by Matt Rogers
He sure hoped not.
Otherwise he might have to revert to old measures.
And old measures never ended well for anyone.
‘I never got your name,’ Slater said, noting the deja vu to the conversation he’d shared with Natasha. He wondered if there was any significance there.
Was he deliberately avoiding forming a personal connection with anyone until he absolutely had to?
Nonsense.
Otherwise he never would have gone upstairs with Natasha.
‘Alexei,’ the man said. ‘I was not part of this. I swear.’
‘I believe you. I just need to see for myself.’
‘I tried to stop them…’
Alexei’s face had swelled so significantly that it masked his emotions, but Slater thought he spotted the man openly weeping through his wounds. He stepped forward and laid a hand on the big barman’s shoulder. The guy’s chest heaved up and down.
‘It’s okay,’ Slater said. ‘You did everything you could.’
‘Not enough.’
‘It happens to everyone.’
‘Does it happen to you? You seem too calm. You must be in these situations a lot. Do you ever not do enough?’
Slater pondered that. ‘Not usually. But I put everything into it.’
‘I tried that.’
‘You don’t have the experience I do.’
‘I tried…’
‘Show me.’
Alexei pulled up the requisite video file and let the footage speak for itself. It was grainy, but it painted a competent picture. Slater didn’t need the barman to clear anything up. He saw it all for himself.
Three men sauntered up the staircase with as much nonchalance as they could muster, moving in single file. They were hard, cruel men — Slater could tell from their gait. They had the physiques of tradespeople with the demeanours of something much darker.
He’d seen their types a thousand times before.
Ex-military in some capacity, disciplined and tough and utterly lacking a conscience. Even in the grainy footage Slater could see the intense focus in their eyes — these men had committed themselves to a discipline, which was something sorely lacking in many in today’s society, a noble gesture in itself. But they had directed their focus at something horrific.
Blood money.
Dollars for suffering.
He didn’t know if they were the ones running the show or the henchmen recruited to carry out their superior’s wishes. But, all the same, they transformed like chameleons as soon as they made it upstairs, out of sight of the regular patrons. The easygoing moods vanished, replaced by sociopathic intensity, and they made a beeline for the closed door to Natasha’s room with renewed vigour. One of them knocked politely, keeping dead quiet, and all three of them poised over the threshold like coiled springs. The door swung open and the trio surged into the room, blocking the camera’s view. Natasha didn’t even get the opportunity to scream. They bundled her into the room, their fast-twitch muscle fibres firing, and all went quiet.
Slater sensed hot fury scratching at the cellar door deep inside him.
If they were going to…
But they didn’t. They only spent a few seconds in the room before dragging her out into the hallway with a sleek gunmetal grey sidearm pressed to the side of her head. Her face was distraught, her lips flapping, her eyes streaming tears, but no sound came out.
They’d instructed her to remain silent. They didn’t want to alert the customers downstairs.
‘I realised something was wrong right about now,’ Alexei mumbled through split lips. ‘And I came up to investigate.’
The barman appeared at the top of the staircase on the surveillance footage, scorn in his eyes. Unblemished, Alexei surged forward despite the presence of the loaded gun and threw himself at the closest hostile. In any other encounter a violent fistfight would have erupted, alerting everyone downstairs to the commotion. But the guy Alexei chose to try and brawl with simply stepped back and unleashed a staggering uppercut into the underside of the barman’s chin.
Alexei crumpled into the wall and slid down it, barely conscious.
The stocky thug threw three full-strength punches into Alexei’s unprotected face, breaking his orbital, squashing his nose, causing immediate swelling across his delicate facial features.
Natasha watched the beatdown unfold with a horrified expression on her face, turning pale.
The guy with the gun twisted it against her temple, daring her to move, to make a sound.
She didn’t.
The man leant forward and spoke in a low tone, undetectable by the surveillance camera’s stock microphone.
‘I was conscious,’ Alexei said, stumbling over his words, slurring them. ‘I h-heard what he said.’
‘What did he say?’
‘To walk out between the three of them like nothing was wrong at all. He told her if anyone suspected anything downstairs, he’d shoot her in the head without a moment’s hesitation.’
‘She obliged?’
‘Watch.’
26
On the screen Natasha nodded, crippled by mortal fear, and her shoulders slouched as she became complicit in their demands. She followed them sheepishly down the corridor, trying her best to still her shaking torso. Before they descended the staircase and disappeared out of sight, one of the giant thugs laid a palm on her shoulder and whispered into the back of her neck.
‘Telling her to relax,’ Alexei said. ‘They were treating it as a joke. As if they’d done it a hundred times before. I do not know who they are.’
‘Maybe they have,’ Slater said. ‘Maybe they’re experts.’
‘Can I say something?’
‘Of course.’
‘I know you are an angry man. I can sense it. Even though I’m having trouble seeing anything. Do you think this had something to do with you?’
‘I can’t know for sure. There’s only one way I can find out.’
