Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  “We’re pretty sure that you are telling the truth, Clay. Unhappily, whether you knew it or not, whether you were a spy or not, whether we took over the prison or not, you probably were not going to make it out of here alive,” Mikail said in a matter-of-fact tone. He showed that he was not particularly concerned one way or another with what Clay thought about what he was saying. “You see, you’ve stumbled into a very secret compound, Clay. Once you got into this building, you were not getting out alive. This place doesn’t exist. Warwick doesn’t exist. As of last night, man, you don’t exist.”

  “What is all of this, then, Mikail? Why are you telling me any of this? Do you think that you are some movie villain, some brilliant psychopath who has a soundtrack playing everywhere he goes and likes to talk his victims to death? Why not just do whatever it is you’re going to do?” Clay asked.

  “We’ve come to take you to a meeting, Clay,” Mikail said, smiling. “We’re waiting on word that a ‘high value target’—is that what you people like to say?—has been captured, then we’re going to have a little town meeting in the gymnasium. Nothing so sinister as you imagine. We’re just filling time, being neighborly. I am glad you liked the food.”

  As Mikail finished talking, Clay saw another young man enter and some words were shared between him and Mikail, and then the young man exited again without having looked at Clay at all.

  “Time to go to the meeting, Clay, are you ready?” Mikail asked, smiling.

  “What do you want me to say, Mikail?”

  “You don’t need to say anything. Just put your hands behind your back. We’re going to take a walk.” Mikail pulled out a set of handcuffs and before Clay could even think of some plan to fight or escape or shout, the handcuffs were clamped on to his wrists behind his back, and he was gently pushed toward the door. Mikail and Sergei walked before him, Vladimir walked next to and somewhat behind him, holding him lightly by the handcuffs.

  The first thing Clay noticed was that the door to the hallway down to the cell clusters, the hallway down which he had first seen the prisoners, was completely intact. There was no damage to it at all. In fact, as he walked toward the office and followed Sergei into it, he saw no damage anywhere. No wood particles, no pieces of glass, no blood. There wasn’t a single clue that there had ever been a riot. Of course, he thought, he’d only heard it. He hadn’t seen any of it.

  Rounding the corner into the security office, as soon as Sergei and Mikail had moved to the right and cleared from his vision he saw, sitting at his desk, completely unmarred, unbeaten, and fully alive… Officer Todd Karagin. The man smiled like the cat that ate the canary, the smile of the magician who was savoring his lifelong best reveal.

  “Good morning, Clay,” Todd said with a wink in his voice, if not exactly in his eye. “Good to see you. Welcome to the Charm School.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Never, in the long history of humankind, at least since Plato wrote of The Cave, had a man appeared so surprised and confused as Clayton Richter did in that moment. He stood in the prison office, handcuffed, before the man that had, he had thought until this very moment, died in an effort to save him. And now it turns out to be a con? But… why the charade? Clay wondered.

  For his part, Officer Todd was, for the moment, enjoying the surprise. He was acting like he’d just won a prize fight. He stood up and cracked his knuckles, and sucked his wind in and did one of those shadow-boxing dances, before raising his arms in mock triumph. “What’s the matter, Clay? Cat got your tongue?”

  If Clay had been a bit more clever and if this new shock hadn’t stolen his breath, he might have replied, “Yes, Schrodinger’s cat,” and while these Russians tried to figure out what he meant by that, he might have rushed headlong into the officer or straight through the office, down the hall, trying to find a door, anything, any way that might lead to out. But none of that happened, because he was surrounded by captors, deep inside a locked prison and sometimes cowardice and fear are the things that keep endangered men from engaging in heroic stupidity.

  As it was, he stood there like someone about to be administered a test he knew he’d flunk. No. It was worse… It was that he felt so overcome by a sense of helplessness and disgust that his knees buckled slightly and he turned pale. Too many weird things. Too much to handle. Best to just observe my right to remain silent. He caught his balance with a shuffle of his feet and then straightened, but he didn’t answer.

