in smuggling, investment fraud, and money laundering. It was not like him to break the surface to take a deal like this gold buy. But it was so available and so profitable that he overreached. It was greed.
Was he becoming as American as his new name?
He propped pillows behind him and snapped through more channels on the eighty -inch screen mounted on the wall. It was the only light in the room.
The condo was dark, the heavy curtains drawn. Thousands of LED lights created a shifting kaleidoscope over his naked body.
The gold itself was an answer, he thought. Find where it came from and find the men. But even that was a dead end. There were no reported robberies in any media or within any law enforcement agency anywhere. The underworld was silent as well. No one knew anything.
Tests of the gold by a geologist in his employ only informed Alexei that the metal was of very pure quality, but loaded with debris and other metals. But gold was gold, and this gold could be separated and refined to a saleable purity.
Some of the metal was fashioned into crude objects. Plates, cups, and small idols. The largest pieces, his man told him, formed a larger idol or icon that had been hand fashioned to represent a human figure of some kind. So, it was old stuff? Looted from a temple or museum or dug up somewhere?
The geologist found bits of shell and bone among the debris he separated from the gold. He suggested that these could be carbon dated as they were organic material. Alexei paid for these tests, and the results only told him that the gold was not ancient or even medieval. These ugly artifacts that looked as though they might have been fashioned by a backward child were no older than Alexei himself.
He had all the gold sent to a metallurgical lab in Tennessee. The lab was one of a set of properties he owned under the guise of an investment group whose only member was himself. It would be sold off through other holdings and dispersed throughout the world, sinking into the global pool of available gold without a ripple to make Alexei even richer than he was before.
But still, the not-knowing was making him restless. Unanswered questions were dangerous things. Someone was out there with tens of millions of his money, and he wanted to know who they were and what they were about.
His view of a writhing Japanese girl who could not be of legal age was obscured by a black blotch across the screen. He stabbed a button on the remote and a hockey game popped onto the screen, but the black blotch remained.
The black blotch was not on the screen. It was in the shape of a man. A man standing at the foot of his bed.
“Leonid?” Alexei said. But Leonid was supposed to be in the main room of the house where he monitored the security cameras set about the condo and grounds.
The shape grew larger. Alexei sat up but a hand, a strong hand with a grip of stone, clutched his throat and forced him to recline back on the pillows. Alexei grabbed the wrist of the hand to pull it away. The wrist felt as if it had been carved of oak. The hands were gloved in smooth leather. The grip of the fingers on his neck tightened until Alexei’s vision tinged red and he released the oaken wrist.
The hand relaxed, and Alexei sucked in a lungful of air. The man hovered over him. In the light reflected from the mirrored headboard, Alexei could see the man’s eyes regarding him unblinking. The eyes were the color of a clock that sat upon the mantle of his grandfather’s dacha in Yalta. Green eyes the color of malachite. Eyes that betrayed nothing but cold inspection.
“Where is Leonid?” Alexei said.
“The man in the living room is dead.”
Alexei began to rise, hands fisted. The iron grip pressed him back.
“You will stop looking for the men who sold you the gold,” the man with the malachite eyes said.
“Why should I?” Alexei spat. “There will be others who will find them. Find you.”
“No, there won’t.” The malachite eyes grew darker and darker until they finally joined the greater blackness.
Miami businessman Alex Davidson was found murdered in his Star Island residence. Early police statements claimed that he was a victim of a murder-suicide perpetrated by an employee named Leonard Stansfield, who was found in the residence, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot. Both Davidson and Stansfield were found naked with evidence of recent physical contact between the two suggesting a sexual relationship gone wrong according to a final report issued by Miami-Dade police officials.
46
Ramming Speed
Ahinabad dropped to the
