I didn’t feel like laughing anymore when one of them hit me hard across the side of my head with the metal top of the gun.

  One of them was holding me down in a headlock and the other one was fishing for something in the pocket of his leather coat when the Connecticut state trooper vehicle skidded to a stop behind the truck.

  “No!” I yelled as the two guys let go of me and without delay opened up on the gray police car.

  I sat frozen, eyes closed, palming my ears as the two deafening Heckler & Kochs went off a foot from my face. When the gunfire ceased, I looked and saw that the patrol car’s windshield was now a smoking sheet of holes from the fifty rounds that had ripped through it in the space of five seconds.

  As I tried to get up, they got me in a headlock again and slapped a wet cloth onto my face. It was really wet and clingy, like an antibacterial wipe. They smothered me with it. Stuck it in my nostrils. It felt like I was drowning. The smell of it was heavily astringent, medicinal, the scent of rubbing alcohol and something vaguely bitter.

  The drug, whatever it was, was powerful. Almost immediately, I felt light-headed. The sky and traffic started fading in and out, like my eyes were on a dimmer switch some kid was playing with.

  It took me a second to realize that I was being lifted again. I hardly felt it when my face slammed against the dirty carpet of the pickup a second or two later. I looked up at Yevdokimov sitting in the backseat above me with his eyes closed. Then I turned and, in my swimming vision, saw that my phone had fallen out of my jacket and bounced loose under the seat.

  It felt like it was ten pounds as I pulled it out and looked around. There was a little alcove with a drink holder and maps in it beside Yevdokimov’s feet on the seat above me.

  The front doors were popping open when, with my last bit of strength and consciousness, I reached up and dropped the phone in there and passed out.

  CHAPTER 102

  I WOKE SOMETIME later. I was on my back on a cold, hard floor. I felt hungover, nauseated—that bitter alcohol scent still coating the insides of my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, the light was agonizingly painful, and when I tried to move, I got the spins. So I closed my eyes and lay still. After about ten minutes, I opened my eyes again in little slits, giving them time to get used to the idea.

  After a minute or two, I made out that I was in a cramped room with rough stone walls and a raw-drywall ceiling. It was lit by a shop light on the floor whose cord snaked along the ground and out under a cheap wooden door. Across from me along one wall was a huge, cheap-looking leather couch, above which hung a big plastic roll of what looked like industrial Hefty bags on a cylindrical metal holder attached to the wall.

  What the hell is this place? I thought groggily. A crash hangout for a janitor?

  There was a strong musty smell in the air, which could only mean a basement. It comforted me somehow as I lay there. It was a happy smell. Suburban families, popcorn and videos on sleepovers, board games on a rainy day.

  Those visions imploded as I heard the horrendous screams start in the distance. There were three in a row. Three impassioned shrieks of someone in hysterical, unholy pain.

  Get out now! I told myself. But as I jumped up, it was like my feet had been pulled out from underneath me. I smacked the left side of my face pretty good on the concrete. What the hell? I thought. Then I looked down and felt like letting out some unholy screams myself as my mind kicked straight into adrenaline-pumping animal panic.

  My left leg was handcuffed to an old galvanized steel heating pipe that was embedded in the concrete floor.

  The door shot open. One of the ski-masked guys walked in. He had his jacket off and was wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt. Behind him came a second ski-masked guy wearing an army-green long-sleeved T-shirt, dragging something heavy.

  He was dragging Yevdokimov, I realized a moment later. The Russian was naked and very dead. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone more dead. His face and arms and chest looked like they’d been worked on by a very motivated demolition crew. There didn’t seem to be a part of him that wasn’t black or blue or covered in blood.

  The second guy walked over and, with a squeak, wheeled off a huge sheet of plastic over the couch. He slit the plastic off the roll with a box cutter that he pulled from his pocket, then the two of them lifted Yevdokimov up and tossed him onto the plastic-covered couch, wrapping him up like the largest, sorriest fish in the history of the world.

