Assassin on Centauri B (Nick Walker, U.F. Marshal Book 7)

by John Bowers

  “I’m all yours, sir. Lead the way.”

  Nick half expected Diana to accompany them, but she didn’t. Stepan led him up to the parking garage and Nick settled into perhaps the most expensive hovercar he’d ever ridden in. The car was a convertible, and this time he didn’t insist on the top being up; he was definitely not comfortable riding in an open-top hover, but clenched his fists and did it anyway. The wind wasn’t as bad as he expected, perhaps because it was behind them; Stepan remained silent as he piloted the car across the downtown area toward the elevated freeway.

  Nick spotted Government Annex before they reached it, four square blocks of official buildings nestled in the curve of the freeway, right on the edge of downtown. The buildings were built of white marble and based on the architecture, looked to be about fifty years old. A tower extended from the center of the complex, rising about ten floors. Stepan headed straight for it, gradually shedding altitude, and set down on the edge of a private parking lot reserved for employees and government officials.

  As they walked toward the main entrance, Stepan buttoned his coat and issued a word of warning.

  “You do not speak until invited. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Inside Government Annex looked like any other bureaucratic building Nick had ever seen. Self-important minor officials running to and fro; attractive, well-groomed women working the offices and guard posts; bewildered civilians trying to find their destinations from documents in their hands or building directories in the lobby. Nick and Stepan walked past them all to a lift that would take them up; Stepan used a keycard to bypass the public floors and take them straight to the top. When they stepped out, they faced a well-appointed lobby with only a few chairs and a receptionist. The woman at the desk glanced up and smiled at sight of Stepan.

  “Mr. Petreykin! Hold on a moment, I’ll see if he’s ready for you.”

  True to her word, she only took a moment. A quick inter-office call and she waved them by.

  “Go right in, sir.”

  Nick followed Stepan through a doorway into a bright, spacious office with an excellent view of the inland part of the city and the mountains beyond. The freeway was visible but one had to look down to see it.

  The desk in front of the window was big enough for six people to work, if three sat on either side. It was made of sturdy, polished wood similar to mahogany and most of the surface was bare, giving the impression that its owner was extremely efficient.

  Its owner was a medium-sized man in an expensive suit, his iron-grey hair trimmed neatly, his chin blue with subdural beard follicles. He gazed at Nick and Stepan with a neutral expression, as if waiting to receive an apology. He spread his hands apart on the surface of the desk and stared up at them.

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” Stepan said in a subservient voice, “this is Nick Russo. He is the man you wanted to meet.”

  Ivan Federov, the top political figure on Beta Centauri, turned his attention to Nick. Nick waited for him to speak, but he did not. After twenty seconds of silence, Nick cleared his throat.

  “Mr. Prime Minister, I apologize if I was overzealous with your son. I was just trying to do my job.”

  “You did not recognize him?” Federov’s voice was level, a pleasing baritone.

  “No, sir. I’m new to Beta Centauri. I don’t think Sasha recognized him, either.”

  “Sasha?”

  “The other doorman I was working with. No one identified the young man as your son, so I didn’t have a clue who he was.”

  Federov was silent for a moment; he didn’t appear angry, but neither did he seem satisfied. His English was flawless.

  “What, exactly, did my son do to warrant such treatment?”

  “To be honest, sir, he was acting like a jerk.”

  Nick was aware that Stepan flinched at his words, but ignored him. If he was reading the Prime Minister right, the man wanted to know the truth.

  “A jerk? In what way?”

  “He was already drunk when he arrived at the Rodina. He tried to crash the line and get ahead of everyone else, and when he was told to wait his turn, he became belligerent.”

  “Belligerent?”

  “Yes, sir. He took a swing at Sasha and that’s when I got involved.”

  “Was it necessary to rough him up?”

