Page 36 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

No, the innovative part was what his company, VB Auctions, actually sold.

The bidders in tonight’s auction had no need for any such equipment and wouldn’t even take delivery. Buryak was cautious to the edge of paranoia and so he’d come up with the idea of a phony auction.

What the men had really been bidding for was the commodity that was Viktor Buryak’s specialty, and perhaps the most dangerous product in the city. Worse than drugs, plastic explosives, poisons, machine guns.

Information.

The “dump truck” that stone-faced Welbourne bought was really a file that Buryak and his employees would assemble. It would contain exacting details of shipments of fentanyl and OxyContin from a warehouse in Pennsylvania to Virginia to New York and on to its ultimate destination in Connecticut (the circuitous route, which involved using separate trucks decorated with fake signage, was for security).

The file would also include the names of the drivers, their personal information (family members too) and the names of police in each jurisdiction the trucks would roll through, including, in New York City, a few precincts with cops who could be counted on to turn a blind eye, or even help Welbourne’s hijackers.

The “boat” the Twins had bought was a dossier on a man named Suarez who’d come to New York from Miami, with a small crew, and was planning on starting a drug operation that catered to the Latinx population. It was small-time and not much of a threat to any of the bidders, but the dossier could be used to guarantee that the man would have to kick over a good portion of the take to the winner. It contained sexting messages between the married Suarez and a mistress. Selfies too of both of them, several naked in bed, the bath, thefloor, the kitchen island (really? Buryak had thought). The girlfriend was, literally, that: a girl, sixteen, which made the pictures child pornography and their self-documented activities statutory rape.

Suarez would pay big.

Duggin had gone away happy too. The “backhoe” was a year’s worth of monthly reports on when and where the NYPD vice and drug teams would conduct raids. Duggin’s specialty was sex trafficking, and his crew ran more than a dozen massage parlors in the city. Buryak had been amused when, after he won the auction, Duggin had brayed a laugh. “Bought myself a back-hoe.Damn.”

As a cover, yes, VB did move industrial machinery and made a fair profit doing so. But the golden kernel of the operation was what took up ninety percent of the time, resources and space: the research department, which operated much like a corporate espionage/private eye/data-mining firm. His people conducted interviews and performed surveillance and collected data. But they dug much, much deeper to unearth sensitive information that no one else could provide.

Admittedly, some of the practices were questionable—using Bulgarian and Czech Republic hackers (they were the masters). And then there was always the ever-popular business model of extortion, blackmail and broken limbs or threatened children.

Knowledge is power, and armed with Buryak’s facts and figures, the crime bosses in the New York area were thriving. Arrests were down by thirty percent and an outfit paying for Buryak’s services could count on hobbling an upstart competitor before they got a toehold in the territory. And the products and services that Buryak didn’t deal in, but that his clients did, proliferated all the more abundantly on the streets of New York, Bridgewater, Newark, Trenton and every other supermarket catering to consumers with that insatiable need for drugs, guns, sex, stolen credit cards and merchandise.

His success, he knew, put a figurative price on his head. The police and FBI wanted desperately to stop him. Look at that bullshit Leon Murphy case. Utterly trumped up. But no one was more security minded than he was, a lesson learned early, on the streets in Kiev when his father—a loud and proud organized criminal—was arrested in front of the family home by police who decided that lifting his hands and crying“Ne zachepy moho syna!”warranted bullets in his head.

At least they heeded his plea and did not in fact hurt his son. They told the boy to stick to the straight and narrow—well, an equivalent Ukrainian cliché.

But, of course, he did not. The fourteen-year-old knew only his father’s calling, but from that blood-spattered moment on, he followed what he called “prophylactic practices” to stay safe, alive and out of prison.

He convinced his mother to move to the U.S., where at least due process would give you a fighting chance and lawyers could be miracle workers. He identified a pretty and moderately sexy woman who was Ukrainian American and he became a citizen of the country. On the surface he was a legitimate businessman, running a successful company. He was active in church. He donated to good causes and served on charitable boards.

None of which fooled a single soul. There was no doubt among the authorities he was data-miner-in-chief to the gangs—the “Godfather of Information,” some paper dubbed him—but proving it was another matter. This, he knew, was why the prosecutor clutched at straws and tried to bring him down with that bogus murder charge.

He himself never stepped over into the dark side of his operation. He had minions for that. They were well paid for their loyalty. But more important they were mostly married or had children. Therewas the unspoken whip: that if they broke the watertight seal and Buryak got damp, very bad things would happen. (Only once had he transgressed, murdering a contractor who’d come across a stash of unaccounted millions in his country house and tried to extort him. He’d successfully turned the man’s death into an accident, but the effort that took, and the anxiety it caused, told him he would never take matters into his own hands again.)

This was why he’d been mortified and infuriated to have been arrested—and tried, no less—for the death of a punk like Leon Murphy. Killing someone for trying to sell protection at one of Buryak’s warehouses? No point. He would’ve sent a lieutenant to sit down with Murphy in a bar and explain about the dangers of identity theft. “Such a problem, such a hassle … People lose everything. They even end up on the street, Leon.”

Why waste ammunition?

His phone—an encrypted satellite—hummed.

It was his head of research department. “Willem.”

“Sir. Are you free?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I need to talk to you about the Chemist. Our reception team picked up some information you need to know about. The tap in the courthouse prosecution room.”

“All right.”

“They didn’t get as much as they’d hoped. He doesn’t talk much. At least the audio quality’s good. He said that if you were acquitted, he would findsomeevidence to quote ‘nail you’ for something.”

“The Chemist said that?”

“That’s right.”

“I see. Anything specific?”

---