Unfinished Business

by W. Soliman

  “It doesn’t matter, Igor.” Jasmine smiled at the man who’d knocked the crap out of her just the day before, a wealth of tenderness in the gesture. “Let him play his silly games if it makes him feel better about himself.” Igor returned his wife’s smile. “Everything’s backed up.”

  “What’s going on, Jas?” Kara asked, more forcefully this time.

  “Isn’t that obvious,” I said, aware of Anton standing at my shoulder, almost hyperventilating with shock as he stared at Jasmine. “As soon as your darling sister found out about this operation, it changed everything.”

  “No!” Kara was naturally reluctant to believe it.

  “I’m afraid it’s true, Kara. Igor is doing all of this for my sake,” Jasmine said, pride in her voice. “I never should have doubted him. Igor has always been able to remain one step ahead of the masses by using his brains and not being afraid to take risks.”

  “I wouldn’t overestimate his cerebral qualities, if I were you.” I said. “Any fool can steal.”

  She glared at me. “You think you’re so clever but you don’t have a clue what’s really going on. We’ve been watching you and laughing ourselves silly.”

  “What about Kara? Have you been laughing at her too?”

  She scowled. “If you hadn’t interfered, Kara would never have known.”

  “Because she’d have finished up the same way as your brother?”

  “No, that was an accident.” A flash of genuine-seeming pain crossed her face. “But I was determined Kara wouldn’t suffer a similar fate.”

  “How did you know I was here at the agency?” Kara asked, ice in her tone.

  “I saw the picture Monika took of you when you came here for a job.” She redirected her scowl towards Igor’s daughter. “I can’t believe her stupidity in taking on another girl at such a sensitive time. When I heard she’d done it I was immediately suspicious and asked to see the girl’s picture. Monika didn’t recognise you, of course, but I—”

  I raised my eyes at Kara. “You let them take your picture?”

  “I couldn’t avoid it, Charlie. They needed one for their records but I thought that by the time it was printed I’d be out of here.”

  “In this age of digital photos?” I didn’t need to press the point. She knew she’d been stupid.

  “There was always a possibility that I’d be found out.” Kara was speaking to me but her eyes, narrowed with bitter contempt, were trained upon her sister. “But I didn’t think it would be Jasmine who gave me away.”

  “You ought to be grateful that it was me—”

  “And so you persuaded your husband to put you in the same room as Kara,” I said with quiet mordancy. “Once there you played the part of the wronged wife, just to find out how much she knew about your operation.”

  She shrugged. “It pays to be cautious. Igor and I had a long heart-to-heart once we arrived here. As soon as I understood that he was distancing himself from his previous activities for my sake, I was able to tell him what I was really doing in that hotel. I told him about you, Kara, and when I realized you were here at the agency, I said I’d find out what you knew as long as Igor promised no one would be hurt this time. You would have stayed here for a few days and then we’d have been gone and you wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone anything.”

  “Why?” Kara asked, pangs of bitter disillusionment in her tone. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why?” Jasmine stared at her sister as though it was the craziest question she’d ever heard.

  “Yes, why? You seem to have everything in your life you could possibly want. Money, a loving family, power—”

  “Power?” She made a scoffing sound at the back of her throat as she paced the narrow hallway in front of her husband and his daughter. “Power was precisely what we didn’t have. When I first met Igor, the Soviet Union was an economic disaster, which enabled criminal organisations to flourish. But there was no honour amongst thieves, and contract killings were at an all-time high. I never knew from one day to the next if I would see him again. Can you imagine how that felt?”

  I shrugged. “Like an occupational hazard, I should imagine.”

  “And the threats against him were also directed against me,” she said, as though I hadn’t interrupted her. “I never felt safe, no matter where I was in the world, and if we hadn’t changed direction there’s every possibility we’d both be dead today.”

  “By why marry such a man at all?” Kara shook her head. “I just don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you?” Jasmine paused in front of Kara and looked into her eyes. “Have you never craved excitement, Kara? Have you never wanted to live on the edge and grab life by the throat?” Kara shook her head mutely. “I hated the way Father dominated the entire family, including Mother. Especially Mother. I couldn’t understand why she put up with it. It was like she had no spirit, no mind of her own. And when I found out what he’d done to Brett, I couldn’t accept that she didn’t actually know.”

  “Just a minute, what did he do to Brett?” Kara stared at Jasmine.

  “Ask him.” Jasmine pointed at me. “He knows.”

  “Do you, Charlie?” She looked bewildered. “You know but kept it from me?”

  “Your mother told me but didn’t want you to know. She wanted to protect you from that.”

  “Yes,” Jasmine said spitefully, “everyone wants to protect little Kara, but I suppose it doesn’t make any difference if you know now.” She tossed her mane of blond hair, not looking at Kara as she spoke. “Our dear father was sodomising our brother.”

  Kara gasped. I reached out to touch her shoulder but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “And when I found out, Mother pretended to be shocked.” Jasmine frowned. “But how could she not have known? What sort of mother does that make her? If anyone laid so much as a finger on Sergei, I would know at once.”

