The Prince of Risk Read online

  Alex had established twenty-four-hour watch on the house two days earlier. During that time there had been no sightings of Shepherd coming or going. To verify that no one was inside, she’d conducted a pretext, sending Malloy and Mara to the front door, posing as activists canvassing the area for signatures. No one had answered, and readings from the infrared scanner programmed to detect warmth emitted by human beings came back negative.

  She was raising her hand to knock again when the door swung open.

  “Hello.” The man was tall and fit, with dark hair cut to the scalp. He wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. His eyes were blue and steady. Alex couldn’t tell if he had a nice behind or not. He did, however, have arms like a weightlifter, his biceps bursting from the sleeves. Alex felt a pinch between her shoulder blades, a twinge, nothing more. It was her sixth sense, and it said, “Trouble.”

  “Mr. Randall Shepherd?”

  “Yes?” The response was tentative, as the man looked at the two agents, both attired in dark suits, both wearing sunglasses.

  Alex badged him. “I’m Special Agent Forza with the FBI. This is Special Agent Malloy. We were wondering if we might have a word.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Not yet.” Alex smiled as she removed her sunglasses. “May we come in?”

  “I’m happy to answer any questions out here.”

  Alex detected a hint of a foreign accent. The h in happy was too soft, more ’appy. A background search on Shepherd had come up close to empty. He had no credit cards, didn’t subscribe to cable TV, and neither the IRS nor Social Security had heard from him in years. The Texas driver’s license number he’d given on his rental application was valid, though she hadn’t been able to pull up the picture. And of course there was the matter of the cashier’s check. No one paid three months’ rent in advance. To Alex’s eye, he was a straw man.

  “We’d prefer to come inside,” said Malloy. “We can get a warrant if you’d like.”

  Shepherd shrugged and his blue eyes softened. “Come in, then. The place is a mess. Don’t want to give the FBI the wrong impression.”

  Shepherd swung open the door. Alex followed Malloy inside. The home was cheaply furnished and smelled of smoke and stale beer. There was a sagging couch, a beat-up armchair, and a coffee table scarred with cigarette burns. Copies of New York, Time Out, This Week in New York, and, more interestingly, Guns and Ammo lay arranged messily on one end. At the other, Alex noted a residue of spilled coffee or tea, not in a puddle but shaped very clearly at a right angle, as if it had been spilled next to a magazine. A magazine that had been hastily hidden.

  “You like guns?” she asked.

  “I’m from Texas,” Shepherd volunteered. “I hunt.”

  “Whereabouts?” asked Malloy.

  “Where do I come from or where do I hunt?”

  “Both,” said Alex.

  “I come from Houston, but we used to hunt in East Texas. A place called Nacogdoches, near the Louisiana border.”

  “Where in Houston?” asked Malloy. “I’m from Dallas myself.”

  Alex said nothing. Malloy was born and raised in Seattle, but she liked his tactic to keep the pressure on Shepherd.

  “Sugarland.”

  Malloy nodded, then asked offhandedly, “Who’s mayor down there?”

  “No idea,” said Shepherd. “I haven’t lived there in years. Who’s the mayor of Dallas?”

  Malloy stumbled and Alex picked up the baton. “You don’t sound like you’re from Houston,” she said. “Are you in this country illegally?”

  It was Alex’s practice to go at a suspect head-on. She believed that confrontation yielded the greatest results, both immediate and in the long term. You had to shake the tree to see if any fruit might drop to the ground. She liked to shake it hard.

  “I’m American,” said Shepherd. “Last I checked, that gives me the right to be here.”

  “Do you have a passport?”

  “Okay, enough,” said Shepherd, holding up his hands. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  Shepherd didn’t respond, and Alex saw his eyes narrow, a current of anger rustle the calm façade.

  “We want to know where you are keeping the machine guns,” she added.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I believe they are AK-47s.”

  Shepherd’s eyes widened, and he laughed as if a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. “AK-47s? Here? You’re serious? At least now I know you’re at the wrong house. You had me worried.”

