“Sounds good to me,” Ofelia said.
“If those three cars are black and German makes, they just came round a bend here at over two hundred per hour,” Mark shouted and pushed the accelerator down hard.
Ofelia turned around and looked at the three black cars catching up with them fast. “Kurwa mać,” she swore and unbuckled the basket-style infant car seat. She raised its handle, pulled it forward, and squeezed it into the rear legroom behind Dernov. She then pulled an anthracite-colored blanket from the cargo room, lay down on the backseat, and covered herself and her child with the blanket.
The needle vibrated as it passed the two hundred kilometers per hour mark. The family car would just not make more with three and a half passengers on board.
As the black cars closed in on them, Mark noticed he had just missed Hohenzollerndamm exit. He cursed. As the car came out of an underpass, he could see the Funkturm again. A sign announced the next exit to be Kurfürstendamm about a kilometer away.
The rear window shattered, and a million tiny shards of tempered glass sprayed on the blanket covering Ofelia and Xandi. The front window cracked, two finger-sized holes with a halo white like cotton candy around them appeared right between Sanders and Dernov. Two loud cracks, shots, followed.
Suddenly Dernov woke up and screamed like crazy. He quivered and tried to free himself from the safety belt that bound his hands to his sides.
“Easy, Pyotr,” Mark shouted while he kept as low behind the wheel as he could. “Calm down and get low.”
“Chto za khren,” the Russian screamed and wiggled his hands out of the belt. He turned around and slipped down into the passenger side leg room.
Mark’s headrest exploded, and a blizzard of fluff blew around his head. The driver side window shattered, and the wind blew the white flakes around further. The shock of the bullets just missing his head by a hand’s measure made Mark swerve to the right. He felt the tires touching the shoulder and swerved back to the left. He heard more two-round bursts fired behind.
The mirror told him that the shots all originated from the first SUV, a man had squeezed his burly body through the sunroof and aimed at Sanders’ car with a carbine. He kept firing, but Mark’s erratic swerving back and forth made the aim difficult.
Kurfürstendamm exit came up, and Mark tried to remember what the streets beyond the exit looked like. His mind was blank. “What the fuck,” he said and swerved right. The Japanese SUV sped up the two-lane ramp, Mark noticed the stop sign at the upper end. It was bad news, it told him there were small, slow streets ahead. He decided for the narrow street straight ahead. He saw a street sign flash by, Storkwinkel, an apt name for the one-way street with cars parked left and right. He had maneuvered himself into a crammed residential street. Not good.
Up ahead he saw a ten-story highrise at the end of the street. About fifty yards before the building, an even narrower street went off at a ninety-degree angle. Not good at all.
Mark braked hard and pulled the wheel around, the SUV’s driver side scraped along a small Japanese car that was parked first in the row on the left side. He shifted to second gear and hit the gas again. He could now see the end of the narrow street. Ahead he saw a four-lane avenue, Kurfürstendamm. It could only be Ku’damm. With screeching tires, he steered the car to the left onto the avenue and accelerated. The SUV still followed, so did the two sedans. At least the shooter had taken a break and sat back down.
They passed a monument, a couple of old Cadillacs sticking out of an oddly-shaped concrete block. He remembered the place, he and Michał had passed it on their way from Vitus’ co-worker’s house to the Polish embassy.
“We can’t outrun these guys on the empty avenues,” he shouted. “Ofelia, can you talk your way into the Polish embassy?”
His wife stuck out her head from under the blanket. Xandi’s crying was not muffled by the cover anymore, it ripped through the car like a siren now.
“Of course, I can!” she shouted and slipped back under. The crying did not stop, but it was muffled again.
“Okay, change of plans,” Mark shouted.
“What plan?” Dernov screamed and then puked all over the center console.
Mark ignored him and the acidic slime on his right hand. The needle rose steadily and reached 140 kilometers per hour. Mark tried to remember where to get off of Hubertusallee into which Kurfürstendamm had merged at the Cadillac monument.
Traffic had increased slightly, first trucks and vans traveled along the avenue. Some honked as Mark raced past them, sometimes cutting into their path to avoid direct line of sight between him and the hunters on his heels.
