Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  “Very good,” The Voice said when the grooming was finished. “I would like you to think for a while on this question. How much of yourself will you give away to stay alive, and at what point does your life cease to matter?”

  The camera shifted angles constantly during the next two recorded days, often shooting from underneath the cube where the blood smears were turning brown and the increasingly indiscreet puddles of urine dried.

  Lewis played back the video frame by frame after the razor disappeared and noticed a brief discrepancy in the time code, but did not see The Voice. He accidentally let his gaze wander over the picture of his family on his desk. He turned it facedown.

  When heavy wire cutters appeared on the reflective floor, Lewis rewound the video again, but The Voice remained a ghost. Abel awoke and cried tearlessly, without sound. Lewis suspected he was too dehydrated to produce either.

  “Do you have an answer to my question?” The Voice asked.

  “Please let me go. Can’t you please let me go?” Abel asked, turning around and around until he was weaving dizzily.

  “Is the answer one finger from your left hand? If it is, I will give you water.”

  “No! Please!” Abel screamed hoarsely and struggled to his feet. “Let me go…”

  “I can’t, Abel. You will be an example for others.”

  According to the time code, Abel cut the pinky off his left hand four hours and thirteen minutes later.

  “Jesus Christ,” Lewis muttered, his long finger trembling as he pressed the pause button. He jerked when the phone on his desk rang. The light indicated it was his business line, not the secure line. He ignored it.

  Abel was watered and his wounds were bandaged. The time code showed another longer gap and Lewis realized that The Voice was concealing his identity, disrupting the feed while he attended to his prisoner.

  When Abel was asked to cut off a second finger, he held out for only an hour, rocking himself like someone in the throes of severe dementia.

  “Now write, Abel. Confess.”

  Lewis watched as the man on screen used the bloody stump of his second finger to scrawl a crude graffiti on the walls. Abel wrote and wrote until he was on his knees. Line after line of confession deviating into large, looping whorls of blood and tiny, cryptic scratches on the glass. Lewis felt his own pulse begin to race as he copied, to the best of his ability, what Abel was writing. Even under duress Abel was employing a code, and Lewis was able to extract a chilling name from the bloody script.

  There was more in the confession, and it would take a specialist to get it all. But there would never be a specialist. Lewis had already decided to burn his notes once he learned everything he could.

  Finally, Abel collapsed into a fetal position mumbling, “Killmekillmekillme.”

  “I can’t kill you yet. Forensics would indicate when you had died, and we have more work to do before.”

  Lewis had watched the video with such concentration that he began to lose track of time and courted the absurd notion that he was somehow trapped inside the cell with Abel. When a calendar reminder popped up on screen, Lewis was dragged back into the present and placed a call to his wife and daughter in New York. He lied about weather interfering with his ability to make a video connection, unwilling to see Cat on the same screen that displayed Abel’s disintegration. He hung up after several minutes, unable to remember the conversation beyond a sense of disquiet when he asked to speak to his daughter and Cat said, “Hedde’s out.”

  He placed another call and cancelled a dinner meeting.

  Long after he should have been asleep, Lewis crept through the house and retrieved a 9mm Makarov semi-automatic from the box in the bedroom closet. He took a quiet shower to wash away a rank sweat, the small pistol safe inside a plastic baggy on the soap dish. He emptied Piotr’s bowl and scooped in wet food from a fresh can, unable to remember when he last saw his tiny companion.

  He awoke some time later with the orange light of dawn filtering through the window, confused, hand pawing through papers on his desk until they closed over the automatic. Gun in hand, he stumbled to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee—thick, black stuff gifted to him by a friend in Istanbul. Inhaling the steam as it rose from a cup, hot enough to burn his hand, Lewis stopped in the living room to pluck the old double-barrel shotgun from its rack over the mantle.

