The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  McCall pushed himself through the narrow opening. Claustrophobia descended upon him fast. He snagged to a stop.

  Couldn’t move.

  He fought down an unexpected surge of panic. He could not be trapped down here unable to move forward or back the way he’d come. He closed his eyes in the darkness. Forced himself to stay calm. Opened his eyes. Inched forward.

  Two more inches.

  Three more.

  Another three.

  McCall saw the dim light now on his right from the main storm tunnel. He squirmed toward it.

  A little bit closer.

  Within arm’s reach now.

  Then he stopped.

  Held fast on both sides.

  The pipes were crushing his stomach and breaking his spine. He fought down the panic again. Took a deep breath. Lunged to his left.

  Couldn’t move.

  Lunged one more time.

  No good.

  McCall became very still. Willed himself not to scream. Felt the panic being pushed down.

  One more time.

  Do it!

  He lunged to his right.

  And broke out of the narrow space into the storm tunnel.

  McCall stood for a moment in the clammy semidarkness, catching his breath. Ahead of him, Salam and Rachid had stopped in the tunnel. Their backs were to him. They’d heard something, but whatever it was, it was in front of them.

  Probably Fooz shuffling his feet nervously.

  McCall would have no problem killing both of them. They wouldn’t hear him come up behind them. But he didn’t want to do that. It could bring reprisals down onto the Subterranean Dwellers. Even if he got rid of the bodies—and there were a thousand places to dump bodies in these tunnels where no one would ever find them—Borislav Kirov might be told that Salam and Rachid had gone down here.

  And then Jackson T. Foozelman strolled out of his hiding place into the main tunnel. He looked very surprised to see the two enforcers. They held their guns on him.

  “Hey, there!” Fooz called. “What are you guys doing down here? Why the guns?”

  Salam stepped forward, a commanding presence, his voice reasonable.

  “FBI agents,” he said. “We’re looking for two fugitives.”

  “That you think came down here?” Fooz asked, as if incredulous. “No one comes down to these tunnels unless they’re maintenance men from the city or subway workers. Unless they’re aimin’ to move down here.”

  “They were trapped. We don’t see they had anywhere else to go.”

  Fooz shook his head. “No, sir. Not down here. We kinda got our own security system in these tunnels. We’d know if anyone came down here wasn’t supposed to be here.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Salam demanded.

  “The Subs, son. Subterranean Dwellers. This is where we live.”

  “How many are you?” Rachid asked.

  “Oh, never really counted, people come and go, you know? Some can’t stand living in the upworld and climb down here to see if they can survive. Some of us, well it gets to ya after a few years, the smell, the isolation, they give up and go back to the surface. But I reckon there’s a couple of hundred of us down here. There’s hundreds of miles of tunnels under New York. Here, let me give ya a tour of my area. Be careful of the rats, though. And we got cockroaches that make the rats look puny.”

  Salam lowered his gun, motioning for Rachid to do the same. They put them into holsters under their coats. “We’ll take your word for it, Pops.”

  “Want me to show ya the way back to where ya climbed down? Which manhole was it, Forty-second street?”

  “We’ll find it.”

  “Awful easy to get lost down here. All these tunnels crisscross each other. Ya gotta know how to walk ’em. Also there’s the subway tunnels. You stumble into one of them, you better watch out for the live rail, or it’ll fry ya.”

  Fooz glanced past them without seeming to. McCall knew he could see his figure silhouetted against the light. The old man looked back at the enforcers.

  “Let me show you a shortcut back to that ladder,” Fooz offered. “Right this way.”

  He turned and walked on down the tunnel. Salam and Rachid hesitated, then followed him. McCall pressed himself back into the pipes into dark shadow. But the killers didn’t look back. He couldn’t hear what Fooz was saying, but he was chattering on and waving his arms dramatically and McCall figured the two enforcers couldn’t wait to climb back up that ladder and get the hell out of here.

  It was Gershon that McCall was worried about.

  He hadn’t liked what he’d seen in the agent’s eyes when he’d walked out of Candy Annie’s warm oasis home.

