My head exploded.
For a second I saw only bright fireworks. I tasted coppery blood. My hands grabbed the air and I careened to one side and he was on top of me and cracked the butt of the gun on the center of my forehead.
I was woozy and out of breath. His face loomed over me. His eyes were an unnerving amber, like a wolf’s.
“Do you believe there is light at end of tunnel when you die?” he asked. His voice was higher pitched than I remembered from the videos and had the grit of sandpaper.
I didn’t reply. It was a rhetorical question anyway.
He flipped the gun around, then ground the barrel into the skin of my forehead, one-handed, twisting it back and forth as if putting out a cigarette.
“Go ahead,” I panted. “Pull the trigger.”
His face showed no reaction. As if he hadn’t heard me.
I stared into his eyes. “Come on, are you weak?”
His pupils seemed to flash.
“Pull the trigger!” I said.
I saw the hesitation in his face. Annoyance. He was debating what to do next.
I knew then he had no more rounds left. And that he knew it too. He’d ejected the magazine but hadn’t had the chance to pop in a new one.
Blood from his nostrils seeped over his beaver teeth, dripping steadily onto my face. He grimaced, and with his left hand he pulled something from his boot.
A flash of steel: a five-inch blade, a black handle. A round steel button at the hilt. He whipped it at my face and its blade sliced my ear. It felt cold and then hot and extremely painful, and I swung at him with my right fist, but the tip of the blade was now under my left eye.
At the base of my eyeball, actually. Slicing into the delicate skin. He shoved the handle and the point of the blade pierced the tissue.
I wanted to close my eyes but I kept them open, staring at him defiantly.
“Do you know what this is?” he said.
My KGB friend had told me about the Wasp knife.
“Dusya,” I said.
A microsecond pause. His mother’s name seemed to jolt him.
“I spoke to her. Do you know what she said?”
He blinked, his eyes narrowed a bit, and his nostrils flared.
That second or so was enough.
I scissored my left leg over his right, behind his knee, pulling him toward me while I shoved my right knee into his abdomen. Two opposing forces twisted him around as I grabbed his left hand at the wrist.
In an instant I’d flipped him over onto the ground.
Jamming my right elbow into his right ear, I tucked my head in so it was protected by my right shoulder. My right knee trapped his leg. He pummeled me with his right fist, clipped the top of my head a few times, but I was guarding all the sensitive areas. I gripped his left wrist, pushing against his fingers, which were wrapped around the knife handle. I kept pushing at them, trying to break his grip and strip the knife from his hand.
But I had underestimated Zhukov’s endurance, his almost inhuman strength. As we grappled over the knife, he jammed his knee into my groin, sending shock waves of dull nauseating pain deep into my abdomen, and once again he was on me, the point of his knife inches from my left eyeball.
I gripped his hand, trying to shove the Wasp knife away, but all I managed to do was keep it where it was, poised to sink in. His hand trembled with exertion.
“If you kill me,” I gasped, “it won’t make any difference. The others are on their way.”
With a lopsided sneer, he said, “And it will be too late. The casket will be flooded. And I will be gone. By the time they dig her up, she will already be dead.”
The knife came in closer, and I tried to push it back. It shook but continued touching my eye.
“I think you know this girl,” he said.
“I do.”
“Let me tell you what she did to me,” he said. “She was a very dirty little girl.”
I roared in fury and gave one final, mighty shove with all the strength I had left. He flipped onto his side, but he still didn’t loosen his grip on the handle.
I drove my knee into his abdomen and shoved his right arm backward. The knife, still grasped tightly in his fist, sank into his throat, into the soft flesh underneath his chin.
Only later did I understand what happened in the next instant.
The palm of his hand must have slid inward a fraction of an inch, nudging the raised metal injector button.
Causing his Wasp knife to expel a large frozen ball of gas into his trachea.
There was a loud pop and a hissing explosion.
A terrible hot shower of blood and gobbets spat against my face, and in his bulging amber eyes I saw what looked like disbelief.
106.
I was able to hold out until shortly after the casket came out of the ground.
It took five members of the FBI’s SWAT team two hours of digging by hand, using shovels borrowed from the Pine Ridge police. The casket was almost ten feet down and the earth was sodden and heavy from the recent deluge. They hoisted it out on slings of black nylon webbing, two men on one side, three on the other. It lifted right up. The casket didn’t weigh more than a few hundred pounds.
It was dented in several places and had a half-inch yellow hose coming out of one end. The hose had been trenched into the ground for two hundred feet or so and was connected to the air compressor on the back porch. A much thicker, rigid PVC tube came out of the other end, the pipe sticking out of the ground.
The team didn’t believe my assurances that the casket wasn’t booby-trapped. I didn’t blame them, of course. They hadn’t looked into the monster’s eyes.
If Zhukov had placed a booby trap in the casket, he would not have denied himself the opportunity to taunt me with it.
But he hadn’t. There was none.
