by Gary Haynes
‘Revenge,’ Kazapov said. ‘I believe in revenge.’
The faintest of smiles passed over Richter’s lips.
‘Do you have a last cigarette for me?’ he said.
‘No more cigarettes.’
Kazapov decided now that he couldn’t risk shooting Richter in the forehead, as he’d planned to. He would smash his skull in once the Cossacks were out of earshot. It wasn’t what he’d just said. Kazapov knew that his family would be alive if it wasn’t for the likes of Richter. But the man’s death wouldn’t ease his own pain, the feeling in his gut like a smoking cannonball, the feeling in his head like a blistering sun.
He would bury the body in the forest. He would smoke a cigarette as he squatted beside the unmarked grave. He would walk off towards the checkpoint where he’d file his report, each paragraph laced with untruths.
That done, he would murder Major Volsky before he left Berlin and blame it on some unsuspecting member of the Volkssturm, who’d be executed without a fuss.
73
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2015, the next day.
The Chechen had to be taken alive.
The sun had just risen, casting long shadows, but the humidity was stifling already. Carla had flown down from DC aboard an FBI, eight-seater jet, the black fuselage without identifying insignia.
The detached, rundown house was about twenty yards back from the residential street, surrounded by a rusted wire-mesh fence. It had a wooden façade that looked as if it had been subject to termite damage, and a tin roof, a little terrace area. For the last twenty-four hours, the property had been under surveillance via satellite imagery by FBI special agents on alternating eight-hour shifts, and a physical stakeout had been ordered as soon as the Chechen had been identified as an occupant.
On the other side of the house was an abandoned, red brick veterinary clinic. To the rear, a private cemetery, the overgrown branches of moss-strewn willow and cedar trees touching the elaborate sarcophagi, the marble coated with damp lichen.
The front garden was unkempt, a mass of yellowing elephant ear, wild azaleas and purple thistles, with withered palm fronds and bamboo among the carpet-grass. There was no garage, but a pickup truck, with dimpled orange bodywork, was parked on the cracked cement driveway to the right of the house. The two chrome exhaust pipes shone in parts like luminous stars, as shafts of sunlight caught them. Muted, intermittent laughter could be heard coming from the front room, above the songs of blue jays and waterthrush, the constant chirping of cicadas.
Carla wore an FBI baseball cap and a T-shirt, both of which were already wet with sweat. She crouched beside an unmarked SUV, with tinted windscreens, just far enough away to avoid ricochets off the bonnet and wheel arches. Both ends of the street, which were out of eyeshot, had been cordoned off with rolls of yellow tape, and patrol cars belonging to the local police department.
A small black, FBI SWAT truck, which had moved at a crawl up the opposite side of the street to Carla, halted now, and the helmeted, seven-person team disembarked from the back doors. They hunched down, and duckwalked beside a stone wall that led up to the curtilage of the house.
The issue wasn’t who would win a shootout, but rather how to avoid one happening. She had impressed on the SWAT team the necessity of taking the Chechen alive. Anything else would be regarded as failure. Other lives depended on it, she knew. Young Kalmyk women’s lives.
The SWAT team reached the end of the wall and the lead agent opened the gate, which hung from a piece of frayed rope lassoed around an iron post. They bolted upright and rushed forward. A pair jogged to the rear of the property, where the parish PD had already ensured a no-escape zone. Two others headed for the flanks. The remaining three would go through the front entrance once the wooden door had been taken care of.
Carla edged closer, to get an unencumbered view of the frontage. The metal ram impacted the door three times before it swung inwards. But a second later, a chrome folding chair crashed through the front window, raining shards of glass onto the garden. A skinny white man, naked as a new-born, leaped from the jagged opening and landed among the foliage. He had a shaved head and looked to be in his mid-twenties. His muscular body was heavily tattooed with blue crescents and geometric designs. He began screaming, his right hand brandishing a machete.
Carla thought he resembled some deranged pagan warrior.
