The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  Jovan Durković stood beside the stool in the other corner of the cage. He was completely still. His entire focus, his body, his mind, his soul, were on the brute in the other corner. His breathing was measured. His hands were held loosely at his side. His bullet wound was just a raw scar. He had forgotten about it.

  He just waited.

  Both men were dressed in jeans. Both were bare-chested. Both were in bare feet.

  The referee, a small Serbian man in a rumpled black suit, held up a white handkerchief.

  Both of the fighters took two steps forward and stopped.

  There were no cautions, no instructions.

  The crowd was already going wild in anticipation. The betting was fierce. Berezovsky saw fistfuls of money changing hands. He wondered how many were betting on the bigger, stronger man? His money would always be on his assassin, if he was a betting man. And he was. But not with his own money.

  The referee dropped the handkerchief. It fell in Berezovsky’s mind in slow motion, as though he were watching a movie. It hit the ground and the two fighters simply rushed each other. There was no circling, no weaving and jabbing, no determining the opponent’s weaknesses.

  They went in swinging their fists.

  The only rule in the actual cage fight: no kicks. It was a boxing match. Two men, stripped of all weapons, fighting with raw courage and savage strength.

  To the death.

  The brute got in the first punches, hard ones to Durković’s ribs and some punishing blows to his face. He did not even flinch. He backed away, came forward, and went right for the brute’s face. The blows hurt him. Berezovsky could tell that. He was winded already and stumbling a little.

  Durković hit his opponent again in the face, a vicious right, that knocked several teeth out. They flew into the dirt. The big man came back, dodged under a left hook, and slammed a fist into Durković’s right eye. The sheer force of it staggered him. The big man got in two more blows to Durković’s solar plexus, sending him back.

  The referee leaned down and picked up the handkerchief. He waved it in the air. Both fighters saw the flash of white. Both backed off. The rounds were very short. Berezovsky glanced down at his Rolex. Hadn’t even been a minute. But the punishment the two fighters had taken would have amounted to several rounds in a Vegas casino.

  The grace time was also short. Berezovsky counted thirty seconds. Then the small ref waved the white handkerchief, dirty now and actually streaked with blood where one of the fighters had dripped down on it, as if to catch their attention. Then he made a big display of dropping it to the ground again.

  The crowd went wild, shouting and screaming encouragement to whomever they were rooting for. Berezovsky could tell most of them were for Durković. He was the hometown boy.

  The two fighters just ran forward and wailed on each other. The blows were vicious and barely blocked. The big man swung a fist into Durković’s genitals. He staggered for a moment, and his head snapped up, as if that low blow had actually pissed him off. The pain would have to have been excruciating.

  It only made Durković pause.

  But long enough for the big man to swing another fist at the right side of Durković’s face. The force of it spun him around. Berezovsky could see, with a start of alarm, that Durković’s right eye was almost entirely closed.

  You can’t block punches if you can’t see where they’re coming from.

  Durković compensated, turning more sideways on to the brute, who came in again, throwing more punches. Durković blocked most of them. He took a right on the chin that would have sent another opponent to his knees.

  Durković shook it off.

  And then he moved forward, head down, as if he wanted to finish this now.

  The referee picked up the soiled white handkerchief, held it high, but Berezovsky didn’t think he was going to drop it again.

  Durković slammed a series of punches into the brute’s solar plexus. They were expertly placed. If the crowd hadn’t been so zealous, Berezovsky could almost imagine hearing the big man’s ribs crack and split apart. Durković followed these blows with punches to the man’s face. The big man punched back, but his attack had no effect whatsoever.

  Durković rained more blows in on the brute, very fast, like a machine.

  The crowd was on its feet now, yelling for blood.

  Durković swung his fist at the big man’s face, smashing his nose, shoving the splinters of bone up into the brute’s brain.

  Berezovsky thought he was probably dead before he crashed to the dirt floor.

