“Because you haven’t managed to buy off enough cops and politicians in the capital to protect you?”
“That’s not my worry.”
“You really think some mob bosses in Talas can roadblock a highway?”
“Not them. They are nothing. No, my former employer.”
“I have a hard time picturing you working for anybody. So who is it?”
“Figure it out, boy, you have more than enough information.”
Franny thought back over the investigation that had brought him to Kazakhstan. The former KGB agents who had been blown to kingdom come in New Jersey. The garroting of a cameraman who’d made the mistake of recording and selling DVDs of the joker fight club. Baba Yaga’s proficiency with a firearm, and ability at defensive driving.
“Christ, you were a spy. KGB, right? Those guys in New Jersey were guys you knew back in the day. You were recruiting from the old sandbox.”
“So, you are not a dunce. Good to know. Yes, a number of my associates had fallen on hard times. It was a tough adjustment to the Capitalist Paradise. I found it easy to hire them, and between us we knew enough secrets to keep us safe.”
“So why is the KGB all butt hurt?”
“I took something from them when I left. I didn’t trust them to keep it safe.” She fell silent and he glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She looked sad, an emotion he’d never thought to see on that ancient face. “I never thought I would get old. That he would get old. When you’re young you never do…”
Franny lost the thread because a flash of color among the trees caught his eye. Yellow and red and black. Franny jammed on the brakes, drawing an expletive from Stache and a hiss from the old lady as she clutched at the front seat.
He threw open the door and jumped out, running toward that writhing mass of coils. “Marcus! IBT!” The young man stopped and stared in shock at Franny.
Behind him he heard Baba Yaga scream out, “Nyet! Stupid boy! Drive, drive!”
Franny realized that command was meant for Stache not him. They were going to leave him. Marcus’s expression changed from one of surprise to one of wild rage. Franny panicked and started to turn back toward the van when he was knocked to the ground as IBT shot past him. It was a rapidly flexing coil that had hit him behind the knees. Franny hit on his bad shoulder and screamed in pain.
“You bitch! You fucking bitch! Why can’t you stay dead?” Marcus, screaming out the words.
“Marcus! No!” Franny shouted. In desperation he tackled the final few feet of IBT’s snake body, trying to slow him down.
“Get the hell off me!”
“Wait! Listen!”
Franny could feel the powerful muscles in IBT’s snake body flexing and thrashing against his chest and belly. It was like riding a bucking horse with nothing to grip. His hold was slipping because of the agony in his side.
Stache was trying to climb over the center console and into the driver’s seat while drawing his gun. IBT’s tongue shot out, and slapped across the man’s face. He screamed, convulsed, and collapsed as the poison did its work. Baba Yaga leapt out of the backseat. Her mouth was working, wrinkles becoming deep crevasses around her lips as she worked up a mouthful of spit.
“Watch out!” Franny yelled, but Marcus seemed to know the danger.
He shot off to the right, and gave a hard jerk of his tail to take it out of harm’s way. The violent move shook Franny loose and he went rolling across the dirt and pine needles. The wound in his side was screaming, and he felt nauseated and light-headed. He rolled onto his knees, and drew the pistol he was carrying just as Marcus lashed out with the tip of his tail, and knocked Baba Yaga into the side of the van. The old woman slid down, unconscious or worse. Marcus spun, his tongue lashing out.
“Fuck!” Franny yelled and fired a shot into the ground between Marcus and Baba Yaga.
The young man reared back, and his tongue missed Baba Yaga’s body, but hit her on the left hand. She began to jerk and convulse. IBT, his torso supported on the coils, gave Franny a look of confusion and betrayal. Franny pushed his advantage.
“Back off,” Franny snapped. He watched Marcus’s mouth work, and the tip of his tongue appeared. “You want to bet your tongue is faster than a bullet?”
Franny scrambled over to Baba Yaga’s side, and checked the pulse in her neck. It was thread-like and jumping, but she was still alive. There was a spreading bruise on her forehead and her hand was blackening.
