by Archer Mayor
After that, it was sit and wait. Which took all of five minutes.
Willy had just stepped out onto the landing, to benefit from the stairwell’s acoustics, when he leaned back inside and announced, “Company.”
We helped him back over, took up positions, and started listening to the crash and rumble of the wind on the building, trying to discern any stray movement in its midst.
We found it with the single sharp clang of something hard hitting metal, like the toe of a shoe against one of the steps. Moments later, the vague shape of a head moved against the dark background of the landing beneath us.
Instinctively, I opened my mouth to shout the standard police warning not to move, when Anatoly’s muzzle flash exploded right next to me. In that split second of lightning clarity, I saw the man below spin like a top and vanish from sight. He never knew what hit him.
Willy looked disgusted. “So much for waiting till we see the whites of their eyes.”
But my own disgust ran deeper, and Gail picked up on it instantly, placing her hand gently against my back. “They are here to kill us.”
I glanced across at Padzhev’s pinched features. His arm was obviously causing him growing discomfort. “They’re here to kill those bastards,” I barely whispered.
But she was right. I was no longer a cop—I hadn’t been for a long time now. Worse, I was now operating out of desperation. Niceties like verbal warnings and taking prisoners were as appropriate here as in a feeding frenzy.
But I still couldn’t come to terms with shooting a man in cold blood.
There were more sounds from below, furtive, tentative, unaccompanied by anything visible. Sammie jogged over to the door leading to the small exterior platform to see what was going on outside the building. All she got for her pains were two shots which ricocheted inside the large room like lethal marbles in a tin can.
“Nice, Sam,” Willy said to her. “Maybe you can call in some artillery next.”
She gave him a baleful stare and came back, saying nothing.
A voice speaking Russian echoed loudly up the stairwell. Padzhev and his men listened quietly, and then Padzhev responded with an abrupt one-liner.
Willy smiled grimly, seemingly in his element. “What d’ya bet that meant, ‘Fuck you’?”
“You should know,” Sammie muttered.
There was a sudden blast of gunfire from below and a stuttering of blinding flashes. Bullets came screaming through the gridwork before us, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, careening among the obstacles we’d laid out, like crazed hummingbirds hungry for blood.
We hit the floor and covered our heads, feeling the thud of spent missiles falling around us. In the background, we could hear the dull thunder of footsteps pounding up the stairs.
Willy, his cheek bleeding, cradled his one good arm on the barricade, oblivious to the fusillade. “Come on, come on, come on,” he kept shouting, and then began to fire. The rest of us joined him a moment later, and in the bursts of acrid light, we saw two men fall, entangled in our barrier, and three more behind them turn tail.
The silence that followed emphasized the ringing in our ears.
I motioned to my cheek and asked Willy, “You okay?”
He touched the wound gingerly. “Yeah. Didn’t even go through.”
“Went through this guy,” Rarig said, his voice trembling with adrenaline.
We looked at one of Padzhev’s men, seemingly resting with his back against the barricade. His shirtfront was stained bright red. Without hesitation, Gail scrambled over on her hands and knees and checked his pulse. She shook her head at me. Two of the other Russians dragged him to one side and distributed his gun and ammunition among them.
I glanced at Lew Corbin-Teich, who was sitting around the corner from the door, his back to the wall, his eyes sightlessly on the opposite wall. His gun was resting on the floor between his legs.
I scuttled over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Lew?”
I wasn’t sure what to expect—from nothing to a frightened scream. Instead, he turned his head and looked at me calmly. “I am fine, thank you.” He then handed me the gun. “I do not believe I will be using this, however. I might have been of service in a situation like this very long ago. But I realize now, despite even this, that I am not who I once was.”
I took the gun and returned to the others, doubting he was alone in his sentiments.
There was a longer wait before the next assault, and when it arrived, the reasons for the pause became instantly clear. Another barrage from the stairwell’s nether depths was accompanied by a second, long distance offensive from outside, with a shower of automatic gunfire through the exterior door Sammie had peered from earlier.
