The movies had helped distract me for a bit, but I still wasn’t enjoying the trip. I’d never been on a passenger plane before. In fact, I hadn’t flown at all before getting a ride on the Condor Jet a few days ago. We were flying business class, which was a relief, because after one glance at the coach section I’d known I couldn’t have spent sixteen hours there without killing someone. Even with the bigger seats in business class, it had been no picnic, and I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. I don’t like being somewhere I can’t exit quickly if need be. To distract myself in between the movies, I read a pretty good horror-historical novel by Stephen King. When I was done enjoying the tale of the living dead tormenting a turn of the century Maine town (Sometimes they come back was the novel’s catch phrase), I napped or simply laid back and savored the memories from the day before.
We’d enjoyed an entire twenty-four hour period without a single crisis, physical or emotional. She’d gone shopping, replacing the clothes that she’d left at the Condor Lair, and I’d watched her shop; we’d eaten at some decent restaurants and walked around town and enjoyed Cats, even if apparently it was nothing like the musical from her universe. After dinner, we had met with Father Alex at a private residence in Queens, courtesy of a friend of his. We’d drank some vodka and gone over our travel plans. Afterwards, Christine and I had retired to a guest bedroom in the house, made love and fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
It’d been a very good day. Nothing had spoiled it, not even the knowledge we were heading into unknown territory the next morning.
I glanced at her sleeping form. She was snoring softly, looking cute as a button even with her disguise on. I wanted to wake her up with a kiss, but it would have looked funny, since our current identities had us down as father and daughter. I settled for a gentle hand on her shoulder. The smile she gave me when she opened her eyes got me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. Good thing I was incognito, so I could smile back without feeling like a complete idiot.
The plane landed and we joined a throng of jet-lagged passengers on their way to the terminal. Sheremetyevo Airport was big but worn down. It made a good stand-in for Russia itself – decaying and threadbare, its glory days long behind. The customs agents were sullen and unfriendly, and half of them looked like they were in the throes of a hangover, even though it was three-thirty in the afternoon, local time; the other half looked and smelled like they were working on the next day’s hangover. There were packs of armed soldiers with attack dogs everywhere, and both humans and dogs looked like they’d rather be somewhere, anywhere else. I saw plenty of tourists milling around the airport, though, so maybe the rest of the country wasn’t so unwelcoming. I guessed we’d find out, although we weren’t going to get much chance to play tourist.
We met Father Alex after we’d cleared customs. He’d been in the same flight but had insisted on flying coach, both for security reasons and because he didn’t like spending money on luxuries, even other people’s money. I thought that spending sixteen hours back in the coach section was enough torment to qualify for sainthood, but I hadn’t argued with him. He looked pretty rumpled, and somewhat uncomfortable in his civilian clothes. His suit, shoes and indeed every bit of clothing he was wearing was Russian-made, courtesy of some of his parishioners. His passport identified him as Boris Gavrikov of Lipetsk, a city pretty close to the Dominion border.
Christine was uncomfortable with the cheek implants that changed her facial features enough to fool even face recognition programs and made her look, in her words, ‘puffy-faced;’ she didn’t care for the brown wig and brown eye contacts she was wearing, either. Her clothes were ‘Earth Alpha Goth Chic’ whatever that meant: the outfit was mostly black and included tights, a leather jacket and heavy military-style boots. She looked very different from her usual self, and she’d even changed her body language, which was the kind of good tradecraft I could appreciate. She must have taken drama classes at some point.
I looked like a middle-aged businessman, complete with an off-the-rack suit and tie. Not my usual attire, but I was used to playing different roles, and ‘guy in suit’ is one of them. My body language was also different, slower and more ponderous, befitting a guy who didn’t exercise as much as he should. Our passports were Canadian and claimed we were Herb McDonnell, age 54, and his daughter Kimberly, 17. The father-daughter bit had been Condor’s idea of a joke. Funny guy. I had to confess we looked nothing like Face-Off and Armageddon Girl, though. Christine was doing a good job of behaving like a jaded teenager, currently listening to music and disinterestedly peering at the world through her Tru-View Enhanced Reality sunglasses. I looked mildly annoyed but remained polite even to the surly customs agents, as any good Canadian would.
