“If you’re right and it’s a copycat of that Russian guy and you mention the words ‘KGB’ and ‘radiation,’ this is going to be a shit storm, pardon my French. All the alphabet agencies, the media . . . And if the Russians are involved, it’s serious trouble. You gotta keep a lid on it.”
“Jack’s on the phone to Bingham right now. I’ll call the PR people and get them in lockdown mode.”
“Appreciate it, Laurie. Now we gotta find this girl. Any reason to think she’s not going back up to Columbia?”
“Hold on a second, Lou, Chet just walked in.” Laurie turned to McGovern.
“Chet, the woman, she say where she was going?”
“No, she half jogged down Thirtieth Street, heading west. I assumed she was heading back up to Columbia. Why are you asking? What’s going on, Laurie?”
Laurie ignored Chet.
“I’d guess she’s heading back to the subway, Lou. Ten, fifteen minutes ago now.”
“Lou? Are you talking to Lou Soldano?” Laurie waved him off. Jack was standing in the corner, on the phone with a finger in his other ear and saying a lot of “yessirs” and “nosirs.”
“I’ll put out an APB if you can give me a description. You said she seemed scared?”
“Very. She couldn’t wait to get out of here,” Laurie said.
“Sounds like she knows more than she should. So how would you describe her?”
“Maybe five-six, slim, about what, one-ten? Black hair, just down to the shoulder. Lovely skin.”
“ ‘Lovely skin’ ain’t a description, Laurie.”
Jack had finished talking with Bingham, and he piped up. “She’s incredibly attractive. Maybe French/Moroccan/Slavic. Chet McGovern here was panting like a dog.”
McGovern took the phone from Laurie.
“I’d say she’s more likely Italian. Dark skin, like olive color. Soft features, dark brown eyes. Gorgeous, like a supermodel. She told me her name is Grazdani, that’s all. You think she’s in danger?”
Laurie snatched back the phone.
“Lou, it’s Laurie again. Remember I said she’s a fourth-year medical student at Columbia.”
“Good point,” Lou said. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to get a picture from Columbia, if she actually goes to Columbia. Now, you guys have to zip your lips. Keep me posted if anything happens. I gotta go, Laurie. I’ll be putting a task force together including the NYPD organized-crime unit. This is serious, Laurie. This has organized crime written all over it. And it has to somehow involve the Russians. Jesus, Laurie, that polonium stuff is associated with nuclear weapons.”
51.
BROADWAY, IN FRONT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 25, 2011, 6:45 P.M.
Pia emerged from the subway at the same entrance she’d used on her way to the OCME, pausing near the MTA area map in the shadow of the Columbia Medical Center’s art deco buildings. She’d raced out of the medical examiner’s office with her head spinning. It was dark, the streets were wet and slick, and there seemed to be hundreds of people on the sidewalks. Pia couldn’t face going all the way across town in the rain despite her umbrella so she took a different route, walking to Park Avenue South and the Twenty-eighth Street station on the 6 line, then traveling to Grand Central and taking the S train, the shuttle across town to Times Square. There she had taken the A express train up to Washington Heights.
Throughout the entire unpleasant train ride Pia had acted like a zombie, seemingly impervious to her environment. A few people, mostly men, tried to talk to her, but she didn’t respond in the slightest. She was in a daze, going over and over the events since Rothman and Yamamoto had fallen ill. It was as if she were experiencing a living nightmare. Having her suspicions corroborated at the OCME afforded her no satisfaction in the slightest. All it had done was cement her fears and sense of dread. She didn’t know specifically if the lethal agent that had been given to Rothman and Yamamoto was polonium, but her intuition told her it was. What to do now was the question for which she had no answer. Maybe she should just run and hide someplace until all the pieces fell wherever they were going to fall. The reality was that she had certainly opened the floodgates at the OCME. Whether she liked it or not or intended it or not, the police were now going to be involved, along with every other law enforcement agency. In her vernacular, the shit was about to hit the fan.
