The Wolf: A Novel Read online

  Alexander earned a black dagger tattoo, the first of what he hoped would be many, on his sixteenth birthday when he shot and killed a retired KGB agent turned Red Mafiya enforcer who had pocketed more than his share of the neighborhood drug proceeds. He was allowed to keep the semiautomatic he had been given for the execution as well as any money found in the dead man’s pockets. The Mafiya liked the way Alexander went about his business, calm and deliberate, and they gave their approval whenever he made a request to recruit younger members to the organization.

  “Life is different here than in the village,” Alexander said to Vladimir, tossing the younger boy’s overnight bag on the center of a small bed in the rear of the barely furnished apartment.

  “It cannot be worse,” Vladimir said, taking a quick glance at his new surroundings.

  “There’s work to be had,” Alexander said. “Money to be made. How much depends on what it is you’re willing to do.”

  “Anything but work in a factory,” Vladimir said. “I will kill before I step foot inside one.”

  Alexander nodded stiffly. “You will have to.”

  Vladimir returned to his town after two weeks with Alexander. His cough had not improved, but he had been introduced to Alexander’s older associates and was given an indication of the type of work that would be expected of him were he to return and have his name placed on their ledgers. He was given two gifts by the Mafiya boss, a tall man whose upper body, back, and arms were covered in tattoos, in the tradition of the criminal underworld. The man’s history could be read like chapters of a book written into the contours of his skin. The man had stared at Vladimir for several moments, charcoal eyes and black beard hardly disguising the cold indifference that fueled him. He had handed Vladimir a small caliber handgun and a folded roll of cash, waiting for the boy to accept them and nod his head in appreciation. “These are for you to do with as you choose,” the man had said. “And if we never see each other again, we part as friends. But if you wish to return, come here to live, there is a place for you. You will be one of our own, a member of our group until the day one of us is found dead. Have I made myself understood?”

  “How soon can I return?” Vladimir had asked.

  The bearded man had shrugged.

  Vladimir put the gun in his jacket pocket and held the cash in the palm of his left hand, fingers wrapped tight around it. “I won’t be gone long.”

  Vladimir rested a cup of coffee on a tray and glanced at a dozen photos spread across the length of a glass table. The memories rose into the air like smoke. He had been a boy then and not yet begun the steep climb he attacked with such ferocity and viciousness that even the most hardened of Russia’s criminal elite were shaken by it. He could not count the number of men and women he had killed, but he could count the millions his life of crime had reaped. He no longer concerned himself with vast real estate holdings, homes and apartments spread throughout Europe and the United States. He ignored the expensive cars, the stunning women, and the lavish lifestyle such ways afforded him.

  Now thirty-seven, for the past seven years Vladimir had been the undisputed leader of the Russian Mafiya. The frail boy who had trouble taking a full breath had grown into a proven power broker, deciding the fate of thousands. In his rise he had also amassed an impressive business portfolio. He was the first to set up a string of phony medical labs and clinics across Europe, utilizing them as fronts for profitable insurance scams that netted his organization roughly $1 billion per year. Through a network of middlemen, Vladimir owned several private security firms, installing systems in the homes of millionaire businessmen. This allowed him to see what they had of value and what his gangs could plunder without worry when the occupants were out of town.

  His most lucrative dealings involved the drug trade.

  He had established a successful working partnership with three Mexican cartels. These relationships enabled Vladimir’s crew to move $1 million of cocaine and heroin through the world’s pipeline per hour.

  But on this day, on this early morning, with the glistening tops of the Swiss Alps close enough to touch, there was only one item that had Vladimir’s full attention.

  Vladimir “the Impaler” Kostolov was ready to begin the next phase of a plan he’d been constructing for more than a decade.

  The plan that would cripple strong nations and wreak havoc with their financial institutions.

  It would shudder the cores of national leaders, forcing them to make desperate moves.

  It would lead to chaos, death, mass confusion, and despair.

  It would bring the world to the brink of ruin.

  Vladimir sat back and watched as his cousin Alexander Zaverko shuffled onto the patio, his frail fingers barely holding onto a thick cup filled with hot coffee. Alexander, five years older than Vladimir, was one of his most trusted confidants and his only true friend. They had risen through the criminal ranks, side by side, until Alexander was stricken with stage four lung cancer less than a year ago, though he neither smoked nor drank. By the doctor’s accounts, his cousin would be fortunate to live through the summer. Vladimir had doubts he would make it that far.

  Alexander gazed at the photos spread across the table. “Have you selected one yet?” he asked, his voice barely audible.

  Vladimir reached for one photo and showed it to his cousin. It was of a young man named Ali Ben Bashir. “This one would have been perfect,” he said. “Sadly, he chose to be a martyr instead of a leader.”

  Alexander looked at the photo and nodded. “The bombing in Florence,” he said. “Impressive work.”

  Vladimir slid a second photo across the table. “This one has the potential to be another,” he said. “His name is Raza.”

  “Why him?”

