The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  “We need to talk,” he said to McCall.

  Laddie loaded up two more server’s trays with cocktails and Coronas.

  “Can you give me an hour?” McCall asked him.

  It looked for a moment as if the young bartender was ticked off—it was very busy. But he looked at Control, felt the palpable tension between the two men, and nodded.

  “Sure, Bobby. I’ll pull Amanda off the floor. No problem.”

  “Thanks.”

  McCall didn’t look at Control as he took off his black Bentleys apron, tossed it to one side, and walked to the front door. Control followed him. Kostmayer noted the young bartender watching them leave.

  “Old boss,” Kostmayer murmured. “Bobby left his last employment a little abruptly. They’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  CHAPTER 23

  He sat in the lavish office that had been put at his disposal for the grand opening. It was all steel and chrome with a glass-topped desk and pieces of modernistic sculptures, white explosions of tendrils like flowering alien plants that reached up to the tiny light sockets recessed into the ceiling. There were multicolored cubes decorating stark white shelves and chairs that looked like NASA had designed them. None of it was to this man’s exquisite taste, but that was fine. He would only be here for the weekend. He sat in an office chair, which was a padded bigger version of the white ones, not that it was any more comfortable. He was dressed in a tuxedo with a red bow tie. He looked elegant and relaxed. He had kept the office door ajar, because he wanted to hear the dance music drifting up from the main floor of the club. It pounded to a primal beat, some incomprehensible rap lyric. Leonardo was in Singapore shooting a movie, and had agreed to come to the opening night of the latest Dolls nightclub. The star was dressed in a white tux, right out of Gatsby. He had managed to get through the phalanx of reporters and photographers and had run into, quite by chance, his costar from Titanic. They had embraced and kissed and then did an impromptu turn together on the dance floor. The media had gone crazy. It was the best publicity the man could ever have hoped for. Now if one of the supermodels who had been desperately trying to get Leo’s autograph could have a wardrobe malfunction, let one of those big, ripe breasts pop out for the cameras, he’d be on YouTube.

  He stared at the LED screen on his Mac. On it Borislav Kirov’s image was as clear as if he’d been sitting across the desk. The man listened without moving, with no flicker of expression crossing his face. He was good at disguising his emotions. Kirov finished his Skype report. It was as if he’d run out of steam. He was careful, patient, and ruthless. And not accustomed to setbacks. He had not liked giving the intel he had just provided.

  Particularly about Katia and Natalya.

  Alexei Berezovsky appreciated Kirov’s honestly and frankness.

  But inside he was seething.

  “Natalya was not hurt or touched?” he asked.

  In his own office, with its antiques and shadows, in direct contrast with what he could see of Berezovsky’s office at the Dolls nightclub in Singapore, Kirov felt short of breath. He did not want to start hyperventilating, not in front of his boss. Any sign of weakness was a death sentence with this man. Kirov made certain his voice was strong and impartial.

  “No.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Returned to her mother.”

  “They are at their home?”

  “As far as I know. Natalya went to school today.”

  “But she has not spoken a word to anyone since that vicious mugging on a New York street?”

  “No.”

  “Katia will come to work at the club tonight?”

  “If she doesn’t, I’ll bring her here myself.”

  “Let her come in her own time. She will. There is nowhere else for her to work and be paid enough money to live in Manhattan. As to the stranger who rescued Natalya from the arms of your enforcers…”

  Kirov squirmed inside, but did not interrupt.

  “You are certain he is not a police officer or a federal agent?”

  “He’s just some private citizen who took it upon himself to be a hero.”

  “That he accomplished this daring rescue, without loss of life or real injury, either says a great deal about his skills, or a great deal about the ineptitude of your enforcers. Did you, at least, get this stouthearted fellow’s name?”

  “Bobby Maclain. He’s a bartender at a restaurant called Bentleys on West Broadway.”

  Berezovsky did not bother to disguise the contempt in his voice. “A bartender rescued your kidnap victim?”

