Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  “Shit,” said one of the guards in the east tower, shivering from the cold. The tower’s internal heating system had failed months before and the space heaters allocated to provide heat in its stead kept blowing fuses in the ancient facility.

  The world believed this infamous Soviet-era gulag to have been closed a generation before, an obsolete relic of the Cold War and nothing more. The atrocities that had taken place within these walls were little known beyond them, since so few ever imprisoned here survived to tell of the tale.

  “What’s that?” the second guard in the east tower raised.

  “What’s what?”

  “There’s something moving in the ice mist.”

  The second guard raised the binoculars in his gloved hands to his eyes, but pulled the frigid plastic from his flesh at first touch. “I’m too cold to care.”

  Those were his last words before a bullet pierced his forehead dead center. He fell toward the other guard who reached out to grab him when a bullet caught him in the identical spot.

  * * *

  There were only sixty-three forgotten men currently imprisoned at Koryak, a facility capable of handling ten times that number. As a result, security had gone lax and those serving out their enlistments here passed the time struggling to play cards from within bulky gloves while bundled up in three or four layers of clothing. Indeed, there was little to “secure” when the bulk of the sixty-three prisoners were old, infirm, weak, or some combination of the three. Koryak didn’t seem a gulag notorious for its brutality any longer, so much as a rest home for the forgotten. And those charged with guarding it believed the facility’s secretive nature, along with its distance from anything even approaching civilization, made for the best security of all. No roads whatsoever led to the complex and helicopters had trouble managing the region’s winds in the best of conditions, never mind ones like these.

  The recreation room overlooked the front of the prison complex awash in a thick ice mist, before bright orange flashes flared amid it. The soldiers saw the flashes an instant before the explosive percussion burned the air and blew out a measure of the room’s glass. A brief wave of heat comforted the soldiers before a frigid blast of air surged inward, just ahead of the combination of shrapnel and ruptured glass tearing them apart.

  * * *

  The woman yanked off the full-face Nomex mask that had protected her from the cold as well as from witnesses and security cameras. A shock of jet-black hair tumbled out, making her green eyes look even more vibrant, so piercing and intense in moments as focused as this that it was difficult to meet them. She led the gunmen down the halls streaked with grime and peeling paint, encountering little resistance along the way until they reached the final fortified checkpoint set before the lone cellblock in use.

  “RPGs!” the woman ordered.

  Three of her men unshouldered and fired the weapons in rapid succession, obliterating the security station in a mass of twisted steel and shattered glass. The woman led her men over that and the bodies of the guards within, surging on toward the wing’s command center.

  “Pomogite, nas atakuyut!”

  She heard the desperate call that the prison was under attack, screamed by one guard into an old-fashioned shortwave radio, as two more braced themselves before a door barricaded with desk, chairs, and filing cabinets. The woman signaled her men to take cover.

  “Use your fire to distract them,” she ordered, and heard their gunfire ring out immediately, while she looped around to the command center’s lone interior window.

  “Pomogite, nas—”

  The woman shot the guard operating the radio through it first, then the other two men in rapid succession, never once considering how exposed she’d been herself in the process. Once inside the command center, she yanked a heavy lever sideways to mechanically unlock all the doors in the cellblock beyond and shot out the radio, just in case.

  From there, the woman headed down a set of rusted steel stairs to the block and straight to the seventh cell down an endless aisle. The first thing she saw was an interconnected series of landscape drawings that made it look as if the blank cell walls actually formed an expansive picture window offering a majestic view of a pristine landscape beyond. The next thing she noticed was an old man with long gray hair and beard adding to them in deliberate, painstaking fashion with what looked like children’s crayons.

  “Professor Taupmann?”

  The old man continued his drawing, either ignoring or not hearing her call.

  “Professor Taupmann,” she said louder.

  He turned finally, regarding her with a start and then squinting. “Did you find my glasses?”

  “Come with me, Professor.”

  The old man smeared the collection of colors staining his hands onto his drab, worn prison uniform. “Because I need my glasses. I can’t read without my glasses.”

  The woman yanked the cell door open. “We need to go.”

  He narrowed his gaze. “You’re a woman,” he said, as if realizing it for the first time.

  “Please, Professor. Now.”

  “Oh, I can’t leave,” he said quite calmly, unmoved by her presence. “I’m a prisoner.”

  “Not anymore, Professor,” Raven Khan told him, moving a pair of glasses resting atop his head to the bridge of his nose. “There’s someone who very much wants to meet with you.”

  FOUR

  ANKARA, TURKEY, THREE WEEKS AGO

  The young American woman moved about Weavers’ Road amid the old shops that filled the landscape. Most knew her as Amanda, but she always thought of herself as “Manda,” from her younger sister’s inability to pronounce her name properly as a toddler. Manda had stuck, inevitably drawing a smile when she thought back to those happy, simple times that had spawned it.

