Higher Cause

by John Hunt

  Many of the windows of the building were broken, seemingly used for target practice by the local rock-throwing urchins. Much of the glass had managed to fall outward onto the sidewalk, however, and it crunched under his feet as he strode briskly toward a black and darkened door, behind which, he knew, were several people who suffered from a nearly complete lack of moral structure. In the dark parking lot were several automobiles — shiny, new, and foreign — which belied the beaten and dreary nature of the building he was about to enter.

  Boris Jadovovic opened the door when he knocked. He was a large and rotund man for whom the passage of time had been unkind, for he looked to be nearly twice his thirty years. There was no lightness in his eyes, no youth, no vigor. He said not a word to Jeff as he ushered him down the short corridor toward the factory floor. The corridor smelled dingy, and the air was stifled with the scent of old cigar smoke. There was little ventilation here.

  They walked out onto the floor and a welcome rush of cool fresh air from the broken windows greeted him. In this place, the air felt as if he were still outside. Several men sat at a table in the far corner — the area of the factory that was still reasonably well lit. Much of the remainder of the large room suffered from the failing of short-lived Russian light bulbs, and the large but tired metal press machinery cast dark shadows that created an eerie resemblance to a moonlit graveyard. There were several doors that might or might not serve as easy egresses. The men at the table had yet to look up. Jeff noted a faint sensation in his stomach — a warning signal.

  As he approached the group, he rapidly studied each man. The wafer-thin old man on the right was Andrei Tomolov — the most powerful of the group. His power resided primarily in people’s respect for the position that he had held in the old government: a deputy in the KGB. None of the other men stood out as particularly noteworthy in their former or current pursuits, so this respect given to his former position carried weight.

  The other three men at the table were younger, and they wore the outlandish attire that was stock in trade for the Moscow underworld: bright purples, heinous yellows, and shiny materials. One wore red Hi-Top American sneakers, which he had resting on the table in front of him. The Mafia members were proud of their position and one of the ways they flaunted it was by dressing in these gaudy outfits.

  Each had an entrepreneurial knack that would have made him wealthy in the black market, had the black market not been at least partially replaced by the free market. These men had come to wealth by taking advantage of government subsidies of a variety of goods. They would buy the goods at the low subsidized price, ship it across the border into Western Europe, and reap huge profits, all at the expense of the central government. They had done well in this trade, but they had risen to positions of power in the Mafia hierarchy not by their talents, but by the forced abdications of those above them. Andrei was the man who forced the abdications, frequently with a bullet.

  Andrei had become Jeff’s primary target, for it was this man who was making the most effective effort at banding Moscow’s various criminal factions together into a coherent and functional organization. Indeed, Andrei had several times visited Palermo, and he received financial backing, as well as advice, from the famed mafiosi there.

  Jeff had always felt an inexplicable feeling of sympathy for the American and Italian Mafia. The men and women in those organizations seemed to possess some respectable features. He rarely liked the men whom he had helped to arrest, kill, or destroy, but he usually found something worthy of respect in each of the malignant swine whom he pursued, even the ones not in Mafia syndicates: loyalty, honor, charity, love of family.

  However, Jeff had recognized some time ago that none of the men in front of him now deserved any respect. These men, despite being the core personnel in the fledgling Russian Mafia, possessed none of those values that made leaders effective — no loyalty, trust, or charity. The only character trait that any had in abundance was overconfidence. Their livelihood was based on fear as a tool to take advantage of the weaker members of society. And they did not even do well at that. Despite the large numbers, there was not yet much intelligent competition in the criminal society, so these poor excuses for men were the top dogs.

  The four men at the table were the heads of the four most significant Mafia groups. He had finally gotten them all together. Each of the three younger men stared down at the table. Not one pair of eyes focused on Jeff.