Father Alex shook hands with me. “Welcome to Moscow,” he said, exaggerating his accent so he sounded like someone who’d learned English in school but rarely used it. “If you me follow…” He led us to a taxi stand, where we had to wait a good thirty minutes before getting into a cramped Chinese car. Father Alex and the squinty-eyed cabbie exchanged some rapid-fire words in Russian. The cabbie started arguing but eventually relented when Father Alex flashed a hundred-dollar bill at him. Benjamin Franklin’s picture seemed to get a lot of traction in Russia. The cabbie grabbed the bill like a trout snapping after a fly, cursed under his breath and got going.
“Are we there yet?” Christine said ten minutes after we’d left Sheremetyevo behind, in a whiny tone completely unlike her normal voice. I’d have to tell her that if the whole physics thing didn’t pan out, she should try her hand at acting. She was a natural.
“Soon, Kimmie,” I said soothingly and patted her on a shoulder; she shrugged off the touch with an exasperated “Dad!” Father Alex smiled.
Moscow lay ahead of us. The cab drove through roads that had been imperfectly cleared of snow. It might be mid-March, but winter was still alive and well here. The city’s skyline wasn’t very impressive at first sight. A couple of skyscrapers stood out but most of the buildings were blocky, impersonal things. The cab didn’t take us past any of the tourist spots, so we missed seeing the Kremlin and the big palaces and cathedrals. Instead, we headed to the outskirts, which were shabby and decidedly un-picturesque. The cabbie looked none too happy about it, either.
Traffic was bad, worse than anything I’d seen in New York. The local drivers liked to play rough, and the cabbie had to do some fancy driving, accompanied by loud cursing and honking. A couple of times I had to resist the urge to get out, grab some asshole’s car and flip it upside down. The not-so-occasional patches of ice added a little spice to the whole thing. It was a mildly exciting leg of the trip.
Things got even more interesting as we reached Solntsevo, the neighborhood Father Alex had told the cabbie to go to. The buildings were pretty run down even by local standards, there were more potholes, which was saying a lot, and graffiti and bullet holes were depressingly abundant on the walls. Traffic was much sparser; it was clear that people didn’t venture there if they didn’t have to. The cabbie’s apprehension grew as he drove past three uniformed men with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. The cops or militia or whatever were smoking cigarettes and making small talk with some hard-faced hookers who were showing a lot of skin despite the below-freezing temperatures. The cops glanced curiously at the cab but didn’t bother us. The cabbie muttered something that sounded like a prayer of thanks.
We came to a stop in front of a brick-faced building. A handful of teenagers outside were smoking, lounging around and comparing prison-style tats, apparently as inured to the cold as the hookers we’d seen. They watched us intently as we got out of the cab and grabbed our luggage from the trunk. The vibe I got wasn’t all that different from the rougher neighborhoods in New York, except it was damn colder. The atmosphere of despondence and despair was similar, if perhaps a little deeper here. As soon as I shut down the trunk, the cab sped off and left us to the tender mercies of the locals.
“This way,” Father Alex said
. We started to walk through the snow-covered sidewalk towards the building’s entrance, but the teenagers headed us off. A few of them were calling out to Christine, and I didn’t need to understand them to figure out what they were saying. They spread out in a half circle around us. I’d checked them out on our way in; at least three of them were packing heat. Handguns, and one of them had a sawed-off shotgun poorly concealed under his greatcoat. Things might get interesting. I wouldn’t be particularly worried about a confrontation, even before my power boost, if not for the fact it would draw attention to us, which we really couldn’t afford.
The biggest and meanest-looking one said something to Father Alex. He only said one word in return. “Akula.”
The gang banger blanched, suddenly looking a like a scared little kid. He stepped back and his friends did likewise. We walked past them and made it to the building.
