In For the Kill

by Shannon McKenna

  Renato’s eyes flashed. “As I thought you were just like your lying cunt of a mother. But are you as good in bed? Shall we find out?”

  “Renato.” Hazlett looked pained. “Such language. Please.”

  “I knew you were a human bloodhound, just like her. Willing to lie and cheat and fuck your way in a straight line toward whatever you wanted. So she told you about the lab somehow? We monitored every scrap of paper she sent, but she coded it for you, eh? Slippery bitch.”

  “So you saw her last letter,” Sveti said softly.

  “Of course,” Renato said. “We were still waiting and watching at that point, trying to see what she was up to. We waited too long. I didn’t want to make the same mistake with you. I wanted you killed years ago, but Michael said no, Sonia’s daughter is just a sad, insignificant little twat who will waft along into some unremarkable, mediocre life and not give us any trouble. But no.” Renato shot a furious look at Hazlett. “Why risk it, you said! But I was right this time! We waited just long enough for her to come stab us to the heart!”

  “We had also been informed that running afoul of your American protectors could be problematic. Calm down, Renato.” Hazlett’s apologetic smile was weirdly incongruous behind the pistol. “You’ll have to forgive Renato his venom. Your mother had him fooled for some time while she gathered information about our project. He never saw or met her in the Ukraine, you see, so she targeted him when she began snooping in Italy. She introduced herself using her maiden name. She was very charming, very beautiful. Very seductive. It was months before I put it all together and told Renato what she was really up to. He’s still upset with me. He got his feelings very deeply hurt.”

  “Whore,” Renato said through his teeth. “Lying whore cunt. You look like her. You whore like her. You’ll die like her, too.”

  “Yes, yes, Renato. Not now.” Hazlett sounded bored. “We were fortunate that the lab was already closed when she discovered it. None of our research was compromised, like last time. It was just a matter of silencing her, making sure she hadn’t told anyone.” He shrugged. “I thought it was handled. But she slipped something past us evidently.”

  “We should have killed her sooner,” Renato snarled. “And you just had to lure the daughter here, dangling the bait. Self-indulgent fool.”

  Hazlett looked wistful. “I was so glad, back in the day, when your fierce protectors gave us an excuse to wait to kill you. You were such a lovely little cream puff. They say, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, right? You’re an enemy I wanted to keep oh, so close.”

  “I would never have had sex with you,” she said.

  Hazlett did not appear to hear her. “I was disappointed when you soiled yourself with your pit bull. It compromised your virginal glow. But girls will be girls. Everyone needs a range of sexual experiences. That way, they can appreciate true skill when they finally encounter it.”

  She hated the turn the conversation was taking. The speculative way both men were looking at her body made her stomach flop.

  “Lift your arms into the air,” Hazlett said, getting up and walking slowly around her. She could smell the sharp citrus perfume of his aftershave, then the cold, hard circle of the gun barrel against the nape of her neck. “And do not think for one instant that I am not capable of putting a bullet into your brainstem if you move.”

  “I do not think that,” she said, thinking of the lake of bones.

  “Renato, take the gun from her waist holster. And search her for other weapons. I know you’ve been itching to put your hands on her.”

  “Certainly.” Renato’s voice was an oily ooze. He stuck his hands into her waistband and took out the gun, but left his hand under her shirt, stroking her belly, sliding up to cup her breast. “So warm and soft. Bellissima.” He ran his hands greedily over her chest, squeezing and probing. Sveti clenched her jaw, swallowed. Stayed motionless.

  “Renato, stop fondling her and get that envelope she’s holding,” Hazlett said impatiently. “It holds what remains of Sonia’s photos.”

  Renato snatched it out of her hands and shook the pictures into his hand. He shuffled through them, making angry, petulant little noises, then grabbed the silver bucket that the white wine had chilled in. He dumped the ice into the small sink in the bar, placed the bucket on the table, then grabbed one of the tapers out of the candelabra.

