When we were settled in the booth, I said, “Why was it an unfortunate business?”
“Can I call you Vin?”
“That’s my name,” I said.
“There is much you don’t know, Vin.”
“Fix the problem and fill me in.”
“How long are you staying in Riga?” He watched a woman with white wavy hair down to her buttocks strut past. She winked at him and rolled her tongue around her upper lip.
“As long as it takes.” I didn’t want to tell him that, more truthfully, my stay would expire when I ran out of cash, which, at current levels of expenditure, gave me until the day after tomorrow.
“You are staying here? In the hotel?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Excellent. Then you shall stay as my guest—I own it.”
I was immediately uncomfortable, my Protestant work ethic compromised by the knowledge that I was living off the proceeds of a known people-smuggler, and who knew what else. “I’m happy to pay,” I told him.
“Nonsense. Do you see anything here you like?” he said.
I figured he wasn’t talking about the décor. “No,” I said.
“You Americans—you are all so…repressed,” he concluded, shaking his head.
“Let’s talk about General Scott.”
“General Scott started out repressed, but I brought him around. He came to have a fine appreciation of the female form, even if he didn’t partake.”
“I know. I met his girlfriend.”
“Yes, Varvara. Exquisite, but troublesome. She was one of my star attractions here. The general fell in love with her.”
“Really,” I said.
“So I gave her to him as a present.”
“Or a bribe?” I said.
Katarinya, the young woman who’d approached me at the bar, distracted Radakov. Actually, we were both distracted. She strolled past on her way to somewhere, leading a young man by the hand who was practically panting. My eyes followed her, unconsciously. Her glasses intrigued me. I didn’t usually associate eyeglasses with women who oozed sex. It was like lusting after the school librarian. Her perfume eddied around our table.
“So, you like Katarinya?” said Radakov.
I didn’t answer.
“Yes, she is beautiful. From the Ukraine, from an extremely poor family. What you see is genuine. She has not visited my surgeon, one of the few women here who hasn’t.”
I sipped my drink.
“You want to fuck her, I know,” he said. “I can arrange it.”
“Why did you have Abraham Scott killed?” I said, ignoring his offer.
Radakov sighed. He shrugged. “It was not me. I was against it. There were others who insisted on it.”
“Will you tell me who these others are? Are you referring to The Establishment?”
Radakov turned to face me. “You have no idea what you are dealing with.”
“Like I said, enlighten me.”
“Perhaps. But not tonight.”
“After General Scott’s son was killed in Iraq, he went to Baghdad for a couple of days. Shortly after that, he came here to Riga. In between, he went somewhere else. Do you know where he went?”
“Yes, I do.”
The woman who had shown us to the booth came over and whispered in Radakov’s ear. “Excuse me, Vin,” he said, “I have a business to run. Tonight, as I said, enjoy my hospitality. We will talk more tomorrow.” He spoke to the waitress and motioned at me. She nodded a couple of times and then Radakov walked away.
The woman flashed her professional smile at me. “Anything you want, let me know.” Like Radakov, she turned and melted into the crowd. It was past midnight now and the place was jammed. The growing number of customers had been matched by an influx of Radakov’s women. The two blondes who’d bathed in the tank earlier were now onstage, doing a double act. I felt as if I was watching reruns. Time to leave.
I walked out of The Bump, past a line that snaked down the road. Riga might have had a massive gender imbalance in its population, but that didn’t seem to have affected Radakov’s business. The place was a gold mine.
I was in a busy part of town, the street lined with restaurants and bars. Riga was a lively place. I found a joint that served steak, and took a table outside. Women of all ages cruised the street, apparently on the hunt for available men. I knew this because several times I had to inform complete strangers that, no, I wasn’t dining alone—my wife had just gone off to powder her nose. I bought a glass of wine and an entrée and had them placed beside me to cement the ruse. I didn’t want company. In fact, I was starting to wonder about the wisdom of being in Riga at all. What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t owe Abraham Scott or his wife anything. And now I’d pretty much ended my OSI career by thumbing my nose at the big cheese, ignoring the order to return to Washington. Was it just my resentment at being shot at and mugged? What drove me? I wanted to believe that it was a heightened sense of judgment, or was it justice? Was I trying to prove something to myself—that I could still do this gig? Showing off to Anna? “Jesus, what the fuck were you thinking?” I said quietly to myself.
