She dropped him into the closet, walked to the armchair, took out the Beretta 21 Bobcat from her jewelled bag, walked back, and pointed it at his head. His eyes were calm now as he looked up at her. The only thing he could move were his eyelids.
“I probably should kill you,” Elena said. “But I got what I came for. If our paths ever cross again, and I mean if we happen to find ourselves on opposite sides of a street in some foreign city, I will kill you. Because you put your hands on me. You think of yourself as an art lover and a man of culture. You know what I see? A filthy pig stinking of Russian tobacco and gin with a cock the size of a little boy’s.”
His eyes flared.
She kicked him in the balls.
If he could have moved, he would have folded into himself. Then she kicked him in the head, her high heel smashing his temple. He slumped over, unconscious.
Elena closed the closet door. She grabbed her glasses from the desk, but he’d broken them. She dropped them into her bag. There was a scuff of sound from outside. Someone was at the door. She quickly unlocked it. A uniformed security officer stood there, a ring of keys in his hand.
“Sorry, looking for the bathroom,” Elena said in Russian, and pushed out of the office past him.
* * *
Kostmayer couldn’t find Elena in any of the gallery rooms. He headed toward the back of the gallery to the loading dock. It was in shadows. Nothing moved. Then he found Masters’s body dumped behind some large, wrapped-up sculptures, ready for the next exhibition. He knelt and felt for a pulse at the big man’s throat. There wasn’t one.
“Masters is dead,” Kostmayer said for Control’s ears. “Elena’s been compromised.”
* * *
The bell at the high school rang. The kids started to empty out of the school yard. McCall watched Scott heading across the concrete with his friends. He was talking animatedly to the tall black kid. Both of them laughed. His server, whose nameplate said DANA, brought McCall another cup of Sumatra Asia/Pacific extra-bold blend.
“Three cups today,” she said. “You must have a lot to think about.”
“I knew they’d come for me,” he said.
“Who would come for you?”
“The football jocks. They waited for me in that school yard. In the pouring rain. I wanted to run away. I was scared.”
“Did you run away?”
“No.”
Dana looked over at the school yard. The last stragglers disappeared into the school building.
“You went to that high school?”
“A long time ago.”
“And some jocks beat you up in the school yard?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following your story.”
McCall shook his head. “No story. Just some memories,” he said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She smiled and nodded and moved to another table to pick up discarded cups and plates.
McCall looked at the doorway through which the kids had disappeared. He felt a sudden overwhelming sadness at all of the pickup basketball games he had missed with his son.
* * *
Elena walked quickly through the crowded gallery rooms, liberating a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. She looked for Masters but didn’t see him. Up on her small podium, the harpist started another haunting melody. No one took any notice of Elena. She reached the main entrance.
Outside, the two ex-FTB officers who’d murdered Masters were waiting for her. She recognized them immediately from the party. She knew who they were. There was no way for her to cross the street into Park Iskusstv. And she didn’t dare wait for Control or Kostmayer in the crowd outside the gallery. If the thugs moved to either side of her, she was dead.
Plan B.
Elena walked quickly down the side street to where the Lada Kalina Sport car was parked. She wished now her backup vehicle was not a distinctive canary yellow, but that was what had been delivered. She had the keys to the car in her bag. She unlocked it, without looking back, slid in, dropped her jewelled bag on the passenger seat, fired up the vehicle, and took off.
In the rearview mirror she saw the two ex-FTB agents running back to the front of the gallery.
What she didn’t see was the black Gaz-3102 Volga that pulled out after her.
Elena accelerated into the traffic on the Ul. Kymskiy Val. She reached into her bag and closed her fingers over the silver flash drive. She had no idea what was on it. She didn’t need to know. All she had to do was deliver it to Control.
She thought back over her evening at the art gallery.
Robert McCall would have been proud of her.
