Authors: Douglas Corleone
“Two of my best men,” he rasped. “Russians. Former KGB.”
I rapped the Glock against his ear to keep him from trying to smile again. He shouted in pain as I dug the Glock into the flesh next to his shoulder again.
“The Russians,” I said. “What are their names?”
“Jov. Sacha.”
With my left I smacked him across the face.
“
Last
names,” I said.
“Jov Sergeyev. Sacha Orlov.” He took pains to force a grin. “Go. Marshal Fisk. Find them. They will enjoy killing you. Reuniting you with your wife and daughter.”
A furious rage flowed through me, but I had to think of Lindsay now. I took several deep breaths in an attempt to maintain control.
“Where are they taking her?” I said.
“North. To Belarus.”
“Why? Who’s there? Who’s waiting for her?”
“The man who hired us.”
“Give me a goddamn
name,
” I shouted.
“I do not
have
a name. You
know
that I wouldn’t. And you
know
I wouldn’t know exactly where they were taking her. They will receive instructions along the way.”
“Why the stopover here?” I said. “What did you do to her? Why didn’t your men take her straight from Warsaw to Belarus?”
“Because,” he said, breathing heavily. “Because of what was on the news. Viktor and I, we decided to renegotiate the contract.”
“The father,” I said.
“Of course, the father. When we discovered who he was, what he could supply, we realized the girl was worth ten times what we were being paid.”
“This man who hired you agreed to pay more?”
“Not at first. He said he didn’t give a fuck who her father was. Her father wasn’t what he was after. But we told him it didn’t matter. You buy a platinum diamond ring, you pay for the diamond. Regardless of whether all you want is the platinum.”
I didn’t say anything as I thought about what he’d just told me, just moved the barrel of the gun a few inches downward and to the right. The question was, could the buyer be believed? Was the buyer really not after the father? Or was that just a negotiating tactic? Had to be, right? The amount of money that was changing hands, no way this could be about anything but Vince Sorkin’s trade secrets. The buyer not only had an idea of the girl he wanted, he had a name. Lindsay Sorkin. He knew what city she’d be in, what hotel she’d be staying at. No, I was convinced. To use Dmitry’s hideous analogy, the buyer wanted the platinum diamond ring for the
diamond,
not the platinum.
I pressed the barrel deeper into his chest, said, “Go on.”
Let him think talking would extend his life. Even if only for a few minutes.
“We had to bring in another buyer,” he said. “A Syrian we had worked with in the past. Smuggling arms through Turkey.”
“I want a name.”
“Bilal ibn Hashim,” he said. “But the Syrian ultimately lost the bidding war. He said if we didn’t sell her to him, he would simply take her. So, Jov and Sacha left for Belarus immediately.”
From the front of the house I heard the click of a lock, followed by the squeak of the door.
“Quiet,” I cautioned Dmitry.
I twisted his body so that I could use it for cover if need be, and slowly aimed my Glock at the door.
The door was open just a crack.
My heart pounding, I listened to footfalls moving in our direction. It sounded as though there were two pairs, one heavy, the other shuffling.
Then I watched the door swing slowly inward.
I saw the gun first, then the heavily inked arm holding it.
Finally, I saw where the gun was leveled—directly under Ana’s jaw.
Chapter 46
With Ana positioned directly in front of him, Viktor Podrova moved cautiously into the room. With the light from the foyer spilling in behind him I clearly made out Viktor’s face. His jaw was jumpy, his eyes narrowed as he took in the scene. Dmitry was bleeding badly from every orifice in his head.
“Drop the gun and step away from my brother, or the Polack girl dies.”
“I am so sorry, Simon,” Ana said. “He snuck up on me across the street while I was watching the house.”
She had tears in her eyes. Snow caked all over her hair and clothes. A bruise was forming below her left eye. The bastard had hit her and I wanted to rip his face off for it. But I’d settle for getting her out of this room alive.
“It’s all right, Ana,” I told her. “We already have what we need. If Viktor is truly as intelligent as Interpol says he is, then he’ll step back and allow us both to leave.”
