Later the same day, as Alex tidied up some final points on the Medina securities case, she phoned one of her favorite New York hotels, the Gotham, on West 55th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. She booked herself a room for the next evening.
She followed this with a call to her FinCEN contact in New York and arranged for an interview in two days. The FinCEN offices had an address in the financial district, not too far from Ground Zero. They had a time slot open for her in the morning at 10:00 and she took it.
Then she called Joseph Collins, a philanthropist and her mentor-as much as anyone had been one. She set a meeting with him for the next afternoon at 2:00. He would meet her in his home office at Fifth Avenue and 84th Street, he told her.
Her trip, though on short notice, was taking shape.
On the computer in her office, she went to the internet and booked an Amtrak ticket for the next morning. The train was easier than the airlines from Washington, she always figured, and faster too.
She glanced at her watch. If she left work on time today, which Mike had suggested, she could catch a solid workout at the gym in the evening and still have time to pack.
Tonight was her night to join in the pickup basketball with her friends at the YMCA. She had nicely worked the games back into her Wednesday schedule. She enjoyed seeing and competing against a good group of friends, and she could more than use it this evening. The tedium of being bound to a desk was slam-dunking her. And yet at the same time, she had been putting off placing the call to Federov. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe there was too much that could go wrong.
“What the heck,” she finally mused to herself, pumped a bit at getting away from the office again for a few days. “I’ll make the call and then I’m out of here.”
So her final call of the day was to the switchboard at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, where she asked for a guest named Yuri Federov. She waited to see if he had registered there under his real name and was partially surprised to learn from the operator that indeed he had.
“Could you put me through to his suite?” she asked.
She felt her heart race. She was under no illusions about Federov’s amorous feelings for her. He was an assignment, she reminded herself. He was potentially dangerous and had to be played carefully. She often wondered if there was a shred of decency in him and had come to the conclusion that, yes, if she looked hard enough, she could find some.
Maybe not much. But some.
Then she reminded herself that the last time she had seen him was a dark night in northern Italy, and he had just executed a man who had betrayed him. Sometimes she needed to do an urgent reality check on some of the people with whom she dealt.
There was light classical music as she waited for the connection. Lord, the money that people paid for these hotels, she thought to herself, and not for the first time. How much did it cost Federov to stay in a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria? Fifteen hundred bucks a night? Two thousand? A hundred bucks an hour? Two bucks a minute?
Well, if you had stolen obscene boatloads of money you could afford to spend obscene boatloads, just as long as you didn’t blow all of it. She remembered how her mother had busted a gut just to earn five hundred dollars a week in the 1980s and thought she was doing well. Even though Alex worked in financial crime deterrence, sometimes the fiduciary realties of the modern world were surreal.
The phone in Federov’s suite rang twice. Then he picked up. His response was sharp and gruff. “Hello?”
Alex felt a final surge of nerves. Then she spoke into her phone.
“Hello, Yuri,” she said.
A slight pause. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“This is your favorite American woman, or one of them, at least.”
His mood changed. “Alex?”
“Alex,” she confirmed.
“My goodness! How wonderful!” he said. “And your spies are so efficient! I’ve hardly been here long enough to unpack.”
In the background, there was electronic conversation in Russian, most likely an internet television link playing in his suite. It scrambled her thoughts slightly to be speaking one language while hearing another one acting as a counterpoint.
“Consider yourself lucky to be here long enough to unpack,” she said, playing along.
He laughed. “I have you to thank for that.”
“Not me, my bosses,” she said.
“You’re in New York, I hope?”
“No, not yet. But I’m going to be in New York tomorrow night. Interested in having some drinks and some conversation?” To her abiding shame, she added a flirtatious tone. Oh, well, she reasoned. They both knew it was a game, and they both knew how to play.
He switched into Russian. “For you? I’ll order iced champagne in my suite. Or vodka and beluga caviar!”
She laughed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Let’s not waste time, either,” he answered. “I’m so very pleased to hear from you and would be delighted to see you.” He paused. “Even though I know you phone for business probably, not pleasure or romance, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Then the vodka and seduction can come later,” he said. “Maybe the next day. What do you think of that?”
“I’d say it’s evidence that you’re still a dreamer,” she said.
“Hey,” he said with a laugh. “Listen, Alex LaDucova. I’m already having dinner with a friend tomorrow. We’re going down to the New York Italian Mafia neighborhood in Manhattan. What does he call it?”
“Little Italy?” she asked.
“That’s it. You come here to the Waldorf, we have a few drinks, and then you would be welcome to come along.”
“Who’s your friend? A woman or a gangster or both?”
“Neither,” he said. “Business contact in New York. He’d like to meet you, I’m sure. Very good that you called.”
She was fiddling with a pen at her desk. “All right,” she said. “How about this? Six thirty at the bar in the hotel lobby. Peacock Alley.”
“Wear something sexy,” he said. “I want to show you off.”
“And you wear a suit,” she said. “I don’t go out with men who don’t know how to dress.”
“Ouch,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, half amused, half revolted, fully intrigued. She clicked off, sighed, and wondered where life was leading her this time.
Ninety minutes later, she was at the Y, playing point guard in a pickup basketball game. Her friend Ben centered for her side. They played two twelve-minute halves and prevailed 37-32.
After a light workout with weights, she drove home. She noticed two people sitting in a battered Taurus in front of her building but thought little of it. Things like that were part of the urban landscape. No point to let paranoia get the best of her.
She parked her car beneath her building and then, wanting a little more night air, took the long way to her apartment by coming up out of the garage on the side street and walking toward her building’s front entrance.