  But not today. Today nothing could make Manda smile, as she traced her way amid the shops and kiosks stacked high with fabrics, hand-woven carpets, and leather goods. The awkward route she’d traced through alleys and along less traveled side streets pressed up against the façades of buildings had left her already torn clothes even more tattered. The blood from scrapes on her arms and face was fresh, but not the swollen, yellowing bruises that persisted long after the beatings had ended.

  Where am I?

  This surely wasn’t any city in America and Manda had traveled far too little in her life to recognize it from the geography or architecture. It took a sign over some kind of municipal building to tell her she was in Ankara.

  Turkey, then. The men who’d abducted her had taken her all the way to Turkey.

  Barely an hour before, she’d managed to escape her captors here—the brutal, foul-smelling men to whom Manda had been turned over. Her last memory of freedom was a champagne toast with the dashing playboy she’d met while performing at the Seven Sins Resort’s Cirque du Soleil show called Elysium on the Las Vegas Strip. She’d been putting her gymnastic abilities to great use, was actually hanging upside down the first time she spotted him staring and smiling at her from his front row seat. He was there again at the following night’s show after which there was a note from him waiting in her dressing room.

  He claimed to be from Russia and swept Manda off her feet. The best restaurants, shopping, front row seats at the biggest shows in town. One glorious week later, she put in for her vacation time in order to take a surprise trip he’d planned for them. She remembered toasting their trip with champagne aboard his private jet, vaguely recalled the flute slipping from her hand.

  Manda awakened some indistinguishable time later in a windowless suite fit for a queen where a man she bore only vague memories of took her repeatedly. The suite had a view facing a sea, rich with pounding waves, she didn’t recognize. During the day she’d listen to those waves and whatever sounds she could hear in search of clues for where she was. She knew they must have continued to drug her, and yet what little she recalled of the man himself was that he always took her by force, brutally from behind so she wouldn’t be able to se
e his face. And the few glimpses she caught revealed a figure shrouded in darkness everywhere.

  “What do you want from me?” Manda had wailed him at one point, finally finding her voice.

  The man started away from her and kept walking, didn’t even give her the courtesy of looking back before he shut the door behind him, leaving her to the darkness.

  That very morning, following the first night in many the man didn’t visit her, she managed to hold a noxiously sweet drink in her mouth long enough to spit it out without any of her captors noticing. They packed her into the back of a windowless van where she pretended to be as dazed as the preceding days that had stretched into weeks. And when the van door was thrust open, she burst out and bolted. Manda had barely stopped since fleeing an area close enough to the city’s docks to smell the salty sea air.

  Now that air was rich instead with the scents rising from the handbags, jackets, belts, and satchels that cluttered the scene. She slid through thin smoke wafting off grills that featured cooked meats, fish, and chicken, some already skewered and roasting on kabob spits. Antiques were featured among the quaint shops as well, along with all manner of jewelry, embroidered artwork, and flatware fashioned by coppersmiths who practiced their craft just as it had been done centuries before in old-fashioned fire-baked kilns.

  Manda cocked a gaze to the rear again, conscious of any ripples in the crowd that might indicate the men after her were closing. No sign yet, but she couldn’t let herself expect them to give themselves away.

  “American Embassy,” she said to a few passersby who looked friendly. “Can you tell me where I can find the American Embassy?”

  A local man who spoke English finally noted her efforts and approached from the other side of the street.

  “Atatürk Boulevard,” he said, indicating the direction in which the embassy was located.

  It turned out to be in another section of the city entirely, adding to her desperation made even worse by the need to constantly check around her on the chance she’d been followed or spotted. With no money for a cab, no money at all, Manda’s best hope of reaching the embassy was the subway, where she could either sneak on or appeal to the mercy of another friendly stranger. Having no mastery or even familiarity with the language, she didn’t dare try for a police station or even approach an officer if she spotted one. A few cruised by in boxy sedans with lights on top, and Manda resisted her initial instinct to flag one down.

  The stranger who’d finally helped her also pointed her in the direction of the nearest station for the Ankara subway, known as the Ankaray. It was located not far from this ring of old shops, just up the road from a gate before which rested rolling carts selling figs, dried fruits, and spices, their fresh scents already replacing those of grilling meats and leather goods she’d left behind her.

  Manda stopped, swung to check the street again.

  Still nothing.

  She picked up her pace slightly, passing through the assemblage of rolling pushcarts and stationary kiosks. The Ankaray stop seemed so far away, but then it was upon her, and Manda descended into the cool darkness down stone stairs toward the platform below. Clinging to the hope she had made it, believing her escape to be all but complete with the rest just a formality.

  Almost to the bottom, though, she saw the gate was chained shut, the station beyond unexpectedly closed.

  Manda rattled the chain and kicked at the fence in frustration, feeling trapped again, frightened that all the efforts that had led to escape from her own de facto prison had gone for naught. But she wasn’t about to give up after coming so far, with so much at stake. Instead, she swung to remount the stairs and find an alternate route to the U.S. Embassy.

  And saw a dark figure looming at the top, staring down at her.

  Manda felt her insides gnarl and knot up. She tried to swallow but couldn’t find enough breath to manage the effort. She was left with nothing, no way to leave even a signal of the truth, of what the world needed to hear, to know.

