Breath of Hell (Harry Bauer Book 8)

by Blake Banner

  One of the guards was shouting something at me in Russian, the other was bellowing down the passage. I ignored them both, put a choke hold on Yushbaev and hauled him over to the tray of food. There I snapped the plastic knife by forcing the blade against the tabletop with my left hand. When it broke, I pressed the jagged point close beside Yushbaev’s left eye.

  “Tell your boys to stand down, Gabriel. You know me well enough to know that I will make a mess of your left eye, and when I am done I will make a mess of your right one. And I am more than happy to die breaking your damned neck. So tell them to stand down, now!”

  He babbled something at them in Russian as his few remaining troops arrived running out of the passage. Behind them, in dribs and drabs, looking confused and worried, came the women.

  “Now, you are going to do exactly as I say—”

  “You cannot expect to get away with this.” He croaked the words, like a frog. “Your position is impossible.”

  I ignored him. “First, I want all the women topside.” I was watching the guards and saw one of them glance at the women. “You! You speak English?”

  “Little.”

  “OK, understand this, I will take out Gabriel Yushbaev’s eyes, first the left, then the right, and then I will kill him. Understand?”

  He was looking nervous and nodding. “Understand.”

  “So you must put all the women in the elevator, and send them up to the house. Do it now!”

  He babbled something to Yushbaev, who quickly answered, “Da, da!”

  Then the guards were shouting at the women, herding them into the elevator like cattle. The women were shouting and whimpering too, more like frightened sheep than cows. Soon the elevator doors closed and half the women began to ascend.

  I snapped at the English-speaking guard.

  “You! What’s your name?”

  “Gregor!”

  “Gregor, next time I give you an order, if you check with this son of a bitch I will take out his left eye. Understand?”

  “Understand.”

  “I am the power now. You do what I say.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a big Slavic guy standing beside him with a walrus moustache. I jerked my head at him and said, “So take your pal’s GSh and bring it to me.”

  He hesitated a moment and I pressed the jagged point of the plastic knife deep into the corner of Yushbaev’s left eye. His scream was horrific and his arms and legs began to thrash. Gregor jumped and ran to his big, Slavic friend, snatched the semiautomatic from his holster and brought it to me, screaming, “Stop, mister! Stop, you must stop! I not check! I not check!”

  I eased up. I had not damaged Yushbaev’s eye, but I had cut deep into the very sensitive skin at the corner of his eye. Blood was running freely down the side of his face and he was weeping. Gregor handed me the 9mm Gryazev and Shipunov and I took it in my right hand, wedging the cannon hard under Yushbaev’s jaw.

  The elevator returned and I jerked my chin at the remaining girls. “Send them up.”

  There was more herding and a couple of minutes later the last of the girls were on their way to the surface. To Gregor I said, “Stairs?”

  He shook his head. “No stairs. Only elevator?”

  “OK, what about another elevator, a cargo elevator.”

  “No, no, only this elevator!”

  He was looking real anxious and I thought maybe he was telling the truth. I nodded and turned my attention to Yushbaev.

  “OK, Gabriel, now I need you to walk and I need you to talk, I do not need you to see or smell or use your arms or your hands. You’re a smart guy so you know where I am going with this. You are going to eat my breakfast and drink my coffee, and you are going to do it like you were a starving wolf, and then we are going to take a ride. Give me a small problem and I will blow your hands off at the wrist, after taking your damned eyes out with a plastic knife.”

  He didn’t argue. He was still sobbing, and with every sob I could see he was losing the respect of his men. That suited me fine. I let them watch him wolf down my breakfast and drink my coffee, then I spoke to Gregor again.

  “Tell your guys to get down on the floor with their hands behind their heads.”

  He issued the order. They spent a couple of seconds looking at each other until Gregor screamed at them and they all dropped and adopted the position. I said, “Call the elevator.” He did. “Now get on the floor, over there, with your back to me.”

