Red Scare (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 3)

by Mike Leon

  “Whoa. That would not be a good movie.”

  “He thinks what he’s doing is art. He wouldn’t stop lecturing me about it.”

  “Alright, you want to hit this house. How do you hook it up to Volchenko?”

  “He sent me there, Max. He owns the operation.”

  “You got that on tape?”

  “I wasn’t recording.”

  “What? Were you saving the battery in case D.B. Cooper wandered in to tell you his life story?”

  “He showed up unexpected. What the fuck do you want from me? I talked to him. I’ll testify.”

  “That’s not enough. I need the fucker on tape blabbing about his involvement in predicate offenses for RICO.”

  “Fuck.” Dmitry was afraid of this. He has his rainy day collection of audiotaped evidence that implicates Volchenko in racketeering, but that stuff was saved exclusively for a do-or-die situation. Some of it goes back years, and therein lies the problem. If he gives the FBI those tapes, they’re going to ask questions about why he sat on them for so long. Dmitry does not have satisfactory answers to those questions. “We don’t need RICO. Hit the house. Velour will cave on Volchenko in a heartbeat.”

  “If we go in there making assumptions Volchenko will be on a plane back to Moscow before we put the first set of asscheeks in the paddy wagon. We need RICO to freeze his assets and ground him stateside, and that means we go to the U.S. attorney when we are one hundred and one percent sure his dick is in the grinder.”

  The cell rumbles again. This time, Dmitry yanks it from his breast pocket and knocks his finger against the phone’s answer graphic. He fails the first time by pressing too hard, and has to try again. When he does accept the call, he holds the phone to his ear and snaps at the unknown caller.

  “What?!” he barks into the phone.

  The voice on the other end sounds like something that should be lurking in a child’s closet in the night. “Fedosov,” the bogeyman says. “You underestimated me, Fedosov.” Dmitry’s heart sinks into his guts. “Big mistake.”

  “Who is this?” A stupid question. He asks only out of a surprise induced lack of dialogue options. He knows he won’t get the answer he needs.

  “I killed Sergei and Nikos.”

  “Nikos isn’t dead.”

  “Well, severed heads can live for a minute or so, but let’s not split hairs.”

  “What do you want?” Dmitry’s phone chirps in his ear to notify him of an incoming message.

  “I want to kill your boss. I want the syndicate to burn. But most of all, I want to run a cheese grater over your face until I’m just filing dry bone.”

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

  “I just sent you some hot pics. This is just the start. I will take everything from you; your money, your power, your hope, your skin.”

  The phone emits a loud crack and shrill screech, then nothing. Dmitry lowers it to his lap and taps the screen to check his text messages.

  “What was that?” Wintergreen asks. His confounded face is up from the novel now.

  “That was your Mack Bolan,” Dmitry says as he looks at a photograph of five dead bodies spread around an upturned collapsible table in what appears to be the back room at Nikos Petrovich’s butcher shop. Nikos’ severed head adorns one of the table legs. “God, damn it! He just killed Nikos and all of his people!”

  “No fucking way.”

  “It’s one guy, Max! One guy! You told me it was impossible. Nobody can do that, you said! Fantasy for zitty teenagers, you said! He’s racking up a serious body count for an imaginary character.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “I don’t fucking know! He says he’s going to kill everybody! Volchenko, me, everybody!”

  “That’s it. I’m pulling the plug. This is getting stupid.”

  “No! We need to hit the snuff house!”

  “Fuck the snuff house! You have shit on these people and you’re gonna get shish kebabed!”

  Dmitry grunts in frustration. He can feel the heat building under the surface of his face, the humid stickiness forming on his brow. “What if I give you what you need on Volchenko right now?”

  “What are you gonna do? Ring his doorbell and ask him to speak clearly into the microphone?”

  “Look, just bear with me here. If I bring you the tapes, we hit the snuff house.”

  “Yeah. We’ll hit the fucking snuff house.”

  “Alright. I’ll get you the tapes.”