  “In my judgment at the time, yes, sir. Our customers expect and deserve to be treated fairly, and when one man tries to gain extra privilege for himself and his friends…well, I don’t take that lightly. Trust me, sir, I was a lot gentler with him than his behavior warranted.”

  Federov’s eyes narrowed and he steepled his fingers.

  “You said some pretty harsh things to him.”

  “I spoke the truth to him. I told him he was acting like a spoiled brat, and he was. He said he was going to ‘teach’ me something about respect, but I told him that respect is earned, not bestowed. And that is also true.”

  “You humiliated him.”

  “No, sir, I only treated him in accordance with his actions and attitude. If he was humiliated, then he brought it on himself.”

  Federov scowled for a moment, then pursed his lips.

  “Mr. Russo, I apologize to you and to Rodina for my son’s behavior, but was it really necessary to beat him?”

  “Mr. Prime Minister, I did not ‘beat’ your son. He was too drunk to take a beating. I did slap him around a little, just to get his attention, but he was in no condition for anything more severe than that.”

  “Did you have him arrested?”

  “No, sir. I did not call that police officer, and I don’t think anybody else did. She must have been driving by and saw what was going on. She took your son and his friends on her own. I didn’t try to stop her, but I didn’t call her, either.”

  Federov looked increasingly unhappy.

  “Your story doesn’t match the one my son told me. I guess it boils down to your word against his.”

  “I’m sorry about that, sir, but I’ve told you the truth. Did your son tell you that he tried to spit on me?”

  Federov’s eyes expanded in surprise. He placed both palms flat on his desk and rose halfway out of his chair.

  “He did what!”

  “Yes, sir. I saw it coming and ducked, but he certainly tried. If he had succeeded, I can promise you he would look a lot worse this morning than he does now.”

  “That little bastard!” Federov growled. “When he was little, he used to spit on his mother. I tried to beat it out of him, and I thought he was over that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Staring at his desk, Federov waved a hand.

  “All right, Mr. Russo. Thank you for explaining your side of it. I admit I was skeptical—I didn’t want to believe that Ivanovich would do something so stupid—but I guess I was wrong.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Prime Minister. I’m only sorry you had to find out from me.”

  “Are we all square, then?” Stepan Petreykin asked.

  “Yes.” Federov, looking embarrassed, met Stepan’s eyes and nodded. “Yes, we’re good.”

  Before either man could say anything else, Nick played the tourist card.

  “Wow! Mr. Prime Minister, that is a magnificent view of the mountains through your window. And look at that—the airport is just right there!”

  “Hm?” Federov swiveled in his chair and glanced out the window. “Yes, the view from here is rather nice, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll bet you got a great view of that airliner crash the other day, didn’t you! From here it would be a ring-side seat.”

  Both Federov and Petreykin looked a little shocked, but Nick’s wide-eyed exuberance deflected any suspicion.

  “I suppose it might have been,” Federov said, “but I wasn’t here. It happened on a Saturday night.”

  “Oh, too bad. I’ll bet that was something to see.”

  “Well.” Stepan Petreykin took Nick’s elbow and steered him toward the door. “If there is nothing else
, Prime Minister…”

  “No, that’s all. Thank you, Stepan. I think I have a pretty clear picture of things. I will make sure my son doesn’t embarrass himself again…or me, for that matter.”

  With a smile and a nod, Petreykin ushered Nick out of the office. Neither of them spoke until they were back in the parking lot.

  “What the hell were you thinking!” Stepan demanded. “You don’t ask the Prime Minister if he saw the airplane crash!”

  Nick looked surprised. “You don’t?”

  “Of course not! No one wants to see something like that.”

  “Well…I would. I mean, I would never want an airplane to crash, but if one crashes anyway, I want to see it. I’ve never seen a plane crash.”

  Stepan squeezed the key fob in his hand and his car squawked to guide them to it. As Nick climbed in on his side, Stepan put a cap on the conversation.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Russo—you just might get it. Odds are that if you ever do see a plane crash, you might be on board.”

