“Give me a few minutes to clean myself up and I will meet you in the café across the street,” he told Rogas.
He quickly showered and changed into clean sweats and a light plastic rain jacket. The American was waiting for him at a table in the rear corner of the café. Ivanov appreciated the simple tradecraft. Nobody could sneak up on them there. Rogas was drinking from a small, almost dainty cup. An espresso or a Turkish coffee. He had not ordered a drink for Ivanov but he had asked the waiter to bring out a couple of steaks and a bowl of fries.
“You looked like you were training hard,” Rogas said. “The little guy really worked you over. What is he, some sort of ninja?”
“Eighth dan judo master,” Ivanov said. “He trained with Professor Jigoro Kano. I have never beaten him. Possibly never will. But I get better every time I fail.”
“Amen to that,” said Rogas, raising his tiny cup of coffee. “You want a drink or something? A vodka?”
“I gave up drinking many years ago,” Ivanov said. “Vodka gave me this.”
He rubbed gently at the scar which disfigured one temple. “Vodka and misery and a poorly manufactured Makarov. But thank you, Rogas. I will have water and this steak which Mr Davidson will pay for, yes?”
“Oh yeah, you betcha.”
The café was maybe three quarters full. Ivanov frequently ate here after training. The alternative was returning to his empty apartment and cooking something for himself, a prospect which did not often appeal. The café was conveniently located and the proprietor, a native Parisian, had married an exiled Russian woman back in the 1920s. She liked to converse with Ivanov in their native tongue. They discussed the weather and philosophy. Never politics. She knew Ivanov was an uptimer. The locals always seemed to know.
His water arrived, and in short order their meals. He did not know Rogas well. They had not served long together in the war. Ivanov had quickly disappeared into covert operations, almost entirely behind the Iron Curtain, running his own ops as often as he took instructions from London or Washington. Or the Zone. Rogas had served mostly in the Pacific and gone into private security after the war. He had not enjoyed running his own business as much as he imagined, he told Ivanov, and the offer of a job with Davidson Enterprises had come at an opportune moment.
“Maria O’Brien pulled my fat out of the fire, man,” he said. “I was about to lose my shirt. You know her? She came though on the Kandahar with Lonesome Jones.”
“Indeed. She works for Davidson. So this work? This is for O’Brien?”
“Very astute,” said Rogas. “If you take it on, you’ll report to her, but Slim Jim does want to talk to you himself.”
“When would I meet him?” Ivanov asked.
The American produced a small electronic device from a pocket. A pager. An archaic technology from their childhoods, but hugely popular now, years before either of them had been born. Pagers were much more reliable than the emerging cell phone networks.
“When I get word,” Rogas said. “Your schedule free for a week or so? Passports in order?”
Ivanov chewed over a big chunk of steak, giving himself time to think. He had largely recovered from his time behind the Wall. He had no work scheduled and did not know when he might receive any in the near future. After completing a job, it was not unusual to go months without a commission from the agencies. The money was not an issue. His ongoing retainer was generous and both governments, London and Washington, paid extra for piecework. The balance of his payment for Rome had dropped into his Swiss account as soon as he returned from the field.
But he knew he would stagnate and go rotten here in Paris, or back in London, waiting for something to happen. He could momentarily distract himself, as he had this evening, but that would be increasingly difficult.
He chewed and swallowed.
“I am all good to go,” he said.
And he was. For the first time since he had returned from Rome, he felt the heavy pall lifting from his mood without the effort of hard physical exertion.
CHAPTER NINE
It was not long before the two crewmen were missed. Charlotte ducked into the ship’s forward hold, closing the hatch behind her, the cries of the dead men’s crew mates growing louder and seeming to come from all directions. It had to be the NKVD. The ship’s officers would assume a couple of missing men were skiving off work, bludging a cigarette or even a sly drink in one of the many secret spaces on board a vessel of this size. The “cocksuckers from Moscow”, however, would have raised the alarm as soon as the two men had not checked in.
