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.