It was warmer inside, but not much. Two bored-looking guys with military-style crew-cuts and impressive tattoo per square inch ratios were keeping watch in the lobby. Father Alex spoke to them, and I heard that word again, Akula. One of them showed us to the elevators while the other called ahead on his wrist-comp.
The inside of the elevator had seen better days and had a faint smell of old urine and some suspicious stains here and there that had the rusty-brown hue of dried blood. Father Alex pressed the button for the penthouse and up we went.
“Who or what is Akula?” I asked.
“It means ‘shark,”” Father Alex explained. “He is the man we’re here to see.”
The good father was the man with the contacts, so I let him take the lead. It was weird. In New York he really hadn’t had any dealings with the Russian underworld. His one run-in with the Mafyia had involved a couple of parishioners with bad gambling debts, and it had ended when I had a little talk with the debt collectors. He’d never given any indication that he knew much about either the Russian or Ukrainian criminal underworld, although I knew he had helped a lot of immigrants, legal or otherwise, from all over the region. I had a feeling I was in for some interesting revelations.
I met Christine’s eyes and gave her a reassuring grin. She smiled back; she looked a little apprehensive but not all that nervous. After the week she’d been having, being in a strange country on her way to meet with some local crime lord just wasn’t something to get overly excited about.
The elevator opened and we stepped into a carpeted hallway, much cleaner and neater than what we’d seen of the building so far. Loud music and computer FX sounds were coming through the open door of the apartment at the end of the hall. We headed there.
Through the open door, we saw three men sitting on a couch and playing Neo Apocalypse VII. On the big plasma screen across the living room, a CGI Ultimate delivered a fatal blow to Hyperia, eliciting a roar of laughter from all of the players; from the blood spatter on the screen, I figured they were using one of the unauthorized mods that turned the game into a gore-fest. One of the men glanced casually in our direction, waved us in and pointed towards a doorway covered by beaded curtain that led deeper into the apartment. I noticed that the coffee table between the couch and the big screen TV was heaped with piles of cash in various currencies, as well as a fair assortment of handguns and a mirror with a mound of coke next to a razor blade and sniffing tube.
Nobody ever takes me anywhere nice.
We went through the beaded curtain, down a short corridor leading to an office, where a man sat behind a desk. No, not a man. A Neo, a Freak like me. About one in ten Neolympians are Freaks, all of them Type Twos and Threes. They don’t just get super powers; they also end up with a little something extra, a deformity or two that clearly marks them as something both more and less than human. This Neo had gray, leathery skin, oversized yellow eyes and a flat, almost vestigial nose; his skull was sloped and elongated towards the back. His shoulders were inhumanly broad, and his arms far too long for his body. He didn’t quite look like a humanoid shark, but it was close enough for the nickname to fit. I would have bet the skin was as rough and abrasive as sandpaper, too. A sight for sore eyes, the kind of creature most would fear and none would love. If you look like a monster it’s damn easy to turn into one. I knew that only too well.
Akula rose from behind the desk. He was tall, six seven at least, although his inhumanly wide shoulders gave him a squat appearance. He was wearing a white undershirt and military camo pants tucked into combat boots. His lips parted into a huge carnivorous smile, revealing double rows of pointed teeth. That was one ugly motherfucker.
“Mykhailo,” he said in a growling voice.
“Fedir,” Father Alex replied.
The two men met in a hearty embrace, laughing and trading quips in Ukrainian. Father Aleksander’s demeanor and tone had changed noticeably. He sounded younger, more irreverent and rougher around the edges. I had the feeling he was being more himself now than the way he conducted himself around Saint Theodosius’.
After they were done exchanging pleasantries, the two Ukrainians turned towards us. “These are my friends,” Father Alex said in English. “Herb and Kimberly.”
“Any friends of Mykhailo are welcome here,” Akula said. His English had a British accent intermixed with the Ukrainian one. “Come, sit. Fancy a drink?”
