Pushing Brilliance

by Tim Tigner

  I rolled, torquing to the right with everything I had, as if swinging for survival on the face of a cliff. I pulled Scar on top of me and then over, all the way from my left side to my right. A hundred-eighty-degree roll of five hundred furious pounds. The instant my right side hit the bottom I released my left hand from around Scar’s wrist, and prepared it to deliver a powerful palm strike to his upturned ear.

  His gun hand now freed, Scar began swinging the Glock toward my head.

  I was in a race all over again. The second in as many days. Two lives in the balance, milliseconds on the clock.

  As Scar’s Glock neared the completion of the arc that would end my life, my left palm pummeled his exposed ear with a powerful thud, driving his head down on the pen like a hammer on an inverted nail.

  His head hit the floor.

  The Bic disappeared.

  The lights went out.

  Once again, I’d beaten my rival to the punch by the breadth of a hair.

  Scar fired wide as he spasmed in death. Somewhere in the back of my brain I registered that there would be three bullets left if he’d started with a full load, four if he kept one in the chamber. I reached and rolled and took it down to two. Gorilla took my round in the heart and collapsed like a duck blown out of the air. His body hit the stairs and slid to the next landing, lifeless and limp, his head thunking surrender on each bloody step.

  Chapter 27

  Wheels Turning

  I LEAPT to my feet and wrapped my arms around Katya, pulling her to my chest. “You were amazing,” I whispered. “You saved us both.”

  She was trembling like a baby in an ice bath.

  I guided her across our landing to the upward staircase and sat her down on the second step. “Just close your eyes and breathe deep for a couple of seconds.”

  She nodded weakly, maintaining a thousand-yard stare rather than closing her eyes.

  I picked up the Glock and zipped down the adjacent stairs, sticking to the right to avoid leaving footprints in the smeared and spattered blood. Rummaging through Gorilla’s pockets, I found nothing but a wad of rubles and a slim ceramic lock-blade knife. No papers. No identification. No phone. I pocketed the plunder along with the Glock and bounded back up to search Scar. A Mercedes key, more rubles, and a folded sheet of paper. I was curious, but it could wait.

  I extended my hand to Katya. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We didn’t have a key to our room, but a couple of warm smiles and a hundred-ruble note convinced a gray-haired janitor to let us in. I didn’t like leaving impressions, but figured our secret was safe with his generation. Stalin had taught them to keep their heads down and tongues tight.

  I spoke the moment our door closed. “Let’s gather our things and go. An investigation is going to erupt the moment someone uses those stairs, and we need to be gone by then.”

  I retrieved our passports, wallets, and phones from under the mattress while Katya stuffed her clothes and our toiletries into her backpack. We left the Korston without checking out, as people often do. The morning maid would find that the bed had been slept in and the shower used, so there would be nothing to draw suspicion to Mr. and Mrs. Yates.

  “Metro?” Katya asked, as we traded the dim hotel lobby for afternoon sunlight.

  I held up a finger. “Maybe. Wait here. I’ll be back in thirty seconds.”

  I headed toward the hotel’s back parking lot.

  Katya began to follow. “Talk to me, Achilles. Tell me what’s going on.”

  I stopped and turned. “They had a car, and I’ve got the key. We may as well use it. Plus, it may yield clues. These guys didn’t have cell phones or wallets on them.”

  She stared at me. “What if they have a driver waiting in the car? He’ll shoot you on sight.”

  “That’s why I asked you to wait. You have to trust me, Katya. I promise to explain everything once we’re clear. I just don’t want to stop to do that now. We’re too exposed here.”

  Her mouth started to tremble, and I knew I’d screwed up. I had to get better at working with an amateur partner. “I don’t think anyone will be in the car. It’s much more common to work in twos than threes. And if there were a getaway driver, then why would Scar have a key? Besides, I have a gun now too. By asking you to wait, I’m just being cautious. Make sense?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll be right back. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I made a mental note to work some decompression into our schedule. As soon as possible. Next stop.

