A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  When near-consciousness returned for a moment, she had no idea when or how much later, she was vomiting, stretching her neck like a tortoise as she retched. She seemed to be shivering — something was shivering, anyway, a great way below the isolated, dim pinhoie of light in which she was aware of herself.

  Her body seemed to have been anaesthetised. The faint light winked like a distant star, then went out …

  … conscious again, the noise of wind and rushing snow. She was certain of the sounds. Also knew that she could not move her arms, and that her upper torso was naked. There was a dim, orange light and she could see, actually see, for a moment. Her breasts and stomach looked white and dead, as if she were lying in a morgue. Her stomach churned. Corrugated tin rattled in the blizzard. She was no longer shivering. Though she could see, there was no other sensation, no feeling. Just the immensely slow and difficult realisation of her immediate surroundings.

  Filth. She was covered in filth. She could smell it everywhere around her. She — stank. The dim light was retreating to a pinhole again. She — had — been … left — to … freeze — to … death…

  … garbage bin. Huge garbage bin. She was freezing to death at the bottom of an enormous garbage bin, half-buried in the rubbish, hands tied … her mind was at once exhausted by the effort of realisation. She opened her cracked lips to scream, but either no sound would come or she was unconscious again before a noise could emerge from her throat.

  Vorontsyev lay in the dark, staring at the flicker of headlights passing along the street outside then glimmering and dying on the ceiling. The bedroom was cold, making the cigarette smoke acrid and sharp as a wood fire. The tip of the cigarette glowed —

  — like my conscience, a fitful thing at best, he admitted, staring at the stub before grinding it out in the glass ashtray on the bedside cabinet.

  It was late in the night and the old house was silent. His flat was on the first floor, comprising the best rooms of the Tsarist building. The window rattled with the passing of a truck. He could have had a more modern flat, more furniture and better carpets, even more rooms. He could have shared a fairly luxurious modern block with senior officials, government people like his chief, who had just left. He simply preferred this place, isolated among more modern blocks as if it had strayed out of the dilapidation of the old town and lost its bearings forever.

  The roof leaked, the exterior needed repainting but the other tenants hadn’t the money to spare — and he had nothing in common with them: a minor civil servant; the mistress of a prominent local businessman who was an ex-colonel in the KGB, and her new baby, in the smallest apartment at the back; and a young couple on the top floor above him. She danced in one of the clubs … danced? Took off her clothes, while he played the piano in pander relationship to her. Still, he liked jazz …

  He favoured the place above anywhere else in the town. He listed its faults, and isolated himself from it now only because his chief had brought his official life into the house and somehow corrupted it. He had invaded his privacy.

  An uncertain and corrupt man, he had shifted on his chair as if dodging the frequent assault of invisible projectiles, the entire ten minutes he was in the room. His fur hat had been clutched in his hands all the time, as if he were attempting to wring it dry of something, or strangle the small animal it had once been. You are being careful, Ale&i, aren’t you? Over and over, like a maiden aunt. Almost as if he must be sure he employed a prophylactic when dealing with the town. Not an unnecessary precaution, he thought, smiling despite his irritation. No real penetration, nothing really done, just playing at it… his relation to crime was sex wearing a condom. No one would feel a thing, just as long as he was wearing his indifference.

  The chief of police for the district of Novyy Urengoy had come to ensure he wasn’t treading on any toes, especially those of Bakunin. Perhaps someone had been unsettled by the raid on the brothel; hadn’t been there, but expected to pay a call before too long and didn’t want the police embarrassing him! The chief carried little messages like that. At times, it seemed his only function — his exchange for the kickbacks and the presents and the nice dacha and new car, and the jewellery displayed by his plump wife. It was difficult to despise him … he was a gentle, timid, sensitive man overwhelmed by the town, by Russia since the bad old days, and by his wife. His corruption saddened him as much as it did Vorontsyev.

  And it wasn’t much worse, he admitted, lighting another cigarette, than bearing silent, ineffectual witness lo the corruption of others. Being good, doing right, ought to be more than keeping your nose clean and not touching pitch!