  We climbed aboard and I told Yushbaev, “Take it up, Gabriel. I have no desire to break by an excess of pleasure. I am very happy to use pain. Do it!”

  He pressed the button, the onboard computer read his biometrics and we began to rise.

  “You have an underground power supply.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But sending and receiving signals depended on an antenna above ground which was damaged last night.”

  “When the generator was destroyed. It was housed on the roof of that building. I feel very strange.”

  “Yeah? Relax and enjoy it, that was the advice you gave me, remember? So Marianne had to go to the yacht to arrange things. That was the only place where you had secure communications.”

  “You said it, Rambo.”

  He giggled, I sighed and the doors opened.

  We were in the master bedroom. It was as I remembered it. The light filtering through the windows said it was midmorning, maybe ten thirty or eleven. Yushbaev looked at the bed with an idiot smile on his face. “Where is Marianne when you want her? I think maybe she is in that bed. Shall we go and look for her among the folds and warps of space?”

  “No.”

  I grabbed a cushion and dropped it in the elevator doorway to stop it closing. Then I bent and retrieved my bag. It still had the C4 and the rest of my gear in it. I took two cakes and stuck a detonator in one of them. I set it to self-detonate in thirty seconds, tossed them into the elevator car, removed the cushion and sent it back down. I counted thirty seconds and the walls shook, the wooden paneling cracked and the elevator doors rattled.

  Yushbaev stared at me with no particular expression. “Trapped,” he said, “in the heart of the world. In hell, maybe.”

  “Yeah, deep. Get moving. Walk and talk, Yushbaev, walk and talk.”

  He nodded thoughtfully as I propelled him toward the door. “They sound the same, and the meaning is parallel. Talking is the walking of the mind, Harry. This is an important realization. Talking is the walking of the mind. Walk and talk.”

  I resisted the temptation to slap him across the back of the head. Instead I asked him, “Where do you keep the information you have on the colonel?”

  We had arrived at the galleried landing and he started to take the steps down. He repeated, “The information you have on the colonel. That phrase means nothing to me. Meaning, Harry, is something that we give to objects and phrases. They have no inherent meaning of their own.”

  “You learn that from a fortune cookie, Yushbaev? You think you might grasp the meaning better if I blow your kneecap off?”

  “I don’t like violence.”

  “You were blackmailing Colonel Jane Harris.”

  “Jane.” He stopped dead halfway down the stairs, smiling, and sighed again. “I like Jane.”

  “Keep moving.”

  I shoved him and he started ambling down the stairs again. In the light of day I could see the carnage of the night before. There were eight dead and partially dismembered bodies lying in large pools of congealed blood and gore.

  “I don’t like violence,” he repeated. “I am like Buddha. Gotama Buddha, Harry, wanted to remove suffering from human experience. I too wanted to achieve my ends by causing pleasure instead of pain.”

  I pushed him toward the door. “Fascinating. Now focus, Gabriel. You persuaded Jane to do what you wanted, right?”

  He nodded and fell into step beside me. “Oh, it was not hard. She was the bait on my rod to draw you in. Marianne said, ‘Kill him and torture her,�
� but I do not like causing pain, Harry.”

  “You just pay other people to do it for you.”

  “That’s it,” he said absently. “I thought, back then, if I had you both. If I could induce you both into my system, what an investment that would be!”

  “You should have listened to Marianne.”

  “I should.”

  We came out of the front door onto a broad flight of shallow steps that fanned out down to the gravel drive. I said, “But you didn’t. Instead you blackmailed Jane into working with you.”

  He snapped his fingers. “It was brilliant.” His eyes were shifting here and there. “Please keep talking to me,” he said. “I think the trees want to eat me.”

  I pushed him onto the lawn and we headed for the breach in the southeast corner of the wall. “You made deliberate public displays of her kissing you on the cheek, leaving your yacht alone and returning of her own free will, negotiating on your behalf…”

  “It was guaranteed to bring you running.”

