A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  The image of Kauffman, hunched in his confessional chair, clutching an untasted drink, was very vivid; and profoundly enervating. He sat in imitation in the hire car, watching his aimless hands fiddle at the circumference of the steering wheel.

  The rain blinded the windscreen like a waterfall. Not at all like tears.

  Nothing else matters now, not you or me… He’d said something like thai to Kauffman, simply in order to threaten him — but the words had gained weight, come like a rock to crush him. Nothing mattered — not now.

  Except Turgenev, except the certainty that the pattern had repeated itself in Afghanistan and later in Siberia. Billy, just like Vaughn, had grabbed the easy dollar, the easy lie. Found heroin, sketched a supply route, put everything in place, made money.

  Been killed. Deservedly.

  Not Beth, though John Lock removed his hands from the steering wheel so that they might gently hold his head while it raged with the unborn life of what he had learned from Kauffman. It hurt like a migraine.

  It assaulted his present and his past, turning them inside out. He had been placed in a moral vacuum by Kauffman’s story and the pressure suit of his past had not protected him.

  Lock groaned, pressing his head against the windscreen, which was mercifully cold. Billy, Vaughn, the Company … all reduced to a multiple murder because of money in a Virginia mansion outside of which the Flag flew and inside of which the elite of Washington had assembled the previous evening, to toast his sister’s birthday. While Billy had been fingered in the library by Pete Turgenev because …? Why? Siphoning off more than his share? A double-cross, a wrong deal, a too-late fit of conscience?

  And an innocent bystander had been killed along with the perpetrator. His sister.

  He got out of the car, forgetting to lock the door he slammed in rage. He stamped up the steps of the apartment house and let himself in. His rage carried itself into the hall ahead of the smell of the ra’in and the fallen, sodden leaves and his wet clothing.

  He mounted the staircase blindly, head hanging, swinging from side to side. Someone was going to pay, someone was going to answer — it was all he could think with any clarity amid the whirling, upthrown images of things spoiled or past redemption. He threw back his own door and clomped down the hallway towards the living room.

  The girl was lying on the big sofa, her body twisted around so that one arm lay underneath it and the other was drooped to the carpet, as if she had been fending someone off. Her face confirmed that. Her very young, stranger’s face. The blue eyes, heavily made up, were wide and terrified, staring directly at him as he entered the room. One of his ties — he immediately recognized the vivid pattern as that of a present he had received from Beth last Christmas — was tight around her slim throat.

  He had strangled her, the body declared. In his apartment, with one of his ties. Her skirt was around her waist and she was wearing no underclothing. He had strangled her in a violent, sadistic rape after the drinks left half-emptied on the coffee table.

  In their struggle, which must have been very brief, she had overturned the standard lamp and rucked up the Chinese rug.

  But he had been too strong for her, and had raped and killed her. All of it was evident — so evident — to his heightened senses, that he at once listened to the street outside, waiting for the noise of police sirens. The slowing swish of a car —

  — he touched the net curtains, but the car turned into a drive way across the street. He recognized it as that of a neighbour.

  Not yet, not quite yet—

  He turned back to the girl’s body. A teenage hooker, maybe even a schoolgirl, someone of no account to them, who could merely fulfil the part of a raped and murdered body. Like Beth, a bystander … They knew he was getting close and had to be stopped.

  Something inside him was thinking beyond the panic the body inspired. It moved him to the bedroom and the safe under the floorboards, where he removed the fake passports that had been religiously renewed ever since his days with the Company. His hands started to fill a sports bag, when he found the pistol … only to replace it in the bedroom drawer because it would be found on him at any airport in the United States. Instead, he was prompted to gather his toilet bag, other things … crumbs of a life, like the photograph of Beth in a silver frame.

  By the time he returned to the apartment’s living room, he could hear the loudening noise of a siren. There was no time left.

  Lock looked at the girl and the rage boiled inside him. But he also knew that the apartment had been taken from him, that he would never return here. Turgenev had taken Beth first, and now the rest of his ordinary life. Leaving him only with a past self he thought he would never again need; the man who knew how to kill people, how to deceive, how to escape, how to survive.

