Tsar

by Ted Bell

  There was murmured assent, everyone still too much in a state of shock over the recent violence to respond normally.

  “Only two global powers have any realistic chance of challenging the United States, two governments capable of bringing back balance, restoring order and political symmetry: our own and, at some point in the future, the Chinese. Personally, I would much prefer our own humble motherland to take the lead on this battlefield.”

  With laughter and applause, relaxation returned to the body language of the Ten. Although the smell of cordite and the coppery scent of fresh blood still hung in the air, the two dead colleagues were already fading from the collective memory.

  “Good, good. So let me propose a notion to remedy this crisis, shall I? This morning, I tell you that our immediate goal is to stop the American encroachment on post-Soviet territories. To do that, I suggest that we reclaim the lost republics of our former Soviet Union. Not all at once, too provocative, but rather one bite at a time. We will begin perhaps with little Estonia, such a thorn in our side. A great deal of the groundwork there has already been done. At a subsequent meeting, I will inform you of the actual timing and strategy. Once the West has digested that and thinks we’re done, we will take them all back! Either by force or by subterfuge, but we will take them back.

  “When we have accomplished the reintegration of our beloved motherland, we will look beyond those new boundaries, east and west. Because I tell you, gentlemen, the only way to protect our borders is to expand them!

  “Returning our beloved Russia to her rightful place as the dominant world power will require nothing less than a new revolution! It will not be easy. As Chairman Mao once said, ‘A revolution is no dinner party.’ But we will prevail, gentlemen, we will prevail!”

  Rostov got to his feet first, clapping his hands loudly. The other soon followed, leaping out of their chairs and applauding vigorously. This went on for at least five minutes, until Count Korsakov spoke again.

  “Thank you all. I appreciate your sense of duty and love of country. But to achieve this glorious rebirth and revolution, we will need to keep the West from interfering. Keep their noses out of our nest. We will need a ruse de guerre, a trick, a distraction that prevents any counterattack by our enemies when our tanks roll. Any thoughts?”

  General Arkady Gerimosov, who had perhaps drunk more “little water” than his comrades, spoke first.

  “We could distract them by taking out New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Excellency? A most persuasive ruse de guerre, non, mes amis?”

  The laughter in the room was explosive, but not everyone thought it was funny. Some of them privately thought it was a seriously good idea. Korsakov was not amused.

  “A most entertaining idea, General Gerimosov, but, as Napoleon once said, ‘There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind.’ And on that note, there being no further business until the president’s presentation later on, this meeting is adjourned.”

  “Volodya?” Korsakov said, speaking privately to the president via an earbud in Rostov’s ear.

  “Excellency?”

  “I desire a private word with you. I wonder if you might excuse yourself for a few minutes and join me in my office?”

  “Indeed. I’m on my way.”

  Rostov put his napkin to his lips, smiled at his colleagues, and slipped behind the curtain to see the wizard.

  “Yes, Excellency,” Rostov said to the silhouetted figure sitting in the shadows. He took his usual chair, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette.

  “There is a man who needs watching, Volodya.”

  “Who and where, Excellency?” Rostov replied.

  “An Englishman named Hawke. I have some history with his family. He recently moved from London to Bermuda. He has somehow become involved with my daughter, Anastasia. A romantic liaison, perhaps. Perhaps not. He would appear to be a private citizen, extraordinarily wealthy. But I’ve reason to believe he’s MI-6. Or perhaps just a freelance operative for hire.”

  “He needs watching or killing?”

  “Both. For now, just watch. Contact my private security force on Bermuda. A Mr. Samuel Coale on Nonsuch Island. The old American NASA downrange tracking base. He’ll know what to do. When it’s time for Hawke to go, I will inform you. Then I will want you to contact Mr. Strelnikov. Paddy Strelnikov. An American gun of mine. He’s the only one I would send up against this Englishman.”

  “He’s good, is he, this Brit?”

