by Matt Rogers
So maybe this new guy had nothing to do with the other three.
Slater figured there was no point shying away from what could be a potentially disastrous situation, so he leant across the empty aisle seat beside him, as nonchalant as possible. All the warning signs fired away, hinting that all was not as it seemed.
He stared straight into the eyes of the man with the receding hairline, and the guy visibly reacted, shrinking away from the sudden scrutiny, wiping a bead of sweat from the side of his forehead despite the chill in the air.
Then the man shot to his feet and hustled for the other end of the carriage, moving with enough restraint to minimise attention, but hurrying all the same.
Slater ignored the three men across the aisle, and slid quietly out of his seat to follow.
3
Positioned at one end of the train carriage, tucked away in the furthest corner, shielded from prying eyes, Misha Bessonov noticed the two men hurry past him.
He reached for the MP-443 Grach pistol in the leather holster at his waist.
He’d been working for the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation for the last five years, each of which he had spent as a highly devoted and respected employee. Most of his time had been spent in the field, adapting the old-school methods of the Russian military to the new world. There had been plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his counter-terrorism skills over the years, one of which was presenting themselves right now.
Because there was some shady shit going down in Vladivostok.
And this train seemed to be a hotspot for undesirables.
He’d been keeping tabs on Viktor Gribkov for the seven days he’d spent on the train. According to all the intelligence files he’d been able to gather, the man was forty-three years old and had been working at a shipbuilding plant in Vladivostok for the better part of three years now.
What couldn’t be explained were his reasons for fleeing to Moscow two weeks earlier, abandoning his position in the plant with enough haste to draw attention. The Federal Security Service had noticed the ruckus Viktor had stirred, and instructed Bessonov to keep tabs on the man in Moscow to see what he did next.
Then it had all changed.
Almost as quickly as he’d hurried away from the shipbuilding plant, Viktor suddenly felt the need to return. He’d booked a last minute ticket on board this private train and made the journey across the Trans-Siberian Railway, heading straight back as if nothing had happened at all.
But Bessonov had been silently observing the port worker for the entire duration of the trip — civilians weren’t very good at noticing surveillance — and had concluded that the man was terrified for his life.
And then there was the matter of the businessman and the two thugs…
Bessonov had only noticed that party a couple of days earlier, but it hadn’t been his main priority. His attention was consumed by Viktor, and the other three could wait, but Bessonov certainly suspected they were up to something.
What is it about Vladivostok that attracts scum?
And now, a whole new realm of possibilities had opened up, because of the African-American man trailing a couple of feet behind Viktor with intent in his stride.
Who the hell is this new guy?
Bessonov didn’t know. But, judging by the tension crackling in the air, confrontation was about to occur. And he couldn’t sit back and let that take place without making a move himself. He needed more detail. It had been a painful seven days of quietly observing patterns in behaviour, wondering just what the hell Viktor’s intentions were and speculating as to whether the train was about to go up in a raging fireball.
For all Bessonov knew, Viktor might be conspiring with the black man to set off a bomb. For the entire duration of the journey Viktor’s choice of attire had been odd — everything was one size too large, and none of it fit right, or looked appealing in any way.
What’s he hiding?
Bessonov wasn’t about to wait to find out.
For all he knew, he might be the only thing resting between the innocent passengers and a thunderous fireball.
He checked briefly down the aisle as the two men hurried straight past him and ducked into the narrow corridor at the end of the carriage, but no-one was watching.
Good.
Bessonov thumbed the safety off the Grach pistol and waited for the proper opportunity to shuffle after the two-man crew.
He would get answers.
Whatever it took.
4
The man with the receding hairline didn’t realise Slater was on his tail until it was far too late.
The guy slipped into a corridor connecting the carriage with the booths to the dining car. Slater was familiar with the next car — he had spent much of the past week gorging on potatoes and dumplings and all manner of traditional Russian cuisine.
He didn’t like to admit he had a drinking problem, but he hadn’t been able to resist the vodka and cognac on offer. Today, though, he was sober.
Which helped with what came next.
A quick look over the man’s shoulder revealed the dining car packed with passengers, all of them hunched over heaped plates of food from the buffet. It was the peak of the lunch hour, and if they made it through to the dining car Slater would have no chance of effectively confronting the guy. It had to be here, in this narrow, dimly lit passageway, the entire thing rattling and shaking as the tracks underneath it shuddered.
They were leaving Khabarovsk’s outer limits.
Entering the desolate no man’s land of rural Siberia.
Now.
Slater closed the gap — only a few feet by this point — and surged into range. The man noticed, jolting on the spot as he sensed movement only a few inches behind him. He began to twist on the spot, a reactionary impulse move, and Slater wrapped one hand around his thick tuft of dark hair and yanked hard to the left.
Nerve endings fired atop the guy’s scalp and he naturally stumbled in the direction Slater threw him.