  Rounding the back corner of the building, I saw an old beer truck parked before the delivery door, and beyond it a likely candidate. A shiny new Mercedes van sat backed up to the employee entrance. The beer truck rumbled to life as I approached, and pulled out after its loud transmission clanked into gear. The bearded driver paid me no attention in his side mirror.

  The Mercedes was a white panel van emblazoned with the blue logo of the GasEx corporation. I walked around it as though it were my own, visually confirming that it was empty while listening intently. Satisfied, I returned to the driver’s door, yanked it open, and hopped in with my Glock covering the cargo area. Nothing there but a large stainless-steel storage box and an ominous packet of heavy duty cable ties.

  I located the cover for the fuse box under the steering column, popped it open, and extracted the fuse for the entertainment console. Starting the engine, I confirmed that there was no power to the GPS system, and drove to pick up Katya.

  “Won’t they be able to track us?” Katya asked, as we rolled over the Metro Bridge into central Moscow.

  “If they use LoJack, then yes. But they’re more likely to use GPS, if anything at all, and I’ve disabled that.”

  “And if it is LoJacked?”

  “They won’t get around to tracking it for hours. How about dinner? We’ll eat and see if anyone shows up looking for it.”

  I followed Katya’s guidance to a neighborhood a couple of kilometers south of the Kremlin, stopping along the way to purchase a couple of movie posters and a roll of packing tape. We parked strategically in a courtyard near the Frunzenskaya Embankment, and covered the GasEx logos with the posters. Ours was now just another of the thousands of panel vans in the city that twenty-million Russians called home.

  “Do you think the van really belongs to the GasEx Corporation?” Katya asked, as we walked the Moscow River embankment. “Or is that camouflage?”

  “Camouflage seems more likely to me. I can’t imagine how an oil and gas behemoth could be connected to Vitalis Pharmaceuticals, but it might be genuine. A big part of our problem is that we have no idea what we’re up against. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this is big. Very big.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The murder of my family was the biggest event of my life, with framing me for it a close second. So I naturally assumed that it was a big event for the perpetrator too, and I’ve been looking at this like a murder investigation. But what if it wasn’t? What if I got the scale wrong? What if Colin, and Martha, and my father were just three victims in a war?”

  Chapter 28

  A Thousand Words

  WE STROLLED in contemplative silence toward the shadow of the Crimean Bridge, as the dark waters of the Moscow River rippled past. Ahead on our left, the sign for a Georgian restaurant Katya favored glowed like the light at the end of a long tunnel.

  Opening Guria’s arched pinewood door for her, I saw heavy pinewood tables with matching chairs, forest-green curtains, and a bit of Georgian bric-a-brac. The decor was nothing special, but the smells were divine. Roasting meats and melting cheeses and spices I knew I’d love but couldn’t identify. The dining room was packed with jovial patrons sucking down juicy dumplings and dark red wine, toasting to health, and looking for love. We got lucky with a table, and a motherly waitress in a green apron and headscarf was soon with us.

  “I’m thinking we should get it all,” I said to Katya so the waitress could hear. “Pork and
lamb shashlik, khinkali, and khachapuri, with beans and greens. Does that sound good to you?”

  “Sounds great.” Katya’s voice was noticeably less tense than the last time she’d spoken.

  “Wine?” the waitress asked.

  “Borjomi,” I said, referencing the famous Georgian sparkling water.

  The waitress gave me a spirited look that said I’d earned a B-plus.

  I pulled up an iPhone app and found a couple of private apartments in the area advertising as B&B’s. Got the thumbs up from Katya and made note of the addresses as the Borjomi and khachapuri arrived. I stuck my nose out over the steam, closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. Freshly baked bread browned just so, rimming a buttery puddle of melted cheese. Hard to beat that.

  I put a slice on each of our plates and raised my effervescent glass. Katya raised hers back at me in the Georgian tradition. “Survival of the fittest. It’s nature’s primary rule. Adapt and flourish, or freeze and perish. In my line of work, I’ve seen a lot of it, but I’ve never seen anyone adapt like you, Katya. Colin was right, you are amazing.”

  She blushed and clinked my glass.