  Alex assessed Shepherd’s body language. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His eyes held hers. The laugh was rich and easy. There was no fidgeting, no playing with his hands, no delaying or prevaricating or any of the giveaways typically found in a person who had something to hide. Everything indicated that he was telling the truth. The twinge had lessened, but it was still there.

  “We had a report that you were unloading a crate with Russian markings at three a.m. a few days ago,” she said.

  “That?” Shepherd chuckled, showing a set of straight white teeth: just a big ole Texas boy. “Can you stay here a second? I show you.”

  I show you. Odd, thought Alex. “We’d rather come with you.”

  “Suit yourself.” Shepherd led the way through the kitchen and into the attached garage, where a late-model Ford pickup was parked. He skirted the truck and stopped, pointing at the ground. “There’s your crate,” he said. “I like to play paintball. That’s our ammo.”

  Alex rifled through the crate, sifting the bags of paint balls. Malloy picked up a bag, then dropped it, disappointed. He looked at Alex and sighed. Case over. One more false alarm. Alex couldn’t read Cyrillic, but she could make out AK-47 well enough. She ran a hand inside the crate; her fingers came away slick with paint. She rose, and the three walked back through the kitchen.

  “That’s some load of groceries,” said Alex. “Expecting someone?”

  “Family,” said Shepherd. “Barbecue tonight.”

  “They in from Texas?”

  “All over, actually,” said Shepherd. “You’re welcome to stop by and see for yourself. We’re firing up the grill around seven.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Malloy.

  Alex slowed, eyeing the groceries on the counter. There was milk and orange juice, bread and peanut butter, and bags of beef jerky. To one side were amassed a dozen small bottles of five-hour energy drink. Above the fridge sat two cartons of Marlboro Reds, but she knew Shepherd didn’t smoke. His fingers were clean, with no nicotine stains between the index and middle fingers. And there were those white teeth. She didn’t see any chicken or steaks or ground beef: staples of a summer barbecue. Of course, he could have already put it away. She looked at the refrigerator, then thought better of it.

  She and Malloy stopped at the front door. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Shepherd,” she said. “We’re sorry to have intruded on your day.”

  “It is no problem.”

  Alex smiled as the twinge in her back turned into a dagger. There it was again. The clumsy syntax. The faintest of accents, turning it into eet. She didn’t know exactly where he was from, but it wasn’t Houston, Texas.

  She rubbed her fingers together and found them as slippery as a few minutes before. Not paint but grease. The kind of grease that keeps rust from gun barrels. And all the while she kept her eyes locked on Mr. Randall Shepherd.

  You bastard, she thought. You goddamned, Oscar-winning bastard.

  Shepherd stared back, eyes steady, unblinking. He ran a hand over his scalp, and Alex observed two rivulets of sweat at his temple beginning to roll toward his jaw.

  “Au revoir,” she said, as lightly as her thundering heart would permit.

  “Au revoir,” said Shepherd. The response was immediate and unrehearsed. It was French French, not her clumsy American variant. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. Shepherd shook his head, chuckling to himself. “Mai
s merde.”

  “Hands against the wall,” said Alex. “You’re under arrest.”

  “What is it?” asked Malloy. “Did I miss something?”

  But by then the man who called himself Randall Shepherd was bringing a large semiautomatic pistol to bear and Alex was pushing Malloy aside as she cleared her Glock.

  “Drop it!”

  She was a second late.

  15

  The first bullet struck her in the chest. She wasn’t sure where, only that she felt as if she’d been flattened by a truck. The second hit her in the same place, and even as she tumbled backward and her head hammered the doorframe, she knew that he was a professional. What kind of professional, she wasn’t sure, because by then she’d hit the ground and she couldn’t breathe, and even though her eyes were open, all she could see were skyrocketing colors.

  Alex tried to raise her head, but nothing happened. The thought came to her that she was wearing her vest so the bullet couldn’t have penetrated the Kevlar plates and injured her spine. She tried again, with only a marginally better result. She didn’t like slackers, or anyone else who refused her orders, and the same went for herself. Angered, she ordered her fingers to curl, but for all her efforts, she remained as immobile as a petrified rock.