Trees lined the avenue, the houses got smaller and more elegant-looking. The street narrowed from four to two lanes. Memory failed Mark in the stressful moment. Then he saw a church on the right. He remembered it and braked hard again, turned right, and accelerated into yet another one-lane residential street.
Cars were parked on both sides of the street. Sanders’ SUV went about ninety where going thirty was considered speeding. As Mark tried to keep up the high speed and some sort of distance between them and their pursuers, he brushed against cars left and right. The luxury models had alarms, they sounded through the early morning. This neighborhood had probably not seen this much action since the war.
Mark heard more shots. He ignored them and concentrated on finding the right turn. A large villa with an iron gate was his waymark, he turned left into the same street he had used when he had taken Michał to the embassy three weeks earlier. The car razed off three thin metal bollards and a speed limit sign, better than hitting a car head on. One more corner, Mark knew it, this was the street beyond which he had parked for hours waiting for his best friend to return.
The motor stuttered. “No, no, no, you need to keep going. It’s right around the corner, baby,” he shouted at the dashboard. He turned right into Lassenstraße, brushed against another small car on the left side.
As he wanted to hit the accelerator again, he saw a mass of people blocking the narrow street. He cursed, tore hard at the wheel, braked, and hit a beech tree on the right side. Airbags exploded all around Dernov and Sanders.
Simultaneously, the SUV in pursuit screeched around the corner and pushed the small car Sanders had already dented into a fence. A few seconds after the impact, the passenger door opened.
The people in the street, men and women, were curiously looking at the freak accident. A lone man walked toward the family car and tilted his head to look inside. Some were filming the scene with their smartphones. A woman dialed 112, the international emergency services number.
Police sirens started to wail in the distance, they grew louder and slowly drowned the sound of the car alarms one street over.
“Out, out, out,” Mark shouted, unbuckled himself and Dernov, and opened the driver side door. He got out, kept low, and opened the back door. He pulled the blanket off Ofelia and hit her belt’s release button. When it clicked open, he started pulling her out by the legs.
“Wait,” she screamed pulling at the basket handle of the baby seat. “Xandi’s stuck. He’s stuck.”
Mark’s son cried.
His wife shouted for help. He saw a large man walking up to his car, it was the shooter.
Dernov, shell-shocked, was still in his seat. Mark let go of Ofelia, took the Glock out from between the driver’s seat and the console and fired through the passenger window.
Pop. Dernov screamed as the glass shattered next to him, he frantically fiddled for the door handle.
The big man did not flinch.
Mark violently pulled Dernov by his left wrist, over the filthy center console, and dropped him on the blacktop.
The sirens grew louder. Behind the slowly approaching Russian, he could see other men dressed in black suits running off in the two luxury sedans that had pursued the Sanders’ earlier.
Pop, pop, pop. He fired again blindly through the broken passenger window while climbing back into the car and r
eaching for the recliner handle with his left hand. He could finally pull it, the seat gave way, and Ofelia crawled out backward with the baby seat in hand.
The people in the crowd started to realize what the violent popping sounds were and started to panic. They shouted at the embassy building in Polish. They wanted to get inside, to find cover behind the concrete pillars of the fence and inside the building.
Dernov frantically crawled away from the scene. The lone man from the crowd first hesitated then duckwalked toward Dernov and pulled him up. He held out his hand to Ofelia. The three ran for the embassy’s still closed gate. The men in the crowd were first pulling at it, then started climbing it. A woman in the crowd shouted to bring the baby inside. And it’s mother. And the poor man who was with them.
Three men lifted Ofelia with the basket-style car seat in her arms up and over the fence. Another pushed Dernov over the shoulder-high barrier.
Mark slowly crawled backward out of the car and kept his gun aimed at the big guy’s center mass. His hands were shaking. He walked slowly backward away from the vehicle. He kept the man in his sights through the back windows and then around the rear of the car. He heard the crowd behind him shout something about the woman and the baby. He trusted the Poles would look out for his family.
He was halfway between the car and the embassy’s gate. Close, just a few more steps. His wife was there, his son. He would be safe there.
You don’t turn your back to a threat, he rememberd his self-defence coach’s words. He kept looking at the Russian, at the steel-blue eyes that said very clearly ‘I will kill you’.