  From a dark recess in the corner a woman appeared. Jeff had seen this woman, Tanya, several times before, often in the company of the lead enforcer, a man named Dmitri. Dmitri was not present tonight, or at least he was not making his presence known. The woman was very attractive, but she seemed to lack intelligence. She appeared detached from the activities around her — not uninterested, but oblivious. Jeff had concluded that she was simply unaware and lacked the intellectual capacity to make moral distinctions of any kind. She spoke Russian with a faint accent that he could not place, and efforts at obtaining background information had been mostly unrewarding. The limited information he had on her was a threadbare story of failing out of the Grozny School of Ballet in her mid-teens, after which she had worked at several factories in several capacities before turning to prostitution. Now she was a Mafia girl.

  Jeff was aware that something had gone far astray with his plans. The men around him all seemed ill at ease. This was not a talkative group, but they usually exchanged brief pleasantries. Such pleasantries were entirely absent tonight. Andrei appeared angry. Jeff glanced about the room as subtly as he could, and with the mental agility of a veteran chess player readily identified his most suitable escape route. He also noted that none of the men had any bodyguards, which was probably one of the preconditions of this group’s congregating.

  Andrei placed his hands on the table and pushed himself up from his seat. His neck was scrawny and his mostly-bald head was tiny. The area of his right temple was depressed, as if he had had part of his cranium removed, or perhaps beaten in. Jeff had never asked, and he had found nothing in the files to explain it. Jeff’s handlers in Washington had warned him that the dearth of information regarding the main players in this mission would make this the riskiest of his escapades to date. Jeff had not worried too much, relying on those instincts that had functioned so well for him in the past. But he had been mildly disturbed throughout the last few months. He had essentially no background information on any of these men except for Tomolov, and even that intelligence was clearly inadequate. This had hindered Jeff’s abilities to get inside their heads, to learn their weakness, and to press the right buttons. It would cost him now.

  “Mr. Marcos,” said Andrei, staring intently at Jeff, “I have been looking forward to this visit for some time. However I had hoped that you would be a man whom I could trust. This does not seem to be the case.” There was to be no mincing words tonight.

  Jeff noted the impersonal use of his last name, or rather the last name of his current alias. In Russia, use of either the first or the whole name was standard.

  “To what do you refer, Andrei?” Jeff shuffled his pants as if attempting to pull his shorts out of his crotch, but in fact he was maneuvering the gun under his coat to a more accessible position.

  “You need pretend no more. What is your real name, by the way?”

  Jeff knew this was not a bluff, but he had nothing to lose by playing it out. He said in halting, heavily accented, and poorly enunciated Russian, “I do not know what you say. You know who I am. My name is Juan Marcos, and I have shown my value to you. Is this a test? Because I dislike it and will not submit to it!”

  Andrei’s face had turned bright red, and he shouted loudly, “Stop! Enough! I will hear no more of that. This is no game. You have lied to us from the beginning, and it is time for the truth. Tell us now who you are!” Jeff felt the metal tip of Boris Jadovovic’s pistol against his neck. He noted that it was warm, as it had absorbed the heat from the fat man’s blubbery belly.

  Rece
iving no response from Jeff, Andrei continued. “Juan Marcos is an enormously overweight man whose description is nothing like you. Lie no more!” With that, the thin man struck Jeff across the face with the back of his ringed hand, and the blood poured forth so rapidly from Jeff’s lip that it soaked the offending hand before it had finished its impact.

  Jeff was stunned by the surprising strength of the older man and slightly distracted by the blood pulsating out from his lip. Boris Jadovovic took the opportunity to search him, and extracted his weapon from his belt.

  Jeff considered his position for a moment, wiped his bloody mouth with a handkerchief extracted from his coat pocket, stood tall, then began. “Well, Andrei Tomolov. What a man you have become! The head of a puny criminal community. What happened to your commitment to the Party, your devotion to the State? You have become a decrepit self-serving man. You are a disgrace!”

