Death Benefit (37 page)

“I couldn’t disagree more. If it was polonium, it would have to be a high-level operation of some kind. Polonium is impossible to get. It would mean there would have to have been intense planning for weeks—months, even. There has to be powerful people involved, there has to be. I essentially
lived
inside a conspiracy for years. I told you, George, if you saw what I’ve seen, you’d know people are capable of anything.”

George was aware that a couple of other diners, people he didn’t recognize, were looking over at them from other tables. Pia’s makeup couldn’t conceal all her bruises, especially in the harsh fluorescent light of the cafeteria. George leaned in toward her and lowered his voice.

“So what do you intend to do exactly before you give up on this thing?”

“There’s only one more place to check for significant radiation—the bodies at the OCME. If there is none or I can’t get in to check, then I’ll give up my investigation. Is that good enough?”

“How are you going to get in the door at the ME office?” George asked, remembering their conversation the previous evening with the pathology resident.

“I don’t know that yet,” she said, with a touch of irritation. “If I just tell them what I believe, they’ll think I’m crazy. ‘Remember those research guys from Columbia that were brought in here? Well, I think someone put polonium in their coffee....’ I may go with the alpha particle emitter idea I mentioned. I don’t know. I’ll see how the land lies. I’m just going to have to wing it.”

“Maybe you should just go and hang out in your room. Hold off on going to the medical examiner’s for today. You’ve been running around like crazy and you got beat up last night, for Christ’s sake. I can’t go with you this afternoon, but perhaps we can go together in the morning?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I have no idea if the ME’s office is even open. I don’t know how long they keep the bodies there, either. I would imagine the office encourages families to arrange to take their relatives to the funeral homes as quickly as possible. Plus, if we go tomorrow, they’re likely to be short-staffed. They’ll probably say, ‘Come back Monday.’ And I just can’t sit around. I have to know.”

“You’re probably right about Saturdays,” George said. “But—”

“No, George, I’m going today. You go to class. There’s no way I can get in trouble at the OCME.”

“You’re very resourceful,” George said with a wry smile.

Pia ignored the comment. “I’ll leave now. Would you mind hanging on to this coffee cup? I’ll keep the Geiger counter and hope I need it.”

George took the bag. “Not at all. We’ll meet up as soon as you get back.” He watched a focused Pia leap up and lift her cafeteria tray. “And be careful! Try to stay out of trouble!”

Pia merely glowered at him before leaving.

 

 

G
eorge watched her wend her way among the tables, deposit her tray at the window, and then leave. The idea occurred to him to call the police now that Pia was safely out of sight. But he knew if he did that, whatever the outcome, Pia would never talk to him again. He was certain that she would consider it an act of betrayal.

Tossing back the remains of his coffee, George got to his feet. At least he was going to be on time for the lecture.

 

 

A
leksander Buda ended the call on his cell phone and held the device in his hand, then used his spatula-like index finger to tap the end-call button. There was now a problem in an operation that had gone so smoothly up to now, and he hated problems. Problems gave him terrible heartburn. He found the container of different-colored antacid tablets he always carried, took a handful, and chewed them quickly, one after another. Buda was fifty-something—fifty-what he didn’t know for sure, because his family had left Albania with a few pots and pans and a little money but no documentation indicating when he was born. Over time, first in Italy and then in the United States, he had acquired the paper trappings of the immigrant, including a date of birth in 1958, but he had no idea if it was true.

Buda wasn’t a big man, perhaps five-nine, but he had close-cropped hair with a scar that ran into his hairline on the right side of his broad face and enough prison tattoos on his arms, should he care to show them, to make anyone think twice about approaching him. Buda dressed unobtrusively, today in a tan long-sleeved shirt and jeans and sneakers. One might imagine he actually was a handyman for a group of East Side co-ops, work he showed up for every now and again, rather than what he really was: the head of a crew in the Albanian mob.

Buda’s crew, or clan, was less hierarchically organized than a Cosa Nostra family, and leadership was often fluid and based strictly on results. Through a combination of caution and brutality, Buda’s power had remained unchallenged for years. The members of the crew shared their compatriot’s reputation for ruthlessness and violence, gained over more than twenty-five years of aggressive criminal activity. The Albanians had come late on the New York scene and they had been keen to make up for lost time. They took low-level positions in Italian organizations only to rise up and challenge the longer-established Mafia stalwarts.

In Europe, Albanian groups established a strong presence in hard and soft drug trafficking, dominating the heroin trade in many countries, running the raw materials from Afghanistan through Turkey to Albania. Processed heroin and other drugs could then be distributed anywhere in the world, through hubs like the terminals at Port Newark, New Jersey. Heroin was just one business the crews were involved in. They also had interests in such prosaic activities as extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling. Aleksander Buda had lieutenants working such operations so he could keep a low profile and take on more lucrative projects, such as the one he was working now, the one with a problem.

Buda was very aware that Albanian crews had developed a profile. One based in Queens had been taken down by the FBI a few years before; another in Staten Island was broken up in 2010. There were now more than two hundred thousand Albanians in the New York metro area, maybe three hundred thousand. The vast majority, all save a couple of hundred, were hardworking and law-abiding. Buda and his men drifted in and out of this Albanian diaspora, hiding among them in plain sight. The mob groups were clannish and secretive, hypersensitive to any kind of insult, and quick to use violence for the sake of vengeance. Under the Albanian code of
besa
, a man’s word was his bond and a handshake was a cast-iron seal. Buda had an agreement to complete this task, and he realized he was going to have to expose some of his men to take care of this particular problem. And doing work in public was another thing that made him nervous.