  The referee raised up the white handkerchief as high as he could.

  The sign of a victor.

  Durković turned slowly, looking around at the rabid crowd. There was no expression on his face. And then Berezovsky saw something he had never thought he would ever see from this man.

  He smiled.

  He acknowledged the crowd.

  Berezovsky knew that Durković had grown up with these people. They had been his neighbors and drinking buddies. Maybe he’d fucked some of the women, although it was difficult for Berezovsky to think of his assassin in bed with any of them. But then, perhaps in those moments he was a different person.

  Two heavyset villagers came forward and carried the big man’s body out of the cage. Another two picked up the two wooden stools. The referee didn’t walk to Durković and raise his arm in triumph. He just turned once in a circle, holding up the fingers of both hands.

  Ten.

  Berezovsky took that to mean this was Durković’s tenth victory.

  In his cage fighting career?

  Or just that year?

  And once the fight was over, everything happened very quickly. The crowd moved away from the stands. Men started breaking down the steel cage and the stands.

  Twenty minutes, Berezovsky thought. That’s what Durković had told him. He heard no telltale policija sirens, but obviously the local populace wanted all evidence of the death struggle erased as quickly as possible.

  As they erased the brutality of it from their minds.

  It was in moments like this that Berezovsky despaired of the human race.

  The crowd was streaming down the country road, bathed in light, fractured by clouds sailing over the pale moon. Durković walked away, a solitary figure. None of the spectators would ever have approached him in the seconds after a fight. Durković walked to an old Fiat parked in the back area of the ruined Orthodox church. He unlocked the trunk, took out a towel, and wiped the blood from his face. He pulled off his shirt, wringing wet, and put on a dark gray Patriots football sweatshirt. Berezovsky doubted Durković had ever been to a Patriots game and wouldn’t know Tom Brady if he fell over him, but Berezovsky could allow his assassin some Western quirks.

  Berezovsky headed for Durković’s car, but some of the crowd reached him first. Now they could approach their hero. They clapped him on the back and shook his hand. Two young women hugged him. He allowed himself to be pulled through the back area of the church toward the glowing main street.

  Berezovsky trailed behind them, not wanting to spoil his assassin’s special moment. The main street was a quarter of a mile from the abandoned church. The Chechen turned and looked behind him. The steel cage was already gone. The last of the stands were being pulled apart and packed into the backs of old pickup trucks. In another five minutes there would be no sign of a death match except for the blood in the dirt.

  And no policija would be looking for that.

  By the time Berezovsky reached a tavern in the center of the village Durković was already inside. Berezovsky waited for him in his rented Hyundai Santa Fe 4x4 parked across the street. A few minutes later Durković exited the tavern with a tankard of beer in his hand. The man’s right eye was still virtually closed. He walked to the passenger door of the Hyundai, opened it, and slid inside.

  Berezovsky had an iPad open on the little shelf between the seats.

  “How much is the prize money?” he asked.


  “Five hundred dollars,” Durković said.

  He was turning something small over in his fingers. Berezovsky couldn’t see what it was, but it caught the moonlight streaming through the windshield.

  It unnerved him a little.

  “Why do you do it? When you are paid more than a million dollars a job?”

  “I grew up in this town. I have always been a champion. Since I was fifteen years old. These are my friends. My neighbors. My roots are here.”

  “Did you know the man you killed tonight?”

  “He was the butcher in Zhajevo, a nearby village. I remember him. He had a nasty temper. I once saw him strike a child for touching a piece of ham.”

  Durković raised his hand.

  Now Berezovsky saw what was in it.

  A razor blade.

  Berezovsky involuntarily put a hand up to his throat.

  Durković put the razor blade up to where his right eye was closed and slit the skin above it. Blood spurted down the side of his face. Berezovsky was repulsed, but tried not to show it. Durković took out a new handkerchief from his jeans pocket and wiped the blood away. More of it was coming, but he ignored it. His eye was open now. Berezovsky knew the pain must be excruciating, but the man did not even flinch.