  EXT. YMS MARKETING SOLUTIONS - DAY

  Sid stares up at all four stories of YMS Marketing Solutions wondering just what the hell to expect inside the place. Before Sid cut his head off, Nikos said it was a pump and dump—whatever that means. It sounds sketchy for sure. Dumping bodies? Then what do they pump them with? It’s a mystery Sid should probably solve before he goes in there.

  He leans against the back of the parallel parked black utility van he picked up from Enterprise Rent-A-Car using one of his stolen identities. He could have picked a faster car, but he doesn’t need speed. He won’t be running from anyone. He needs space to keep weapons and prisoners. There will be prisoners. If no one else, Dmitry Fedosov will be his prisoner.

  After a few minutes, a tall black man with thinning but curly hair and a speckled complexion exits through the glass double doors from the building lobby. He has a name badge which matches the sticker lettering on the doors: YMS Marketing. Sid opens the van’s rear doors, then snatches his quarry by the arm and pulls him toward the van.

  “Hey! Hey! Wha—” the man mumbles. He shuts up when Sid stick’s the FNX in his face. According to his name tag, his name is Curtis. Curtis goes in the back of the van via stomp kick and Sid climbs in after him. He closes the doors so they can have some privacy.

  “Here!” Curtis says, passing a wallet to Sid once they’re both shut in the back of the van. “Take this. Take whatever you want. Just let me go.”

  Sid flips the wallet open to a California driver’s license which identifies the salesman as Mr. Curtis Washington of Van Nuys. Sid throws it back at him. “I don’t want this. I want answers,” he says.

  “Anything. Just don’t shoot me.”

  “How many guards are in the building?”

  “There’s just Jerry.”

  “How is he armed? Sidearms? Body armor? Pineapples?”

  “I don’t think they let him have guns.”

  “And the Russians? How many?”

  “Russians? I don’t know about any Russians.”

  “Fedosov. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know who that is. I think you got the wrong guy, man. I just work here!”

  “What is a pump and dump?”

  “Are you with the S.E.C.?”

  Sid punches Washington in the gut. The man folds over, clutching his abdomen. “I ask the questions.”

  “Look, man! I bombed my series seven! Nobody else would hire me. I got fifty grand in student debt! I don’t want to work here! I just needed anything!”

  “Talk.”

  “Okay. But it’s textbook stuff, man. We take a position in an over the counter security and then get a lot of people to take a long position in that security in order to inflate the market value and then we close our position.”

  “Huh?” Sid Hansen speaks two languages: English and Violence. That last bit did not sound like either one.

  “YMS, man. It’s a classic pink sheet pump and dump. They’re not even covering it up very well.”

  “You’re pumping the security?”

  “Securities. You know, stocks. We buy a stock. Then we get a lot of other people to buy the stock and that makes it cost more. Then we sell all our shares.”

  “What do they do with them?”

  “They’re stocks, man. You don’t do anything with them.”

  “Then what do the Russians do with them?”

  “I told you, I don’t know any Russians.” Washington cocks his head as some recollection enters his mind. “Except that guy y
esterday with the skinny white girl that kept looking at me funny. I think that guy was Russian.”

  “These stocks. You keep them in the building? What do they look like?” If Sid can find the stocks inside, he can destroy them and ruin the syndicate’s operation here.

  “They don’t look like anything. Do you not know what a stock is?”

  Sid glares silently at Curtis Washington for a long time, uncertain if he should admit he has no grasp of what a stock is. “It’s a thing,” he finally says.

  “It’s a holding,” Washington says. “It’s abstract.”

  “Fuck. I hate that word.” Sid has heard that word before and it always accompanies some arcane madness that boggles his mind. Abstract. Fuck abstract.

  “It’s not that complicated. I’ll explain it to you. It’s like, say I build a factory that makes, um, whatever that gun is.”

  “A Fabrique Nationale FNX-9, nine millimeter pistol with laser aiming module, and standard box magazine.”