  “A mother’s intuition,” I suggested mockingly.

  “I…I think I need to…”

  Kara rested her hands on her knees and dropped her head between them. I thought she was going to be sick but after a moment or two she straightened up again, beads of perspiration peppering her brow. There were tears coursing down her deathly pale face but she seemed a little more composed.

  “Did you really imagine I’d let myself be treated like that by a husband?” Jasmine threw her head back and blew air through her lips. “Ramsay was the same. He wanted me to marry him so that he could control me and dictate the course of my life. Well, I wasn’t having it, and when Igor offered me a job on his boat I jumped at the chance. His life was exciting, vibrant, and he made me feel alive like no one else has ever been able to. But most important of all, he didn’t ask more of me than I was prepared to give.” She turned towards her husband and brushed her hand gently along the side of his face in an intimately possessive manner that, irrationally, made me feel like an intruder. Igor grabbed that hand and kissed the back of it, almost violently.

  “But you don’t mind if he hits you?” I said.

  “He’s never done that before. And it was for your sake that I let it happened this time, Kara. He thought I was in that hotel with Anton, and if there’s one thing Igor can’t stand it’s the thought of me with another man. I didn’t tell him why I was really there in order to protect you, little sister.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes and stared at Kara, as though expecting some display of gratitude. “So don’t tell me I don’t care about my family, about Brett, because I do. Perhaps too much. Igor wanted me to detach myself from you altogether.” She sighed. “I should have listened to him, but when Brett recognised me I just couldn’t help myself. I had to spend a few hours with him and make sure he was all right. And look where that got me.”

  “And you made up that story about your husband giving you tranquillisers just to get our sympathy,” Kara said coldly.

  “Oh no, that was true,” Kalashov said. “She was beside herself when she found out about her brother’s accidental ki
lling, and I was afraid she’d do something stupid. I needed her to be calm until this thing is over and I can give her more of my attention. So I gave her things to make her sleep. Besides, I didn’t want our children to see their mother so upset.”

  “How touching,” I said derisively.

  “I had a bit of a breakdown,” Jasmine said, “and actually started believing that Igor was my enemy. I think it must have been a side effect of the pills he gave me.” Her laugh was brittle.

  “I was actually planning to get Anton to help me escape from him.” She moved to stand beside her husband and gazed up at him with open adoration. “Thank goodness he understands that I wasn’t thinking straight and has forgiven me.”

  “I would forgive you anything.” He took her hand, turned it over and applied his lips gently to the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.

  “You see,” Jasmine said, a triumphant note in her voice. “No one will ever come between us and nothing will stop us getting what we want.”

  “That must make you very proud,” I said.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Jasmine asked.

  “Lock them back in that room,” Kalashov said. “It will only be a couple more days, and then we’ll be finished here for good. Once we’re gone, I’ll get someone to let them out, even though it would be better to have no loose ends.”

  “No, Igor! No more killing. Kara’s my sister.”

  “Yes, but they know—”

  “What they think they know and what they can prove are two very different things. They have nothing on us, and even if they did, by the time they present their evidence, we’ll be long gone.”

  “It doesn’t do to be sentimental,” Monika said, speaking for the first time.

  “Like you’re not sentimental about your saintly mother?” Jasmine said caustically. “Just stay out of this.”

  “Since you’re soon going to leave these shores, you might as well satisfy my curiosity and tell me how you got into cybercrime,” I said, suspecting vanity would make Jasmine want to spell it all out. She didn’t disappoint.

  “I told you how it was in Russia. With all his KGB connections Igor was able to make a lot of money very quickly. For the entrepreneur unafraid to take risks there were fortunes to be made, but the downside was that we never felt safe anywhere.”

  “Nadia, my love, I don’t think it’s necessary to—”

  “It’s all right, Igor. I’ll never see my sister again so let me try and explain.” She smiled at her husband and turned back to us. “In the early days I helped bring in some of the girls that worked here at the agency. I didn’t know what they were being brought in for. Igor wanted to protect me from that and at first I thought they really were destined for jobs as waitresses and barmaids.” Jasmine shook her head and smiled, presumably struck by her own naïveté. “One day I was stuck on the boat for a few days with two girls, waiting out a storm. We got talking and I realized just how intelligent they actually were. One of them was a computer expert and I couldn’t believe all that talent would be going to waste just because she wanted to live in the west. I told Igor about her, unintentionally planting the idea of cybercrime into his head, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  “And you subsequently stole nearly fifty million from a High Street chain.”

  “That wasn’t us, unfortunately, but it spurred him into recruiting the best Eastern European feminine minds in the computer world. He took advantage of the fact that women, especially beautiful ones, are usually dismissed as brainless bimbos. Men see exactly what they want to see and so we simply played on their chauvinism. Igor brought the girls over to pose as escorts and set them to work on the computers. It’s taken time and patience but he’s finally on the verge of eclipsing our rivals’ achievements and making history in the annals of cybercrime.” Her noxious smile was full of pride, like they’d done something truly noteworthy. “Everything’s in place and nothing and no one can stop us now.”

