Of the original six, three were still free: the company lawyer, the crooked police investigator, and Victor Grayson himself. North’s campaign was moving into its final stage.
Andrew Krivins, the company lawyer, had always considered himself smarter than the men around him. He had graduated from a good law school, built a fifteen-year career, and rarely lost. He owned a luxury condo downtown, a second home in the country, and a discreet Swiss bank account.
He never got blood on his own hands. While other men threatened people or broke bones, Krivins prepared documents that made theft look legal. On paper, everything he did was clean.
But after hearing what had happened to Tyler, the Grayson brothers, and Russell, he felt real fear. He called Grayson and suggested they both leave the country while they still could.
Grayson, sounding exhausted, told him there was nowhere to hide. He ordered Krivins to stay put and wait while “professionals” handled the matter. Krivins hung up with shaking hands and poured himself a large glass of expensive cognac.
He kept telling himself he was only a lawyer, not a thug. Surely that had to count for something. For three days he stayed inside his darkened condo, speaking to food delivery drivers through the chain lock.
On the fourth day, panic won. He emptied his hidden safe—cash, passport, bank cards—and stuffed everything into a travel bag. Then he called a cab to the airport, planning to catch the first flight he could out of the country.
A yellow cab with an older driver arrived twenty minutes later. Krivins climbed into the back seat, told the driver to step on it, and leaned back. He closed his eyes and pictured himself drinking coffee in some quiet European city by evening.
He noticed too late that the cab had left the highway and was heading into a desolate industrial area. Through the dirty window he saw warehouses, empty lots, and abandoned factories.
He shouted at the driver and demanded to know where they were going. The car stopped hard. The driver turned around, and Krivins saw he was not an old cabbie at all but a hard-faced man with cold eyes.
Two more men appeared, yanked the lawyer from the car, twisted his arms behind his back, pulled a hood over his head, and threw him into a damp basement.
When the hood came off, Krivins found himself tied to a chair in a foul-smelling room with no windows. A heavy door opened, and North walked in.
Krivins had read about him in crime reports and now stared at him like a man looking at a final exam he had no chance of passing. North asked, with dry humor, how the trip to Europe was going.
The lawyer started in on his usual defense—that he was just a lawyer and legally clean. North laughed in his face and said “legally” was a convenient word for cowards.
He told Krivins that, morally speaking, he was worse than the thugs. He had watched an old man get beaten and thought only about paperwork. Then North pulled out a prepared statement—a full confession covering Grayson’s property schemes, bribes, intimidation, and fraud…
