The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  “Who’s got my back?”

  “Masters. He’s a bona fide art collector and speaks fluent Russian. Got into Moscow this afternoon. There wasn’t time to brief you.”

  She stepped into elegant Dolce Gabbana black lace pumps.

  “Masters is good. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Control took her hand.

  “Elena…”

  “Be aware, don’t take risks, get what I came for, get out. And try not to drop this dress on the floor of one of Alexei Berezovsky’s private conference rooms.” The lightness left her voice, replaced by a quiet toughness. “I know what to do, Control. That’s why you brought me to Moscow.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  They walked to the door of the bedroom. Elena’s eyes flicked to a small framed photograph on the bedside table. It was of Elena, who looked just the same, with a younger Robert McCall, on the deck of a sailboat with the backdrop of an old city glistening in the dying sun behind them. They were holding glasses of wine, laughing about something. On the photo was written in a neat hand: To my darling Elena—All My Love—Robert.

  Control had noted the photograph. “Where was that taken?”

  “Croatia. Off the coast of Split on the Adriatic Sea. A four-day vacation also not in my file. And before you ask, no I haven’t heard from him. Not in over three years.”

  “But you still carry his picture everywhere you go.”

  “He doesn’t need to know that.”

  Control opened the bedroom door wider. “It’s better he’s out of your life, Elena.”

  “What happened? Why did he go into hiding? No one at The Company will talk about it.”

  “Need to know.”

  “But you know where he is. You know where all of us are, at all times.”

  “I don’t know where Robert McCall is.”

  “But you don’t believe he’s dead.”

  It was a statement. Control shook his head.

  “He’s a tough man to kill,” he said. “I should take that photo. We don’t have many pictures at all of Robert McCall.”

  “Not even in his file?”

  “They were removed. Probably by him.”

  “Well, you can’t have that one.” She moved out into the sitting room of the suite. “Let’s not be late for our Chechen host.”

  CHAPTER 2

  McCall sat down at an outdoor table at Starbucks on West Sixty-second Street. He ordered his usual Sumatra Asia/Pacific extra-bold coffee. Stirred in three packets of sugar. He was a little late, but recess wasn’t over yet. Across the street, in the high school playground, teenagers were moving in groups, talking, roughhousing, throwing footballs, a couple of basketball games going on. Scott was dribbling as McCall sat down, faked left, turned right, back left, completely fooling his opponent who was waving his arms like he was on an aircraft carrier bringing in a plane. Scott stretched up to his full six-foot-one and took the shot. It hit the rim and sailed off. Close. McCall watched his son hustle away, guarding a tall black kid who had taken the rebound. Scott was lean, blond hair, not a jock, but he knew how to move with a kind of fluidity that McCall admired. He was a friendly kid, obviously well liked. Fifteen years old. McCall hadn’t spoken to him since he was eight. That had been at Grand Central Station in June of whatever year when he’d met Scott and his ex-wife Cassie for five minutes.

  Twenty missions ago for McCall.

  He watched the shifting pattern of students in the school yard and the color bled into black-and-white in his mind. He remembered six football jocks coming to beat the crap out of him in the pouring rain in that same school yard.

  Across the street, Scott stole the basketball from his opponent, started dribbling down the court. McCall watched him twist, fake, shoot. This time the ball swooshed through the basket. McCall gave him a thumbs-up sign. Not that Scott had any idea that his father was sitting across the street at a Starbucks watching him.

  * * *

  Elena stepped out of a cab in front of the Alla Bulyanskaya Gallery at 10, Krymsky Val, part of the Central House of Artists. She and Control had parted company four blocks east. Snow was still falling. Elegantly dressed men and women, most of them young, were moving inside the modern building. Elena joined them.

  Inside, the art patrons were guided to the Alla Bulyanskaya Gallery, which consisted of seven large rooms of paintings and sculptures. Waiters in tuxedos passed among the guests with silver trays of champagne. Waitresses in black silk blouses and very long black skirts handed out hors d’oeuvres. A girl who looked like an older Lady Gaga with spiky blond hair and a revealing red gown was playing a harp on a raised platform. Elena adjusted her glasses as she took a proffered glass of champagne from one of the waiters and moved among the crush of people.