  “He’s book-smart and street-smart,” Vladimir said. “He has many reasons to be angry and that only helps fuel his passion to destroy. He’s ambitious and craves power.”

  “Which makes him untrustworthy,” Alexander said.

  “They are all untrustworthy,” Vladimir said. “But he has extra reasons to want to leave his mark. He was a student of art and at one point embraced the culture he now so much despises.”

  “What made him change?”

  “He was rejected by a number of European universities,” Vladimir said, “the majority of them in Italy. It seems they were at odds over his work. Raza thought himself a gifted painter and sculptor; school administrators thought otherwise. Raza looked in the mirror and saw Michelangelo; the administrators saw a meager talent, and a brown-skinned one at that.”

  “He turns his back on his own world, only to have …”

  “The world he wished to enter turn their back to him,” Vladimir said. “Ostracized in one, ridiculed in another—two necessary ingredients for a terrorist.”

  “How good is he?”

  “Working on a small stage, he’s done well,” Vladimir said. “He’s building a reputation, and that will only grow as he selects higher profile targets.”

  “Will he listen to you?” Alexander asked.

  “None of the good ones can be expected to follow our orders,” Vladimir said. “Which would make it a waste of our time to give them any. Raza will want our money and we will want him to kill and destroy. It makes for a sound arrangement.”

  “I wish there were enough time for me to see this one through to the end,” Alexander said.

  “As do I, cousin,” Vladimir said. “But I will do my best in your absence.”

  Chapter 3

  New York City

  SUMMER, 2013

  The meeting was held on the thirty-fifth floor of a downtown Manhattan office building.

  The conference room table was covered with porcelain carafes, sterling silver coffeepots, and crystal bowls filled with fresh fruit. Three ornate chandeliers lit the room, the glow of their bulbs gleaming off the polished table and mahogany chairs. The floor to ceiling windows were bulletproof.

  It was a landmark building whose halls were once p
opulated by land barons and oil and steel magnates. It was a place accustomed to accommodating men of power, and I knew the ones I had invited to join me would feel at ease in here, impressed by the surroundings. They saw themselves as similar to those billionaires from an earlier century, so the parallel would not be lost on them.

  I had food prepared by the finest chefs from every nation that would be represented at the table—from southern Italian delicacies to the freshest sushi to the finest French pastries. I had been around these men long enough to know they were appreciative of respectful gestures and put at ease by tastes of the familiar.

  I needed them to feel comfortable as I pushed them to make what I knew would be an uncomfortable decision. My words had to be measured, my tone direct but not demanding. I would need to read the room quickly, watching for facial expressions, eye movements, and body language, to gauge each reaction. I had to anticipate concerns but never patronize or lie. I had to exert authority while being aware of the power each man at the table wielded.

  I needed to convince a group of men who for decades were in full control of everything to join me in risking it all.

  I was first to arrive.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat at a chair in the center of the table. I had requested the meeting three weeks earlier but given no details as to what would be discussed. Every one of the men scheduled to attend had offered condolences in the days following the deaths of my wife and daughters. They were hard-core crime bosses but they were husbands and fathers and had been knee-deep in a harsh business long enough to have suffered their share of loss.

  I was the youngest of the eight.

  My father, Mario, was a long-haul truck driver, a proud union member who put in heavy hours. He was a big man with a laugh as hearty as his appetite and he was always good company. My mother, Elena, was frail, and I never can recall a time when she wasn’t ill with one malady or another. We lived in a two-story house in the northeast Bronx on a dead-end street. I attended a local Catholic school and was a weekend altar boy. I would smile when my mother would tell me what a handsome priest I would make, not wanting to shatter an illusion she shared with every other Italian-American woman in the parish. You could say I was bookish, spending hours in a back room in a small library that faced a supermarket parking lot, a pile of books by my side. I read the books boys my age would love—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the novels of Jack London, Rafael Sabatini, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. On Sundays, after mass, I would go for long walks with my father and tell him about the tales I had read during the time he was away. In return, he would tell me about the cities he had driven through and the small towns he had visited, spending nights in the cabin of his rig, the cackle of a portable radio the only company he required.

  I preferred solitary activities, which I’ve been told is not uncommon for an only child. It is a habit that has served me well in the criminal world, a place populated by those who prefer to go it alone. I made a quick leap from checkers to chess and learned to compete against myself, using books about the masters of the game as my guide. It is a practice I’ve kept to this day, except now I use it to plan strategies and moves against a range of ruthless opponents.

  I was a baseball fan, listening to the games during the season, anticipating the moves made by the managers of both New York teams, preferring National League ball to that played in the American due to the strategic in-game decisions required. I studied the stats in the morning paper, checked a player’s on-base percentage against the opposing pitcher’s hits-to-walk ratio, attempting to evaluate who had the greater chance to succeed, and look for reasons behind it.

  I was a member of the school track team. I was a long-distance runner, choosing to compete against a clock as opposed to an opponent. I ran just about every day, regardless of weather. I loved the sounds of my sneakers bouncing off a dirt road.

