The Hunted

The offer ignited a bitter quarrel among the Russians. Day to day a loose-knit group, they were bound by two common traits-they all spoke Russian, and all had ties of one sort or another to the Russian underworld. The big question-indeed, the only question-was, who would get first crack at Alex Konevitch?

After two days of passing increasingly malicious notes back and forth, the Russians gathered in a tight swarthy huddle in a remote corner of the yard to discuss the offer-a cool half million to whomever killed him within thirty days, declining in value with each passing month. They spoke in Russian, and they sparred loudly and heatedly, with no concern at all about being overheard.

The sooner the better-this point seemed elemental and was quickly agreed among the ten men. Why wait and waste a hundred grand? Point two was almost as easily settled-the first crack would be their best shot. Catch Konevitch before he knew of their intention to kill him. Catch him before he had his guard up. Catch him at his most vulnerable.

If that flopped, future efforts would become increasingly difficult.

The experienced hit men raucously laid claim to the honor. The killing game wasn't as easy as it seemed, one explained, and the other killers nodded with great gravity and solemn agreement. An amateur making his first plunge was likely to do something unfathomably stupid. Two of the veterans confessed how they had choked on their first jobs. Seemingly insignificant details that suddenly ballooned into big problems. A wrong glance here, a careless stutter there, that alerted the target. A case of last-minute jitters that turned paralytic. A lot could go wrong, and often did.

The thieves and pushers and kidnappers weren't buying it. What was so hard? Bring something sharp, pick a vital organ, and poke it. No problem, as easy as cutting steak. The bickering intensified and verged on violence, before Igor, a clever accountant with a talent for money laundering, came to the rescue with a way to buy peace. One hundred grand from the bounty would be carved off and split among the nine Russians who didn't get to stab a hole in Alex.

Everybody wanted to argue about this for a while, but the compromise was irresistible, and inevitably accepted.

Now everybody benefited. And now everybody had a stake in doing it right.

Thus the lottery rapidly whittled down to four. Three had made a handsome living on the outside, killing people. Number four was a blowhard who loudly proclaimed two murders and launched into vulgar, descriptive bragging about his handiwork. They suspected he was lying, and they were right. Nobody could prove it, though; thus he had a tenuous, shaky seat at the table. But having settled on this logic, it was a short bounce to the next argument.

To nobody's surprise, this proposal came from the lips of Lev Titov, hands down the most productive killer in the group, if not the entire prison. It was plain common sense, Lev argued-the one with the most scalps on his belt should have the first shot. Having jumped off to an early start, at age fourteen, fulfilling every schoolboy's dream by strangling his math teacher, Lev went on to compile an impressive pedigree of homicides. He was legendary among certain circles, a remorseless assassin who killed without flair or even a telltale method. He had slain for himself, for the Russian army, for the Mafiya, and occasionally, when his short fuse got the better of him, for the hell of it. He was fussy and painstaking, and able to murder with a bewildering variety of weapons, from a deck of cards to sophisticated bombs. He once killed a man he suspected of cheating at chess by stuffing the checkmated king down his throat. Unpredictability and a certain amount of messiness were his only signatures.

A quick show of hands. Eight for. One puzzling abstention. Only the blowhard against.

Lev was the man.

One hundred grand would be split nine ways; the other four hundred would go into an account of Lev's choosing. A man who smiled rarely, Lev could not wipe the grin off his face. With seven years left on his sentence, he could at least look forward to a little gold at the end of the rainbow.

And so it was that at the moment Alex placed his tray on the table and casually fell onto the hard metal bench, Lev never even turned around. Why bother? After watching and studying his target for four days, he could write a book on Alex's culinary habits. He knew Alex would quietly sip his lukewarm coffee and wait for his big cellmate. Alex liked eggs, his cellmate adored French toast. It was a routine they shared, like an old married couple. The roommate would pour and scrape his runny eggs onto Alex's tray, and the French toast would land on the big guy's before they launched into their breakfasts.