Bear

by Matt Rogers

  ‘But you wanted to get to know her.’

  ‘That would have been nice.’

  ‘I wanted to get to know my brother, too.’

  ‘What didn’t you know about him?’

  ‘We didn’t spend much time together. The business kept us apart. I was one of the scouts. I drove between villages in the Far East, searching for potential candidates. Vadim ran the mine itself. There was a lot of work behind the scenes. And before that … we did not speak.’

  ‘How touching,’ Slater said. ‘Reunited through bloodshed.’

  ‘Reunited through business.’

  ‘It’s the same thing to you?’

  ‘Don’t take the high road,’ Ruslan said, his handsome face twisting into a snarl, the blood caked dry above his lips. ‘You are no better than me.’

  ‘We’ll have to agree to disagree. Now, back to the main point. Why am I alive?’

  ‘You took my brother away from me.’

  Slater laughed.

  Harsh.

  Cruel.

  ‘Are you going to cry about it? Your brother made innocent people fight to the death at the bottom of a mine to please oligarchs. Do you really expect me to feel bad that you didn’t get a chance to hold hands?’

  Ruslan stirred, almost launching to his feet, but restraint seized him at the last second. He clenched his teeth, grinding his molars back and forth, and stayed seated.

  ‘I know what you’re doing. You want me to kill you. You know what I’m keeping you alive for.’

  ‘I assume you’ll try to make it painful.’

  ‘As painful as you deserve.’

  ‘Your brother,’ Slater said.

  Ruslan raised an eyebrow. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He didn’t die well. Actually, if I’m remembering this correctly … I think he squealed. Begged. I wonder if it runs in the family.’

  ‘Try your hardest,’ Ruslan said. ‘Nothing you say will faze me. Don’t bother.’

  ‘Grit your teeth any harder and you might break one,’ Slater said.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, or I might make it even more painful.’

  ‘How long does it take to brainstorm what to do? Unless you don’t even have two brain cells to rub together. I mean, Jesus Christ, you’re just making this painful for yourself, Ruslan. Don’t think too hard or you might pass out.’

  ‘You’re going to regret this.’

  Despite the helplessness of the situation and the complete lack of energy inside himself, Slater summed up the capacity to mockingly shiver. ‘I’m terrified.’

  ‘Why are you so confident?’

  ‘Confident?’

  ‘You … don’t seem to care that you’re about to die. I find it fascinating.’

  ‘I figure my luck’s finally run out. About time.’

  ‘You find yourself in these situations a lot?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m sure my brother thought he could kill you.’

  ‘Actually … he didn’t know who I was. But he was clashing with a friend of mine.’

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Same line of work.’

  ‘Where is your friend now?’

  ‘Not here. And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘You don’t have other friends?’

  ‘None who can help me now.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone can help you now.’

  ‘You’re full of one liners, aren’t you?’ Slater said. ‘What’s the delay? I’m sure you know how to hurt me. You’ve made a side gig out of it. Get to work.’

  ‘The icebreaker doesn’t leave this plant until early tomorrow. Which means I have all night.’

  ‘I’m sure Magomed wants you back in a few hours.’

  ‘He doesn’t. He’s familiar with what happened to my brother. He knows what this means to me.’

  ‘What’s he going to do?’

  Ruslan said nothing.

  ‘I’m about to die,’ Slater said, and he believed it. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘Then what does it matter?’

  ‘I want to know what I wasn’t able to prevent. I want to take it to the grave.’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do,’ Ruslan admitted.

  Vulnerable.

  Genuine.

  ‘He’s keeping you in the dark?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t like it.’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘Do you think—’

  Ruslan laughed. ‘We could team up? I don’t think so. For as long as I can remember my world has been nothing but suffering. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in the Russian Far East, but it’s hell. Cold, barren hell. That’s the only way I can describe it. And everything around me has been suffering. Everyone suffers out here. And my line of work makes that worse. Just the way life goes. So I don’t care what Magomed wants. It’s going to be bad. The new Russia might not make it. He’s got more suffering inside him than I’ve ever seen, and he wants to take it out on … something. But as long as I get paid, I don’t care. The world won’t end. Even if it leads to war. There’ll be some corner of the globe I can go and stick my head in the sand. And then I can forget about the fact that the only person in my life I actually cared about died brutally in the bottom of a mine. But at least I can make you hurt before it all goes to hell. Some kind of revenge. Vadim would like that.’

  ‘I would never team up with you,’ Slater said. ‘The second you let me out of these cuffs I’ll cut your throat for what you did to that girl.’

  ‘If only you knew the rest of it.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ruslan said.

  ‘Will Slater.’

  ‘You’re not going to like this, Will Slater.’

  ‘Get it over with. Avenge your brother. Nothing I say will make you change your mind.’

  ‘No speech?’

  ‘No speech.’

  ‘Then I need a cigarette.’

  ‘That’s a real dumb thing to do.’

  ‘It would be,’ Ruslan said. ‘If you had any chance of getting out of this. But I felt your skull under my boot. I know the hurt you’re feeling. I know it won’t get better. And I know you’re not going anywhere.’

