The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  You don’t have friends, McCall. You know why? Because they don’t live very long once they shake your hand or crawl out of your bed.

  They took Sam out of the recovery room just before 3:00 A.M. McCall waited until he knew Sam was in a hospital room in intensive care, then went home and slept for eight hours. Kirov and Daudov didn’t know where he lived. He showered and changed clothes and had breakfast at the Cup & Saucer on Canal Street.

  McCall’s thoughts were churning. Granny had probably saved his life in Grand Central Station and he had needed his backup. Old Sam Kinney was clinging to life. Kostmayer was a target now and Brahms would be if Kirov found that bug under his favorite table and traced it back to him. But if McCall was going to help people who had nowhere else to turn, he knew he couldn’t do it alone.

  The high school was on Seventieth Street and Ninth Avenue. McCall walked up behind Katia who was waiting away from the other mothers picking up their kids. She stiffened for a moment, then relaxed when she turned to him.

  “This is Natalya’s school. It’s only six blocks from my new apartment.”

  “I know,” McCall said.

  It looked as if she wanted to say more, about the apartment, but she didn’t. She looked at the doors where teenagers were streaming out, watching for the first sign of her daughter.

  “I went back to the club last night,” she said. “No one bothered me. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Melody said she talked to you. She didn’t know your name, but she described you. She said you went into the alcove and spoke to Boris Kirov for ten minutes.”

  “I did.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him you were only going to dance.”

  “And he agreed to that?”

  “He didn’t agree or disagree. It’s understood.”

  “I didn’t see Daudov at the club last night. In fact, a few of them were missing. Kuzbec, Salam, Rachid, and they’re always there, watching us.”

  “They can’t be there every night.”

  “But it’s very unusual for all of them to be gone at the same time.”

  McCall shrugged, like these things happen. Katia put a hand on his arm, as if she was finally going to say what was in her heart, when she caught sight of Natalya coming out of the front doors of the school. The teenager looked around, spotted them, and ran toward them. McCall was searching the faces in the crowd. No one he knew. No one he didn’t want to know. Natalya reached them and gave her mother a hug. There was something different about her to McCall. The way she moved, the radiance in her big liquid eyes, the way she turned her head.

  She wasn’t afraid.

  She turned to McCall and he thought he might get a hug also.

  But then Natalya did something quite extraordinary.

  She said softly, “Thank you.”

  Katia went very still. Tears flooded her eyes as she looked at her daughter. She didn’t say anything. That would have spoiled the moment. McCall didn’t know why the teenager did not speak. But he thought he knew why she did now.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and smiled.

  Then Natalya hugged him.

  McCall put his arms around her, protectively, and looked away, into another time and place and was afraid.

  CHAPTER 27

  They’d moved her.

  They’d come to get her in the black hole where she lived twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. They’d had her in isolation and darkness for months. She’d lost track of time. It didn’t matter if it was day or night. But she’d tried to keep a calendar going inside her head. It wasn’t accurate, but she clung to it, as if it were. It was spring, she thought. The one hour she was allowed to go out of the prison block, to walk around the narrow exercise area, it had not been as cold lately, with the smell of thunder in the air. The concrete had been wet most of the time. Spring showers.

  They had allowed her twice into the front courtyard to walk to the main gates with other prisoners and look across the Neva River. On the embankment on the far side was a monument built “To the Victims of Political Repressions.” It consisted of two bronze sphinxes with women’s faces on one side. But on the side facing Kresty Prison the inmates could only see bare skulls. She saw her face in those skulls. There was a stylized window with prison bars between the sphinxes. She thought of that as her cell, except hers had no window. There was an urban legend in the prison. Originally it had 999 cells. The architect, Tomishko, in 1890, reported to Tsar Alexander III that he had completed building the great prison for him. To which the tsar had replied no, Tomishko had built it for himself. Then the architect was thrown into a secret cell, cell number one thousand, where he rotted to death.

  She was being kept in a secret cell apart from the other prisoners. She believed it was this same phantom cell where the body of Tomishko was whispered to be rotting. She had not found his bones, but the cell smelled of death.

  She repeated her name over and over to herself, so she would not lose her identity. That’s what they wanted. To reduce her to an animal with no human connections. She reached back into her memory for trips she’d taken with her parents. But they were fading. She could not see her mother’s face any longer. She could see her father’s countenance, but it was in profile, some moment when she’d disturbed him in his home office and he’d turned away from her. He’d never been particularly interested in her. He’d wanted a boy. She had been four. But that memory of him was precious, because it was one of the only ones she could grasp and hold on to. And even that remembrance was paling, growing old with her, becoming transparent to the point where it would soon vanish altogether.