Now, instead of bullets bouncing in front and over us, they came from behind as well, commingling in a hail that sent us scrambling uselessly for cover. The very steel walls we’d depended upon for protection became the allies of our attackers, redirecting their shots in patterns we couldn’t anticipate.
As before, Willy stood his ground, this time with Sammie and two of the Russians beside him, but they were paying the price, flinching and falling under the deafening onslaught.
And then Rarig yelled, “Grenade.”
Rolling across the floor toward us was the cylindrical missile from a grenade launcher. Anatoly was in mid sprint almost as soon as Rarig let out his warning. He fielded the grenade like a ballplayer, tossed it underhand back toward the door, and dove to his right for protection.
The explosion occurred just outside the building, riddling its corrugated wall, and turning it into a ragged, day-lit doily, each hole of which threw a shaft of light across the bitter, smoke-filled air. Anatoly lay still where he’d landed, caught by a piece of shrapnel.
I staggered to my feet, my head thrumming from the effects of the blast, and gestured to the ladder leading up to the roof hatch. “Get out, get out. Willy. Sam. Get the hell out.”
I grabbed Gail by the arm and thrust her toward the small room with the ladder, hauling Corbin-Teich to his feet to follow her. Little by little, the others fell into line, some barely able to walk—Padzhev supported by a bleeding Corbin-Teich—until only Sam, Willy, and one of the Russians were left at the barricade.
Sam crouched long enough to slam another magazine into her gun and shouted to me, “Get them out. We’ll be right there.”
I did as she said, pushing, prodding, yelling at the others to hurry, until at last only Padzhev was left on the ladder, struggling up with one hand and being pulled along by the scruff of his neck. Mercifully, inside the small room, we were shielded from most of the lethal ricocheting.
I wedged myself alongside the room’s small doorway and called out to the three of them, “Now. Go. I’ll cover you.”
Only Sam and Willy made it. The Russian turned to follow and caught a slug to the side of his head, falling to the floor as if dropped from thirty feet.
The other two ran by me, Willy first, because of his arm, then Sammie, who positioned herself across from me as Willy began to climb. He was almost to the top when the first head appeared around the corner of the stairwell door. I fired at it and ordered Sammie to go.
She hesitated and then obviously realized now was not the time. Halfway up the ladder, however, she stopped, hooked one arm around a rung, drew a bead through our door to the one at the barricade, and said, “Okay, your turn.”
I retreated as she fired several shots to cover me, until my head was even with the backs of her legs.
“Go,” I shouted, and we both scrambled as fast as we could, up and through the roof hatch above. There, Willy was lying on his stomach, waiting for anyone to come into view.
The contrast between the roof and the room below was an assault on the senses. Instead of being catapulted from chaos to calm, we found ourselves surrounded by the equivalent of a minor hurricane. Freezing wind tore at our clothing, cut off our breath, and worked in pulsating gusts to drive us off the roof’s flat surface. B
leeding and dazed, most of us either staggered to retain our footing, or simply gave up and fell to the cold steel plating.
Leaving Sammie with Willy at the hatch to watch our backs, I crawled around to check on the others. Padzhev, his head cradled in Corbin-Teich’s lap, looked almost beyond help, his eyes glazed and his face expressionless. Rarig, holding a stomach wound, lay on his side, turned so he could catch his breath in the gale. Gail was sitting cross-legged, her back to the wind, several guns in her lap, trying to force her numb fingers to redistribute our remaining bullets among a small cluster of magazines. She was grim but determined, looking up as I appeared and saying, “Jesus Christ, Joe. Is this what it’s like?”
I wasn’t sure I understood and then realized I’d heard only some part of a raging internal monologue. But the light in her eyes spoke well of her spirit, so I gave her a kiss and left her alone.
Back at the hatch, Sam and Willy were deep in conference.
“What’s going on?” I asked, stretching out beside them.
“Nothing,” Willy answered.
“I think they pulled back,” Sammie said.