The steak arrived and it was good, but, despite the growl in my stomach, I had no appetite. I forced it down and left. The night was chilly but I didn’t feel it—I was too busy thinking about all the information in this case, all the facts that led nowhere, all the deaths, and the cold reality that I had no solid leads to a suspect. In fact, I was grasping so hard for something to hold on to, I’d even considered adding Jefferson Cutter to the list of people of interest. I had absolutely no doubt that Radakov was mixed up in this mess—he’d admitted as much. In a way, he’d also confirmed the existence of The Establishment, but I had no authority here to extract anything from him that he wasn’t willing to divulge.
Radakov, the Chechen separatist and peddler in sex slaves; General Scott, four-star general of a huge NATO airbase; Harmony Cutter Scott, his wife—the chief players in this drama. Perhaps General Scott was trying to find out what made Radakov tick, hence all the information that he’d downloaded on the Chechen separatist movement. And what about The Establishment? Was it a government think tank of some kind? Or something else entirely? Several times during this investigation I’d felt a sense of the whole coalescing, or, given the amount of blood that had been spilled, coagulating, but then something new would pop up and the feeling would dissolve. As Anna had observed, someone out there obviously thought of me as a danger or potential threat; otherwise, why the attempts on my life?
I glanced up. My feet had found their way back to The Bump. The line outside had lengthened and the music was still pumping. Somewhere within, a door opened and a hot ball of stale beer fumes, body heat, and perfume rolled over me. It was getting on to 0130 hours and, although I wasn’t feeling tired, I’d had enough, and I wanted to get up early so that I could get on Radakov’s case. I walked through the entrance to the hotel, lost in speculation.
My room was quiet and dark. I turned on the bedside lamp and stripped. I needed a shower, if only to get the airborne testosterone from The Bump off my skin. I climbed under the hot water, careful to keep the gunshot wound high and dry. Ten minutes later I got out, toweled off, and went back into the bedroom.
I stood in the doorway, towel around my waist, frozen. When I was last there, like, just before I got in the shower, I didn’t remember seeing a woman kneeling on the bed. But that’s exactly what was there now. I recognized her. It was Katarinya, only she wasn’t wearing her glasses anymore. In fact, she wasn’t wearing anything.
She said, “I know you want to fuck me. I felt your longing for me. I have thought about you inside me.” She put her head down on the covers and stretched forward with her hands, keeping her ass high. Her fingers slid between her thighs. They began to gently stroke and rub her vulva. “Please fuck me,” she begged. There was suddenly a look of intense pleasure and pain on her face, as if someone had flicked a switch. She’d turned on a sexual hunger that could
only be sated—if what I was hearing and seeing was any indication—by a good ol’ Yankee boy in the saddle. But I didn’t buy it. Aside from the fact that if I had this effect on women I was sure I’d have experienced it already before now, I’d seen this very act performed by several women earlier tonight for men who had responded by inserting dollars under their G-strings with their teeth. Yeah, I was aroused, but that was offset by the pity I felt for her for being manipulated, used as someone else’s instrument, and by my anger at Radakov for doing the using.
“Katarinya, please get dressed,” I said, squatting down on my haunches beside her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I replied. I put my hand on her shoulder. She responded by rubbing her cheek against my fingers, and then softly biting one of them.
“I am not sexy for you?” she asked at full pout, coming up on all fours and advancing toward me, her full breasts swaying between her arms.
“You’re not here because you find me attractive.” My throat was annoyingly dry. “Radakov told you to come.”
“Yes, he did. But I like you, especially because you’re resisting me.” She sucked in her bottom lip and held it under her teeth suggestively. Her eyes went to my towel. “Oh, and it is all an act, see?” There was mock surprise in her voice as she reached in and fondled me. I was hard but, while my body might have been a boiling sea of willing hormones, my head and heart said, emphatically, no.