  “Perhaps the best. He has caused our comrades in Havana and Beijing no end of trouble. Also, I am worried about my darling Anastasia. My daughter has been…unhappy since the untimely death of her husband, Vanya. She seems quite taken with this Hawke. It is troubling. I don’t want him in our nest.”

  “Perhaps you should tell your daughter to steer clear of this man, Excellency. She is, after all, the soul of obedience.”

  “Perhaps. But for a time, maybe, he will make her happy. And besides, who knows what she might learn from this Englishman in the meantime, eh, Volodya?”

  Rostov nodded.

  “Where is Paddy Strelnikov now, Excellency?”

  “On assignment in America. Taking care of business.”

  5

  BADLANDS, NORTH DAKOTA

  The road ahead looked like a frozen snake. Black and glistening in his headlights, slithering out there, disappearing into the distant snow-white hills. Paddy Strelnikov had his high beams on, but still, mostly all he could see was swirling snow. Wet stuff, soft blobs of it hitting his windshield. Splat. The wipers were working okay, but he still couldn’t see shit.

  He found the stalk of the left side of the wheel and put the dims back on. Yeah. That was better, less snow and more road.

  Strelnikov didn’t know from driving out in the middle of nowhere at night in the middle of a freaking blizzard. He was a Russian emigrant from Brooklyn, f’crissakes, where they had normal highways. The BQE, the Long Island Expressway, hell, even the Santa Monica Freeway out in L.A., et cetera, those he could handle. This road? North Dakota? Forget about it, brother. This was freaking Mars.

  He glanced at his chunky gold watch, saw what time it was, and accelerated, fishtailing a little. He watched the red needle climb past eighty, ninety. He hoped to hell this automobile had traction control. He thought they had a switch for that on these new cars, but he hadn’t been able to find one. He wasn’t exactly sure what traction control was or even where he’d heard about it. TV commercial, probably. Whatever it was, it sounded good to him. When it had first started snowing hard, he’d pulled into a rest stop and looked for the switch.

  Good luck. There were a whole lot of knobs and switches on the dash, way too many, in fact, but not one of them said anything about traction control. It was no wonder Detroit was going down the toilet. Nobody had a clue how to work the damn cars anymore. Somehow, a few years back, some genius in Motown had decided everybody in America wanted dashboards to look like the cockpits of a 747. Now, they all did, and nobody had a clue what button did what anymore.

  He’d looked around inside the glove box for some kind of a manual, but of course there was none. Just his rental contract and a folded map of North Dakota, which he did not need, and his.38 snub-nose, which he hoped he would not need. He really did not have time to dick around with this car anymore so he’d pulled back out onto the I-94 highway and kept on heading west, hoping for the best.

  Maybe traction control was even standard on this thing, automatic, he told himself now, speeding up a little. But about an hour ago, he’d almost skidded into a ditch. Twice. The road conditions were so bad back there it had been like trying to drive a friggin’ schoolbus across a frozen lake.

  The car, a black Mustang coupe rented at the Bismarck airport Hertz counter, had a good heater, at least, once you finally found the knob that turned it on. He’d come across it only by accident, looking for the traction-control thingy, just like he’d finally found the bu
tton that turned the radio on. At least a previous renter had punched in some pretty good radio stations. Must have been some fuckin’ electronics engineer or jet pilot or something who’d done that. Whatever happened to two knobs, over and out?

  There was an all-night talk show out of Chicago he’d been listening to. Pretty good reception, and the show was good, too, called The Midnight Hour with your host, Greg Noack. Tonight’s topic was capital punishment, of course, because tonight was the night old Stumpy was going to ride the needle.

  Everybody in the country, not just Chicago, was talking about Charles Edward Stump, a.k.a. Stumpy the Baby Snuffer. Yeah, talking about Stumpy’s impending execution, et cetera. This case had gotten media attention worldwide, not just the tabloids, either.

  Mr. Stump was, in fact, the reason Fyodor Strelnikov, known since childhood as Paddy, was driving through the Badlands of North Dakota on this most miserable night in December. The execution was scheduled to take place at midnight tonight, which was, he saw, looking at his watch, exactly two hours and six minutes from now. Stumpy’s sayonara party was going down at Little Miss, prison slang for the Little Missouri State Penitentiary just outside the town of Medora, North Dakota.