  Gunfire battered the air, the bangs and concussions so loud that her ears hurt worse than her chest. There was a thud on the floor beside her, and like that, she could see again. Malloy was lying next to her. Blood spurted from his neck in messy arrhythmic geysers. He’s a goner, she thought. No one can lose that much blood. She knew this was a terrible thing, and that later she was going to be heartbroken. But for now she was too stunned to feel anything.

  The floorboards shuddered beneath her. Feeling rushed back into her limbs. She raised her head in time to see Shepherd running up the stairs. He stopped halfway and fired his pistol. The shot sounded louder than the others and brought her back to her senses. More gunshots followed. She was in a shooting gallery at Coney Island, if every shot made you wince and rattled your insides. Jason Mara came out of the kitchen, firing across the room at Shepherd. He and DiRienzo had taken the back door to insure against Shepherd’s pulling a runner. Mara’s head snapped back. Blood splattered the wall behind him. He fell. She knew he was dead.

  Shepherd continued up the stairs. Alex aimed her pistol and fired. And fired again and again. Filaments of plaster and wallpaper erupted around him. He twisted and pointed his pistol at her. He was 20 feet away, but she felt close enough to count the grooves in the barrel. He had her dead to rights. The muzzle flash blinded her. Wood splintered an inch from her ear. All this time, she kept firing. Sixteen rounds, she told herself, though she had no idea how many times she’d pulled the trigger. Her hand was sore from squeezing so hard, and her wrist was shaky. She paused for a second—less, even—trained the sights on Shepherd’s chest, then fired three times in succession. Shepherd appeared to hurl himself against the wall, rebounded, and flipped forward over the balustrade. His head struck the floor first, cracking the rotting planking. He didn’t move after that.

  The silence was louder than the gunfire.

  Alex struggled to a knee and turned her attention to Malloy. “Hang in there, Jimmy,” she said. “I’ll get help.”

  Malloy’s eyes beseeched her. His mouth hung open, lips trembling. He was speaking, but the words were incomprehensible. He repeated himself and she understood. “My girls,” he was saying. “…love them.”

  “Stay still, baby. It’s going to be okay.”

  Alex avoided his eyes. She had to find his carotid artery. Her fingers probed inside the gaping wound, but there was too much blood and half his goddamned neck was no longer there. Malloy’s hand shot up and grasped her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. Slowly the pressure relaxed. The hand fell back to the floor.

  “Jimmy,” she said.

  Malloy stared lifelessly past her.

  Alex stood. A pall of smoke drifted across the room, the cordite so thick it burned her eyes. Mara was dead, too. She already knew that. DiRienzo lay a few feet away. He had a hole in his cheek and the back of his head resembled a savaged pomegranate.

  She crossed the room. Randall Shepherd lay on his stomach, his head swallowed by the old, termite-eaten floorboards. She kicked him and he did not respond. She kicked him again, because he was an asshole. Kneeling, she put two fingers to his neck, but she could find no pulse. She could see into the space beneath the house. An olive-drab crate with yellow Cyrillic writing sat inches from her feet. She still had no idea what the writing said. It didn’t matter. There were numbers, too.

  She could make out AK-47 just fine.

  16

  Bobby Astor stepped to the curb and raised a hand in the air. A steel-gray Audi SUV swerved into the right lane and pulled to a halt in front of him. Astor jumped into the back seat. “Good morning, Sully. You will kindly refrain from any mention of my father. I’ve been taking condolences for two hours now and I’m fed up with it.”

  “Screw you, too,” said Detective First Grade (retired) John Sullivan, turning in his seat and fixing Astor with his watery blue eyes. He was sixty-seven, stout, and ruddy, very much in fighting trim. Since retiring from the force two years earlier, he’d worked as Astor’s official chauffeur and unofficial bodyguard. “My condolences on the passing of your father.”

  “Condolences accepted,” said Astor. “Get me to midtown.”

  Sullivan guided the car into traffic. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what a shitty day. First your dad and then this thing out on Long Island.”