  The oiled, black length of the rifle was backed by a carved, wooden stock and ornately worked triggers. Even Lewis, not really a gun aficionado, had admired its elegance when he first laid eyes on it. The Moscow official who had given it to him said its previous owner was Prince Mikhail Sergeevich Lopuhin, arrested and shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Antique though it was, the weapon was in perfect working order. Lewis felt comforted by the grim weight of it and leaned it against the wall of his study near the door before returning to his desk.

  Abel made it through the remaining fingers on his left hand over the next few days, bandages and water appearing when he was a good boy. The words on the walls had run and were now like ruins buried beneath dried brown streaks.

  On the fifth day, according to the time code, Abel picked up one of the stiffening fingers from the floor and ate it.

  “Dear God,” Lewis said.

  He had taken to keeping the blinds down and checking the perimeter security system every half hour or so, seeking reassurance from the green LED display. He wished he had a dog. The pistol was in the pocket of a heavy sweater he had been wearing non-stop, and it clanked against the kitchen counter during rare trips outside his study to make another pot of coffee.

  The video continued. “Consider the question, Abel,” The Voice said. “Is the answer your left foot? Or a phone number?”

  The footage jumped again and now Abel was screaming at a wall, as if The Voice had just been inside the cube with him. He looked emaciated and crookbacked, almost subhuman. He turned to a cell phone on the floor, but couldn’t hold it with his mangled hand. Ultimately, he wedged it between his knees and dialed a number.

  The footage blurred and the time code jumped. The image steadied on Abel shaking a small hatchet in his right fist. His first blow was clumsy, tearing a flap of skin off the corner of his forehead. He staggered and fell but bounced up with manic energy. Abel’s second blow, even one handed, drove the steel head of the hatchet into the thin bone at his right temple with surprising force and he collapsed in a heap, red sludge seeping from the wound.

  The time code indicated eight minutes of twitching before Abel went completely still.

  Lewis hit pause and covered his eyes, trying to gather his thoughts and banish his fear. He rewound the footage until the image of Abel crouching over the cell phone appeared. Lewis paused it, using agency software to isolate and zoom in on the phone’s damnably small screen. Either the camera’s resolution or the software was insufficient and the enlarged number remained an indistinct blur.

  Lewis returned to his place in the video, thankfully near the end. He hit play, unaware of the reluctant moan drifting from his own mouth.

  Rigor mortis had begun to twist and stiffen Abel’s corpse when Lewis noticed the tell-tale blur of yet another break in the recording. Automatically he ran the footage back frame by frame.

  Lewis sat up straight in his chair, knocking over a glass of water.

  The reflections made it nearly impossible to tell, and the light in the mirrored room had been turned off, but Lewis could make out the blurry outline of a too-white face that seemed to float disembodied, staring directly into the camera.

  Lewis crumpled his paper notes into a glass ashtray, lighting them with a wooden match. The ball of paper curled and twisted like a live thing as it burned, and he turned away from the acrid smoke.

  The phone rang and startled a small sound from him.

  The business line again, not his secure line.

  Lewis grabbed the shotgun and strode into the dining room where he opened the glass door of a dark wood liquor cabinet and removed a slender bo
ttle. Fat, wet flakes of snow were blowing against the expansive windows, and the darkness of the woods beyond seemed to writhe in a constant state of indiscernible motion. He retreated from the windows, returning to his study with the bottle to pour a shot of pepper vodka, downing it as he dialed the secure phone. The bloom of heat expanded through his torso and spread a warm blanket across his seething mind while he waited for the clicks and sounds indicating a secure international connection.

  “Secure connection,” Lewis said.

  “Connection secure,” a clipped voice on the other end responded.

  “Bierce, it’s me,” he said. “Something, I don’t know how to describe it, came into one of the dead-drop web sites. I’m sending it to you encrypted.”

  “Who sent it?” Bierce asked. His thin voice sounded hollow, as if heard through a tin can and wire set up.

  “That’s just it. I don’t know.”

