Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  There were no illusions on my part. This wasn’t part of some elaborate scene I had planned out in my head, flying across the world, dealing retribution to those that deserved it. My scheme was never to be facing down the man who killed my family and best him in a hand-to-hand duel, with a burning building providing the backdrop.

  People who thought real life worked that way watched too many movies. My reason for coming, my only reason for coming, was for blood. Years of trying to suppress what had happened had done nothing to quell the hatred inside of me. It had eaten me up every day, kept me from falling asleep, forced me to hide in the mountains, ashamed of what had happened, afraid of what I would become if I ever allowed myself to confront those feelings.

  No more. Never again would I avoid the bathroom mirror in the morning or fear going to bed at night. For five years I had hidden, fearful of what I’d become. In doing so, I had grown ashamed of what I became. I had never sought this out, had never wanted Lita to show up on my doorstep and solicit my services, but she had and now here I was.

  I was going to finish it.

  “I tell you what a coward is,” I said, sliding the shashka away from him with the toe of my shoe, gun trained on him the entire time. “A coward is someone who sneaks out into the desert and kills a woman and a little girl in cold blood. A coward is someone that is so afraid of a man he’s never met, he’ll target his family.”

  I tucked the gun into the small of my back alongside its companion and hefted the sword from the ground, holding its gleaming steel blade up so the burning Blok home danced across it. Beside me I could hear Pavel muttering, his words thick and low, monosyllabic swears spit out in Russian.

  Something deep within told me he hadn’t given my family the benefit of a few last words. I’d be damned if I afforded them to him.

  “You wanted to fight like men, you should have found me five years ago,” I said, whipping the blade across me, the honed edge of it finding the base of his skull, tearing through it without opposition.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The lo mein noodles were a little chewy, the chunks of carrot and broccoli a bit like rubber. In the bottom of the carton, pools of sauce had congealed into gelatinous blobs, clinging to pieces of chicken, coating the sides of the paper container.

  The late lunch was less than ideal for Mia Diaz, the only thing she could find after ten minutes of rummaging through the break room that wasn’t clearly labeled with somebody else’s name. Given that the office was over twenty miles from the closest Chinese restaurant, the origin of the carton or the date it arrived were both mysteries, neither of which she was especially keen on deciphering at the moment.

  Her time at the office had started more than two full days ago. The first night had been spent organizing and conducting a raid that proved to be an exercise in securing a vacant home. The second was spent manning her desk, waiting for lab analyses, hoping for something concrete to come back that she could use to pin down the Bloks.

  In the time since, she had burned through both changes of clothes she kept on hand and even gone against her usual self-imposed rule to stay far away from the community cots, catching a total of four hours in the preceding two days. She was now to the point in her body cycle where every flat surface presented itself as a satisfactory place to stretch out for a nap, every food item that wasn’t marked toxic seemed fine for consumption.

  Diaz had just forked a hefty clump of noodles into her mouth, slurping up the uneven ends of them, as the fast-becoming-familiar scent of herbal tea greeted her nostrils. Even in her near delirium, shoveling down week-old Chinese food, the scent turned her stomach, bringing a bit of moisture to her eyes.

  “I wondered what that smell was,” Hutch said in greeting, pushing himself inside the door and coming to a stop, his shoulder leaning against the frame. He peered over at the carton and said, “Szechuan Garden, never heard of it. New around here?”

  Diaz held up a finger for him to pause and chomped down on the mouthful with vigorous aplomb, swallowing everything half chewed. It caught in her windpipe and landed in her stomach with a mighty splat, a small burp rolling up and out of her in reaction. She covered her mouth with a fist and waited until her stomach settled before lowering her fork and leaning back in her chair.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said. “I actually have no idea. I saw the carton in the fridge and claimed it as my own.”

  “Ah,” Hutch said, rocking his head back in understanding, raising his mug to his lips. “The spoils of war.”

  A smirk shoved the left half of Diaz’s mouth up, her head tilting back with it. “Something like that. And I hardly think a man who walks around drinking that swill has the right to be commenting on smells.”

  “Touché,” Hutch said, raising his eyebrows. “Anything new coming in from the tech guys?”

  “No,” Diaz replied. “Lots of residue, lots of fingerprints, but nothing substantial enough to make a compelling case yet.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Hutch said, nodding. “That place was clean by the time we got there the other night.”

  Diaz nodded, a sick feeling rising in her stomach. His assessment, his word choice, both fit perfectly. The place was clean by the time they had arrived, almost too much so. The scene had practically been scrubbed in anticipation of their arrival.

  Across from her, a forlorn smile crossed Hutch’s face as he looked down at the mug with a face that bordered on longing. “Yes, I will miss this when I’m gone. I’ve tried having some shipped into D.C., but it just isn’t the same.”

  Fingers laced atop her stomach, Diaz raised her eyebrows at him. “Going somewhere?”

  Hutch kept his attention down on his mug a long moment before looking up, his eyes widening just a bit. “Yeah, I was just stopping by to let you know. The word has come down from on high. It seems things are slowing down here, so my presence has been requested back in the capital.”