  Chapter 19

  The rest of the day was largely uneventful. Nick was given a few odd jobs to do around the Rodina and in midafternoon was chosen, along with Aleksandr, to ride shotgun for a couple of people in Accounting as they transported a sizeable amount of cash to a local bank. Everything went off according to plan—the money was delivered and deposited and no one attempted to interfere.

  That evening, Nick worked the front door again, this time with Aleksandr—Sasha had the evening off. It was boring duty, checking IDs and telling people to wait; Nick heard the mutters and grumbles and everyone who had to wait seemed to think it was his fault, but they stood the line until they were allowed to enter and no one caused any trouble.

  After work, Nick took another walk and made his nightly calls. Polina had nothing new and was gratified that he had survived another day. Connie Ventura, however, had an update for him.

  “Gregor Patushkin, sixty-two, runs the Molograd chapter of Bratva. He has four sons, one of them in prison. His organization is only about a third the size of the Petreykin mob. Thirty years ago, Gregor was tight with the Petreykin family, but about a dozen years back, his oldest son was caught in a sting operation run by MGB. The Petreykins had influence with MGB and the courts but refused to intervene, and Gregor’s son got fifty years.”

  “What was the charge?”

  “Human trafficking. The Petreykins were already involved in that business, but the Patushkins were just getting started; the Petreykins had warned them off because they wanted the business exclusively for themselves. When the Patushkin kid was caught, it didn’t sit well with the Petreykins and they made no effort to help. That ended the relationship between the two families and they’ve been at odds ever since.”

  “Any recent activity?”

  “It looks like things have been quiet the last few months, but there are flare-ups from time to time. The last incident on record was about three months ago, when four men turned up dead on a subway platform in the south end of the city. They had been tortured and beheaded, but they still had their hands and identification was made from fingerprints. They were Patushkin soldiers, and investigation revealed that they had been running a dozen girls in Petreykin territory. Nobody ever found the girls, but they’re probably on Sirius by now.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now. Anything you want reported back home?”

  “Not really. I met the PM today.”

  “The Prime Minister? Really?”

  “Yeah.” Nick laughed and briefly described his encounter with the kid outside Rodina. “I slapped him around a little, told him what a loser he was, and the next thing I know I’m on the carpet in front of his old man.”

  “What did the PM say?”

  “He wasn’t happy, but I think he was more embarrassed that his kid’s a jerk than anything else. I don’t seem to be in any trouble.”

  “Well, that’s good news. Keep me posted.”

  “Will do. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Nick pocketed the phone and continued walking down the street. He walked all the way to the harbor, enjoying the cool night air and admiring the city, which had quieted down after midnight. His thoughts ran back to the Prime Minister’s office and the view out the window.

  Nick had only been half kidding about the plane crash—if the experts were right and an electronic device had been used on the airliner, the job could have been done from Ivan Federov’s office. The office was located barely two miles from the airport with an unobstructed view of the glide path. Nick would have loved to inspect the office for tripod marks, either on the carpet or on the desk; certainly it wasn’t the only location that could have been used—hundreds of other tall buildings had an equally clear view of the airport—but he would love to send a forensics team in to look for evidence.

  That wasn’t going to happen, of course, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  Sunday, April 5, 0448 (CC)

  In the early morning hours of Sunday, Periscope Harbor was as quiet as it would ever get. Except for bars and clubs, business was pretty much shut down and, but for the occasional police car, the streets were empty. Thirty blocks from the Rodina, in the same Asian neighborhood where Nick had worked with Aleksandr, nothing was moving except a couple of stray cats and three teenage boys in defiance of their parents’ curfew. The boys, all in their early teens, were doing nothing more offensive than smoking cigarettes and drinking some contraband beer; the cats were thinking about starting a family.