  He set the sheaf of photographs on fire and held them in front of her as they burned. When the flame threatened his hand, he dropped the charred, blackened scraps into the bucket, darting Sveti a spiteful look. “She looks a bit the worse for wear today, Michael. Her glow has dulled. It happens to them all, my friend. Sad, but true. Beauty fades.”

  “She’d shine right up again, if not for those pesky moral principles,” Hazlett complained. “Those are what dull her. Just like both her parents. It must be genetic. Such a pain in the ass.”

  “Both parents?” It jolted her like a cattle prod. “You knew my father, too?”

  “Of course,” Hazlett said. “That’s where it all began, back in my impatient youth. I was looking for shortcuts to fame, riches, and glory.”

  It all crashed together in her mind. “The lab my father blew up, in Nadvirna,” she said. “It was yours. Zhoglo was supplying you with test subjects. The orphans and mental patients.”

  He sketched a theatrical bow. “Mea culpa. It started decades ago late one night over a bottle of wine. Renato was researching a compound that blocked a certain molecule from binding to its cell surface receptor. If pretreated, the compound completely protected tissue, skin, muscle, bone marrow, from lethal doses of radiation. The implications were stunning. So that night we came up with a plan.”

  She felt as though she could see right through the flesh of his face. She saw his naked skull, with that wild, pale blue light blazing out of his eye sockets. A death’s head, babbling cheerfully on.

  “We went with a two-pronged approach. On the one side, Illuxit Transnational would set up random controlled medical trials for cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy, in Brazil, India, the Ukraine. In the Ukraine, I started considering Vadim Zhoglo as a possible partner for the second prong of our plan. He saw the possibilities right away. An intelligent man, Zhoglo. I was sorry when he died.”

  “I wasn’t,” Sveti said woodenly.

  “Well, of course, you wouldn’t be,” he said vaguely. “Anyway, we went ahead with the legitimate, slow and plodding development of the Milandra line of cancer treatment drugs, and they’re a big cash cow for TorreStark, I’m proud to say. Zhoglo organized our shadow lab, where we conducted our more . . . well, aggressive research, you might say. He provided materials, and we—”

  “Materials? That’s what you call the people you murdered?”

  “Don’t be self-indulgent,” he scolded. “You know how the world works. He provided test subjects—until your father stopped him.”

  “Papa,” she whispered. For the first time, she saw the nature of this monster her father and mother had battled so bravely. She finally saw why they had felt so driven, so compelled to stop him at all costs.

  They’d been willing to sacrifice themselves, and ultimately, her too. It didn’t make it less painful, but she understood them now.

  “Sergei had us fooled, right up to the end,” Hazlett said. “He cost me years of research. I wouldn’t have been forced to open the lab in Italy at all, if not for his meddling. All those lives could have been spared. But as it was, we built again and developed our secret compound. We piloted the legitimate research right where it needed to go, too. It’s all legal and aboveboard now. One injection of ABR2B-88 before total body radiation completely protects the subject from both gastrointestinal and hematopoietic acute radiation syndrome. The possible applications for the military, for industry—”

  “And the black market,” Sveti said.

  Hazlett shrugged. “We’ll see. We haven’t launched it yet. Renato, get the cuffs from my briefcase and bind her hands, so I can rel
ax.”

  Renato complied, opening the case that lay on a table. He jerked her hands together, and Hazlett pressed the gun under her ear.

  “Bitch,” Renato muttered, as he ratcheted it brutally tight.

  “I was there when your father died,” Hazlett said. “A memorable anatomy lesson. He deserved it, for inconveniencing us. But in the end, Cherchenko’s solution was better than Zhoglo’s.”

  “The boats from Africa,” Sveti said.

  “Exactly. Perfect test subjects. Undocumented, illegal, invisible. Through Pavel’s Italian mafia contacts, he could broker hundreds of them at a time. All sizes, all ages. So efficient, so smooth. No one noticed, no one talked. The Camorra had the local people well trained.”

  “They gave everything they had in the world to get their families away from war and genocide,” Sveti said. “And they found you.”

