Judge & Jury - James Patterson [73]
She nodded. “Yes.” She leaned her head against my chest. “I know what’s going to happen, Nick. I’m praying that it does.”
“We’re leaving in two days,” I said.
Chapter 90
THE REEDY MAN in tortoiseshell glasses leaned back against the park bench and looked at me. “These prints you sent me—where did you get them from?”
Charlie Harpering and I were old friends. We were sitting in a tiny park across from the courthouse: the historical Five Points in Gangs of New York. Charlie had spent many years at the FBI. Now he worked for Homeland Security. It was he who had procured all the files for me.
“Never mind how I got them. What I need to know is if there was a match.”
Harpering studied me long and hard. What I was asking him to do—to go around all normal channels and procedures, to give me information that he might not pass on to his boss—was a lot to ask, even of a friend.
“You know, I could screw up a well-earned pension over this.”
“Trust me.” I gave him a big smile. “Retirement’s way overrated. This is important, Charlie. Was there a match?”
The Homeland Security man let out a breath. Then he opened his briefcase and set a file on his lap. He nodded. “Yeah. There was a match.”
He opened a plain manila file. Facing me was a blowup of the fingerprints Yuri Plakhov had faxed me.
“They belong to an Estonian,” Harpering said. “Stephan Kollich. He came in through JFK on a commercial visa, April twelfth.”
April 12. Cavello was sprung from the courthouse six days later.
A wave of validation surged up inside me. Remlikov had been here.
“You’ll see he left seven days later.” Harpering pointed farther down. A day after the escape! “Back to London. Out of DC.”
“And on to anywhere else?” I asked.
“All she wrote, I’m afraid.” The Homeland Security man shrugged. “At least, under that name.”
“Thank you, Charles,” I said, tapping him on the chest. “Here.” I slid over a shopping bag containing the bound Homeland Security files. “I won’t be needing these anymore.”
He tucked the bag between his legs. “What the hell are you up to, Nick? You know I did this out of friendship. Anyone else, we’d be in a federal office right now. Who is this guy?”
“Let’s call it a career move. We’ll try and figure out later if it’s up or down.”
Harpering sniffed, agreeing. “I see what you mean about retirement. Then I might as well take you the distance, Nick—whichever the hell way it goes.”
“What do you mean?”
He took two additional sheets out of his case and slid them into the file. “Kollich’s visa application. For old times. And just for the record, it didn’t come via Tallinn, Nick. Estonia. It came from Tel Aviv.”
I blinked. “Jesus.”
“Gets even better.” Harpering dropped the file on my lap. “Assuming you’re trying to find him, of course. Good luck, Nick.” Harpering stood up. “Give the sonovabitch a shot in the balls for me.”
I looked down at the new file. There was an address on the visa application: 225 Yehudi Road.
Haifa.
Chapter 91
RICHARD NORDESHENKO WAS contemplating a chess move with his son on the terrace when the doorbell rang.
“Get that for me, Pavel.” Mira was out shopping. The boy went to answer the front door.
Nordeshenko was enjoying his new life. He had tossed his cell phone into the sea and let the one or two contacts he still trusted know he was out of business. For good.
Every day he went swimming in the Mediterranean. He picked up his son after school and drove him to chess. At night he took Mira to the fancy shops and cafés in Carmel Center. He tried to put to the back of his mind that just a few weeks before he had gotten away with a crime covering the front page of every newspaper.
“Father! There’s a man.”
Nordeshenko pushed himself slowly out of his chair and went into the living room. It might as well have been a squadron of Mossad he saw standing there.
“Hello, Remi.”
“What are you doing here?” Nordeshenko gasped. Reichardt. His face went slack and ashen.
“Just a little traveling, Remi. Some sightseeing. Throwing myself on the