Willy opened his mouth, but Sam caught his arm to quiet him. “Listen.” She got to her knees to hear better. “Listen. It’s gunfire.”
“What the hell?” Willy dragged himself to the edge of the roof, where the wind smashed off the side of the tower and came up at him like a solid wave. “There’re people down there,” he shouted back. “People in tactical vests. Good guys.” Barely keeping to his knees, he began waving his arm and yelling to those below, oblivious to the fact that we could barely hear him just ten feet away.
Minutes later, a megaphoned voice floated out of the open hatch as from some subterranean deity. “You on the roof. This is the FBI. Put down your weapons and come down the ladder unarmed.”
Sammie looked at me, smiling from an exhausted face. “I’ll never dump on e-mail again.”
Chapter 22
TONY BRANDT AND I SAT in a small conference room down the hall from Jack Derby’s office. It was two weeks after the FBI, accompanied by Gil Snowden and members of the Vermont State Police, had plucked us from the center of Edvard Kyrov’s vengeful crew.
There had been a flurry of bureaucratic activity since then, during which we survivors had been questioned, debriefed, and discussed behind closed doors like problematic visitors from a distant planet. Gail alone had been cleared almost immediately—a right, she’d asserted later with a laugh, awarded to all deputy state’s attorneys who’d been kidnapped on the job.
Rarig, Padzhev, and, as it turned out, Anatoly had been taken to the hospital in various states of disrepair, where they were all recovering. Lew Corbin-Teich, after a long talk with Snowden, returned to Middlebury and teaching, having decided his blown cover mattered little in a post-Soviet world. Snowden had also had a chat with Rarig, although less, I thought, to debrief him, and more to rub in the fact that it was he who’d joined forces with Tony to save us after hearing of Sammie’s SOS. I didn’t doubt this would have little effect on Rarig’s paranoia, confident that he’d come up with some wild theory to explain it.
I, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to accept things at face value again, including the fact that the mugging in Washington had in fact been just that. Snowden showed me DC police documentation revealing that my attacker had been caught trying to stick another tourist in the ribs a week after I’d left town, and had been ruled insane by the court. More nut than predator, he hadn’t been after money but thought he was ordained to rid the city of trespassers—which explained why he’d been lurking around a war memorial instead of some back alley.
That conversation had taken place at our house, over coffee, and I’d taken the opportunity to ask Snowden some additional questions, like why I’d been invited down to see him in the first place.
“I had to find out what was going on,” he’d told me. “We’d seen the articles about Antonov’s death and had Philpot confirm his identity at the ME’s office in Burlington. I knew how tight Antonov was with Padzhev, and that Padzhev was involved in a major power struggle back home, with international implications. But I was also in a bind. I couldn’t ask the FBI to run the case, since no federal crime had been committed, and we’re not allowed to operate on U.S. soil. So, I figured if I asked you to Washington, your suspicions might push you to dig deeper than you might otherwise. The mugging was a happy coincidence, falling right into my lap—I used it to spur you on. I actually didn’t even know about it till you told me. And I did my best later to keep you interested—I told the RCMP, for example, about Antonov being a point man for the Mafia and asked them to leak it to you.”
“Then why did you run interference for Rarig?” I’d asked. “Pulling his high school pictures just before they were mailed to us?”
He’d shaken his head at the memory. “With Olivia Kidder suddenly involved, it was getting out of hand. I wanted to slow things down a little.” He’d paused then and added, “I’m sorry you got so messed up in the process. If I’d known Padzhev was going to plant that brooch on you, I never would’ve used you as a bird dog in the first place. Things got away from me.”
His commiseration had sounded nice, but I hadn’t kidded myself. I knew damn well that if he’d had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have changed his tactics much. It wasn’t in the nature of either the man or the organization he worked for to treat people like me as anything more than pawns.
Perhaps responding to this, I’d needled him a bit. “Rarig said you’re a crooked, ambitious, well-connected backstabber—and implied Padzhev’s had you in his pocket since the mid-seventies.”