  Turgenev … Vaughn Grainger had to tell him it was Turgenev, that he was behind everything, including the murder of this girl. When he heard it from Vaughn, he could He dragged himself away from the room and the girl’s body, ran through the hallway, slamming the door of the apartment behind him. The siren’s noise was audible on the landing.

  Dmitri Gorov was shaken from an exhausted sleep by the telephone’s peremptory insistence. He shrugged awake, sensing himself still clothed. His mouth was dry and tasted awful. He glowered at the dial of the clock as it came into focus. He must have fallen asleep about an hour ago, after Alexei had left. He groaned and picked up the receiver. Goludin’s excited, somehow boyish voice.

  ‘- found it, sir! We’ve found — Marfa and me, we’ve got a bag of the stuff, heroin!’

  ‘Calm down!’ he growled. ‘Where, how? Take it slowly.’

  Dmitri felt his own excitement. The cramped, dull room seemed warmer.

  ‘One of the storerooms in the hospital.’ His voice suddenly became a hoarse, theatrical whisper. ‘Calling from there now.

  It’s in my pocket, the evidence!’ Then, after a pause: ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Don’t leave Marfa,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll come over.’ He rubbed his cheeks, then his weary, gritty eyes. ‘I’ll come over now. Stay with her till I get there — no one suspects?’

  ‘No. We thought — ‘ The voice was now an exhilarated chortle.

  ‘- someone was going to stumble right into us, but no one did.

  Footsteps outside the door, they just went on down the ‘

  ‘Never mind. Just try to act normally. Routinely. And — well done.’

  He put down the receiver, after balancing it in his hand for a moment, wondering whether to call Vorontsyev.

  ‘Leave him to rest,’ he muttered as he got off the bed as heavily as an invalid. Then, like a fierce bout of indigestion, the enormity of what Goludin had told him struck his stomach, doubling him over. ‘Jesus — I’ But the exclamation was exultant.

  His hands clenched into fists as the tension eased and he straightened up. He wanted to punch them like an athlete signalling success. ‘Got you! Got you!’ he exhaled, grinning, rubbing his hands together as he hurried to the bathroom.

  He flung cold water against the sleepy numbness of his face, towelled himself vigorously, then studied his features for a moment in the mirror, aware of the house’s perpetual silence.

  A weary, ageing, defeated man stared back at him, belying the excitement that still wrenched at his stomach.

  He dismissed the image and hurried from the bathroom, rubbing down his ragged dark hair, tugging on his overcoat. He almost failed to hear the telephone, even exclaimed against its noise as he turned back down the hall.

  ‘Yes?’ he snapped impatiently.

  ‘Dmitri? It’s Lubin. There’s a report just in-‘ His voice was awed, as at news of a bereavement or the loss of a lifetime’s savings. ‘It’s the chief, an explosion at his flat. The place is wrecked!’

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve been trying to find out. The report’s only just come in, from a patrol car. Half the house has caved in, a young woman and a “child are de
ad for sure, but I ‘

  ‘Meet me there!’ Dmitri snapped. ‘Now!’

  He put down the receiver and turned, disorientated. He felt dizzy and sick. He put his hands gently to his face, as if to assure himself of his identity. His forehead was icily damp with perspiration, and he was once more aware of the house as silent and empty. Alexei, Alexei … They’d got to him because they were too close. Much too close to be left alive.

  He stood in the doorway of his house, staring at the snow.

  They had killed Alexei.

  Goludin reached the door of the ward, to find Dr David Schneider coming away from Marfa’s bed. He had almost challenged the doctor before the realisation that Marfa was unharmed and was vigorously shaking her head beyond Schneider’s shoulder to stop him. His cheeks flushed, and his eyes became shifty, unwilling to meet Schneider’s careful inspection of him.

