Titan Trilogy 3.5-Black Soul

by T. J. Brearton

  He was going east, the wrong direction, towards the approaching police. He turned past the school campus and hurtled down a dirt road, jouncing alongside an overgrown field.

  The road became paved and the sirens faded. He was in the Sheksna suburb, sleepy houses under a baleful night sky. A few more turns and he reached a main avenue.

  He headed back to the hotel, trying to drive easy and go unnoticed, though his fuse was still burning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He found them in Nel and Maritje’s hotel room. The young woman was sitting in a chair in the corner, Nel was applying an ice pack to her face. Hanna paced around, chewing on her fingernails.

  Maritje stepped in front of William.

  “Sit down.”

  He did as he was told, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.

  She pulled antiseptic ointment and bandages from a bag. She worked on his cuts. “Anyone see you like this?”

  “The front-desk clerk. I acted like I was a little drunk.”

  “You might as well be,” Hanna said.

  Maritje held up a finger and told William to track it with his eyes as she moved it back and forth. “You have a concussion,” she concluded. “Does your head hurt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She took a bottle from the bag and shook out four pills, then handed them to him along with a bottle of water.

  William looked at the young woman. “What’s your name?”

  “She doesn’t speak English,” Hanna quipped. The anger rolled off her in waves.

  “Her name is Klara,” Nel said.

  William looked at Klara until the young woman turned her eyes away. She had been unconscious when he rescued her so she didn’t know who he was. He wondered what Hanna had told her on the drive to the hotel.

  Coffee was burbling in the pot, the room fragrant with the aroma. William checked the time on the digital clock above the coffee maker. It was five a.m.

  Maritje poured a cup of coffee for the young woman, who thanked her in Russian.

  Hanna tapped William on the shoulder. “Your room,” she said.

  He followed her out, sparing one last look at Klara. She stared out the window where the sky was beginning to lighten over the Sheksna River.

  * * *

  In William’s room, Hanna closed the door and wheeled around on him.

  “That was the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever done,” she said. “We’re finished.”

  He took a seat at the small round table and looked at her. “They said that?”

  “They didn’t have to. This isn’t what the PJP does. It’s not what we do.”

  “It is now.”

  She was so frustrated with him that she couldn’t sit down. She paced around, her dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her fingers tapping against the palms of her hands. She wore black leggings that showed her strong, runner’s muscles. She was everything he cared about, all that was left. And yet he kept it up, he continued to test her, upset her.

  “This is so unprofessional,” she said.

  “Professional? Explain to me what profession this is. All I keep hearing is what I can’t do. It’s like we’re a government.”

  She stopped and glared at him. He hated the sudden pity he saw in her eyes, outsizing her anger. “Why are you acting like this? Huh? Who the fuck are you?” Her look of sympathy vanished. She grabbed his duffel bag from the floor and pulled a small zip-up leather case from it. He knew what she was doing.

  She put the case on the table and opened it up. She pulled out the black, portable storage drive and set it in front of him.

  “I left a normal life behind. Friends, family, job, apartment. Always on the move. Always someplace strange. Always with you. And I thought I knew you.”

  I thought I loved you. That was what she wanted to say, he thought. But she wasn’t spiteful like he was.

  “Look at you,” she said. She let it hang in the air for a moment and then sat down on the bed.

  “You hated your life,” he said. “And look what we found, huh? The system was broken. Nothing gets accomplished that way — it just goes around and around.”

  He couldn’t stand seeing her distraught like this, it fed flame to his burning fuse.

  “I know,” she said, “I lived it, you don’t have to tell me. You act like you have some sort of moral high ground. But what you’ve been doing . . . Brendan, what you’ve been doing . . .”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “I’m sorry. It slipped out.” Her eyes drove into him. “Maybe that’s because I wish you were still that guy. Huh?”

  He tensed, ready to stand up. He stole a look at the black box on the table. The hard drive filled with data. “What? What have I been doing? I’ve been doing exactly what we set out to do. What we agreed to do.”

  “This is not what we agreed. We agreed to use the black box. We agreed we’d compiled evidence, help law enforcement groups build cases.”

  “You knew you couldn’t be effective the old way. Just like I did. This is the way. You said it yourself, the PJP needs someone to press charges. So? She’s in the other room.”

  Hanna leaned towards him and pointed her finger. “Stop being so smug. I believed we needed a certain . . . freedom to do good work. Yes. But in a way that made sense. Not vigilantism.”

  He slumped back in the chair and ran a hand over his face. There were bandages over his split nose, beneath his eye. He looked at the stump of his missing finger. He saw Kevin Heilshorn’s face, the dead eyes staring up out of the garden and into the bright blue sky. He saw the body of Jeremy Staryles, tossed into a grave, dirt shoveled over his corpse. They were the bodies left in his wake.

  Something changed in the air, the hostility dissipated.

  “We’re done,” she said quietly. “It’s over.”

  “No, it’s not.” He couldn’t look at her.