  Distance to the joint from here was approximately sixty-seven miles.

  Paddy snugged the pedal a little closer to the metal. He had time to do what he had to do, but he didn’t want to cut it too close. Get in, make his delivery, and get the hell out of this friggin’ state. You had to figure the joint would be mobbed, all the protesters and media crawling all over the place. He stuck the needle on 100 miles per hour.

  “The real question is, is Charles Stump insane?” a caller said on the radio.

  “Insane?” Greg Noack said. “Anybody who kills eight newborn infants in their incubators while their mothers are sleeping in the maternity ward down the hall is completely off his nut, man!”

  “That’s my point exactly, Greg. Stumpy’s not guilty by reason of insanity. Can’t right-wing geniuses like you and Rush Limbaugh understand that!”

  And on and on like that the calls went. The armies of bleeding hearts were out in force on the airwaves tonight. Apparently, in addition to the media forces gathered for the last two days, there were three or four hundred people standing in the freezing cold outside the prison gates at Little Miss. They were lighting candles, good luck in this weather, protesting the death penalty, et cetera, claiming Stumpy was emotionally distraught at the time of the murders, he’d been abused by his insane mother, blah-blah.

  Like that made it okay, like Stumpy shouldn’t stretch hemp because he was a victim, too. Right. We’re all victims now. Hitler was a fricking victim. His mommy was mean to him when he pee-peed in his pants. Here you got a guy, at this moment probably the most despised human being on the planet, and still, the governor was, even at this late hour, considering a stay. A stay? Politics. Enough said. The trial jury, at least, had had the balls unanimously to put Stumpy down as a stone baby killer.

  But Paddy Strelnikov knew that Stump’s train went a lot farther than that.

  A whole lot farther.

  Strelnikov had made Stumpy his personal hobby when the powers that be in Moscow had given him this current assignment a couple of months ago. Before writing up his report, he’d read all the trial transcripts, bought a few drinks for people here and there, interviewed nurses on duty that night, the K-9 guy who’d found the little bodies in their shallow graves, the arresting detectives, the ME, the whole nine yards.

  Then he’d gone to have a little chitchat with Mrs. Stump in the Lorraine, Illinois, loony bin where she’d been doing crossword puzzles since 1993. Oh, the stories that little ninety-two-pound, white-haired, wack-job chick could tell.

  According to Mom, who was wearing an attractive housecoat with sleeves that wrapped all the way around and fastened with heavy buckles at the small of her back, little Charlie, when he was just a tyke, had amused himself by putting insects, goldfish, rodents, and then abducted kitty cats inside an old microwave he kept in the basement. Zapped them at full power. Then he’d graduated to higher life forms.

  Nurse Stumpy, her golden boy, had been abusing and killing infants and children for years, his mom told Paddy, with a gleam in those weirdly protruding blue eyes, and then, what he’d do, Stumpy began calling the victims’ families around Christmastime, taunting them by implying that their babies were still alive. And how did she know all this? Because she was upstairs, listening in on the other line, that’s how. This was the Stump family’s idea of holiday entertainment, their special holiday greeting card.

  And that’s the final report he’d made, the report he’d sent to his boss, who’d told his boss, who’d told his boss, et cetera, and that’s how come he was out here in the middle of friggin’ nowheresville making sure everything was copacetic in connection with this particular execution. There were to be no loose ends, et cetera, in the case of Charles Edward Stump.

  The Wiz, as he privately called his boss, didn’t like loose ends. And the Wiz ruled his world. Paddy, he was just muscle for hire. He knew that. Accepted it. He was a gun, that’s all. But by God, he was a good one. He was a fuckin’ Howitzer.

  Strelnikov saw the fluorescent green exit sign for Medora coming up and moved over to the right lane. He’d take a little-used two-lane state road from here the rest of the way to Little Miss. He reached over and shut off the radio. He couldn’t stand to hear those people defend that moron anymore. Even now, just thinking about it, Paddy was shaking his head at the stupidity that seemed to run in the Stump family.

