AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We see him. It’s Kuznetsov,” said the feds in the other car.
Busboys were Windexing tabletops and a vacuum whirred loudly from somewhere as the five agents and I, in raid jackets, stormed into the restaurant ten minutes later.
There was gold everywhere. On the covers on t
he chairs, the brass railings, and the mirror frames. From the gilt ceiling hung massive, glittering chandeliers that were about as demure as Cleopatra’s earrings.
We found Kuznetsov in the very clean and bright stainless steel kitchen. He was a tall man, about six foot four, in his fifties, wearing an apron over a stylish white dress shirt and gray silk suit pants. He was expertly chiffonading clusters of basil on a butcher block with a ten-inch chef’s knife.
“Maxim Kuznetsov?” Paul Ernenwein said.
The beefy, gravely handsome dark-haired man glanced up at us, then slowly set down the huge knife. He blotted at his broad forehead with a paper napkin. Something good was cooking in a pan on the stove behind him. Some kind of chicken in a thick brown butter sauce.
“Yes. How can I help you?” he said in, surprisingly, completely unaccented English.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions about a national security matter,” Paul said. “Could you come with us, please?”
He stared at us steadily with his dark eyes.
“Will I need a lawyer?” he said.
Paul smiled.
“I guess we’ll just have to see,” he said.
Chapter 44
The next morning at around ten, Paul Ernenwein and I were walking south down bright and blustery Park Avenue, heading to a surprise meeting with the Secret Service at their forward team HQ.
The invite was quite sudden, and even more curious since this was the very same Secret Service who’d said they wanted to run their own separate departmental investigation in the search for the president’s shooter instead of teaming up with us.
“So I heard our Russian friend, Kuznetsov, didn’t bite,” I said to Paul as we crossed East 31st with steaming doughnut cart coffees.
“You heard right,” the stocky Boston FBI agent said as he pulled up the sleeve of his trench to check his watch. “We released him around eleven p.m., when his lawyer showed. He maintains that he had no knowledge of Pavel Levkov and that his number on Pavel’s phone could have been from any one of the patrons of his restaurant, to whom, he claims, he often loans his phone.”
“Oh, so that explains his connection to the attempted presidential assassination,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Just a simple case of loaning out his cell phone. Our bad.”
“Don’t worry,” the feisty redheaded agent said with a grin. “Before we let him go, we let it be known that we were going to put full-court pressure on him and his entire organization until he decides to be more cooperative. He didn’t exactly seem to be shaking in his boots, but we’ll see what happens.”
Up the block, I followed Paul into the marble lobby of a prewar office building, and we badged our way past the desk. Through a buzzed-open and unmarked door on the eighth floor, I counted about two dozen stressed-out T-men among the laptops and file cabinets and paper shredders.
Paul said hello to one of the agents, who led us to the back of the office. Inside the briefing room, a dark-haired woman sat at a desk, biting on a pen as she stared alternately at the two laptops open in front of her.
“Paul, Mike—I’m Margaret Foley. Thanks for coming,” the tall, attractive, intense thirtysomething brunette said as she stood and smiled and shook our hands.
Paul had already told me that Foley was the Service’s newly assigned agent in charge in New York. He’d heard she was supposed to be a pretty straight shooter, ambitious but fair. Her people seemed to like her.
Foley gestured at her laptops.
“I’ll be blunt, fellas. We’re getting absolutely nowhere in our own investigation on the president’s shooter, and I was hoping we could maybe pool our resources in tracking him down. Does that sound like it makes sense?”
“Yes,” Paul said as he unbuttoned his coat. “Finally.”
Foley laughed as she rolled up her shirtsleeves.
“Yeah, I heard my predecessor didn’t play that well with others. I’m hoping I can change that.”
She uncapped a marker with a sharp pop and brought us over to the whiteboard she had set up in the corner.