“You … you’re protecting her? Why?” IBT’s head drooped and he added thickly, “She killed Father Squid.” Marcus suddenly sounded very lost, young, and forlorn.
Franny collapsed until he was sitting on the ground and he slowly lowered his gun. Memories of mass at the church of Jesus Christ Joker, and Father Squid’s deep resonant voice as he raised the host, or delivered his sermons. The joker priest had ministered to Jokertown for more years than Franny had been alive. Franny’s father had known the man. “How? What happened?”
“She.” Marcus’s dark eyes flicked toward the crumpled woman. “Told me if I won my last fight I’d go free, then I realized it was Father Squid I had to fight. He offered to let me kill him, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. She spit at me, but Father Squid pushed me aside. He saved me and died.”
“How did she change him?”
“So you know what she can do?”
“Yeah, I saw it in action.” Franny repressed a shudder. Marcus didn’t even try.
“She turned him into a prayer bench.” The fury was back. “Guess she thought that was funny. Now tell me she doesn’t deserve to die?”
Franny hesitated. He could tell Marcus about Baba Yaga’s hints that she knew some great and terrible secret, but why would the joker believe him? Franny wasn’t all that certain he believed the old woman, and he had experienced the feelings of horror and rage in the hospital.
He could wax eloquent about how he would see to it she faced justice and that just killing her where she lay was unworthy of Marcus and the wrong thing to do. And run the risk that IBT wouldn’t give a shit. Besides that was the kind of pious crap that Marcus had probably been hearing from people like Franny his entire life, and the young man had been acting as the guardian or vigilante of Jokertown for the past year.
Neither was a risk he dared take. There was only one choice. He lied.
“Well, you’ve done it.”
“She’s dead?”
“Dying. She was in tough shape at the hospital. This has done it.” The choice Franny had made also meant that he couldn’t offer to get the kid out of here. Marcus was going to have to be sacrificed to the possibility that Baba Yaga actually did know something. “You better get out of here. There are people after you, and they’re not real sympathetic.”
“Are you sure she’s gonna die? I poisoned the shit out of her and she lived.”
“Jesus, Marcus, she’s also like a hundred years old.”
“Yeah, and she’s an ace—”
“Look, maybe she could neutralize your poison, but inertia’s a bitch. You slammed her into a goddamn car.”
For a few more heartbeats it hung in the balance. Franny held his breath and then Marcus gave a tense nod and slithered away, vanishing among the trees. Franny sighed and pressed a hand against his side, grateful that the kid hadn’t thought to ask Franny what the hell he was doing with Baba Yaga.
The old woman’s cell phone lay on the ground near her. Franny grabbed it up, but found the screen cracked, and it wouldn’t respond no matter what he tried. Frustrated, he threw it hard against the side of the van.
He knelt beside Baba Yaga and tried to think past the pain, exhaustion, and confusion. It was poison. Should he try to suck it from the wound like he’d read in those old western novels his father had loved? Franny had read them to try and feel closer to the man he’d never known. He pushed aside thoughts of home, his mother, and decided not to make the attempt. He had no idea the power of IBT’s poison. He might incapacitate himself. He deci
ded to tourniquet the arm to try to keep the poison from spreading.
He ripped the sleeve off her dress, wrestled Stache out of the driver’s seat, and using a stick and the dead man’s tie he applied a tourniquet to the upper arm. He then lifted Baba Yaga in his arms, laid her on the backseat of the van, and secured her as best he could with the seat belts.
“Don’t die,” he ordered.
He started driving, picking roads that were heading east and north. Baba Yaga wasn’t able to object now and he was going to find the damn highway.
Squirming back up toward the village, Marcus’s heart banged in his chest, and not just from the effort of climbing through the rocky terrain. Seeing the old lady again had set it racing; knowing that she was dead kept it that way.
Dead. He hadn’t been sure after he’d poisoned her. Now he could be. The news elated him. He was free of her. A life with Olena was really possible now. But Marcus’s emotions were never as black and white as he wished they were. He couldn’t shake a certain amount of shame at the way he killed her. It had been so easy in the end, just a slap of his tail. For all her evilness, Baba Yaga really was just a frail old lady. For all he knew she was someone’s grandmother.