  “It’s too personal for you. You’re lashing out. I’m afraid you’re going to start drinking. William, I’m afraid you’re going to kill somebody.”

  And there it was. The statement hung in the room like a pall.

  He looked at his hands, dirty from the fight in the street. Cuts he hadn’t seen before, oozing blood, from broken glass.

  “You want Alkaev,” she said, crossing over to him. “So do I. But we can’t do it like this.”

  He looked up at her, wanting to get out of the chair and put his arms around her. Stare into those green eyes. Kiss her.

  His emotions were all over the place. She was right. He couldn’t trust himself.

  He put his head in his hands.

  Hanna touched his shoulder. “Alkaev isn’t even in Cherepovets.”

  He stared up at her again. “What?”

  “I couldn’t sleep either. I tried calling you . . . I got an email from Orlov. He sent it not long after he left. Alkaev is in Yaroslavl. He’s been there for the past two days. It’s over three hours away. He’s not even here.”

  William stood up. He rose too fast and his vision turned grainy, and he lost his balance. He fell to one knee and leaned on the bed. Hanna tried to help him up, but he shrugged her off. His mind was spinning. It was hard to focus on anything for a moment, but he made his way to the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway, where his head cleared some.

  “Are they really going to kick us loose?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. They didn’t say anything yet. But Nel and Maritje have been at this for a while now. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s too hard for you.”

  He managed to look at her again. He was afraid he was going to start crying. It made him angry at himself. He wasn’t in control.

  Most people, he figured, wished they could start over. With no attachments. Completely free. But then a person had to decide what to do. Giving your life to a cause was like staring death in the face. There would be few distractions, no football games or backyard barbeques. But that had all been taken away from him long before, anyway.

  This lif
e had always been inevitable.

  His eyes skipped from her to the black box on the table, shining in the lamp light. A gift, or a curse?

  “But,” Hanna said, “we have to play the long game if we’re going to do any good. Showing up at Alkaev’s school in the middle of the night to . . .”

  He put up a hand, asking her to let it be for now. Her gaze fell away from him. What he saw in her face was worse than anything else. It looked like shame. Like he had humiliated her.

  William stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. He ran the shower. Once he was sure he couldn’t be heard, the tears came. Gritting his teeth, he punched the wall.

  He tore the shower curtain from the tub, flung it aside and stepped beneath the pounding water, still fully dressed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He cleaned up his mess, wrung out his clothes in the tub, and hung them on the shower curtain rod after he’d repaired it. Hanna hadn’t bothered him while he was in there. At one point, he thought he heard the hotel room door open and close. She’d left.

  He swiped condensation from the mirror and looked at his reflection. His nose was a bit bent from a long-ago break. There were faint scars from his past life. The fresh cuts needed new bandages after the shower.

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and a V-neck sweater. It was early summer in Russia, humid, but so far the temperature hadn’t gotten above sixty. He found his pair of Doc Martens and was lacing them up when the phone rang.

  He stared at it before answering, afraid of what it might be. It wasn’t even six a.m. Who would be calling?

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Chase?” The front-desk clerk had a nasal voice and was recognizable straight away.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Chase . . . I’m very sorry to disturb you . . . but the police are here to see you.”

  His fears were confirmed. He played them off. “The police?”

  “They said they wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?” William looked out over the river. He reminded himself again that the last thing he could do was be ensnared by the Russian system. They would start digging into him. His credentials and story were solid, but there were always cracks. He might even be extradited back to the States. There was a more than good chance he’d face some hefty charges there.

  “They just say some questions. About last night.”

  “Well, I stayed out late. Had a bit too much vodka.”

  The front-desk clerk offered a nervous chuckle. “Yes. They say they just want to talk. I told them you would come down.”

  They wanted to see if he would run. They could have come to the room door, but they wanted to smoke him out this way.

  “Alright,” William said. “I’ll just get dressed. I’ll be right down.”

  He hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. Then he quickly gathered up a few things — his passport, driver’s license, visa, and his destination description from the consulate.

  Russia was brutal when it came to tourists. Even parking tickets could result in deportation. But his business visa was government-sponsored, thanks to Orlov. Still, he might be detained for days before Orlov could work things out, if at all. He wasn’t sure what was worse: indefinite detainment in Russia, or a trip back to the States in handcuffs.

  He grabbed his room key off the table, stuck it in his back pocket, and looked at the portable storage drive. He found the case and put the drive in, zipped it up. Taking it with him, he walked down the hallway to Nel and Maritje’s room, where he knocked softly. He heard someone coming to the door and Maritje opened up.

  She smiled at him, a pretty young woman with pitch black hair, cut short. He felt bad about the position he had put her in.

  Hanna and Nel were sitting with coffees on the far end of the room. They watched him come in, and Hanna’s eyes fell to the zipped case he was carrying.

  Klara was asleep on the bed. William stopped when he saw her.

  She had the blankets drawn up to her shoulders, her hand lightly touching her ear, like she’d been tugging at it. Memories came swimming up out of the depths. Memories of his own daughter, years ago, who had pulled on her ear when she was tired. She would fall asleep that way, just like Klara.