  “But how did they access—”

  “I know, I know. Listen, it came to the site because it was meant to be seen. It’s a warning. It says so right in the fucking footage.”

  “A warning against what?”

  Lewis poured himself another drink and downed it, hissing against the fire. This was a subject he had been meaning to broach with his superior but, until now, had not found a politic way to do so. Present circumstances were not taking his feelings into account, it would seem.

  He tipped the glass over and rolled the cut crystal beneath his finger across the black maple desk. A thin trail of liquid slid into the wood grain.

  “Are you there?” Bierce asked.

  “It was Abel on the video, sir.”

  “Abel?”

  “Yes,” Lewis said, the icy hug of fear settling around his rib cage. “Sir, I’ve been aware for some time—”

  “Not on the phone,” Bierce cut him off. “Not even on a secure line.”

  The glass slipped from his wet fingers and rolled off the desk. Lewis ignored the crack of breaking glass.

  “The things this son of a bitch did to him…” Lewis said.

  “Send it,” Bierce said. Lewis heard the note of worry in his superior’s voice.

  “As soon as I get off the line. But one question…”

  “Yes?”

  “I think our bad boy made a mistake,” Lewis said. “I got a quick look at him, only one, but maybe Tech can do something with it. And I think there was a name coded into the confession Abel was writing.”

  “Who is it?”

  Lewis nodded even though the other man couldn’t see him.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Who is Mister White?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said who is Mister Whi—”

  “Stop talking,” Bierce interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Consider yourself beyond sanction and get out of there right now.”

  The call abruptly disconnected, and Lewis was left standing in his dark office listening to a dial tone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lewis redialed Bierce’s direct line, but the phone on the other end rang with no answer. He hung up, brow twisted with worry. What the hell was going on?

  He began to reach for the vodka bottle again but stopped himself as he heard a sound upstairs.

  “Knock it off,” he whispered to himself, but cocked his head to listen. The dacha, which could easily be described as rustically luxurious, and in which Lewis entertained the elite of St. Petersburg in the warmer months, was suddenly full of unfamiliar sounds and threatening shadows.

  Lewis caught a flash of crimson in the dark window and spun to look at the perimeter security controls on the wall.

  The LED display was flashing red.

  Lewis crossed the room and snatched up the shotgun leaning against the wall. The house shuddered as a snowy gust crashed against it.

  He quietly thumbed back both hammers on the weapon, barrels aimed at the floor as he put his back to the wall near the doorway. A chill line of sweat trickled down his spine and he forced himself to breathe.

  This is ridiculous, he thought to himself, some rational part of his brain insisting that he had been worked into a nervous state by the horrifying video footage.

  But Bierce was not a man to play games.

  Lewis stepped into the hall, eyes darting in every direction. With a near silent slide-shuffle in his sock-covered feet, he moved towards the front door where he kept his heavy coat and snow boots. A Russian winter was lethal without protection.

  He stopped in mid-step, muscles tensing as Piotr yowled from somewhere on the second story and flooded his bloodstream with adrenaline.

  Break contact.

  Lewis bolted for the kitchen, away from the obvious exit at the door. With no effort to remain quiet, he crawled up onto the counter and forced up the window over the sink. Long icicles hung like bars in front of the opening, but Lewis dove through them in an explosion of shimmering shards, landing heavily in a puff of white and losing his grip on the shotgun. He came up in a crouch and raked his hands across the snow but the weapon had disappeared.

  “Son of a bitch,” he hissed, writing off the long-arm. He looked around, trying to see everywhere at once, eyes straining through the falling white curtain to locate the threat.

  Every clump of snow resting on a pine bough was the pallid face of Mister White. He heard death in the rustle of the trees.

  Lewis rose and bulled straight for the tree line, knees pumping high as he plowed through two feet of snow. He made no effort to zig-zag or present an elusive target. Long-unused lessons blazed to the front of his thinking. Complexity was death. Simplicity was survival. His twin goals were distance and speed.