  They taped the ends with a roll of duct tape they produced from beneath the couch, and when they were done they lifted him up like a rug and dropped him on the floor. The black-shirted guy sat down on the couch and put his feet on Yevdokimov like he was an ottoman. Then his buddy joined him.

  Robertson was right, I saw as they peeled off their ski masks. It was Vladislav and Oleg Filipov.

  I’ll have to congratulate Robertson, I thought. If I ever see him again.

  Father and son Filipov sat there staring at me with their pale, sharp, nasty-looking faces and their feet up on Yevdokimov, not saying anything. Staring back, I’d never been so afraid in my life. My heart beat against my chest like that of a rat trapped in a corner, and when I swallowed, I realized that I didn’t have any saliva in my mouth.

  CHAPTER 103

  THE OLDER GUY started laughing.

  “And how are you?” he said in a deep Russian accent as he laboriously stood up. “Here. I have something for you.”

  The old man took something out of his black cargo-pants pocket. It was a two-foot piece of flex pipe with a sharp-looking fist-size chunk of metal on the end of it. The metal part was a heavy brass hose bibb, I realized as he came forward and whipped me over the top of the head with the metal flail.

  As I sat up, I felt a trickle of blood drip down from my scalp, a warm rivulet that fell over my forehead, along the side of my nose, over my closed lips, and off my chin. “Do you like my cop-be-good stick?” he said as I sat there in agony. “It’s the whipping action of the flex pipe that really delivers the groceries. I also love the way it smashes and cuts at the same time. All without putting too much strain on my wrist. I’m older and must consider such things. You will cooperate with us now.”

  I glanced into my tormentor’s cold brown eyes as my skull throbbed.

  “So here we are,” said the cruel prick as he sat down and crossed his legs on Yevdokimov’s body. “You wished to find us, yes, Mr. NYPD? Well, be careful what you wish for.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask us who we are?” said the younger guy—the one in the green T-shirt—who, unsurprisingly, had a Russian accent as well.

  “You’re the bombers. The terrorists,” I finally said with slow deliberation as I continued to bleed. With the drugs and the pain and the fear, it wasn’t easy to keep my voice steady.

  “We are the bombers. This is true,” said the old man. “But we’re not terrorists.”

  “No. More like pissed-off citizens, you could call us,” said the younger Russian, cutting in. “What’s the word? Disgruntled—that’s it. Call us disgruntled immigrants.”

  “But enough about us,” said the old man, slapping the flail into a palm. “Let’s see what you know, okay? Question one.”

  He lifted his booted foot over Yevdokimov and brought it down hard.

  “Do you know why we killed this piece of shit?”

  “The ransom,” I said carefully. “He found your video and tried to make money off it.”

  The old pig looked surprised. “That’s right. Yevdokimov and I were associates. We actually used to work together in the KGB a lifetime ago. I contracted out a job for him, but he made a mistake. He tried to turn the tables.

  “Now,” the old man said, stomping the body again with his combat boot, “Yev is my table.”

  “When you were in the KGB, you worked with Rezende’s uncle,” I said, putting the pieces together. “In Cape Verde, to overthrow the Portuguese.”

  “You know a little history, I see,” the old man said. “Which is saying a lot for an American. That’s exactly where I met Paulo Rezende and his tool of a nephew, Armenio. Paulo was there when I came up with the tsunami project back in 1971.”

  Now I was confused.

  “Yes. Surprising, isn’t it? This plan has been in the pipeline since before you were born, cop. The bureau called it Krasnyy Navodneniye.”

  He smiled.

  “Operation Red Flood,” he said.

  CHAPTER 104

  “IT STARTED OUT as a lark, really,” the old man continued. “One night, Paulo and I came back from a bombing run and were listening to the BBC news. A story about the latest volcanic threat on Árvore Preta and a geologist who speculated that one piece falling off the volcano might be a titanic tsunami threat to the United States.