CHAPTER 3
The blast hit the car like a huge fist, smashing out the driver’s side window. The Lada swerved across the narrow, cobbled street just off Tverskoy Boulevard. Little daggers of glass spit into the left side of Elena’s face. She felt the wave of heat like someone had opened an oven door. She saw everything happen in exquisite slow-motion: she avoided hitting a spar of metal on the edge of the street with a glassed ad on it for Guerlain Shalimar and a pink perfume bottle hiding the curves of a naked young woman. There was a big black-and-white cow on the sidewalk. She hit that, sending the back of the sculpture through the window of a store with KOOEHH, SOUVENIRS, VODKA AND CAVIAR FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE painted over the doorway. Rows of Russian nesting dolls with painted caricatures on them scattered: Mick Jagger, Putin, Obama, Princess Diana, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stalin pointing an accusing finger at her. All of them splintered and shattered along with the glass in the window.
Two couples had been walking out of a grocery store on the corner. The explosion hurled them to the ground. The woman rolled into a fetal position. The man had lost an arm. A busker in a long black coat had most of his face peeled off, strips of blood erupting up his torso. An orange tabby cat sitting on the top of his amplifier was fried. The sound of the explosion roared in her ears like a long, distorted echo, playing at the wrong speed.
Elena bounced up onto the sidewalk. A low wall was covered in Russian graffiti, the words WWW.ROSTSPLONT.RU scrawled above some angry swirls of color. She swerved away from it.
The Company safe house had been on the second floor of a pink apartment building. It was the only apartment that had a terrace. The wrought-iron railing that had been around it was now mangled in the center of the street. A Vaz 2107 had swerved to avoid it, but had struck it. An old Mercedes-Benz hit the back of the Vaz and sent it flying into tables along the side of the Starbucks on the opposite corner. Couples threw themselves to the ground or scrambled away, none of them badly hurt except one young woman cut by flying glass.
Elena looked ahead. Beyond the wrecked souvenir store was the huge wooden figure of a man riding on a unicycle, glasses on the painted face, wearing a deerstalker cap, white shirt and red tie, riding britches, raising a huge white cup to his lips. He’d balanced there for years—but tonight he came toppling down, right across the hood of Elena’s Lada. The white cup smashed through the windshield, as if the unicyclist were demanding she take a sip. Shaking, Elena leaned forward, thrusting the white cup out of the windshield. The wooden figure fell off the car as she swerved again, jumping back up onto the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding the second couple outside the grocery store picking themselves up from the ground. The man appeared unhurt. Blood streamed down his girlfriend’s face.
It all happened in six seconds of absolute clarity.
Elena jumped back down into the street just as a second explosion ripped through what had been her destination. More glass exploded out into the narrow street. Two more vehicles skidded to a halt. A heavy Volvo smashed into the old Mercedes, sending it into the window of a hat shop. A florid Russian climbed out of the Volvo, ran over to the Mercedes, and dragged out a screaming woman, stumbling away with her before the Mercedes went up in a ball of flame.
And then Elena was out of the chaos. She turned right onto the main
boulevard. She passed the BECTTA building with its large art designs in the bright windows. To her left she noted the Vitek sign high on a building across the square, white against a blue background. Beside it was a tall building lit up in multicolors, some kind of a design. She couldn’t make out what it was. Her mind was focusing on small, meaningless details, trying to cope with the outrage and violence she had narrowly escaped.
They’d known she would go to The Company safe house. They had timed it almost perfectly. Obviously something had happened to put the timing off by a few seconds. She remembered why. She’d had to brake and stop while a small parade of students had crossed in the middle of Bolshaya Bronnaya Street. It looked as if they’d come from some sort of protest. It had delayed her.
And saved her life.
Elena drove down a dark side street, pulled over to the curb, and parked. She sat still for a few moments, shaking the glass slivers out of her hair. She brushed them off her dress. She knocked out the rest of the glass shards in the driver’s side window with the butt of her gun. There was nothing she could do about the windshield. Now there was a round, neat hole where the wooden figure’s white cup had smashed through. The rest of the glass had not starred. Thank God.