Straight through one of the restroom doors.
They burst into the bathroom, Slater following straight after the man. The space they entered was tight and claustrophobic, even more so than the adjacent corridor. It was a space designed for one person. He reached back with one of his winter boots and thundered the door closed behind him. The door rattled in its frame, but that was the only noise the altercation caused.
Otherwise, no-one made a sound.
Slater didn’t think a slamming door would draw much attention.
He had a few minutes.
The guy had started sweating even harder, his eyes bulging in his sockets, his lips flapping. Slater sensed something palpable in the air — some kind of horrified reaction to the confrontation. This man hadn’t wanted to be disturbed. He had certainly been planning something.
The hairs on the back of Slater’s neck rose, and he bundled the guy into the opposite wall, crushing an elbow against the soft tissue of his throat to cause as much discomfort as possible.
He needed the guy in a panicked state.
He needed answers.
‘You speak English?’ he hissed.
When a couple of seconds elapsed without a response, Slater squashed his elbow tighter into the guy’s neck.
The man spluttered and wheezed and went red.
‘English?’ Slater said again.
‘Not much,’ the guy grunted.
‘But some?’
‘Yes. Some.’
‘Who are you?’
‘What?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Viktor.’
‘If I let you go, will you answer my questions?’
‘Yes. Yes. Please … keep quiet.’
Slater hesitated — it was an odd request. He’d assumed Viktor would scream for help at the first available opportunity, but instead the guy seemed terrified of that exact situation.
He didn’t want to be discovered.
Slater let go of Vik
tor’s collar and backed off a step. He didn’t want to come off as entirely clueless — which he was — because it would make Viktor clam up. He wanted details, but he wasn’t quite sure how to get them. He made up his mind in the space of a half-second, chose an avenue of approach, and got to work.
‘Who’s after you?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Viktor said.
‘Don’t play dumb. Your English is fine. You can understand me. Why are you hiding?’
‘Who are you?’ Viktor said.
‘I might be able to help.’
‘No. You cannot help.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You are not Russian. You are a foreigner. What is your business here? This is not your world.’
‘Who’s after you?’ Slater repeated.
‘No-one.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘Why? You know nothing. You want me to give you information. Why do you want this? You get involved with this and you get killed.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You should not be confident.’
‘I get involved with things for a living. I haven’t been killed yet.’
‘Not like this. Leave.’
‘What if I don’t want to?’
‘I am not going to help you.’
‘I never asked you to.’
‘So what do you want from me?’
‘Information.’
‘I already told you. Do not get involved. How do you not understand this?’
Viktor’s eyes lit up with intensity, piercing into Slater for the first time. Since stumbling into the narrow bathroom the man had maintained a steady drooping gaze, refusing to make eye contact. But now he lifted his head and stared directly at Slater, as if urging him to follow his requests.
Slater couldn’t remember the last time he’d been pressured into doing anything.
He stood his ground.
‘The three men in the booth,’ Slater said. ‘You know them?’
‘What?’
‘The three guys in suits. One of them looks nervous, like he’s being guarded, or held against his will. What do you know about that?’
Viktor continued staring, flabbergasted. ‘You need to mind your own business, my friend.’
‘So you do know—’
Viktor held up a hand. ‘I know nothing. I don’t know what you are talking about. But you need to mind your own business all the same. What are you expecting?’
‘Huh?’
‘You push me in here and want answers. You want to know about three men in suits. Why do you want to know all this?’
‘I’m curious.’
‘Russia is not kind to people who are curious.’
‘You know that from experience?’
‘Sort of.’
‘You going to Vladivostok?’
Viktor waved a hand in a broad sweeping gesture, addressing their surroundings. ‘Only place to go on this train.’
‘You got business there?’
‘I am not telling you anything.’
‘Is anyone on this train in danger?’
‘No.’
Slater said nothing, shooting daggers across the tight space. ‘You’d better be telling the truth.’
‘I am the only one in danger on this train. And it won’t happen here. It will happen in Vladivostok.’
Something shifted in the air, and Slater sensed a breakthrough. He’d positioned himself between Viktor and the door, and with thirty pounds more muscle and three times the strength the man hadn’t even attempted to make a break for it. Now he was cracking under pressure, beginning to leak details…
But Slater didn’t get to finish his line of enquiry, because the door to the bathroom thundered inward and hit him in the small of his back, taking him entirely by surprise and sending him stumbling forward — not very far, but enough to create the slightest gap for a body to force their way in.
The next second, someone charged straight into the room, and Slater’s brain went haywire as he picked up the glint of gunmetal in his peripheral vision.
5
Shut down the threat.
Slater didn’t even take the time to get a glimpse of who his attacker was. With three men now crammed into such a tiny space, there was little room to breathe, let alone move. He only saw the gun, and suddenly cortisol flooded his senses, activating an instinctive reaction to the newcomer.
