Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  “Why haven’t you taken her before?” he asked.

  “I was told that she was dead,” Novak hissed. “I was lied to.”

  Val hesitated. “I have a previous commitment.”

  “You wound me, Vajda. But I have the perfect motivation.” Novak’s smile widened. “Bring the man.”

  Val went immobile, like a man regarding a snake that was poised to strike. Two of Novak’s men left. Minutes ticked by. The door burst open, and Novak’s men came back in.

  Imre dangled between them. He looked terribly small and fragile. He had been beaten again. One of the lenses of his spectacles had been shattered. His head dangled, blood streaming down his chin.

  The world receded to an unimaginable distance, leaving Val suspended in a vacuum. No air to breathe. No place to stand.

  Imre lifted his head and looked at Val, breathing heavily. His eyes watered, but they were calm. One was swollen almost shut. New cuts and bruises were superimposed over the old.

  “You thought we did not know about your pet?” Novak’s voice was a crooning taunt. “Your favorite client? You think no one wondered who taught you English, French, fucking existentialist philosophy? Cretin. I kept him aside for years for just such a moment, Vajda.”

  Yes. He was a cretin, for not moving Imre closer to him. Criminally stupid, for not guarding his weak spot with more care.

  “You thought you were too good to serve me?” Novak said. “You are a whining dog begging for scraps, Vajda. And this old pervert gave you scraps, did he not? When he was not buggering you?”

  Novak made a sharp gesture. One of the men holding Imre elbowed him viciously in the face. Fresh blood spattered onto Imre’s white shirt, joining the dried spots.

  Valery lunged toward them. Several guns swung up, trained on him. Someone wrenched his arms back violently and slammed a metal pipe across his throat. He barely felt it.

  He stared at Imre, shaking. Unable to speak, to think.

  “So.” Novak caressed Val’s chin with a clawlike hand in a hideous parody of tenderness. “I hope, for your old friend’s sake, that you are not going to tell me you are incapable of undertaking this.”

  Blood was filling his mouth again, but Valery could not swallow. The pressure across his throat was strangling him. His ears roared.

  “No,” he choked out hoarsely. “I am not saying that.”

  “Good.” Novak made a gesture to the men holding Val. The pressure on his throat eased. His arm was released.

  “And now, a demonstration of my resolve,” Novak said briskly. “We will remove a piece of your friend—a small piece. A finger, an ear, so we all know where we stand. Keep the piece if you are feeling sentimental. Did I hear your friend plays the piano? A teacher at the conservatory? Once a concert pianist? Charming. A finger, then.”

  “No,” Val broke in. “Do not touch him. Or it’s no deal.”

  “You do not set the terms of this deal.” Novak’s smile stretched out over his long, discolored teeth. “I set them. All of them. You have forgotten the rules, my boy. A few of his fingers should remind you.”

  Val’s mind raced desperately like a rat in an electrified maze. He groped in his shirt pocket with his hand, felt a small, smooth cylinder.

  He yanked it out, with a flourish. “The rules just changed.”

  The snickering and muttering abruptly stopped. All eyes went to the ampoule in Val’s hand.

  “And what is that?” Novak asked.

  “Poison gas,” Val said. “If I break this, everyone in this room dies before they can reach the door.”

  Novak chewed the inside of his sunken cheek. He shot a look at András. “Whose responsibility was it to search this man before he was brought into my presence?”

  One of the younger men’s eyes went wide. He began to back away.

  András lifted his gun and shot the man in the face. He hit the wall and slid to the floor, the swath of gore vivid against white cement blocks. Imre made a choked sound. He sagged between his two captors.

  “Everyone dies, including yourself ?” Novak’s tone was light. “And your friend?”

  “Of course,” Val said. “It’s worth it to me. I dislike being bullied. You and I can continue this conversation in hell.”

  Novak chuckled softly. “Do you always carry poison gas on your person? What an odd accessory.”

  Valery’s eyes locked on Novak’s. “Life is so uncertain,” he said. “Death is much more reliable.”