 

 

A
fter Jerry Trotter made his proposal to Edmund three weeks previously, it had taken Edmund two days to call the number Trotter gave him. Ten, fifteen times he had told himself that he wouldn’t call, that he’d throw the piece of paper in the fireplace and forget all about it. Other times, he convinced himself that this was a test of his resolve set by Jerry, that if he called the number, Jerry himself would answer the phone. But at times, usually in the dead of night, when he sat by himself in his study drinking whiskey, Edmund ran through what such a call would be like to make. Say this guy actually was a killer for hire; how do you introduce yourself to someone like that? What do you say? He figured that if you called on business like this, you didn’t use your own phone.

Edmund finally called the number from a pay phone in a Laundromat on Second Avenue in the Sixties in Manhattan, a busy spot without any obvious security cameras trained on it. Edmund steeled himself, inserted his money, and dialed the number. Someone picked up but didn’t speak, and Edmund ran through his rehearsed lines.

“Hello. I got your number from a friend. I have a proposition for you. This isn’t a joke.”

Edmund didn’t say any more; the phone line quickly went dead.

An hour later, Edmund called again, from the same pay phone.

“Can we meet somewhere? I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say—”

Click.

The next day, on the fourth attempt, at ten in the morning, a thickly accented voice said, “Call in an hour. Pay phone bank at Grand Central. Main-level concourse.”

Edmund did as he was told.

“Take six train to Morrison Avenue, exit platform north side and wait.”

Edmund was at a point of no return. All he’d done was make a few phone calls, but now he was going to meet someone he knew was a killer. He looked at the commuters walking through Grand Central, ordinary people like him. If he went ahead with this, he would no longer be ordinary. In the recent endless days and sleepless nights, Edmund had weighed the possible costs of doing what Jerry demanded and doing nothing. If he failed to act, he’d be ruined financially and personally. But Jerry’s terrible scheme gave him a chance.

Another thought had occurred to Edmund and was proving impossible to ignore. These doctors were destroying his business. It was their fault he was in this position, and he was damned if he was going to let them get away with it.

Edmund rode the subway north to a section of the Bronx he’d never visited before. He got off the train on a windswept elevated platform. There was hardly anyone else around at eleven in the morning, just two men who had alighted at the station—one who had sat in Edmund’s car, another from the car behind his. Edmund left the station, walked down to the street, and stood by the exit. He checked his phone, and crossed and recrossed the street, looking for some sign of life.

Suddenly, a dark blue panel van drew up, and the back doors opened. A voice from within told Edmund to get in, and he did. The van drove away, and immediately Edmund’s arms were seized, tape was secured over his mouth, and a cloth bag was roughly forced over his head. His body was patted down, hands thrust into his armpits and groin. Then his clothes were removed, all of them, and he was left naked, bound, and gagged on the floor of the van, first as it rattled along the street and then, for what seemed like an age, parked someplace.

“Okay, Mr. Edmund Mathews, rich banker man from Greenwich, how did you get that phone number?” The voice came from the front of the van somewhere.

Edmund tried to talk but his mouth was taped shut. He mumbled and the voice said, “How rude of me. Let the man speak.”

The tape was ripped away crudely, and Edmund reeled from the shock.

“A friend of mine gave it to me. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”

“We’ll see. So what you want?”

Edmund laid out what he wanted. It didn’t take long, but he had to explain a couple of times the need for using polonium to effect the killings.

“Okay, this is what we do. You come to Middletown Road subway station, eleven tomorrow. Bring a deposit for me. As a gesture of goodwill. Say, fifty thousand dollars in Ben Franklin notes. Nonrefundable. Give the man back his clothes.”

Edmund’s arms and legs were freed, and he dressed quickly. The van moved again and stopped after a few minutes, and the doors opened. Edmund got out in a bleak parking lot behind an abandoned building. He figured out where he was, less than a half-mile from where he had been picked up, and he took the subway back to Manhattan.

More than at any point throughout the whole ordeal, Edmund’s flight reflex was strongest that night. If he called the FBI, surely he could give them Jerry and this guy, whoever he was, and at least he would be free from this crazy plot. But he wouldn’t be free of LifeDeals and Gloria Croft and his own imminent destruction. The Statistical Solutions data had finally come in, and merely underscored what Russell and Edmund already knew. Their model was shot to pieces the moment regenerative medicine became a reality. His need to stand and fight kicked in.

Edmund traveled again to the Bronx, and was again driven away in a van, this time of a different color. Again, he was bound and stripped, but his clothes were returned more quickly this time and his mouth wasn’t taped, a small mercy for which Edmund was grateful. He could feel that the envelope with the $50,000 was no longer in his jacket pocket.

“Thank you for the money,” the same voice said. “A more cautious man would throw you out of the van now and be happy with good takings for one day’s work. But I read about you, Mr. Mathews, and I am intrigued. Then I read about the people you say you want to die and I think,
What are they doing? I don’t understand, I am a stupid peasant
. Then I think,
This guy must be for real
. I don’t know why but I do. I also think this is a very expensive idea. Someone has to go to Russia, buy this radioactive material from some very bad men and not get caught. They have to give this material to the marks, plus the bacteria, and not get caught. We can do it, but not for one million dollars.”

“How much, then?”

“Two. And a half.”

“Jesus.”

“Mr. money guy, I see where you live, how much money you make. You are not doing a trade, here, on Wall Street. I don’t negotiate—that is the price. And tomorrow, the price is more.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, speak up, please.”

“Okay,” said Edmund.

The two men met once more, three days later. Edmund told Russell he needed a huge amount of cash but not what it was for. Russell asked once, and Edmund bit his head off so Russell just did what he was told. It took Russell two and a half days to assemble one and a half million dollars from various business and personal accounts. Edmund packed it into a large baseball equipment bag and drove to the address he had been given on the phone. It was the same parking lot where he had been let out the first day. Once more, Edmund got in the van and went through the same degrading procedure.