Snowden had only laughed, denying none of it. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I love how this turned out. It’s driving him nuts seeing me look good.”
Of the Russians I was told little. The feds had gathered them up, the dead and the living, to be taken to parts unknown, but I did find out Kyrov himself had slipped through the net. I’d worried that their taking possession of Padzhev might end any chances I had of clearing my name, but Padzhev had come clean, and Snowden made sure the Vermont Attorney General’s Office knew how and by whom the brooch had been planted in my jacket pocket.
Other legal details had been addressed: Rarig’s disposal of Antonov’s body, Willy and Sam’s unorthodox view of their job descriptions, and, of course, the little matter of my violating those court-issued conditions.
All but the last were being handled with “extenuating circumstances” kept firmly in mind, although Tony had been sorely tempted to rid himself of an utterly unrepentant Willy Kunkle, something Sammie had headed off by saying that if he went, she did, too. Not that I’d believed Tony in the first place—he’d ended up barely slapping their wrists.
I was beyond such special treatment, of course. My problems went outside the department. They even exceeded Judge Harrowsmith’s reach, had he been inclined to help. By ignoring almost every condition levied upon me, I had guaranteed my own dismissal from the police force and unwittingly awarded Fred Coffin at least a consolation prize.
Which was why Tony and I were now sitting in Derby’s conference room. All I could rally in my defense was a lifetime in law enforcement, a good performance record, and the hope that Vermont’s small cadre of decision makers might see their way clear to making an exception in my case. But those were slim chances. I had thumbed my nose at the court, regardless of circumstances. Even if they didn’t hit me with time, fine, or probation, I’d still be saddled with the commission of a crime. And thereby lose my career.
There’d been but one strategy left, and to his credit, Jack Derby had thought of it. Since there seemed to be no way to duck this particular legal bullet, Derby had called on the one man in the state with the power to make it simply disappear.
The door opened and Derby stepped in, accompanied by Gail. “Thought you’d like to see a friendly face,” he said, as they both sat down.
I watched them cautiously. “Do I need one?”
>
Derby laughed, removing any doubts. “Just so you can celebrate. The governor’ll be granting you a pardon later this week. Your record’s clean.”
I’d been preparing myself for a likely disappointment, knowing pardons were all but unheard of, especially from a tough-on-crime governor like our current one. Now I didn’t know what to say.
Derby removed the need, his own obvious glee needing further outlet. “Better still,” he added, “it also means Fred Coffin’s been handed his lunch by the same man he was ass-kissing for a judgeship. I love it when irony works in your favor. Apparently the governor’s a big fan of yours—and not so big on ambitious nitpickers.”
“Coffin’s been fired?” I asked, stunned by such a reversal of fortune.
“Oh, no, although he’ll probably wish he had been. He’s still at the AG’s, and unless he quits, nobody’ll let him forget how this turned out. Given his track record, payback’ll be terrible.”
He paused, brought up short by having flown his colors so openly. When he spoke again, it was in a much more muted tone. “Well,” he inaudibly slapped the tabletop and rose to his feet, “I’ll leave you to it. Congratulations, Joe. I couldn’t be happier for you.”
He leaned forward, shook my hand, and was gone.
Tony got up also, smiling to himself. “I didn’t realize Fred had pushed his buttons quite so hard. Interesting working in a state this small.”
He paused at the door, looking back at me. “See you tomorrow morning?” I smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Tony. I appreciate it.”
He shrugged. “I blame it all on Kunkle. He’s a bad influence on you.”
I sat still, staring at the polished tabletop after he’d left, lost in thought. Gail reached out and squeezed my hand. “How’re you doin’?”
I leaned forward and kissed her knuckles. “Let’s get out of here.”
Jack Derby’s office was on the second floor of a bank building located downtown on Main Street. When we stepped out onto the sidewalk, the evening rush hour was clogging the road. Brattleboro wasn’t designed for heavy traffic and had never figured out how to deal with it. I looked up and down the block, thinking of all I’d seen happen in this town, feeling a great sense of relief to be back on familiar ground.