Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 79850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
“You can do that?” I asked her.
“Twentieth-century medicine is a marvel,” she assured me sarcastically. “Maybe try that first next time.”
I groaned. She smirked.
On my way out of the hospital, she asked me to please take care of myself, as she didn’t want to see all her work go down the toilet.
“Your concern for me is overwhelming,” I groused at her as I was being wheeled away on a gurney.
She only smiled and waved.
I was still in a drug-induced fog for the first twenty-four hours, at which time I was moved out of Illinois and taken to New York. Not that I saw the city. My view looked exactly the same as it did in Chicago. From the tower I was in, I saw another, lots of windows, nothing else. Inside my room was a police officer who didn’t speak to me for the first few days, but she finally broke down when I offered her my chocolate pudding. I never understood pudding. The consistency was gross.
“Don’t get any stupid ideas,” she warned me as she put the empty container back on my tray. “There are two police officers outside this door.”
“You’re saying even if I lull you into a false sense of security, you have backup.”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”
“You realize I’m here by choice,” I reminded her.
“Do I look like I care?”
It would have been scarier if she wasn’t smiling at me.
As far as informing on my father, I didn’t trust anyone but Calhoun, but he talked to me over a secure video feed from his office to my hospital room, and explained that Special Agent in Charge Monica Lewis was basically him there in Manhattan.
“She’ll take good care of you, Maks, and I appreciate what you’re doing for the city we both call home.” He took a breath. “Truly.”
The beautiful woman who walked through the door twenty minutes later had a sunny yet serious demeanor and put me immediately at ease. Her dark gaze was steady when she looked at me, her laugh was warm, and her concern for me seemed genuine. Once I proved I was telling the truth with passcodes and accounts in the Caymans that the FBI had no clue about, I was golden. She spoke to me like we were colleagues, not like I was a criminal. It was the best I’d felt in years. I had no idea of the weight I was carrying until it was gone.
Two weeks later, I sat in a steel-and-glass room at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City with a monitor in front of me and the seal of the FBI behind me and answered questions that Lewis asked me as she sat off-camera. It was recorded, and they played it for my father another three weeks after that in front of the impaneled grand jury. The law was that everyone got to face their accuser, but we weren’t there yet. It was a whole process.
My recorded statement was meant to help the nice people on the grand jury decide if there was enough evidence to charge him. So my father got to watch me, on video, alive and well, in all my glory, as I explained what I knew, what I would testify to, and what I had evidence of. From what I was told afterward, it took the jury no time at all to agree that Grigory Lenkov should be charged on all counts. He was indicted later that same day.
I never saw him, wouldn’t see him until I appeared in court. If I had to. With all the evidence, Lewis told me, it probably wouldn’t be necessary. I hoped that would be the case. And it wasn’t that I was afraid to see him, but that I found myself utterly fractured. I had moved from sadness and betrayal to anger and bitterness, and then to feeling hollow. He’d orphaned me with his choice. He had unmade me as his son. I had no place anymore, no family, no friends, no one. I was all alone, an outsider staring in at my old life. Seeing him would have crushed me, and I needed time to heal that wound.
“I can’t imagine he won’t take a plea,” Lewis told me later as we sat together in a high-rise hotel overlooking Times Square. It was as close as I was getting to it. “That’ll decide where he’ll spend the rest of his life. In a regular prison or ADX Florence.”
A supermax prison seemed like the best place for Grigory Lenkov. A place where he would be alone every minute of every day would drive him insane very quickly. He needed people in some capacity, and at least in a normal maximum-security prison, there would be a hierarchy he could ascend to.
“He’ll take a plea,” I assured her.
“That’s my feeling as well. My money’s on your old friend Lev making that choice as well.”