A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  The security lights mounted along the eaves of the hunting lodge cast purple-tinged shadows on the snow that stretched away from the window towards the belt of trees which encircled the estate. There was a faint, livid glow away to the south where Novyy Urengoy lay like a pool of brackish water, festering and vile. He detested the place and its concerns — even those which involved him. Novyy Urengoy was people like Panshin, the American Schneider — like Rawls before him a craven, greedy, spineless thing — and even Bakunin, the peasant GRU colonel.

  He disliked their necessity in the scheme of things, their satellite status around his star.

  The hunting lodge had once belonged to a half-mad prince from the last century. He had built it in the middle of Siberia’s desolation, far from plentiful game and wildfowl, had dug lakes, planted trees, had imported deer, bear, fox and duck to kill at his leisure.

  There was, he admitted, something admirable about the scale of the thing and the wealth necessary to create a hunting estate in a barren wilderness at the edge of the arctic tundra. He enjoyed the house — more than the New York apartment, less than the villa in Antibes, and perhaps to the same degree as the ranch in Montana. Moscow and Petersburg he loathed equally.

  He rubbed his long forefinger up and down the aquiline curve of his nose, staring out at the snow. A secretary entered after knocking, explained the urgency of some papers. He gestured they be placed on his desk and dismissed the woman with another wave of his hand. He was content — no, it was necessary — to brood for a few minutes longer. Lock, the subject of his mood, was little more than an itch. He was all but less than nothing. And yet … he was still out there, even after the frame-up involving the dead hooker in his apartment. The police had been only moments too slow, but Lock had blundered through the closing trap, and was now in Phoenix. What did he expect to team? Turgenev knew what he could be told by Grainger, but he wondered how much Lock desired those truths.

  Did he really want to bring his world crashing down?

  Turgenev smiled in puzzlement. He disliked not really knowing Lock. In Afghanistan, he seemed always in Billy’s shadow, a Ml somehow formless, immature figure; dull, conventional, almost prim, a maiden aunt in a war zone. He smiled again. That had been true … the man had had the necessary courage, he had absorbed his training well, he’d survived a few tight situations.

  But he hadn’t been real, somehow, not quite there.

  Did his ignorance threaten to cause him to underestimate Lock? He didn’t think so — he simply liked certainty.

  But then, he was certain of his people and Tran’s people. They would eliminate Lock …

  He snapped his fingers to summon his attention to the desk and its papers. Lock was a dead man. The local problem of Vorontsyev had been settled —

  He paused for a moment. He had underestimated Vorontsyev.

  The policeman he had thought ineffectual, almost a dilettante or intellectual, morose and solitary, hanging on for his pension, had surprised him by persisting; by getting as close as he had done before he had been stopped.

  Therefore, had he underestimated Lock?

  He resolved the question by sitting in the leather swivel chair behind the desk, his back to the window, and taking up the sheaf of papers the secretary had brought in.

  No, he had not underestimated the man. Lock was about to go under for the third time — not waving but drowning.

  His hand grabbed instinctively for the sports bag he had dropped, scrabbling like a crab across the marble steps, as the police sirens loudened and he tensed against the next bullet. Then Lock rolled across the mosaic inlay towards the shattered open doors of the hospital. Something puckered the marble near him and buzzed angrily away. Then he was on patterned carpet, his body colliding with a woman stretched prone and terrified in the foyer. He got to his knees and scuttled away from the door. The carpet was littered with frightened bodies as if there had been an air raid.

  There was blood on one bright print frock, then he was on his feet and blundering past a nurse in uniform and a doctor kneeling over someone else in shock. His heart thudded against his ribs, the tempo of his panic. He fled past the lifts, hardly aware of his direction, allowing the survival mechanisms to dictate to him. He plunged down steps into an empty, soughing corridor that smelt aseptic and safe.

  Whether they were Tran’s people or belonged to Turgenev no longer mattered. All that was important was that he was still acting like a slow-moving target, open to surprise, easy to kill -

  stairs ascending again. He glanced back along the corridor.