Viktor tightened his grip and Ana let out a scream. His finger trembled over the trigger of his Makarov pistol.
“You may think you know all about me and my brother,” Viktor said, “but if you think you are leaving this house alive, Marshal Fisk, you know nothing.”
As I looked behind Ana into Viktor’s eyes, there was no doubt in my mind as to how this standoff would end. Two of us would live. Two of us would die. The only question was, which pair was which.
The smart money would have been on the Podrova brothers. Or at least on Viktor. I didn’t need to read a sixty-page psychological profile on him to know he was ruthless. I could almost smell the cruelty coming off him. I was certain that if it came down to it, Viktor would sacrifice his brother to save himself. On the other hand, there was no way I would sacrifice Ana, and he knew it. Behind those menacing eyes was a knowing smile. He possessed a human shield; I held nothing but a bag of bones. To Viktor, Dmitry was already dead.
“Drop your gun
now,
” Viktor shouted, “or the lawyer dies.”
Calmly, I said, “You kill her. I kill your brother. What then? We fire at one another to see who can take the most bullets before he drops dead?” I shrugged. “Sounds rather unpleasant.”
Viktor was through hiding it; now he did turn his lips up in a smile.
“Not quite, Marshal Fisk. You see, there is one thing that separates men like me from men like—”
Before he could finish the sentiment I turned, aimed at the mirror, and fired. The move caught Viktor off guard, but not Ana. As Viktor moved to fire on me, she sank her teeth deep into his forearm. He released her with a scream and she dived onto the carpet.
Viktor lifted his Makarov and squeezed the trigger in my direction. Once, twice.
Both shots hit his brother.
Ana lifted a piece of broken glass from the floor and swung it, burying it as far as she could in Viktor’s calf.
Viktor shrieked in pain.
It was all the time I needed.
I fired.
The bullet caught Viktor square in the chest and knocked him backward into the wall. His body slid down, leaving a bright red vertical streak down the Sheetrock.
I dropped Dmitry to the floor just as he released his death rattle.
I helped Ana to her feet. Her body was shivering and I was desperate to warm it, to comfort her in any way she needed comforting. The room, I knew, reeked of cordite and spent blood and sizzling flesh, but all I smelled were fresh strawberries. I buried my face in her hair as she clung to the back of my neck. We pressed our bodies together.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, breathing heavily. “I think I am getting used to this.”
Carefully, I led her around the broken glass and fallen bodies.
“What did he mean?” Ana said as we passed Viktor and stepped out into the foyer. “What was he going to say about what separates men like you from men like him?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Ana.”
“Well, it is a very bad habit to interrupt people when they are in the middle of a sentence.”
If she was joking, she didn’t let on.
We moved swiftly through the living room to the front door, intent on not taking a single moment for granted.
Together Ana and I stepped out of the duplex and into the ferocious cold, knowing two things for certain.
The Podrova brothers were dead. And, far more important, little Lindsay Sorkin continued to live.
Part Four
THE CHILDREN OF BELARUS
Chapter 47
Ana and I were just a few kilometers outside of Gomel, the second largest city in Belarus, when our rented Suzuki Grand Vitara struck a large fallen branch, immediately overheated, and seconds later broke down. I’d been dozing off in the passenger seat of the navy SUV when Ana released a scream so loud it made me reach for my Glock. I thought our tires had been shot out. In the pitch black, the SUV rumbled to the side of the deserted road and let out a great sigh of steam from the hood. We sat in complete silence for several moments as we contemplated the repercussions of becoming stranded on a dark, rural road in southeastern Belarus in the dead of winter in the freezing cold.
A light snow dotted our windshield. I lowered my window and gazed out into the woods. More than one-third of the country was forest. Pine, spruce, oak, birch, aspen, alder—all were represented. Here, the trees stood so tall they choked off any light from the moon.
“We are imprisoned in a Grimm fairy tale,” Ana said softly.