  * * *

  Danil Gershon had no intention of going to Dr. Bennett’s son for treatment, or to The Company safe house on Ninth Avenue. At least, not yet. His cover had been blown. He did not hold Robert McCall responsible for that. McCall could not have known he was working undercover at the Dolls nightclub. The fault was with himself. Something he had done had betrayed him to Kirov, a momentary recognition in his eyes when McCall had walked into the alcove, a change in his expression, something in his body language. Or they may have been suspicious of him for some time. He had fucked up. It was up to him to make this right.

  His arm hurt like hell, but it was not incapacitating. Dr. Bennett of the Subterranean Dwellers had done a good job. The painkiller, might have been morphine, was wearing off, but that was okay. He needed to be alert. He couldn’t have a narcotic blurring his senses or dulling his reflexes.

  That sweet waif Candy Annie had taken him through six tunnels to an iron ladder against a concrete wall exactly like the one he and McCall had climbed down. Or rather, the one McCall had climbed down with Gershon on his back. That had hurt his pride. He didn’t need to be carried by anyone. But he was grateful to McCall.

  Gershon had climbed up the rusting ladder with difficulty, but it hadn’t been as painful as he’d feared. He’d looked down once and saw the young woman’s pale face staring up at him, concerned for a complete stranger. Then she’d turned around and he’d lost sight of her in the shadows, going back to her sad little dwelling under the city streets. He hoped McCall could talk her into joining the real world again. But McCall wasn’t the warmest human being on the planet. It wasn’t like him to care about strangers.

  Or it hadn’t been.

  Gershon’s plan was simple. He had McCall’s Sig Sauer 227 in his jacket pocket. He was going to walk right into Dolls. They’d be setting up for that night. Kirov would probably be in his office. He would walk up the stairs to the second floor. If Kuzbec or Salam or any of the other enforcers were there, and tried to stop him, he’d shoot them dead. He would surprise Kirov and shoot him also, probably in the leg. It would slow Gershon down, but better Kirov was in pain and worrying about whether he was going to bleed out and die. He’d then carry Kirov down to the man’s Mercedes, which would be parked in its usual spot in front of the nightclub. He’d take the car keys out of Kirov’s pocket and drive away. Then he’d get his arm wound treated and drive to the Ninth Avenue safe house and call Control.

  It was a good plan.

  He thought it was what McCall would do.

  As Gershon crossed the narrow alleyway behind Dolls, heading for the back door of the nightclub, a black Lexus roared into life at the other end. It gunned forward. Gershon only had time to half turn before the vehicle hit him, throwing him over the hood, then right over the car. He crashed down onto the broken cobblestones.

  In the Lexus, Bakar Daudov backed the car over Gershon’s body, just to make sure, then ran over him again. He stopped the car, got out, took a Sig Sauer 227 pistol out of Gershon’s jacket pocket, noted with interest the bullet wound in his arm, got back into the Lexus, and drove away. Someone would find Gershon’s dead body and call the police to report the hit-and-run.

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoon McCall went to Central Park. He found Granny sitting alone at one of the
chess tables. There were four games in progress, but not near him. McCall sat down opposite Granny, hit the timer, and moved his white pawn.

  “Pawn to queen four. What the hell were you doing?”

  Granny moved his black pawn and hit the timer. “Pawn to knight six. You weren’t expecting trouble at Grand Central. It was rendezvous protocol between agents who accidentally meet in the field. I just had a bad feeling.”

  “Pawn to king four,” McCall said, and moved the chess piece.

  “Bishop to knight seven.” Granny moved his bishop. “You’ve been out of it for a while. There are times when you need someone better than Kostmayer to watch your back.”

  “You fired into a concourse full of innocent people.”

  “None of them got hit by any of my bullets.”

  “That’s not the point!” McCall almost shouted at him. “You endangered their lives.”

  “And saved yours.”

  McCall took a breath, then nodded. “Bishop to king three.”