  She remembered her husband, Peter, being gunned down in a Tbilisi street in Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union. Rain sheeting across his body, glistening off the cobblestones, running red, his arteries spewing out the blood as fast as his heart could pump it around his veins. That horrific image was always with her. She could see the face of the Russian colonel she had killed. She had knifed him in the stomach and the surprise on his face would never leave her. It had been very satisfying. Up until that moment he had been arrogant and smug. He had kicked her dead husband in the ribs like he’d been a dog he’d found lying on the cobblestones and was seeing if it still yelped. There were fragments of other times: luncheons in Berlin … being on a roller coaster in an old fairground that had traveled around Europe for six hundred years … running across some railway tracks with bullets hitting the earth around her with dull thuds, like doors slamming … making love to a man, not her husband, before she had met him, when she was an art student in Paris, a strong young man with pale limbs and a kind face, stroking her body, whispering in her ear how beautiful she was … his longing for her had made her cry. She tried to remember why they had parted, but she couldn’t.

  There was one other strong recollection she clung on to. A man she could see leaning over a sheaf of blueprints on a table in an old farmhouse. He was impeccably dressed in a light blue pinstriped suit, a blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, gold crossed golf club cuff links, a red tie with small chess pieces on it. A handsome face, if a little severe. Not kind eyes, but not cold, either. She could conjure up the smell of his cologne, like limes. Her Control. He had outlined her mission coolly, articulately, in detail. He was precise and meticulous. She had felt confident. She could do this. It was an easy infiltration for her. She spoke fluent Russian, from her mother’s side of the family. A Russian mother, a Swedish father. She looked very much like the young woman she was impersonating. That woman was dead. All of the paperwork had been immaculate. Or so she’d thought. At first she had fooled them all. She had been very close to her objective: the names of the men in a terrorist cell operating out of Georgia. She had been one day and night away from accessing the intel on that cell and getting it back to Control.

  And then she’d been caught.

  She tried to remember what had betrayed her. It had been a stamp on her forged passport. It had been missing a color.
Something like that. She couldn’t really recall. It was just a part of the jumbled mosaic that had replaced her coherent thoughts. It didn’t matter. They’d trapped her. Taken her to the Kresty Prison on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, two five-story cross-shaped buildings. Not a forbidding place from the outside.

  A hellhole on the inside.

  Then the questioning had begun. They wanted to know who she really was. Who she worked for. All of the precious information inside her head. She told them nothing. She feigned blackouts and memory loss. She’d been beaten when they’d taken her, and then a guard at the prison had beaten her again before he’d raped her in her cell. He’d been reprimanded, not for the rape, but for the beating. She had used it to her advantage, saying she could not remember anything, feigning disorientation.

  Then they’d thrown her into her phantom cell. Her isolation was complete. No light. No proximity to any of the other prisoners. She ate alone and exercised alone. She didn’t shower alone. There was always a guard watching her. He was not the one who had violated her. She had not seen him again. Maybe they’d shipped him off to an ice hut in Siberia. Or killed him. But even that thought gave her no solace.

  The darkness and isolation had taken its toll on her. She had felt it draining her of strength, blunting her emotions, dimming her thoughts, hour by hour, minute by minute. It was hard to sleep on the low pallet with a mattress so thin it was barely a pad. There was a toilet in one corner. Nothing else in her cell. Her memory loss had become real. They had not tried to interrogate her again. But she had heard whispers. Among the guards in the exercise area. She had heard a name: “Arbon.”

  And it had struck dread in her.

  It was a name she knew. Everyone in the intelligence community knew the man’s name.

  An interrogator.

  A monster.

  And then they’d come for her in her prison cell and hauled her up off her pallet and taken her out of the cell block, in her black prison shirt and pants, like pajamas, down corridors she’d never been before and through a big steel door and out into a bright moonlit night. She had breathed in the night air, so cold but so sweet, looked up at the myriad stars like spilled diamonds above her. They’d thrown a black hood over her head. She’d been manhandled by two of the guards to some kind of vehicle; a van, she thought. She’d been helped up into the back and thrown down to the cold floor. She had curled up into a fetal position, one she knew so well, and had heard the van’s motor start up.

  It wasn’t a long drive. She was able to calculate it at just over an hour because she counted the seconds off in her head. There was a loud, agonizing creak of gates opening that she could hear even inside the van. Then the vehicle rolled forward about a hundred yards and stopped again.

  She waited.

  The back doors of the van were opened. Hands reached for her, dragging her out of the vehicle. She stumbled as she stood up straight. The concrete was cold on her bare feet. Two guards marched her through an outside area. She strained to listen. Heard the distant, mournful whistle of a train. They were near railway tracks. She could hear nothing else but the wind gusting. She was taken inside a building. The sounds of the guards’ boots echoed. A large space. Then she was shoved along a long corridor and down a series of metal stairs.

  Another corridor, and they stopped her. She heard the rattle of a ring of keys, then a lock being turned. She was pushed forward and forced down onto a chair. The hood was removed.

  She sat in a twelve-by-fifteen windowless room. There was a metal table in the center with two folding metal chairs at it and two more metal chairs against a blank green wall. A single lightbulb hung on a short electric cord from the ceiling. Two armed guards she had never seen before, in army uniforms, walked away from the table to an open doorway. She could see a slice of the green-walled corridor beyond it. She expected them to switch off the light as they left, plunging her into her familiar darkness, but they didn’t. The first guard went through the open doorway. The second turned and looked at her, flat eyes in a doughy face.