  Unless …

  Above her, the dark figure started down the stairs, his heavy boots clacking against the concrete. Manda needed a way, any way, to leave some hint, some clue that could alert someone to her plight, her identity. As the large figure dipped into the shadows, she tore the gold pendant—her lucky charm—from its chain. She had to do anything she could to prevent others from ending up as she had. With any luck, it would be enough to help catch the men behind this.

  Manda stole one last look at the beautiful raised design finely emblazoned onto a subtle ridge in the pendant’s center. Then she slipped it onto her tongue and found the breath she needed to swallow hard enough to push it down. The pendant scratched at her throat, almost forcing her to gag, but she resisted the reflex long enough for it to slide on and imagined she could feel the pendant plop into her stomach as the figure reached the bottom.

  A sliver of sunlight revealed him, thankfully, to be a policeman. Dressed in a navy blue uniform, he eyed her coldly, suspiciously. Probably thought she was a prostitute about to turn a trick.

  Manda was reaching out to touch the officer’s shoulder, ready to plead with him in English, when he rammed a knife into her gut, twisting first to the side and then up. Amanda felt herself crumpling, felt her insides spilling. She was almost dead by the time she hit the cold concrete, lying at the police officer’s feet. The last thing she felt was him ruffling through her pockets to make sure there was nothing on her person that might give away her identity.

  Manda pictured the pendant she’d swallowed sitting in her stomach in the final moment before her eyes locked open.

  PART TWO

  NOW

  I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

  Alexander the Great

  FIVE

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  “If you could all come forward,” began the auctioneer from beneath the covered porch, “we’ll begin. I see a lot of familiar faces and the handout describes the procedure,” he added, clearly impatient to get to his next location, “so I’m going to assume there are no questions. The starting bid is ten thousand dollars.”

  A bevy of hands, from virtually all of those gathered, shot up in the air, drawing catcalls from the protestors clustered on the sidewalk. All victims of the spate of foreclosures that had descended upon Las Vegas the last five years, a process further slowed by a severe backlog in the courts. A few of those protests at auctions like these had turned violent recently, leading to a police presence at all of them.

  “Do I hear twenty thousand?” the auctioneer, a tall, thin man with dyed black hair matted to his scalp, continued.

  A Hispanic couple stood off to the side. The man looking stiff and angry, his expression bent in a bitter scowl, seeming not to feel his wife pressed close against him fighting back tears.

  The hands of about half those gathered before the modest sixteen-hundred-square-foot home on Pinecliff Drive eased upward. The home was well maintained but lacked landscaping atop its tiny yard. No garage, but there was a paved driveway where an overhang used to be until the owners removed it to make room for a basketball hoop for their sons. They’d bought at the peak of the housing boom, exceeding their means to make sure each of their boys had a bedroom to himself in a decent neighborhood, something they saw as crucial to the American Dream to which they were committed. They’d emigrated from Guatemala legally, became citizens, and found jobs in the hospitality industry that allowed them to make ends meet.

  But only just.

  So when the recession cost Imelda Marquez her job and her husband Juan his overtime, the struggles began. They cut back, found a way to survive until Juan was laid off, too. Odd jobs only carried so far and after countless rounds with the bank, loan modification specialists, and anyone else who’d speak to them, foreclosure had proven impossible to forestall and the auction had been scheduled for today.

  “Do I hear sixty-five thousand?” the auctioneer announced
, after checking his watch.

  More of the crowd had peeled away at each ten thousand dollar increment until at sixty-five thousand only two active bidders remained. A pair of men sweating in their suits who represented a real estate investment trust, and a woman wearing a stylish Nicole Miller linen pants suit with white blouse and vest. The woman’s dark Dior sunglasses covered part of her brow beneath a bird’s nest of thick black hair and makeup so perfectly applied as to seem part of her skin. The woman stood with her back to the men from the trust that operated under several names to avoid scrutiny from local consumer groups and the kind of bad publicity its practices attracted. They had shaken their heads, faces wrinkling in displeasure when she strode onto the scene like it was some kind of red carpet event, paying them no heed whatsoever.

  “Eighty thousand,” the woman called out before the auctioneer could continue, turning toward the men representing the real estate trust for the first time. “We both know you’re not authorized to go above seventy-five, so let’s cut to the chase. See you soon.”

  “How many times does your boss plan on doing this?” one of them asked, brushing past her.

  “As many times as you.”

  * * *

  Once she’d initialed the preliminary paperwork and handed over a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty thousand dollars, the woman walked right past the protestors, ignoring their heckles and taunts. She rounded the corner and veered toward a Lamborghini idling beneath the only trees on the street thick enough to offer any shade.

  Naomi Burns made straight for the passenger side door and climbed inside the Tyrant Class model soon to go into production worldwide, already stripping off her wig.

  “Another for your collection, Michael,” she said to the man in the air-conditioned cool of the driver’s seat, listening to the deceptively quiet purr of its V-12, seven hundred horsepower engine.