by Christa Wick
A month later, he touched down in Moscow as Rodya Kalinin—the newest recruit in a joint task force between the FBI and its Russian counterpart to stop organized crime.
8
Mikhael
Russia – Present Day
Reaching into his medical bag, the physician nodded at Mikhael's bloodstained shirt. A faint tremor ran through his hands as he snapped on a pair of blue surgical gloves.
"That will need to come off."
Osip dropped the sandwich Arkady had picked up while fetching the doctor onto a deli wrapper and stood. His hand dove into his pocket to retrieve a buck knife as he strolled over to where Mikhael remained tied to the chair. With a grin smearing his face, Osip opened the blade and grabbed the cuff of Mikhael's sleeve.
Careless with the knife, he began ripping upward, nicking the skin along his bicep and again at his collar.
Mikhael watched through swollen eyes as the doctor turned pale over the rough treatment.
The man was young for his profession, probably mid-thirties. Mikhael doubted he had ever been summoned to attend a prisoner just so that the patient could be murdered later by the same thugs. Any work he did for the Rodchenko syndicate in Moscow was likely at the end of the crime—patching up bullet wounds after gunfights or otherwise saving the lives of killers so they could kill again.
Osip circled behind Mikhael to start cutting on the other half of the shirt.
"Can't you untie him?" the doctor asked.
Leaning forward, Osip stuck his craggy face in front of the doctor's, smiled a leering grin and pointed with his bloody blade at the two teeth Mikhael had knocked out when they had captured him.
It had taken eight of them total to subdue Mikhael. Osip, Kostya and Arkady were left to guard him while the others were treated for broken ribs, a shattered eye socket and a skull fracture.
"I don't think so," Osip lisped.
The doctor bobbed his head, sweat beginning to bead along his upper lip.
"I'll need—"
"Hoy!" Arkady interrupted from where he stood by one of the few boarded up windows that offered cell reception. "Does he have a tattoo on his chest?"
Returning to his sandwich, Osip kicked Kostya where he snoozed on a floor mat.
"They want to know if he has a tattoo on his chest."
Kostya wiped at eyes still bleary from the vodka he had consumed the night before. He rolled onto his feet and shuffled to where several jugs of water were lined up. He grabbed one, twisted off the cap and began to splash it on Mikhael's chest.
Looking around, he snatched up the shredded shirt and used it as a wash cloth, dousing the dried blood with more water as he scrubbed.
"He's got a whole fucking painting!" Kostya bellowed. Leaning close enough that Mikhael could have head butted him, the old Russian squinted at the gray and black shaded drawing. "An angel with a spear stepping all over..."
Hesitating, Kostya poured more water on the tattoo.
"Stepping all over...uh..."
"The devil," Mikhael offered, Rodchenko's name whispering at the back of his mind.
"The devil," Kostya repeated.
"It's him, it's fucking him," Arkady shouted. "He was telling the truth!"
Osip continued eating his sandwich as if nothing had been said. Kostya sank onto his ass and broke into laughter.
"I'll be damned."
Mikhael knew the deal was set. His captors intended to sell him to the Volkov family for money and a protected place within their organization. With Dima's reputation as an unparalleled psychopath, no one on the side of the Volkovs would question the men's motivation for selling out their boss.
"I may be able to reset this," the doctor said, his fingertips wrapping around Mikhael's strong cheekbones while his thumbs pressed softly at the sides of his broken nose.
"Don't," Mikhael growled. After he had finally spit and snorted out or swallowed down most of the blood-filled mucus, he found he could breathe without difficulty. Resetting his nose would only bring more blood and fresh pain to cloud his mind while he worked on escaping.
The doctor dropped his hands to trace the lines of Mikhael's ribcage. Another growl and the swollen and bruised flesh confirmed a potentially cracked rib.
Grabbing a roll of elastic bandaging, the doctor began to weave a compression wrap around Mikhael's chest and back where the rib was injured. Each time he wound the roll to the front, he had to dip close to Mikhael's ear.