  The men at the table looked up at Jeff now, each confused by his sudden verbal offensive and his impressive command of their language, suddenly with no trace of accent. The redness had receded from Andrei’s face, and he had begun to squint his eyes.

  Jeff continued. “Comrade Tomolov, I will tell you exactly who I am. I am a man who knows what you once were, and what you could have become had the Soviet Union been maintained. Those who hired me you once called friends, your brothers in arms. They have been watching over you. I am their man, assigned to prevent you from suffering the sentence that the remainder of this fine group will no doubt receive. You know full well how those same local Moscow police whom you have always so disdained have infiltrated your organization. When you were in the KGB, you despised them for their ineptitude — their failure to adequately enforce proper law. Now you despise them for their meager efforts to enforce the laws that you break. You need not despise them anymore, for their efforts are much more effective. Indeed, in the past, you might have even been proud of them.” Jeff paused for a breath, and one of the other men at the table took the opportunity to intercede.

  “What are you talking about?” He asked Jeff. Then he turned to Andrei. “What is he talking about?”

  Jeff was hoping that these men would be intimidated by him. And he was right. He had built a reputation in the past months as a man of action, quick and deadly. He had earned their respect and their fear with his display of physical prowess and agility with weapons. But they had considered him inferior in intelligence because he spoke so slowly in Russian. With their one reason for feeling superior now shattered, Jeff was intimidating.

  Jeff continued. “You thought that you have bought out the local police. This is not true, Tomolov. There are a few people who have not been touched by you, and the Americans and Interpol are now working with them. They are moved to action by your incessant efforts at promoting the drug trade. It would have been better had you avoided that industry, for you have now fallen into the arena of the crazy American war on drugs. The Americans have created in their media, and instilled a great enmity for, an entity called the ‘Russian Mafia.’ This is the same entity which you are only now attempting to create.” Jeff looked at each of the men in turn, then at the eldest. “You see, Tomolov, the Americans and Interpol have an enormous task force already here in Moscow to lay siege to the organization that you have yet to even create. They will squelch you in your first efforts.”

  Andrei was seated quietly at the table now. Jeff knew it would not be long before he realized the absurdity of Jeff’s statements. Most of Andrei’s friends whom Jeff had referred to were dead or already on his payroll. But for the moment, Andrei was considering what Jeff said, and it gave him time.

  He picked out one of the younger men at random and began to prod him verbally. “You sit there in your high-fashion clothes, flaunting your newly gained wealth as a status symbol. Can you not see that this will only be tolerated temporarily? Do you not see that there is power yet in the government? Only Andrei will be protected. You will simply be found with a bullet in your head — placed there by the Americans, or by the Moscow police — could be either or both.”

  His bluff diminished the overconfidence of the men near him, and they began to argue among themselves. Should they pay attention to this man? How could the police dare to interfere? Which of the police were going to be executed tonight for allowing this to happen? How much could they trust Andrei, who may have little need for them?

  Jeff was being ignored now by the three younger men who seemed convinced that there was indeed, finally, an organized effort to destroy them. They had not had to deal with such a thing before now and it would put a rift in their confidence in each other and themselves. The pressure of the warm muzzle of the gun at Jeff’s neck had relaxed some time ago. Jeff fixed his eyes upon Andrei. He would soon come to his senses. Indeed, it was not long until a sneer began to form on the old man’s lips and Jeff knew his ploy had been recognized. It was time for action.

  Andrei motioned to the fat man, Jadovovic, and the muzzle of the gun came back to Jeff’s neck. Jeff suddenly spun around counterclockwise; he raised his left arm high in the air and came down hard on the fat man’s arm, catching the gun in his armpit. Simultaneously, he pummeled his right fist into the man’s larynx, crushing his windpipe. Jadovovic suffered the anxiety all men feel as they suffocate, and in his duress squeezed the trigger of his weapon repeatedly, each bullet exiting the gun and dissecting a different part of Andrei Tomolov’s torso. The old man spun around like a rag doll shaken by a puppy, unable to fall, as the force of each impacting bullet raised him almost off the floor. The three men had turned quickly toward the melee and drew their weapons. Jeff let the fat Russian fall in agony to the ground and dove toward the dark shadow cast by the nearest piece of massive wrought-iron machinery. A hail of bullets followed him, pinging off the solid metal of the surrounding equipment.

