Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  In the time since, though, his grasp on reality had begun to waiver. He had started to enjoy his newly acquired lifestyle a little too much, believing in the legend he was trying to build around himself.

  To combat it, Sergey had tried to reassert himself. Weekly phone calls. Sending Pavel to act as a go-between. Sending Lita to Yellowstone. Slowing the arrival of the first shipment to make sure Viktor was up to the task.

  So far the combined outcome of his efforts had only served to prove that Viktor was far from capable of handling such an enormous responsibility.

  “From now on you do,” Sergey said, steel in his voice. “This is too important to mess up because I can’t reach you.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” Viktor replied, boredom, disdain, hanging from the words. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of a midday surprise?”

  Sergey pulled the phone back and stared at it, his face twisted into a scowl. He snarled at it a moment, fighting back the urge to reach through the line and grab his nephew by the throat.

  “I’m calling to see what happened in La Jolla.”

  Another moment passed, the sound of Viktor blowing out a long sigh filling his ear. “The plan to do things quietly didn’t work. They wouldn’t deal with us. Said they didn’t trust the new model.”

  As angry as Sergey wanted to be at the news, he couldn’t say he was surprised. It was the answer he was expecting to hear, the same thing he would have said if he was in La Jolla’s position.

  “So what are you going to do?” Sergey asked, trying to keep his voice level. He didn’t want Viktor to hear judgment in his words, to have any reason to believe he was being second-guessed on it.

  “I am sending a team tomorrow,” Viktor said. “I am instructing them to be as delicate as possible but to be thorough, no matter what it takes.”

  Sergey shook his head in silence. It was exactly the answer he had figured he would hear.

  “Yes, I think that sounds perfect,” Sergey said, rolling his eyes as the words crossed his lips.

  “Thank you, Uncle.”

  A moment of silence fell as Sergey turned his gaze back to the fire, watching the orange flames curl around the charred bark of the logs, flickering upward in a serpentine pattern.

  “Okay, that is all,” Sergey said. “I was just calling to make sure everything was under control. Thank you for taking care of it.”

  “Of course, Uncle,” Viktor replied. “Feel free to call any time. I’ll be sure to have my phone on me from now on.”

  “Noka,” Sergey said, his face contorted in anger. He signed off without waiting for Viktor’s farewell, not wanting to hear one more lie, one more word dripping with condescension from his nephew.

  Sergey waited for the display on his phone to clear before pressing a second button, the line connecting. This one went straight to voice mail without ringing; the recipient was most likely out of cell phone range, or was keeping it off to maintain his privacy for the time being.

  Once the digitized voice informed him the caller was unavailable and asked him to leave a message, Sergey leaned forward in his chair, the warmth of the fire hitting his cheeks.

  “Pavel, this is Sergey. Call me when you get this. I need you in California, as soon as possible. We have to teach somebody a lesson.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A peculiar smell wafted out of Diaz’s office as we approached. It smelled a bit like incense, with a hint of something herbal mixed in. The moment it flitted past my nostrils I knew what it was, and my mind pulled back to a time many years before. If not for the tiny pulse of mirth I felt at experiencing the scent again, my stomach would have flipped in complete revulsion.

  Beside me I could see Diaz was having that very reaction. The aroma had twisted her face into a knot, incomprehension on her face.

  “What the hell is that smell?” she asked as we drew closer.

  “You’ll see,” I said, shaking my head. “Good luck ever getting it out of your office again, too.”

  Diaz made a deep-throated, guttural sound that resembled a gag as we rounded the corner into her office, the light inside already on. Standing behind the desk was Hutch, studying her bookshelves, the source of the odor sitting on the desk beside him.

  Put simply, the man looked like holy hell. Dark crescents underlined his eyes and covered most of his cheekbones. His thin hair was matted flat to his skull, and every article of clothing he wore looked like it had been wadded into a ball and stomped on a few times.

  “Hutch, how the hell do you drink that stuff?” I asked, stopping just inside the door, trying in vain to put as much distance between me and the steaming cup as possible.

  “You kidding me?” he asked without looking over. “I’ve been looking forward to this since I heard we might be swinging through town. Can’t get the real deal like it on the East Coast.”

  Diaz made a face, leaning forward a few inches toward the cup and sniffing before recoiling. “You mean you actually put that shit in your body?”

  Hutch pulled his gaze away from the shelf and glanced over at Diaz, his expression stony. “I’ll have you know I never felt better in my life than when I was drinking three cups a day.”

  Both sides of Diaz’s nostrils pushed up in a sneer as she peered down at the cup of greenish liquid. “What the hell is it?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I injected. “It’s basically a witch’s brew of Native American and Southwest ingredients. Some kind of man-making concoction.”

  “He may be a Christian and talk white; but he’s still an Indian and his rules is his rules.”

  I could see the confusion on Diaz’s face as she looked a question my way, tilting her head to the side.

  “Same movie,” I explained.

  “Right,” she said, raising her head in a nod that relayed she didn’t quite understand.