  “Arbon,” he said in a nasty whisper, and closed the door.

  The key turned in the lock.

  Serena Johanssen shivered with fear.

  It was better in the dark.

  * * *

  Granny sat in the cockpit of the AH-64 Apache helicopter on the edge of a wooded area near Lake Ladoga outside Saint Petersburg on the Volga River. He’d flown it to this location from Kemijärvi Airport in Lapland. Control had greased a few palms. The local authorities believed the helicopter was being flown by two Finnish pilots en route to Saint Petersburg. The chopper was screened in three directions by trees, but it was vulnerable from the river. Except Granny didn’t think anyone would be rowing across the river with a windchill factor of minus-forty below. It was a two-man cockpit and Granny sat in the back pilot’s seat. The copilot was a young Company agent named Hastings who had the personality of a doorknob, but he’d been on twelve missions for Control and had come back from all of them. Granny didn’t like partners for the same reason McCall didn’t like them. They tended to get killed. But Control had insisted it was a two-man extraction.

  Granny liked the AH-64. It had a nose-mounted sensor suite for target acquisition and night-vision systems. It had a self-sealing fuel system to protect against ballistic projectiles. It had a .30-millimeter M230 chain gun carried between the main landing gear under the aircraft’s forward fuselage. And besides the Hydra 70 rockets, it carried AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. Granny liked those, too. What he liked best was the IHADSS system the chopper carried, which he always thought of as “Bad Ass.” It was an Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System built into the pilot’s helmet. Granny tapped his helmet with his fingers, as if to make sure it was still on his head. He could slave the chopper’s 30 mm automatic M230 chain gun to the helmet, or to the copilot’s helmet, making the gun track head movements. He could control the firing with the TADS/PNVS, Target Acquisition and Designation, Pilot Night Vision System. The Arrowhead system was newer and more sophisticated, but it had not been installed in this AH-64 bird, which was on the elderly side, having been built by Boeing in 1998. But it would get the job done. Granny would use the TADS/PNVS system to fire the Hellfire missiles. They had different semi-active laser variants—AGM-114K high-explosive anti-tank, AGM-114 KII with external blast fragmentation in sleeve, and the AGM-114K MAC, Metal Augmented Charge—enough firepower to cause a lot of damage in a very few seconds. They had a range of eight thousand meters. He would line the target up on the semi-active laser homing millimeter wave radar seeker, giving the controls over to Hastings. He knew the facility would be camouflaged, but he had put his own laser system into the AH-64 and this would be a good test for it.

  Now he had to wait. He took out a crushed pack of Lucky Strikes, the ones from the 1940s, when they rivaled Camels as the number-one selling cigarette in the United States. He looked fondly at the front of the pack with the distinctive red circle with LUCKY STRIKE in black lettering. Beneath it was written “It’s toasted,” as if that made it any better for you. It didn’t have the L.S.M.F.T. (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco) on the package, so it was from a carton manufactured before 1945. Granny had a supplier in Cairo who shipped cartons to him. Where the Egyptian got them, dating back to the 1940s, and in good condition, Granny didn’t know and didn’t care. He offered Hastings one. The kid shook his head. Probably bad for his two-hour a day workout regimen. Granny lit one up, blew out smoke, wondered just how black his lungs must look by now. Not that he cared about that, either. He cared about few things. Saving this Company agent’s life—he cared about that. He didn’t know her. But he’d found out in the briefing session that she’d been bold and fearless and at the eleventh hour she’d been caught. That had been a year ago. Now they had a chance to get her out. Even though the bigger mission had been running for almost six months, the extraction phase Control had put together in under thirty-six hours. They’d moved her from Kresty Prison outside Saint P
etersburg.

  Bad idea.

  Control had given Granny rough coordinates for the location. They were not exact. And they didn’t know how long she would be kept there. The window for her rescue could be very short. Probably only a couple of hours, maybe less.

  Granny looked once at the glowing dial of his Omega diver’s watch. Almost midnight.

  “Come on, Control,” Granny muttered under his breath. “Our little girl’s time is running out.”

  In the next moment he heard Control’s terse voice.

  Granny took a deep drag on the Lucky, crushed it out, and tapped his copilot’s helmet.

  “Good to go,” Granny said.

  A moment later the AH-64 chopper lifted off the ground.

  * * *

  The Citroën pulled up to the big iron gates of the abandoned automobile factory. General Palkovnik Ivan Dymtryk of the Sovietskaya Armiya stepped forward with an uncharacteristic thrill of anticipation. He would actually be seeing the legend, in person, for the first time. He knew his description, of course. All Soviet military officers did. When the man stepped out of the back of the Citroën, the general was not disappointed. He was a tall, striking figure, a black beard closely cropped to a chiseled face. He wore a dark gray fedora. There was a single diamond earring that glittered in his right ear. He was a little heavyset. He wore his signature long black overcoat, which broke over the ankles of his black boots. He wore black gloves. He carried a slim steel briefcase that almost glowed in the soft darkness. General Dymtryk couldn’t see the man’s eyes from this distance, but he knew they were like chips of black ice.