  Jeff spun and rolled deeper into the shadows. How he wished for a gun right now. When Jadovovic had taken his gun, Jeff had not been able to see where he had placed it. He had relied on obtaining the fat man’s own gun to complete his escape. The unfortunate emptying the entire magazine into Tomolov had contributed to Jeff’s mission, but it left him in the unenviable position of being unarmed, outmanned, and in deep trouble.

  He could hear the footsteps of the men, one walked down each wall, away from the lit corner of the room. Undoubtedly, one man was weaving his way amongst the machinery directly toward him. That would have to be Hi-Top, for there were no audible footsteps. He would take on one at a time. They had divided and therefore they could be conquered. From his position tucked in the shadows, Jeff could see one man make his way down the wall to his right, past the row of machinery in which he hid. He moved quietly in that direction.

  The light from the single bulb in the corner cast long beams, like a flashlight, between the dark green machinery. Jeff had to proceed through several of these beams. He made his move quickly and as silently as he could, ducking and rolling into the welcome deep shadow of the next heavy press in the line. He needed shadows desperately. Once and twice again he leapt across the white beacons that were his greatest enemy in this place. On his third leap one of the men caught sight of his fleeting shadow, shouted loudly to the others, and began to close in on his position.

  As the man on the right wall approached one of the largest machines in the factory, he cautiously peered around the side, giving plenty of clearance to avoid an assault from around the corner. Jeff looked down at him from the top of the machine and jumped, crashing into his head with his knees and then dropping and rolling to the side. As he fell, he drove his fist into the back of the man’s wrist, forcing him to release his grip on his weapon. Jeff grabbed the freed gun by the muzzle and smashed the grip downward onto the man’s temple, knocking him unconscious and probably killing him with the blow. He rolled into the next shadow as the two other men came rapidly on the scene. They quickly realized that they now had an armed opponent, for one of the men panicked and began firing randomly into the shadows and yelling obsceni
ties.

  A good plan often fails not because of poor decisions but because of the events that cannot be predicted. Jeff had learned to be very wary of any plan, for there were so many opportunities for the unanticipated to occur. One of those events happened now, as a randomly fired bullet, shot by a man in an unthinking frenzy, ricocheted off a hydraulic pump and imbedded itself into the right side of Jeff’s chest.

  A bullet does not drill a clean hole in the tissues through which it passes. Rather it initiates a rapidly expanding cone of complete destruction as the velocity of the bullet is transferred, like falling dominoes, to the fragments of skin, fat, cartilage, bone and vital organs in turn. After entering his skin, this bullet shattered Jeff’s anterior seventh rib — sending bony fragments throughout much of his right lung — and into the muscle tissue of his heart. The large base of the cone of injury exited under Jeff’s right armpit, an eight-centimeter hole filled with a mass of bloody tissue with bone and lung fragments protruding from it.

  Jeff was so far tucked in the shadows that the man who shot him could not have seen his successful targeting, and Jeff could not even make out the extent of his own wound, although he knew that it was probably fatal. He lay back and, as quietly as he could, coughed up his first mouthful of blood. It tasted salty and sticky. He felt like vomiting.

  As the echoes of the gunshots died away Jeff was unable to hear the footsteps of the two Russian men over his progressively more labored breathing. They might be right around the corner, or in the next shadow over. He examined the gun that had fallen to his lap. It was an old Russian model of some kind that, in his pain and in the dark, he could not name. It looked to have about a 9-mm round. He checked the chamber and the clip and found nine bullets. It would serve.