  * * *

  In his black panel truck in the Park Iskusstv across the street from the gallery, parked just to one side of the Yakov Sverdlov monument, Control sat hunched over a monitor nestled amid sophisticated electronic equipment. The tiny digital camera in Elena’s glasses was fitted into the top of the frames connecting the lenses. The moving images Control was receiving were pretty good, even if the field of vision was narrow. Control looked for his agent Paul Masters in the crowd. Couldn’t see him yet.

  Control was nervous. He hadn’t sat in a truck like this, actually controlling an agent in the field, in twelve years. His driver, a local Company operative named Sergei, stayed behind the wheel, ready to move the truck if necessary. Behind Control was Mickey Kostmayer, a boyish-looking Company agent in his late twenties, dressed in a tux. Kostmayer had brown hair and pale green eyes that could look a little crazy at times. Control could feel his bottled up energy like a palpable force.

  “I can go in,” Kostmayer said. “I don’t need an invitation.”

  “Give her some space,” Control said.

  * * *

  In the Alla Bulyanskaya Gallery, Elena was also looking for agent Paul Masters. She spotted him in a corner, talking animatedly to a couple of Russian matriarchs who looked as if they’d raised Stalin. Masters would be tough to miss. He was a bear of a man, wearing a black tux as if it were a tent he’d wrapped around himself. There was a glass of champagne in his big fist. He glanced across the crowd as one of the matriarchs shook her head vigorously to dispute what he’d been saying about the Wassily Kandinsky painting they were looking at. It was called “Moonrise.” Masters’s eyes locked for a split second on Elena, then he turned back to the painting with a dismissive gesture, commenting that the painting looked like a black angry cloud of a man with fists raised over the tiny figures of a man and a woman standing on a lake that had iced over and that the moon was nowhere to be seen. The matriarchs looked mildly scandalized.

  A tall, imposing Chechen, in his late forties, pushed through the crowd, shaking hands, smiling, courteous, dressed in a tuxedo. This was Alexei Berezovsky, a onetime FTB agent, now a patron of the arts, owner of three of the trendiest nightclubs in Moscow, two more in Saint Petersburg. He looked powerful, like an aging athlete. Elena saw him coming.

  “Got him,” she murmured, for Control. “Alexei Berezovsky, very elegant, a reptile in a tux. He’s looking for me.”

  Berezovsky’s hair was dark, not a streak of gray anywhere. Several rings sparkled on his fingers. His face was handsome, but the eyes were glacial. He exuded strength and power and a raw sexual energy. Elena watched him work the room, using that energy, that charm, just the way he’d used it on her. She hadn’t slept with him—they’d only met for drinks three times—but she’d made sure the sexual promise was there between them. He finally spotted her. Excused himself from a young couple and crossed the busy room to her. He smiled and took her hands.

  “Elena! You came!”

  “I promised I would.”

  “Yes, but not everyone keeps their promises, do they?” His voice was almost melodic. “Especially journalists. Are you still covering that gangster Putin?”

  “He’s a very interesting man.”

  �
��He is a criminal. And his power is waning. Your CNN bosses should have you interviewing someone with more influence on the world.”

  “Someone like you?”

  He waved off that notion as if she’d been much too flattering. “I no longer work for the government. I am now an art patron and a capitalist, but you know all of this.”

  He stepped closer to her. His eyes were on her cleavage, debating whether or not she was wearing a bra. He decided she wasn’t.

  “How late is this shindig going to go?” Elena asked.

  “At least until midnight, I am certain.”

  “I can’t stay long. I have a conference call with Atlanta in an hour. But I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  Berezovsky turned slightly. Someone in the room had caught his eye. Elena followed his gaze. A heavyset man, looking uncomfortable in a dark suit, a thin tie, big brown boots, stood unmoving amid the stream of patrons around him. He looked as though he should be on a factory floor manufacturing cars. He saw Berezovsky and immediately walked up to one of the Arsen Avetisian sculptures. It was a gold creature piggybacked on to the back of a skeletal black-suited figure with no head. Berezovsky turned back to Elena.