  For instance, it takes a real numbskull to get the death penalty in a state that doesn’t even have the death penalty.

  Charles Edward Stump had been convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder. Stumpy, who was twenty-seven years old at the time of the killings, had been a male nurse at the Fargo General Hospital, working in the maternity ward. Hello? Background check? So, one dark night three years ago, nobody knows why, Nurse Stump had gone into the incubation ward and suffocated all of the newbies, one after another, with a pillow.

  Lights out, kiddies!

  Then, according to the transcripts Strelnikov read, he had gathered up all of his little victims into a pair of pillowcases, walked out of the hospital, and got into his car. He drove south from Watford City, where the hospital was located, and transported the dead babies just across the Little Missouri River. He parked on a dirt road outside Grassy Butte and buried them in a mass grave in a deeply wooded area just inside Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

  An autopsy later revealed two of the babies had been buried alive.

  If Stumpy had had even half a brain in his head, he might have noticed the word national in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. National meant it was a federal crime. And now it was the feds who were going to tuck Stumpy onto his cozy little gurney and put him to sleep permanently tonight.

  Blue lights flashing in Strelnikov’s rearview mirror snapped him back to reality.

  “Great,” he muttered, slowing down and pulling over to stop on the shoulder. Hell, he was only doing a hundred. Somebody on Mars had a problem with that? He reached over and popped the glove compartment, his fingers closing around the little snub-nose. He shoved it under his right thigh, the grip sticking out where he could get it if it came to that.

  A second later, the cop was standing outside his window, shining a flashlight in his face. He wound the window down, cold air and snow blowing in, and said, “How you doing, officer?”

  The cop bent down, shining the light in Paddy’s eyes. Then he directed it into the backseat, where something shiny had caught his eye.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “An alligator case.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “What’s in it?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Hairbrushes. Soap. Perfume bottles, et cetera. For my lady’s bath. I’m a salesman. I sell these things.”

  The cop looked at him a
second. Paddy was used to it. He knew he didn’t look like a traveling salesman. He looked like a professional wrestler in a shiny navy-blue suit two sizes too small.

  “Driver’s license and registration, sir.”

  “Yeah, well, hold on a sec.” He reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out his driver’s license. The license wasn’t in his wallet, no, it was wrapped inside five crispy one-hundred-dollar bills with a rubber band around it, just in case of a situation like this one. He handed it to the cop, who played his flashlight on it.

  “What’s this?”

  “That would be my driver’s license, officer. Wrapped inside five hundred spanking-new U.S. dollars.”

  “Sir, you-”

  “Officer, look, I’m in kind of a hurry here, and I’d appreciate it if you’d just give me my license back and take the rest as a small token of my undying gratitude.”

  “Look, pal, I-”

  “Okay, okay, I gotcha.”

  Strelnikov stuck his hand back inside his pocket and pulled out a neatly packed wad of cash.

  “Five thousand dollars. That’s my final offer,” Paddy said, giving the guy his killer smile, the one he’d learned on the streets of Brighton Beach and Coney, use it just before you punch some scumbag’s lights out. “Christmas is right around the corner, you know, officer. Five large could come in very handy.”

  He could tell from the look on the cop’s face which way this thing was going to go. Due south.

  “Okay, sir, I’m going to ask you to step out of the vehicle. Now. Keep your hands up where I can see them.”

  “Look, you’re making a fatal mistake here, officer.”

  “Out of the car, sir,” the trooper said, backing away with his hand on his holster. “Now!”

  The honest cop didn’t see the ugly little snub-nose appear just above the windowsill. Maybe he’d missed that word, fatal. Too bad, it was a key word.

  Pop pop, went the.38. Two of the best, smack dab in the middle of the trooper’s noggin.

  “Buh-bye,” Paddy said, looking out the window at the dead man splayed in the red snow as he accelerated away, the Mustang fishtailing wildly on the icy shoulder of the highway.