Chapter 25
Lex
Andreev
? ? ?
I get up carefully. I shower and dress in dark clothes. I pull a coat off the rack in the foyer and check the inside pocket for the second Sig and the third magazine.
I am going to kill Marcus Andreev today.
I have been thinking about it since the warehouse. I have worked it out. There is a pit at the rear of the Konstantinos warehouse on the south side of Worcester that has held five other men in the seventeen years it has existed, and Andreev will be the sixth.
I have imagined the pit, what I will say to him before I do it. I have imagined the part where I leave the warehouse, drive home, shower, get into bed beside Maeve, and do not tell her.
I have decided I can live with that- maybe.
I do not write Maeve a note. The Konstantinos detail will tell her I left at 5:12 AM. The detail will not tell her where. That is fine. By the time she wakes up, what I am going to do will be done.
I leave.
? ? ?
Petrov is at the warehouse when I arrive at 5:54 AM.
"Where is he?" I say.
"Holding cell B. He’s been there since 11:47 last night. We picked him up at his apartment in Quincy. His wife and daughter were not home; the daughter is at Dana-Farber for an overnight infusion that started at 9 PM."
"Sedated."
"No. He’s not slept. He knows what is coming. He’s been at the table with his head in his hands since 12:30 AM."
I nod.
Petrov says, "Boss."
"Yes."
"Cormac left a message. Dick Foley is at his pub in South Boston this morning. Foley is the one who introduced Andreev to the man Andreev has been working for. Cormac thought you would want to know."
Foley. Richard Foley. Bookkeeper. Gambling debt.
The man Cormac has been quietly tracking for nine months is moving money for the Boston Russian network in small, careful pieces while pretending to keep the books for an O'Brien construction company.
Foley is the cutout below the cutout. Foley is the man who put Andreev in front of the man Andreev sold us all to.
"Tell Cormac to keep him," I say. "Do not move on Foley until I have spoken to Andreev."
"Yes, boss."
I walk down the corridor to holding cell B.
? ? ?
Marcus Andreev is at a metal table.
His head is in his hands. His coat is on the back of the chair. His shoes are off; Petrov takes shoes when he picks a man up because a man without his shoes doesn’t run for the door. Andreev has been crying. The crying is not new. He’s been crying for some time before I got here.
I sit down across from him.
He doesn’t look up.
I let the silence work for me. The silence was the tactic I used with Igor Volkov yesterday. The silence is the tactic that always works.
Andreev breaks first.
"I know what I am."
"Tell me."
"I am the man who sold your daughter."
"You are."
"I didn’t know they would take her. I swear to God. I didn’t know."
"Tell me how it happened."
And he tells me.
Anya was diagnosed at four. She’s now six.
The diagnosis is a rare neuroblastoma that has not responded to standard treatment.
The experimental program at Dana-Farber that has, in the last six months, halted the progression costs $80,000 per month.
Federal insurance covers fifteen. The shortfall would have bankrupted Andreev and his wife in three months.
He is, by his own account, a man who has been watching his daughter not die in monthly increments, and the increments are $80,000 apiece.
Five months ago, in a coffee shop in Cambridge, a man approached him.
The man's name was Dick Foley. Foley said he had heard about Anya.
Said he had a friend who might be able to help.
The friend was a Russian businessman with sympathies, the kind of man who liked to do good things quietly.
Foley arranged the introduction. The Russian was named Mikhail Sokolov.
Sokolov said he could pay Anya's treatment for as long as it took.
He said all he needed was information. Schedules.
Routes. Nothing that would directly harm anyone.
The protection details, Sokolov said, would handle anything that went wrong.
Andreev told himself he was only providing logistics.
He told himself the protection details could handle anything that went wrong.
He told himself a great many things he believed less and less.
The first piece of intel he passed: the brownstone location. The second: the courthouse route variations. The third, a few days ago: Eleni's apartment camera blind spots and the rotation schedule he had personally proposed to the Marshals' lead two weeks earlier.
He didn’t know they would take Nora. He didn’t know they would take a child. When he found out, after the dawn phone call from Petrov, he tried to reach Sokolov. Sokolov had gone dark.
"I know what I am," Andreev says again, his head still in his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I just needed her to live."
I stand up.
I have stood up because I am about to do what I came here to do.
My right hand goes to the holster under my coat. The Sig Sauer P226 has been my sidearm since 2014. The pit at the back of the warehouse is forty-seven yards from this room. The drive home from there is fifty-three minutes.
Then, in the small, specific corner of my brain that I have spent fifteen years teaching to be quiet, something happens I didn’t predict.
I think of Nora.
Not the kidnapping. Not the photograph. Not the recovery. I think of last night. The bath. The way Nora hummed a tuneless song while Maeve washed her hair. The fierce ritual of being a parent at the end of the worst day of her short life.