  “He took my men by surprise,” Kirov said. “They weren’t expecting any kind of a rescue effort.”

  “Does this urban vigilante have a relationship with Katia?”

  “He says he doesn’t. He says he’s not even a friend. Merely an acquaintance.”

  Berezovsky was quiet for a moment. “And demanding that Katia partake in … your business there … was Bakar Daudov’s initiative?”

  “Yes.”

  “He overstepped his authority.”

  “He’s your man,” Kirov pointed out. “He’s a law unto himself.”

  “No, he answers to me,” Berezovsky said, his voice softer.

  “Do you want me to kill him?”

  Kirov asked the question with a certain bored nonchalance, but he knew that Berezovsky could see right through it. Bakar Daudov would be a very difficult man to kill.

  “I will deal with him,” Berezovsky said. “What about the other matter?”

  “Danil Gershon is dead. The victim of a hit-and-run accident. There were no witnesses and the police have no leads. Gershon discovered nothing in his time here at the club. He was strictly a low-level enforcer. He hadn’t risen through the ranks to be in a position of familiarity. He wasn’t a confidant.”

  “What made you suspicious of him?”

  “He tried to gain access to my computer files. I discovered it yesterday going over some surveillance footage.”

  “You believe he was working undercover for the FBI?”

  “Yes. They believe we’re running protection—which we are—but also prostitution and drugs, which we’re not. I’m trying to confirm Gershon’s association, but it doesn’t matter. He’s dead. He can’t have given the feds anything.”

  Berezovsky nodded. He took a gold cigarette case out of his tuxedo inner pocket and extracted a Sobranie Black Russian cigarette. He lit it with a heavy onyx lighter on the desk.

  “I see you still indulge in your weakness,” Kirov said.

  “Better than the Sobranie Cocktails you smoke. Sobranie Black Russians were supplied to the royal courts of Great Britain, Spain, and Romania. They are pure. No filter. You might as well inject nicotine directly into your veins. My hero, Errol Flynn, smoked them. Of course, he died at fifty, with the body of a seventy-five-year-old man, but all heroes are flawed. Watch him in Charge of the Light Brigade. Magnificent. As for your hero, I want to see the man’s face.”

  “I’ve got a picture of him. I’ll send it to your iPhone now.”

  Kirov hit some keystrokes.

  Berezovsky picked up his iPhone from the desktop. He found the picture within five seconds.

  And his entire demeanor changed.

  He stared at the image of McCall pulled off the surveillance camera. Slowly he set the cigarette down into a glass ashtray the size of a fist and blew out a cloud of blue smoke. But there was no warmth anywhere in his body. All he felt was an icy chill.

  “I know this man,” he said. “He is not some local neighborhood hero. He would not take a personal interest in Katia or anyone else, even if she was his lover. He is a professional. An operative of a shadow unit within the CIA that no one acknowledges. It is called The Company. His name is Robert McCall. There was a rumor that he had resigned. That is obviously bogus. He is still working as a government operative. Or, if he did quit, he is back in the game.”

  “But if he knew anything about the mission, he wouldn’t have walked i
nto my nightclub the way he did. He would’ve known he’d be under surveillance. That I’d send his picture to you.”

  “Perhaps he wanted me to know. I had the woman he loved killed.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find a place where he will be vulnerable. Take as many men as you need. Have Daudov lead them. And Kirov … be very careful. Robert McCall is lethal.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear that,” Kirov said. “There was something about the way he talked to me. The look in his eyes.”

  “Inform me when he is dead.”

  Berezovsky terminated the connection. He took out his wallet and extracted a worn photograph from it. In the photo were Katia and an eight-year-old Natalya, standing with Berezovsky in front of the Vienna Opera House. Across the bottom of Katia’s figure she had written, I love you, Alexei. Across the bottom of Natalya’s figure, in a child’s scrawl, was written, Love you, Daddy.