She cursed under her breath and moved through the hold as quickly as she could. The cargo loading was finished. All the freight had been stowed and sealed up. She moved through inky blackness with the aid of her night vision goggles, taking inventory as she went. The NVG batteries would last another three hours. Her comm links were cut. She had a fighting knife, and fiverounds of caseless ammunition. She had not tooled up for a prolonged firefight. That had not been her role. St. Clair had ordered her on to the Russian ship to locate Ernst Bremmer and extract him if possible. To kill him if not. The mission brief came from MI6, not Harry Wales. He was the mission lead during the contact phase, but as soon as everything went sideways the team had defaulted to presets.
Extract or execute.
She moved quickly through the hold, navigating by the soft opalescent light of her goggles. Aware of just how lightly armed she was, Charlotte scanned her surroundings as she passed through them, looking for anything which might prove useful as a tool or a weapon. A firefighter’s axe or a crowbar would have been welcome. All she could scavenge, however, was a short length of chain, maybe two feet long. The chain was heavy, but not unusable, the links about as thick as her little finger. It lay on top of a wooden tea chest, and she’d almost ignored it. The metallic sounds of the hatch opening again—she had only just sealed it behind her—was enough to change her mind. She swept up the chain, wrapping it around her left fist and forearm as she accelerated towards the corresponding hatch at the other end of the cargo hold. A door clanged open and she heard voices calling out the names of the men she had killed.
“Dimitri! Piotr! Where are you? The captain will have your balls for his borscht if you are down here squeezing each other’s dicks.”
Charlotte slowed to a pace at which she could move silently, invisibly. She had the advantage of night vision technology and…
A small supernova overwhelmed the augmented technology of her goggles as the Russians turned on the lights. She squeezed her eyes shut instinctively, but was still blinded, her vision blooming with the red and black starbursts of her traumatized retinas.
“Over there! Who is that?”
She dived to her left, half-remembering, half-guessing at a space between two stacks of cargo. Her shoulder clipped the corner of a wooden crate, spinning her around and off balance. Without her vision she tumbled over, tucking in her chin and elbows, turning the fall into a roll that brought her painfully up against something that felt like machinery. The voices were swearing now, angry, but also uncertain and unmistakably afraid. They called on her to show herself.
“Bezbiletnyj! Bezbiletnyj!” they called out. Stowaway.
“Nyet! Spion!” another voice called out. A woman’s voice this time. But her Russian arrived on the back of a thick German accent.
Charlotte heard more hatchways clanging open and shut, this time forward of her position. She was boxed in.
She took off the NVGs and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to restore her sight, but she was still half blind when the first of them reached her. Charlotte unloaded one round each into the center mass of the two dark, indistinct blobs which loomed up in front of her.
She was rewarded with a strangled scream, and a wet, gargling sound that probably meant she had hit her second target in the throat. Poor aim under pressure, she thought. Both bodies dropped to the deck with heavy thuds. Their skulls rang on the platin
g. Her eyesight was recovering, slowly. The augmented technology of the NVGs wasn’t completely useless. Had she been wearing a Gen4 combat array from the 21st, digital shutters would have safeguarded her from the blast of artificial light as soon as the inbuilt sensors detected the photon spike. Her AT combat goggles merely cut battery power to the amplification system. She still suffered a temporary loss of some vision from the unexpected surge of electric light, but at least she hadn’t fried her eyeballs.
