Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  “Found something of yours in a snowbank,” Father Messina said, nodding back to the Jeep he was towing.

  “Gerard,” Cat said, running up to him and wrapping her arms around his middle, burying her face in his chest. He could feel her sobbing against him and was so surprised that it took him a moment to realize who she was.

  “Cat?” Gerard said, awkwardly patting her back.

  He looked up at the sound of another door opening and saw a teenager staring at him with fear in her eyes. The priest rested his hand on her shoulder and ushered her forward, speaking quietly.

  “I’ll unhook the Jeep,” the priest said as Gerard looked down at the wild red hair of his niece.

  “Best come inside,” he said to the top of Cat’s head.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  - 1 -

  Uncle Gerard’s smell filled the dimly lit kitchen. Sweat, whiskey and cigarettes competing with the more pleasant scent of the black iron woodstove in the corner. The chemical salt odor of canned soup was ingrained in the table and the exposed wood of the floor. Cat wondered how much of the stuff you had to eat to leave such an indelible scent.

  “No way. Dad?” Hedde said, scorn writ large in the twist of her lip.

  Uncle Gerard just grunted, reading the note Lewis had left for Cat. He held it out and Hedde snatched it.

  “His work changed, but he never left Foreign Service,” Cat said.

  “This is total bullshit,” Hedde said, looking up from the note and crumpling it.

  Cat pulled the new passport and driver’s license from her purse and tossed them on the table. Hedde picked them both up and her brows furrowed even deeper.

  “And this,” Cat said, laying the revolver on the table.

  Uncle Gerard and Hedde reached for it at the same time, but the teenager pulled her hand back when the older man showed no sign of relinquishing the weapon. He expertly flipped open the cylinder and emptied the bullets onto the table, his thick fingers surprisingly nimble.

  “These are meant to do some harm,” he said, picking one up and examining it. “Hollow points.” He fixed his eyes on Cat. “And you don’t know anything else ‘cept this note and the code word Lewis sent?”

  “Just that he’s in trouble and thinks we might be too,” she said.

  Gerard handed the empty pistol to Hedde, who balanced it on her palm, surprised at the weight.

  “Dad hates guns,” Hedde said.

  “Then your father made a hard choice,” Gerard said. “Sending you to me must’ve been a hard choice too.”

  “We’ll only be here overnight—” Cat began, but a shake of Gerard’s head silenced her.

  “You’ll be here until this thing is done,” he said.

  “But Dad’s such a…such a…” She couldn’t match the long-held image of her father with the cold reality of the pistol in her hand. “He throws dinner parties.”

  Gerard took the gun back and reloaded it, snapping the cylinder closed with a flick of his wrist. He slid it across the table to Cat.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “When were you going to tell me he was in the CIA?” Hedde asked.

  “You’re father planned to tell you when you turned eighteen,” Cat said.

  Hedde sprang from her seat, eyes blurring. The chair toppled over and she made no move to catch it. “This is such bullshit.”

  She turned like an automaton and stalked from the kitchen with her palms pressed down by her sides. Cat rose when she heard the front door bang open.

  Gerard waved Cat back to her seat. “Etienne,” he said, voice thrumming deep in his chest.

  Cat heard claws scrabble on wood and a dark shadow ambled into the kitchen, red tongue lolling from a black snout. He wore the scars on his face and a mangled ear like a record of his conquests.

  “Find her,” Gerard said, and the dog trotted from the room, claws clicking on the tile.

  “Is this really happening?” Cat asked.

  Gerard nodded.

  - 2 -

  Accustomed to solitary reflection, Gerard realized that he had spoken more in one evening than he had in the last month. It had been years since anyone had sat at the kitchen table with him.

  He looked through the frost-covered panes of glass on the front door to see his niece divided into a thousand prisms as she sat on the stump beneath the hanging tree. A dark girl in some strange, old timey dress, as if she lived in a faded black-and-white picture. The black bulk of Etienne nosed at the hands covering her face and she shoved him away. The dog settled onto his haunches, watching her.