Strange how, with everything that had transpired over the past few days—the shootout at Chudzik’s lake house, the standoff with the Podrova brothers—
this
could feel like our low, our rock bottom. But it did. Maybe because it seemed so completely senseless. This wasn’t an obstacle raised by the Germans or Turks, the Pruszkow mob or corrupt cops, wasn’t a land mine laid by Yuri Bobrovnyk or the Podrova brothers, or even the Russians we were trying to track down. This was just dumb, stupid luck—nothing but shitty fate.
And wasn’t that the worst of all our fears? Something we couldn’t at all control. A tumor in the colon, a drunk driver barreling down the wrong side of the road, striking us head-on because we’d decided to forgo the two-dollar delivery fee and order Chinese takeout instead. It was the ultimate mind-fuck. Those who just happened to be riding the subway in Tokyo on a Monday morning in March 1995, or flying from Boston to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001.
For me, it was Hailey. Over and over, for years, I’d thought,
Why her?
I’d blamed my career, my being in Bucharest when she was taken. I’d blamed Tasha’s parents for buying us that huge house in Georgetown when all we’d needed was a two-bedroom apartment downtown. Hell, I’d even faulted Tasha herself for being at home with Hailey and not out shopping or at a Nationals game with Tasha’s older brother, Benny, and his wife, Lara. But it was none of their faults. Only the man who took her, and however he came to find her, which was pure rotten luck.
Ana and I both jumped at a loud rap on her window.
Even though I’d been watching for tails fairly steadily since we’d left Kiev, I placed my hand around my Glock before telling her she could lower her window.
The man standing outside our SUV in the scudding snow was large and had a round, red face and a full, gray beard.
“Preevyet,”
he grunted, which I knew to be a greeting. He then followed with a few sentences I couldn’t begin to understand.
Ana, not for the first time, surprised me.
“Knee puneemaiyoo,”
she said carefully.
“Ya plokha guvareyoo pa rooski. Vy guvareetyeh pa angleeski?”
Grimly, the man shook his head.
“What did you say?” I asked her.
“I told him I do not speak Russian. I asked if he spoke English. He doesn’t.”
“Hauno,”
I muttered. Russian for “shit.” One of the four or five words I remembered. The others would be useful only in a bar.
Fortunately, the steam billowing from beneath our hood clued the man in as to our troubles. He motioned for Ana to pop the hood and she did. I knew little about engines but felt bad about leaving him out there alone in the cold, so I opened my door and hopped out to join him. By the time I got to him he was already shaking his head and frowning.
“Nyet,”
he said.
It was clear that he couldn’t fix it, at least not out here, in the dark, in the blizzard, with no tools and no parts. He stepped around the hood to Ana’s window and pointed behind our SUV to his pickup truck, which must have been twenty years old. We then engaged him in a game of charades. After a few tries, we realized he was mimicking the act of taking us to his home, where we could spend the night.
“What do you think?” Ana said as the man returned to his truck.
“What choice do we have?” I replied. “We’ll be fine. He’s an older man, and besides, I’m carrying my gun.”
We piled into his pickup and, after a few attempts, his engine coughed to life. He waited for the truck to warm up, then we rolled off.
*
As we drove deeper into the forest I saw that Ana, seated in front between me and the Belarusian, was growing more on edge. As was I. The only lights were those of the truck we rode in; it was clear that no one else was around for miles. We’d already accomplished enough twists and turns that we’d never find our way back to the Grand Vitara if need be. Not that getting back to the broken-down SUV would do us much good anyway.
More than twenty minutes later we arrived at our apparent destination, a single-story home that somewhat resembled an old barn. The Belarusian parked the pickup haphazardly on what I suspected was the front lawn. I couldn’t know for sure as it was buried under a thick layer of snow. He extinguished the headlights and opened his door, providing no hint that we should follow.
“Maybe he is just going in to get his tools,” Ana said quietly.
As she said it, the large man looked back and motioned for us to exit the truck.
Heads down against the blowing snow, we followed the man to the entrance of the home.
He stepped inside, while we were stopped at the threshold by a young woman, presumably the man’s daughter. We waited in the cold as he explained our presence to her in his language. The young woman appeared more skeptical the more he talked, and for a minute I was certain we were going to be turned away, left to freeze to death in the forest.