  As Lensky, the pathologist had remarked …

  He sighed. His stomach rumbled from the cheese sandwich he had made and eaten on his return. And the beer. He felt no more than discomforted by his self-analysis tonight, no more than impatient with his insomnia. Almost reconciled. His chief’s quiet desperation rendered Vorontsyev a certain complacency, a higher place in the moral pecking-order of Novyy Urengoy.

  And besides, the gate had been left open — just enough. The drugs business had moved its epicentre, to Schneider and maybe even Val Panshin. Kasyan might have been Rawls’ murderer, and he could continue to oversee the Rawls case because Rawls was now linked with Dr Schneider. There were drugs on the street, and Schneider might well be involved.

  He continued to smoke, feeling sorry for his chief and agreeably indulgent of himself. The old house creaked around him in the wind, the occasional car passed, and once a child cried.

  Vera Silkova’s new baby in the smallest apartment, or one of the civil servant’s children — didn’t the boy have earache or something? He sniffed, drew on the cigarette.

  He was still awake, at two-thirty, when the telephone rang.

  ‘Vorontsyev.’

  The line was filled with distance.

  ‘Sir, it’s Goludin, sir-!’ someone was shouting, his voice removed and faint. ‘Goludin, sir!’

  ‘What is it, man? It’s two-thirty in the morning!’

  ‘- Marfa, sir,’ he heard. ‘We can’t find her. She’s disappeared, sir!’

  ‘What?’

  He felt very cold.

  ‘- blizzard She went out in it, sir, to check the store sheds.

  Hasn’t come back. They’ve got search parties out, but there’s no trace of her!’ Goludin was hysterical.

  ‘Find her!’ he snapped. ‘Do what you have to, but find her!’

  He slapped the receiver down, hunched on the bed with sudden stomach cramps. Blizzard or not, it was enemy action, not accident. She wasn’t lost, she was gone. She’d been removed.

  The reality of it emptied him of his complacency, leaving only a stark and raw fear in its place. Marfa, in all probability, was not simply missing, she was dead.

  Noise. Penetrating, deafening. She seemed to be listening underwater.

  It was like the roar of a retreating tide. Her eyes opened, and she fuzzily saw a corrugated tin roof. She could not hear the wind, but could see the haziness of blown snow through her own grogginess. And cold. She was so cold. She stared up at the slanting tin roof and saw a shadow creeping across it like an eclipse of the sun.

  Terror, like a dark wind, made the pinhole of light that was her awareness flicker like a candle flame. Then she saw the sides of the garbage bin and remembered where she was. And that she was smeared with filth. Her memory, as much as the present, reminded her of the rank smells of rotting meat and vegetables.

  She fought against the failing light from the pinhole, against the dull dark which seemed to well up again. The noise was louder, as if her head had surfaced from water.

  She knew the sound now …

  … slowly — terrified. It was the noise of the grinding, crushing mechanism of a garbage truck. She had been dumped in the bin with this in mind. She would be — tipped — into the — crusher … buried on the tundra … she finished, as the thoughts whirled and blew like the snow coming in under the corrugated tin roof where
the bins were stored. She moved her lips. She didn’t seem to be gagged, but something filled her mouth so that she could make no sound. Her jaw was frozen like the huge, gaping mouth of a dead sturgeon she had once seen. She could not feel her hands, her limbs, her torso. There wasn’t enough of her left alive to scream.

  Darkness… shadow. Shadow of… the garbage truck moving under the tin roof, banging against the sides of the huge bin.

  She was aware that the bin was being jolted, then tilled.

  Shifted on its base, angled. Tipped blank once more. Awake. The bin seemed more angled, her body, to which she no longer belonged, had moved to the circumference of the bin, was hard against its filthy metal. She was huddled against the side of the bin as it was hoisted at a steepening angle. She heard hydraulics soughing like the blizzard.

  She felt the dark coming on again, and tried to move in protest against it. The bin tilted more steeply, and she could see snow and darkness, the distant glow of dim lights. StiJl her mouth refused to scream.

  Teeth. The maw of the truck. She was staring into the jaws of the garbage truck.