“If she was,” he mumbled, bitterly, “they should thank me for taking her out.”
He worked his way up a ravine, preferring to stay away from the road, even the quiet one up to the village. The sign at the intersection, he’d learned, identified it as a joker village. Not a place refugees were likely to head. Still, he didn’t want any other chance encounters like the one with the cop and Baba Yaga.
He hadn’t found out exactly what was going on in the city, but he knew that people—rich and poor, ace and nat alike—were fleeing Talas. The desperate unease he’d seen yesterday morning had only increased. Now the people looked downright crazed. From the trucks piled high with stuff it was pretty clear there was looting going on. He planned on warning the village, maybe setting up a watch and barricading the road. They had Olena’s Glock. Maybe they could scrape up more weapons. Anyone coming to mess with the village would find them ready and waiting. A joker militia.
Coming up out of the ravine, he got a clear view back down the valley. “What the fuck is that?” he asked.
A helicopter. It cut across the valley from the northeast, heading toward the highway. He wasn’t sure why, but from first sighting Marcus didn’t like the aggressive, military shape of the aircraft. It paused above the highway at the spot where the smaller road cut away toward the village. It hovered there, like a wasp over a procession of ants. It rotated, leaned forward, and started up the village road.
Marcus really didn’t like that. He picked up the pace of his slither, weaving through scrubby trees and around rocks. He squirmed for all he was worth, catching glimpses of the helicopter when he could. He lost sight of it as he came into the village. Whip fast, he carved through the cramped alleyways between houses and burst out onto the main street just as the helicopter roared into view. Marcus shouted an alarm. He grabbed two kids who were playing in the street and deposited them on their doorstep, and then he turned and rose up on his coils to face the oncoming helicopter. It flew right over him, a menacing shape that pummeled him with the downdraft of air from the rotors, sending dust and debris swirling. It traveled the length of the village, turned and circled back, slowly passing down the main street. Looking up, Marcus saw the pilots’ helmeted, goggled faces staring down at him. Insects, all right. He waved his arms, as if shooing them away.
It didn’t do any good. The helicopter touched down at the edge of the village, landing right in the middle of the street. Marcus had never been this close to one before. It was loud, that was for sure. And this one looked high-tech like nothing he’d seen flying over Jokertown. Sleek, with tinted windows along the main cabin and a blur of whirling rotors that hardly looked wide enough to lift it. The tail propeller spun inside a ring that housed it, looking like a tricked-out hubcap spinner. The engines half cut, and the rotors began to slow. Before they stopped, the doors on both sides of the main cabin popped open. Figures emerged. Before he could properly see them through the dust, Marcus shouted, “Back the way you came, motherfuckers! You hear me? You’re not welcome here. Turn the fuck around and go.”
A six-pack of heavies took up points around the aircraft. They wore military fatigues, had close-cropped haircuts, and hefted machine guns to complete the look. Other figures emerged, a handful of men in suits. A hulk of a man with wide, massively muscled shoulders that were barely contained in his black suit. The moment he was out of the helicopter and standing, it looked impossible that he’d ever fit in it. He slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses and looked around, disinterested, hardly seeming to notice the enormous snake-man standing just a few feet away.
The rotors slowed to a halt and the dust cleared, a tall man with steely grey hair that he’d combed back from his forehead disembarked. He took Marcus in with cold blue eyes. Amusement lifted the corners of his lips. He said something in what Marcus assumed was Russian. The big man responded, chuckling as he did so. The helicopter’s engine cut off.
“Fuck you, too,” Marcus said in the sudden silence.
The grey-haired man grimaced. He said, in accented English, “I did not say, ‘Fuck you.’ I said, ‘They sent a black mamba to welcome us.’”
“Whatever,” Marcus said. “The ‘fuck you’ stands.”
Stepping closer, the grey-haired man said, “I know you. You fought in Baba Yaga’s arena. You are a killer of jokers. That is not my business, as I am no joker. But with me you do not fuck, understand?”