  ‘I — thought you were guarding your colleague?’ Schneider remarked. There was a nervousness about the American, but Goludin was aware only of his own embarrassed guilt. ‘I found her bed empty and the sister unaware of your location,’

  Schneider added stiffly, as if imitating a formality of manner he did not feel. ‘I’ve-‘ He attempted a reassuring smile. ‘I’ve warned the young woman to stay in bed, for her own sake.

  OK?’

  ‘Oh — what? Yes, yes —’ Marfa was still shaking her head as if in warning, What excuse had she given, what if he was asked where they’d been? ‘Sorry about that.’ Schneider’s Russian was schoolroom correct, carefully enunciated. Yet Goludin was aware that his own replies made him seem the user of an unfamiliar language.

  Schneider, he was certain, suspected something. Then the doctor nodded dismissively, and moved past him. Goludin hurried to the bed, blurting:

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That I went to the toilet while you must have wandered off for something to eat!’ she replied excitedly. ‘Well?’

  ‘Dmitri’s on his way here now — we just have to sit tight!’ He was grinning in imitation of her now, the tension radiating from both of them in the aftermath of their discovery. ‘Bloody hell!

  We’ve done it, Marfa — we’ve actually done it!’

  Schneider paused in the corridor to glance back through the windows set in the ward’s fire doors. He saw the young detective bending over the woman in the bed. It was as if they were children hugging a secret to themselves and congratulating themselves on their knowledge. The realisation was an icy trickle in the small of his back. He hurried to the lifts.

  He’d kept an eye on them, suspecting they had been deliberately secreted into the hospital, arrivals in some Trojan horse.

  Yet they’d done nothing, seemed to know nothing, have little or no suspicion; a rather intense young woman and a clodhopping detective. They had gradually ceased to represent any danger.

  Now-?

  He thrust through the lift doors even as they began to open and clattered along the corridor in the basement towards the storeroom. He passed a nurse whose arms were laden with fresh linen and who nodded respectfully. He felt his returned smile was sickly.

  He inspected the lock. There appeared to be no damage, no signs that it had been forced. He unlocked it and let himself inside, relocking the door before switching on the lights. At once, it seemed, he saw the small, spilt patch of white powder on the floor, though in fact it must have been some seconds later. He moved slowly towards it, his heart thudding in his chest, his side feeling winded. He bent awkwardly down like an old man, wetting his finger, touching the powder, tasting —

  — spitting it out. It was the horse. His body was bathed in sweat. He glanced wildly up at the shelving, then rose to his feet, clambering and scrabbling to the top of the shelves as if to escape rising water. Found the opened box, touched it again and again in disbelief and the wish that he was wrong; the fervent wish that …

  He slid rather than climbed to the floor. Rested his head against the cold metal of the shelving. Banged his fist limply against a shelf, as images of the woman in the bed and the stupid young male detective appeared in his head, like mocking masks. How could they have found it, those amateurs, those morons …? The older cop suspected him, he knew … One of the packets was missing, they had evidence now. Hard evidence.

  They’d come looking for him with a warrant.

  He sniffed. He had to tell Panshin. Now that Rawls was dead, only Panshin could get him out from under, help him climb out of the deep mire he was in

  ‘Calm down, Panshin!’ Bakunin barked, his hand clenching in a strangling motion on the desk. ‘It’s been taken care of! The head has been chopped off the chicken, you’re just watching the body die.’ He listened. ‘They can be dealt with easily. Just tell the American doctor to calm down. What’s the matter with these people, haven’t they anything resembling guts?’ They were all grasping and pathetic, like Rawls, who had been too greedy and whose removal had brought the others back into line. An example had been made and had had its effect. Now, because some of the shipment awaiting transport on from Novyy Urengoy had been stumbled on by a moronic detective second grade and a woman, the panic had broken out again like a revisiting epidemic. Schneider and Panshin — what poor straw-men they both were. Greed was their only confidence; otherwise, they were negative, empty, grubby creatures. Invertebrates.

  ‘Tell Schneider to watch them, see who visits them. And reassure him, Panshin. Tell him everything has been dealt with, that everything is now OK. Do you understand? The head has been cut off the chicken. Tell him that!’