  Granny moved his next chess piece in answer to McCall’s move. “Pawn to bishop five. There was a young woman wounded in the chest. I checked up on her later in the day. She pulled through. The young turk who shot her? Did it deliberately. Wasn’t even aiming in your direction. Very bad guys.”

  “White pawn takes black pawn to bishop five. I didn’t ask for your help.”

  “That doesn’t mean you didn’t need it. You’re emotional, McCall. That’s new. Might be a good thing, might not.”

  “I have a different life now.”

  “After what I saw in Grand Central Station yesterday, not that different,” Granny said, but there was no irony in his voice. “Bishop to knight two.”

  “Queen to rook five,” McCall said.

  “Really? Okay. Pawn to knight six.”

  Granny took off his square-cut glasses and polished them with a blue silk handkerchief, looking out into the park beyond them. A softball game was in progress about a hundred yards away. He watched a young man swing at a ball like he was at Yankee Stadium. The bat connected and the ball sailed over the first baseman’s head. The batter took off. Another young man, in jeans, a lavender T-shirt, and canvas shoes, looking like he’d just been soaked off a sunglasses ad, came home to score.

  “I wasn’t in that church with you,” Granny said. “I should have been.”

  McCall let the silence deepen between them. He thought back to that day. Then he made his move.

  “White pawn takes black pawn knight six.”

  He took away Granny’s black pawn.

  Granny moved his black knight without even looking at it. “Knight to bishop six.”

  “White pawn takes black pawn rook seven.”

  Granny looked down at the chessboard, as if in surprise.

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference if you’d been in the church,” McCall said.

  “You don’t know that,” Granny said. “Neither do I. But it’s haunted me, too.” He put back on his glasses. “Why did those guys at Grand Central want you dead, if you’ve been off the radar for this long?”

  “They weren’t after me. They were after Danil Gershon.”

  Granny made his last move. “Knight takes queen rook five.”

  McCall made his. “Bishop to knight six. Mate.”

  McCall stood up. Granny looked down at the chess battleground and nodded. “Gioachino Greco. Mate in eight moves. Nice.”

  “You knew what I was doing. You let it happen.”

  “Did I? Things happen to you, McCall. Bad things.” Granny glanced up at him, the sunlight catching his square-cut glasses, making his eyes opaque. “What are you doing? If it’s not a Company mission, who are you helping?”

  “Probably myself.”

  McCall walked away from him. There was a roar from the softball game as one of the Wall Street brokers got called out at second.

  * * *

  Bentleys was a madhouse on Monday and it was only 6:30 P.M. The bar stools were full with more patrons standing behind them. Laddie was mixing drinks with fast hands, taking credit cards and putting them beside the register, grabbing orders from the servers. McCall watched him as he put some drinks onto a tray. No one rocked a vodka gimlet the way Laddie rocked one.

  On the TV set over the bar was a news broadcast with no sound. It was devoted almost solely to the shootout at Grand Central Station. There was shaky footage taken from people’s cell phones of the terror scene. People on the ground—the one uniformed cop lying dead, the other calling for backup—other people running for the exits. No shots of any of the gunmen. No shots of McCall in the crowd, or Gershon or Granny. The uniformed police officer was the only fatality. Innocent people had been injured, mainly in the stampede to get off the concourse, but none badly. One young woman had been taken to Bellevue in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the chest, but she was now in stable condition. By the time the police had arrived in force, all of the dead gunmen had simply disappeared.

  Cleanup, McCall thought. No evidence left behind. No way any of them could be traced back to Dolls nightclub.

  McCall put the last drink onto his tray and moved out from behind the bar with it. He made his way to the booth by the window where the Karen Mafia were gathered. He waved off their server, Amanda, whose hair was a dark mauve tonight, accentuating her black lipstick and eyeliner.

  “I got this,” McCall told her.

  Karen was showing her friends something in a faux Louis Vuitton Speedy 30 purse. She quickly dropped her purse at her feet, but he’d noted the Smith & Wesson pistol nestled in among the cosmetics. It was an SD9 VE model, 10 + 1 capacity, a few years old. He didn’t say anything about it. He set out the drinks all around.

