Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2) Read online

  Upon arriving in Vienna I took an Uber over to the Hilton and settled into my room. I tried to sleep, to build up my strength before the sleepless night we had planned, but soon I heard Boris go into the room next door. There was a hesitant knock on the door connecting the rooms. I opened it and the smile I had on, expecting Boris, dropped from my face immediately. A Russian gorilla was in the door, with a shaggy black beard, a shaved and tattooed head, and a gun pointing at me.

  There’s not much to do in this sort of situation – you either surrender, or do something unexpected to gain the advantage.

  I threw myself sideways and to the floor, landing on my hands, and kicked the door with both legs into the gorilla’s face.

  “Ow! Yop tvoyu mat, Ehrlich, calm down. Calm down, you jungle beast.” The voice, at least, was familiar. The gorilla quickly removed the beard and the tattooed forehead, then tossed away the weightless plastic gun.

  “You see how it is, boss?” said Boris, pulling me up to my feet, “Twenty rubles in a fucking costume shop and you’re a new man. How long have we known each other? Nine – no, ten years now, and you didn’t recognize me from two feet away, and if I weren’t prepared for that I’d be pretty fucked right now.”

  I couldn’t help but remember the Boris who first came to us as a cadet a decade ago. A polite, introverted young man, an extremely talented mathematician who in his spare time enjoyed tackling the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Problems while listening to Stravinsky on his headphones. We soon realized there was something different about him. Something special.

  “Well done, Boris. Shall we get to work?”

  He looked at me and seemed to struggle to find the right words.

  “I… no, listen, boss. I feel that this dreck is just under our noses, and the reason we haven’t found him is because of twenty fucking rubles just like these. Also boss, before we get to the professor, we’ve made a pretty decent connection in RET with the office manager of their HR department, a mustachioed older lady looking for true love.”

  “Did you sic the gigolo on her?”

  The gigolo, also known as Yefim Vasilyevich, was a hopeless Don Juan. If there was someone in the world who would actually fuck anything that moved, it was he. Yefim also happened to be a truly gorgeous man – dark curls, blue puppy-dog eyes, and a concrete six-pack. We got him from his father, Colonel Vasilyevich, who also worked for us.

  “Affirmative. They’ve been inseparable.”

  “As long as she doesn’t kill herself like that –”

  “Honestly, if it’s after the job’s done, I couldn’t care less. As long as she provides the link to their office.”

  “Okay. So, shall we get to work?” I asked again.

  Boris opened his laptop and brought up a video file.

  “We’ve got three hundred and twenty suspects,” he said, adding air quotes. “They’re filtered according to Hamdani’s estimated height and weight, give or take 10%, and only those spotted more than once a week in one of the locations you specified. Now I’m going to take a shower if you don’t mind. And for the record, that really was a good kick, boss. Surprising, for a man your age.”

  I tried to think of a comeback but couldn’t, so I just rolled my eyes and started going over the footage as he went into the shower. None of the suspects looked anything like the professor, but I was sure that he was there somewhere, and also certain that he’d chosen a disguise that could be easily abandoned, for Ali’s sake. Boris’ little show-and-tell only made that clearer.

  I’d gone over the photos twice by the time Boris came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, just as a knock on the door marked the arrival of the room service cart with its many sandwiches and coffee. I had no intention of getting up, so Boris was forced to try and juggle the towel and the door and the tip, and eventually dropped the towel and was left hanging out in the breeze in front of the giggling room service attendant. I told him he looked surprising, for a man his age.

  “Well? Did you find something?” he asked after she’d left, still giggling.

  “No.”

  “Figures. Bring up the toolbar. See that red X? click on it. Two hundred and sixty filtered out, we’re left with sixty. Now click the X again.”

  I complied, and a new list came up:

  Hamdanov (Hamdani) residence – NOM

  Iran embassy – NOM

  “What’s ‘Nom’?” I asked.

  “No match,” said Boris. I went over the rest:

  Hezbollah representative – NOM

  RET + physics inst. – 11

  Uni. music dept. – NOM

  Park next to residence – NOM

  Iran embassy + RET – 16

  “Can you bring up the ones found at both the embassy, RET and the physics institute?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and started typing.

  “It should be over 11 and under 16.”

  “Yeah, but those numbers aren’t worth much. Small cells – big anomaly.”

  “Let’s take fifteen of them.”

  “And do what? Pull on fifteen beards and give fifteen apologies? Remember, none of these guys has even been to the Hamdani house. If we had any number of recurring visits, things would be different, but – “

  “If we have to, we’ll pull on fifteen beards.”

  “Leaving us holding a whole lot of short-and-curlies.”

  My phone rang, and I answered in German. It was Bella, telling me – also in German – that Albert and Nora had taken the noon flight and should be arriving at the hotel any minute to present us with some newfangled shtick Albert had come up with. I thanked her, hung up, and compiled a list of everyone who came up in the search more than once.

  “You know what might explain this? Maybe Hamdani doesn’t come to the Hamdani residence; maybe Faiza and the kid go to him.”