  The Chechen started to wonder if his assassin was human at all.

  “I have sent a blueprint to your iPhone. It was on a flash drive that was stolen from me, but I was able to obtain a second copy. And not easily. You will commit this blueprint to memory. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “After that you will delete the blueprint.” Berezovsky tapped more buttons on the iPad, scrolled down, then turned it around so that Durković could see a photograph on the LED screen.

  “This is your target.”

  Durković stared at it and for the first time in their relationship Berezovsky thought he saw a shadow of doubt come into the man’s eyes.

  “The price for the job would be twenty million,” he said.

  “That is fine. The group who have ordered this assassination are prepared to pay a great deal for its execution.”

  “Where?” Durković asked.

  Berezovsky typed on the virtual keypad and turned the iPad around again.

  The location picture was on the screen.

  Durković shook his head. “Not possible. They will have extra protection around him. There is no way I could get close enough, not in any disguise, not in any other identity.”

  “You are a sniper. You don’t need to be close. We have a way to get you beyond the security perimeter. No one will know how you entered or left the area. You will be a ghost.”

  Durković wiped more of the blood off his face. It had stopped gushing from the open gash above his right eye, but still trickled a needle of red.

  “When is the conference?”

  “In four days.”

  Durković nodded and opened the passenger door.

  “Congratulations on your victory tonight.”

  Durković looked back at Berezovsky. He could see the assassin weighing the irony in the words. Berezovsky thought perhaps he had overstepped his boundaries. He remembered the punishing blows Durković had delivered to his opponent’s solar plexus, breaking God knows how many ribs before he killed him.

  Durković did not respond. He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked back to the tavern. He was intercepted by some young men in the crowd who hugged him like he was a rock star or a soccer icon.

  He was swept inside.

  Berezovsky shuddered involuntarily.

  The man scared the shit out of him.

  He started the Hyundai and drove down the main street of the Serbian village back toward Novi Sad.

  * * *

  McCall came back from his break at Bentleys to find Brahms sitting at the bar. The stools on either side of him were empty, but the place was still jumping. McCall put on his black Bentleys apron. He picked up a couple of orders the servers had left and started mixing drinks. Laddie was at the other end of the bar serving customers.

  Brahms shook his head. “Robert McCall the bartender. I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “The name’s Maclain,” McCall warned. He glanced around, but their conversation was a quiet oasis in the overall tsunami of sound. “Take a look at the booth behind you at the window. Five young women.”

  Brahms turned around and looked. Karen and her friends had long since finished their meals, but they were having yet another round of drinks. They looked happy and relaxed.

  Brahms shrugged. “So they’re beautiful. Especially that redhead. I have enough trouble keeping my mind off Mary since you told me all she’d have on in bed is her Diane von Furstenberg glasses.”

  “Karen Armstrong, the tall blond at the end, is being stalked,” McCall said. “She took a picture of the guy and showed it to me. I pretended to drop her cell phone and sent the picture to my iPhone.”

  Brahms looked impressed. “How’d you learn to do that?”

  “Time on my hands. His name is Jeff Carlson. This is his picture.”

  McCall took out his iPhone, scrolled down, and showed Brahms the LED screen. “I’m going to send it to your cell. You do have a smartphone?”

  “I run an electronics store, McCall.”

  “Call me Bobby.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me? Okay. I have an iPhone. I also have a toaster that pops, an electric toothbrush, and a seventy-inch TV screen. Hilda dragged me into the twenty-first century. I’ll transfer the picture. Give me your iPhone.”

  McCall gave it to him. Brahms’s fingers were a blur on the keys. McCall put several cocktails onto a tray, which was immediately whisked away by Gina, her eyes as soulful as ever. McCall set a whiskey sour down in front of Brahms.

  Brahms smiled. “You remember what I drink.”