  Family is family, even Cat’s husband, Gerard thought. Even if Lewis did throw dinner parties.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  - 1 -

  From the outside, passersby saw ancient ruins draped in a wintery white mantle. Inside, it smelled like a portable chemical toilet in the height of summer.

  “Haluat seksiä hänen kanssaan?” the cadaverous Finn asked over the crashing death metal erupting from a brand new Bose speaker. He leaned over and placed a rolled euro note to his right nostril. In the flickering candlelight the shirtless dealer looked like a walking corpse, his eyes lost in deep sockets, his white-blond hair cut close to the scalp and invisible.

  “Fuck her? She’s dead,” Lewis replied in Finnish.

  The Finn snorted a line of coke off the low table and leaned back, eyes closing. He reached over, without looking, to the woman sprawled next to him on the stained couch and pinched a nipple through the bra she wore as a top.

  “She’s just resting,” the Finn said.

  Lewis glanced around the stone interior of the abandoned church. Violent graffiti covered the walls, and empty bottles and crumpled fast food wrappers littered the cracked tiles of the floor. One wall was charred by recent fire. He had been awake for close to two days, hurrying across the Finnish border and then searching for a man like the one in front of him.

  “Like I said,” the Finn spoke up, doling out another line of fine, powdery cocaine. “We don’t do cars, Mr. Cop.” He smiled, and receding gums gave his blackened teeth vulpine length.

  Lewis shook his head and took the rolled euro. “If you were as heavy as I’d heard, you could move a car. Think of it as a test.”

  Lewis leaned over and inhaled expertly, the drug burning in his nasal passage. His eyes watered and he wiped away a drip of snot. When he looked up, the skeleton man was pointing a chromed revolver at him.

  “I hate tests! I flunk tests!” The Finn screamed, laughing. “But I will take your car anyway, Mr. Cop.”

  Lewis shrugged.

  “They used to hang people here, when the Soviets came,” the Finn said, gesturing at the fire-blackened beams overhead. “How about we hang you and use you for target practice?”

  Lewis leaned over and snorted the remainder of the white line off the table. “This is good shit,” he said in a language of the north Caucasus region, keeping the desperate hope off of his face. “But your taste in music is just shit, period.”

  His seat squeaked as he turned to see the young Russian kid on guard by the door move into the candlelight. The pimple-faced twenty-something had his hand on the butt of a pistol jutting from the waistband of his jeans. The leather jacket he wore was covered with metal studs, and he had skipped the shirt beneath it. Haut couture in the Scandinavian drug set, Lewis thought.

  “Aapo,” he said to the dealer. Lewis thought the kid’s name might have been Alex.

  “What?” the dealer screamed, strings of spit flying from his fishlike lips. “I’m doing business with Mr. Cop!”

  The guard hesitated, eyes darting between Lewis and his boss, before he circled around and whispered in the dealer’s ear. Lewis leaned back, relaxed, his hand closer to his pocket. He realized that what he had thought were intricate, blue tattoos on the dealer’s bare torso were actually a network of prominent veins.

  The dealer looked angry and whispered back. Lewis heard the word “Chechnya” menti
oned more than once as he eased the pistol from his pocket. They hadn’t even removed his coat when they frisked him, and the small weapon had been easy to keep hidden.

  “Bullshit,” the dealer said, turning to Lewis. The cadaverous eyes went wide in the split second before Lewis shot the young guard in the knee. The half-dressed girl on the couch opened her eyes and screamed louder than the writhing man on the floor. She sprang up, racing from the room without a backward glance.

  Lewis stared down the barrel of the Finn’s huge weapon, his own discreet automatic held steady on the other’s chest. The guard continued to wail.

  Abruptly, the Finn smiled. “See, she’s not dead. You want to fuck her now, Mr. Chechen?”

  Lewis smiled back. “Call me Strigoi.”