  “What thing is that?” Astor asked, only half interested. He freed the agenda from his back and set it on his lap, eager to study his father’s business dealings for a clue as to what Palantir might mean.

  “In Inwood, near JFK. Three FBI agents were killed in some kind of operation. It’s all over the news.”

  Astor looked up from the agenda. “Did they give any names?”

  Sullivan’s blue eyes peered at him in the rearview. “Not yet. You know—have to contact the relatives first. Why?”

  “Alex was on a raid last night.”

  “Long Island?”

  “I think so.” Astor speed-dialed his ex. He tapped his foot, waiting for her to answer.

  “You’re an hour late,” said Alex when she picked up. “And yes, I’m all right.”

  Astor was more relieved than he cared to admit at hearing her voice. “Was it Jimmy?”

  “He, Jason Mara, and Terry DiRienzo.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know I can’t discuss it. Listen, I’m busy right now. We can talk later.”

  Astor hung up, shaken, feeling somehow as if he were the one who had dodged a bullet.

  “She okay?” asked Sullivan.

  “Same as ever. Her partner was killed. Jim Malloy. Good guy.”

  “God bless,” said Sullivan.

  “Yeah. God bless,” said Astor. “What the hell was she doing out there?”

  Sullivan didn’t answer. There was a time when he’d worked with Alex. The two didn’t get along. He called her a maverick and thought she was too keen on taking risks, too eager to put herself and her team into the line of fire. Astor had no grounds to argue with him. Alex was Alex. She knew only one direction: forward. And always at top speed. Astor was the same. He often thought it was their similarities that had drawn them together, each seeing his or her own best traits in the other. It had made for a torrid romance. But narcissism, in whatever form, wasn’t a good recipe for a long-term relationship.

  Astor’s phone buzzed. He checked the number. “What is it, Marv?”

  Shank’s voice rattled the car’s speakers. “We got problems. Some of our guys called. They saw what happened earlier. They’re nervous about the position.”

  By “guys,” Shank meant the banks that had lent Astor the money to finance his bet on the yuan. Astor checked the monitor b
uilt into the rear seat. The yuan was holding steady at 6.30. “We’re good. What are they complaining about?”

  “Afraid it might happen again. They’re talking about upping our margin deposit.”

  “They can screw themselves. A deal’s a deal.”

  “Tell that to our lenders. If you’ve got a minute, you might want to stop by and boost their spirits.”

  Astor knew this was an order, not a request. “Who?”

  “Brad Zarek.”

  Zarek was a senior VP who ran the prime direct brokerage department at Standard Financial. Not Astor’s favorite guy. “How much are we into them?”

  “Four hundred million.”

  Four hundred million was a substantial sum. Zarek had every right to be calling. “Listen, Marv, any other day I’d be there in a heartbeat. I’ve got something else going.”

  “This isn’t any other day. If Standard Financial sneezes, all the other guys will get the flu.”

  “Yeah, all right. Call Zarek and tell him I’ll be over. Listen, I gotta go.”

  “Head over there now. The sooner we nip this in the bud, the better. You coming back in, after?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, my ass. It’s not just the banks that are calling. I’m fielding calls left, right, and center from our clients. People are scared. They don’t want to talk to a schmuck like me. They want the schmuck whose name is on the fund.”

  “That would be me.”

  “That would be you, schmuck.”

  “Yeah, okay…I’ll see what I can do.”

  And the hits keep coming, thought Astor. He leaned forward and told Sullivan to take him to Standard Financial’s headquarters at 45th and Sixth. Astor patted his driver on the shoulder. “Hey, Sully, sorry I barked at you like that earlier.”

  “Don’t sweat it, chief. I’ve gotten worse.”

  John Sullivan had first pinned on a badge in 1966 at the age of twenty. He’d seen all the hot spots: narcotics, vice, homicide. Somewhere in there he’d been shot. Word was he’d pulled the bullet out himself and chased down the bad guy. Astor met him when Sullivan was working with Alex on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, better known as the JTTF, the force within a force run together with the FBI and a multitude of smaller agencies.