  Bakunin thrust down the receiver, the fingers of his other hand drumming on the desk. The morning was sullen, skulking like a reluctant worker beyond his office windows. Hiding behind cloud.

  What was the matter with these people? he asked himself again. Did they …? He inspected the idea that had sprung into consciousness. Handled it like a priceless vase. Did they want another example? Is that what they needed?

  It might, anyway, be sensible to remove Schneider, even if it was no longer necessary.

  The shadows of the mountains shrank like curled, dried leaves in the Arizona sunrise as the flight from Baltimore dropped out of a cloudless desert sky towards Phoenix. Lock watched the landscape brighten into aridity, become hard, unforgiving; a reflection, he realised, of the man who observed it from the Boeing’s high, small window.

  Ahead and to port, reservoirs gleamed as small as puddles after a shower, and Phoenix glinted through the haze of distance. He felt his tension return and stirred in his seat to ease its slow, certain grip on his stomach.

  He had abandoned the hire car, taken the airline shuttle bus from downtown up Interstate 95 to Baltimore-Washington airport in Maryland. The red-eye to Phoenix and Tucson had not been under surveillance, his false identity had not been challenged at the gate — despite the first reports on CNN of the Georgetown murder and the proclamation of his identity and background and an old. State Department photograph of him that had appeared on the portable TV being watched by the black woman working at the newsstand. He had made the aircraft carrying only the shreds of calm and resolve with him, his past as intangible and lost as old, flaking skin shed by his body.

  As the Boeing had lifted into the Maryland night sky and pushed through rain into starlight, all the people he had been had seemed like figures, far out to sea, drowning. The orphaned child with the elder sister who organised his life and eased his grief; the college student and basketball player, the cum laude graduate; the CIA field agent who had enjoyed his bitter little war; the State Department expert on the new, chaotic Russian Federation; the occasional, uncommitted lover, the dutiful, accomplished partygoer and dinner guest, the music buff. They were all out there, in the deep, drowning. As others watched the inflight movie or tried to sleep, he watched his past slip beneath the waves, unable to save any of those people he had been—

  except one. Except for the trained, artificial person he had been for a few short years when he had worked for the CI
A.

  That younger man was the only person he had ever been who could — now — hope to survive; the one who had packed the sports bag, collected the money and the false papers and had been able to ignore the dead girl lying in his apartment.

  As America, deep in night, slid beneath the aircraft, he came to a gradual, reluctant accommodation with John Lock, field agent — a man who had killed people, arranged death, employed cunning and ruthlessness; who had survived Afghanistan. That man was all he was allowed and all he wanted to be; because he was the only one who could get close enough to Turgenev to kill him.

  He had drowsed for a time after accepting that fact. The lights of Oklahoma City, after all the other cities, and then a brief, almost dreamless sleep. He had woken only when they served breakfast, feeling stale but alert, tense more than tired. Hardly fearful, hardly at all.

  Phoenix’s desert and glass towers and the giant cactuses. The low, purple hills, the tiny shadows, windscreens on the highway glinting like semaphore, then the aircraft was making its final approach to Sky Harbor airport. The mountains suddenly surrounded the city and were taller than the flightpath. He had to hear from Vaughn Grainger’s lips that Turgenev had ordered Billy’s death, that Tran was not the main man, that it was Turgenev behind the heroin smuggling. Vaughn had to tell him that Turgenev now wanted the whole pie for himself.

  The wheels touched the runway, skipped then settled and the turbines whined in deceleration. Turgenev had gotten greedy and decided to take the whole shooting match away from Vaughn and Billy. When he heard it from Vaughn’s lips, then however long it took and by whatever means, he would avenge Beth’s I murder. Avenge even the teenage hooker dead in his apartment.

  The aircraft slowed, then turned off the runway towards the blinding mirror of the terminal building. Sunlight flooded the cabin. People stirred as if from hibernation. He shook himself and stared abstractedly through the window until the plane’s flank met the tunnel in a kiss and the passenger door was opened. He waited. The other passengers could disembark first, in case they were waiting for him, the Phoenix cops or the Bureau.