  “Yeah that. So I own that factory and I say to you ‘hey, for a hundred dollars, you can own some of my factory too.’ So you give me a hundred dollars and now you own part of the factory and when the factory makes money, you make money.”

  “Which part of the factory?”

  “I don’t know. A floor tile.”

  “I don’t want a floor tile.”

  “Well that’s what you got. If you want more, you have to buy it from me.”

  Sid growls.

  “Look man, it’s just an example.” Sid glares silently as he waits for Washington to go on. Finally, the man does. “So say a few weeks go by and we’re cranking out guns and people are buying them like never before. Then some guy comes around and he says he wants to buy your floor tile. You don’t give a fuck about a hundred dollars anymore. You’re making a hundred dollars a minute just because you own that floor tile. So you say to him you’ll sell him the floor tile for a billion dollars. The floor tile is worth a billion dollars now.”

  “That’s stupid. It’s a floor tile.”

  “I know, man. That’s just how the market works.”

  “So YMS is selling floor tiles?”

  An hour later the discussion is still going.

  Washington sits on an old ammo crate now, smoking his third cigarette with his back to the driver’s seat. He points to a crude diagram of a short put chart, which is scribbled on some loose notebook paper. “So if I think Twitter is about to crash, I buy put options to short it for a payoff when I exercise the put,” he says.

  “And you have to exercise the options before maturity or they expire worthless.”

  “Right.”

  “Why don’t you just buy the stock and then sell it?” Sid waves the FNX loosely at another diagram which was intended to demonstrate a long put being used as insurance.

  “Because then you lose whatever you put in before the crash.”

  “Right.”

  “And if you’re looking to go long on a stock you might as well pick something with a dividend and do iron condor, unless the fear index is over twelve or so. Just my personal opinion.”

  “Okay. I think I got all this. Now, where does the pumping and dumping come in?”

  “It’s not that complicated. YMS buys a stock, usually a company that doesn’t actually even exist except on paper. Then we call a bunch of people and tell them it’s about to go up in price, usually for some imaginary reason. Then those people, usually elderly people who can’t think straight anymore, buy stock in the fake company and that makes the stock worth more. That’s the pump. Then YMS sells all of their shares at that high price and makes a profit of the difference between the price the shares were purchased, usually a few pennies, and the inflated sale price, which is lots more, like ten or twenty bucks or something, times the number of shares. That’s the dump. Then the stock plummets and all those old people lose all their money.”

  “So where are they keeping the stocks?”

  Washington winces in frustration. “Aw, fuck. It’s magic, okay? YMS steals people’s money with magic over the telephone.”

  Sid has seen magic before. He does not like it. He pushes the van door open behind him and slides the FNX into the waistband of his pants.

  “Run,” he snarls back to Curtis Washington. “Never come back here.”

  “Um, okay,” Washington says. He throws his cigarette onto the pavement as he brushes past Sid and jumps down from the van’s rear bumper. He sprints into the streets, never to return.

  Sid picks up a hefty duffel bag from the back of the van and makes his way toward the building. He enters YMS Marketing, walks past the sleeping security guard at the reception desk, and pushes the button to summon the elevator. As he waits for the elevator car to arrive, he sets the duffel bag down next to him and unzips the main compartment. It is filled with Molotov cocktails. Once the doors slide open, he smashes three Molotov bottles inside the elevator car. Then he takes the stairs.

  On the third floor he kicks his way through the stairwell door with a lit cocktail in his left hand, the FNX in the other, and the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He scans a sea of startled faces across this strange place, some kind of call center with rows upon rows of flimsy looking little desks equipped with wired telephones and tiered letter trays stacked with white papers. One woman in a tight pencil skirt stares at him, her mouth gaping as a copy machine spits printed forms onto the waxed tile at her feet. Sid throws the cocktail clear across the room and watches it burst into flame against the elevator doors.

  “Fedosov!” Sid bellows at the crowd. “Where is he?! Give him to me!”