  Diaz nodded, the information clicking with what she’d been wondering for the better part of a day now. While the case was certainly far-reaching, it wasn’t anything over and above a handful of other things the DEA was working on at various times. While he did have some personal background involved, it seemed unusual for a ranking bureaucrat to spend so much time in the field.

  “The only reason I’ve stayed this long was hoping Hawk would turn up,” Hutch said. “This began as a bit of a personal favor to him, after all.”

  There was momentary pause, Diaz getting the impression it was her turn to interject. Unsure what to add, she simply said, “Yeah, he didn’t really seem like the kind to up and disappear like that.”

  “Ha!” Hutch said, shaking his head, his face mirthful, as if her comment was a joke. “Not counting those five years he spent in the mountains, you mean?”

  A forced smile came to Diaz’s face. Having heard the breadth of Hawk’s story, she had a hard time thinking of his time alone in Montana as disappearing, but fought down the urge to say just that.

  “Yeah, besides that, obviously.”

  “Nobody knows whereabouts he come from and it don’t seem to matter much. He was a young man and ghostly stories about the tall hills didn’t scare him none,” Hutch waxed, his attention aimed on the opposite wall.

  The words themselves made no sense to Diaz, though she sensed it was another movie quote she wasn’t meant to understand. She made no attempt to feign knowing, instead sitting quietly, her stolen lunch on the desk before her, watching Hutch stare off at nothing.

  After a moment he snapped himself awake, shook his head, and looked back to her. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him, have you?”

  Diaz met his gaze for a long moment before twisting her head from side to side, her expression neutral. “Not since he told me we had things under control and walked out of the base two nights ago.”

  The two sat in silence nearly a full minute, neither em
oting anything at all, before Hutch drew in a deep breath. “Well, he’ll turn up somewhere eventually again, I suppose.” He took in the last of his tea and lowered the mug to his side, a few stray droplets dripping to the floor by his feet. “Anyway, it was a pleasure working with you again, Diaz. Hope to see you soon.”

  He stepped forward and extended a hand across the desk, which Diaz stood and met.

  “You too, sir. I look forward to it.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Nabbing the sedan from Pavel was a stroke of pure luck. By the time I dispatched the brute, I was certain the clock was running low. Most of the lower level of the house was already awash in flames. Once I collected the briefcase and climbed into the idling car there weren’t yet sirens in the distance or flashing lights refracting off the clouds above, but I was reasonably certain they weren’t far off.

  Even in the quietest of neighborhoods, people will let things go only so far. They might not react to hearing some strange noises, especially if they were at all familiar with who the Bloks really were, but there was no way they would sit on the sidelines and let a house fire consume them as well.

  Somebody had made the call, of that much I was certain.

  Having the getaway ride sitting on the corner, keys in the ignition, engine already warm and idling, made things much easier. Being in a country where the steering wheel was on the left and people drove on the right side of the road helped, too; my only jobs were to toss the briefcase and shoulder bag onto the passenger seat, turn the thermostat from cold to cool, and drive off into the night.

  I made a point to get off their street as fast as possible, then work my way back to a major thoroughfare and put a wide chunk of ground between us.

  After the confrontation with Pavel, I had to force my nerves to remain even. There was no way I was going to draw them back all the way to calm, not with every ending in my body on fire, my heartbeat hammering along at an absurd pace.

  No less than a handful of thoughts fought for the top position in my mind, each as powerful as the others around it. The first, and most obvious, was the fact that I had just dispatched the men responsible for the deaths of my family. It had been a long time coming, a journey addled by fear and uncertainty, but in the end it had been easier than anticipated. I’d escaped without much more than some scratches, showing up in the middle of the night, taking them where they least expected it, finding them where they felt the most secure.

  I might not have been proud of the things I’d done, but I certainly wasn’t ashamed, either. It wasn’t a fight I had started, but had made sure to damn well finish.

  The second thing that I had to keep reminding myself was that I was now driving in a car registered to none other than Sergey Blok. Should the police notice it missing, or somebody put out a search for it thinking he might not have been home when the fire started, I was in trouble. Dressed in black, spotted with flour, streaked with Pavel’s blood, there was no scenario in which I wouldn’t be hauled straight into lockup and never heard from again. I had to put distance between myself and the fire, but I also had to get to my next location.

  The final thing, the part I needed to remind myself of more than any other, was the fact that I wasn’t done yet. As much as I wanted to pound on the steering wheel, turn up the radio, raise my head toward the heavens and scream until my throat was hoarse, I couldn’t. I needed to keep a level head.

  I needed to remember that I wasn’t finished until Blok’s life’s work was annihilated, just the same as he had done to mine.

  Reaching across the middle console, I twisted the combination locks on the case to matching 4-5-1s and flipped open the top. The few items inside had jostled themselves around a bit in the previous hour, but everything appeared intact, ready to play their part.