  Berezovsky stared at the photograph for several moments. Then he took the onyx lighter from the desk and set fire to it. The picture curled and blackened. He dropped the charred fragments into the ashtray.

  * * *

  McCall had handed in two passes at the Albany and Greenwich entrance and now he and Control walked up to one of the magnificent reflecting pools at the site of Tower One. The 9/11 Memorial was packed with tourists. There was a reverential atmosphere; no kids were pushing and shoving; pictures and videos were being taken, but it was all in a kind of respectful silence. Construction workers were still toiling beyond the two pools.

  The two men had said nothing to each other on the walk over from Bentleys.

  “How many passes have you got to the memorial?” Control finally asked.

  “A month’s worth,” McCall said. “I like to be able to walk down at a moment’s notice. There’s peace here. A sense of closure. I have an acquaintance; Hans Gerhardt, a charming German hotelier who used to be the manager of the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto. His son Ralph was killed in Tower One on 9/11. He was thirty-four years old. Worked for Cantor Fitzgerald as vice-president of derivative bonds. His name is inscribed on this pool in bronze along with his girlfriend, Linda.”

  “Did you know either of them?”

  “I know them now.”

  McCall stood still for a moment, looking at the fountain of water in the reflecting pool cascading into the sky, spilling rainbows down onto the memories of the fallen. Then they walked on, away from the deferential crowd, amid the trees, where the white benches were spaced out. McCall looked at his old Control.

  “Why do I think you’ve known where I was every minute of the last year?”

  He had made it a rhetorical question, but Control answered it anyway.

  “We tracked you to that Home Depot you worked at in Boston. When you left there, you went completely off the radar. I suspected you’d have come home to New York.”

  “It was never my home before. But now I live in a neighborhood with people I like.”

  “Have you contacted Cassie and your son?”

  “Not exactly. How did Elena die?”

  The question gave Control pause for half a step.

  “Kostmayer found you.”

  McCall didn’t tell him Kostmayer had known where he lived in SoHo for several months. He didn’t reply.

  “How much intel did he give you?” Control asked.

  “I didn’t ask for any.”

  “Elena was on a mission that took her to Moscow and…”

  “I don’t care what mission she was on or who she was up against,” McCall said. “I want you to tell me how she died. Kostmayer said it was a sniper’s shot.”

  “Two bullets. One in the right leg. The second round hit her right hip and shattered it. She couldn’t move. She bled out.”

  “Why wouldn’t the assassin have gone for a kill shot?”

  “Bad weather, low visibility.”

  “Not through a sniper’s scope.”

  “I don’t know, Robert. Maybe he wanted to take her alive.”

  “If he’d have wanted to do that, he would have come for her at ground level.”

  “So he’s a cat who likes to play with the crippled mouse before he kills it.”

  McCall said nothing. He remembered what Gershon had told him about one of the assassins that might be on Borislav Kirov’s payroll:

  He wants his targets to suffer pain before he puts them out of their misery.

  Something was on the edge of McCall’s mind, just out of reach. It wouldn’t come into focus. He let it go and stopped and looked around them. Checked the crowd. Saw no faces that worried him.

  Control said, “Elena had a message for you. When I found you, I was to tell you to: ‘Get the bastard for me.’ Those were her last words.”

  McCall nodded. Said nothing. Control took something out of his coat pocket. It caught the sunlight.

  “She stole a flash drive. There’s only one file on it. It appears to be part of a blueprint. Maybe an industrial complex. A series if tunnels or passageways. I want you to take a look at it.”

  “It won’t mean anything to me.”

  “Probably not. But you owe Elena that much. She gave her life for it.”

  “No, she gave her life for you.”

  Control’s voice was low and charged with uncharacteristic emotion.

  “I thought I had all the bases covered and I didn’t. Her blood is on my hands. Take a look at this blueprint. If you recognize anything, no matter how farfetched you think it is, get in touch with me. Do it through Kostmayer if you don’t want to talk to me.” He paused. “The Robert McCall I know would avenge Elena’s death.”