  Todd reveled in the obvious reaction. Clay wasn’t sure whether the man couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wipe the smile from his face, but he knew instinctively that there was a difference. The officer reached down and snapped the black holster on a service pistol, patting the gun with his right hand and winking at Clay as he saw Clay trying to remember whether he’d been armed when he first met him.

  “My real name is Fedya Leonivitch Karaganov,” the officer said. “My friends call me Teodor, or just Todd. You are in Warwick, but I guess you know that already. It is the place of our birth. It will be the place of your death. We call it Novgorod among ourselves. Perhaps you’ll get to see some more of our little town before your short visit with us comes to a close.” He smiled at this, pleased with himself, and Clay wondered why. Then he leaned over Clay and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. It was the kind of gesture that you make when you make an obvious bow, like that one the servant makes before the throne. Todd made that kind of gesture, then he stood up and said in his best mock British, “And might you have any bags, Guv’nuh.”

  Clay looked at him and all of the throbbing pain and discomfort from the recent beating intensified and he could feel his broken ribs expand and strain with his breath, and as a man he just wanted to punch Todd in the face. But, he didn’t. He was still processing the fact that Todd was not dead and here the man was before him, and in the seriousness of the moment and with all that had happened, Todd was playing the clown as if life and love and hate and tragedy and comedy were all the same thing and that there was no proper place for each.

  “And might you have any bags in yuh guest quarters, sir, or will you just be traveling with what’s on your person? Have we advised you of our check out policy?” Somewhere in that last sentence he had lost the accent, probably about the word “sir.”

  Clay just stared. He didn’t know what to think. Was this just Todd’s weirdly aggressive finale in acting out a too-scripted end to the little production they’d just so obviously put on for his benefit? Or was it an actual, honest-to-goodness threat.

  Clay looked at the other men in the room and noticed that none of them carried weapons or made stupid jokes. He wondered now if he had been wrong in his assessment that Mikail was in charge, and Mikail seemed to notice his doubt. He’d been standing to the side, watching, like the others, for Clay’s reaction, but now he stepped forward into the center of the men. “Enough, Todd,” Mikail said sharply. He barked out what sounded more like an order than a question. “Has Volkhov been captured?”

  “He’s being brought to the gymnasium as we speak. They found him hiding like a coward in his basement. Everyone else is being assembled according to your instructions. We can go whenever you’re ready.” Mikail looked around the room, then looked at Todd, then at Clay, and motioned with his hand toward the hallway.

  ****

  Todd took Vladimir’s place escorting the hostage, and the whole entourage walked through the office, past an unlocked door, then moved into a long hallway that was dark and only faintly lit by the emergency lighting recessed in the ceiling. As they passed under evenly spaced orbs of light they went into and out of the light and the darkness in regular succession, occasionally stopping or slowing to open doors or turn down hallways as they wound through the maze of the prison. Clay found himself, for no apparent reason, beginning to shuffle his feet, as though he had leg irons. Dead man walking, he thought. It was an eerie and frightening feeling and he could not help thinking that he was a condemned man, walking to his execution.

  The others, the y
ouths, were practically stoic in their quiet, as though they were going over something in their minds, mulling some decision. Only Todd seemed unable to stand the silence. He nervously fidgeted with his hand on Clay’s arm before he began speaking a little too boisterously. “You’re probably a little freaked out right now, aren’t you? That’s OK. I would be, too. Imagine how I felt, for example, when you showed up at our door in that storm. We’d already been planning our little takeover for a long time when you showed up, you see. And here you came, just in the nick of time.”

  Clay heard the implication but hadn’t yet figured out whether they had come to believe him. He turned his head to look at Todd for some clue, but he couldn’t make out the guard’s features in the dark with only one good eye.

  Todd gave him a clue. “I was pretty sure that you were a spy sent by American intelligence. It was just a matter of deciding which outfit you were with.”