  It had been more than a decade since Lewis worked as a true field agent, and his desk-jockey lungs were straining before he reached the shelter of the woods. His thighs burned with the effort, and he had to repeatedly wipe his eyes clean to see.

  It was fifteen degrees out, sometime after midnight. He wore jeans, a sweater and socks. He carried a pistol with eight rounds in the magazine. He had no money, car keys or identification.

  By the time Lewis ducked under the first branches and entered the forest, his feet were numb blocks of ice and he was losing feeling in his fingers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  - 1 -

  Zoya wanted more cocaine. She stayed in bed until Evgeny was snoring lustily, feeling him drying on the inside of her thigh. When she was sure he was sound asleep, she rolled over and fished a small glassine baggy out of the nightstand.

  Empty. She ticked it with a finger to see if any powder remained, but she vaguely remember that she had already dipped her finger in before they had sex, rubbing the powder along her gums before sucking Evgeny’s cock. It made things taste better.

  She slipped out of bed, pleased at the bounce of her breasts. If Evgeny knew she was closer to thirty than the twenty-three she claimed to be, he’d throw her out on her ass. Zoya glanced back at his massive belly covered in a pelt of iron hair. She would convert him into a husband soon or have to move on, and each year that passed made that more difficult. She would not return to the village of Zheleznogorsk to become a shrunken babushka, dying a slow death under gray skies in the middle of nowhere.

  But with the blow roaring through her body, she flew above future concerns. She grabbed her robe and padded, barefoot, towards the stairs.

  Wind rattled the windows downstairs and Zoya pulled the robe around herself as goosebumps broke out over her body. It was freezing on the first floor.

  She hurried into the kitchen where she had left her bag, vague on remembering whether or not she had bought more cocaine earlier, but hopeful. It wasn’t until she had the bag on the butcher block table and was rummaging through it with both hands that she noticed the sliding glass door leading to the back deck was open a crack. She had just enough time to straighten up before she registered intense cold behind her and felt a body made of ice press against her back. Iron-hard arms—ice arms—wrapped around h
er and a hand colder than death pressed across her mouth.

  “Nyet,” she said against the frigid palm as she turned to see a white face made of winter beside her own. Ice clung to his cheeks and his hair was made of snow. Zoya screamed and bucked, but the hand muffled her cry. Something slammed into her lower back, stunning her before she was forced forward over the butcher block.

  In a split second she was back in Zheleznogorsk a child listening to the old women talk of the Strigoi—the men without warmth who stole out of the night to drink in the heat of a living body.

  The gun pressing against her temple brought her back into the present.

  “Zatknis!” the Strigoi hissed, and she stopped trying to scream. “If you scream I will kill you. If you struggle I will kill you. Nod if you understand.” His Russian reeked of the St. Petersburg elite. Her automatic envy brushed away the fear clouding her thinking. She nodded.

  “I am your neighbor from up the road. I will not kill you if you do as I say,” the Strigoi said. “I will make you rich if you do as I say, do you understand?”

  “Da,” she whispered into his palm.

  Zoya registered his trembling body and heard his teeth chattering. She became aware of the familiar position she was in and slid backward, pressing her ass into him.

  Blinding pain flashed through her skull and she reached up to find hot wetness in her hair. Tiny red drops spattered on the table.

  The Strigoi held the small black pistol in front of her face, and she felt his warm breath on her ear. “Next time, I kill you and take what I need without your help.”

  She nodded, mouth clamped shut. It was all she could do not to cry out when he jerked her up straight. He spun her about to face him, and she opened her eyes as she felt the barrel of the pistol pressed to her forehead.

  “Do you want to live?” he asked.

  She studied him, noting the snow melting out of his hair and the ice running from his cheeks. His eyes were dark hollows.

  “Da,” she said quietly.

  “Do you want to be rich?” he asked. She recognized him now. The neighbor who traveled often. Evgeny thought he was American and possibly a criminal.