  McCall looked back toward the memorial pools.

  “Maybe that man doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe he shouldn’t.”

  “I need your help.”

  “I’ll think it over,” McCall said.

  Control followed McCall’s gaze.

  “You knew Danil Gershon, didn’t you?”

  McCall had been hoping that his chance encounter with Gershon had not got back to Control. And his use of the past tense hit him in the stomach.

  “Our paths crossed a few times.”

  “He died today. In a New York street. Hit-and-run.”

  McCall took a long moment to absorb this. “An accident?”

  “I doubt it. There was a bullet wound in his arm. It had been cleaned up and professionally bandaged. Maybe at an ER somewhere, although, according to the police report, there’s been no report filed of a gunshot wound. He was undercover on a mission. There’s a funeral service at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Wednesday. In case you want to attend.”

  McCall nodded. Debated whether to tell Control that he had left Danil Gershon three hours ago, alive and functioning. Decided against it. Control didn’t need to know that. Not yet.

  But the guilt McCall felt about Gershon’s death was overwhelming.

  “Are you going to send anyone more seasoned than Chase Granger to try and bring me back into the fold?”

  “I’ve kept the wolves off your back,” Control said. “I don’t know how much longer I can do that. There’s a lot of sensitive information in your head.”

  “It’ll stay there.”

  “Everyone has a breaking point, Robert. You found yours when…”

  He stopped. Didn’t want to go there.

  “Don’t walk into Bentleys again,” McCall said. “I have a new life there. You represent something old and faded and worn out. Values I no longer care about. If someone from The Company comes to kill me, I’ll send him or her back to you in a body bag. That would look bad at Langley.”

  “If there’s a termination order issued, I’ll make sure you know about it.”

  “In time to escape?”

  “How much time does Robert McCall need?”

  “More than you think,” McCall said. And he smiled, although there was little humor in it. “We’re two old warhorses. Newer, smarter, tougher versions of both of us are being m
anufactured and nurtured. We won’t last long out in the cold.”

  “So come back to where I can protect you.”

  McCall shook his head.

  But he took the silver flash drive from Control’s hand before he walked away.

  CHAPTER 24

  The village was called Stepanovićevo in the Novi Sad municipality of Serbia. He heard the mournful whistle of a train in the far distance. It reminded him of home. He’d grown up near railway tracks in Grozny in Chechnya.

  Alexei Berezovsky had never been to a cage fight. They were outlawed in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, but that had only sent the hugely popular sport underground. It was being held in a field behind the ruins of an Orthodox church on a country road at one end of the Stepanovićevo main street. Berezovsky sat on the top tier of wooden stands that had been hastily put together. It would hold fifty people comfortably, but there must have been over a hundred Serbians in the stands, sitting and standing and crowding around the large cage. The crowd was almost entirely male, although there were several young women hanging on to the arms of their boyfriends. No children. That was one of the only rules. But Berezovsky noted many of the leather-jacketed males had to be teenagers. Some of them looked barely fourteen.

  The fight cage was made up of interconnected steel rods. It was thirty feet across and forty feet high. Berezovsky had been told the entire structure, the cage and the stands, took less than an hour to put up and twenty minutes to strike. Sometimes they had to erase all signs of it fast, if the Serbian policija were called. The ground was dirt. There were two stools at either end of the cage. At one of them stood a big brute of a man. He was at least six-six. His face was lacerated with healing cuts and dark purple bruises. He had survived a cage fight recently, maybe even the night before. Berezovsky didn’t know his name. It didn’t matter. There was no fanfare here. No announcer, no blond bimbo in a bikini carrying a sign to tell the spectators which round it was. No managers, no seconds. There was a referee, but he was there to count down the rounds, not to make sure the Marquess of Queensbury rules were observed. There were spotlights at the top of the cage that illuminated the fighting area in a harsh, white light. The monster looked a little punch drunk, as if he wasn’t sure where he was. He blinked in the light, his breathing labored, as if he was already fighting.