  The chuckles turned to wheezy gasps of laughter. “Ah, Vajda, I have missed you since I sold you on the auction block to those PSS dogs all those years ago,” Novak said, wiping his mouth. “So. Tell me. What do you hope to accomplish with your poison gas?”

  “We talk terms,” Val said. “My terms.”

  “And they are?” Novak’s voice had a humoring tone.

  “The kill fee, to start. Five hundred thousand euro, expenses excluded.”

  There were assorted snorts and snickers from the men assembled. Novak looked amused. “You think well of yourself, Valery. But why a kill fee? It is not necessary to kill her. I will take care of that personally.”

  “Bringing her to you alive is more difficult than a straight kill,” Val said. “I require no interference, no backup team. Live webcam conversations with him upon request.” He gestured toward Imre. “As well as your solemn word before witnesses that he will not be harmed.”

  Novak’s pale, poisonous gaze narrowed. Val kept his face impassive. His heart thundered.

  This was a wild gamble. Novak had a pathological hatred of being lied to. There were whispers about what he had done to his wife years ago to punish her for lying to him. It was said he’d cut off his own son’s finger when he was a child as punishment for lying about some trivial childhood sin. The underlying message was brutally clear. If the boss did that to his own son, what might he do to a piece of shit nobody like me? It had been a very powerful deterrent to lying.

  But the corollary was that in his own twisted way, he considered himself a man of honor. If Novak gave his word not to harm Imre in front of his men, he would consider himself bound by it. Val hoped.

  On the other hand, the man was utterly mad, after all.

  “Vajda.” Imre cleared his throat, coughing. “You cannot—”

  “Shut up, old man,” Val said harshly. “I did not ask you.”

  Tense moments crawled by. Novak pondered, rubbing his chin. “The demand for money is absurd,” he said. “But I do appreciate a man who gives good sport. For this, I will spare the finger—for tonight. And in return . . .” His voice trailed off, eyes sparkling with amusement.

  Val waited, not allowing himself to swallow or breathe.

  “You will provide me with video footage of your affair with Steele,” Novak said. “Something juicy and explicitly sexual, something to entertain the men on dull nights. You will have a few minutes of communication with your friend. If at any point the video rendezvous is missed, I will start to remove pieces of him. I require my first installment—let me see—Monday. I am giving you a few extra days of grace, to allow for travel time,” he concluded, his tone magnanimous. “After that, I will expect something every three days.”

  Val’s jaw ached with tension. “I cannot guarantee—”

  “Then I will start with his fingers,” Novak said lightly. “Do not try to intimidate me, Vajda.” His grin stretched wider. “Look into my eyes. Do I look like a man who has anything to fear from your poison gas?”

  Val’s fingers tightened on the ampule. The faces of the other men in the room were rigid with terror. Novak’s was alight with triumph.

  “Do we have an understanding?” Novak asked.

  Val nodded. Novak jerked and wheezed with laughter. He gestured to one of his men. “Give him his things.”

  The man jerked into movement, producing Val’s wallet, cell phone, Palm Pilot. He dropped them onto the table.

  Val pocketed the items. He seized the file that held the photographs, and s
hoved the case that held the torque under his arm.

  “I need this,” he said. “For pretexting an approach.”

  “As you wish.” Novak’s voice was oily with satisfaction. “Be sure to bring it back when you deliver her. I wish to kill her with it.”

  Val gave Imre one last look. The old man’s eyes were hollow and bleak. Val felt helpless. “We will speak on the videophone,” he said.

  Imre did not reply. Novak’s men shrank away from Val as he made for the door, their eyes on the ampule. No one accompanied him as he made his way out of the labyrinth of subterranean passageways beneath the warehouse district in Köbanya. He remembered the way. The fully functioning businesses above were money laundering fronts for Novak’s other, more profitable businesses. He had organized the front company documentation for some of them himself many years ago.

  The men at the guardposts stared at him as he stumbled out into the frigid night. He had left his coat behind. Snow brushed his battered face. It felt good against inflamed flesh. The water in his hair and shirt promptly froze solid. He shuffled aimlessly through ankle deep slush. Whoever saw his blood-spattered face scurried away, unnerved.