"I have a pill," he whispered, rolled some more and whispered again. "It will wipe out your pain—forever."
"No," Mikhael answered, his voice just as low.
Finished with the wrap, the doctor turned at last to the swollen right eye.
"Can you follow my finger."
Wincing, Mikhael forced his eye to track toward his broken nose then back to center.
"Well, I don't think the retina is detached, yet," the doctor said. "But if the swelling doesn't go down, you could lose your sight in that eye."
Osip grunted a laugh, its meaning clear to everyone in the room—even the physician.
"Look," Arkady said, his call finished. "Fix him up so he's good for a few days. He's someone else's problem after that."
Pocketing his phone, he began to rummage through the doctor's bag. He scooped out five pill bottles and tossed them to Kostya.
"Those are for the sick," the doctor protested, the color draining from his face once again.
"I'm all kinds of sick," Arkady smiled. "I could make a house call and show you what I'm talking about."
Looking at the floor, the doctor removed his gloves and kept his lips tightly pressed.
Finished with his treasure hunt, Arkady snapped the bag shut and shoved it at the physician. "The Rodchenko family thanks you for your service, comrade."
Mikhael watched Arkady shove the doctor's windbreaker and bicycle helmet at him then lead him to the heavy iron door that opened onto the building's back alley. Mikhael doubted the doctor would be of any additional assistance. The man had to know what would happen to him and his family. Even if he went to the police, he couldn't begin to guess which of the officers wasn't on the Rodchenko payroll.
Getting a doctor had never been more than a bid for time and maybe some electronic chatter. He wasn't a man without friends, friends far more powerful than he was. They had more than enough resources to take on Rodchenko. First, they had to find him—and he hadn't made that easy.
Learning of the threat to Alina, he had been downright stupid about things.
Now he had to be smart. He had to buy as much time as he could, look for his own escape opportunities and push Arkady into contacting Volkov or Dima, even the doctor, as many times as he could. The more chatter, the greater the chance he'd be found or finally haul his own ass out of the shit he had fallen into.
Arkady plopped down on the mat next to Kostya and retrieved one of the pill bottles.
"Just what the doctor ordered," he grinned, popping the lid and shaking two tablets into his hand.
A timid knock sounded at the alley door. Osip cursed then swiped at a drop of mayonnaise on his chin as he stood up and kicked Kostya, who had already taken some of the pills and chased them with more vodka.
"Useless," he grumbled, pulling his pistol from the back of his jeans and stalking toward the door. Standing on tiptoe, he looked through a hole in the boarded up window. "I think he wants his pills back."
"Tell him he can suck my balls," Kostya called, the fingers of one hand dancing in the air as if trying to catch a hallucination.
"Have you seen his wife?" Arkady asked as Osip slid open the last lock on the door. "Now that's a bitch I'd pay to fuck. Hey, Osip, tell him to bring that hot bitch here and I'll give him some of his—"
Thwip-thwip
Mikhael threw his weight to one side, forcing his chair to the ground as the whisper soft firing of two bullets through a silencer dropped Osip to the ground and shut Arkady's mouth. The kid's hands fumbled around his body like he was sea
rching for a gun. All he came up with was his smartphone.
Kostya started to laugh, his finger lazily pointing at Osip's dead body. "Now you're the one sleeping on the job, asshole!"
Thwip-thwip
Arkady's brains exploded out the back of his head, the splatter of blood and flesh finally sobering Kostya. He scooped up the pill bottles and offered them to the man in the windbreaker and bicycle helmet.
"Here!" Kostya begged. "I didn't tell him to take them."
Thwip-thwip
With the last of Rodchenko's thugs dead, the man turned to Mikhael. Sunglasses covered his eyes. Below them, a satisfied grin pushed his bold cheeks up high. Bending down, he whipped the glasses off.
"I guess this makes us even now, Nazarov."
"Not so much, Hades," the Russian chuckled. "But you're finally getting close."
