Last Man Standing

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Bad feeling? What do you mean?’

  ‘The way Keenan seemed to be distancing himself from me. I started to think that maybe I was being set up as the fall guy and wanted a friend in my corner.’ He grinned. ‘Thanks for coming, by the way.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Standing. ‘You’d have done the same for me. So what happened then? What did you do?’

  ‘I found a motel and I made another call to Faith. She wanted to know where I was and told me to stay there and not go out until she got back to me. So that’s what I did. I sat and I waited. I kept the TV on but there was nothing about Koshkin being killed. Nothing at all. Then after a few hours there was a knock on the door and there’s two Feds there, asking if I’m Bobby-Ray Barnes. How the hell they knew I was there I have no idea because I used an assumed name and paid in cash. But they knew. So I let them in. They ask me where I’ve been and why I’m in the motel, but they’re being really weird, you know. They keep moving, in front of me and behind me and they keep looking at each other like something’s about to happen. Then one of them says something to me and I answer him, and then I sense that the other one is up to something and I turn around and he’s screwing a silencer into his gun.’ He shrugged. ‘I just went into overdrive, like you do.’

  ‘We were there, mate, we know what happened.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault, Matt, they were there to kill me. Why else would they have silencers?’

  ‘You’re preaching to the converted,’ said Standing. ‘We were attacked as well, by guys with automatic weapons. They killed the motel clerk and came this close to killing us.’

  ‘What the fuck’s going on, Matt? What have I gotten into?’

  ‘It’s all to do with the Russian mafia, and an oligarch who had it in for the client. A guy called Erik Markov. He wanted Koshkin dead and someone decided it would be a good idea to frame you for it.’

  Bobby-Ray ran his hands through his hair. ‘So I’m fucked?’

  ‘There’s good news and bad news,’ said Standing. ‘The good news is that we have definitive proof that Lipov and not you killed Koshkin and the bodyguards.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Standing nodded. ‘Seriously. We found the gloves that he was wearing and the silencer he used and both will have his prints and DNA on them.’

  Bobby-Ray’s jaw dropped. ‘No way.’

  ‘He’d hidden them in the kitchen. I was in the house with John Keenan and Paul Dutch. But the bad news is that they’re both dead.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘We went to the mansion with a couple of LAPD detectives, but when we found the stuff Lipov had hidden, one of the detectives pulled out a gun and started shooting. He killed his colleague and he killed Keenan and Dutch before I could stop him.’

  ‘You killed him?’

  Standing nodded. ‘Eventually.’

  Bobby-Ray cursed under his breath. ‘What the fuck are we going to do? Who do we go to? We can’t trust anybody. We can’t trust Redrock, we can’t trust the FBI and we can’t trust the LAPD. That doesn’t leave much, does it?’

  ‘That’s the problem, the Solntsevskaya are everywhere.’

  ‘Solntsev-what?’

  ‘The Russian mafia,’ said Standing. ‘Mean sons of bitches who have managed to infiltrate themselves into organisations around the world. They’ve got links to the Kremlin and make money from drugs, trafficking, arms, extortion. You name it, these guys do it, and they kill to protect their organisation.’

  ‘So who do we go to, Matt?’ asked Kaitlyn. ‘We have the evidence, who do we show it to?’

  ‘I’m going to need to sleep on that,’ said Standing. He looked around the cabin. ‘How many beds are there?’

  ‘There are two bunk beds in there,’ said Kaitlyn, nodding at a door to their right. ‘That’s where Bobby-Ray and I usually sleep. Mom and Dad sleep in the main bedroom.’

  ‘I’ve been using the bunk bed,’ said Bobby-Ray. ‘Why doesn’t Matt sleep with me and you can have the other bedroom to yourself?’

  ‘That’s very brotherly of you,’ said Kaitlyn.

  ‘I just don’t fancy sharing a bed with Matt,’ said Bobby-Ray.

  ‘Mate, we slept together in Syria often enough when we were on patrol.’

  ‘For warmth,’ said Bobby-Ray. He grinned at his sister. ‘It can get really cold in the desert.’