  So they should. He was soiled, corrupt. Sent out to play roles he could not shake, despite all his desperate effort. Whore, liar, betrayer.

  Killer. Worse. Delivering Steele alive to Novak was more cruel than the swift mercy of a bullet through the nape. Far worse than delivering her into Georg Luksch’s hands. Killing her outright would be kinder.

  And he had to make her trust him. Hah. If not for Imre, he would not know the meaning of the word. But if he could not do it . . .

  He seemed to stumble and shuffle for hours through the pelting snow. He stopped on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, and stared up at the pitiless, implacable stone face of one of the lions. Wind whipped his breath from his mouth. He saw Imre, hunched in his cramped kitchen, frying egg-soaked bread for him as he lectured on Socrates, Descartes.

  Imre, with blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his eyes full of mute suffering. Imre, with mutilated hands, dripping blood.

  Val lurched to the side, and vomited up his guts. The heaving went on long after his stomach was empty. His eyes streamed, his nose ran. The dark water of the Danube roiled sluggishly below. He longed for the icy, airless darkness of it. Not for the first time. He thought of his mother.

  No. It was not his nature. Fuck them. He was too angry to give in.

  He straightened, wiping his face with a sleeve stiff with ice, and resumed his shambling way to the hotel, the jewelry case and file of photos clamped beneath his arm. The conversation with Hegel flashed through his mind. It seemed so long ago.

  He began to laugh. At least he no longer had to worry about Hegel hurting Imre. His friend could only be savaged by one villain at a time.

  Laughter hurt his cracked ribs. He stopped it.

  At least Novak did not know about the child. He clung to that.

  He was still clutching the ampule in his hand, he realized, though his numb fingers barely felt it. His hand tightened on the hard cylinder. He broke off the tip and inhaled deeply.

  It was a sample vial of a new scent, blended exclusively for him by his personal parfumeur in Provence. An extravagant affectation, but fuck it, he had the money. Why not? He liked good smells.

  The scent was voluptuous, hints of sweet wood, fleshy depths of forest mushrooms, the warm, spicy tang of pine, lavender and sage. A pathetically small victory in the face of the leverage that Novak wielded on him, but he would cling to any minor triumph.

  Three more days of safety for Imre’s finger, for a vial of perfume.

  He rubbed some on his skin, inhaled. His body was too cold to release the scent, and the inside of his nose felt frozen solid, but still, he smelled it, just barely, and the earthy, sensual essence warmed him.

  It made him think of Tamara Steele. The way her red lips curved in that secret smile in the evening gown photograph. The picture of her in the black dress, wildflowers in her outstretched hand. Lavender and daisies. Her pale, beautiful face, filled with ancient sadness.

  But the image of Imre’s mutilated hands battered at him.

  He was unaccustomed to the sensation of fear after years of cultivating detachment. It was intensely unpleasant.

  If they killed Imre, that was it. There was no other reason for Val to remain even remotely human.

  You are a whining dog begging for scraps.

  True. His stock portfolio had a net worth in the millions now, and look at him, still living on scraps. A chess game every few years. Distant memories of egg and bread fried in butter, Socrates and Descartes, Bach inventions played on the grand piano. That lumpy, dusty old divan.

  And soon enough, a mossy grave in the cemetery with Imre’s name carved on it.

  Scraps. All that he would ever be allowed to have.

  Chapter 5

  Tam muttered something foul in some half-remembered language as she tore off her goggles. She wiped her hair back off her sweaty forehead and flung down the troublesome pendant with disgust.

  She hated it. The colors weren’t melding. She had envisioned a tangle of bronze and green-tinged copper clockwork bits layered with delicate filigreed gold to hide the mechanism that housed the little hypodermic, but it wasn’t fitting together right, and the semiprecious stones she’d chosen looked dull and blah. The piece didn’t throb or hum, or whisper seductive, ominous things; it had no menace, no driving intensity, no sex appeal. It was a necklace that a funky college girl with a pierced nose might buy from a pothead vendor in a Seattle open-air market for fifteen bucks. Not Deadly Beauty.