  Slater said nothing. There was nothing to say. Every word Ruslan uttered was nauseatingly correct.

  ‘I…’ he started.

  Ruslan shot to his feet, crossed to the portable heater, and shook the steel bars with all his might. Veins pumping. Muscles straining. Teeth bared.

  The steel bars didn’t budge.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Ruslan hissed.

  Then he turned and left the building, fishing a packet of cigarettes out of his gigantic overcoat. The concrete room lapsed into silence, an empty shell containing the remnants of a dark horror story. Cold and pain drenched the air.

  Now, Slater’s brain screamed.

  As it had many times before.

  And he’d always risen to the occasion. He’d catch a second wind, beat down his adversaries as if they were amateurs, mow through the competition without breaking a sweat. He always found a way.

  Not this time.

  His body refused to respond to his mind’s commands. He wished for a resurgence that never came. He sat in the dark corner, dejected and broken, sucking air in giant lungfuls.

  Hoping.

  Hoping for a chance.

  It never came.

  47

  Ruslan Mikhailov stepped out of the building and crouched in the lee of the brick wall, protected from the howling wind, dwarfed by the gigantic skeleton of the half-finished container ship spearing into the heavens behind him.

  His heart pounded in his chest. He lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke, steadying his shaking hands. He was not frightened by the broken man in the concrete room. Slater didn’t scare him.

  Magomed did.

  He knew precious little about what would unfold tomorrow. None of the mercenaries did. The
y were all similar in their worldview, and Ruslan had to imagine that was a deliberate move on Magomed’s part. He knew his screening process hadn’t been as extensive as the rest of the security. His brother had paved the way for the Mikhailov name, and it hadn’t been difficult to transition from scouring villages on the Kamchatka Peninsula to protecting a shipbuilding plant in Vladivostok.

  It was a similar game.

  Assisting the ruthless.

  Because Ruslan and Vadim had learned decades ago that the ruthless paid the best.

  And when lacking any kind of conscience ran in the family, they both realised simultaneously they might as well advance their positions in life at the expense of others. Hence the last decade of Ruslan’s life. He would have preferred a gradual descent into the person he’d become.

  But he knew it wasn’t the truth.

  He’d just snapped.

  One day in his early twenties, he used his fearsome physical stature and all the silent rage built up over his powerless youth to drag a helpless banker into an alleyway, beat him to death, and rob him of all his possessions, including a debit card he maxed out at a string of ATMs across Moscow.

  It was all so … easy.

  And he regarded the corpse of the random civilian he’d plucked off the street without a shred of mercy.

  With a coldness even he hadn’t anticipated.

  It had been a test. To see if he could sink to the same depths as his brother. And he could. From there it had been rather simple. He had a seven figure net worth now, squirrelled away in offshore accounts. Vadim had been worth eight digits when he’d died. The money had vanished. Untraceable. Ruslan would never find it. But he had enough. He’d inflicted unimaginable suffering, and gratefully he found he didn’t care. So there was this last job, satiating the wishes of a man who’d been torn apart by the system he’d devoted his life to…

  …and then nothing.

  He’d done enough. He’d killed enough. He’d seen enough. Even if he didn’t commit the atrocities, he certainly allowed them to happen. He profited from them. He tied up the victim, and handed the customer the knife. That was almost worse than doing the deed himself. He was enabling monsters.

  But he didn’t care. That was the golden ticket to a good life. To a happy life. To a free life.

  When you stopped caring about other people, you could focus entirely on yourself.

  Vadim had taught him that.

  Vadim was everything Ruslan aspired to be.

  He took another long pull on the cigarette, surveying the darkness. All quiet. The gravel fields spread out in every direction, dead and black and desolate. Wind howled through the empty shipbuilding plant. There would be commotion and activity at the other end of Medved, but that was far from here. No witnesses. No questions.

  Just Ruslan, and the man who had aided in the death of his brother.

  It had all led to this.

  He would use a knife. He would make it slow. He would make it painful. Slater was a shell of his former self because of the concussion, but he would feel the agony all the same.

  Ruslan turned on his heel, and drew the serrated combat knife from his appendix holster.

  Whoosh.

  He thought it was the wind, but in the final moment of his life he realised it was something else entirely. Something right behind him. Horrifyingly close. Something whistling through the air.

  The garrotte looped around his throat and tore his skin apart.

  Ruslan started to bring his hands up to his neck, but the wielder wrenched with such ferocity that he didn’t even get the chance to resist.

  Because the man holding the steel wire was powerful.

  Shockingly powerful.

  With a sickening sound, Ruslan’s head split from his neck.

  His decapitated corpse slumped into the mud.

  His retirement plans vanished.

  Just like that.

  48

  It took Magomed twenty minutes to reach the other side of Medved Shipbuilding Plant.

  By now, he didn’t feel the cold. All sensation had been overridden by excitement — he knew his death was inevitable tomorrow morning, but that made him savour every part of life.