Before he could answer, Olena arrived at a run. She skidded into the road between them, a few jokers following her. She spoke a mile a minute, a barrage of Russian or Ukrainian words that she spat like bullets at the grey-haired man. For a time, Marcus could only stare, not understanding a thing. Olena must’ve noticed. She switched to English.
“You!” she hissed at the man. “What are you doing here?”
The man pulled a coin from his jacket pocket and knuckle-rolled it. The coin flipped over and over as it passed from finger to finger. He began to answer in Russian or Ukrainian. Marcus couldn’t tell the difference. Olena cut him off, “Speak English! You sent me to learn it, didn’t you? Spent all that money. Speak English!”
Vasel shrugged. Taking in Olena’s native clothing with something like disdain, he asked, “Precious daughter, what are you wearing? And is that any way to greet your papa?”
“Papa?” Marcus gasped.
“You’re not my papa!” She made a fist with her thumb protruding between her middle and index finger. Marcus almost shouted for her to not hit him with that. She’d break her thumb. But she just waved it in a gesture that included all of the new arrivals.
Vasel shook his head disapprovingly. The coin still flipped from knuckle to knuckle. “You’ve become such a rude girl. I don’t hold it against you. You’ve had a hard time, I know. I will make it right with you.”
The big man paced with the mallets that were his fist swinging in warning. He scowled at the arriving villagers, who’d begun to cluster around them. No one came too close.
“You can’t make anything right,” Olena said. “You let Baba Yaga have me!”
“Everything I did was for you.”
“Liar! How did you find us?”
“A father should always know where his daughter is,” Vasel said. When that clearly didn’t satisfy Olena, he added, “Tracking chip.”
“What?”
“It was for your own good. Remember when you ran away from school with that boy? What was he, Algerian?”
“French,” Olena corrected. “He was born and raised in Paris!”
“Algerian first. Algerian always.” He glanced at Marcus. “At least he wasn’t as black as this mamba. That little adventure cost me headaches, money, resources to find you. We drugged you on the flight back home, yes? That day and many after. Was not just to keep you quiet, though. Also,
for you to recover from a little operation. Tracking chip. I had them place it under that tattoo you so foolishly had just gotten.” He pointed at the spot on his own lower back. “Who would’ve thought my daughter would become tramp?”
Olena’s face shifted through a series of emotions. Bewilderment. Disbelief. Shock. After all these, she settled on anger. An anger that could only be fully expressed in a torrent of words in her native tongue.
“I thought you wanted to speak English?” Vasel said.
She did, mid-sentence. “—a chip in me as if I’m a dog? That’s what you did? I hate you! Hate you!” She spat on him. It was a vicious motion, full of loathing, but it only left a few flecks of spittle on his crisp suit.
Vasel seemed unperturbed. “With the chip I always knew where you were. Always, I had people spying on Baba Yaga, waiting for the moment to take her out, and to rescue you.”
“Rescue me? You gave me to her!”
“You are alive, yes? And now you are free. When our informant told us that the shit had hit the fan in the casino, I was on my way to Baikonur. Lucky timing. I dropped what I was doing and came to find you. I should be in Talas now, taking advantage of the moment, but I came first for you. I get this thanks for it.”
Olena shook her head slowly, contempt mixing with disbelief. “You didn’t come here out of love for your ‘precious daughter.’ You want the company. You want my shares. You can do nothing without my permission.”
“I can do many things without your permission, daughter.”
Olena looked to Marcus. “Every legitimate part of my family’s fortune came from my mother’s family. When she died, Vasel Davydenko had surprise waiting. Her assets all came to me. As long as I’m alive, he’s locked out of the board. Unless I say otherwise. If I die”—she grinned and turned a withering look back on her father—“he doesn’t know what might happen then. I may just give everything away in my will.”
Marcus tried not to looked too stupefied by the casual mention of “my family’s fortune.” One of these days, he really needed to figure out who and what this girl was.
High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel Page 14