  “Jasmine.” Kara was shaking her head slowly back and forth. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s entirely safe for us,” Jasmine assured her. I didn’t think Kara was concerned for her sister’s safety but didn’t bother to set her straight. “Igor has got rid of all his other business concerns in Russia, for my sake. The criminal elements are getting themselves organized now and cooperating with one another. He’s sold everything off to them, which means he’s no longer a threat to anyone and is off everyone’s hit lists.”

  “But you’re stealing vast amounts that don’t belong to you.”

  Jasmine smiled, naked avarice rather than humour reflected in the gesture. “Bah, the banks, they steal from us every day but are never called to account for it. We’re merely redressing the balance. They will most likely be too embarrassed to even report the loss, so we can’t be guilty of a crime that hasn’t taken place.”

  I couldn’t argue with the twisted logic behind that one.

  “Pass me that laptop,” Kalashov said, quiet menace in his tone.

  I shook my head. “Come and get it.”

  “Mr. Hunter, you’re being very foolish. My wife might dislike violence but personally I find it therapeutic.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Bullies invariably do.”

  “I’ve promised Nadia that no harm will come to her sister but made no such promises in respect of you. Although I dislike doing anything that upsets my wife, ultimately I make my own decisions and she will do as I tell her.”

  Jasmine smiled sweetly at me and nodded. “It’s true, you know. It’s only Kara I care about.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  “We’re wasting time here,” Kalashov said. “The laptop. I won’t ask you again.”

  I slowly shook my head. “I’ve grown rather attached to it.” I assumed it was only concern for the machine that was preventing him from setting his goon on me. That I’d miscalculated became apparent as soon as he opened his mouth again.

  “Shoot him,” he said casually, snapping his fingers at his underling.

  I’d been so taken up with Jasmine’s pathetic attempts to justify her husband’s actions that I hadn’t noticed the gun in the thug’s hand. But it now loomed larger than a football in my sphere of vision as he levelled it at me, his arm rock steady, eyes cold and focused. I could smell gun oil and see his finger tightening on the trigger as clearly as I could see the anticipatory half smile forming on his lips. There could no longer be any doubt that he’d kill me without a second thought.

  Time felt as though it were standing still as I tamped down panic. It was deathly quiet in that hallway. Everyone appeared to be frozen in a bizarre tableau. I only had seconds to live, unless I did something. Fast. With no time to think about the consequences, I threw the laptop at the thug, hoping to buy precious seconds by putting him off his shot. Then I hit the floor hard, grabbing Kara’s arm and dragging her down with me. Kalashov instinctively dived to catch the computer, just as I’d figured he would, and the bullet intended for me went straight through his heart.

  Jasmine and Monika screamed simultaneously and dropped to their knees beside Kalashov. Jasmine cradled his head in her lap, manically shaking it as she yelled at him to wake up. Monika rocked to and fro, head thrown back as she kept up a bloodcurdling wail.

  The thug who’d just killed his boss dropped the gun, an appalled expression on his face. Self-preservation kicked in and his head darted from side to side as he looked for a means of escape. He lunged towards the stairs but the last thing I needed was him summoning reinforcements. I stuck out a leg and he tumbled down the stairs, landing with a scream at the bottom, his limbs at unnatural angles. He didn’t move and I thought, with clinical detachment, that he was probably dead.

  The sudden silence as Monika abruptly stopped keening was eerier than when she’d been creating all that racket. I lunged for the gun but Monika got there before me. With a mask of unmitigated hate on her face, she fired it from almost
point-blank range at Jasmine’s head.

  “I never did like her,” she said flatly, watching with detachment as Jasmine’s body crumpled on top of that of her dead husband.

  Then she levelled the gun at Kara and me.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jesus, would this never end? I’d had just about enough of people pointing guns at me today. Especially spiteful, unbalanced individuals who’d just demonstrated that they’d kill without a second thought for the consequences.

  Not surprisingly, Kara was in a catatonic state. Deeply shocked, she stood beside me, trembling, her mouth gaping open as she stared at her sister’s body. She appeared oblivious to the gun being pointed at the pair of us. Not that she would have cared too much, I was willing to bet, even if she’d known. Jasmine, for whose sake she’d risked so much, about whom she’d wondered for all these years, lay dead at her feet and she didn’t seem to be able to take in anything else. It would have been better if she’d died before showing her true colours. That way, at least Kara would have had positive memories to hold on to. If we ever got out of this, of course.

  Where the fuck was Monk? All through this fiasco I’d been consoling myself with the thought that he had to have the house under surveillance and would ride to our rescue in the nick of time. Yeah, like that was gonna happen. He’d know nothing about what was going on in here. Even if his people had seen me scaling that drainpipe, they’d never risk intervening. Unless they’d heard the shots. And the screaming. But it wasn’t likely. The gun had a silencer, this was a big house and I had good reason to know that the walls were constructed of thick, solid brick.

  We were on our own and I had to do something to stop this crazy woman using us for target practise. Desperate times, and all that. I plumped for telling the truth.