Krokodil

by Dustin Stevens

  “Yeah, yeah,” Pally said, the sound of bare feet sliding over hardwood floors audible in the background. “And who am I looking for?”

  “Two men,” I replied, remembering everything Manny had told us. “One of them is named Viktor Blok, both spelled with a K. The other is Pavel, last name may or may not be Haney. Could be traveling alone or together.”

  There was no reply for a long moment as Pally went to work. In my mind I could see the array of electronics I’d seen via video conference earlier, imagining his long hair askew, the sleeves of his oversized sweater shoved back as he worked. The din of a keyboard clattering drifted over the air to me, the only other sound the highway passing beneath my tires.

  “Alright,” he said after two full minutes. Any trace of sleep was gone from his voice, it now taking on the familiar detached resonance he always seemed to assume when working a case. “I don’t have either of those names, but I have a Vitaly Gusev and an Andrei Zhobrov leaving on the four a.m. flight to Hong Kong.”

  The names were undeniably Russian, certainly plausible aliases for two known associates of an international cartel to use for travel purposes. Still, assuming that was them would be a dangerous proposition. I knew that at least one target was based in Russia, but I needed them all there. If the other two snuck away by boat, or even worse traveled inland, it might be years before they surfaced again.

  “Possible,” I said, letting Pally hear my thoughts, “but not certain.”

  “Au contraire my analog friend,” Pally said, a scolding tone in his voice. “I didn’t find them by searching manifests. As you know that takes more than ninety seconds and an act of God to pull off.”

  There was a long pause and I could tell Pally was putting me on. I motioned with my right hand in the darkness, a circular gesture meant to draw the data out of him, but he didn’t bite. “Okay, Mike, how did you find them?”

  “Thank you,” he replied, letting me hear his satisfaction. “You remember those financials you had me run? I finally tracked it back to an account running out of Vladivostok.”

  “Port town,” I muttered, having seen the name a time or two in my previous life.

  “That’s right,” Pally said. “They ran back to a corporation known as Kolb Enterprises International, the very same company that just purchased said plane tickets.”

  I snorted and shook my head, half pissed at the simplicity of it. “Kolb, as in an anagram of Blok?”

  “This is Russia were talking here. This thing was set up in the late sixties when the place was still reeling from the Cold War. Over there, sending an anonymous envelope of cash once a month grants you carte blanche to do whatever you want the rest of the time.”

  As much as I wanted to disagree with his assessment, I knew he was right. It was the way most of the countries of the world operated, even large chunks of our own if we really wanted to nitpick about it.

  “And would you like to hear the best part?” Pally asked. “The owner is a woman named Anya Merinkova.”

  Folds of skin gathered around my eyes as I squinted, trying to place the name. I had heard a lot of Soviet names and accents in the last few weeks, though that one didn’t seem to ring any bells. “And how is that the best part?”

  “In 1965, Anya Merinkova married none other than Sergey Blok,” Pally said, putting a triumphant flare on the end of the sentence, announcing his victory for all.

  I pursed my lips together and released a low whistle, another enormous piece falling into place.

  Lita had come to my office to tie up Mateo and me both. They were ready to start moving their product and were wiping away all loose ends before getting started.

  “Damn, Pally, that’s good work. Seriously, impressive.”

  “I know,” he replied, not a trace of irony in his tone.

  A hint of a smirk tugged at my face, pulling me back an inch. “Hong Kong, though? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “My guess would be it’s not a final destination, it just happens to be the first flight out of that hellhole this morning. I could check everything moving out of Hong Kong later if you’d like, but let’s be honest, they’re going home.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding in agreement.

  Everything I had just learned jibed perfectly with what I’d been expecting. I knew that my going to Baja with Diaz would be a waste of time because they weren’t going to be there. They had been one step ahead of us the entire time, and tonight would be no different.

  “Alright, you mentioned a couple of favors?” Pally said, already sounding bored, ready for his next task or to be cut loose so he could, presumably, return to bed.

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking away my current train of thought and returning to the conversation. “Can you get me a plane ticket out of LA to Russia this morning?”

  There was a long moment of silence, followed by the low hum of air being sucked in. “Hawk, what are you doing, buddy?”

  For the first time since leaving the jail, I felt the anger rise to the surface. It was a reaction I could ill afford, needing to keep it buried just a little while longer.

  “You know damn well what I’m doing,” I said, just audible. “And I’m trusting you to keep that between us in the meantime.”

  “Of course,” Pally replied. “Of course. It’s just...”

  “I know,” I said, leaving it at that. There was hours of conversation we could both add on the topic, but knew better than to dredge up. Maybe once I tracked down an actual location for him we could share a lot of the things that had been left unsaid over the years.

  “Alright,” he said, the sound of tapping on keys able to be heard again, “looks like the best we can do is a direct to Moscow and then a hop over to Vladivostok.”

  “No,” I replied, once more shaking my head. “Just get me into Moscow, I’ll figure it out from there.”