  “Some things don’t change. Can you get your hands on a facial recognition program?”

  “Already got one loaded onto my computer.”

  “It has to be state-of-the-art.”

  “It’s a prototype. If Homeland Security raids my store, I’ll need a get-out-of-jail-free card.” McCall nodded, glanced at the next order, and started mixing the drinks. Brahms shrugged. “Never know when that kind of software might come in handy.”

  “Or when Control will walk into your electronics store with a problem?”

  “Sure. But he’d send someone. I haven’t seen God in years.”

  McCall wrote something on the back of a Bentleys cocktail napkin and handed it to him.

  “This is Karen Armstrong’s address. Kostmayer went over there this afternoon. There’s a security camera outside her apartment building, shooting right down at the entrance door. Sometimes there’s a uniformed doorman standing outside, sometimes not. Do you have a jacket that says ‘Manhattan Electronics’ on it?”

  “Hilda had them custom made. Mary and I refuse to wear them.”

  “Wear your jacket tonight. Go to Karen’s apartment building. That front security camera is malfunctioning. If the doorman questions you, tell him the owner of the building is an old friend. He called you and asked you to fix the camera. Put Carlson’s face recognition into it. Then send that signal to my iPhone. If Carlson steps up to that apartment building, I want my phone to beep. It has to be a special sound, one that I know only means that one thing. Can you do it?”

  “No one else could,” Brahms muttered.

  But he took McCall’s iPhone and slipped it into the pocket of his sport coat, which was loud enough to whistle for a cab. He looked back over at Karen Armstrong, who was laughing at something one of her friends had said.

  “She doesn’t look very scared to me.”

  “She’s got her father’s gun in her purse. She feels safe.”

  “She’s a good friend of yours?”

  “I only know her here at Bentleys. Serving her drinks.”

  “Then why should you care?”

  “Because there’s no one else to.”


  “Does she know she’s got a guardian angel?”

  “She doesn’t need to. Will you do it, or not?”

  “Like I’m going to refuse you?” He looked back at McCall. “You been listening in on our Chechen gangsters?”

  “Got a little busy.”

  Mickey Kostmayer walked up to the bar. McCall looked through the big front window. A yellow cab was idling outside. Kostmayer smiled fondly at Brahms.

  “So McCall dragged you out of the woodwork?”

  Brahms did not return the smile. “I got a life, Kostmayer, unlike you. Your life belongs to The Company.” He thought about it and sighed. “Mine belongs to Hilda.” Brahms slipped off the bar stool. Looked at McCall. “I’ll take care of that matter tonight.”

  “Thanks, Brahms.”

  At that moment Amanda arrived at the bar. Her mauve hair was a little disheveled, but she’d just applied fresh black eyeliner and black lipstick. Kostmayer gave her his best high voltage smile. She ignored him, moved to Brahms, and squeezed his hand.

  “Hey, Brahms,” she said, somewhat seductively, McCall thought, but that was the way she said, “Good morning.”

  “Hey, sweetheart.”

  “Good to see you again.”

  She kissed him on the cheek, turned to McCall. “Rusty Nail, two vodka gimlets, one Greyhound.”

  And was gone. Kostmayer looked horrified at Brahms. He shrugged.

  “I see her at Brahms recitals. Lovely girl. I think she sleeps in a crypt at night.” He looked back at McCall. “You know about Danil Gershon?”

  “Control told me.”

  McCall didn’t bother to ask how Brahms knew.

  “Too bad. A good man. Even if he did like Mozart.”

  Brahms walked away. Kostmayer sat down on his vacated bar stool, dismayed.

  “Cab’s waiting outside,” he said.

  McCall mixed the drinks Amanda needed, then took off his Bentleys black apron. Signaled to Laddie that he was leaving. His shift was over.

  “See you tomorrow, Bobby!” Laddie called.

  McCall and Kostmayer walked to Bentleys front door.