  Clay decided to press his case, but cautiously. “I was with me,” he retorted blandly. “Only me.”

  “Yes, maybe. But how could we have known that? A man who takes pictures… he could be anyone, couldn’t he? And besides, it didn’t matter. It’s not like you’re innocent, Clay. The sign did say you’d be shot if you didn’t stay five hundred feet away. I even told you that myself, and you agreed. You even asked for it! Remember? Either way, of course— ”

  “The pictures were innocent, a stupid mistake, and I was dying,” Clay intoned.

  “Well, you still are, Clay,” Todd shot back, laughing at his own wit. “I guess, in the end, we all are, but some sooner than others.” Clay buckled again, causing Todd to have to stop and shake him violently, as a warning to keep moving.

  Todd went on, “Anyway, the whole world is about to go bottom-side-up and you’re getting a ringside seat, at least for the opening bell... aren’t you excited?” Clay looked at him. Layers of incomprehension were turning into utter confusion. The pieces of fact and truth that he thought he held were being scattered one by one. He wondered to himself if this might be, perhaps the moment when he stepped off into the abyss.

  “Is there any way we can do this,” Clay asked, “without the chit-chat?”

  “I doubt it,” Todd replied dismissively. “You see, we weren’t expecting the main event until Tuesday. Didn’t you say you were a Democrat, Clay? I forget… Oh yes, I remember… you said you were whatever I wanted you to be. It probably would have been better if you were CIA. I mean, you probably would have lived longer. You would have had some value then,”

  Still no real comprehension.

  “Anyway, Tuesday and your ringside seat… We were planning for it all to happen later, but the storms happening together as they did, well, that pushed up our plans considerably.”

  No comprehension.

  “But then we had to take over the town, and that took a moment, so—”

  “Enough, Fedya Leonivitch,” Mikail snapped, and then leaned into two double doors which he’d just unlocked, revealing what in the utter darkness appeared to be a very bright line of light at the place where the two doors met and which grew larger as the doors swung outward into a courtyard where Clay saw, once the bright moonlight had washed over him, laid out in the valley, tucked in the hollow of a range of mountains that rose up and shielded it on all sides, a hamlet that for all the world seemed as if it belonged in the Caucasus Mountains.

  Warwick, Russia, America.

  Comprehension.

  ****

  The cold hit them like an icy frozen wave and the snow was still falling, only not as violently as before, and their boots (his shoes) crunched on the frozen snow and ice that had been trampled down by the weight of many feet.

  They passed through a gate set in a heavy chain link fence like the one he’d seen when he first stumbled upon the prison, and heavy razor wire reflected the moonlight and the beams from the flashlights. Then they headed down a slight hill on a well-traveled path through the snow and eventually they were on a sidewalk that was packed hard in trampled down snow and ice and Clay had to slow a bit because his prison shoes had no traction.

  Arriving at what appeared to be an old school gymnasium, Clay looked around and decided that this was exactly what this structure was. It was the only building in the hamlet that was lighted, but the snow and the moonlight gave the whole town a beautiful, blue shade and the buildings and the town folk could be seen clearly as they moved toward the gym. People were going in, chatting nervously in Russian, and Clay could see armed men—boys actually—all around the place and directing the people into the building.

  Once inside, Clay saw that the gym was set up for an assembly with chairs arranged in neat rows covering the floor and there was a small stage to the left but it was dark and the deep red curtain was drawn closed. Clay glanced around and saw that the gym looked like any old American gymnasium built anytime between, say, the 1940’s and 1960’s, with a hardwood floor deeply worn by thousands of feet, and the smell of All-American high school sweat hanging in the air. The main difference between this gym and any other that he’d been in throughout his life was that the signs in this gym were all in Russian lettering, and the scoreboard also seemed to be sprinkled with Russian figures as well. There was an old banner hanging limply on the far wall and Clay wondered what it said. Probably something like “Go Bears! Beat the—“ who? Who would these Russians play in a basketball game? The Chinese? Latvia?