  Then the panic begins.

  They hide under desks and dash for the windows, some crying like pathetic little bitches, and others bashing violently at the plate glass in an attempt to contend with the three story drop rather than the gun waving maniac standing in front of the exit. A large swarm of them brave the puddle of burning gasoline in front of the elevator and frantically pound against the doors.

  “That’s a bad idea!” Sid shouts, but directing them now is like herding cats—screaming cats that are partially on fire.

  The shiny elevator doors open and the small fire outside instantly ignites the gasoline soaked compartment of the elevator car. A flaming belch erupts through the doors that immolates those squealing cowards trying to get in. Elevators—those things are deathtraps.

  Sid goes to the nearest person he sees, a man in a white dress shirt who appears frozen in terror at his tiny desk near the stairwell door. Sid touches the muzzle of the FNX to the salesman’s nose as he plops the duffel bag down on the desk. “Dmitry Fedosov,” he says. “Point at him.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” the salesman says. His stupid little plastic name tag says Julius.

  “Your boss.”

  “John is my boss.” Frantic realization twitches across Julius’s face. “Wait! You mean the Russian guy who has that office back there?”

  Sid whips his eyes around to the little glass room at the rear of the call center. Empty.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know! He’s barely ever here! He just plays video games back there! He only talks to John.”

  “Where’s John?!”

  The little salesman’s eyes dart around the room, fearfully sifting through the sights of waving arms and running bodies, men crying and women screaming, someone rolling on the floor in a useless attempt to smother a gasoline fire, and the rifling inside the four-inch barrel of Sid’s pistol.

  “He’s right there,” Julius says, pointing at a burning corpse near the elevator doors.

  Sid snarls with annoyance. “Not again.” Sid presses the gun barrel angrily against Julius’s forehead. “I hate it when I kill the guy I need to answer the questions before he answers the questions! Do you know how much I hate that?!”

  “Uh...Uh….” Julius stammers.

  “Answer the fucking question, Julius!” Sid roars. He pulls another cocktail from the bag, rakes i
t across the spiked plastic grip of the pistol to light the match, then lets it fly. It erupts into flame in the middle of the call center.

  A burly man tries to grab Sid’s gun, but Sid slams his face into the desk and discharges two 9mm bullets into the base of his skull, splashing Julius with gore. Julius leaps from his seat and dashes for the stairs, along with many of the others.

  Sid hurls the duffel bag into the bonfire and pops a few shots into it on his way to the stairs. YMS Marketing is a fully involved three story firestorm by the time he pulls the rental van out of its parking space.

  EXT. DMITRY’S CONDO - DAY

  Dmitry’s condo has been blown up.

  He knew before he quite reached the building, or he had a strong suspicion anyway, based on the crowd of onlookers and the big red fire truck sitting on the street. A slow pass of the building reveals most of his furniture lying on the pavement, broken and charred amidst heaps of broken glass. His giant television is cracked to pieces atop a compact car parked at a meter beside the curb. His doorman excitedly talks with his hands to a firefighter. Smoke and flame billow from Dmitry’s absent floor-to-ceiling windows ten stories above.

  The bookcase which held his tape collection lies face-down on the sidewalk, the smoldering remains of its many incriminating microcassettes spilled from inside like a gutted animal. A lone firefighter stands spraying the heap with a hose.

  “Fuck!” Dmitry rasps at his steering wheel. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He hammers his fists down against the dashboard. The tapes are certainly beyond destroyed. Without them, he has nothing—no case against Volchenko, no RICO, no snuff house. But those are not immediate fears. He eases his foot down on the accelerator. He needs to go without drawing attention. The bogeyman may be watching.

  He should leave. He should call Max, tell him it’s over, and get on the first plane out of the city. He should change his name again. He should move to the Canadian wilderness. He should do all of those things, but he sees that poor woman—that poor body—when he closes his eyes. He sees hundreds of them, nameless and buried in the mountains without even a stone to mark them. He can’t leave. Not now.