The smashed glass had sent the three SWAT agents to the ground. Now they radioed warnings to their unseen colleagues, their various weapons raised. Machete still stood among the elephant ear, contorting his features and shouting out threats and obscenities. The agents assumed kneeling positions behind a blast shield.
Carla knew from the photograph Dubois had given her in Brussels that Machete wasn’t the Chechen. She confirmed that to the SWAT team via her own radio. She drew her Glock and jogged forward.
She squatted down by the edge of the abutting wall, aiming the pistol with her finger across the trigger guard, her other hand holding her radio over her chest. She had no intention of shooting anyone, including Machete.
The three agents had got up, and the one with a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun edged forward now and shouted out to Machete to drop the weapon and lie on the ground. But Machete was either psychotic or, more likely, high, Carla thought. With two submachine guns pointing at the house, the damn fool ran at the agent with the pump, the machete above his head, glinting in the morning sunlight. She almost called out, but held her tongue. She wasn’t the one who could lose the use of a limb in a fracas.
The shotgun discharged, the tens of pellets hitting Machete’s torso and spinning him to the ground. He lay on his side, his arms dog-legged over his head. Thin grey smoke rose about him, as if his soul had just departed from his body. She heard screaming inside before her radio crackled. The ground floor had been secured from the rear.
She didn’t move again until she got the all-clear.
Standing, she saw two Caucasian women of similar age to Machete as they were bundled from the front doorway, their hands cuffed behind them. They wore brightly-coloured bikinis, their bodies pierced and tattooed with matching scarlet chrysanthemums entwined in grey barbed wire. They both had blonde hair, thickly lacquered, such that it reminded her of sheaves of corn. When they saw Machete’s horizontal and bloody body, they began to wail.
Carla holstered her sidearm and walked to the gateway. She headed up the garden, little puffs of pollen rising about her trainers. She reached Machete and bent down, putting two fingers to his throat just below the jawline. Unsurprisingly, there was no pulse. She saw that his powder-blue eyes were like spoiled scallops, the gaping entry hole blackened. Blood leaked from the corpse like red sludge from a sack. Two fire ants were already crawling over his pale face.
She stood up and wiped her slick forehead with the back of her hand. She walked a few yards to the doorway, the sound of emergency vehicles flooding her ears. Peering into the shadowed hallway, she waited for the Chechen to appear.
He came out a few seconds later, his shoulder-length hair dishevelled, his beard cut to a satanic goatee. He wore baggy trousers, with a splattered paint design. He was bare-chested, his upper body covered from shoulders to navel in wiry hair. When he was bundled past her by two SWAT agents, she smelled the stale cigarette smoke and alcohol.
She watched him as he was manhandled down to the fence, his demands for a lawyer met with silence.
The unit chief, a lofty black man named Elmore du Preez, came up to Carla’s shoulder.
He said, ‘I sure hope he was worth it.’
Me too, she thought.
74
Federal correctional complex, the next day.
Hockey lay on a padded bench while a tattooed training partner helped him place the barbell back onto the vertical stands. The mixture of an endorphin rush and exhaustion was heady.
It was a cloudless afternoon, engendering a rare moment of civility into the place. Even the BOP officers, holding their sniper rifles and
shotguns in the viewing turrets, situated strategically around the exercise yard, looked relaxed. They rested their forearms on the safety barriers. They wore shades and chewed gum.
A group of black men played basketball. The Mexicans were gathered around a tier of benches. Each group had its own distinctive set of tattoos, together with the generic ones. A spider’s web on the elbow meant a long sentence, a teardrop a murder. Playing cards meant a gambler, and EWMN on the fingers was an acronym for ‘Evil, Wicked, Mean, Nasty’. But the vehemently opposed racial groups weren’t allowed to exercise together. They were either segregated by fences, or simply came out at different times.
Hockey strolled across his portion of the yard after his workout, his muscles pumped, the veins protruding like elvers under the surface of his skin. Dressed in an orange undershirt and joggers, a checked bandana around his sweaty head, he mourned the passing of his hour of relative freedom outside the cell. He craved the outside.