Pia’s intention when she got out of the subway was to hurry back to the dorm. She felt her only resource was George. Even though she was under no illusion that George would know what to do, she hoped she could use him as a sounding board. The fact was, she had no one else. She’d thought briefly about involving the two other stalwarts in her life—Sheila Brown and the mother superior—to get their advice, but the story was much too long and complex and more important, Pia was reluctant to put either of them at risk. In the current situation, knowledge was dangerous.
Although Pia was desperate to get to the dorm, she was also terrified. The moment she’d emerged from the relative safety of the subway, she felt inordinately vulnerable. The men who had attacked her said they would be watching her, and she believed them. It meant that they were there, lurking somewhere in the darkness surrounding the medical center. Although where she was at that moment, near the corner of Broadway and 168th Street, was lit and crowded with commuters, looking west down 168th Street was neither.
Holding her umbrella in the crook of her neck, Pia got out her cell phone, which she’d turned off before going into the OCME. She switched it on. Immediately she saw she had more than ten missed calls and three voice mails. She called George, but he didn’t answer. Instead she left a voice message of her own: “George, it’s me. It’s about six forty-five. I’m at the hospital entrance to the subway at 168th Street. Can you come get me so we can walk back to the dorm together? Okay, I’ll be waiting here.”
52.
HAVEN AVENUE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 25, 2011, 6:59 P.M.
George had not meant to fall asleep, but he had. It was a legacy from the soporific lecture. There was also the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping as well as usual with everything that was going on. Not only was he asleep, he was in the deepest stages such that he didn’t hear his cell phone emit its cricket chirping. The phone was on his desk not ten feet away. He didn’t hear it again when it chirped fifteen minutes later. But that call brought him up from where he’d been such that when the phone chirped a third time, he got up and answered: “Hello.”
“George, it’s Grandma. I tried you before, but I missed you. How are you?”
George was suddenly wide awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, and he fumbled for his watch, checking the time. It was almost seven, and he panicked. Where the hell was Pia?
“Grandma, I’m good, but I’ll have to call you back, okay?”
“Oh, okay, George. Make sure you do now. We haven’t talked in a while. Is everything good?”
“Everything’s good. I’ll call soon! Gotta go!”
George saw he’d missed two calls and listened to the message Pia left the first time. He checked his watch. Shit, she’d been waiting fourteen minutes. As he pulled on a pair of shoes, he tried calling her but got her voice mail. He then raced out into the hall, heading for the elevators.
Prek and Genti sat in the front of the van anxiously scanning passersby through the windshield. Neri was perched uncomfortably on the milk crate, just a little behind and between them. What had been easy earlier, checking out the students as they passed, was now much more difficult. There was a streetlamp at the corner of Fort Washington and Haven, but it was far enough away not to be of much help. It was still raining and much darker. They had been there long enough to be stiff and sore, and in foul moods.
“Where the fuck is she?” Prek questioned morosely. He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. “This is turning into a bitch.”
Neri
, as the most inexperienced, was suffering the most. He’d been so keyed up with excitement, and now that he had had to wait he felt let down, depressed. Although his role was going to be the easiest in that he was going to do the hit, he’d never actually killed anyone before. He had his right hand in his jacket pocket holding his military-issue Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol with the thumb safety on. He’d fired the gun hundreds of times in practice and considered himself a good shot. But shooting a man in the head at point-blank range was a very different proposition from hitting static targets at twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred feet. Yet he knew he had to do it to rise within the crew. Like Prek and Genti, he had his wool balaclava in his lap, ready to pull it over his head and swing into action.
An NYPD cruiser drove by, and all three reflexively crouched down. Prek watched it disappear in his side mirror. Then another NYPD cruiser went past, and Prek tensed up further. He watched that one disappear as well.
“You see that?” he said.
“Of course,” Genti said. “It’s Friday night. I wouldn’t give it much thought.”