  “Are you kidding me? That’s like four thousand miles.”

  I needed to make a stop in Moscow that I didn’t want to mention to Pally. He had already done more than could be expected for me, more than enough to put some heat on him should things go sideways later on. The less he knew from this point forward the better.

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” I replied. “And can you put it under my old alias? I’d rather keep my name off things for as long as possible.”

  “Your old alias?” Pally asked. “You mean the one from before?”

  I glanced over at my shoulder bag stowed on the passenger seat. Deep inside it was a passport I had not used in five years, the last stamp in it placed there before leaving Panama the day my family was killed.

  “It’s still good for another six months,” I replied.

  Once more I could hear a heavy sigh, though to his credit he didn’t fight me on it. “You got it, Hawk.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered, loud enough for him to hear me, soft enough for him to know I meant it.

  “You got it,” he repeated. “Anything else?”

  “Just one last thing,” I said. “Did you know?”

  I left the question as vague as possible, though I had a feeling he would know exactly what I was referring to. If he didn’t, that answered my question just as effectively.

  “Did I...” he began, his voice trailing away. Once more I could hear a heavy sigh, and when he spoke there was a strain that wasn’t there before. “No, Hawk. To be honest, I still don’t. I suspected, but never knew.”

  For whatever reason, I believed him. I had no basis to, beyond the fact that he had no reason to help me as much as he just had. The next couple of days would tell me if he was being truthful, if my initial reaction was right.

  If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t much matter anyway.

  “Thanks, Pally,” I said, ending the call.

  I drove in silence a full ten minutes, an overhead sign, white letters on a green background, telling me I had eighty miles to go on towards LA. I used the time to process what I had just learned, using it to fill in ever more of the holes that existed.
There were only a couple small gaps remaining, all of which would hopefully be answered in the coming days.

  The second number I had to dig out of the shoulder bag, scribbled down on a scrap of paper buried deep in the bottom of it. The first time I’d heard Lita’s accent I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but had thought I should bring it just in case.

  The line rang a dozen times before it was picked up. There was no answer, just total silence on the other end.

  I counted to five in my head before saying, “Same place, same time,” and hanging up.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Twelve and half hours in the air plus an eleven hour time difference put me on the ground in Moscow just shy of a day after leaving. Considering that Pally had been kind enough to arrange a first class ticket for me, I spent almost the entirety of that time reclined flat on my back, eyes closed. The Lufthansa craft wasn’t quite as spacious as some of the other planes I’d been on, the lay-flat seat pinching my shoulders a bit, but it was still far preferable to a half day crammed into coach.

  The first nine hours of the trip were spent in complete darkness, a near comatose state as my body recovered from the last few days, prepared for what lay ahead. After that my mind raised itself into a state of consciousness enough to allow for activity, the same damn dream sifting in, waking me with a start.

  The last couple of hours I sat with my gaze aimed out the window, trying to plan my next move, making sense of what I already knew.

  Two weeks ago a woman I had never met walked into my shop and spent an absurd amount of money to get me alone in the woods with her. She fed me a phony story to lead her to a man from my past, whom she executed, and tried to kill me. In the time since more people had died, the questions piling up thick and furious.

  Sitting and trying to sort the information out in my head, I allowed myself a pass and tried not to focus on my own foolish actions throughout. Lita’s willingness to pay such an absurd amount of money should have been my first tip off, followed by her demeanor and a hundred things thereafter.

  Five years ago I would have sniffed this thing out before it ever got off the ground. Now I was just lucky to still be breathing, hoping that the next few days would put things right for good.

  The plane touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, a harsh, stark structure that could have been anywhere from Paris to New York City. Without the need to wait for luggage I made a single stop to exchange two hundred dollars into rubles and stepped out to the curb to flag down a taxi.

  The driver, an older man with tufts of graying hair and a handful of teeth in his entire head, made no attempt at small talk after learning I only spoke English and drove me the twenty minutes to the closest metro station, alleviating me of a hundred rubles. From there I ducked underground and hopped a train towards downtown, moving slowly, acting as nonchalant as I could manage.

  Inside me, two emotions fought for the upper hand, both threatening to explode out at any moment. The first was anxiety. The Blok’s had known exactly what we were doing from the moment things got started. There was a better than not chance they knew I was on the ground, using an alias to book the ticket be damned. I had done my best at counter surveillance the entire time, using every reflective surface I could to monitor my tail, eyes darting back and forth, hidden behind my sunglasses, but I was far from infallible, especially in a city I didn’t know well.

  The other emotion was anger, a bear in hibernation within me, a cranky monster that was ready to finally explode forward and claim what it had been waiting so long for. Five long years I had managed to keep it dormant, removing all major stressors, cleansing my life of any remnants from the past. Everything that I had encountered in recent weeks though, starting with being shot at and encompassing every site and person from my past, had brought it all rushing back, five years of residual animosity heaped in with it.

  I chose a corner seat in the last car in the train and put my back to the wall, removed my sunglasses and counted the minutes in my head. My posture slouched and I pretended to doze, all the while watching every face that entered and exited, filing away anything suspicious.