Keeping her eyes closed as long as she dared, Charlotte holstered her side-arm and came to her feet with her fighting knife in one hand and the short length of chain wrapped around the other. She had three rounds of caseless ammo left, and wanted to save them, if possible. She was trapped in a sort of cul-de-sac, surrounded on three sides by stores and cargo. She moved towards the mouth of the little alleyway into which she had dived, her eyes adjusting to the blessedly poorer illumination provided by a couple of flickering bulbs high overhead. When the next pursuer loomed in front of her, she was able to launch a front kick into his midsection, aiming for his groin. The steel-capped toe of her boot connected with soft flesh and he yelped in pain, doubling over and presenting the back of his head for a killing stroke. She drove the blade of her combat knife deep into his neck, and for the second time in mere minutes was overwhelmed by the stink of a dead man voiding his bowels.
That wasn’t the worst of it.
As his corpse dropped away, her knife went with it, trapped between the vertebrae she had partly severed with the savagery of her strike.
“That will be enough.”
It was the German woman. The one who had spoken before and, Charlotte was certain now, the Stasi operator who had posed as Frau Bremmer back at the Hilton. She could not yet make out fine detail, but her vision had recovered to the point where she could vaguely recognize the woman’s face.
“Frau Bremmer” was holding a pistol, pointed at Charlotte’s midsection. Unlike the buffoon Charlotte had just killed, this woman had not charged into Charlotte’s fighting range. She remained just out of reach and showed no inclination to give up the advantage.
For one heartbeat, and then two, Charlotte-Grace François fell through time, thrown back to those few terrible months of her childhood when she was held captive in Camp 5 of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Cabanatuan prison complex. Back to when she had been a frightened little girl everybody called Gracie.
She had learned at an early age what it meant not just to be a prisoner, but a slave. As a prisoner you might be afforded some respect, some value. As a slave your existence was forfeit to the whims of your masters.
She wasn’t going back there again.
The flickering lights in the hold of the Bulgakov stuttered and dimmed half a second longer and more erratically than had been their pattern. Charlotte performed a simple body movement, an exercise in tai sabaki known as the entering rotation. She stepped forward on her leading foot and swung her rear hip off the invisible but all too real line extending straight out from the muzzle of the pistol pointed at her. As she did that, fully expecting to be gunned down, and not caring as long as it meant evading slavery again, she whipped out her left hand—the one holding the short length of chain. The dull steel links shot forward like a rattlesnake and bit deeply into the steady, perfectly manicured hand of the woman holding a gun on her.
The pistol fired, but the bullet crashed into a wooden crate. A second shot sparked off the steel plating as the gun fell to the deck. Frau Bremmer did not try to recover the weapon and her advantage. She attacked. The women flew at each other.
A short-bladed fighting knife, curved like the talon of a great bird, appeared in Bremmer’s other hand. Charlotte half-stepped, half-stumbled around a slashing backhand cut, barely getting a functional deflection block between her face and the cruel curve of the blade. She hip-checked the German, sending her into a shipping chest which cracked under the impact. The improvised, desperate move gave Charlotte the split second she needed to receive the next wave of slashing, stabbing attacks from a stronger base. Grasping the length of chain between her fists, she used it as a flexible baton, fending off multiple thrusts and parries that came at her from every direction.
The Stasi woman was ferocious, but controlled. Her initial assault lasted only a few seconds, but she did not relent, making a fluid, razor-edged blur of her weapon. Charlotte was hard pressed to hold her off, and prevent the blade from sinking its sharp and wicked fang into her arms or hands. She knew that Bremmer—or whatever this bitch’s real name was—wasn’t going for a killing stroke. Not immediately. She aimed to slash through tendon and muscle, crippling Charlotte before coming in for the kill. Or, more likely, for capture. She would want to seize the intruder for interrogation.
That was Charlotte’s advantage. She did not care if this woman died. Indeed, the faster she went down, and didn’t get back up again, the better.
They danced around each other in the dim, flickering light of the cargo hold. The guttering illumination of two or three old-fashioned filament globes lit them with a strobing effect, making their movements seem oddly mechanical, even robotic, where in fact they were sinuous and beautiful. Graceful but lethal.
Bremmer feinted high but slashed low.
Charlotte pivoted and flowed away.