  Precisely at three o’clock in the morning, the silent, empty street erupted in a flash as the Jing Chong Market exploded. Flame gushed across the sidewalk to the middle of the street, narrowly missing the three boys, who dropped their beer and cigarettes and ran like hell; the cats ran even faster. Seconds later, three more businesses in the same building also disintegrated into a flaming inferno.

  The explosions weren’t very loud, more of a whoosh than a boom. Within seconds, everything inside the four businesses had turned to ash and flame sheeted up the sides of the building. An automatic alarm sounded at the nearest fire station, located nine blocks away, and people on the upper floors of the structure woke to a nightmarish scene. The lifts were out of order and the lower stairwells were blocked by fire, so the half-panicked residents hurried upward to escape the flames. Before they could reach the roof on the fifty-third floor, the first fire unit had arrived.

  With modern fire-fighting technology, the inferno was brought under control within minutes. No one died and no one was seriously injured, but four businesses were destroyed and police were soon crawling over the scene trying to determine what had happened—and who was responsible.

  *

  Nick Walker had barely gotten into bed when someone pounded on his door with a heavy fist. He held the .45 in his hand as he opened the door, but relaxed when he saw who it was.

  “Russo, get dressed,” Diana Stepurin ordered. “We have a situation!”

  Nick didn’t ask questions. His eyes were gritty and he was tired, but he quickly pulled on his pants and shirt, grabbed his windbreaker, and followed her to the parking garage. Six minutes later she set down on the street half a block from the scene of the fire.

  The sidewalk was crowded with residents from the damaged building, nearly all of them Asian. Nick stared in shock at the corner store, which was still smoldering in spite of clouds of chemical fog being sprayed by a hovering fire vehicle.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked as he and Diana stood apart from the other spectators.

  “Some kind of bomb,” she told him. “Four businesses all at once, and they’re all our clients.”

  Nick nodded. He recognized the corner market as the same one that had reported being robbed by four young men. He spotted the elderly couple and their daughter among the onlookers.

  “Looks like plasma,” he told Diana.

  “How do you know?”

  “We had a few incidents in Jois
ey. Plasma destroys everything but doesn’t wreck the building. It relies on heat rather than explosive force.”

  “That building looks pretty bad to me.”

  “Yeah, from the fire, but it didn’t collapse. With a more powerful explosive, it might have.”

  Another hovercar settled down a few yards away and the pilot climbed out to join them. Nick glanced up to see Boris Nikolaev with a grim look on his face.

  “I guess we know who did this,” he said.

  Diana nodded.

  “We do?” Nick stared at both of them.

  “We do,” Boris said. “The Patushkins.”

  “Patoot who?”

  “Patushkin,” Boris repeated. “A rival family.”

  Nick frowned. “Wait a minute, what the fuck! I thought you guys ran this town. Who the hell is Patushkin?”

  Diana turned angry eyes on him, but her anger was directed elsewhere.

  “We do run this town!” she snapped, “and we’re going to keep running it!” She stabbed a finger into his chest. “You are going to make sure of it.”

  *

  By the time they returned to Rodina, all the cousins had assembled. Nick, Boris, and Diana went down to the dance floor where everyone was gathered. Nick wasn’t sure at first why the dance floor had been chosen, but as Bratva soldiers began to stream in, he understood—they needed a room big enough to hold everyone.

  The word had gone out, and by four-thirty in the morning the room was packed with Bratva employees, a rough looking group that included Sasha and Aleksandr. Nick had not met most of those present, and many of them gave him a curious stare, but no one asked any questions.

  Orel Petreykin called the gathering to order.

  “All right, listen up! We have situation.” He explained what had happened and where. “We think Patushkin did this. If true, we will take action.”

  “How do we know it was them?” someone asked.

  Diana stepped forward.

  “We’ve had reports before now that Patushkin has been trying to muscle in on some of our insurance clients. I believe tonight was an attempt to show the merchants that we can’t protect them. If we let this pass, we may as well just turn over our protection business to the Patushkins, and the minute we do that, Periscope Harbor becomes their city.”