Pawlowski was short on honesty, but when it came to leadership the man had something.
Bogosian decided working for an American-Polish company was almost as good as crossing the Big Water. Caspar was a follower. When it was explained, he saw that a payroll job was his best option. Popov and Mario took two days to convince themselves there would be no ransom, then became Pawlowski’s personal bodyguards. They were good. Even Filshin had to run his appointments with Pawlowski through Popov.
Filshin didn’t know whether to be afraid or relieved that he wasn’t party to all of his boss’s enterprises. Chief among the big man’s concerns was regaining control over the frozen bank accounts he used for laundering the money he earned. Pawlowski explained that he and his men had been working that problem when the Filshin Gang interrupted them by kidnapping the boss, but those plans would now go forward.
Filshin expected Johnny Rienzo to look like he belonged to the reality TV show gangster family he once caught his son watching back in Cleveland before Filshin chased him outside to mow the lawn… pudgy, short, and dripping with gold chains and diamond pinkie rings. But Johnny Rienzo was cool understated elegance in thousand-dollar suits. The ponytail that would have looked silly on Tony Soprano added élan and class.
Filshin’s life veered further out of control. Man up, he told himself, and opened the requisite bank accounts in New York, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Aruba. Stop whining. He sent Natasha’s father a plane ticket to Toronto and arranged for a weekly stipend to be sent to Natasha. He paid the bill for the kids’ conservatory and medical school. If he couldn’t go home, he would shoulder the finances. His family was safe. The rest didn’t matter.
At the top of Pawlowski’s agenda was a business conference in Katowice, Poland. The conference website explained why he was so interested. Michael Usher was the keynote speaker and the new Polish Environment Minister, aka Pawlowski, was scheduled to welcome conference attendees. Pawlowski would stay out of sight until then.
Filshin was reading the bios of the other speakers when Pawlowski walked by his desk. He stopped to stare at the photo of a young African-American woman.
“Well, well, isn’t this interesting,” Pawlowski said.
Friederike Jordan looked about the age of Filshin’s own daughters; hardly old enough to be the expert in environmental remediation that the conference website said she was.
“I never thought I’d run into Fritzi Jordan again, but here she is. And she’s coming to Poland. Hey Johnny, come get a load of this.”
“Cute. Who is she?” Rienzo asked.
“An old friend from my Washington days. Though how in the hell Fritzi Jordan ever got involved with wanting to clean up the environment beats me. Maybe it was having to work with Michael Usher. He definitely leaves me wanting to clean up the world.”
“Wait a minute,” Rienzo said. “Are you telling me, she used to work for Michael Usher, the guy who just tried to have you killed?”
Pawlowski nodded. “Usher introduced us. He arranged for me to show up at a swank party and sweep her off her feet.” His swollen face twisted into a smile that showed genuine fondness. “Wasn’t much of a challenge. She’s a sweet kid.”
“It’s a setup,” Rienzo said.
Pawlowski laughed. “Fritzi? Ridiculous.”
“She just appears here, on your home turf? After how many years?” Rienzo said. “With the guy who hired Filshin to kill you?” He shook his head. “It’s a setup.”
“Fritzi doesn’t have it in her.” Pawlowski pulled up a chair and sat in front of Filshin’s monitor. “This is great. Not only do I get to come back from the dead to snag a lucrative contract, I also get to hook up with an old friend.”
Rienzo picked up a conference brochure from Filshin’s desk. “This isn’t good.” He passed it to Filshin. “What do you think, Jenye?”
“I am also thinking, is looking like trap.”
“What? Am I working with a couple of old ladies? This is going to be fun. Fritzi and Usher had a falling out even before I left Washington. I’m surprised she’s still works for him.”
Rienzo and Filshin looked at each other. Pawlowski didn’t notice. “
“She was his secretary?” Rienzo asked.
“No. Nothing like that. They worked together at NSA.”
“The National Security Agency?” Rienzo asked. “She was a spy?”
“Mathematician. Usher said she was some kind of genius. Wrote encryption algorithms. You know, software to keep people from hacking into government computers.”
Rienzo and Filshin exchanged another glance. “So why was Usher wanting you to be meeting her?” Filshin asked.
Pawlowski was grinning, still thinking of his student days in Washington. “Usher said she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. He needed to know what she knew.”
“And? What was it?”
“No idea. I never did find out. Fritzi never talked about her work.”
Rienzo grinned in disbelief. “A woman who doesn’t like to talk?”
“Never ever,” Pawlowski insisted. “Everything I learned about her work came from Usher.” He snatched the program booklet from Rienzo and leafed through it. “Whatever she had on Usher, it must have been a doozy. I was invited to so many parties, I lost count. Fun for me, awful for Fritzi. She hated the Washington social scene, but her boss wouldn’t take no for an answer. Usher must have been behind that too. I became a refuge for her, which was probably what Usher intended.