  She seemed to scream. The organism had to scream, and did.

  She screamed again.

  Perhaps it was only in her mind. The bin continued to move through its hydraulic arc, tilting her and the rubbish towards the truck. She was in a huge, foul cup tilted towards an enormous mouth and teeth.

  Screamed. Screamed.

  Something like a face — woollen mask, just eyes really, looking at her as the bin came level and she began to slide towards the grinding jaws of the truck. A face terrified in shock, above a body as unable to move as her own.

  The maw. Blank.

  He knew that they wouldn’t wait much longer, that they’d be coming for him.

  Lock stirred uneasily in the swivel chair, glancing once more out of the big windows of Vaughn Grainger’s study down towards Phoenix. They would come soon … yet his dazed and ragged nerves would not move him from the chair, from the room or the house. He’d had lo return to Vaughn’s house, after losing the prize that Tran represented, despite the danger that they would suspect his hiding place. There had to be something for him to find, some explanation, some clue, some evidence to tell him what in hell was happening …

  But there was nothing, nothing at all. Not in the safe or the filing cabinets or the desk drawers. No records, no details, no plans and no hints. He yawned with nerves and dull weariness.

  GraingerTurgenev had become a conduit for heroin, and all he had to go on were Tran’s threats and an old man’s desperate, sick words in the rear of an ambulance rushing him to intensive care. There was nothing else, not even a suggestion of the corruption of Grainger Technologies.

  There were only the photo albums, which now lay strewn on the big desk. Snapshots filed neatly in cellophane slips which unfolded under his hands like the images of an old What-TheMaidSaw machine at the end of a seafront pier. Beth, Billy, himself, Vaughn, his parents in one or two, hundreds of others.

  Vaughn, in most of them, always a dominating, stern figure who seemed to be in uniform even when relaxing in shorts beside a pool or hunched over a smoking barbecue.

  Lock glanced at his watch. Four in the afternoon, and still he remained there, his hands playing over the snapshot albums like those of an amateur conjurer. There was no rabbit out of their hat. Nothing to tell him what had happened in the past — and how it had led to Billy’s murder. Beth’s murder. He lit a cigarette and the smoke tasted stale on his tongue and raw in his throat.

  He had told the butlef not to report the burglary. Not yet, at least. The man had accepted his temporary authority with a shrug. The housekeeper had made him a sandwich lunch. Otherwise, they ignored him. At that moment, they were dutifully at the hospital, visiting Vaughn, whose condition was stable, according to the doctors.

  He was alone in the house. The maid had retreated to her quarters above the garage. The poolman had come and gone, and the gardener was around back, hoeing at stubborn desert weeds among the flower borders.

  He stared at the photographs as if willing the captured faces to speak, tell him what had happened. The sun burned in through the long windows. The air-conditioning purred. Tran’s people had expected to find something — the drugs, just a lead to the drugs — what?

  Which, meant Tran knew very little. He’d stirred a hornets’ nest for the sake of nothing. Tran would inform his contacts… if he knew who they were -

  Grainger’s face staring up at him from a photograph. Tran had believed Grainger knew about the heroin, he’d gone straight to what he thought was the top when his supplies didn’t arrive.

  Why? If Tran didn’t know who to contact, then Lock still had a little time, a small window through which he could squeeze in order to break into the case. From Washington. He had to get back. He had to know more about Tran, more aboutTurgenev.

  Pete Turgenev, of whom Vaughn had been so scared in that suite at the Jefferson Hotel. Scared almost to death, dominated and cowed by the Russian. GraingerTurgenev. That had to be when it had happened, the corruption of Vaughn’s company, Billy’s company … when they went into Siberia and found Turgenev as a partner. Who in turn had found greedy men, men he could use … Had to be, surely?

  Pete Turgenev knew. Whatever part he played, whatever he had done or ordered to be done, it had to be Turgenev who was behind it. Not just his people, but him. He had frightened Billy at the party, frightened Vaughn at the hotel. It was Turgenev against whom Vaughn had tried to warn him in the ambulance.

