State of the Union (13 page)

Though this attitude made for a very lonely personal life, she much preferred being in control and keeping people at a distance than opening herself up to the hurt that would certainly follow from allowing someone to get too close.

“You are going to tell me everything I want to know,” she said as she kept the gun trained on him while she filled a kettle of water and placed it on the stove to make tea for herself and her patient. She had been standing outside in the cold waiting for Popov to show for quite a long time. The fire in the stove had nearly gone out and her toes were frozen completely through. There wasn’t much that she hated more than the bleary Russian winters. It was no wonder that the death toll from alcoholism soared during this time of year.

“Who are you and what are you doing here? Who were you talking to on the phone? Who sent you here?” she demanded.

“If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”

“If you
don’t
tell me,
I’ll
kill you,” replied Alexandra, squeezing off a shot from her silenced Walther that splintered one of the chair’s wooden slats right between Popov’s legs.

He flinched and his hands instinctively went right to his crotch. He hid one behind the other and began extricating the knife hidden behind his belt buckle.

“Hands!”

“You’re crazy. You know that?” said Popov, trying to buy more time.

Alexandra fired two more rounds into the chair, shaving off one of the legs and causing Popov to topple over onto floor.

“Yob!” Fuck
, he yelled when his shoulder slammed into the floorboards.

Alexandra didn’t notice that the man failed to reach out with both hands to break his fall.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m going to kill you right there if you don’t tell me something of value in the next thirty seconds.

“Who the hell are you?” said Popov as he stared up at her.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-seven,” continued Alexandra.

“All right, all right,” offered Popov. “I was hired to find out what happened to General Karganov.”

“It sounded to me like you were hired to kill him and me for that matter.”

“Originally, I was hired just to find his body.”

“By the people who killed him, correct?” demanded Alexandra.

“I have no idea who killed him, or tried to kill him I should say.”

“Bullshit. Who hired you?”

“Please. Can’t I at least sit up?” pleaded Popov. It was a voice he had not heard himself use in a long, long time. It was the voice of the pitiful, defenseless orphan, but here he thought it might work. If she thought he was defeated, broken, she might let her guard down. It only had to happen for an instant. That was all he needed and she would be dead before her body hit the floor.

“I will tell you what you need to know,” continued Popov. “I just want to sit up so I can stop the bleeding.”

Alexandra nodded her head and stepped back, well aware that she had already fired six of her eight shots. She didn’t want to waste any more ammunition.

Alexandra set two teacups and saucers on the edge of the sideboard. She placed a tea bag in each cup and then walked slowly backward to the stove for the kettle, never taking her eyes off Popov.

She poured the boiling water into the first cup and as she began pouring it into the second, she heard her patient stir in the other room. He let out a long, struggling moan as if he was having trouble breathing.

Alexandra was so intent on the noise emanating from the other room that she failed to pay attention to the teakettle. As the lid fell off, the scalding spray of hot water caused her to drop it and with a startled cry, snatch her burning hand to her mouth as her gun fell to the floor. It was an opportunity Popov had to take advantage of.

No second chances
, he thought to himself as he shot out of his chair and went straight for Alexandra’s throat. Before she knew what was happening, he was on top of her. He swung his right arm like a hammer, crashing it down onto her forearm with a force that reverberated throughout her entire body. Popov then swung the back of his left hand in a wide arc toward her face.

Even in the dull light of the kitchen, she saw the glint of the blade coming at her. Without enough time to raise her arm in a defensive block, Alexandra simply turned her head down and offered her attacker her face, rather than her throat. As unthinkable as the bargain was, it was the only thing she could do to save her life.

The blade cut into her scalp just above her temple. Hot blood rolled down her cheek and she spun her body away from Popov. As she continued to move, Popov continued thrashing at her with his blade. She put up her arms to defend herself and in a matter of seconds he had slashed her leather jacket to ribbons. In the scuffle, her gun was kicked across the floor, and she had no idea where it had gone.

Popov was in control and he knew it. Like a cat who had cornered a field mouse and was playing with it before the final coup-de-grace, he drove his beautiful blond captive into a corner of the small kitchen and wondered if maybe killing, at least her, at this point was a little premature. Surely she could be good for something else before she died. If she was good enough, maybe he’d even give Stavropol a discount on her murder.

He decided that the old adage of an eye for an eye very much applied to this situation. He would need to start by cutting off one of her ears. She would scream her pretty head off and it would be messy, but in a very perverse way, Popov thought it would be fun. In fact, it would be like the snuff film one of his underworld colleagues had once shown him. Right at the height of the action, the moment of greatest passion, the greatest pleasure, that’s when he would kill her, but not before then. The buildup would be a sensually excruciating game of foreplay. He was growing hard just thinking about it—pumping the seed of life into her as the spirit of life oozed out of her.

The gun
, Alexandra thought.
Where the hell was that goddamn gun?
She had to find it.

Her eyes swept left and right across the floor and then finally spotted it, sticking out from underneath the kitchen table.

She needed to draw Popov’s attention away from the table, and so she raised her hands in a classic martial arts fashion.

Confident in his advantage, Popov laughed and said, “Do you mean to do me harm, little girl?”

Alexandra hoped to unbalance him by stirring the hornet’s nest. Clenching and unclenching her fists as if she was limbering up to really go at it she said, “I don’t know if your face could be any more ugly, but I’d like to give it a try.”

She had hit a very raw nerve. Though Popov might appear vain, he was incredibly insecure, especially about his face. “You don’t like it?” he asked. “You’d better get used to it as it is the last face you are ever going to see. In fact, before you die, I think I would like to finish what I started. I’ve only given you a little kiss with my knife. Soon, you two will become much more intimate and then we’ll find a mirror together and decide whose face is more ugly.”