9
Mikhael
"Why, when a man goes crazy, it is always about a woman?" Trent Kane, code name Hades and Chief Operating Officer of Stark International, asked from the back of an operations van that looked like it had last been used by a plumbing contractor without being cleaned out.
Mikhael shrugged and reached into the bag Kane had tossed him a second earlier.
"Hold up, don't put anything on yet," Reed Henley, another Stark employee, ordered from the front seat, a computer balanced carefully on his lap and Arkady's smartphone in one hand.
Kane rolled his eyes then leaned against the side of the van and closed them. Mikhael slid along the bench seat and looked over Henley's shoulder.
"I thought you don't do field ops anymore," he said, his injuries turning each word into a rough mumble.
"And I thought you would have enough sense not to run off on your own."
"C'mon," Mikhael joked. "You're old enough to be my granddad. You should be in a home playing bingo with silver-haired ladies."
Snorting, Kane opened his eyes. "Lucky for you that he isn't. Reed's the one who found your dumb ass after figuring out it was this Alina chick who put you on a suicide mission."
Mikhael shot Kane a hard look.
The man was right, though. Mikhael had foolishly expected a different reception. There was no reason to think she wanted to see him, not after everything she had said the last time he saw her. Still, trying to save her life while explaining that Dima had a kill order out on her should have softened her up toward Mikhael a little.
The hurt over how he had parted from her was definitely the reason for his telling no one he was going. He didn't want to relive the past or justify the danger he was putting himself in for a woman who had so coldly rejected him.
"Fine," Mikhael mumbled and reached into the duffel again.
"Hold on, now," Reed said. "You still want to help her, right?"
Mikhael let the shirt fall into the bag. "Yeah. But she doesn't want help. She said she won't leave Dima."
"Dmitrey Dmitreyovich Rodchenko?" Reed asked, pulling up a document on his computer. "Current head of the Rodchenko crime family and her half-brother."
Her half-brother and Satan's most evil spawn.
"That's the bastard," Mikhael agreed.
Would it change Alina's mind if he played the recording to her—the one with Dima talking to an underling in a Geneva hotel about getting her to Russia during the Pakhan meeting in St. Petersburg and making it look like a rival within the Rodchenko syndicate assassinated her?
"Well," Reed continued. "If you want to help her, we have a short window of time before anyone knows you've escaped or that you likely had help doing it. Right now, the guards at the compound have returned to business as usual, especially since Rodchenko is not set to return from St. Petersburg until tomorrow. But it could only be hours or even minutes before Dima tries to dial up one of the dead men."
"He knows the reception in that building is shit," Mikhael offered.
Jiggling Arkady's phone at them, Reed smiled. "Good. I have a plan that will have one of Rodchenko's men deliver Alina exactly where we want and then leave her with us."
"And why would he do that?" Kane asked, his gaze lighting up with curiosity.
Reed jiggled the phone again. "Because his boss told him to."
10
Mikhael
Muscles aching, hands loosely tied behind his back, Nazarov sat on another steel framed chair. The building was different, this one a long, narrow unit with an electric roll-up door at the front, no windows, and a smaller exit at the back left slightly open.
Two cameras on tripods pointed at his body, both of them forward from where he sat at the back of the unit, one on the left, the other on the right. Harsh studio lights bathed his body in unrelenting brightness that showed every cut and bruise on his face and bare torso.
The bulbs were hot, making him sweat. He let his head droop. Fatigue weighed him down but the constant stream of adrenaline his body manufactured kept him from sleeping.
Mostly, he didn't want his expected guests to see the hope blazing in his one good eye.
The rolling door at the far end began to raise. He didn't lift his head, knew he had to look defeated.
Through an earpiece, Kane let him know everything that was going on. Reed had sent a text mimicking Dima's phone to one of the guards at the compound, all of their cells pinged to pull their numbers days ago while he and Kane searched the city for any sign of Nazarov. After capturing Arkady's phone, he had matched up the numbers already gathered with names in the dead man's contact list.