  Two distant white-coated figures, neither of them in pursuit of him. He clambered up the stairs, his breathing loud and ragged, his legs heavy. He emerged into a smaller, more cramped foyer.

  Accident and Emergency. A man was bleeding onto thermoplastic tiles from a head wound, there was another man with a bandaged arm. A harried, untidy nurse belied the orderly calm of the Grainger Wing before the first shot. He blundered through the stiffly opening doors into the hard, varnished sunlight and onto the dusty concrete of a car park. He could immediately hear the police sirens, and glanced wildly around him. The staff car park, ranks of cars and 4WDs glinting with chrome and glass.

  A woman standing beside one small Nissan sedan was struggling into a white coat. He ran towards her. At once, her face was startled and determined.

  ‘Keys!’ he snapped. ‘I don’t have time to explain, give me the car keys!’

  She was frightened, but not sufficiently. He saw her raise the keys to throw them out into the car park. He snatched at her wrist, smelling her perfume and fear at once, his face close to hers. Her eyes were wide, panicked at the prospect of violence.

  He wanted to shake his head, but thrust her away, keeping hold of the keys.

  ‘I just want your car!’ he shouted at her like a plea, and unlocked the door. Her fear changed into outraged anger. She was looking around for help; then she began moving towards him as he threw the sports bag into the back of the car. A baby seat, empty, for which he was thankful.

  ‘Hey — I’ she began, but he glowered at her.

  ‘Lady — doctor-l Just keep away from the car!’ He climbed in and fumbled the key into the ignition. It fired first time. The woman was banging the driver’s window. He waved her away, snarling: ‘Get away from the car!’

  He let off the brake and the car surged forward, brushing her aside. The tyres squealed on the hot concrete as he headed the car wildly towards the barrier of the car park, which swung up at his approach. The woman, waving her arms in furious anger, diminished in the mirror. The Nissan bumped out onto a narrow road. He turned …

  … north. Towards the mountains and the desert beyond them. Out of Phoenix.

  Away from the airport — there were other airports. He accelerated away from the traffic lights, turning onto Black Canyon Highway — Interstate 17. Flagstaff was a hundred and forty miles north. It had an airport, flights out of Arizona. Far enough to begin with. He studied the mirror. He was sweating profusely but his temperature and heartbeat were returning to normal.

  There was a sense of exhilaration nudging aside the shock of the unexpected attack.

  The cactuses lined the road now like crosses. There didn’t seem to be a car in the mirrors, intent on pursuit or on matching his speed. With luck, he had perhaps thirty minutes before the police put up a helicopter to monitor the I-17 and the other roads out of the city. The doctor would describe her car, describe him. He would, in a half-hour at most, be identified as John Lock, fugitive. Less if they asked the nurse outside Grainger’s room.

  The suburbs straggled away on either side of the highway. As if dousing green and gold fires, crop-spraying hoses fountained great peacocks’ tails of water that rainbowed in the sun. An aircraft dropped towards Sky Harbor airport. The mountains opened. Cholla, prickly pear and saguaro cactus populated a dusty expanse as the road began to climb towards the New River mountains and into the Sonoran desert. Sun City, nibbling at farmla
nd, lay behind him in the mirrors, as ordered as a trailer park, the planted fields seemly and neat. Phoenix was little more than a mirage in the morning heat.

  He began scanning the high desert air, paling to colourlessness, for the first signs of a police helicopter. He realised he had to get rid of the car but shivered at the thought, the desert suddenly more real, pressing around the air-conditioned box of the Nissan. He had to have another car, and quickly.

  TEN

  Form of Escape

  ‘Good, good,’ Turgenev murmured, adding: ‘That’s fine, Ivan and thank Takis for me.’ He settled back in the leather swivel chair, watching the smoke rise from the Cuban cigar resting in the onyx ashtray. ‘I’ll leave the detail with you — sure, I’ll be there for the signing of the new contracts. How hot is Athens at this time of the year? Good …’ He chuckled companionably with the caller, the CEO of GraingerTurgenev in Greece. ‘OK, talk to you soon.’