  Boris shrugged helplessly.

  Fifteen minutes later Albert and Nora knocked on the door.

  Albert looked disappointed by the state of the sandwiches and coffee, or lack thereof, on the room service tray.

  “I’ll order some more,” I said and called room service.

  Albert opened the lid of his gigantic laptop.

  “Check this out,” he said. “Here we have Professor Hamdani in all his glory, walking around Tehran with and without the kid, at the university, at the IRGC headquarters, going home, and dozens of other brief clips taken by Mordechai’s surveillance team. Now, we’ve fed this into the Gait Analysis.”

  A stopwatch animation popped up on the screen, presenting the percentage of the professor’s gait as it was analyzed and modeled by the software. The progress bar mostly stood still and occasionally jerked forward. It grew slower and slower, and we started losing our patience.

  “What are we actually looking at, Albert?” I asked.

  “The real deal. Motion pattern recognition. The reliability of this software is absolute, like another biometric identification. We literally got it yesterday – this is actually O’Driscoll’s personal app.”

  We all just stared at him.

  “Look,” he said, “right now I’m scanning your suspects’ gait characteristics. You have three hundred and twenty, right?”

  Boris nodded apprehensively. He didn’t seem extremely optimistic.

  “Ten seconds per sample, so fifty-three minutes, total. Just under an hour.”

  “No, too long,” I said. “Take only the ones who were at RET and at the physics institute and visited the Iranian military attaché.”

  “That’s only sixteen,” Albert muttered, swiftly entering the new filters. “Good, so – at ten second per sample – got it.”

  The doorbell rang with impeccable timing, and I opened the door for a hotel attendant carrying a tray with four sandwiches and four glasses of orange juice. I tipped him and he smil
ed and left. I looked back at the screen as Albert bit into his salmon and cream cheese. Nora glanced at the food uninterestedly.

  The screen was split in half: on the right, frontal footage of Hamdani walking along Zaferaniyeh Street in Tehran, and on the left, frontal footage of a man leaving the Iranian embassy in Moscow. He seemed a few inches taller than Hamdani, bald and bearded – and yet, the computer declared them a perfect match. The bodyguard walking beside him looked like Bogdanov’s twin; it seemed they’d even bought their raincoats at the same cheap stand.

  “Yes!” Cried Albert.

  “How reliable is this?” I asked, trying to keep my right hand from shaking.

  “One hundred percent,” Albert whispered excitedly, “it’s like a fingerprint, or a retina scan.”

  “How certain?” asked Boris.

  “I just said, a hundred percent, Boris, a hundred percent!”

  “Blyat, I meant how certain are you that it really is one hundred percent?”

  “As certain as you’re Boris and he’s Ehrlich and I’m Einstein, capisce?”

  “Eight rubles for the beard, maybe another ten for the bald head,” Boris muttered mournfully, quickly leafing over the reports from his team, “and do you know how much I paid the Chechens with the cameras? Trust me, it’s better that you don’t…Bingo,” he said, after a moment. “Now that we know it’s him, there’s something else we should look into.”

  “What?” asked Albert, finishing his sandwich.

  “A place that wasn’t on the list. Whenever he was at the University, three times a week, he’d go straight to the mosque after that,” said Boris. “I guess he’s gotten more religious.”

  “Did he go to the mosque back in Tehran?”

  “Negative. Not even once,” said Nora, and sipped her orange juice dispassionately. “He’s either meeting someone there, or becoming a better Muslim.”

  “We’ll have to look into this mosque,” I said. “He hasn’t been seen entering the Hamdanov residence even once.”

  “No,” said Nora, frowning, “But not only has he been there… he’s been living there, with Faiza and Ali.” She pulled out her MacBook with a magician-like flourish and quickly brought up building plans in Russian of a building we all recognized.

  “Follow me downstairs,” said Nora, sliding the 3D blueprints upward, “Now all the way down this path… and voilà, we’re on Sytinskiy. Twin buildings, a shared back yard for the children of the proletariat. You seeing it yet? He goes home to his apartment on Sytinskiy street, out the back entrance into the shared yard, into the stairwell of another building, and comes out into Bolshoy Palashevskiy Alley, where he takes the back entrance into the building, goes up, straight into the shower where he takes off his beard and the rest of his disguise, and that is that. Luigi told me once – you wanna keep them from seeing something? Stick it right under their noses.”

  Boris bent over to plant a kiss on my cheek, then took four little bottles of vodka from the minibar and shoved one into each of our hands. He placed a hand on his head and said, “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, shehecheyanu ve’kiyemanu ve’higianu la’z’man ha’zeh. Amen. Now, my friends, it’s time to get back out there and get that fucking Nazi.”

  “What Nazi?” Albert asked.

  “If you grew up where I did, you’d know that the world is divided in two: either you’re a Jew, or you’re a Nazi.”

  “I’m coming too, Boris. Let’s go grab some Nazis!”

  “No, you’re not,” Nora said decisively, and when I looked at her questioningly, she added, “Look outside.”

  I went to the window and looked down at the street. Shmulik from the local branch was looking back up at me, waving and grinning broadly.