  ‘I’ll take the big bed,’ said Kaitlyn. ‘You can have the bunk beds.’

  36

  It had been dark for several hours by the time the two black SUVs pulled up next to Standing’s Ford Escape. There were three heavies in the first car, hard men that Oleg Ivchenko used as enforcers and assassins.

  Ivchenko was in the front passenger seat of the second vehicle. Driving him was one of his most trusted operatives, a former Spetsnaz special forces soldier called Valeria Demidova. Demidova was female, in the sense that she had only X chromosomes, but there was nothing at all feminine about her, other than her name. Her first name meant strong and she was, as an ox. She had put on weight since leaving Spetsnaz and if anything that had made her even more formidable. Ivchenko had seen her take out three men single-handedly, and she had taken several punches to her square jaw with no signs of feeling them. She was wearing a black leather bomber jacket and blue Valentino jeans and with her close-cropped jet black hair most people who saw her assumed she was a man.

  Sitting in the back was Ivchenko’s nephew, a big bruiser of a man called Gregory Nesterov. Nesterov wasn’t smart and sometimes had to have things explained to him twice, but he was fiercely loyal and Ivchenko trusted him with his life. Nesterov almost never left Ivchenko’s side; he was with him night and day and even slept in the next room. Ivchenko was sure that Nesterov would take a bullet for him, because one night in Moscow he had done just that. That was in the days before Ivchenko had been sent to head up the Solntsevskaya’s Los Angeles operations, back when Ivchenko was a foot soldier in Moscow, running a kidnapping ring that seized the children of wealthy Muscovites and held them until ransoms were paid. A rival gang had taken offence at one of the victims Ivchenko’s team had chosen and had sent a group of armed thugs to teach him a lesson. They had ambushed him as he walked to his car and he had been shot in the hip before he managed to pull out his own gun and kill two of his attackers. He was too slow to get the third, who fired at point-blank range but Nesterov managed to throw himself in front of his uncle and took a bullet in the chest. Ivchenko fired at the attacker but he ran off. Ivchenko drove his nephew to hospital and he survived. Two weeks later Ivchenko found and tortured the shooter for a whole night before killing him and throwing his body parts into the Moskva river.

  ‘What do you think, boss?’ asked Demidova. She tapped her chunky fingers on the steering wheel. There was a single gold band on her wedding finger, the only jewellery she wore.

  Ivchenko stroked his goatee thoughtfully. They had flashlights in the car, but the lights would mean that they would be seen and they would lose the element of surprise. In a perfect world they would have come with night vision equipment but the world wasn’t always perfect, especially not the world that Ivchenko moved in.

  Ivchenko looked at his wristwatch, a gold Rolex Cellini Prince with two dials that told the time in California and Moscow. ‘It’ll be light in four hours,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait and head to the cabin at dawn.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  Ivchenko opened his window a few inches and lit a cigarette. Four hours wasn’t long to wait. He took out his mobile and cursed when he saw that he wasn’t getting a signal, then smiled as he realised that no signal meant that when the shooting started no one would be able to phone for help.

  37

  Standing heard a noise from the other side of the room and he sat up, reaching for his gun, immediately wide awake.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Bobby-Ray. ‘Don’t shoot, I’ve got coffee.’ He kicked the door closed behind him.

  Standing blinked. Light was coming in through the thin curtains and
he could hear birds singing in the distance. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Time doesn’t mean anything out here,’ said Bobby-Ray. ‘Dawn’s breaking. I get up with the light and there’s no point in going out when it’s dark.’

  Standing sat up. ‘How long are you planning to stay here?’

  ‘Until I know it’s safe.’

  Standing ran his hands through his hair. ‘That could be forever,’ he said.

  Bobby-Ray sat down on the end of Standing’s bunk and handed him a mug of coffee. ‘The way I see it, at the moment everyone’s out to get me. The Russian mafia, the FBI, the cops, even my own bosses. And it’s clear that they don’t want to take me in alive. Until that changes, I’m better off here.’

  ‘We’ve got the evidence to clear you,’ said Standing. ‘We just have to get it into the right hands.’ He sat up.

