“There, you see? I am being pursued by those who seek to take me, to use me as a specimen, and then to kill me. Yet you are more interested in my name, in who I really am. What does that tell you?”
Despite her desire just to pull the AK up and fire a warning round into the darkness, she thought about it.
“I need to know what’s going on,” she said finally.
“You need? How important.”
“Damn it, can’t you just answer the question? Who the hell are you really?”
“Why do you care?”
Throughout the entire exchange, Zoe was quiet. Yet Sveta could sense the intensity in that silence. She chose her next words carefully.
“Because I want to get out of this alive. I don’t think you have any idea of the type of resources your enemies have at their disposal. They can burn this city to the ground. So why are they after you?”
Drogol’s face twisted with rage.
“You lie,” he screamed. “You always lie.”
“Watch your mouth,” Sveta said quietly.
“And now you dare to say such a thing? I know your mind. It schemes and plots. You only wish to know who I am and why these people want me so that you can bargain me away like you did so many years ago.”
Drogol waved his hands wildly as he spoke. Sveta curled her finger around the trigger of her AK.
“You are crazy.”
“I am not crazy. I know that it was you who bargained my life away to Yusupov. Oh, have I surprised you? Did you think I did not know, that I was a poor simpleton cowed by your imperial will?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Sveta, stepping back and lifting her automatic weapon
“Do you truly not remember who I am?”
“I’ve had enough bullshit. I ask you a question, you answer with a question. And you’re bugshit crazy. I’ve never laid eyes on you before tonight. So why don’t you just tell me who you are and why they’re after you?”
“They are,” said Drogol, “after my blood.”
Back to square one. Biological warfare.
“But you’re not contagious?”
“Contagious? You really are a child. Of course I’m not contagious.”
“You’re like their prize lab specimen gone missing.”
Drogol’s angry laugh roared through the empty space like dynamite going off in a cave.
“Yes,” he said, with an approving smile. “I am, as you say, their prize lab specimen gone missing. Anna Kazakova wants my blood to cure her disease. Hauck wants me dead before that can happen.”
“And you? What do you want?”
“I want,” he said quietly, “free of this curse. I want to regain the destiny of my own soul.”
“That’s what you want?”
“That is only the beginning, my child. But without that beginning, I can never achieve what I truly want.”
“And what exactly is that?”
He shook his head dismissively and turned away from her and began descending the stairs again.
“Who are you?” she called after him.
“A man tested by God and abandoned by love. Do you see this young woman here?”
He waved the lantern toward Zoe. In its wavering light, she seemed younger, more vulnerable despite or perhaps because of what she had undergone.
“And?”
“God so kindly sent her to me to give me the hope to go on. She is His angel given to me, a sign that although I am tested sorely by Him, I am not separated. She was sent to give my heart hope, hope that my love unrequited is not love denied.”
Sveta took a step forward, leaned her head back, and looked him straight in the eye.
“Let’s get going. You don’t want to tell me anything, so I’m not going to bother asking anymore.”
Silence hung between them for a time like a rope knotted at each end waiting to be pulled again by one or the other. Finally, he turned around and began walking away, his footsteps strong and determined.
“I am a monster who would be a man again,” he said without turning back.
It hung in the air, dramatic as an oath and frightening as a curse hurled in darkness. It was the belief, the utter conviction in the man’s voice that unnerved her. She considered turning and making a run for it. If she could shake the nagging fear that the beast was close behind them, she was willing to do it. But in the dead air of the descending hallways, she had caught a whiff of blood and fur.
Sveta hurried to catch up with Drogol and Zoe. For now, she was out of questions. But she had the uneasy feeling that she should have shot him back at the warehouse.
With the AK slung over one shoulder, her duffel hanging on the other, she started walking after the two of them. She knew she should have let both out of the car and kept on driving. Too many risks staying with them. She didn’t know who they really were or what was really going on, and she would likely never get a straight answer out of either of them anyway. Still, the last place anyone would ever look for her is a couple of stories under the city of Detroit. And she could not shake the feeling that between her and the exit lurked the beast.
*****
Hauck checked his electronic perimeter and found it secure. Time to rest. He went to the couch, placed his pistol under a cushion, and laid his Benelli shotgun on the floor within easy reach. There was not a time within recent memory that he had ever slept without a firearm close by.
Anna Kazakova and her troops should already be in town. He had given instructions to Yuri and Evgeny; The Instructor was on his way. All that could be done had been done. Sveta was missing and so were Drogol and Zoe, but it was his analysis that they were together. Tomorrow he would see if he was right. Sveta was a smart woman, but in today’s electronic world, anyone could be tracked. She would think she was safe.
She would be wrong. Sooner or later, Zoe would contact him.
Chapter Thirteen
“Sir, no one is answering at the warehouse,” came the driver’s voice.
It echoed through the speaker system in the limo; Anna Kazakova would allow no private communications between Mishka and his men. They were less than ten minutes away and Mishka immediately grew nervous. The seats formed a rectangle in the back of the car, and in the center of this was a table of highly polished rosewood. A laptop sat next to the backside of the driver’s headrest.