  “But how did you do that, Gabriel? You blackmailed her.”

  He was half-walking, half-running now, gaping at the trees beyond the big, redbrick walls.

  “Do you think I can buy the trees, Harry? Do you think I can buy their souls?”

  “Probably. Talk to your brokers. Tell me about Jane.”

  We arrived at the hole in the wall. It had caved in from the blast, crushing a couple of guys and a dog. We picked our way through the rubble to where there were two Toyota trucks and four guys, all six torn to shreds by the blast and the red-hot ball bearings.

  “Jane, what can I tell you. She is beautiful.”

  “Tell me about her boyfriend.”

  He stopped and laughed, leaning forward with his hands on his thighs. Then he turned, wagging his finger at me. His pupils were huge, black discs.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” he said. “Who is her boyfriend/ I think you would like to be her boyfriend, huh, Harry? I think you have a soft spot for Jane. But be careful, maybe that soft spot will suck her in, all the way inside to that blackness you have in your soul, huh, Harry?”

  I sighed. “Jesus! It’s like talking to an insane asylum tripping on acid.” I shoved him in the direction of the track where I had hidden the Jeep. “Bull, Gabriel. Remember Bull? Jane’s boyfriend?”

  He hunched his shoulders and hugged his arms. “I am afraid of these trees, Harry. They want to consume me. Can you see their mouths, up in the dark canopy, their mouths are looking down at me, and they want to suck me in.”

  “Keep walking and think about something else.” We moved through the ferns, among the tall, straight trunks, weaving back along the path I had followed the night before. “Tell me the story of how Jane dropped out of college.”

  “Jane dropped out of college?” He giggled. “That’s rich. You should tell me that story to keep my mind off these trees. These trees are really dangerous, Harry. I can pay you. I can pay you a lot to protect me. From the gaping mouths, the gaping mouths.” He repeated it a couple more times, exaggerating the sounds of the vowels. “The gaping mouths…”

  It continued like that as we moved down the slope. I wasn’t sure the Jeep would still be there, but Yushbaev’s lawyers had managed to keep the cops at bay and the truck was where I had left it.

  “Get in the passenger side, Gabriel.”

  I shoved him and he clambered in. I got in behind the wheel and fired up the big engine. I smiled at him.

  “I know what you want,” I said.

  He smiled back with arched eyebrows. “You do?”

  I put it in reverse and spoke as I turned the truck around. “You want Marianne. In the Emperor Suite, with champagne and oysters. Am I right?”

  He nodded, gazing out the windshield. “Oh, yes. That’s good, Harry.”

  “She’ll make you forget the trees and their deep, black mouths. She’ll put her arms around you and make you feel all right.”

  “Oh, yes, Harry. That is what I need right now. It has been very hard this week. It is kind of you to think of that.”

  “Yeah, kind of guy I am.” I pulled back onto the track, followed it to the end and turned right toward Gelendzhik. “But it gets even better, Gabriel. I am going to take you to the Bucephalus now, where we are going to see Marianne, and you are going to make love to her for hours while I prepare lunch.”

  His head lolled back against the seat, he closed his eyes and sighed. “Oh, that is going to be just heaven.”

  “It’s your special day, Gabriel. So while I drive us to the yacht, why don’t you tell me about those two years that Jane was with Bull. That was real smart of you to track that down. Tell me how you did it.”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Must have been somebody else.”

  I drove in silence for a while, trying to control the anger and frustration in my gut. Eventually I forced a laugh into my voice.

  “You didn’t know that Jane had dropped out of college?”

  “Nope. You think Marianne will fuck me? She was real mad at me.”

  “You didn’t know about the marijuana and the coke?”

  “Nope. I think if you tell her she might. She admires you, you know?”

  “How about Bull?”

  “Bull, there is something seriously wrong with reality, Harry. Did you know that? Reality does not work. I think I am going to fall into a hole in reality in a moment. Can I hold your hand? It’s like the Philadelphia Experiment all over again.”