  Mikail’s entourage lined up in front of the stage on a low podium as more chairs were brought in. Todd, a little too roughly, forced Clay into a seat and then sat down in the empty seat beside him. Todd seemed to be absolutely loving every minute of this bizarre pageant, as if he had waited for it all of his life.

  Clay watched as hundreds of people filed in—the citizens of Warwick, he presumed—and he noticed that they were an interesting mix of young and old, mostly middle class, it seemed, and neither expensively nor shabbily dressed. There were some Asians and what looked like Arabic people among them as well. The crowd resembled what Clay would assume any small town in rural Russia might look like, though their faces showed signs of strain and worry and it was obvious that they were not used to having men with machine guns everywhere.

  Clay heard a noise start from somewhere within the crowd and the noise grew outward exponentially like a wave. At first it was just a whisper and then it became a general gasp, slowly growing into loud murmuring as the back door to the gym was thrown open and a cold air rushed in along with four heavily-armed boys dressed all in black who pushed before them in chains an old man with a thick gray beard. The man had evidently been severely beaten during his ‘capture.’

  The man looked old and wise and his condition readily discomfited the crowd as he passed along a makeshift lane that formed in the standing room only crowd that had formed at the back of the gymnasium. The old man proceeded to walk into the crowd and the lane continued forming before him, giving off an impression of Moses parting the Red Sea by walking into it one belabored step at a time. Women put hands over their mouths to stifle gasps and men had looks of outrage on their faces, but none were brave enough or outraged enough to do anything other than gape and murmur and then slink slowly back into their seats.

  The old man had trouble walking and stumbled to the ground several times as he was pushed rudely and disrespectfully from behind by the armed boys. As he fell to his knees, his head drooping low, one of the boys snatched him up roughly, pushing him forward once again until the group had joined the “leaders” at the front of the assembly. Volkhov (Clay assumed this must be the one they had called Volkhov, and it turned out that he was right) was thrust down into the empty chair next to Clay, and his head hung down so that Clay could not see his face.

  A deathly silence finally overtook the crowd. The tall young man named Vladimir stood and walked forward and indicated with his hand upraised in the ancient style of the Romans that he had something to say, as if he were Cicero about to address the Assembly.

  The general d
in in the room died down, as all eyes were turned to him.

  Clay suddenly felt someone behind him, slightly at his side. He felt the person put a hand on his shoulder and lean over and whisper into his ear. “I am to be your interpreter. I am called Alyona,” He tried to turn his head to see who it was and then realized to his surprise that it was a young woman who was maybe eighteen years of age. She, too, turned her face, so that she could look him in the eye, and he saw that she had the slightest smile and sadness in her eyes.

  Vladimir began speaking. Alyona translated into Clay’s ear as quickly as Vladimir spoke. She spoke English well, but not perfectly, and this accent for the first time gave Clay the impression of Vladimir’s, and even Mikail’s, Russian-ness, which was something they had lacked in his mind until now.

  “As most of you know, or have heard, the town of Warwick is now in our hands. You may not believe it is so, but we are sorry for any trouble that this necessary action has caused you and your families. It was something that had to be done. Comrade Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov has assumed command of this town—if it may be called a town—and has graciously organized this meeting to inform you of the situation and the details of what must soon come to pass. I will endeavor to be brief.

  “This place—which the Americans call Warwick—is not a ‘town’ at all, though you may think that it is because you have lived in it all of your lives. It is a prison, and a place of slavery, owned and operated by billionaire capitalists on American soil. It is the Dachau of the American Experience and when we write its history, as we shall, the thousands upon thousands of human deaths will be catalogued for the rest of the world to know. The people who live here did not choose to be born here, did not invite or approve of their own slavery, and have committed no crimes against either America or Russia.