“Maybe a cell tower is down,” Mishka offered.
“Idiot,” said Anna. “Send a car ahead and find out what is going on. Have your driver circle a mile distant from your warehouse until we have confirmation of its status. I am too old to drive into a trap and you would of course be the first to die if it is. You understand me, Mishka?”
“Completely, Mrs. Kazakova.”
Mishka did understand.
There were three other passengers in the back portion of the car besides himself. Anna, her physician Dr. Pazyryk and Ivan her bodyguard. It was a tense drive for Mishka. He had no idea as to the extent of what Anna knew, and that terrified him. A woman who was willing to cage her own son was capable of anything.
Sitting in the front seat, next to Mishka’s personal driver, was the sniper who killed the two bodyguards standing on either side of Mishka. He was an old, thick man named Nikolai with a wide head and a dark visage. It was difficult to understand he could shoot so well with his thick shoulders and bulky body. But his work told another story.
Word finally came.
“Sir,” said the driver nervously. “I have news.”
“Well, what is it?”
“All dead, sir.”
“What?”
“All dead and both women have vanished. A vehicle is missing. A black Hummer.”
“All dead.” Mishka repeated.
“How?” asked Anna.
“Madame?” asked the driver.
“Were they shot, stabbed or strangled?”
“They were torn apart. Like by a wild animal. Blood everywhere.”
“I see,” said A
nna quietly.
“I don’t understand,” said Mishka, wringing his hands. “Who could have done this? They were seasoned men, well-armed.”
“Quit whimpering. Do you have video?”
“What?”
“Do you have security cameras?” repeated Anna.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Can you access it on that computer?
She pointed to the laptop on the table between them.
Mishka’s face brightened.
“I can do that,” he said.
“Then do it,” snapped Anna.
While they drove around at a safe distance, Mishka brought up the video access system and logged in. He had to do it three times because he was so nervous he kept typing in the wrong password. When the menu finally appeared, he breathed a sigh of relief. After a few minutes, he was finally able to locate the time where he left the warehouse to go meet Anna. His finger trembled as he pressed “Play.”
They all hunched forward to see the screen more clearly except Ivan. There was no sound and it was in black and white, which made it seem all the starker. No one spoke until the beast came roaring in.
“Stop that,” said Anna. “Stop it there. You see that, Doctor? It lives.”
“What is it? What is that thing?” asked Mishka. “It is like a giant wolf.”
“Giant wolf indeed,” whistled Dr. Pazyryk. “It must be eight or ten feet tall. And look at it. It’s not exactly a wolf, is it? It’s like some hideous amalgam of animal and machine.”
The security camera had captured a straight on shot of the beast’s head. Mishka could not quit staring at it. Dark droplets dripped from its jaws, and in one clawed hand, it waved an arm. Eyes bright white. Nothing he could have imagined would have prepared him for this picture. It was as though the impossible had become possible. He felt, for the first time in his life, utter horror.
“That thing,” he said, “that is real? That is what killed my men?”
“Press the button again,” said Anna. “We must see everything, right to the end.”
Ivan leaned toward Anna and told her, “I can feel his presence in this evil place.”
“And here is where you will confront him,” she told him.
With a nervous glance at the two of them, Mishka clicked the “Play” button again, and the video resumed. Images of the wild beast ripping apart his men resumed. When the forklift hit the electrical panel and the emergency lights began to strobe, he clenched a fist and began to swear softly.
“Stop,” said Anna.
Mishka did as he was told.
“Go forward just a little.”
Again.
“See,” she said. “Do you see that Ivan? It blurs. The image of the beast blurs.”
“It is unstable,” said Ivan. His thin white eyebrows came together and wrinkles appeared across his forehead and the corners of his eyes. He pursed his lips as he considered the implications of his own observation.
“Probably a camera malfunction,” said Dr. Pazyryk.
“Fah,” said Anna. “Once, maybe yes, but twice. No, there is something important happening. Ivan is right, I think, although I cannot explain it.”
“What do you mean unstable?” the doctor asked Ivan.
Ivan did not answer.
Mishka spoke up, unable to contain himself.
“What kind of beast is that thing?” he asked again.
“It is a man-beast,” answered Ivan solemnly. “It is a defilement of life itself.”
Mishka could sense an undercurrent of madness in this man, and, for a moment, he was not sure if he feared him even more than the beast. His white, waxy skin and his peculiar eyes so pale in the muted light in the back of the limousine gave him a corpse-like appearance.
“Stop the video,” said Anna suddenly.
When he stopped it, she said, “It is him. Look. We see the beast enter, and now we see the man himself leaving. The beast is gone. But see, see he has not aged, Ivan. He has not aged a day since I last saw him all those years ago”
It was true. A man whom Mishka had never seen was walking with Sveta and the woman who she had brought with her.