  “Manhattan, Corona, watermelon screwdriver, Long Island iced tea, Sex-on-the-Beach, and a strawberry daiquiri. I’ll need to see some ID.”

  Karen looked up at him, surprised. “You carded me when I first came in here, Bobby!”

  McCall’s tone was brisk. He wasn’t playing “friendly Bobby” tonight. “We get a lot of customers at Bentleys. Need to see all of your IDs.”

  One by one, amid some muttering and eye rolling, the girls fished out their wallets and took out their driver’s licenses to show him. McCall picked up each one and appeared to be examining them carefully, but he barely glanced at any of them until Karen handed him her driver’s license. McCall looked at her address, memorized it, and handed the license back to her.

  “Thanks. Sorry about that. The boss is on our ass about IDs in here. Seems some guy got into an accident two nights ago after he’d been drinking beer at Bentleys. Wasn’t seventeen yet.”

  That seemed to relax the table. Karen smiled at him.

  “No problem, Bobby.”

  “You get to go home to see your folks this weekend?” McCall asked, as if casually.

  “Yes! We did the whole big barbecue thing. Played flag football on the front lawn.”

  Very Norman Rockwell, McCall thought. Like the patchwork squares that Candy Annie had sewn together for the bright quilt on her narrow bed below the New York streets.

  That’s where Karen got the gun, McCall thought. Probably her dad’s.

  “You ever see that creep again?” he asked her. “The one you thought was stalking you?”

  “He is stalking me!” Karen flared. “His name’s Jeff Carlson. He was at S.O.B.’s last night!” Off McCall’s look: “Style On Beat, it’s a nightclub on Varick. Don’t you ever get out, Bobby?”

  “I play bingo once a month,” McCall said. “You sure it was him?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ve been looking out for him. I took his picture with my iPhone.”

  “Let me see it,” McCall said.

  Karen looked a little startled.

  “In case he walks into Bentleys, I want to know what he looks like.”

  Karen nodded. Good idea. She fished her phone out of her pocket, scrolled through enough photos to fill an FBI database, found the one she wanted, and handed her cell phone
to McCall. He pretended to drop it, muttered “Sorry,” and picked it up. As he did so, his fingers flew over the silver keys on her cell. Then he straightened and looked at Carlson’s image on the LED screen. The picture was a little rushed, taken in the Style On Beat club, just off the dance floor, but Carlson’s face was in focus. McCall nodded and handed Karen’s cell phone back to her. She showed the picture to the rest of the eager group, who passed the iPhone around almost in awe. A real-life stalker. Wow.

  McCall moved away with the empty tray back to the bar.

  Kostmayer was waiting for him on the last stool beside the server’s station. Amanda was putting cocktails that Laddie had just set out onto her tray. She looked Kostmayer over, liked what she saw, gave him a shy smile. She moved away with the loaded tray.

  “Got a number for her?” Kostmayer asked.

  “Big trouble,” McCall said. “Katia and Natalya?”

  “Living the American dream at an apartment in the Dakota. Katia is certain there are emotional strings attached. I told her there weren’t. Try not to make a liar out of me.”

  McCall ignored that. “What about Danil Gershon?”

  “He didn’t go to the safe house. I waited for two hours, then I went to Dolls nightclub and looked around, but I didn’t see him.”

  “He wouldn’t have gone back there.”

  McCall glanced around, but no one in the noisy restaurant was paying any attention to them. The news broadcast was over. There were games playing on four of the TV screens around the bar, Yankees against the Orioles, Phillies and Red Sox, a Canadian hockey game, Canucks versus the Habs, and a hushed golf tournament.

  “You sure about that?” Kostmayer said.

  “Kirov sent a termination squad of ten men,” McCall said. “Gershon wouldn’t walk right back into the lion’s den.”

  “Sure he would. McCall wannabe.”

  At that moment Control walked into Bentleys.

  McCall saw him reflected in the big mirror behind the bar. He walked past Sherry at the hostess desk up to the bar, showing Kostmayer no recognition whatsoever.