  I drove on in silence, with Yushbaev gripping my shoulder to stop himself falling through a hole in reality, while the red embers of anger were steadily fanned into a red-hot flame.

  We came off the M4 onto Ulitsa Lunacharskogo, and followed that through semi-industrial wastelands to the intersection with Ulitsa Ostrovskogo, which threaded its way among pretty apartment blocks, stores and cafés, and the eternal abundant trees, to Ulitsa Lenina, the port and the seafront, where two long piers thrust out into the water, with a few yachts moored to them, and anchored a quarter of a mile out, I saw the Bucephalus, massive and gleaming.

  “OK,” I said to Yushbaev, “let’s go talk to Marianne, see if we can’t arrange a little bit of paradise for you.”

  Twenty-Three

  We walked the two hundred yards to where the launch was moored, with my arm linked through Yushbaev’s, like we were old pals and he’d had had a few vodkas too many. We climbed in and I took the launch out to the boarding deck at the rear of the yacht. There, with some difficulty, we clambered aboard and moved to the sliding glass doors that gave onto the saloon.

  Now I could see there was a screen beside the doors. Yushbaev placed his palm on it and, once scanned, he allowed it to scan his eye too and the doors hissed open. We went through. The doors hissed closed behind us and he turned and gripped my lapels, frowning hard into my face.

  “Where am I, Harry?”

  “On the Bucephalus, and we are looking for Marianne.”

  “Is this…” His face remained immobile but his eyes rolled around in their sockets, taking in his surroundings, “Is this all a reflection of my inner being?”

  “I don’t think so, there are too many trees and too much sunshine. Where is Marianne, Gabriel? Would she be on the bridge?”

  “Then she is in control?”

  “Probably. How about crew. Is there any crew on the yacht at the moment?”

  “These questions…” He shook his head. “So deep. How have I been so blind? What, in the end, is control, Harry?”

  I rolled my eyes and wondered if it had been worth it, feeding him my breakfast. “Come on, let’s find that elevator.”

  “The elevator…,” he said, nodding ponderously. “Exactly!”

  We made our way through the luxurious lounge and found the elevator that led to the Emperor and Empress Suites. Yushbaev stood swaying and making unnaturally slow blinks.

  “Gabriel, we are looking for Marianne. You want to see her, right?”

  “Very much.”
<
br />   “So I need you to think, will she be in the suite, or will she be on the bridge?”

  He just stood and stared at me, then turned and stepped into the elevator. I followed him and we rode up to the suites. The doors hissed open and we stepped out into the grotesque, crimson antechamber, with the rococo chairs and the passage that led down to the Emperor Suite on the right, and the Empress Suite on the left.

  He walked unsteadily, across the room and down the passage. He stopped in front of the tall walnut doors and pushed them open. I followed him into the absurd drawing room and watched him cross to the bedroom door. He opened it and stood staring for a while then went inside.

  I went and looked. He had crawled under the duvet and covered himself, and was moaning and repeating Marianne’s name. he was about as useful as a paper parasol in a monsoon.

  I turned and was not all that surprised to find Marianne leaning on the doorjamb. She was in a dark blue suit with a white blouse and a string of pearls around her neck. She said, “What have you done to him?”

  “I fed him my breakfast.”

  She laughed. “Looks like I backed the wrong horse.”

  “Violence wins every time over pleasure.”

  “That’s a bleak philosophy, Harry.”

  “It’s not a philosophy. It’s a fact.”

  She made a “maybe” face. “So what now?”

  “So now I need to know what he had over the colonel.”

  She gave her head a tiny shake. “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maybe. You’ll never know.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “Yes.”

  I stepped toward her and she pulled a .22 from her jacket pocket.

  “These babies get a bad press. Big guys are not supposed to be scared of twenty-twos. But if you know how to use them, they can do a lot more damage than a forty-five. And believe me,” she smiled, “I know how to use one.”