  If somebody was tailing me and using a team approach, there would be no way for me to know it. Being stuck in the corner of an underground train would be the worst possible place in the world for me, at least for the next hour or so anyway, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  Most of the crowd departed the train at Red Square, tourists and sightseers off for a morning of roaming the country’s most famed attraction. I remained in place as a new wave of people entered, a carbon copy of the crew that had just left, the same type of people headed away from the Square, off to cross the next item from their to-do list.

  Two stops after the Square I exited the train and surfaced three blocks west, taking my time, roaming in and out of a handful of different shops. I bought a glass bottle of what appeared to be tea in one, a candy bar and a newspaper in another. All three items were plastered in Russian writing, none of it decipherable to me, though that was hardly the point.

  Six minutes before nine o’clock, local time, I appeared on the northwest corner of Red Square and walked along the outer edge of it. To my right was the sprawling expanse of the Kremlin outfitted in dark brick, a single spire of an oversized clock tower rising from the center. Scads of guards could be seen manning every gate, standing at attention, oblivious to the blustery winds already pushing across the Square.

  Large handfuls of tourists were clumped up into herds around the outside of it, guides in garish outfits explaining the building and its architecture in a dozen different languages, pictures being taken by the hundreds.

  In front of me rose St. Basil’s Cathedral, its multi-colored domes twisting up towards the sky. The grey overcast of the early morning did nothing to diminish its magnificence as it sat like a dazzling beacon on the end of a sea of brick and concrete, beckoning people to it.

  As inviting as the structure may have appeared, my destination lay much closer, sitting alone on a bench halfway between the two landmarks. Hunched over in a wool overcoat, collar flipped up to the ears, he tossed out small bits of breadcrumbs, a flock of pigeons hopping around before him, snatching them up.

  Six years had passed since I’d last seen Xavier Doss. Like me, the first hints of middle-age were starting to set in, though he could still pass for late twenties if need be. His cocoa colored skin was free from lines save a few crow’s feet around the eyes, his dark hair shorn close to his scalp.

  I slid down onto the bench beside him without extending a hand in formal greeting, the gesture far too obvious to anybody that might be watching. The bench seat felt cold beneath me as I settled onto it, watching the birds hop around in front of me.

  “X.”

  “Hawk,” he replied, flinging another clump of bread crumbs out onto the ground. “Nice haircut.”

  A half smile tugged at my mouth as I kept my gaze aimed forward, watching throngs of tourists and government workers all scurry by, heavy coats and dark colors already starting to make their first appearances of the season. If I was staying longer than a day or two I would have to purchase something much the same, my suit jacket already proving inadequate to the brisk wind blowing across us.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I said. “I didn’t even know for sure if the line was still good.”

  “Just barely,” X said simply. His voice was free of judgment or accusation, not even a hint of curiosity. I had asked for the meeting and therefore whatever transpired therein was going to be on me.

  Xavier and I had worked together briefly during our initial training into the agency. As former military personnel with fight training, I was winnowed towards being a field agent, bouncing around the globe, mixing things up on the ground. Coming from the Ivy Leagues and three years spent on Wall Street, Xavier was made an analyst. He was inserted into the Moscow branch of an American brokerage house, used to monitor any suspicious financial dealings goin
g on in Asia.

  While his skill set might not have aligned exactly with my current mission, he was an ally, which was what I needed most at the moment. Even if he couldn’t help me directly, I knew he wouldn’t do anything to get me killed either.

  “You still involved?” I asked.

  “Six more months,” he said, twisting away a crust of bread and tossing it, three pigeons diving towards it at once.

  I nodded. That would put him at almost ten years in, which was the standard career mark for most people abroad. After that they either circled back home for a nice cushy desk job or left the agency entirely, a sparkling letter of recommendation in their dossier.

  “Congratulations. Moving home or moving on?”

  “Home for now,” X replied, his face aimed away from me, his gaze shifting every few seconds, no doubt scanning the crowd as much as I was. “Maybe on thereafter, haven’t decided yet. Just need to get out of here.”

  “Too cold?” I asked.

  “Too white,” he corrected. “The snow, the people, all of it. Time to be closer to normality for a while.”

  The words weren’t exactly what I wanted to here, issued as a subtle hint for me not to do something that could potentially jeopardize his last bit of time in-country.

  “Point taken,” I said. “I guess I’ll just jump right in, you can decide if there’s any way to assist me or if we stand and walk in opposite directions, part as friends.”

  A small snort rolled out of X. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” I said. “Regardless of what happens in the next five minutes, I’ll buy you dinner in Washington the next time I’m there.”

  A long moment of silence passed as he considered the proposal. He twisted the last bit of bread in two and tossed both pieces out, wiping his hands clean against each other.

  “Start at the beginning,” he said.

  At this point I wasn’t even sure where that was, so I started where I knew I could get the biggest punch. Hopefully it would be enough to draw him in.