‘Will you go after them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Should I pretend I’ve never seen you before?’ the man said. ‘If anyone comes asking?’
‘What if they enquire about your face?’
‘An unruly customer, of course. There’s no evidence of anything to the contrary.’
‘You need a hospital,’ Slater said.
‘That is up to me to decide.’
Slater shrugged. ‘I guess so. I’m not going to hold your hand.’
‘I think I can deal with this on my own.’
‘Who’ll run the place when you’re recovering?’
‘I’ll get help.’
‘Who?’
‘People I trust.’
‘You know them well?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you blame me for what happened?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Alexei said. ‘I fear you. If we’re being honest. I don’t know whether to get angry at you, because you might kill me.’
‘I’m not going to kill you. You did an honourable thing.’
‘Not honourable enough.’
‘You did what you could. Those were trained killers.’
‘You know their type?’
‘Rather intimately.’
‘What will you do?’
Slater paused, letting the silence of the upper level drown out their conversation. He thought long and hard. Then he said, ‘You can take care of yourself from now on?’
‘I’ve been running this place for ten years. I can take care of myself. Just have to clean up some blood, yes?’
‘Then you never saw me.’
‘And if your picture shows up in the newspaper tomorrow?’
‘Then I’ll be responsible for a few murders. And you definitely won’t want to know me then.’
‘So this never happened?’
‘It never happened.’
‘I’ll never know whether you succeeded in finding her or not.’
‘No, you won’t.’
>
‘Can you call me? If you manage to do it?’
‘I don’t have a phone.’
‘You really are a strange man, aren’t you?’
‘Comes with the profession.’
‘What’s your profession?’
‘Some things are best left unsaid.’
With that, Slater pivoted on his heel and disappeared from the room. He figured Alexei wouldn’t even realise he was gone until the barman swivelled around in his computer chair and squinted through his puffed-up eyes.
But the man was tough. Far East tough. Vladivostok tough.
He would survive. He would continue. He would prosper.
And Slater would do what he was put on this earth to do.
Fight.
27
As he thundered down the staircase, he figured it had always been inevitable.
He’d come to Vladivostok for a reason. Any attempt to ignore it was futile. It would always catch up to him, like fate, destined to unfold the way it was always supposed to. He hadn’t told a soul why he’d really come here, and he wasn’t about to.
Because that centred around a time he would much rather forget.
But he couldn’t forget about it until he’d put his demons to rest.
So it all seemed to fall into place. He strode straight past the groggy, zombie-like patrons and powered out into the street, sporting no possessions whatsoever. A free man in every sense of the word. He had nothing tying him down, no burden to shoulder, nothing to force him to loiter anywhere for longer than he needed to.
He’d always structured his life that way, ever since retirement.
Because it allowed him to react on the fly. It allowed him to abandon his surroundings at the drop of a hat. And no-one had ever needed him to go through with that sort of drastic plan more than Natasha. He knew, deep in the bottom of his heart, that he was responsible. Iosif was out there somewhere, alive, and the shadowy figures connected to him slunk around Vladivostok. They were connected to the mercenaries. Somehow. Some way.
And Slater finally realised that the stars had aligned.
He needed Natasha back. Not because of his own sense of guilt, but because she didn’t deserve what had happened to her in the slightest.
And if it had something to do with him, he wouldn’t rest until he found her.
He made it out into the freezing street without being bothered by any of the patrons. Once again, they probably found him a curious enough sight to stare, but Slater’s presence couldn’t drum up enough interest for them to bother interfering. He left the tavern behind, silently wishing Alexei the best of luck in his recovery. He ran into people like the barman far more often than he ever expected — ordinary people who went above and beyond, even in the face of death.
Most would have hesitated at the sight of the three thugs, one of them armed, pressing a loaded gun to a hostage’s head.
Alexei had hurled himself into the fray.
Maybe in another life he would have made an effective operative. If Black Force had caught him early in his evolution. If they’d honed him into a human weapon from day one. But not many received that path. Not many were offered the opportunity.
Slater had been.
He wondered if it had all been a colossal mistake.
Then he saw them again, and all extraneous thoughts shrank away.
The two men from the previous night were still pacing up and down the dreary Vladivostok streets. Their demeanours sported signs of wear and tear — Slater figured the pair had been up all night on their personal crusade. Even from the opposite sidewalk, Slater spotted the heavy dark bags underneath their eyes. They were both in their thirties if Slater’s eye for detail held up, but the stress and the lack of sleep had aged them ten or fifteen years. They clutched the same crumpled paper between their fingers, but the elements had ravaged the printed photo, so all Slater saw from across the street was a faded silhouette printed out and folded in their hands.
Well, what’s there to lose now?
Besides, something subtle told him it was all connected.
He crossed the street, barely checking in each direction before he stepped down onto the asphalt. At this time of year, when the cold bit deeper and harder than usual, Vladivostok became a ghost town. Slater wondered if news of the debacle at the train station had transformed the city into a collection of shut-ins — ordinary civilians terrified to leave their homes at risk of having their heads blown apart from a long-range sniper rifle.