  - 2 -

  The commuter train hurried along the tracks, passing safety lights that bathed the interior with periodic flashes of orange brilliance. Lewis slumped on a maroon bench in the dim car, just another weary traveler. He planned to convert the considerable amount of cocaine on his person into cash in Helsinki. Not only was the capital city home to a boisterous club and drug scene, it was a safe distance away from the Mercedes.

  He was sure the expensive vehicle he had traded for the drugs had a tracking system built into it.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, wiping his dripping nose. He noticed a woman a few seats ahead of him was sitting sideways in her seat, staring at him. Her face was a mass of gray seams, eyes like bitter, black raisins buried in creases of fat beneath a surprisingly colorful hat from which a few white wisps of hair escaped. Orange light filled the car, and for a brief moment her shadow climbed up the wall behind her.

  Lewis looked down at his lap.

  He had achieved safe distance with speed and considerable luck. But he thought he could feel them, or Him, right on his heels, the rasping breath of Mister White hot on the back of his neck. Some fading, rational part of his mind knew that fatigue and shock were generating an internal wave of paranoia, but his rational mind was powerless to resist.

  Above all he needed time to think. What was happening? Who was Mister White? What did Abel have to do with anything? Why had Bierce warned him and then cut him loose?

  Abel.

  Bierce.

  “No,” Lewis said under his breath.

  Declared “beyond sanction” meant that Lewis did not dare contact any agency assets, and it also denied him access to agency resources. It left him alone and vulnerable.

  Easy to clean up.

  This was not agency, even if Bierce was involved. This smelled like freelance. It smelled like Abel. Lewis had already been looking at Abel, wondering why he had been allowed to color outside of the lines for so long.

  Abel and Bierce.

  And now it was being cleaned up, except Lewis was in the loop as well.

  The sinking feeling he had was more than just a cocaine crash.

  It would take all of his experience, care and the funds he could scrape up to get him to Munich and the very important locker waiting for him there.

  And then, if he was very, very lucky, he would make it to America.

  Did you follow instructions, Cat? Are you all right?

  The very idea of his family had taken on a surreal quality, far less real than the warm breath in his ear whispering wordless threats.

  “Sätt en kula i huvudet.” Put a bullet in your head. Lewis jerked around in his seat to see a young man with a blonde beard sitting in the row behind him, eyes closed and buds in his ears, muttering along to some Swedish musical monstrosity. He turned forward and slumped lower.

  Lewis had shot a man just hours ago. He was smuggling drugs taped to his torso while his family, far away, was dealing with school and home. He had illegally crossed an international border and planned on crossing more before he was finished. He had sent his family fleeing from their safe haven and into a world he thought he had left behind.

  It’s all coming back too easily, he thought. The veil he had draped across the past turned out to be a gossamer thing and no protection at all.

  As the drugs wore off, he felt the crash coming on and leaned his head back against the vibrating glass of the train’s window.

  He twitched awake at the next stop and sat up straight, confused until he saw the old woman in the brightly colored cap still staring at him. He closed his eyes again, aware of the weight of her regard until the swaying train worked its will on his tired body.

  Tension drained away in waves, and the sound of the metal wheels clacking rapidly along the tracks lulled him into a troubled dream in which his family was being chased by faceless men for reasons they would not share.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alex drove a vintage Yugo like a racecar driver, sliding around icy turns, bouncing off the packed snowbanks and daring himself to get home with both headlights intact. The white walls blew past him so fast he could not make out any details. Trees were a blur and the stars overhead were streaking as if he was attaining light speed.

  Fuck, it’s only a Yugo, he thought. His leg hurt where the bullet had clipped it, but they made pills for that shit and he was flying high, the bandage around his knee crusted brown already.

  “Maailma ilman Jumalaa,” he screamed at the windshield. The title lyrics to Convulse’s “World Without God.” Finnish death metal to beat all death metal. Fuck the Swedes.

  At twenty-one years old, Alex knew about death metal, selling drugs and the hell of serving in the Red Army’s disgraceful ass-kicking in Chechnya.

  Now he could add the selling of stolen luxury cars to that list.