  “That got me thinking. Why not just get some dynamite and give that cliff a push? I put it over the wire back to the big boys in Moscow, and they just ate it up. A month later, they sent out a team of engineers and surveyors who concluded that it could be done. They commissioned and typed up a plan for exactly how to do it, down to the last detail. I actually got a promotion for think-tanking that attack. And why not? It was genius.”

  “Why didn’t they do it?”

  “They were thinking about it in late 1980, I heard. There was some seismic activity, so they were going to make it look like an accident, but then Reagan got elected, and they thought if the truth ever came out, he was just crazy enough to let the nukes fly.”

  “Why now, then?” I said. “Why destroy New York now? Does Russia want to bring back the glory days and start World War Three?”

  “No,” said the old man. “We have no political agenda. I gave up all that political shit years ago. I’ve been a good honest crook for the last twenty years.”

  He looked over at the younger Russian.

  “I did it for my son here,” said the old man, patting the other guy on the back. “For him and for my grandson.”

  “Your grandson?” I said, panicking, thinking there was still another nut out there we hadn’t found yet.

  “My son, Mikhail,” the younger Russian said, staring almost sadly at me. “We did it for Mikhail.”

  CHAPTER 105

  THE YOUNGER RUSSIAN took a photo out of his wallet and walked over and crouched beside me.

  “Do you recognize him?” he said.

  The picture was of a pale young teenager with a slightly misshapen shaved head. His eyes weren’t exactly level with each other. He was more than a little loony-looking, but I kept that to myself.

  “No. Should I know him?” I asked.

  “Yes. He was on the cover of the Daily News last year.”

  Too bad I read the Post, I thought, not knowing where this could be going.

  “Did something happen to your son?”

  “I’m a thinker, an introvert, a shut-in, some might say,” the Russian continued. “I like books. Math, physics, mechanics, engineering, abstract things. But back in my twenties, I was a little more outgoing, and I had a dalliance with a stripper.”

  “One of my workers,” said the old man. “I owned four clubs in Miami at the time. It was his twenty-first birthday. The least I could do.”

  Father of the year, I thought.

  “So she got pregnant, and Mikhail was born. He had problems from day one. Birth defects, then a diagnosis of autism, then schizophrenia. All these stupid diagnoses just to say he was mentally not okay.”

  “Years of psychologists and medication and my favorite—therapy,” said the old man, disgusted. “Bullshit! All of it!”

  “They wanted to institutionalize him,” the son continued. “But I said no. I knew there was somebody in there. Somebody smart who could be funny and who just needed to be watched over. So I took care of him. I raised him by my side; he was with me all the time. He was a big pain in my ass, but he was smart. We would play chess and cards. He was so good at cards. Could add in his head almost as fast as me.”

  The son looked down at the floor wistfully as he took a breath.

  “In 2012, he was doing okay enough that I was able to leave him with an aide every once in a while. The aide, I thought, was a good man, but he turned out to be not so good. Because he smoked dope and fell asleep one morning while I was at an engineering conference in Philly, and Mikhail left the apartment alone.

  “He got on the subway, and I don’t know what happened, but that morning in upper Manhattan, he pushed a woman in front of the number one train.”

  “At a Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street,” I said, vaguely remembering the case now. “That’s why you blew it up.”

  “Yes,” the son said. “You’re catching on. See, Mikhail was taken into custody. I’m away. Mikhail has no one, no ID. He can’t speak for himself, but he was obviously mentally sick. They should have taken him to a hospital, yes?”

  “No,” said the old man bitterly. “Turned out the Manhattan DA knew the female victim and pulled strings to have Mikhail booked, put immediately into the system. Without learning the details about Mikhail’s condition. Without thinking about any of the consequences. Do you know the name of the man who was the DA at the time?”

  “Mayor Carl Doucette,” I said.

  He nodded, smiled.

  “The late mayor Carl Doucette,” he said.