  “Yes, I know their stories are heart wrenching, taken individually. But I console myself by the fact that the Milandra product line will improve cancer outcomes for hundreds of thousands of people, and our compound could pull the teeth of terrorism’s most vicious threat against civilization. That’s worth something, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t,” Sveti said faintly. “It’s grotesque when you try to justify it. Be honest about your sadism.”

  Hazlett looked affronted. “I’m not sadistic! I simply don’t suffer from the awful torment of empathy, like you do, and thank God for it. You’re a slave to it, Svetlana. It’s just agonizing to watch you suffer. It’s so much simpler to be me. I don’t actively enjoy anyone’s suffering. I simply don’t waste my time on guilt or remorse. I get on with it, see?”

  “So you’re a sociopath, then,” she said.

  Hazlett made a face. “I don’t like labels,” he replied with distaste. “They’re limiting. Don’t put me in a box. I won’t fit.”

  “You’re not even human,” Sveti said. “Not if you can’t feel.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” he scoffed. “I feel many things! I’m feeling disappointed right now, for instance. Cheated out of what’s rightfully mine. That’s a perfectly valid feeling!”

  “Cheated of what?”

  His eyes turned soulful. “You. If only you hadn’t made the connections. If you’d been less stubborn, less obsessive, I would have taken you for my lover. Maybe even my wife.”

  Renato snorted and rolled his eyes.

  Sveti suppressed a burst of bitter laughter. If there was a path through this experience that did not terminate in her grisly death, making this man angry and offended was definitely not on it.

  “But I was stubborn,” she said. “I was obsessive. And so?”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve suffered this way,” Hazlett confided. “I’m not married, and not because I didn’t want to be. I like intelligent, fascinating women as much as any man, but after a time, they start complaining. They want something that I can’t give them. I could make do with stupid, unperceptive women, or gold diggers, but they bore me. I can’t bear their presence for more than the time it takes to fulfill my biological needs. Then I want them escorted back to wherever they came from. But you would have been different, Svetlana. For you, I could have felt real feelings. We could have had something special.”

  He looked like he expected her to mourn what might have been. But she was incapable of playing along with his fantasy, even to save her own skin. “So it’s all about you,” she said. “All the time.”

  He looked politely blank. “Who else?”

  A pointless discussion if there ever was one, so she abandoned it. “What are the dirty bomb materials for?”

  “Oh, that.” Hazlett chuckled. “That was random. Isn’t that funny? This Sword of Cain was not my doing. That was Pavel Cherchenko’s bright idea, foiled by your mother. She certainly got around, I give her that. We knew nothing about it until Pavel told us a few days ago.”

  “But . . . then why was he—”

  “Presumptuous idiot,” Renato said coldly.

  “His plan was to proof his people against radiation with our drug, then set off a dirty bomb and have freedom and leisure to loot and pillage,” Hazlett said. “The idea has merit, in a bestial sort of way.”

  “Ridiculous.” Renato spat the words out. “Criminal scum.”

  “As you see, Renato does not approve of my plans, but I’m going forward with Pavel’s idea anyway,” Hazlett said. “But a new and improved version, of course. We noticed yesterday as we followed your RF signal that you lingered in the garbage dump in the canyon for over thirty minutes. So we told Josef to pay particular attention to that area. And lo and behold, there was The Sword of Cain. Josef is quite a discovery, by the way. He was the one who told us what happened in Sant’ Orsola. Bold ideas, nerves of steel. A good replacement for Pavel. And thank goodness for someone who can make that bomb for us.”

  Sveti’s mouth dangled open. “You’re setting off the bomb? Why?”

  He lifted his arms. “Because I can.”

  Her mouth worked. “But . . . but that’s crazy!”

  “Not at all,” he said calmly. “Anarchic, yes, but Pavel’s unhinged thinking process took him to places that mine had never dared to go. The more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea became. Remember at the gala, when I spoke of my passion for finding those pressure points? This is a nerve center so tender, it will make the whole world jump six feet into the air. It’ll be so entertaining.”

  “You’re doing this because you are bored?”