  He howled with laughter as he caught the corner of a snowbank and lost his left headlight. He knew fuck all about racecar driving, but fuck it!

  Aapo would be pleased at how easily he had moved that Chechen’s Mercedes. Maybe he would let him start his own sales, or at least fuck Narttu.

  He skidded under a pair of leafless, overarching trees into the decrepit church’s driveway, and his headlights picked up the stone structure rising from the snow. Narttu thought it was so old it was haunted, but Aapo said she did too much coke to know anything.

  “World without God!” he screamed again, even though the next song was playing. He turned off the engine before reaching a complete stop, and the car lurched and farted as the music died.

  The car door resisted when he tried to open it, so Alex hit it with a shoulder and it popped halfway open with a squeal. He slithered out.

  “Shit,” he said in Finnish. Cursing in his adopted language was still his strongest vocabulary. Fucking knee hurts. He pictured a line of white and a pile of pills and started limping for the side door they used to go in and out. The main congregation’s doors had been boarded up a million years ago, and it was too hard to get the stuff off.

  “Aapo,” he called out to give the tweaky bastard some warning it was a friendly coming inside. He adjusted the pistol in his waistband as he limped, and he patted the rolls of cash in his jacket pocket.

  The door was already cracked open an inch and he pulled it the rest of the way before the security breach caught his attention, but his knee hurt like hell and he wanted some pills.

  “Hey Aapo—” he shouted before the rest of the greeting died in his throat.

  The interior of the massive room was lit by a hellish orange light, and Alex saw that the little furniture they had was consumed by eager flames.

  When he looked up and noticed Aapo, his mind refused to accept what he saw, and he blamed it on the drugs twisting his sight into nightmare.

  The Finnish drug dealer’s naked corpse dangled by the neck from an overhead beam and was melting like a plastic man softened in a microwave oven. His limbs hung too low. His arms were as long as his legs and stretched until they were easily five feet in length.

  “Aapo?” But the dealer didn’t respond. Aapo’s tongue was a thick wad of meat protruding from his mouth, and his nearly bald head was black with retained blood.

  Alex shook his head t
o erase the horrifying sight and only then noticed the massive stones tied by thick ropes around Aapo’s wrists and ankles. As he watched, Alex heard a ripping noise as Aapo’s right arm grew another six inches before separating completely at the elbow.

  Alex opened his mouth to scream and was hit by a spray of red drops, gagging at the salty taste on his tongue. The stone and forearm hit the floor with a crash, and Aapo’s hanging body spun wildly until the left arm tore free at the shoulder.

  “Nyet, nyet,” he blurted in his native Russian as he backpedaled. He heard the door slam shut behind him and spun about. Alex had a split second to make out a pale, featureless face atop a body made of shadow before he grabbed the pistol in his waistband and yanked, blowing off the tip of his penis and shattering the patella on his uninjured right knee.

  He let out an animal bellow as he collapsed onto the flagstone floor, trying to clutch his wounded groin and knee at the same time, writhing like a grub covered in salt.

  Alex, who knew about death metal and a few other things, did not actually know very much about pain. But shortly after he opened his eyes and saw the terrifying face hovering over his, Mister White instructed him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  - 1 -

  An autumn breeze rustled the broad-leafed trees surrounding the Millhouse and scattered drifts of orange, yellow and brown across the grassy hillside. There were oaks, maples and hickories, old Virginia forest on protected Federal land that circled the fence line in the manner of ancient, natural guardians.

  Ronald turned up the collar of his denim jacket and resumed raking near the rusted chain-link fence, gathering the fallen leaves in a series of piles leading downhill. He inhaled their musty odor while the rake worried at new calluses on his palms. Not long ago he would have balked at the thought of manual labor, a pear-shaped man with wide, wobbling buttocks, unaccustomed to physical exertion. But the directions on the bottle of clozapine caplets were quite clear. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY. So he wielded his rake when the leaves fell and used a wheeled dolly when it was time to move feed or other goods about.