Two of their bomb techs inspected the compressor hose and the vent pipe and the exterior of the casket, looking for triggering mechanisms.
Somehow they were able to ignore all the thumping and pounding and muffled screams from within. I wasn’t.
Diana had her arm around me. She was supporting me, and I mean that in a physical sense. My legs had turned to rubber. Everything before my eyes was moving in and out of focus, though I didn’t understand why. The blood loss was minimal. True, the pain in my chest had grown steadily worse. The blunt-force trauma had been bad, but I’d thought the worst had passed.
I was wrong. The escalating pain should have been the first sign. But I was preoccupied with getting Alexa out of her coffin.
“Nico,” she said, “you weren’t wearing trauma plates.”
“Hey, I was lucky I had a plain old vest with me,” I said between sharp gasps. “Trauma plates aren’t exactly standard equipment.” Breathing was getting more difficult. I couldn’t fill my lungs. That should have been the second sign.
“You should have waited for us.”
I looked at her, tried to smile.
“Okay,” she conceded, nuzzling me on the neck. “I’m glad you didn’t wait. But do you always have to be the first one on the battlefield and the last one to leave?”
“No. I’ll leave as soon as I see her.”
The hollow thumps, the remote anguished cries that could have been half a mile away. I couldn’t stand listening to it. Yet the bomb techs continued their methodical inspection.
“There are no explosive devices,” I said. I staggered across the marshy field. “He would have boasted about it.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get her out of there.”
“You don’t know how.”
But I did. I knew something about caskets. The Department of Defense provided standard-issue metal or wooden caskets to the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty, if they were wanted. A few times I’d had the solemn and terrible duty of accompanying the body of a friend on the plane home.
When I got to Alexa’s casket I shoved aside one of the guys in their bulky blast-resistan
t space suits. He protested, and the other one tried to block me. Someone yelled, “Back away!”
The other guys on the SWAT team stayed back as per standard procedure. I shouted to them, “One of you must have a hex key set, right?”
Someone threw me a folding tool with a bunch of Allen keys on it. I found the right one and inserted it in the hole at the foot of the casket and turned the crank counterclockwise four or five turns to unlock the lid.
The rubber gasket had been mashed in places where the steel casket had begun to cave in under ten feet of dirt, but I managed to pry it up.
A terrible odor escaped, like from an open sewer.
Alexa had been lying in her own excrement, or just a few inches above it. She stared up, but not at me. Her hair was matted, her face chalk white, her eyes sunken in deep pits.
She was wearing blue medical scrubs and was covered in vomit. Her hands were curled in loose fists that kept jerking outward. She couldn’t stop pounding the sides of her coffin. Her bare feet twitched.
She didn’t understand she was free.
I knelt over and kissed her forehead and said, “Hey.”
Her eyes searched the sky. She didn’t see me. Then she did. She looked directly at me, uncomprehendingly.
I smiled at her and she started to cry.
That was about the last thing I remembered for a long while.
107.
I hate hospitals.
Unfortunately I had to spend a few days at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where my FBI friends were kind enough to helicopter me from New Hampshire. The ER doc told me I’d developed a tension pneumothorax as a result of the blunt-force trauma. That my entire chest cavity had filled up with air, my lungs had collapsed, and I’d gone into respiratory distress. That it was a life-threatening condition and if one of the SWAT guys hadn’t done what he did, I’d surely be dead.
I asked him what had been done.
“I don’t think you want to know,” he said.
“Try me.”
“Someone with medic training stuck a large-bore needle in your chest to let the air out,” he said delicately.
“You mean like a Cook kit?”
He looked surprised.
“In the army we called that a needle thoracostomy. Every field medic carries a Cook pneumothorax kit in their aid bag.”
He looked relieved.
He ordered up a lot of X-rays and put a chest tube in me, had the wound in my calf cleaned out and bandaged, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me to another ward to recover. After three days they let me go.
Diana was there to give me a ride home.
* * *
EVEN THOUGH I could now walk just fine, the nurse insisted on rolling me to the hospital entrance in a wheelchair while Diana got the car.
She pulled up in my Defender. Nice and shiny and newly washed.
“Look familiar?” she said as I got in.
“Not really. It looks almost new. Someone find it in the woods up in New Hampshire?”
“One of the snipers. He drove it back to Boston and decided he liked it better than his Chevy Malibu. It wasn’t easy to pry it out of his sweaty little hands. But at least he washed it for you.”
“I want to see Alexa. Is she still in the hospital?”
“Actually, she got out a lot faster than you. She was treated for dehydration, they checked her out, and she’s fine.”
“I doubt that.”
“You’re right. I’ve dealt with plenty of kids who’ve gone through traumatic experiences. I know some good therapists. Maybe you can convince her to see one.”
“Is she at home?”
“Yeah. In Manchester. I don’t think she’s happy about it, but it’s home.” As we headed down Comm Ave toward Mass Ave, she said, “How about I cook dinner for you tonight? As a celebration.”