  The first item to come out was the phone, my left hand draped over the steering wheel, my right working the controls on the device. While intermittently switching my attention between the road and the mobile, I pulled up the one stored number inside and pressed Send.

  “It’s late,” X said, his voice more annoyed than tired.

  I ignored the statement completely. Instead I rattled off the second address Pally had given me from memory, going slow enough he could record it, fast enough not to insult his intelligence.

  X remained silent until I was done before asking, “Okay, what’s there?”

  “Your ticket out of Russia,” I said, skimping over the details because at the moment I had none. Given everything Pally had told me about the financial transactions originating there and the dimensions of the former manufacturing warehouse, I was more than certain it was the production hub for the drug that was about to enter North America.

  Even if the Krokodil itself wasn’t made there, it could be easily inferred that something inside would tell them where to find it.

  “Yeah?” X asked, the annoyance gone, a twinge of excitement creeping in.

  “Give me thirty minutes to clear the scene,” I said, “then it’s all yours. All I ask is when you become a rock star with the administration, you give some credit to SAC Mia Diaz in California.”

  “Mia Diaz,” X sounded out slowly, no doubt recording the name alongside the address.

  “You both helped me when you didn’t have to. Thank you.”

  This time it was his turn to ignore a statement, brushing it aside without acknowledgment. “I’ll see you soon, all right?”

  “See you soon,” I responded, flipping the phone shut and tossing it into the open briefcase beside me.

  Squeezing the wheel with both hands, I followed the road I was on back through town, headed toward the warehouse. I let the scene at Blok’s fade from memory, the familiar anger buried within rising to the surface, ready to do what I must to finish the job.

  Taking up the two Mark 23s from the seat beside me I laid them across my thighs, popping the half-used magazines and changing them out for fresh. Combined, that gave me twenty-four bullets, plus the knife in my pocket, to take on whatever waited inside.

  I would think it more than enough firepower for a manufacturing facility in the middle of the night, but if not, at least I had taken care of the ones that mattered before meeting my end.

  Recalling the directions Pally had drilled into me, aided by hours on the train to recite them over and over again, I pulled off the main road onto a darkened side street demarcated by a series of Russian characters starting with a K and ending in Y. I followed it for almost a mile, watching as a small residential clump slid by behind me and the land to either side opened up, trees and houses giving way to barren concrete lots.

  The warehouse I was looking for was positioned at the very end of the road, the only structure with any lights on. Just a single overhead lamp was visible in the parking lot outside, a smattering of vehicles parked beneath it. Most of the enormous building was shrouded in darkness, but fluorescent bulbs were apparent through a row of frosted glass encasing the top.

  Again my breathing and heart rate leveled out as I set my gaze on the building, following the road as it wound toward it, pulling to a stop just beyond the reach of the overhead lights. I killed the front lamps on the car and left the engine idling, assessing the situation before me.

  From where I sat, the only clear point of entry was a set of glass double doors positioned directly in the middle of the building. In total the expansive structure looked to stretch a few hundred yards long. Massive shipping doors on either end were pulled shut, looking like they had not been used in some time.

  The windows along the top of the building were almost thirty feet off the ground, too high for entry under optimal conditions, which I was far from. I was armed, but otherwise I had nothing of real use, no cavalry coming for another twenty-eight minutes. My goal was to be long gone before they arrived, bypassing any extended awkward questioning, letting X and Diaz take the credit from afar.

 
Three days ago I had been granted Special Consultant status, though my guess was that had since been rescinded.

  Without seeing the back side of the building, it was a fairly reasonable guess that my best, and probably only, real point of gaining access was the set of doors staring back at me, just over two hundred yards away. In an ideal world I would have been able to gain entry from a point that provided me some modicum of cover, allowing me to scope out what I was walking into.

  If the last years had taught me anything, though, there was no such thing as an ideal world.

  One at a time I moved the guns from my thighs to the briefcase, wedging them in place. Squeezing the wheel tight in both hands, I rolled my wrists back and forth twice. Bits of leather shaved off, dotting the front of my pants.

  I paused just long enough for one last deep breath before dropping the gear shift into drive, my foot slamming the accelerator toward the floor.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The nose of the sedan burst through the first set of double doors, their metal casings twisting away over the front of the car and shearing back along the sides. Shards of glass cascaded around the vehicle as if raining down on the roof, coating the front windshield. I could hear them pinging against the steel body, bouncing off the gleaming black paint, flying out behind me in a misshapen rooster tail.

  A moment later the nose slammed into a second set of doors, the barrier flying backward, tearing away whole and sliding across the floor, the jagged metal of their hinges screeching against the concrete. I was unprepared for the second blast, and my head slammed forward against the wheel, my own knuckle catching me just above the left eye. Stars erupted in front of my vision as warmth dripped down over my face, the salty, metallic taste of blood seeping between my lips.

  Halfway into the room I regained my bearings and slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed as I came to a stop, and the smell of burned rubber trailed behind me. I grabbed up the guns from the seat beside me and stepped out, weapons raised at shoulder height, my head swiveling from to side.