“I don’t like to see cops in the area when we’re doing a job. Where the hell is this bitch?”
“It’s getting harder and harder to see these kids’ faces until they’re right on top of us,” Genti said.
A group of three students in lab coats walked past the van, followed by a couple of people walking alone. One of them caught Genti’s attention, and he leaned forward and picked up his balaclava. A minute later he slumped back in his seat. It was yet another false alarm.
Pia had been walking back and forth along the side of the subway stairs, waiting for a call from George, trying to figure out where he could be. They had definitely planned on getting together when she got back from the OCME. More than once, she had resolved to quit waiting for George and walk back to the dorm by herself, at least until she looked down 168th Street and saw that it was darker and more deserted than it had been fifteen minutes earlier. Pia had been about to call George for the third time when she’d been frightened by a hand on her shoulder. Spinning around, she had had to restrain herself from lashing out at her attacker. But it wasn’t an attacker. It was Will McKinley, who’d come up from the subway and caught sight of her pacing back and forth. After initial small talk and mutual sympathies about Rothman’s and Yamamoto’s passing, Pia had latched onto him for company back to the dorm. As an enticement, as if she needed it, she had offered to share her umbrella.
After reminding each other about the deaths, they’d each regressed into their own worlds. They walked in silence until beyond the 168th Street hospital entrance. Pia wondered what Will might say if she told him what she now knew. She thought he probably wouldn’t believe her.
“I was surprised to see you,” Will said. “Did you come out of the subway like I did?”
“I did,” Pia admitted. She tried to think of what to tell him if he asked where she’d been, so she changed the subject. “Have you seen George at all today?”
“Wilson? No, but I haven’t been around since lunch. Lesley and I still haven’t found a home for our month’s research elective. I took the opportunity to do a little shopping.” He held up a shopping bag.
Pia spotted a police cruiser heading in their direction along 168th Street. She tilted down the edge of her umbrella to keep her face from being seen, which Will noticed immediately as it bumped into his forehead. She had reacted reflexively. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the police were looking for her. Although being picked up by the police was surely not something she wanted to happen, at least not yet, she was the first to admit it would be far better than being confronted by her attackers again.
“What, are you a fugitive from justice?” Will quipped, unknowingly interpreting Pia’s gesture correctly.
“Hardly,” Pia said with a fake laugh. Another police car was coming, so she kept the edge of the umbrella angled down.
They reached Fort Washington Avenue and waited for the traffic light to change. There were only another couple of hundred yards to the dorm. Pia relaxed a degree. They had not seen any men in Columbia Medical Center security uniforms. She was looking forward to getting to the relative safety of George’s room.
Genti was the first to spot Pia and Will coming around the corner heading right for them, backlit by the corner streetlight.
“There, in front, fifty yards.”
“Both of them!” Prek voiced with delight. “Fantastic! D-day. Wait for my word. You okay, Neri?”
“Sure!” Neri said with more bravado than he felt. He slipped off the safety on his pistol and pulled on his balaclava as Prek and Genti did the same.
Neri looked out the van’s rear window to see if anybody was coming in the opposite direction.
“Wait!” he said. “Who’s this coming from the dorm? Is that him?”
“Who?” said Prek. He swung around to look at George. Then he flipped open his cell phone and studied the picture Buda had sent him. The only illumination in the van was from the dim streetlights and it was a small photo. He swung back around to look at the man walking with Pia. They could have been twins in the misty half-light. “It has to be the guy with Pia. What is this, the Swedish Olympic team? Everybody is blond.”
Prek waited a couple of beats as the couple got closer. “It’s him. Hell, he has his arm around her. How close is the guy coming from the back?”
Neri checked again. “About two hundred yards.”
Prek picked up a rag from the dash and soaked it with a hefty slug of the Ultane anesthetic, which they were going to use to take down Pia. He shot a look at Genti, and Genti nodded back.
“Okay, go!”