Then Slater strode into range of the two men, got a proper look at the piece of paper clutched between one guy’s frozen fingers…
…and he realised the incident hadn’t made the news at all.
He knew the face staring up at him — an identification photo, taken at an upbeat moment, displaying the wry smile of the man who had died in Slater’s arms the previous day. He felt a pang of sadness for Viktor. The printed ID made him seem jovial, a far cry from the terrified shell Slater had met on the train. An easier time, no doubt.
‘Excuse me,’ the man on the left said in broken English. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Have you seen this man?’
Slater continued staring at the image. Something in his face must have given it away — both men paled at the same time.
‘You know him,’ the second guy said.
Slater nodded. ‘I know him. You two haven’t been watching the news?’
‘What do you mean?’ the first man said. ‘Of course we have.’
I thought as much.
So the incident at the train station had been suppressed. There were a number of explanations — none of them good, yet some more sinister than others. In all likelihood, there was an ongoing investigation at the train station, and details of the murder hadn’t been linked to the media yet. Or, also just as likely, there simply wasn’t enough media in Vladivostok to get the information out in a hurry. Then there was a darker concept, one that Slater initially dismissed but found himself returning to time and time again.
Someone was actively covering up the details.
Hiding Viktor’s death from the general public.
Someone in power didn’t want anyone to know what had happened at the train station, for reasons unknown.
Unfortunately, Slater had enough experience in the field to get an idea of where this situation might be heading.
He bowed his head. ‘We should talk about this somewhere private. Because you two might have something I need.’
‘Where is he?’ the first guy said, shaking the paper in Slater’s face. ‘Tell me!’
‘Quiet,’ Slater hissed, suddenly paranoid.
He threw a glance up and down the street. Now there were a few pedestrians about, directly juxtaposed against the dead streets Slater had stepped into upon exiting the tavern. Every passerby sent a pang of anxiety through his chest — it seemed like everyone was out to kill him. It seemed like everyone knew who he truly was.
‘Not here,’ he muttered. ‘Come with me.’
But he should have paid closer attention to the mental fragility of the two men in front of him. They evidently knew Viktor well, and his sudden disappearance had torn them apart. Now they had a glimpse of what might have happened to their friend, and this strange foreign man was hiding information from them, preventing them from reaching the truth.
Slater realised all of that as the first guy lunged for him, his eyes manic and sleep-deprived.
Slater caught him by the lapels and hurled him into the brick wall of the adjacent building. The impact drove the breath from the man’s lungs, but for good measure Slater kept hold of his collar. He wrenched him away from the wall and slammed him into the surface for the second consecutive time, adding insult to injury.
Then he let go, and hissed, ‘I will help you as much as I can. But not here. I’m on your side.’
The unharmed man stared at Slater, wide-eyed, in disbelief at the outburst of violence. These men were physical labourers, but that didn’t mean they were accustomed to
the type of force Slater could unleash in the blink of an eye. They had spent their whole lives toiling away on construction sites, and he had spent his life toiling away in combat gymnasiums.
Big difference.
Overpowered into submission, the first guy nodded sheepishly, sucking air into his lungs in giant gasps, and beckoned into the nearest alleyway. ‘Is this good enough?’
‘It’ll do,’ Slater said. ‘I can’t hang around for long.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to put the pair of you in danger.’
With that, he led them into the grimy stink of the alleyway, a narrow strip of land between two towering brick buildings. Overhanging awnings and lattices and balconies cast great shadows across the muddy ground.
And someone followed.
28
Slater didn’t recognise the hostile presence until it was far too late.
He ushered the two men into the lip of the alley, and then sensed rapid footsteps directly behind him.
Close.
Too close.
He spun on his heel and threw a massive right hook without assessing the threat, figuring he didn’t have time.
He was right.
The giant mercenary surged into range in unison with Slater’s wild swinging, looping punch. He connected on the jaw and felt the vibration of the direct impact resonate up through the bones in his forearm, into his upper arm.
His shoulder socket rattled. A good, clean punch.
Lights out.
Or, maybe not.
The big Russian thug stumbled like a newborn giraffe and went down in a half-squat, almost losing his balance entirely. But he kept his legs underneath him and burst back to his feet, disorientated and thrown off by the attack but still composed enough to return the favour.
The guy was at least six foot three, standing a few inches over Slater, and built like a concrete slab. Slater didn’t want to consider the arsenal of designer drugs the man was on. The real question was whether he could fight or not.
He could.
Inhibited by taking all five of Slater’s knuckles directly to the jaw, he still had his wits about him enough to burst into motion. With his own survival on the line, the guy came in swinging with a serrated switchblade. The knife had been clutched between his fingers the entire time — he’d stormed into the alleyway ready to stab a series of holes through Slater’s mid-section.