  His daughter would’ve been close to Klara’s age, had she lived. Almost a woman now.

  He snapped out of it, crossed the room, and set down the case in front of Hanna. “I have to go downstairs,” he said, holding her gaze. “The police want to talk to me.”

  The women exchanged looks and Nel stood up. Before she could say anything, he touched her arm. “I’m sorry. But, listen to me. Let me handle this.”

  It went without saying that Klara had to be kept a secret. Though many governments saw the presence of the PJP as good public relations, Russia was not one of them. In order to get information on Alkaev, the PJP had used incriminating data from the storage drive to put pressure on Severstal, who had then sent Orlov to them as damage control. All the Russian government knew was that Nel and Maritje were PJP, and that they were in Cherepovets. They were aware William and Hanna were in the country, of course, but not necessarily as PJP. There was no reason to lead the police to infer that the four foreigners were working together, or that they had rescued Klara, because the police might be complicit.

  William gave Hanna one last look and left the room. What was left to say? He’d made his bed, now he had to lie in it. He needed to preserve the reputation of the PJP, protect Klara, and he needed to keep his storage drive safe. If the police asked for Hanna, she would pass the drive off to the Dutch women.

  He headed down the hall to the elevators, rehearsing his cover story in his mind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The lobby of the Arnaks Premier Hotel was walled in glass. William saw two police cars parked right in front. One of them was empty, the second was occupied by an officer driving and someone seated in the back, just a vague shape.

  Two policemen were inside the lobby. They were middle-aged, likely patrol cops, dressed in short-sleeve blue shirts and wearing peaked caps with red bands and a badge in the center. They ogled the cuts and bruises on William’s face.

  “Good morning.” William stuck out his hand.

  One of the policemen shook it. “Good morning.” His voice was flat, his smile pure counterfeit.

  “How can I help you?”

  “Let me see your papers. Please.” He spoke in heavily accented English.

  “Of course.” William pulled out his documents and handed them over. The first cop passed them to the second, who stepped away, laying things out on the large front desk.

  William noticed another man in the lobby, standing at a distance by a couple of couches and two large potted ferns. He was in a trench coat, his back turned, talking quietly into his phone.

  “So,” said cop one. “I like to know where you are last night.”

  “Last night? I was here for a while. I had trouble sleeping — I never sleep well in hotels. I went out for a few drinks.”

  “Few drinks. Where?”

  “Killfish. In Cherepovets Center.”

  “Killfish not open past two a.m. Where were you, say, three a.m.? Four a.m.?”

  The insignia on the policeman’s two shoulder straps was a single gold dot followed by two gold stars. He was praporshchik, meaning he hadn’t served in the military yet was the equivalent of a sergeant.

  William glanced at the man in the trench coat. He had ended his call and was just standing there, looking out through the glass. William wondered if the man was a detective, and the praporshchik was just the warm-up act.

  “After the bar closed I bought some alcohol and drove back here. I just sat in my car. Stared at the river.”

  “You stared at the river,” the praporshchik repeated. He pointed at William’s face. “And this is how you get injuries.”

  William feigned embarrassment. “I fell down, by my car. Smacked my head right into the glass, even cracked it. I just totally
went down. I’m not proud of it, I—”

  The praporshchik waved a hand in the air and turned away. He joined the second patrol cop at the front desk. They looked over William’s paperwork together and mumbled in Russian.

  William watched the police car outside with the obscure figure in the back. At the same time, the man in the trench coat began to saunter over, as if he had all the time in the world.

  Here we go, William thought.

  The praporshchik left the desk and returned to where William stood. As he walked he gestured toward the police car outside and whistled. The driver got out, rounded the car and opened the rear door. The blurry figure from the back stepped into the dreary morning.

  He stared into the lobby, his face a mask of hate. The cop outside spoke to him and Demyan slowly raised his arm, pointing through the glass.

  The praporshchik was next to William, close to his ear. “This man tells different story.”

  “I’ve never seen that man.” William turned to the praporshchik. “I’m a business consultant for Severstal. I have a government-sponsored visa. If it would help, we could call Bogdan Orlov. He can tell you who I am.” William stared back out at Demyan. “I don’t know that person.”

  “This man say you came to school.”

  “No.”

  “We have reports of gunfire.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “The woman with you. She is upstairs?”

  “No one was with me. I told you, I went to a bar, then bought some alcohol, alone.”

  “And she came back with girl. Yes? Another student.”

  William gave the front-desk clerk a look. The young man seemed to shrink. But it wasn’t his fault, William thought. He was just doing what he thought was right. People trusted the police. Even in Russia, perhaps especially in Russia, obedience to authority was a powerful impulse.

  William considered running. But that would be more foolish than anything he’d done so far. Even if he could be smuggled out of the country by Orlov, that would leave Hanna holding the bag. It wouldn’t be a case of his imprisonment in this country, or extradition back to the States, but hers.