“You know, thinking back, I think Usher was afraid of her.” He laughed so hard that his bruises made him wince. “How can you be afraid of a mathematician!”
A sly look came over Rienzo’s face. “She did programming for government computers? As in government banking computers?”
“Maybe. Usher didn’t say.”
“Your friend may be the answer to our banking problems.”
“You mean…”
“Exactly. Let’s get back to your office.” He shot him a warning glance meant to exclude Filshin, but Pawlowski stopped him. “How can Jenye help us, if we aren’t up front about our cash flow problems?”
Rienzo turned to Filshin and explained. “The biggest handicap we have in growing our business is quickly making our money legal by investing in something tangible, which can’t be shut down or seized without taking down a lot of other businesses. You know, like in the banking crisis…too big to fail and all that.
“We like the waste industry, and construction…architectural renovation and interior design. Expenses can be padded there. But cash businesses, big cash businesses like casinos and hotels, are best.
“Since this global war on terror thing though, the US has clamped down on how money moves. We have millions waiting to be invested, and we can’t do anything with it.” Rienzo said.
“Millions?” Pawlowski said. “Try hundreds of millions.”
“Jan has come up with a brilliant plan to free up our money.”
“It is brilliant, isn’t it?” Pawlowski’s bruised face managed a crooked smile. “But we need to get the press involved. It can’t work without the press.” He gave Rienzo and accusing look.
“My PR contacts in New York are working that,” Rienzo told him.
What were they talking about?
Pawlowski gave Filshin a brief summary.
Filshin worked to keep his horror from creeping into his face as he listened to how Pawlowski had arranged for a train loaded with nuclear material to be hijacked. He intended for the public to force governments in eastern Europe to unfreeze his bank accounts, but somehow the authorities had hushed it up. He and Rienzo were now planning attacks in a number of eastern European cities that would ratchet up public fear and get news of the train’s disappearance out. That would increase the pressure to unfreeze their accounts.
“RDDs is engineer-speak,”Pawlowski said. “‘Dirty bomb’ sounds so much scarier.”
“Scary will give us back what is ours,” Rienzo said in his raspy NYC voice.
/>
They were seriously crazy, Filshin thought.
Rienzo wasn’t done. “I read in the Wall Street Journal the NSA is making banks install transaction monitoring software to find accounts being used for money laundering,” Rienzo said. He tapped Fritzi Jordan’s picture on the monitor. “If your friend here is the mathematical genius you say she is, I think Filshin and his boys should go to the conference and snatch her.”
Filshin looked up at Pawlowski, who didn’t like what he was hearing one bit. “Come on, Johnny. NSA has hundreds of projects. We have no idea what Fritzi was working on.”
“It doesn’t matter. I have a more ordinary math genius project in mind. Like where she cracks bank security on the internet and moves our money somewhere safe, while we step up the timetable with the dirty bomb attacks. Hijacking the train isn’t working. Every time I read about it, the authorities say the castor train was ‘delayed’ or ‘diverted’, and the bastards repeat all the security stuff; how anyone trying to get at the plutonium will keel over from radiation poisoning.
“No more warning shots. Let’s see what happens when we hit a city with an armed dirty bomb. That should shake something loose.” A sly look crept into his face. “But it won’t really matter, because we’ll have Little Miss Math Genius moving our money out the whole time they’re chasing dirty bombers. By the time the Feds and Interpol catch on, it will be too late.”
Another kidnapping, Filshin thought. A woman this time. And another road trip with Popov. The only consolation was that Pawlowski seemed as unhappy about it as he was.
If you liked A Spy in Berlin you can read more in
The Professional Friend: A Spy Novel
available at most online booksellers.
About the Author
Astrid Julian was born in Germany, raised in Canada, and currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. Her fiction has been published in the US, Russia, Canada, Germany and the UK, where her novelette "Irene's Song" was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in the short fiction category. 2014 marks the first appearance of her spy thriller The Professional Friend. It takes readers on an adrenaline-charged race across Europe as organized criminals terrorize cities from Berlin to Moscow with dirty bomb radiation.
The topics of Astrid Julian's nonfiction range from space-based microscopy on the International Space Station to the testing of jet engines and rockets in NASA wind tunnels and vacuum chambers. Her film "Return to Flight" is the story of the men and women of Cleveland's NASA Glenn who worked to return the shuttle to flight status after the Columbia accident. It can be found on YouTube.
Also by Astrid Julian
Mysteries and Thrillers
Atomic Mouse
The Icarus Mirror
Julianne’s Freckles
The Professional Friend
Fantasies
Bringing Sissy Home
Irene’s Song
The Last Secret
The Hunter and the Stag
Science Fiction
Child of Chernobyl
Mother’s Day
Blowup
Connect with Astrid Julian
https://www.facebook.com/astrid.julian
https://twitter.com/AstridJulian
https://www.youtube.com/user/pliny47
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AstridJulian/posts
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