Just as Pia and Will came alongside the van, the three masked men leaped out, Prek and Genti from either side of the front, Neri from the back. Neri stepped around from the back of the van as Will McKinley stood stock-still in front of him, his mouth open wide. Neri pointed the gun at Will’s head and a fraction of a second later Will reacted by turning toward Pia, who’d let out a scream. Neri fired, sending a nine-millimeter bullet into the side of Will’s head. Simultaneously Genti grabbed Pia in a crushing bear hug while Prek slapped the Ultane-soaked rag over her face. Almost immediately the fight went out of Pia, and she lost consciousness.
Neri ran around to the front of the van and got into the driver’s seat while Genti dragged Pia to the back of the van and pulled her inside. As Prek ran to help Genti, he caught sight of Neri’s spent casing. He picked it up from the sidewalk just before jumping into the van behind Genti and slamming the doors shut behind him. Neri already had the engine started, and the moment he heard Prek’s “Go!” he accelerated from the curb, made a rapid U-turn, and headed north on Haven Avenue. The hit-and-snatch had taken about seven seconds.
There were three witnesses who saw everything and eight more who heard the gunshot and saw the van drive away. One of the witnesses had his own reasons for not wanting to talk to the police that evening so he kept right on walking as if nothing had happened. The second was a male med student who had been walking back to the dorm, twenty yards behind Pia and Will. He had watched in horror as the raid unfolded. At first he thought he might be watching a movie being filmed, but it was dark and there were no cameras. And the blood coming from the shooting victim’s head was very real. He called 911 and tried desperately to remember what, if anything, he’d learned in the past two years about gunshot victims.
The third witness was George. He’d seen Will and Pia before the event and had stopped, waiting for them to come to him. He was relieved to see Pia, but his relief was short-lived. In the next second he saw the men leap from the van, shoot Will, and snatch Pia. It happened so quickly he didn’t have a chance to move. He blinked, as if blinking would reset the scene back to when Pia and Will were walking toward him. But it didn’t. It was only then that he ran forward to where the other student was kneeling over Will McKinley’s body.
Inside the van, Prek used a prepared syringe to give the ba
rely conscious Pia an injection of Valium, enough to knock her out completely.
“Don’t drive too fast,” he yelled ahead to Neri. “Keep it steady.” Prek and Genti then struggled to roll Pia up in a threadbare carpet. It wasn’t easy in the rocking and swaying van.
Neri’s hands were shaking, and it was all he could do to stop himself from throwing up. The mark had looked right at him. Neri blinked rapidly and concentrated so he wouldn’t drive right off the road.
“And, Neri,” Prek said.
“What?”
“Good job.”
On a quiet side street just north of the George Washington Bridge, Neri pulled over behind the waiting dark blue van, and the men quickly transferred their cargo. With that done, Prek returned to the driver’s seat with Genti riding shotgun. Neri was told to keep a watch on Pia.
Abandoning the white van, Prek drove ahead to where he could get on the Henry Hudson Parkway to loop around and get onto the George Washington Bridge, heading over to New Jersey. As they expected, the bridge was chockablock with rush-hour traffic. But the crew didn’t mind in the slightest. The hit-and-snatch had been flawless, and they were giddy with their success. It was, as Prek said, a tribute to the Albanian mob tradition.
“I even got this,” Prek said proudly, as he pulled Neri’s bullet casing from his pocket and held it up. “Are we good, or what?” He then handed his cell to Genti and told him to text Buda that the operation went smooth as silk.
53.
BELMONT SECTION OF THE BRONX
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 25, 2011, 8:05 P.M.
Aleksander Buda had been happy to get the text from Prek. He’d been mildly concerned about the operation even though it was a relatively simple job. But he knew from sore experience that “shit could happen.” Be that as it may, the pesky girl was unconscious in the back of the van, and they were on their way to the agreed-upon location, Buda’s summer home, and the boyfriend was dead. The white van they had used had been abandoned. Now the only suspense that remained was the fate of the girl.