Her left side burned. She saw that her left arm was red, seared in the heat. She ached as if someone had taken a hammer to her ribs. Her eyes were puffy and there was a trickle of blood from just under her right eye. She adjusted the rearview mirror and inspected the damage. Her face was imbedded with tiny glowing jewels of glass. Gingerly she picked each one of them out of her skin, wincing at the pinpricks of pain.
She had been very lucky.
She could hear the ambulance and police sirens in the distance, coming closer, sonorous sounds, not like the familiar wails or whoop whoops of fire engines and police cars back home. She couldn’t stay still. There would be a contingent plan in place to kill her. It would already be activated. She needed to get some medical supplies and bandages. She needed the firepower and ammo that had been waiting for her at the safe house, along with a new passport and ID papers.
But she knew where to go. Thanks to something Robert McCall had once told her. Pillow talk on a soft, violet night when they couldn’t sleep after they’d made love. He’d told her things. Unusual for him. But he’d wanted to talk. As if there had been no one to listen to him for a very long time.
Elena readjusted the rearview mirror, expecting to see headlights behind her. There were none. But she could hear the ambulance and the cop cars arrive at the scene of the explosion two streets away. She pulled out of the parking spot, grateful that the back window was still intact. She wouldn’t be able to travel far like this without attracting attention, but she couldn’t just abandon the Lada. She could try to hot-wire a car in the street, but that was risky: car alarms, a call to the police reporting a stolen vehicle. She didn’t have too far to travel. No, she would risk driving the Lada a few miles outside of Moscow. There was no other choice.
She got onto the artery heading into the Moscow suburbs. She kept looking in the rearview mirror, but it was tough to see if she was being followed. Just headlights in a shifting pattern. No one car appeared to stay behind her. She gripped the wheel tightly, trying to ignore the burning in her left arm and leg. She saw the explosion in the safe house in her mind, erupting across the narrow street, how the harshness of the light had lingered on her retina. It triggered a memory within her.
Robert McCall was standing at a window in a Serbian hotel room, six years before, seeing explosions light up the night sky, the entire building shaking slightly with each one. He was dressed in camo wear. His eyes showed fatigue and something deeper. He had just been standing there, unmoving, looking out into the night. Elena had got up from the bed and walked over to him. She remembered her body glowed in the reflection of the window, spattered with rain.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Just reliving some old memories,” McCall said.
“Good ones?”
“Ones I can’t get rid of.”
He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. Elena sighed.
“Bad for you.”
“I like to think of myself as the keeper of the flame,” McCall said dryly.
She took the cigarette from him, inhaled it deeply, blew out the smoke, and handed it back. She laughed again, but now it had a harsh sound.
“I’m worried about your lungs and you’re about to go into a firefight. How big a prize is Jancvic?”
“It depends on what The Company does with him. He’s a chess piece. They’ll use his extraction to their advantage, or they’ll give him back for one of ours.”
“So he doesn’t matter,” she said flatly.
“Everyone matters,” McCall said, “but no one cares.”
“You do.”
“I do the work that’s required. It’s a job.”
“I know better,” she said softly.
McCall stubbed out the cigarette. A moment later there was a rap on the door.
“You could hear him before he knocked?”
“Yes.”
Kostmayer’s voice was muffled: “It’s time, McCall.”
McCall raised his voice and said, “Give me a minute.”
Elena moved into his arms. She was trembling.
“Isn’t this where you tell me the lives of two people in this war don’t amount to a hill of peas?”
McCall smiled. “Beans. Bogart was better looking, and he could go home to Lauren Bacall. Stay in this room until morning. There’s a loaded gun on top of the bureau. Use it if you have to. Don’t use it if you don’t.”
“You’ll come back.”
“Not here. If I survive the night, I go to a safe house. Control will have another job for me.”