  “So what did you find in West Yellowstone?” I asked, steering the conversation back to the task at hand. I could judge by his appearance he must have traveled straight through to get here, meaning whatever he uncovered was important.

  “He’s connected,” Hutch said, shifting to face both of us, his customary position with toes pointed out and hands shoved deep in his pockets. For a moment it was like déjà vu, standing in that office, looking at him there, that awful stench in the air.

  “How much or to whom, I don’t know,” Hutch added, raising his eyebrows in resignation. “He’s got airtight papers and a backstory to fit them, but it was complete bullshit. Guy couldn’t answer the most basic of questions about his supposed livelihood.”

  “So what makes you think he’s connected?” Diaz asked, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms in front of her.

  “Because the moment I started asking him about Mateo Perez, the Juarezes, whoever, he shut down. Almost catatonic. No looks of confusion, no searching his memory, nothing.”

  “Subtle,” I said.

  “More than you can imagine,” Hutch said, glancing at me through heavily lidded eyes.

  “So what’s that mean?” Diaz asked. “We’ve got somebody out looking to pick off the Juarezes?”

  “Apparently. Maybe,” Hutch said. “Hell, I don’t know.”

  I leaned forward and rested my palms across the top of the chair in front of me. I ran the various players through my mind, the different affiliations they had.

  “All right,” I said, thinking out loud. “We’ve got the Juarezes, with Mateo Perez. Two weeks ago he goes off the reservation and shows up in West Yellowstone, being tracked by someone with a forged background who isn’t in our system.

  “A week after that, someone claiming the same fake story shows up looking for her.”

  “I don’t know that he was looking for her,” Hutch said. “My guess is he was a cleanup guy. He was there to check on Mateo.”

  “Maybe you, too,” Diaz added, jutti
ng her chin toward me.

  I nodded, having already considered that angle as well. I wasn’t sure how or why I had been lumped in with Mateo, especially after five years away. In that time I had had no contact with any of my former cases, had barely spoken to the people I worked with.

  I wanted, needed, a clean break from it all. I had made promises, to my wife, myself, every single deity I had called on that night, that I would walk away and never return if given the chance. Until two weeks ago, when a woman I had never met showed up and put a bullet into my chest, I had kept those promises.

  The question though was why? Why had it happened? Why had they sought me out?

  “I’m guessing the guy up there wasn’t in the system, either?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Hutch said. “The park has an FBI agent on-site for investigations. He put him through their system and came back empty. Whoever these people are, they’re ghosts.”

  I considered the statement, thinking back to my time on the FAST team. In our experience, nobody was ever a ghost, not entirely. They might be beyond our sightline, but people like this were never completely invisible.

  “Maybe just here,” I said, putting the idea out to let the group chew on it. “Lita claimed to be from New Mexico, but I swear her accent was Eastern Bloc, maybe even Russian.”

  “Same with the other guy, Pavel,” Hutch said.

  “And those names,” Diaz added, “Lita and Pavel? Not exactly Jim and Jane.”

  “So maybe they just aren’t in our system,” I said. “Do we know anybody at Langley? Somebody that might have lines back to the old KGB files or something?”

  A long, weary sigh slid out of Hutch. He raised a hand to his chin and rubbed it over his two-day whiskers, shaking his head. “Not really, at least none come to mind. Tensions between the different agencies have reached an all-time high under this new administration, with them squeezing on the funding like they have. Nobody works together anymore—we all see each other as competition.”

  “Christ,” Diaz muttered, shaking her head.

  I bobbed my head in agreement with her, but didn’t vocalize it. Hutch had heard my gripes with bureaucratic machinations a thousand times before. Once more wasn’t going to add anything new to the narrative.

  “What about Pally?” I asked. “Can he get around a few firewalls? Maybe take a look?”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Hutch said. “I need to circle back with him and see if he’s found anything on the money trail anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said, my mind racing, trying to fit the pieces together. “What else does that leave us with?”

  A twist of a smile curled up on Diaz’s face. She glanced over at me, my mind picking up on her insinuation within a moment. The same look stretched across my features as I stared back, neither of us saying anything.

  “What?” Hutch asked, glancing from one to the other.

  “Carlos,” Diaz said, her gaze locked on me, her body twisting toward Hutch. “I’m guessing he should be good and ready to talk here soon.”

  I coughed out a laugh as Hutch looked from one of us to the other.

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because the last time we saw him, he was walking alone on a dusty stretch of California highway,” I said.

  “Looking like he might piss his pants after Hawk pointed a gun at his head,” Diaz said, suppressing laughter.

  “Aw, hell,” Hutch said, letting out a small groan, raising both his hands up to rub them over his face.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “there wasn’t a round in the gun, and a second team came by ten minutes after us to grab him. We just needed to soften him up a little.”

  “You’ve dealt with Carlos before,” Diaz said. “You know how he can be.”

  A look somewhere between exhausted and exasperated stretched across Hutch’s face. He looked at each of us in turn before shrugging and saying, “Yeah.”