With their cell numbers, Reed had been able to hack into some of their phones, read their messages and determine who was the most obedient and gullible. He sent the text to Fedor Gusev with an address and the words "Come alone, bring Alina with you."
Now, with the door open, he texted Fedor to let Alina out. The woman didn't fight. She got out of the car clutching her purse before Fedor had time to finish reading the message. She was halfway down the length of the unit before the final text flashed across Fedor's screen as the rolling door began to close under Reed's remote direction.
Go. Leave her.
Hearing the rolling metal door shutting her in, Alina froze. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the lights of the car disappear. Turning back to face the lifeless looking man in the chair, her shoulders sagged.
Reed stepped through the unit's rear door, his hair slicked back, sunglasses covering his eyes and black gloves on his hands. He held a pistol in one, the same weapon with its silencer that Kane had used to kill Osip, Kostya and Arkady.
Slowly, he lifted the gun toward Nazarov's head.
"No!" she cried and crossed into the bright lights. Ignoring Reed disguised as a gunman, she wrapped her hands around one of the cameras and started to beg. "You don't have to do this. I am loyal to you."
Tears streamed down her face. Her nose began to run and she wiped absently at it.
"You know you will always have my loyalty. Don't do this to him."
Reaching down, Reed tugged at the knots, freeing Nazarov's hands. The big Russian made it onto his feet, his gait unsteady in approaching Alina as she continued to plead into the camera, promising Dima anything.
When he wrapped his hands around her shoulders, she screamed and fought like a caged animal until she saw that it was him. Then she stopped as sure as if they'd shot her with a tranquilizer dart.
"This is fake?" she said after her gaze skittered around his face then over to Reed to find the gun re-holstered and Kane and another team member entering the room to quickly clear the camera and lights.
"A ruse to kidnap me?" She screamed the accusation, her hand closing into a fist that connected a second later with the cheek below Mikhael's swollen eye.
"Dima is going to kill you and blame Malinovsky," he rasped, doing nothing to shield himself against her next attack.
Her fingers wrapped around the sides of his face, the nails digging in and her thumbs poised to gouge his eyes. Halting, she turned pale. She jerked her hands close to her body, leaned to the side and threw up.
/>
"Time to go," Reed urged as the last of the equipment was cleared from the room.
"Your wounds are real," she said, swiping the back of her shaking hand against her lips.
Scrambling away from him, she pushed onto her feet. "Go home, Mikhael, wherever that has been all these years. You'll get us both killed."
Growling, he advanced on her, his footsteps too unsteady to catch up as she drew further away.
"He already intends to kill you, Alina!"
"Why add another body, you fool?" she asked with a bitter laugh.
"You. Don't. Have. To. Die!" he ground out.
A feeble smile brightened her face. "Maybe Dima will give me one last day with him."
All but broken, Nazarov turned to Reed. The big Russian's hands curled into fists and his arms shook with the need to punch something. "Help me understand, my friend."
"Stockholm syndrome?" Reed offered. "Given the dossier I worked up, she's been victimized her entire life. She's formed a traumatic bond with this Dima character where any brief respite in his cruelty is perceived as—"
"Not Dima," she said. "Never Dima."
"We need to go," Kane warned, popping his head through the unit's rear exit. "Get your asses—and hers—in the van. Now!"
"I'm not going anywhere." Taking another step back, she crossed her arms against her breasts and tucked her chin, her dark eyes threatening a fight. "Fedor will return, eventually."
Hearing Nazarov's sharp intake of air, Reed stepped between them and fished a small vial with a spray cap from his pocket.
"Look, Miss Rodchenko, we can do this the easy way or the hard way." He took a meaningful glance at the unit's concrete floor then smiled at her. "I suggest the easy way."
Her expression widened, the eyes appearing startlingly large with the irises colored a dark chocolate.
Reed lifted the vial higher, its nozzle pointed at her face. He smiled. "Doesn't matter if you hold your breath. It will begin penetrating your skin immediately."