  “Give me five minutes. Meet me at the entranceway to the next room.”

  He walked away, acknowledging more friends and patrons, heading for the Avetisian sculpture. Elena walked through the crowd parallel with him.

  “You get all that?” she murmured.

  * * *

  In the panel truck, Control and Kostmayer watched the monitor. Their view of the party was all oblique angles through Elena’s glasses as she moved. They caught sight of Berezovsky twice, but the crowd kept swallowing him up.

  “Can’t keep track of him,” Control said. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

  Elena’s voice echoed slightly in the cramped space of the truck’s interior.

  “Don’t worry. He wants to get his hands on what’s under this dress. Well, you know, you’ve seen the goods. Can you blame him?”

  Kostmayer looked at Control.

  He cleared his throat. “Don’t ask.”

  Kostmayer said: “I don’t like this.”

  Into his mic Control said to Elena: “Just get what you’re there to get. Don’t let him put his hands on you.”

  “Might be tough to fight him off, boss.”

  “Not for you.”

  * * *

  Elena watched Berezovsky walk past the burly worker at the Arsen Avetisian sculpture. The man put something into the ex-FTB agent’s hand. Something small that caught a quick flash of light. Berezovsky slipped it into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and moved on.

  “They’ve made the exchange,” Elena murmured.

  She walked quickly through the room now. Took an iPhone out of her jewelled bag, put it to her ear, listened as if someone was talking to her, then shut it off and dropped it back into her bag with a sigh of exasperation. She made sure that Berezovsky saw her doing it. She caught up with him at the entrance to the next gallery room.

  “My conference call got moved up. I’m going to have to leave, Alexei.”

  “Not yet. Please come with me. There’s something special I want to show you.”

  He took her arm and guided her into the second gallery room.

  Paul Masters extricated himself from the clutches of the two Russian matriarchs and followed them.

  * * *

  On the monitor in the panel truck, Control could see the second gallery room was even more crowded than the first one. Then Elena’s glasses showed her walking down a corridor, away from the patrons and the music and the noise of the party. Elena looked once over her shoulder. Kostmayer leaned in past Control, his gaze intent on the monitor.

  “Masters should be following her.”

  “He’s there somewhere. Just not in her line of vision.”

  “Ask her if she can see him. Tell her to nod her head slightly.”

  Control spoke into the mic: “Elena, if you can see Masters, nod your head.”

  There was no response. The camera did not bob up and down.

  “Elena, if you can still hear me, nod,” Control said.

  There was no nod from the camera. Kostmayer fiddled with some levers.

  “We’ve lost contact.”

  “She may have taken the earpiece out,” Control said.

  “Why the hell would she do that?”

  “She has to make split-second decisions. She’s in the field.”

  “Yeah, well, I could do with some champagne and culture,” Kostmayer said. “I’m going in.”

  “Just observe,” Control warned him. “Take no action. She has the situation under control. Tell me what you see.”

  Kostmayer nodded, fitted an earpiece into his ear, and climbed out of the panel truck.

  * * *

  In the second gallery room, Masters moved to the short corridor down which Berezovsky and Elena had disappeared. A young man in a dark suit, looking a little drunk, stumbled into him and murmured an apology. Masters steadied him.

  “Might be time to get some fresh air there, son,” Masters told him in Russian.

  Another young man stepped up to Masters’s left side and plunged a long stiletto through Masters’s ribs, right into his heart. Masters staggered and the first man held him up. They helped Masters down the corridor as if he were ill and turned a corner out of sight.

  Elena did not see this. Berezovsky led her to a door at the end of the corridor. He unlocked and opened it.

  “This is my sanctuary here at the gallery,” he said.