A few minutes later we were all sitting on one of the half dozen or so sofas in a large meeting room adjacent to the office, glasses of vodka in our hands. Akula and Father Alex chattered in Ukrainian while we got our drinks and sat down. I downed my glass in one gulp and got another one. Christine mixed a lot of orange juice into hers, sipped it and tried not to grimace at the taste. She clearly wasn’t a vodka girl; nobody’s perfect, I guess.
I’d known Father Alex had not been a simple Orthodox priest. For one, he was a Neo, not a very powerful one, true, but he had empathic powers and the ability to speed up healing in others. His empathy couldn’t hold a candle to Christine’s, but it had been one reason we had become friends; he could pick up my surface emotions, which had allowed him to get a sense of who I was. His healing abilities were too weak to help Neos, but by concentrating he could boost a normal human’s healing rate to that of a Type One Neo, which meant broken bones and gunshot wounds could be fully mended in a matter of a few days, or even hours, depending on the severity of the injury.
Healers could pretty much write their own ticket in the US and most of the rest of the world. Most of them worked in hospitals and private clinics and even the weakest of them made more money than a top-rated neurosurgeon. Father Alex had preferred to remain out of the spotlight, however, quietly helping people in the community for free. He’d intimated that he preferred the anonymity not just out of humility but because his past had been on the shady side and apt to catch up with him if he became too well-known. He hadn’t volunteered any details, and I hadn’t asked for any. I preferred to judge my friends by their actions, not their pasts.
I figured Father Alex’s past was going to become pretty important in the near future, though.
Chapter Seventeen
The Twisted Twosome
New York City, New York, March 20, 2013
He was a wanted man now. He’d lost everything.
Kyle Carmichael shook his head and smiled, amused at his own conceit. ‘Everything’ meant something very different when you were as wealthy as he was. Yes, his identity would become part of the public record soon enough, but he had dozens of new others, and ways to generate more. Sure, his assets had been frozen by the Feds – except for the hundred million or so he had carefully laundered and placed in a multitude of bank accounts across the world, plus another five million in cash hidden in a dozen safe deposit boxes around the world. He’d prepared for a life on the run for a long time. He might no longer have many toys as he used to, but he hadn’t lost everything.
He glanced at Melanie’s sleeping form. He hadn’t lost anything important, not really.
Careful not to wake his beloved, he left the bed and headed for the bathroom. He ex
amined himself in the mirror. He no longer looked remotely like Kyle Carmichael; Kyle might not have his buddy Face-Off’s abilities, but he had enough gizmos to change his appearance well enough to fool face recognition programs, let alone the old Mark-I eyeball. Cheek and nose nano-tech alterations changed his facial configuration enough to spoof even the most advanced NSA systems. Even better, his new face came with its own identity, including a retina-scan signature and a credit and job history that he had carefully built over the years. All of it would pass muster even if the FBI decided to run a background check on his new identity. As far as anybody who looked at him could tell, he was a normal, solid citizen by the name of Fred Humboltd. He was safe.
Kyle grinned again. Well, he was safe as long as he didn’t put on the Condor costume. He wasn’t going to give that up, though. The world hadn’t seen the last of Condor, not by a long shot. Condor and Kestrel were here to stay.
Kestrel. He looked back at Melanie’s sleeping form, remembering how they’d spent the night.
* * *
Kyle pinned her against the wall, holding her wrists behind her back with one hand, controlling her with his greater strength. A part of him knew that she could have broken free in a dozen different ways, that she was letting him overpower her, but it didn’t matter. The beast within felt in control, and that was all that mattered. He pressed his free hand over her mouth and nose, smothering her, and she made little choked noises as he pushed himself inside her, slamming Melanie into the wall with each brusque thrust. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she struggled to breathe, and the sight of her, helpless and in his power, his to do as he pleased, drove him to the brink. The beautiful and terrible knowledge that he could kill her right then and there set him off.
(Memories: there had been two of them. Monica and Hakim: they had made him bleed, and scream, and beg. They had made him like it.)
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 31