“But he won’t be there,” she said bitterly. “He wouldn’t put his life on the line. Does this Control of yours have a name?”
“Probably,” McCall said ironically, “but I wouldn’t be telling it to a journalist. Report what happens. Don’t judge it. You’ll stay alive that way.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Probably not. Lock the door behind me.”
He kissed her gently on the lips, then picked up a sports bag filled with two M16 rifles, grenades, and ammo and walked to the door. Elena walked naked to the bureau and picked up the loaded gun and aimed it. If McCall felt the barrel on his back, he didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t pause. He opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through and closed it. Elena walked to the door, opened it a crack. Tears streamed down her face. She could see McCall and that young turk—what was his name again? Mickey something … Kostmayer, that was it—walking down the shabby, dimly lit hotel corridor. Their voices echoed faintly to her.
“We’ll get her out of the red zone tomorrow morning,” Kostmayer said.
“She’s a reporter. CNN’s new poster girl. She won’t like it.”
“Do you care?”
“Only that she’s safe.”
They reached the threadbare stairs and descended them.
Elena closed the door.
“Fuck you, McCall,” she said, and threw the gun onto the rumpled bed.
Now, as she drove toward the Russian park with the wind howling through the jagged glass openings, she wondered if that was the moment she had decided to change her life. Had she done it to serve a greater purpose? Or to make sure Robert McCall would never walk out on her again? She had not seen him for a year after that extraction in Serbia. When she had, she was a new agent in The Company, much to his horror, and they didn’t speak after that for another year. But then there’d been a mission in Vienna. She’d been his backup.
And things between them had changed.
Their feelings for each other had taken over.
She turned off the boulevard onto a paved road that went through a kind of wasteland. It was desolate and somehow post-apocalyptic. Death hung in the air, seeping up out of the broke
n concrete, along the rusting barbed wire coiled like glistening snakes in the fractured moonlight, on stunted trees and blackened walls and streets that led nowhere. Her eyes were constantly flicking up to the rearview mirror. There were no headlights behind her, just the distant blur of the lights on the faraway boulevard. If she remembered the Google map Robert had shown her, the park was up ahead about five miles.
The road twisted and turned through the no-man’s-land and then she saw the first disaster, hanging in the air ahead of her like a wounded bird. It looked as if it had been snared on power lines that had buckled. It just hung there, almost gracefully, but in danger of tipping over at any moment and crashing the rest of the way down to the ground. The main rotor blades were clearly visible. It was a blue Mi-38 helicopter. The rear tail and rotor had been sheared off. Data flashed through her mind, like she was Robocop, like it always did. Mi-38, max speed 320 km/h, cruising speed 290 km/h, operating ceiling at 5900 meters, hover ceiling at 3200 meters, GT engines, aircrew 2, passengers 30. She wondered if it had ever flown, or if it had been dragged out of some junkyard, driven on a flatbed to the park, hoisted up with a crane, and delicately placed on the fake power lines. A steel ladder glittered from the ground up to the hanging chopper.
Elena turned a steep right and then the road straightened out to a pair of gates closing off the park. Except they weren’t closed. One was open, beckoning her.
She drove through.
On her right was the eerie sight of the crashed airliner. This one was real. She remembered the details. It was a Douglas C-47-DL operated by Aeroflot. On April 13, 1947, the plane was on its way to Khatanga Airport in Russia when it made a forced landing after the failure of engine one. All passengers survived, but nine died while desperately searching for help in the bleak, snow-laden tundra. The remaining twenty-eight passengers were rescued after twenty days. The pieces of the transport were stored in a warehouse in Rostov and then sixty years later shipped to the park over the period of a week and carefully laid out to look as if it had just that moment crash-landed and split apart. Its carcass gleamed and chilled in the frigid air. Elena kept expecting to see some flash of movement, a survivor crawling out of the wreckage toward the sound of her car. But if anything moved, it was only rats who had infested the twisted fuselage.
The Equalizer Page 3