An officer came up to him. He was a squat man, with several chins and a well-trimmed moustache, who wore aviator shades.
‘After your shower, you’ll be escorted to the library,’ he said.
‘Why’s that?’ Hockey said.
‘Your cell’s being searched.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ Hockey said, truthfully.
‘Shower and library.’
Hockey knew shakedowns for drugs, a miniature smartphone or a shiv happened intermittently, so he just nodded, knowing there wasn’t anything else he could do.
A few minutes later, after removing his clothes in the changing room, he walked into the shower area. He was careful not to slip on the wet tiled floor, even though there were only a few innocuous-looking inmates about. He couldn’t afford to show any sign of weakness, especially here.
Things happened in the shower area. It was a platitude, almost an urban myth. But it was a fact. The reason was simple. When they were in their individual cells, they couldn’t get at one another. In the yard, there were CCTV cameras everywhere. There were the officers in the turrets, the riot control officers nearby. Only those that were multiple lifers, those that had no chance of getting out, killed in the yard, and then only the inmates that were members of their own gang, or racial grouping. A hit ordered from the outside, or a stabbing in revenge for what had occurred on the inside, something that would be regarded a trifling snub by law-abiding people.
When he got to his chosen shower head, he picked up the bar of soap from the wire cradle affixed to the wall and broke it in half. The last time he’d been in prison, someone told him that a Crip had been rushed to the hospital block, his hands leaching blood. The soap had contained three razor blades, snapped into little pieces. But this bar was safe. Just soap.
The warm water felt good on his skin as he washed the sweat from his hard body. He put his head back, allowing the water to wet his cropped hair and cover his face. Then, pressing his hands against the tiled wall, he let the water career down his back and over his buttocks.
After dressing, he was led from the changing rooms by a single officer to a cinder-block corridor. Hockey waited for him to unlock the green circulation door, the metal flecked with rust, that led to a grille gate about twenty feet away. He walked past an office door to his left and the guard slunk forward. He was tall man, with a thin, high-ridged nose and a small, pale pink scar on his jawline. He wasn’t adroit, Hockey knew, but he wasn’t a dumb-ass either.
‘Wait up there,’ he said, pointing to the gate.
Hockey walked the few steps to it and the guard motioned for him to put his hands through the grille so that he could secure them with double-lock handcuffs. Hockey reckoned he was afraid he’d grope one of the female civilian staff in the office, or worse.
‘Just got to collect some paperwork,’ he said.
The guard went into the office behind him.
Hockey thought about the fuckup. He’d been told not to watch the DVD. He’d been told to hold up for three days and then take a flight to France and deposit the DVD in a safety-deposit box in a private bank in La Défense, the main Paris business district, at precisely 10.00 am local time. He’d been given a smartphone number to ring when the job was completed. The FBI raid on his flat had thwarted that.
Later, while in prison, when he thought he’d been told what was on the DVD by the female FBI agent, he received a message. It had nothing to do with little blonde Aryan girls. She’d lied to him. But it was a snuff movie. His employer had been framed by the Albanian mafia, they said. A complicated matter and one he need not know the details of. The message had come from César Vezzani. He’d believed it. He hadn’t snitched to the authorities. He hadn’t given them anything.
Five seconds later, he heard the door open behind him and the steps of what he thought was the guard. It wasn’t. But there was no way he could see the Russian inmate, a prison kitchen porter, a man heavy-boned but lean, his eyes the colour of cedar wood, with plump lips and a goatee. There was no way he could’ve seen him exhale a slither of metal from his nasal cavity to pick the lock in the circulation door. There was no way he could’ve seen him squat down to remove the shiv from his rectum. There was no way he could’ve seen the dagger tattoo on the man’s shoulder, the tip dripping blood, the elaborate rendition of a Russian Orthodox church on his back, or the cross on the chest denoting the prince of thieves, a symbol of a respected member of the Russian mafia. Tattoos acquired in a prison thousands of miles away, cut with an improvised razor and ink made from a mixture of urine, ash and scorched rubber.