  She was losing her touch, her eye, her concentration. In a word, everything. Lack of sleep, maybe. Not that she’d ever slept much.

  The light over the door strobed. Rosalia was intercomming her. She pulled off the earphones, thinking wistfully of the twelve-hour-long trances she used to go into to work. Absolute concentration, no distractions. Miles inside the sweet privacy of her own twisted mind.

  Those days were gone. And she had no one to blame but herself.

  She stabbed the button that stopped the savagely melancholy Spanish gypsy lament howled out by broken wine-and-cigarette-roughened voices. A sentimental choice. Unusual for her. Usually she went for hard rock. Something feverish and raucous, to burn out the fog in her head and help her get to the faraway place where the images of the jewelry came to her, glowing and glittering and twisting in her mind.

  She hit the intercom. “Yes, Rosalia? What is it?”

  “A visitor,” Rosalia replied, in her native Brazilian Portuguese. “The red Volkswagen. I think it is the dark lady with the boy baby.”

  Tam dropped her face into her hands. No. Please. Not Erin again.

  It had only been a week since the last concerned visit, full of great examples of beatific madonna-style mothering and tit-sucking and cooing and crooning and gentle, well-meant, incredibly irritating advice.

  She tossed down the goggles and punched up the security program onto her studio computer monitor. Sure enough. There was Erin’s red Volkswagen Bug, parked outside the outermost line of defense. Waiting to be beckoned in. Tam switched to another camera angle, and made out the car seat in the back, with Kev’s chubby, heavy-cheeked profile. Probably already hungry for his liquid lunch. She was in for it.

  Her sigh felt almost like a growl as she deactivated the various devices. Time to brace herself for the irritating questions. Had she done a fucking blood test to check for anemia ? Was she taking a fucking multivitamin and mineral supplement? Did she want to do another fucking barbecue lunch on Sunday with the McCloud Crowd? To which the answers were always no, no, no, and leave me alone, already.

  But Erin was tough. Thick-skinned. She didn’t back down easily.

  Erin’s car started up again, and Tam watched it glumly as it advanced up the road. The McClouds made big fun of all her security doodads, but she could care less. Daddy Novak would probably love to kill Connor
and Erin and their spawn too, for their part in Kurt Novak’s death. But if they wanted to paint targets on their asses and hang them out in the breeze, that was their affair. She wanted no part of it.

  She washed her hands and headed down the stairs to the entrance. Rachel was heaping towers of blocks with Rosalia on the floor in the big living area. The instant she saw Tam, she dropped everything and hurled her little body in Tam’s direction, squeaking, arms outstretched. Tam scooped her up and hugged her hard. She hefted the toddler, gauging her weight. A little heavier this week. Thirty grams, maybe, depending on whether the diaper was wet. Since taking on Rachel, Tam had become a human precision scale.

  Erin was parked in the garage and getting little Kev out of his car seat when Tam opened the door. Kev was almost as big as Rachel was, even though he was two years younger, the snorting little piglet. Tam tried not to hold that against him. It was difficult sometimes.

  Tam ran an appraising eye over Erin as she hoisted the chubby kid onto her hip. The other woman was finally slimming down from her baby weight, though she was still very soft and squeezable. Tam suspected that Connor liked his wife just that way. Whatever. To each his own.

  “And to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” There was no way to modulate the bitchy edge in her voice, so she didn’t try.

  Erin ignored her completely, saving her smiles for Rachel. “And how is this pretty little sweetheart today?” she crooned. She bent forward and gave Rachel a kiss on the back of her tousled, black-curled head. Rachel clutched tighter, buried her face in Tam’s neck, fingers digging in like little kitten claws.

  Progress. Four months ago, that brief kiss would have sent Rachel into screaming convulsions of fear. She was mellowing. Her little body was tense, but not trembling much. As Tam reset the alarms, Rachel even lifted big dark eyes a little to peek out at the baby on Erin’s lap. Little Kev returned her regard with grave, oddly adult curiosity.