  ‘They don’t care whether I did it or not,’ said Bobby-Ray. ‘They just want me dead so that Lipov is in the clear. The Russians know exactly what happened, they don’t care about the evidence. They just want to protect Lipov.’

  Standing smiled ruefully. ‘Yeah, well that boat has sailed.’ He drank his coffee.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t want to say anything while Kaitlyn was around, but Lipov’s dead. It was pretty messy.’

  ‘Messy in what way?’

  ‘I was just talking to him and he attacked me. He was a hard bastard. He didn’t go easily.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what? It wasn’t your fault. I only went to talk to him, he made the decision to take it to the next level. But it means that he’s not in a position to ever tell what happened. Or more importantly, to reveal who paid him.’

  ‘And who do you think paid him to kill Koshkin?’

  Standing gulped down some coffee. ‘His business partner, maybe. Erik Markov. He’s connected to the Russian mafia. But with Lipov dead, I don’t see that we’ll ever be able to prove that.’

  ‘But we can prove that Lipov killed Koshkin.’

  ‘Sure. His prints will be on the inside of the gloves. And the silencer will fit into your gun.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ll try to pin the silencer on me?’

  ‘There’s no way you could have hidden the silencer with the gloves in the kitchen,’ said Standing. ‘The problem is, who do we give the evidence to? We only get the one chance and if we get it wrong …’ He shrugged and left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘What about someone at Redrock?’ said Bobby-Ray. ‘It’s in their interests to prove that it wasn’t one of their employees who killed the client, right?’

  ‘John Keenan would have been the best bet,’ said Standing. ‘He seemed a good guy.’

  Bobby-Ray nodded. ‘He was. What about Faith Hogan? His number two? We can’t trust her, can we?’

  Standing grimaced. ‘She said she talked to Keenan but Keenan denied that you’d been in touch, so she can’t have said anything to him.’

  ‘So she’s part of this? She’s tied in with the Russians?’

  ‘I think she has to be,’ said Standing. ‘From what you said, it wasn’t long after you told her where you were that the FBI agents turned up.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, it could be a coincidence, but if we do approach someone at Redrock we might be better doing it at a higher level. Keenan’s boss, maybe. Though again, how do we know who we can trust?’

  ‘You could put out some feelers. I reckon I’m safe enough here for a while.’

  Standing looked around the cabin. ‘I hope so,’ he said.

  38

  Ivchenko couldn’t see much of the sky through the tree canopy overhead, but the little that he could see was starting to glow red. He climbed out of the SUV and lit a cigarette. He had napped over the past few hours but hadn’t really slept. His nephew had been in a deep sleep for most of the night, snoring and occasionally mumbling to himself in Russian.

  Demidova had stayed awake, sitting quietly and staring out through the windscreen, moving only to sip water from a plastic bottle. When Ivchenko got out of the SUV she joined him and stood with her hands in her pockets. Ivchenko looked at the two dials of his watch. It was ten minutes to six in California and ten to four in the afternoon in Moscow.

  He walked around to the rear of the SUV and opened the door. There was a black nylon holdall there and he unzipped it.

  The three men in the other SUV climbed out. Leo Sorokin, Niko Tarasov and Petr Okulov. They were all wearing hoodies and jeans, though Sorokin had topped his off with a leather jacket. They went to the back of their SUV and pulled the door open.

  Ivchenko pulled an Uzi out of the holdall. It was one of his favourite guns. The Israelis knew how to make weapons and the Uzi was hard to beat, certainly for close-up fighting against multiple targets. The version Ivchenko was holding was the Uzi Pro, with a grip and handguard made of polymer to keep the weight down, and designed to allow two-hand operation to reduce the tendency of the original Uzi to pull to the side when on automatic fire. The Uzi Pro weighed less than two and a half kilos and without a stock was just thirty centimetres long. There were three magazines in the holdall, each holding 25 cartridges. Ivchenko slotted one magazine into the gun and put the others into his pockets, one on the left, the other on the right.