  He looked irritated. “You’re missing my point. You just handed me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s not exactly the gift I was longing for, but I’ll be a good sport and take it. This bomb can never be traced to me. I did not purchase the material, nor build it, nor pay to have it built. Nor did I have contact with anyone who did, except for a few untraceable calls from burner phones. The only point of contact is you, Svetlana. With you gone, I can detonate this bomb and cause mass mayhem with absolute impunity. How could I possibly resist?”

  The question was so foreign to the way her mind was wired, it left her stupid and stammering. Hazlett sailed smoothly on past.

  “Renato and I were sure when we planted the trace on you that Pavel and his goons would just kill you. But you killed him instead. Who’d have thought you were such a virago, to look at you. So delicate. So feminine.” His eyes raked her hungrily, up and down.

  “Sasha.” Her voice caught on his name. “Sasha killed him.”

  Hazlett shrugged. “Whatever. Last man standing takes the credit. I was astonished you survived. I hated the thought of Pavel doing something grisly to your lovely, delicate person, but it was such a simple way to solve our problem.”

  “Like with Mama,” she said. “You let them execute her.”

  “True. But you survived long enough to deliver the long-lost radioactive materials into my hands. There’s really only one thing to do with such an item, right? Josef is hard at work right now, making us a huge, awful bomb. Alas for poor Rome. So rich in history and culture. My heart bleeds for the Sistine Chapel, and Michelangelo’s Pietà. Rome will be uninhabitable for God alone knows how long.”

  “Rome? But . . . but . . .” She looked frantically from one man to the other. “You can’t mean to blow up a dirty bomb in Rome!”

  Renato and Hazlett exchanged glances. “I’ve weighed the pros and cons, and I’m willing to sacrifice Rome,” Hazlett said. “Though you’ll be leaving this earthly plane tonight, so it hardly concerns you.”

  That was too obvious to deserve comment. “But a war could start!” she protested. “So many people killed!”

  “Not really,” Hazlett soothed. “Several hundred tourists are likely to die in the initial blast, yes, but it won’t level the city like a nuclear bomb would. It’s the lingering radioactivity that will be the problem. And the panic that will convulse the entire planet, of course. It’s like a needle, and I can jab it at the nerve center of the global economy, stand back, and see what
twitches. What a rush. Josef will go ahead with his looting, which will be profitable enough to content him. And there will be a tremendous surge in interest for our new compound. An anti-radiation sickness med from TorreStark. Imagine the possibilities.”

  Sveti’s gorge rose. “You’re doing this to drive up stock value?”

  Hazlett shrugged. “I sounds so banal when you put it that way. It’s not that I need the money. After a few hundred millions, one wouldn’t even notice a tenfold increase. But once one starts making money at that level, it’s a habit that’s very hard to break.”

  She had to keep him talking. “Why Rome?”

  “I personally would have preferred another city, or another country altogether. I’m fond of Italy, and I’d rather target a place where I don’t own valuable property, where the disarray will not impact industries in which I am heavily invested, and where my favorite vacation spots will not become radioactive wastelands. But there are other considerations that lead me to choose Rome.”

  He waited for her prompt, his eyes glittering.

  She was unable to wait him out. “And these are?”

  Hazlett’s smile was smug. “The people arriving at the airport this morning. Tamara Steel, Valery Janos, Nick Ward, Rebecca Cattrell.”

  Fresh panic scattered what was left of her composure. “But how did you . . . I didn’t even know they—”

  “We’ve been monitoring your e-mail, Svetlana. Ever since you were old enough to have your own accounts. They sent you their travel details. They have rooms at the historic Hassler Hotel, right next to the Trinità dei Monti church, overlooking the Spanish Steps. I’m very fond of the Hassler myself, and I regret blowing up a precious chunk of Roman history. But if it’s necessary . . .”

  “No! Think this through!” she begged.

  “I’ve thought of everything. With one push of a button, all the angry, irritating people who would have searched for you disappear, in a puff of radioactive dust. Of course, there’s your pit bull, but one of my people will pay him a visit, let’s see”—he glanced at his watch—“any minute now. A few drops into his IV and good-bye, Sam Petrie.”