The German reversed the sweep of her attack, then redirected again, coming in straight, before spinning out wide and reaping the space where Charlotte had just been with a classically perfect spinning back-kick.
Her boot slipped through empty space, the target had already vanished and reappeared elsewhere, but that was merely a cue for the threshing machine of her evil little blade to whirr up again, striking and sparking off the steel links of the chain Charlotte was weaving in front of her like a cat’s cradle.
All of this happened inside a couple of seconds.
The Stasi woman backed off, barely panting.
Charlotte remained alert, her balance evenly distributed, watching for any chance to lash out with her improvised steel whip again. She did not think she would easily get one. Frau Bremmer was possessed of the sort of combat skills Charlotte thought were the preserve of those with uptime training. Advanced uptime training. She thought she could detect elements of different kung-fu schools, of Indonesian stick fighting and a blend of old school jujitsu and krav maga in the woman’s style. She was not fighting like someone who’d done a bit of judo and karate.
They faced each other, two evenly matched predators.
Charlotte maneuvered, looking for a kill track.
Bremmer made small adjustments to her stance and orientation, moving only so far as she needed to keep her opponent within her fighting arc. She held her weapon hand back, her empty hand forward. It moved every now and then, feinting potential attacks, but never delivering.
She said nothing. She did not call for help. She did not try to effect Charlotte’s surrender through negotiation.
“You speak English?” Charlotte asked at last, probing for a way through.
No reply, just a subtle shift in the German’s hips and feet to keep her properly aligned. She did not look directly at Charlotte, instead keeping her gaze fixed on a point somewhere over her shoulder, away off in the middle distance; all the better to employ her peripheral vision against unexpected lines of attack.
Charlotte, who had laid the targeting reticle of her focus on the woman’s center mass for the same reason, allowed her eyes to slip up and lock onto the German’s. If the peripheral was fully covered, a linear attack might work.
Probably not.
But it was all she had.
“I hope you speak English,” she said as they continued their exquisitely calibrated dance around each other. “Because I can help you. Your technique is flawed.”
For the merest instant Frau Bremmer’s eyes lost their distant focus.
“In kung-fu,” Charlotte continued, “there is the lying hand…” she waved the fingers
of her right hand, around which the greater length of chain was now wrapped. “And there is the truth hand.”
She briefly performed a spirit fingers gesture with her left, which held the far end of the chain in a lighter, looser grip.
Bremmer may have been listening to her, but her eyes were unfocused again. She knew all she had to do was keep Charlotte here long enough and she would win. Charlotte knew that too.
“So which is your truth hand?” she asked. “And which hand lies?”
Charlotte flicked her eyes at the small curved blade, nodding slightly as she did.
Then with a loud, explosive kiai she threw away her only advantage, flicking the length of chain directly at Bremmer’s face, ignoring both her knife hand and its empty twin. The German easily ducked below the clumsy projectile, not shifting her stance, just dropping her hips so that the heavy, clinking length of chain flew overhead. Her expression did not change until she realized what Charlotte had done. The split second distraction had given her a chance to spin down into a reaping kick that carved Bremmer’s legs out from under her.
Charlotte’s heavy boot heel crashed into the side of Bremmer’s knee. There was no amount of training, and very little in the way of armor, that could protect the vulnerable joint. It disintegrated under the force of the impact.
Bremmer did speak up then.
She screamed in pain and rage.
Charlotte was up and on her before she could reset, stamping down hard on the nearest ankle, destroying the joint, flooding the woman’s systems with enough shock and pain to buy her another half second, which she used to kick away the blade that was rising quickly but unsteadily to slash at her shins. She went with her forward momentum, folding her legs beneath her and driving the battering rams of her knees into Bremmer’s torso. It was an unsophisticated, blunt-force assault but it worked. All her mass and speed exploded into the woman’s upper body, shattering her rib cage and driving long shards of broken bone into vital, inner places.
Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time Page 8