“A celebration of what?”
She gave me a sideways glance and pursed her lips. “I don’t know, maybe the fact you saved that girl’s life?”
“If anything was a team effort—”
“You’re doing that thing again.”
“Thing?”
“Where you give everyone else credit except yourself. You don’t have to do that with me.”
I was too tapped out to argue.
“Let’s make it my place,” she said. “I don’t want to be the first person to turn on your oven. Does it even work?”
“I’m not sure. Let me go home and get changed and take a shower. Or a sponge bath.”
“It’s just dinner, you know.”
“Not a date. Of course.”
“Like the thought never occurred to you.”
“Never,” I said.
“You know something, Nico? For a guy who’s so good at recognizing a lie, you’re a really bad liar.”
I just shrugged. She wasn’t so good at it either.
108.
ONE WEEK LATER
The waves crashed loudly on the rocks below, and the wind howled along the point. The sky looked heavy, a mournful gray, as if any moment it might begin to pour.
No more armed guards, I saw. The guardhouse was empty. I parked in the circular drive and crossed the porch, the floorboards creaking underfoot.
I rang the bell and waited almost a minute, then rang again. After another minute the door opened, and Marshall Marcus stood there.
He was wearing a gray cardigan and a rumpled white dress shirt that looked like it hadn’t been pressed.
“Nickeleh,” he said, and he smiled, but it was not a happy smile. He was weary and defeated. His face seemed to have sunk and his teeth seemed too big for his mouth and far too white. His face was creased and his reddish hair stuck out in crazy tufts. It looked like he’d been napping.
“Sorry to wake you,” I said. “Want me to come back?”
“No, no, don’t be silly, come on in.” He gave me a big hug. “Thank you for coming.”
I followed him to the front of the house where you could watch the sea. His shoulders slumped as he walked. The front room was gloomy, the only light coming from the fading late-afternoon sky. Crumpled on one of the couches was a cheap synthetic Red Sox blanket, the kind they sell at Fenway.
“She’s still not talking?” I said.
Marcus heaved a long sigh as he sank into a chair. “She hardly even comes out of her room. It’s like she’s not even here. She sleeps all the time.”
“After what she’s been through, she needs to see someone. It doesn’t have to be one of the trauma specialists Diana’s recommending. But someone, at least.”
“I know, Nick. I know. Maybe you can change her mind. Lexie always seems to listen to you. You feeling better?”
“Totally,” I said.
“Good thing you were wearing a vest, huh?”
“Yeah. Lucky break. You’re doing the right thing.”
He gave me a questioning look.
“Meeting with the FBI.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, only because Schecky says he can get me a deal.”
“Give Gordon Snyder what he wants,” I said, “and you’ll have the FBI on your side. They have a lot of influence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
“But what does that mean? They’re gonna put me in prison? My little girl, look what’s she’s already been through—now she has to lose her daddy?”
“Depending on how much you cooperate, you might even walk,” I said.
“You really think so?”
“It depends on how much you give them. You’re going to have to tell them about Mercury. They know a lot already.”
“Schecky says I have nothing to worry about if I just do what he says.”
“How well has that worked out for you?” I said.
He looked uneasy and said nothing for a long while.
Finally I broke the silence. “Where’s Belinda?”
“That’s why I asked you to come here,” Marcus said. “She’s gone.”
109.
He handed me a pale blue corr
espondence card with BELINDA JACKSON MARCUS on the top in small navy blue copperplate. The script was big and loopy and feminine, but a few of the letters—the H’s and the A’s and the W’s—looked Cyrillic. Like they’d come from the hand of someone who’d learned to write in Russian as a child. The note said:
Darling—
I think it’s better this way. Someday we’ll talk.
I’m so happy Alexa is home.
I really did love you.
Belinda
“She said she was going out to meet a girlfriend in the city, and when I got up I found this propped up against the coffeemaker. What does it mean?”
It meant she’d been warned the FBI was about to close in on her. Though in truth, it would have been difficult to prove Anya Afanasyeva guilty of any serious crime.
“Sometimes it takes a crisis to find out who a person really is,” I said.
I doubt he knew who I was really talking about.
Marcus shook his head, as if he were trying to dodge a pesky fly, or a thought. “Nick, I need you to find her for me.”
“I don’t think she wants to be found.”
“What are you talking about? She’s my wife. She loves me!”
“Maybe she loved your money more.”
“She knew I was broke for months. It never changed anything with us.”
“Well, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke, right?”
A long pause.
He then turned away.
“Come on, Marshall. Did you really think you could move forty-five million dollars offshore without anyone finding out? It’s not so easy anymore.”
Marcus flushed. “Okay, so there was a little nest egg,” he said. “Money I wasn’t going to touch. Money I’ll need if I’m ever going to get back in the game.” He sounded defensive, almost indignant. “Look, I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve got.”
“Apologize? What do you have to apologize for?” I said.
“Exactly.”
Buried Secrets (Nick Heller) Page 30