combined with youth and diligence. A dash of treachery and savoir faire with both. How old are you again? Seventeen?”
“I’ll be thirty on December twenty-fourth.”
“Oh. Thirty. Ancient,” he said.
“So this would be a major promotion also?” she asked.
“Unquestionably,” Gamburian said. “Bigger title, heavier pay-check, increased oversight and responsibility. More physical risk perhaps. The assignment would start after the first of the year, and the offices will be in the Wall Street area. What better place to watch out for financial crime, right? You can just look out your window if things get slow. Oh, and I’m also told that much of the work will have to do with Central and South America, so the job presupposes fluent Spanish. Not just fluent, but so good that it could pass for an educated native speaker. What the State Department grades a 5 out of 5. Again, that’s you.”
“That’s me,” she said.
He leaned forward and wrote out a phone number. “Here’s the number to call for an interview. Think about it,” he said.
She took the paper and folded it away. “Thanks, Mike,” she said. “I already have.”
SEVEN
The car carrying Nagib was in New York City within five hours. The car traveled not to Manhattan, the city of skyscrapers, the upscale, and tourists, but rather to Brooklyn and a neighborhood known as Prospect Heights.
Prospect Heights lies adjacent to Prospect Park, between Park Slope and Crown Heights. It is surrounded by the finest cultural and recreational institutions in Brooklyn-the Brooklyn Museum, the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It is a polyglot area, with a typically New York mix of everything, notably people from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East. The tenor of neighborhoods change from block to block; boarded up, burned-out structures defaced with graffiti stand next to newly renovated apartment complexes with glass elevators and rooftop gardens.
Nagib’s car stopped at a three-story tenement on Lincoln Place. His driver guided him inside to the second-floor home of a man named Hassan, who tearfully embraced Nagib. Hassan was Nagib’s uncle, and he too had come to America illegally seven years ago.
The uncle now had a new ID and a social security card. He had married an American woman of Lebanese descent and was legal to stay. Now he ran a small store and a small cell of conspirators. The uncle’s home was a halfway stop to Nagib’s destination. Hassan served Nagib lunch and provided him with some changes of clothing to take with him. From a safe concealed under the floorboards of a closet, he also provided him with a Chinese-made pistol and a silencer. They went to the basement of the building where there were sandbags and concrete walls. Hassan had built a makeshift shooting gallery there. The man who had guided Nagib this far through his journey gave Nagib a nod, and the traveler took several minutes to practice with his new weapon.
Then a new driver appeared with a different car, a battered 1990 Taurus with a New York license. Nagib climbed in with his new driver, who wanted to be known simply as Rashaad. He was dark-skinned and seemed more American than the previous one. He spoke Arabic with a Saudi accent, and for that reason Nagib didn’t like him.
A few minutes later they were on an expressway, going through a long tunnel. Then they were in an area of oil refineries in northern New Jersey, continuing south. They passed Philadelphia by 2:30 in the afternoon and Baltimore two hours after that. Nagib said little on this leg of the journey. Rashaad said even less. Halfway there, Nagib reached into his pocket. Folded up with some American money was a crinkled photograph of his wife, a pretty woman of twenty-four in a green prayer shawl.
The driver glanced over and spoke in Arabic.
“Put that away,” Rashaad said. “You shouldn’t even have that. I should take it from you and burn it.”
“You try to take it and I’ll break your wrist,” Nagib said. “Then I’ll break your neck.”
Rashaad swore bitterly at him but didn’t do anything. Nagib then thought better of things and put the picture away. There was an old Arab proverb: Me and my brother against my cousin, but me and my cousin against a Christian.
He spoke the proverb aloud, but the Saudi only glowered. Nagib might not have liked his partner, but there was no need to make an extra enemy either.
They continued on in silence.
There was little to talk about and little to joke about. But there was much to think about and much to plan.
EIGHT
Later the same day, as Alex tidied up some final points on the Medina securities case, she phoned one of her favorite New York hotels, the Gotham, on West 55th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. She booked herself a room for the next evening.
She followed this with a call to her FinCEN contact in New York and arranged for an interview in two days. The FinCEN offices had an address in the financial district, not too far from Ground Zero. They had a time slot open for her in the morning at 10:00 and she took it.
Then she called Joseph Collins, a philanthropist and her mentor-as much as anyone had been one. She set a meeting with him for the next afternoon at 2:00. He would meet her in his home office at Fifth Avenue and 84th Street, he told her.
Her trip, though on short notice, was taking shape.
On the computer in her office, she went to the internet and booked an Amtrak ticket for the next morning. The train was easier than the airlines from Washington, she always figured, and faster too.
She glanced at her watch. If she left work on time today, which Mike had suggested, she could catch a solid workout at the gym in the evening and still have time to pack.
Tonight was her night to join in the pickup basketball with her friends at the YMCA. She had nicely worked the games back into her Wednesday schedule. She enjoyed seeing and competing against a good group of friends, and she could more than use it this evening. The tedium of being bound to a desk was slam-dunking her. And yet at the same time, she had been putting off placing the call to Federov. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe there was too much that could go wrong.
“What the heck,” she finally mused to herself, pumped a bit at getting away from the office again for a few days. “I’ll make the call and then I’m out of here.”
So her final call of the day was to the switchboard at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, where she asked for a guest named Yuri Federov. She waited to see if he had registered there under his real name and was partially surprised to learn from the operator that indeed he had.
“Could you put me through to his suite?” she asked.
She felt her heart race. She was under no illusions about Federov’s amorous feelings for her. He was an assignment, she reminded herself. He was potentially dangerous and had to be played carefully. She often wondered if there was a shred of decency in him and had come to the conclusion that, yes, if she looked hard enough, she could find some.
Maybe not much. But some.
Then she reminded herself that the last time she had seen him was a dark night in northern Italy, and he had just executed a man who had betrayed him. Sometimes she needed to do an urgent reality check on some of the people with whom she dealt.
There was light classical music as she waited for the connection. Lord, the money that people paid for these hotels, she thought to herself, and not for the first time. How much did it cost Federov to stay in a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria? Fifteen hundred bucks a night? Two thousand? A hundred bucks an hour? Two bucks a minute?
Well, if you had stolen obscene boatloads of money you could afford to spend obscene boatloads, just as long as you didn’t blow all of it. She remembered how her mother had busted a gut just to earn five hundred dollars a week in the 1980s and thought she was doing well. Even though Alex worked in financial crime deterrence, sometimes the fiduciary realties of the modern world were surreal.
The phone in Federov’s suite rang twice. Then he picked up. His response was sharp and gruff. “Hello?”
Alex felt a final surge of nerves. Then she spoke into her phone.
“Hello, Yuri,” she said.
A slight pause. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“This is your favorite American woman, or one of them, at least.”
His mood changed. “Alex?”
“Alex,” she confirmed.
“My goodness! How wonderful!” he said. “And your spies are so efficient! I’ve hardly been here long enough to unpack.”
In the background, there was electronic conversation in Russian, most likely an internet television link playing in his suite. It scrambled her thoughts slightly to be speaking one language while hearing another one acting as a counterpoint.
“Consider yourself lucky to be here long enough to unpack,” she said, playing along.
He laughed. “I have you to thank for that.”
“Not me, my bosses,” she said.
“You’re in New York, I hope?”
“No, not yet. But I’m going to be in New York tomorrow night. Interested in having some drinks and some conversation?” To her abiding shame, she added a flirtatious tone. Oh, well, she reasoned. They both knew it was a game, and they both knew how to play.
He switched into Russian. “For you? I’ll order iced champagne in my suite. Or vodka and beluga caviar!”