  His hands closed into impotent fists, again and again. Then he drew deeply on the cigarette, expelling the stream of smoke towards the ceiling, his face stretched in pain and dull rage. He’d wasted a day, or almost a day, and alerted the enemy. Stupid …

  He closed his eyes and at once saw Turgenev’s face, with all the power and mass of a dense star controlling the orbits and motions of the other faces in his head — Vaughn, Billy, Tran and finally Beth.

  He and Billy and Turgenev — Lock opened his eyes and stared down at one of the albums. There they were, the three of them, in Afghanistan. The big, real-life adventure for daring boys, the clean war — in its way — after the ethical mess of Vietnam. He and Billy working for the Company, supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles to shoot down Mil gunships in the mountains and around Kabul. He and Billy and Turgenev, after the announcement of the Soviet withdrawal, drawn together to negotiate the wind-down in weapons supplies, the safe passages, the prisoner exchanges. Companions-in-arms. The three of them, the way they were, dressed in headscarves and baggy trousers, unshaven, thin, laughing.

  Drugs had been overflowingly abundant in Afghanistan. The Russians had smuggling operations. The KGB and the army had been involved — just like the Company men who were doing the same. It had obviously been then that Turgenev had begun heroin smuggling. Lock slapped his forehead. It was then that he had acquired the capital to turn himself into an entrepreneur by the time Grainger Technologies arrived in Siberia! He grinned shakily. It fitted. It had to be so.

  He stared at Turgenev in the snapshot.

  Billy had left the CIA after Afghanistan, to run Grainger Technologies.

  Vaughn had wanted to spend his time exclusively with the Grainger Foundation, the charitable arm of the company.

  Lock had returned to the State Department. And then, under the skin like a tumour, it had begun. When GraingerTurgenev had been established, it was gradually corrupted.

  A snapshot of Vaughn Grainger, in uniform, lay beneath his hand. ‘Nam. 1974 was the date on the reverse. Vaughn had re-enlisted, even though Grainger Technologies needed him, the company having limped along ever since the mid-‘60s, when it had stumbled on Wall Street. It got by on handouts, small work, shuffling its loans. It looked as if the company would go under, and Vaughn seemed not to care, wrapping himself instead in the flag and heading for Vietnam. He’d eventually risen to command a Special Forces unit.

  Then the oil-price hik
es of the mid-‘70s made companies like Grainger necessary once more in oil exploration. When Vaughn came back from ‘Nam, with all a soldier’s ruthlessness, he’d turned the company around inside a year. A series of night attacks and dawn raids had put Grainger near the top again, poised to go into Siberia when the Soviet Union collapsed.

  Vaughn, staring out from the photograph, posed in full uniform in front of a fuzzy C-130, medal ribbons vivid on his chest.

  All that — just to end up in an intensive care facility, terrified and broken, an old man with the ground cut from beneath his feet, his son murdered, his daughter-in-law dead, too. Because of heroin. Red horse.

  Lock got jerkily to his “feet, aware of his vulnerability before the windows. Phoenix was hazy in its heat and smog. A distant, high aircraft winked like an early star. He needed to get back to Washington. Company records … he needed to check on Turgenev. He thought of Kauffman, Bob Kauffman whom he’d met in the bar of the Mayflower the day Beth was killed. Kauffman was still CIA, he could persuade him to let him see the files. There was material at State, too, he could use. He needed to know — did know. He wanted proof, before he went after

  Turgenev.

  Before Turgenev came after him …

  SEVEN

  Free Enterprises

  The wind howled across the concrete, whipping the snow into the open door of the helicopter, and over the stretcher onto which Marfa was gently strapped under a red blanket. Her face was the colour and texture of grey plasticine. His own face, if her staring confused gaze could focus on it, would be bitter, culpable. And she would see, in his squinting glance, the gleam of guilty relief. The doctors said she would recover. Physically, that is. He had no notion of how Marfa’s psychology would cope with what had been done to her.

  He supposed it would help that there had been no rape. There had been nothing sexual, no degradation or personal hatred in the attack. Its whole aim was to get rid of her, because she was police and asking questions about the dead Iranian.