I stepped back from the bed, beyond reach. “You have to leave now.” When I met with Radakov in the morning, I didn’t want him to think I owed him anything. And there was another reason for this reluctance and her name was Anna Masters.
Katarinya sighed, got up from the bed, and put on her clothes, or rather cloth—the white Lycra sheath. In a matter of a second or two, her attitude swung from crawling-the-walls-horny to utter indifference. She slipped her feet into her high heels and left without a backward glance. If she were a cat, she’d have flicked her tail with disdain.
I cleared my throat. The door closed. Four men charged at me from the shadows. No time to move. I watched them come, mouth open in surprise, blindsided. They hit me like a stampede. Katarinya, a decoy. I went down on the carpet. I recognized them. Radakov’s men, his companions from The Bump. I elbowed one across the bridge of the nose. The bone collapsed like a crushed aluminum can but the injury didn’t slow him any. They pinned my arms behind me, and locked my head in a wrestling hold. Two of them sat on my legs as the door opened again. Black boots, black pants walked in. The assailants wrenched back my head to face the newcomer. The black shoes belonged to the man with the monobrow, the beak, and the black eyes. He lifted something in his hands. What was he holding? Shit, was it a hypodermic? A small jet of clear fluid shot from the sharp end. Jesus, fuck! He drove his knee into my ribs and slammed the needle into the side of my neck.
“You fuckers,” I yelled. “I will personally farrmm bleeeeeo…”
THIRTY-FIVE
My senses came back online slowly. “Euphoric” was the word that best described how I felt, a warm glow concentrated way down in my groin, spreading its fingers up through my chest and down into my legs. I felt like I had just had the best sex of my life. I was conscious that wherever I was, or whatever I was in, it was on the move. I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t. Fingers ripped the surgical tape off my lids, giving my remaining eyebrow a Brazilian. The feelings of love pretty much evaporated at that point.
“Ah, Sleeping Beauty awakes,” said Alu Radakov, seated opposite, an AK-47 across his lap. “You have been out for hours, Vin. If I didn’t know better, I’d have put your exhaustion down to Katarinya’s athleticism.”
It took a few moments for my brain to catch up with the information it was receiving. The sensation of movement was because I was in the back of a truck, and it was moving. Of course. Radakov sat opposite with three of his men. One of them, I was pleased to see, had a bandage across his nose and two black eyes. He smiled at me. I smiled back—no hard feelings, pal. Like Radakov, they were armed with Kalashnikovs. The guy with the beak and the sallow complexion was seated beside me and I decided he had a face like an angry weasel.
Ropes around my chest and legs held me on the seat, my shoulders and chest tied back so that I wouldn’t pitch forward. My wrists were cuff-locked together, and a cannula had been inserted in the back of one of my hands.
“Midazolam,” said Radakov. “Commonly used in anesthesia. It induces amnesia, and makes the patient compliant—in your case, for hours. Did you have any erotic dreams, Vin? It’s a side effect of the Midazolam.”
That explained a number of things: the hardware in the back of my hand, why the heavens had suddenly shifted from night to daylight, how I came to be in my present predicament, and why, until now, I was so relaxed about it all.
I noted that I was wearing an older style U.S. Army–issue battle dress uniform with European camouflage pattern. The air stank of manure, rotting hay, and something light and sweet I couldn’t quite identify.
“Where are we?” I said, the words croaking in my throat.
“Within an hour’s drive of Grozny,” said Radakov.
Grozny. Grozny? Where was that? It rang a bell.
Maybe Radakov could see the gears turning. He said, “Grozny, capital of Chechnya.”
Chechnya? “What?” I said, the single word encapsulating my complete bewilderment. Chechnya was over a thousand miles from Riga.
The truck bounced and came to an abrupt stop so that we all lurched sideways in our seats. Radakov and his men made their way to the back of the vehicle, skating on the ooze. The weasel guy slipped the knots on the rope tying me to the chassis and sliced away the cuff-locks with a pair of scissors. He smiled at me—not a pleasant sight. I decided the drug’s aftereffect had nothing to do with his likeness to the animal.