  With my father away, I spent a great deal of time with my mother. In the early evening, we sat in the living room and listened to the radio, tuned to an Italian station broadcasting news from a country she missed every day of her life. I would sometimes read to her from an assortment of books—some borrowed from the library, others in Italian, sent to her by relatives in Naples. I never understood the extent of her ailments and I couldn’t guess at the pain she felt, but all I needed to know I could observe—my mother was sick and would never get better and I was there to offer comfort in any way I could.

  It was a safe, simple existence, both within our home and around our neighborhood. I was too young to think much about what I wanted to make of my life, if there was indeed a place for me outside the Bronx. Few of the older kids from the area ventured far and all seemed to find work that required a uniform—military, police, fire, sanitation. I wasn’t sure if that would be the direction I would seek, but I don’t think I would have minded.

  All that vanished the summer I turned thirteen.

  On July 4 of that year, while other kids were in playgrounds or on rooftops waiting for the fireworks to begin, I was on the second floor of our home, at my mother’s bedside, watching her draw her final breaths, her ravaged body giving in to the incessant demands of a disease without any quit. My father gripped one of her hands and I held tight to the other, listening as my mother strained to speak. “I’m sorry,” she said in a painful rasp. “I’m so sorry.” She closed her eyes and let her head tilt to one side.

  My father was not an emotional man. The day after we buried my mother, the only woman he would ever love, he left to drive a sixteen-wheeler packed with oil drums to a factory in Missoula, Montana, expecting to return in less than a week. He left knowing I would be responsible enough to go to school every day and return home to a dinner left for me by our neighbor and my mother’s best friend, Filomena. My father always treated me more as an adult than my years would indicate. There was a feeling of mutual trust between us that neither would betray. It’s a weakness, I know, but one that can be forgiven between a father and a son.

  On his return trip from Montana, somewhere on the curving roads of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my father’s truck swerved to avoid hitting two deer standing too close to the right-hand lane. The truck jackknifed and skidded for more than a quarter of a mile, the cabin crashing against the side of a guardrail, my father’s body blasting through the windshield, landing head first against the base of a tree. He was pronounced dead at the scene, a victim of two innocent animals and a faulty seat belt.

  But I knew better.

  My father had driven those roads for years and knew of the large number of deer who congregated along the curves of that stretch of 76. He would always move his truck to the middle lane during that portion of the drive. He would downshift the rig, slow-riding the 150-mile stretch of road, knowing he was getting close to home. And my father was a stickler about safety, double-checking the engine and cabin, never pulling a rig on the road unless he was confident all was secure.

  My father chose to end his life.

  He had lived with the burden of my mother’s illness for many years and now the weight of her death was more than he could bear and he brought it all to a close on a stretch of highway he had driven for over a decade.

  And then I was alone in a large room, my father’s sealed coffin resting a few feet away, surrounded by flowers and a prayer book. I wore the same dark jacket and slacks I wore for my mother’s wake, sitting there in an uncomfortable chair in a foul-smelling room, having lost, in less than a month’s time, the only two people in my life who mattered. At one point the door behind me swung open and I heard footsteps. I looked up and saw a man who resembled my father in feature and stature, though he was far better dressed and gave off an air of authority. He seemed to be the kind of man used to having his way.

  He walked over to my father’s coffin, rested a hand on the top and bowed his head. He stayed still for several minutes, then made the sign of the cross, turned, walked to a corner of the room and grabbed a folding chair. He sto
pped a few inches from me, popped open the chair and sat down.

  “I’m Carlo Marelli,” he said in a commanding voice. “Your father’s brother and your uncle.”

  “He never mentioned you,” I said. “Never told me he had a brother.”

  “We weren’t close,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s time for that later,” he said, his dark eyes never moving from mine. “Right now, we need to talk about you and me.”

  “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “And I know all I need to know about you,” he said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “You’re a smart kid with a bright head,” he said. “You keep to yourself and don’t let people you don’t know get close.”

  “People like you?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Especially people like me,” he said. “At least for now. Until we get to a place where we know and trust one another, and that’s going to take time. But if you agree, then you and me will have more than enough time to get to that point.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I want you to come live with me,” he said. “I’ll tell you up-front it will be a different life than what you had with your mother and father. And I’ll also tell you right here and now, you won’t be raised as a guest or a nephew I got stuck with. You’ll be raised as if you were my son. On that you have my word. And that’s usually good enough for anybody.”

  “Was it good enough for my father?” I asked.

  Carlo stood, folded the chair and rested it against his side. “Okay, then,” he said. “Most anybody. I know this came on you sudden so take time to think it over. But don’t take too long. I won’t hang around for the funeral; your father didn’t want much to do with me when he was alive, find it hard to imagine he would want me to watch him get buried. I have a few meetings in the city the next day or so. Once those are wrapped up, I’ll come find you and you can give me your answer.”

  “What if I decide no?” I asked.