Hockey merely glimpsed the tattooed and muscular forearm flash under his eyes, the glint of metal caused by the fluorescent strip lighting on the shiv protruding from the calloused hand. He felt the makeshift knife slice deep into his neck. Then — again and again in a kind of frenzied sawing action, severing his windpipe and carotid artery to bring about an expedited exsanguination, a quick bleed out.
He collapsed, with a mixture of bodily shock and disbelief, hanging from his secured hands like a suspended puppet. Giddily, he became conscious of the thick blood bubbling out of the gash. His eyes widened involuntarily as he sensed his body going into a spasm. He felt as if he was drowning. He gasped for air, but there was none. He panted like a dog. There was still no air.
The pain he felt was cool and distant. His head had slumped to his chin. The severed windpipe and artery had destroyed all muscle control there. His brain began to shut down and the corridor went red-black.
Unconsciousness occurred within thirty seconds, his death within eighty.
His pale face had been dappled with blood at first, but his limp body was so drenched with it now that when the guard left the office with a black file under his arm he thought someone had thrown a tin of red paint over Hockey, as a sign of something he wasn’t yet aware of. Something like a tar and feathering, perhaps.
When he got closer, he rushed forward, seeing the gruesomeness of Hockey’s death, the futility of it. He thought about trying to stem the blood flow. But as he crouched down to Hockey’s face, he grimaced. He knew that the catastrophic blood loss had led to cardiac arrest. Even the eyes were filled with blood.
75
Central Park, Manhattan, the same day.
It was more than a year after Sangmu’s disappearance before Gabriel could bring himself to run five times around the one and half mile Reservoir Circuit again. At first, he’d stumbled on a couple of occasions every time he did so, the memories of that day causing a physiological breakdown. It was, he’d imagined, something analogous to what the bereaved felt upon visiting the sight of a fatal car accident or house fire. But part of him, albeit a small and very optimistic part, had thought she might suddenly appear one day.
Now, somehow, with the late afternoon sunshine on his back, the light breeze fingering the leaves of the elm trees, he considered that he was getting closer to her abductors, and the thought both excited and burdened him. He admitted to himself that the burden was born of fear. She could be dead
already. He could become a victim too. But he felt he had no choice but to continue with what he’d set out to do. How could he live with himself otherwise?
He sensed the mobile given to him by Carla vibrate in his hand. He continued jogging and held the phone to his ear, without speaking.
‘Gabriel?’ Carla said.
‘What is it?’
‘Are you driving? It’s a bad connection.’
‘I’m jogging in Central Park.’
‘Could you stop for a moment? It’s important.’
He stopped, wiped the sweat from his face. He looked out at the oil-black water beyond the iron railings and grassy bank. The breeze had picked up and the ducks bobbed about on the lake as if they were plastic toys.
‘What is it, Carla?’
‘Johnny Hockey died in prison today.’
He winced. ‘How?’
‘His throat was cut. He — ’
He pressed the disconnect button. He knew Hockey was a criminal, but he hadn’t wished him dead.
He didn’t know what left the body at the point of death, although he believed that something eternal did. Maybe it was the soul. But whatever it was, he wished it peace. He knew that in life Hockey hadn’t known what peace was, and he sympathized with that. He deserved it in death, at least.
Gabriel passed under a walkway nearby, a little suspension bridge, walked to a public bench and sat down, trying to compose himself. A homeless man was sitting on another bench opposite him. He had greasy hair and a few days’ growth on his chin and wore camouflage trousers and was wrapped in a mouldy blanket. He kept swearing at a red squirrel that was hopping about on the grass to the left of him.
The mobile vibrated again.
He took the call.
‘I’m in Manhattan. I’ll meet you by the fountain in an hour,’ Carla said.
*
Walking over the herringbone Roman brick that marked the edge of the Bethesda Terrace, Gabriel caught sight of Carla looking up at the Angel of Waters, the fountain’s eight-feet bronze sculpture situated in the middle of an ornamental pool amid lily pads. She wore black jeans, a white T-shirt and a patterned serape.