  “So Mikhail is booked, and there’s no room in Central Booking to hold him, so they send him over to Rikers,” the son said. “My son cannot cope with this. He’s mentally sick, like I say, so he starts freaking. A corrections officer puts him in a room they have in the basement for people not cooperating. This room was over a hundred degrees. They said it was some boiler problem.

  “It sure was a problem for Mikhail. They left him there for two days—my son. They forgot about him. My poor Mikhail. New York City boiled my mentally ill son alive.”

  CHAPTER 106

  “WHY DID YOU EMP Yorkville?” I said.

  “Mayor Doucette had his mother at Sloan Kettering hospital,” said the old man, smiling again. “The precious old girl didn’t make it during the evac. Shame.”

  “And Twenty-Six Federal Plaza?”

  “The corrections officer who locked up Mikhail got a new job on the maintenance crew there,” said the old man. “I would have taken down an airliner if he was one of the passengers. To hell with him for slaughtering my grandson and to hell with this city and America. Oh, how you crowed when the Cold War was over; how much greater your country was than ours with your freedoms—or so you thought.

  “And now look at yourselves. You have the freedom to land planes at the wrong airports, the freedom to shunt downtown trains onto uptown tracks, the freedom to kill prisoners by accident. Why? I don’t know. All I know is that you’re a pack of fools, and a fool and his civilization are soon parted.

  “Because this isn’t over,” he said. “If it takes us twenty years, we’re going to make you bastards pay. I ran the Russian mob in Miami. I have millions of dollars and contacts and access to many interesting things. If you think Krasnyy Navodneniye is the only recipe in the old Soviet book of dirty tricks, think again. You should have thought twice before you fucked with my family!”

  “I hear you,” I said, trying to buy some time. “I’m a father myself, and I can’t imagine how horrible it’s been for you. How angry you must be. What happened to Mikhail was a disgusting travesty that deserves justice. But think about all the other Mikhails out there who are going to die over this. You’re right about this decadent Sodom-and-Gomorrah direction we’ve taken of late. But there are still some good people out there.”

  “What’s this? A Bible-thumping cop?” said the old man. “Spare the city for the sake of a few good people? Where are they? Who’s good? Wait. Let me guess. You?”

  “Sure. I’m not so bad,” I said with a shrug. “Spare it for me. Why not?”

  The old man dropped the flail and took out a Glock and pressed it to my forehead.

  “If I were God, I might be tempted,” he said as he cocked the hammer. “Too bad for you: I’m the other guy.”

  CHAPTER 107

  THAT’S WHEN WE heard the noise. A heavy crunching sound followed by glass shattering.

  It was coming from upstairs.

  The old man still had the gun to my head as the two Russians stared at each other. The old man looked down at me with hate in his eyes, pressing the barrel hard against my head, but then there was another creak of wood. It was a footstep in the room directly above, and the younger man put a finger to his lips and the cold metal lifted away.

  He cut a piece of duct tape and wrapped it around my mouth before the two of them went out the door. The massive shoot-out erupted thirty seconds later. Automatic gunfire in the next room starting and stopping and starting again. I hit the deck just before a round ripped a hole in the cheap wooden door.

  Twenty seconds after that, I heard it. The three words I’d been praying for.

  “He’s in here!” Emily said.

  “How’d you find me? My phone?” was the first thing I said.

  She nodded.

  “That find-your-friend app comes in damn handy!” she said, smiling, as she unlocked my cuffed ankle.

  “I’m glad we’re friends,” I said, finally standing. “There was an old guy and a younger one. Russians, like we thought. Did you get them?”

  “The Filipovs. We heard. We got the younger one. He got hit and they found him a block away. They’d bugged out of a cellar door we missed.”

  “What about the old bastard? He said he was KGB. Evil as a snake.”

  “Not yet. But we have the whole neighborhood surrounded. He’s on foot.”

  Emily handed me my Glock and I stumbled up the basement stairs behind her. Golly tamale, did it feel good in my hand at that moment. I could have kissed both it and her. They must have found it at the crash scene.