  He stepped away from the SUV and Demidova reached into the holdall. She took out a Kalashnikov AK-74, a weapon she had used extensively during her Spetsnaz days. Demidova always claimed the AK-74’s lighter ammunition meant that it had less recoil and was marginally more accurate than the AK-47, though the only times she had used it in LA she had been up close and personal and accuracy hadn’t been an issue. The only way to tell the two models apart at a glance was from the curvature of the magazine. The AK-74 magazine had less of a curve than the AK-47 and the designs were not interchangeable.

  Ivchenko knocked on the side window and Nesterov opened his eyes. He rubbed them sleepily then nodded when he saw his uncle with the Uzi. He scrambled out of the SUV and went to join Demidova who was shoving a spare magazine into her pocket.

  Sorokin, Tarasov and Okulov were slotting magazines into their weapons. Sorokin had a Kalashnikov AK-47 with a folding stock and Tarasov and Okulov both had MAC-10 machine pistols, the .45 calibre version, with two-stage Sionics silencers that both cut down on the noise they made but more importantly, made them easier to control on full automatic when they would fire at a rate of more than a thousand rounds a minute.

  Demidova walked over to Ivchenko, her AK-74 down at her side, muzzle pointing at the ground.

  ‘I need you to take point on this, Valeria,’ said Ivchenko. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Da,’ said Demidova. ‘Nyet problem.’

  ‘Barnes is a former Navy SEAL, so be careful,’ he said. He saw her start to grin and he knew that she was about to tell him that Spetsnaz was the best special forces unit in the world and that Navy SEALs didn’t scare her. He held up his hand to cut her short. ‘Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. And watch out for the British guy, there’s something about him that worries me.’

  ‘Nyet problem,’ she repeated.

  Okulov, Tarasov and Sorokin walked over to join Demidova. Nesterov shoved a magazine into the butt of a Glock and shut the rear door of the SUV. Ivchenko waved him over.

  ‘Valeria will lead us to the cabin,’ said Ivchenko. He gestured with his Uzi at a small break in the undergrowth. ‘We head that way. North-east. According to the old man, the cabin is about a mile along that track. When we get to the cabin, we kill anyone we find there. No one will hear us. We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘What about the girl?’ asked Nesterov. He had been helping to run the syndicate’s west coast trafficking operations and liked nothing better than breaking in new girls.

  ‘By the time we’ve finished, they’re all dead,’ said Ivchenko. ‘But if you want to have some fun first, knock yourself out.’

  Nesterov leered and nodded his approval.

  Ivchenko no
dded at Demidova and she headed for the track. Ivchenko patted his nephew on the back. ‘Today you’ll be blooded, hopefully,’ he said, speaking in Russian. ‘Your first kill.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Nesterov. He grinned. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  Demidova disappeared into the undergrowth and the rest of the Russians followed her.

  39

  Standing carried his mug of coffee out of the bedroom. He had pulled on the same clothes he’d been wearing the previous day. Bobby-Ray was adding wood to the stove in the kitchen area. He used a cloth to pick up the metal coffee pot and pour more coffee into Standing’s mug. ‘Fancy breakfast?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ said Standing.

  ‘I’ve got eggs. And I can use the cheese and bread you brought. And the fruit.’

  ‘What have you been eating since you got here?’

  ‘I brought quite a bit of dry stuff with me. Pasta, canned stuff. And there are plenty of fish in the lake.’ He nodded at his rifle, propped up against the cabin door. ‘My plan was to go hunting for fresh meat at some point. The water from the stream that runs into the lake is drinkable but I brought plenty of water purification tablets with me.’

  ‘So you could stay here for months?’

  ‘If necessary, sure. But hopefully it won’t come to that.’ He put the coffee pot back on the stove. ‘I’ve filled the shower bag for you if you want a shower. It’s around the back of the cabin, and there’s a towel there.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Standing.

  They heard a scream of pain outside, off in the distance. It went on for a second or two and then abruptly stopped.

  Bobby-Ray rushed over to the door and opened it. The two men listened intently.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ asked Standing eventually.

  ‘A deer maybe. There are plenty of predators out here. Bear, mountain lion, coyote, bobcat.’