  He put down the telephone, picked up the cigar and puffed contentedly at it. He was aware of himself in the gilt mirror on one wall, exuding what the English would call complacency. He smiled at his image, and was tempted to wink at himself. The Athens operation was an unqualified success. The Greek government scheme, seventy per cent financed by the European Commission in Brussels, to bring Russian natural gas to Athens via a pipeline from Bulgaria, had become hopelessly behind schedule.

  To avoid the penalty clause in the original contract, Russian contractors had been offered a bigger share of the project. It was worth, conservatively, as much as six per cent of the total cost, perhaps fifty million dollars, to GraingerTurgenev. His company.

  Besides which, he reminded himself, Greece was his own judas gate into the billions of dollars that could be siphoned off from the EC over the next few years. Greece alone would receive twenty billion ecus over five years … the opportunities for profits were enormous.

  He put down the cigar and rubbed his eyes. He slipped on half-glasses to study the sheaf of reports that had been left on his desk. In a week’s time, he expected a delegation of senior politicians from the republics of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan — at the hunting lodge. A crucial meeting. The gasfields and oilfields that clustered around the Caspian Sea had been called the new Gulf. Western Siberia’s output was gradually falling … He had to take advantage of the opening up of the Asian fields. To wrest the potential huge profits from the pipeline work, the terminal construction on the Black Sea, in conjunction with Chevron and other US and European companies, was a prize almost beggaring belief.

  And within his grasp. He closed his hand on the desk, as if merely flexing it, opened and closed it again and again as he read the reports. Grainger Technologies, which would be his within days, a couple of weeks at most, was crucial to his strategy.

  Billy should have stood aside — Turgenev sucked his teeth as he recalled Billy on that last evening, at his Maryland home, sweating, guilty, defiant and washed up … Billy should have sold out to him, or at least agreed that the Central Asian project was the future — their mutual future — for the next twentyfive years. But Billy hadn’t seen it, wouldn’t agree … poor Billy.

  He finished reading. The planning had been exact, even to the removal of Billy Grainger and the acquisition of the company.

  Finance, cooperation, funding, strategy — and murder. Meticulously considered and arranged. Billy’s death was business by other means, he smiled to himself, consciously misquoting Clausewitz.

  Against all of which Lock was merely a hornet buzzing outside the window of his study … a harmless nuisance, like a beggar in the street.

  His hand passed over the sheaf of papers, brushing away a small grey beetle of cigar ash. The sister’s death, of course, had been unavoidable. If Billy’s murder had not been disguised as violent robbery, he would not have been as easy to kill for some time after that night. Beth had, unfortunately, therefore been endangered along with Billy. And Billy’s bout of Protestant morality regarding the heroin had sealed his fate as much as the necessity to direct Grainger Technologies towards the rewards of the new oil power region of Central Asia. He had to have control of Grainger by the time the delegation arrived. He had to be able to offer them a package, a unitary capability that would outweigh other consortia.

  Eventually, there would be no need for the fuel of heroin to power his empire — but that time was not yet. Just as one day, the smuggling of nuclear scientists and technicians to Iran and Iraq would prove unnecessary. At present, however, it gave him presence and leverage in the Middle East, dealing with those governments the West kept at arm’s length.

  He looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. The woman had arrived earlier in the evening and now awaited him like the denizen of a harem. He grinned. Time for bed … He bent and picked up the faxed sheet from the floor where it had curled itself into a tube. It referred to Lock’s escape from the Mountain Park Hospital. Lock had spoken with Grainger. He knew it all now. That had been what had enraged him, bul now he contemplated it calmly. Lock was the subject of a manhunt across the continental United States. He was a plague carrier, a leper and outcast with nowhere to go. If and when he was arrested — if Turgenev’s own people were beaten in the race by the police who would believe him? He was a sex murderer; a teenage heroin addict, playing at prostitution to feed her habit, had died.