He kept his gun trained on the threat, he could not turn around and run. He did not want to kill either. He had had to when he had shot those four men earlier. He had to protect his family. He had to fight for what he believed in. He had to. He still had to. Kill or be killed, he thought and pulled the trigger.
Pop, click. The Glock’s slide stayed open. Mark had fired his last round. The Russian was still standing and slowly walking toward him.
“Fuck,” Mark cursed under his breath with watery eyes. Shashka kept looking at him, his blue eyes still sent the same message.
Mark had understood, ‘I will kill you’. No, I will kill you first, he thought.
“Mark,” Ofelia shouted. She screamed her lungs out from the other side of the fence. Her eyes were full of tears. “To mój mąż, he’s my husband,” she shouted while other women tried to calm her down and pull her behind a concrete pillar.
Two arriving silver-and-blue Polizei squad cars screeched to a halt at the corner, sirens wailing. Another came to a sudden stop behind Mark, no siren. Sanders could only see the flashing blue light reflecting off the white-painted houses and the paint of the cars.
“Hände hoch, Waffe fallen lassen,” one of the cops shouted from behind his passenger door. Mark complied. He extended his hands to the sides and dropped the Glock. Then he raised his hands all the way above his head.
The driver cop slowly walked up to Sanders while his partner covered the scene with his Walther P99. Mark felt the officer’s hand on his shoulder, then a sole in his knee pit and his legs gave way. His knees hit the blacktop, they hurt like hell. Behind his head, the policeman put on the cuffs.
“Sie sind verhaftet,” was the last thing Mark Sanders consciously heard. He was arrested.
In the back of his mind, he heard Xandi cry, Ofelia shout his name, Svetlana say that he drove like her grandmother, Hardy curse him for playing hardball when all he was was a kid with a glove.
The Russian, Shashka, stood still and watched Sanders being cuffed. When the other policemen had reached him, he turned around and said only one word.
“Diplomat.”
The cops looked sideways at the black SUV’s plates and the sticker reading ‘Corps Diplomatique’ on the back. They sighed and holstered their guns, then asked politely for a piece of ID.
Epilogue
The dashboard on the laptop screen ran wild. Numbers counted upward in incredible speed. Bar charts reached new all-time highs, and gauge diagrams reached the far right of the scale. TLKS’ infrastructure held up despite most of the fifty million Russian members being online simultaneously.
“It’s done,” Pyotr Dernov said and turned around to Mlada and Ofelia.
“You can’t start a fire without a spark,” Svetlana replied and squeezed Ofelia’s hand.
✽✽✽
The usual sounds of Moscow, the roaring of modern high-powered engines, the clattering of old two-cycle engines, and the bells of trams, drowned in a cacophony of ringtones and chirps. The usual hustle and bustle of people walking to and from work, shopping, sightseeing, stopped. All in a matter of minutes. It seemed like someone had stopped time.
This second, when all over Russia, an approximate fifty million TLKS users got a personal message from Pyotr Dernov, seemed to last for hours.
People stopped in the street to read it and click on the link that told them about the corruption going on in their city, their place of work, their neighborhood.
They learned the truth about their duma representatives, governors, mayors, city hall employees, factory directors, police officers. The enormity of the wealth accumulated by these people, effectively stolen from the people whom they were supposed to represent and protect, shocked people and made them stop doing what they were doing on the spot.
They stood on street corners, on squares, in parks, they forwarded links to friends and family via email and other messenger services. Within less than an hour, next to every single Russian had heard about the Dernov Files.
Public life ground to a halt.
One would not be able to catch a bus, the driver would just sit in his seat and click around on his smartphone. One would not be able to order coffee, the waitresses would stand in a corner, hunched over their phones, talking and showing each other the latest discoveries on their screens.
Children visiting their grandparents sat at the kitchen table explaining their babushka and dedushka what was happening.
In the Kremlin, a young man in an ill-fitting suit sat in the corner of a large meeting room and ignored the senior official screaming at him from the head of the table.
✽✽✽
This is not the end.
Defiant will return.
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About The Author
Joseph Carter started following his passion for espionage thrillers in early 2018 when he began work on
Another Man’s Freedom Fighter. He lives in Berlin with his family and enjoys travel, good food, and wine.
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