He got his feet under him and powered straight back across the space as soon as the new arrival — a man roughly the same height as him — forced his way into the room through the gap in the doorway. Their frames collided, both of them moving at an equal speed in the confined space, but Slater had built up his fast-twitch muscle fibres over a decade of combat.
He seized the upper hand.
He won the collision.
The tide shifted, and the newcomer fell straight back into the half-open door, slamming it closed. Slater breathed a sigh of relief — the fight would be muffled from the rest of the passengers in the carriage, sitting peacefully just a dozen feet from their location. He bundled the new guy into the door and made a lunge for the weapon, bringing his forearm down in a clubbing motion across the guy’s wrist.
The gun was an MP-443 Grach — Slater hadn’t made out any of the features of the guy who was attacking him, but a single glance in the direction of the sidearm confirmed its make. He battered down on the man’s wrist and the guy let out a grunt of frustration.
But he held tight.
Slater smashed his right shoulder into the guy’s chest, hurling him back against the door again. It rattled on its hinges, and he swung at the gun with his bare knuckles, throwing caution to the wind.
Fuck it.
Break your hand if necessary.
Just strip him of that weapon.
His punch snapped one of the guy’s fingers — the bone break made an audible noise in the confined space. The man grunted again, but kept a vice-like hold on the MP-443.
Shit.
Now the guy had a chance to launch some offence — Slater had spent vital seconds fixated on the gun, leaving himself exposed to a punch. He heard the bare knuckles whistling through the air toward the side of his head and recoiled in horror, recognising the incoming strike as accurate enough to shut his lights out. It was blindingly fast, too — another half-second of hesitation and he would have caught the sweeping left hook in the soft tissue above his ear.
But his reflexes pulled through at the right moment, and the punch grazed off the side of his head, firing nerve endings across his temple but causing no significant neurological damage.
Then the gun began an upward trajectory toward Slater’s unprotected face.
Go.
Slater hadn’t realised it, but he’d been holding back. In the chaos and confusion he hadn’t been able to discern any of the man’s features — the guy could be anyone. He didn’t want to put all his power into the brawl in case he did something he would regret. But the sight of the Grach’s barrel moving directly toward his face triggered the primal portion of his brain, recognising the confrontation as potentially fatal.
As soon as his mind said Go, Slater went.
He clenched his teeth and his face turned to stone as he battered the gun away as effortlessly as swatting away a fly. His forearm broke a couple more of the guy’s fingers and the newcomer released his grip on the weapon, but Slater hadn’t noticed he’d disarmed the man until he’d thrown a slicing uppercut like a piston, detonating it off the soft tissue of the guy’s throat. He felt muscle tear under the force of his maximum effort and the newcomer collapsed, sliding down the wooden door and slumping into a crumpled heap on the tiled floor.
All went still.
Slater grimaced as silence fell over the tiny room. The Grach came to rest in one corner of the bathroom, spinning slowly on its side. The man he’d struck down was unconscious — the bad kind of unconscious. Slater could visibly see his throat closing in as he struggled to breathe, and he stifled a c
urse as he realised the damage was irreversible.
Ten seconds later, the guy was dead.
His airways had collapsed.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Slater muttered.
He replayed the entire ordeal in his mind, analysing each impact and noise to guess whether anyone in either of the two nearby carriages had heard.
Probably not, he concluded.
Not a single word had been uttered, and although the incident had sent Slater’s brain into an adrenalin-spiked whirlwind, he realised all hope hadn’t been lost yet. All things considered, the brawl had unfolded relatively quietly. All he had to do was stay low in the bathroom and hope no-one came rushing in after the newcomer.
Finally, Slater had the chance to get a proper look at the man.
The guy was dressed in regular black suit pants and a plain white shirt, with a puffy windbreaker draped over his frame. The jacket hadn’t been zipped up and now it spilled open on either side, revealing a small identification card poking out of the lip of the inside pocket. His guts twisting, Slater bent down and plucked the card free.
He recognised neither the symbol on the upper left hand corner nor the Russian characters running in lines across the face of the card.
He turned and handed the card to Viktor, who had pressed himself as far back across the narrow room as he could. The man’s face had turned white as a sheet. It took him a few moments to work up the common sense to take the card and scrutinise it.
‘He’s fucking dead,’ Viktor muttered.
‘I know that. I did it.’
‘You didn’t have to kill him.’
‘Are you blind? He was a second away from blowing my brains across the room. What do you think he would have done to you?’
Viktor twirled the identification card in his fingers, but his brain didn’t seem to connect the dots. He stared down at the writing with a vacant expression, his eyes glazed over.
‘Viktor,’ Slater said.
He knew the news would not be good — only a certain subsection of society carried identification cards in the first place — but the revelation was suitably grim regardless.