Alexandra swung at him and caught nothing but air as Popov easily stepped back from the punch and laughed. She swung with her other arm and missed again, encouraging more laughter from Popov. “You’re actually not as fearsome as I thought you’d be. Especially not without your gun.”

“Passhol v’chorte,” Go to hell
, she spat, as she put her hands back up in a traditional boxer’s stance. She moved her head and shoulders from side to side, looking for an opening.

“Is this supposed to intimidate me?” asked Popov.

Alexandra didn’t bother answering. She threw an obvious jab with her right hand that Popov easily parried away. He was about to say something else when seemingly out of nowhere Alexandra landed a left cross, followed by a right hook. Obviously, Popov knew nothing about boxing and one of the sport’s most popular three-punch combinations.

As an added measure of security, Alexandra lined up and kicked the stunned Popov in the nuts with everything she had. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he doubled over in pain. The forward weight was more than his injured knee could bear and he fell hard onto his side. Alexandra moved around him and dove for the kitchen table and the gun lying just underneath.

She was less than a foot away from it when she felt Popov’s hand grab her leg. He was clawing his way up her body, desperate to get to the gun before she did.

She was beginning to think that all was lost when the fingertips of her left hand touched the long metal tube of the weapon’s silencer. Alexandra struggled beneath Popov, using her free hand to slap at his head and shoulders.

Millimeter by millimeter her fingers slid down the weapon, brailling its features until she could finally feel the trigger guard and knew the butt of the pistol was almost in her grasp. As she was about to close in on it, Popov grabbed the silenced Walther, struggled to his feet and aimed it at her head. “I’m beginning to think that you’d might be more fun dead,” he said, wiping the blood away from where Alexandra’s left cross had caught him in the mouth. “What do you think?”

“
Kooshi govno ee oomree!
” she replied.

“Oh, I do plan on dying one day, but I don’t plan on eating any shit before it happens.”

“Guess again,” said a man behind Popov, who then whacked in the side of his head with an antique bedpan.

As Popov hit the floor, the Walther discharged, its silenced round ricocheting off the kitchen’s iron stove before exiting through the leaded glass window above the sink.

Though Karganov had succeeded in ringing Popov’s bell, the young Mafioso had been hit much harder many times before in his life. He quickly shook it off, and spun on his haunches to train his gun on the injured general. Karganov knew he was beaten. “
Bliad,
” Russian for
Shit!
was the last thing that escaped his lips before Popov drilled a round right between the man’s eyes.

Minutes later, the fog of gun smoke still hung thick in the air. Alexandra Ivanova had no idea if the ringing in her ears was from her own screaming over the loss of General Anatoly Karganov, or from the deafening roar of the Pit Bull as its .45-caliber armor-piercing rounds raced out of the barrel and tore through the flesh of the onetime orphan from Nizhnevartovsk, and now lifeless Moscow crime figure, Milesch Popov.

W
hat I’m asking for, Mr. President is your guarantee, right now, as a member of NATO and the elected leader of the Republic of France, to stand by us on this one,” replied President Rutledge, who then fell quiet as he listened to his counterpart’s response.

Several moments passed, during which the American president couldn’t help rolling his eyes. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When it was his turn again to speak, Rutledge had to fight to keep his temper in check. “No, this isn’t an
American
problem, it’s an
international
problem and no, we are not interested in having you mediate it for us. There’s nothing to mediate. The sovereignty of the United States is not negotiable.

“Benoit, all countries committed to freedom and peace must take a stand in the war on terror, no matter where that terror comes from. Like it or not, the bloodlines of our two nations are forever intertwined. French blood was spilled in helping to forge our nation and create our sovereignty, and American blood has been spilled in not one, but two great wars in helping your countrymen preserve yours. I can’t state more strongly that we believe—”

Interrupted by a retort from the French president, Rutledge again fell silent for several moments before responding, “Benoit, I want you listen to me and listen good. You’ve been waffling ever since we sent you the file on this from Langley. I know you have problems within your own political party right now and I’ve also got a good idea of what the current disposition is across the European Union toward the United States, but I want to make it completely clear that America resents the fact that you are even weighing what your position should be on—”

Rutledge gripped the phone so tightly he was sure he was going crack the receiver as he was interrupted yet again. Finally, he lost it and the diplomacy with which he was trying to conduct their conversation evaporated. “I don’t give a good goddamn what parallels you think you see between this situation and what happened with Iraq. I’m not going down that road. If your intelligence people want to see the bomb we have in our possession, they’re welcome to it. In fact, they should, just in case you end up with one in your backyard. The reason the Brits got the first look was because MI6 already had operatives over here doing a cross-training exercise with some of our people.

“Benoit, I have a lot of phone calls yet to make, so I’m going to save us both some time and cut right to the chase. We agree with you one hundred percent that by all acceptable standards, the intelligence we have thus far is not independently actionable. But when you connect the dots in that file we sent you, they form a very scary picture. You don’t need to be a lifelong analyst to see that. Millions of people in America could die. Entire cities could be reduced to nothing more than piles of radioactive rubble. If the situation were reversed and we were talking about you potentially losing Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, and maybe even twenty more cities, what would you want to be hearing from your allies?”

Moments later, and for the first time since the situation had broken, president Jack Rutledge allowed himself to relax. “Thank you, Benoit. I’m glad we can count on you,” he said as he hung up the phone.

The feeling of relaxation, though, quickly dissipated as Rutledge’s chief of staff, Charles Anderson, who had been simultaneously reviewing the top secret folder containing the nuclear evacuation plan for the president and his daughter, hung up the extension he’d been listening in on and said, “Well done. Only twenty-three more calls to go.”