Nora got a bath last night at home.
Anya is in an oncology unit at Dana-Farber right now getting an experimental drug pumped into her arm because the drug is the only thing keeping her in monthly increments above the line.
Anya will not get a thousand more baths.
She’ll get, if Andreev is lucky and the experimental program works, several hundred. Not a thousand. Anya is six, and the math is the math.
I understand, in this moment, the architecture of what Marcus Andreev did.
I do not absolve him. I place him.
I sit back down.
My hand comes off the holster.
? ? ?
Andreev has not lifted his head.
He’s waiting. He is, by every measure, a man who has been waiting since 12:30 AM to find out which version of this morning he’s going to get.
"Marcus."
He looks up.
"Mikhail Sokolov. Tell me what you know."
"He’s a businessman in Brookline. Import-export. Office on Beacon Street. The office is small and clean. I checked him out. I checked him out twice. He passed every check."
"He’s not clean."
"I know."
"He works for someone."
"I do not know who."
"Marcus."
"I do not know. I am telling you the truth. He never told me. I never asked. I didn’t want to know."
I believe him.
"Anya goes to her treatment today," I say. "You do not go with her. Your wife takes her."
"Yes."
"You will be in federal custody by 2 PM.
The arrest is going to be clean. You are going to confess.
You are going to give the federal prosecutors everything you have given me.
You are going to name Foley. You are going to name Sokolov.
You are going to spend the next several years in federal prison. "
"Yes."
"The Konstantinos family will not touch you."
Andreev looks up.
His face does what it has been doing since I sat down, only this is the version I didn’t expect to see; the version of a man who has decided he’s going to die today and has just been told he’s not.
"Why," he says.
I look at him for a long second.
"Because I have a daughter," I say. "Because I almost lost her because of you. And because if my daughter were sick, I would have done what you did. I would have done worse. I am the wrong person to judge you."
Andreev doesn’t answer.
He cannot answer.
I add, in a voice that is no longer the voice I came in with, "And one more thing."
"Yes."
"Anya's treatment is going to be paid for.
Through every round she needs. The Konstantinos family will pay it.
Your wife will be told the funding is from a treatment grant administered through Dana-Farber.
Anya will not know any of this. Your wife will not know any of this.
You will not contact us about it. You will go to prison, and you will serve your time, and you will know, every day, that the daughter you almost killed mine for is being kept alive by the family you betrayed. "
"Why," Andreev says again. The word breaks in his mouth.
"Because that is who I have decided to be."
I stand. I walk to the door. I do not look back.
? ? ?
In the corridor, I find Petrov.
“Arrest at 1:45 PM. Coordinate with the AUSA. The arrest is to be made at his apartment, not at the federal building. He’ll not resist. He’ll confess. He’ll name Foley and Sokolov."
"Yes."
"Foley. Cormac is keeping him. We need Foley alive, and we need him in federal custody also. The same protocol. Have him picked up by federal agents within the hour."
"Yes."
"Sokolov is the next thread. I want surveillance on Sokolov starting today. I want every piece of his business traffic. I want every employee. I want every banking record. I want it on my desk by Friday."
"Yes."
"Petrov."
"Yes."
"And the experimental program at Dana-Farber. Anya Andreev. Set up the funding through the family foundation. The funding is to be permanent and untraceable to us. Coordinate with Theodoros if you need to."
Petrov looks at me for a long second. I have known Petrov for twenty-two years.
The look is the look of a man who has watched me grow up from the boy whose father was killed when he was twenty-one to the man standing in this corridor at 8:47 AM, having just decided not to put another body in the pit.
Petrov says, "Yes, boss."
Then he says, in a different voice, "Lex."
"Yes."
"Your father would be proud of what you just did."
I do not respond. I cannot respond. I nod once. I leave.
? ? ?
I drive back to the brownstone.
When I get there, the kitchen is full of light.
Maeve is at the stove. She’s in my T-shirt and a pair of jeans she pulled on without socks.
Her hair is in a knot at the back of her head.
Nora is on a kitchen chair pulled up to the counter, in clean dinosaur pajamas—different ones.
Brontos is on the counter beside her. Maeve is making pancakes. Real ones. Not slightly burnt.
Nora is narrating something to Brontos.
I stop in the doorway of the kitchen. I watch them for a long minute.
Maeve looks up.
She sees me.
She studies my face for one full second.
She says, very quietly, "Did you do it?"
I look at her.
I say, "I did it differently than I would have done it before her."
Maeve nods, slowly. She’s heard the sentence I just said, and she’s, in the careful corner of her brain where she files things, understood it completely.
She says, "Come eat."