  “So there it is,” I said, pushing myself back up away from the chair. “Let’s get Pally on the phone and see what he’s got, then go pay Carlos a visit.”

  “Okay,” Hutch said, “but not right now. I need to sleep at least four or five hours or I’m not going to be worth a damn.”

  I nodded, considering the proposal. I hadn’t slept much in the last few days either; my system was spurring itself along on pure adrenaline and the promise of finally giving myself a bit of closure that I’d been denied for so long.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I said, nodding. “I might rack out, too. We’ll give Carlos a little time to settle down, get past being angry, then go pay him a visit. He has to know a lot more right now than he’s letting on.”

  “I’d love to know what he and Manny were talking about in that visiting room this morning,” Diaz said, her eyes glazing as she stared down at the desk.

  The three of us stood in silence for a long moment. We had a random amalgam of information and evidence, none of it seeming to fit together worth a damn. There were competing interests, unknown cohorts, and the dredging of matters that we’d long ago stowed away.

  It had to all be connected, but we just didn’t have the faintest idea how yet.

  Diaz was the first to break the silence, motioning with the top of her head toward the door. “Cots are still in the back. You know where to find them.”

  PART III

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Icy crystals whipped up off the concrete lot, spraying across the face of Sergey Blok as he stepped out of the rear seat of his restored 1938 Buick Town Car. Oversized and boxy, it wasn’t the most beautiful automobile on the road, but it was far and away unique, which was exactly the impression he was hoping to imprint. There would be little doubt from anybody that saw the car who was seated in the backseat, a gesture of power and prestige without the flashy arrogance his nephew now seemed to favor.

  “Leave the car running, the heater on,” Sergey said to the driver as he passed, receiving a nod of understanding before the window between them was rolled back up. This stop would take no more than five minutes, a surprise drop-in to make sure everything was still on schedule.

  A second gust of wind pulled at the lapels of Sergey’s overcoat as he walked across the open asphalt parking lot toward the front entrance. Once a large manufacturing hub for automobile tires, the warehouse before him stretched out nearly as wide as a city block, a square gray structure that rose a uniform three stories in height. Underfoot, the parking lot was marked off to accommodate several hundred cars at a time, though today, as it usually was, there were no more than a dozen present.

  While having more staff on hand might expedite the operation, it would also involve bringing in a lot more people. Those people tended to have eyes and mouths, both things that Sergey frowned upon. On sight he could name the owner of every auto in the lot, each of them having a minimum of five years of dealing with the Blok family.

  None of them needed to be reminded what would happen if they breathed a word of what went on inside to anybody. They had all seen it play out in front of them before.

  Sergey pushed through the front door and unbuttoned his coat in quick order, stripping away the heavy wool garment. Compared with the velour track suits he favored wearing every day, the article was heavy and bulky, cumbersome to a fault.

  Using both hands, Sergey smoothed out the rumpled front of his bright orange ensemble for the day and stepped through a second set of double doors into the main hold of the warehouse. Stretched before him was an enormous open space, the entire place one continuous room.

  The right half of the building was filled with wooden crates piled high, arranged in tidy rows. A pair of forklifts zipped between them, their engines whining with acceleration, packages fitted onto their metal tongs being delivered. A series of black skid marks smudged the concrete beneath them, but otherwise not a single thing was out of place.

 
On the opposite end of the room were stacks of white plastic reservoirs, each one standing five feet in height and measuring more than two feet in diameter. The raw materials needed to produce the products were now stacked on the far end, arranged in perfect queues, and there was enough on hand to keep the place busy for the foreseeable future.

  Among them moved a single clamp truck, identical to the forklifts on the other end save the oversized vertical tongs on the front acting in place of the metal forks. Sergey watched as its driver squeezed tightly on a barrel and lifted it from a stack before pivoting and lowering it to just a few inches above the ground. With a jerk of a few levers, he set off at a speedy clip, disappearing behind the far side of the makeshift structure that filled the remaining interior of the warehouse.

  A series of metal tracks had been installed after the purchase of the building, and they hung down fifteen feet from the ceiling. Shaped into an elongated oval, the tracks were designed to cover an area thirty feet across on the short end and over three times that on the long end. Heavy plastic sheeting hung down from the track, enclosing the entire area, and a flurry of activity was visible inside.

  Almost a dozen men in total could be seen, all of them dressed in white from head to foot save the yellow-and-blue breathing apparatuses covering the lower halves of their faces and the heavy goggles protecting their eyes. Arranged throughout the space, they went about a bevy of tasks ranging from testing product composition to wrapping and loading the end result into crates.

  Every last one moved with brutal efficiency as Sergey stood and watched, nobody pausing to talk, not a single one slowing their pace of work.

  Sergey nodded in approval at what he saw and walked forward toward the enclosure. Despite the matching uniforms of everyone present, he picked out the man he was looking for on sight—the man’s diminutive stature was easily discernible—and slapped at the heavy plastic.