“But that woman,” he said, “that woman there. She was badly wounded when my cousin brought her. We threw her in a room and left her for dead. She is walking again. How is this? And my cousin, we chained her to a steel plate. How did she get away? And who is that man? How did he get in?”
Anna stared at him coldly.
“That man is Drogol.”
She slapped her hand on the table and looked at Ivan with fire in her eyes.
“Hauck is a demon, Ivan. Look at that woman. Not the wounded one who is now walking, but the other. Look at her face. Fah. Drogol will have no choice but to pursue her. Mishka, can you enlarge that picture?”
“I think so.”
“You think? Do not think. Do it.”
Moments later, Sveta’s face filled the screen. She was carrying an AK47, ready to shoot anything that crossed her path. Her hard-set face was smeared with grime or blood and her hair wired away from her head like it was electrified.
“There, there, just like that,” shouted Anna, jabbing her finger at the screen. “You see it, Ivan? Do you see it, Doctor?”
Ivan stroked his chin, and Mishka felt his stomach turn as the man’s albino fingers slid over the congealed waxy scar that wound along his chin all the way up to his left ear. It was as though he were stroking a bloated white worm.
“She is familiar,” said Ivan. “Something about her face is familiar.”
“Looks a little like Alexandra, doesn’t she?” said Dr. Pazyryk. “Like in that famous painting. You know—the wife of Nicholas II.”
“Thank you, Doctor, for that little history lesson,” said Ivan, and glared at him.
“Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend you, Ivan. Or you, Anna. Or anyone for that matter. I’m just saying it’s who she looks like, that’s all.”
Mishka could not help but see the fear in Dr. Pazyryk’s face when he addressed Ivan. This was something he would not forget.
“How can you tell who she looks like?” he asked. “Her face is smeared with something, her hair is a mess and it is not a good picture.”
“A true Russian,” said Anna, “would not mistake the face of the last Romanov Tsarista.”
They all sat around the rectangular wooden table in the back of the seat, now lit up with the glow from the security camera video. The windows were blacked out, and although the car was spacious, Mishka began to feel claustrophobic. There was no easy way to escape this woman and her madmen.
“Forgive me, Mrs. Kazakova. What I mean to ask is what is the difference if my cousin looks like Tsarista Alexandra?”
Anna flicked her hand at him in contempt.
“You are a boy with a pretty face and guns. What do you know of these things? Hauck, who would capture this Drogol before we can seize him, is a devious thinker. He knows that this man believes he was once in love with this woman. You look shocked Mishka. Yes, I know that the Tsarista Alexandra is dead. But Drogol believes he was alive during her time. He believes that she loved him but could not show it because she was married to Czar Nicholas II.”
Mishka’s brain began to hurt.
“So this man, this Drogol, he is crazy? He is insane?”
“That’s not important,” said Anna. Her face was soft and wrinkled, but her eyes fixed on Mishka’s as though she were about to bite him. “What is important is that we catch this very, very dangerous man you let get away by your carelessness.”
“But I couldn’t know. I did not even know of this man.”
“All that you need to know is that I want him alive because I want, no, I need his living blood. If I do not get it, I will have Nikolai hang you from a meat hook with your dick in your mouth.”
*****
“I will go ahead and then return. The two of you will wait here,” Drogol said.
But as soon as he said his last word, he ga
sped in pain and doubled over. He seemed to lose his balance, but before Sveta or Zoe could grab one of his arms to catch him, he reached for the railing. For a moment, he stood shaking, and then Sveta saw him begin to blur, as though a lens had been placed between the two of them.
It was impossible.
Sveta shook her head. For a moment, for the very briefest of moments, he was transparent, and Sveta thought she could see through him. She thought she saw something moving inside him. No, that wasn’t right. Something forming inside of him. But that wasn’t possible. She was about to step toward him when it happened again.
Then he seemed to regain control and straightened. When he looked at Sveta, he knew that she had witnessed the moment. He glared at her as though daring her to say something.
Then, before she could object, he quenched the lantern wick and continued down the rough wooden stairs into the palpable illusion of an unending blackness. After a moment, Zoe gripped her hand, with the tentative touch of a little girl needing her mother’s reassurance. Sveta free hand tightened on her AK for comfort.
She sniffed the air looking for signs of the beast, but smelled only musty air. Yet she was still tense. So many strange and violent things had already happened that she could not understand. The beast. This strange man. The miracle of seeing Zoe being revived by him with the mere touch of his hands. His odd, old-fashioned way of speaking. And now the dense, almost suffocating darkness. Standing and waiting when she was used to having a plan.
“Nervous soldiers,” a GRU major had once told her, “usually shoot the wrong people.”
Still, it was sometimes better than not shooting at anyone.
“Zoe?” she said.
“What?”
“Did you see that?”
“No.”
“Zoe?”
“What?”
“Just seeing if you were still here.”
“Where would I go?”
“Ever been here before?”
A pause.
“No.”
“Is that the truth?”
Another pause.
“Only in my dreams.”
“You dreamed about being here?”
“I dream a lot.”
Her voice was still shaky, still weak.
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