  Elena stepped into a small wood-paneled office. There were heavy drapes at a window. A closet door was to Elena’s right and some crates of paintings stacked up against the wall on her left. The furniture consisted of a big desk, an armchair, a desk chair. Over the desk was a large oil painting of a naked girl, sitting with her back to the artist, with what looked like translucent white flowers glowing across her back and behind. She had Titian-colored hair. Her face was not visible. Berezovsky gestured to the painting like she was the Mona Lisa’s sister.

  “It is a Bruni, from my private collection,” he said. “They wanted me to hang it for the exhibition tonight, but some treasures are not for the public.”

  He closed the office door.

  And locked it.

  He took Elena’s black jewelled bag and dropped it onto the armchair. Gently he took off her glasses and tossed them onto the desk.

  “Your eyes are too beautiful to hide.”

  Elena thought, for a second, of Control sitting at his monitor in the panel truck watching a still view of the office ceiling.

  Berezovsky took off his tuxedo jacket and hung it carefully over the back of the armchair. Then he pulled Elena to him and kissed her. She yielded to him. Their tongues explored each other’s mouths. He squeezed her right breast, pulled up her dress, and put his hand down her panties, grabbing her ass. She groped his crotch. They kept kissing, hungry for each other. He removed his hand from her ass as they came up for air.

  Then he backhanded her.

  A trickle of blood seeped from where one of his rings had cut her cheek. Before she could do more than gasp, he grabbed her shoulders again, gripping her tightly. His voice was almost guttural now.

  “You really thought you could fool me, you little cunt? You thought I wouldn’t check up on you?”

  Elena let fear show in her eyes, but also her lust, as if she was caught up in the sexual violence between them.

  “What are you talking about, Alexei? I’m a reporter for CNN. You know that. Let me make a call to my boss in Atlanta, he’ll confirm it.”

  “You mean to your Control?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know who you think I am, but you’re wrong, Alexei. My name is Elena Petrov. I’m here in Moscow for CNN to interview your president. What is going on?”

  He let go of her shoulders and shoved his index fingers into both of her ears. She recoiled.

&nb
sp; “What are you doing? There’s nothing in my ears.”

  She put her hand up to her right ear, as if reflexively, and removed the long, thin needle from her hair. She concealed it in her right hand. She moved up close to Berezovsky, her eyes shining, as if this was turning her on.

  “You want it rough, Alexei. I like it rough. But let me take my dress off. It’s a thousand dollars’ worth of reporting and I don’t want it ripped.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You can slap me. But do it with the palm of your hand. You cut my cheek with one of your rings.”

  He slapped her face. Hard. Tears sprang to her eyes. She smiled and her breath came out in short pants, like she was running.

  “That’s good. Do it again.”

  He slapped her face again. She reached up and back, undoing the clasp at the top of her dress, unzipping it. The dress slipped off to the floor. Berezovsky looked down at her breasts. As she knew he would. All she needed was a second. Robert McCall had taught her that. Divert your enemy’s attention for just a second. If you know what you’re doing, that’s all the time you’ll need.

  She stabbed the pin into the left side of Berezovsky’s neck. His body stiffened, then shuddered. The paralysis was not exactly instantaneous, but it worked within a two-to-three-second time frame. Before he could even register what she’d done, Berezovsky couldn’t move. She stepped back and kicked his legs out from under him. He toppled over onto the thick carpet. Elena put her dress back on, managing to zip it up. Berezovsky, as if held by invisible bonds, stared up at her with wide eyes. She picked up his discarded tuxedo jacket, reached into his pocket, and came out with a silver flash drive. She dropped it into her bag.

  “That audio bug you were looking for in my ear?” she said. “I took it out. Didn’t want one of your clumsy caresses to find it.”

  She crossed to the closet door and opened it. There was a dark suit hung up in there, a couple of shirts, a full-length dark wool coat. Some small paintings were stacked along one wall. Elena picked Berezovsky up by the shoulders and dragged him inside the closet. He wasn’t as heavy as she had feared.

  “The paralysis will last at least twelve hours. You’ll be nauseous, so try not to throw up on your shoes. That would be very unpleasant for you.”