  Including the suffering.

  And there had been an awful lot of that lately.

  Briefly, he wondered where it had all gone wrong. Well, he knew exactly where his life had dissolved into shattered fragments. But there had been a time beyond that when the malevolence inside him had festered, embedding the hate deep into his core, making him inseparable from it. And at that point he’d set the wheels into motion, step by gentle step. Now, he was almost at the end.

  He couldn’t quite believe he’d made it this far.

  He left the shipbuilding plant through one of the dozens of side gates and ducked into the back seat of a waiting car. It was a nondescript black sedan pulled from a fleet of identical vehicles. Unimpressive and unassuming. The last thing he wanted to do was stand out and draw attention. He’d spent a lifetime doing that in politics, and it had resulted in nothing but pain.

  Now he could turn the pain into something.

  The driver wordlessly set off, taking him through the dreary streets of Vladivostok in the dead of night. The rendezvous with his men wasn’t set for a couple of hours — he’d lied to Ruslan about the time constraints. In truth, he didn’t want to spend any longer than necessary staring at the man he was supposed to be.

  Bold. Confident. Young. Full of life. Relentless.

  Sometimes Magomed envied the younger Mikhailov.

  It was unfortunate what had happened to his brother, but now Ruslan could have his revenge. Magomed knew as well as Slater that the man couldn’t achieve anything on his own. Not after Ruslan had stomped down on his head, scrambling his brain and ruining any hope of mounting resistance.

  Shame, too.

  Magomed had almost wanted the man to put up a fight.

  He figured Will Slater was a one-man wrecking crew, judging by the confidence the man exuded.

  Magomed had considered putting a bullet between his eyes and removing any chance of a miracle.

  But not even miracles could heal a concussion.

  So he’d allowed Ruslan his petty revenge.

  Because how could he deny it when his own quest mirrored Ruslan’s anger?

  Instead of a single man, he was getting revenge against an entire country.

  No.

  More than that.

  More than anything you can imagine.

  In truth he didn’t know the second and third order consequences of his actions. They would be vast. Enormous. Unparalleled in human history.

  Good.

  That’s all this world deserves.

  The silent driver pulled the sedan into the circular driveway in front of one of Vladivostok’s most luxurious hotels. Magomed’s life had become such a whirlwind of planning and scheming that he hadn’t received the chance to learn the hotel’s name. In truth, this particular journey had been thrown together at the last minute. He was going to send one of his mercenaries to do the job for him.

  Discreetly. Under the radar. A professional killer doing professional work.

  But his run-in with the two secret policemen had supercharged his confidence.

  He’d learned much about himself earlier that day.

  He’d learned what he was capable of.

  He couldn’t quite believe it when Ruslan had spoken of his own altercation with a pair of secret policemen. Magomed’s suspicions of a co-ordinated hit on the major players had proved correct. Thankfully the pair of them had achieved similar results. There were now four corpses of covert Russian government operatives spread around Vladivostok, adding to the stress of the ticking time bomb Magomed had created for himself. If the icebreaker’s maiden voyage hadn’t been scheduled for the following morning, he might have fled and gone to ground.

  Because there were eyes all over this mess.

  Thankfully, there wasn’t much else that n
eeded to be done.

  Except this.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said.

  The driver nodded.

  He stepped out of the car and locked his eyes onto the ground, avoiding the gaze of any passersby who might recognise him from his previous position of power. He stooped his shoulders and hurried for the extravagant marble lobby flooded with artificial warmth. Savouring the heat, he made for the elevators without so much as nodding a greeting at the receptionists and jabbed his finger impatiently against the control panel.

  Once, twice, three times.

  His urgency was undisguised. Maybe in another life he might have taken his time, assessed how to approach, assured maximum deniability. Or he would have followed through with his plan to use one of his henchmen to do his dirty work, because that made all the sense in the world.

  But he had less than twelve hours on this planet.

  And he wanted to experience everything before he went out in a blaze of glory.

  He reached the sub-penthouse level in half a minute, pacing back and forth across the cable car with his sweaty hands shoved into the pockets of his overcoat. This was the end result of months of deception, of utilising old connections and nodes in the power structure to get his way. Once again, he found himself in disbelief that it had worked.

  But it had worked.

  He stepped out into the same ornately furnished corridor that seemed to populate every luxury hotel under the sun. He’d been gifted enough penthouse suites over the course of his career that the bribes had eventually become an unending blur. It felt freeing to be stepping into such an establishment without having to dangle from the strings of the puppet master that paid the most.

  Now he was out of that mad game.

  Now he was…

  …in control.

  He reached the ochre wooden door and rapped on it twice, firm but patient. It opened in a heartbeat. The small unassuming man from the U.S. embassy greeted Magomed with a subtle nod, ushering him into the room as if he had something to hide.

  ‘Great to see you,’ the man said. ‘About time we got to meet in the flesh. Excited for tomorrow?’

  The innocence of following the rule book, Magomed thought.

  He almost felt sorry for the man.