  Lock had killed her. There were even witnesses. Lock would never get out from under …

  … even though his death would be simpler and more satisfying.

  He placed the fax on his desk and barely paused to consider it further. Tran’s people, working in harness with his own men, would prevent Lock ever leaving Arizona. They had a car registration, a description, a possible sighting on the Interstate 17, heading north into the desert.

  Turgenev was whistling softly to himself as he switched out the lights in his study. For a moment he watched the pale glow of security lights and snow reflected into the darkened room.

  Then he finally closed and locked the door behind him and began climbing the wide staircase with its elaborately carved banister towards his bedroom.

  It was a place called Bumble Bee, west of the 1-17, which he had left at Rock Springs. The Sonoran dust blew through it on the slight breeze, and the wooden stores, hotel and handful of houses seemed almost desiccated by the sun. Even the image of Colonel Sanders seemed more aged and leather-skinned above the diner. There was a garage and petrol station next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken parlour and a large sign above a low building that claimed it was the General Store and that it possessed Jeeps for Hire. It was what he had been seeking and he felt the relief rumble though him like the subterranean approach of a subway train.

  The traffic was little more than a duo of pick-up trucks and a dusty Oldsmobile. Figures in stetsons and denims added to the sense of timelessness as if the place had been bypassed by the years as surely as it had been by the interstate highway. There were hills like broken teeth in red-sand gums to the west and south; omnipresent saguaro cactus, and yucca and pine and oak woodland darkened the slopes of the mountains to the north.

  His body was quivering with released tension as he climbed stiffly out of the car into the baking, suffocating heat and the gritty dust. The breeze was like the breath of a furnace. Even so, he shivered. The sight of a TV aerial was sufficient. This was a town, however fossilised; there would be newspapers, TV, radio, any of which could be broadcasting and detailing a description of him and the Nissan, He had drawn the car into a narrow space in the shadow of a dilapidated trailer parked behind the garage. It might go unregarded for two or three hours. A repair truck masked it from the main street of the town. He pulled out the sports bag and locked the Nissan. Then he dropped the keys and dustily kicked them beneath the car.

  Lock crossed to the store, his assumed nonchalance threadbare even to himself. He nodded to an old man perched on a hard chair on a wooden verandah. The sidewalk creaked beneath his shoes — city shoes, city suit. He
cleared his throat and entered the cooler, musty air of the store. It was a little before noon and he was tired: dragged down,too, by the revelations in that hot, quiet room in the hospital and by the sense of what dimly lay ahead of him.

  ‘Good morning.’

  The storekeeper, in a tartan shirt and denims — his stomach spilt the pattern of the shirt over his belt-studied him, then asked: ‘How come you parked all the way over there?’

  ‘I — er, I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way, block anyone,’ he replied lamely. ‘I want to hire a jeep, do some desert sightseeing …’

  ‘We got jeeps. You from Phoenix?’

  ‘Visiting. My — er, my wife’s been taken into hospital. Appendicitis.

  She’s OK, but I didn’t want to hang around, kicking my heels for the next ‘

  ‘I’m not your father, boy — you don’t need to explain. You want a jeep, I can hire you a jeep. You got desert clothes, boots?’

  There was an increased eagerness — and innocence — in the inspection now being carried out. There was no suspicion of him except as a stranger. A lofty, dismissive contempt. ‘Everything you’re gonna need is right over there,’ the storekeeper said, the foretaste of profit gleaming in his eye. His hand caressed his greying beard as if he were miiking something. Lock was thankful for the safety implicit in the man’s attention to business, to fleecing the city-feller who walked in out of the sun looking for a vicarious, safe experience in the Sonoran desert.

  ‘You got to take out insurance — I got the forms right here,’ he continued, following Lock to the counter set in front of a window looking out over the forecourt and the petrol pumps.