The canvas flap at the back of the truck was flung open by a heavyset guy, his face covered in red blotches—some kind of birthmark. He looked fifty but was probably closer to thirty. My copassengers jumped down, and Radakov turned and beckoned me to follow.
“Come,” he said.
I stood uncertainly, my legs still rickety from the drug.
We were on the outskirts of a village sitting at the base of a set of sparsely wooded hills. The village itself was poor, the buildings low and mean. Thin blue smoke coughed from chimneys. Women dressed in loose-fitting print dresses and gum boots, with scarves tying up their hair, wandered about on their daily business. There were a few mangy dogs sniffing around and children hung out in twos and threes or sat listless by the road. We were in the countryside, only the place stank of rotten-egg gas and burnt grease. I spotted a rusted, blackened LAV—Light Armored Vehicle—with Russian markings still visible. Weeds sprang up inside it. I estimated the wreck to be no more than a month old.
Our truck had pulled up beside a paddock housing two tan cows whose ribs and hips showed clearly through their hides. They tottered on their hooves as if they were about to topple over. In the center of the field lay a tangle of old pipes, rusting oil drums, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, drilling gear. And then it clicked—the stench of the place. They were drilling for crude here, “they” being the villagers. The earth squelched under my feet and I looked down. Black crude was breaking through the crust. This place was an environmental nightmare. No wonder everyone, everything, looked so sick.
A cluster of people appeared from around one of the buildings in the village, coming up the road toward us. We met them on a wooden bridge across a stream. Radakov had chosen not to keep me restrained and I knew why. Where was I going to go? Still dazed by the anesthetic, I glanced over the side of the bridge and saw a couple of children sitting by the creek. A large globule of oil broke from the bank and swung slowly out into the center of the flow before being carried away downstream.
I looked back at the approaching villagers: a couple of young men, an old woman, and two teenage girls. Radakov said something to them in
the local language—Chechen, I supposed. The teenage women were pushed forward and Radakov conducted an inspection of them as if they were horses. He checked their teeth, their ears, lifted their hems and groped them, and then put his hand inside their dresses and fondled their breasts. Apparently satisfied with what he found, he motioned at the weasel guy, who produced some paperwork, which one of the young men—perhaps the only literate one among them—perused. The young man seemed satisfied and there was suddenly much laughter shared by everyone except the two young women, who stood with their sullen heads bent, staring at the ground. A pen was produced and the older man scratched his autograph onto the document, followed by the old woman. Radakov then produced two rolls of what looked like U.S. dollars and handed them to the signatories.
The group walked off back to the village, herding the girls in front of them. One of the young men was left behind, and he went into a huddle with Radakov. Radakov’s cronies joined in and an intense, animated discussion ensued. There was a fair bit of pointing over the hills. Eventually some agreement was reached and the young man hurried off down the road toward the village, hands buried deep in his pockets. Something, as they say, was up.
“What gives?” I asked Radakov as he turned to walk back to the truck.
“We walk,” was all he said.
A few words were exchanged with the driver, who rubbed the red splotch on his forehead, and then Radakov led the way to the oil-polluted stream. We went down into the gully and followed it back up toward the hills. I didn’t need to be told that we were taking this route to avoid Russian patrols. What I didn’t know was where we were going, or why.
The crude oil clogging the stream made the going tough, possibly more because of the gagging, solid stench of it than the fact that keeping a secure footing was nearly impossible and we all slipped numerous times.
Eventually, we reached the hills and the smell of sulphur receded. We climbed through the trees for at least an hour. The sun was setting when Radakov called a halt. Two of his men lifted some stones and began to dig beneath them. A couple of feet into the loam, they struck a metal box. Five minutes later, Radakov cracked open the box and handed around the contents: black ski masks, packs of C4, timers, RPGs, and armor-piercing rounds to go with them. There was also a set of U.S.-made night-vision goggles—NVGs—the latest and greatest.
The Death Trust Page 29