  “They’ve been securing you since you got here, and ordered to assist you in boarding the flight right back,” said Nora.

  “I see,” I said, and tried to figure out if there was some way to ditch them.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is an unqualified no. You’re getting on your flight, Ehrlich.”

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Fine.”

  “It’s a shame your professor isn’t a smoker,” Boris said as he packed his things.

  “Not a smoker, but an avid Coke drinker,” Nora said. “I’m sure you’ll manage to get your hands on a bottle. We have one from Tehran.” Boris nodded slowly, as if in contemplation.

  While Boris had certainly become a thug, he was an extremely intelligent, motivated, determined, and efficient thug. Two days after we returned from Vienna we received three cans of Coca-Cola, collected in Moscow and sent to the lab. Boris and his men followed the disguised professor 24/7 in rotating shifts and vehicles. During the week it took for the lab results to come back, Hamdani’s daily route included the University, RET headquarters and the mosque, which he visited at least once a day by now, and at times twice.

  Boris also sent Ismailov into the mosque after him – one of the liquidators’26 children he often employed, and a fellow Muslim. Ismailov found Hamdanov’s devoutness to be genuine, and said he believed this increased presence at the mosque indicated simple religious zealotry, rather than it being a contact point.

  Boris let us know that Hamdani had been entering the apartment only from Sytinskiy, through the back entrance and the yard, while Faiza and Ali only ever used the front entrance. And of course we fell for this low-tech romper room fuckery; a clever guy like Hamdani figured out that once his digital footprint was gone, we’d lose all of our technological advantage.

  At some point Ismailov managed to convince the caretaker of the Hamdani residence – another Chechen – to vacate his position, for a small payment and the casual reveal of a long blade. The bit of extra baksheesh that sealed the deal also bought him some high-quality information: the widow living in the apartment above the Hamdanov’s liked her men slim, muscular and brown, and happily provided the fit and brown Ismailov not only with her enthusiastic company, but also with a bed and breakfast.

  One morning Boris and Ismailov took advantage of the family’s absence to plant a tiny surveillance cam above their front door. And two days later, the final confirmation came from the lab – full match between the Coke cans from Moscow and the bottle from Tehran. Bingo! We had him.

  Then, of course, came the catch – the PM absolutely forbade us from taking any sort of action on Putin’s soil. Tracking was one thing, but that was as far as we would go.

  “How about a tragic accident?” asked Boris, who was more frustrated about this new development than any of us.

  “From now on, we’re tracking him 24/7. Every fucking second.” I said.

  And so, that Thursday, at three in the morning, as Ismailov and the widow were in bed enjoying their night, his phone beeped.

  “Little bathroom break,” he said to the widow, who replied that there was nothing little about him. From the bathroom he called Boris and notified him that the professor was getting ready to leave the house much earlier than usual. Boris put all of his teams on standby.

  An hour later, the RET limo arrived and picked up the professor and his bodyguard. They took Perovskaya Boulevard to the MKAD ring road and after about fifteen minutes of heading north-east, Boris realized they were heading to Vnukovo Airport.

  At the first interchange Tracker A took a right and Tracker B, coming in from the east, took over. The limo drove past the parking lots for departing passengers and was permitted into the work area inside the airport. Boris hurried into the welcome hall and looked for a vantage point. A military Lada Niva jeep was waiting for the limo on the side of the road and led it toward the distant northern edge of the airport. Boris rushed toward the commercial terminal, which had a huge glass window overlooking the runways, and just managed to spot the limo entering the small, exclusive government terminal, in the closed part of the airport controlled by a special division of the R
ussian Air Force and used by high-ranking government officials. Once Hamdani was in the terminal, Boris lost the visual on him.

  Tracker A managed to recognize Yuri Bogdanov, the driver-bodyguard, having a friendly chat over a cigarette with a similar gorilla who had driven a similar limo to Vnukovo. The license plate, when checked, was not found in any of the known databases – on the other hand, it appeared several times in the RET parking lot and the university parking lot at the same times Hamdani did.

  Boris, still hoping to get authorization for action, sounded miserable when he called to tell me that the vehicle wasn’t registered in any relevant database. Apparently we aren’t the only ones who know how to fake corporate documents.

  “How many suitcases did he bring?”

  “Just one briefcase.”

  “Don’t lurk around the airport. Wait for him at home and at RET. He’ll be back soon, today or tomorrow.” I was certain that he wouldn’t abandon Ali for too long.

  Boris let out several Russian profanities and then said, in a more serious tone, “You know, Ismailov’s lovely widow works at the main headquarters of the government electrical company. She’s in economic administration – recycling supervisor.”

  “Boris…” I urged.

  “Yeah, boss, I’m getting there. The company’s just bought a bunch of new computers, and our widow is in charge of scrapping the old ones. When Ismailov asked her if they actually scrap all of them, she told him in confidence that she and the department manager really only scrap the ones that are in bad shape. The rest are used to supplement their income.”

  “Anything interesting we can do with the survivors?” I asked.