  “I’ll never forget the image of you biting that guy. It was so perfect, but so out of character. How did you … what made … where did that ferocity come from?”

  “Remember that self-defense course I told you about the day I visited you in jail?”

  “Sure.”

  “The instructor primed us to change our character when threatened with physical violence. He showed us some pretty scary surveillance videos of attempted rapes so that we wouldn’t have any illusions about what attackers would be willing to do to us. Then he conditioned us to react to rape as a trigger word, a word that would instantly recall those horrible images and evoke that fighting mentality. He made us shout it as we practiced his defensive techniques, both as a means of attracting help, and to act as a psychological trigger. So I screamed RAPE in my head, and bore my teeth.”

  “Wow. I’ll remember that one. And if I ever meet your teacher, I’ll be buying him a couple of drinks.”

  “I must say, I never thought I’d need to use it.”

  I raised my glass. “Let’s hope you never do again.”

  As the dumplings and shashlik arrived, I asked, “Have you heard back from Dr. Tarasova?”

  “Nope. But I left a message saying that I’d stop by first thing in the morning. They open at nine. What is it you expect her to tell us?”

  That was the big question. We were only at the beginning of a complex international investigation, an investigation I had less than two weeks to solve. If we failed, I’d likely spend the rest of my life in jail. It was going to be tight, intense, and apparently very dangerous.

  “We have a general motive we need to make specific. To do that we need to learn about Vitalis’s business. We don’t know what its product was supposed to do, or why it failed. As their clinical coordinator, Dr. Tarasova should have a pretty good understanding of the basics, but I doubt they told her more than that.”

  Katya cocked her head. “Why would they hide things from her?”

  I used a finger to wipe a thin string of cheese from Katya’s chin. “Pharmaceutical companies are very secretive before patents issue and products launch. There’s so much competition, with billions potentially on the line. But at a minimum, she’ll know what Vitalis’s product was supposed to do, for whom, and how. She’d have to know that to recruit patients.”

  Katya pushed her plate back and leaned in. “And she’d have to know why they cancelled the trial.”

  “Not necessarily. The lab results would likely have gone straight to Colin as the chief medical officer. All part of the secrecy thing. How much Tarasova knows really depends on whether Colin regarded her as a partner or a contractor.”

  “I got the impression he thought of her as a partner. He was very collegial with her on the phone. I could tell that he liked and respected her.”

  “Great. The more she knows, the easier it will be for us to figure out what was worth killing for.”

  My poor choice of words put a shadow on our conversation, and we turned our focus back to the food. As we finished off the last of the dumplings, Katya asked, “How did they find us at the hotel?”

  I set the paper I’d snatched from Scar onto the table, still folded closed into quarters. “How do you think? Work it like an equation. You have the result. What are the predicates?”

  She gave me an appraising smile, her eyes aglow. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For understanding me.” She blushed a bit. “The most basic predicate is that they were looking for us, which is disturbing news.”

  “It’s a good sign actually, given our race against the clock. It will be easier to find them if they’re also looking for us.”

  “Do you think they followed us from California, or picked us up here?”

  “There wasn’t time for anyone to follow us. We went straight from your place to SFO and onto a plane, so they picked us up here.”

  “But no one knew we were going to that hotel.”

  “Right ...”

  Katya chewed on that for a second. “So they spotted us at the airport?”

  “That’s my hypothesis. If I’m right, the paper I took off our assailants will back it up.” I slid the folded white sheet across the table to Katya. She opened it up, exposing a printout of four pictures. It was a format I was familiar with, the kind generated by facial recognition programs and used during stakeouts. It displayed a full frontal shot and a profile shot for two people, complete with calibration marks. The background was familiar too. It was the Santa Barbara County Superior Court. We were looking at our own faces.

  Chapter 29

  Knock Knock

  I SET ASIDE my breakfast plate and stood to go. “I think you should wait here while I talk to Tarasova. This is going to be dangerous.”

  Katya shot me a glance that reflected a feisty combination of anger and fear. “The last time you left me alone in a hotel room I ended up with a gorilla at my throat. And that was just for a trip to the shower.”

  “This is different.”

  “How is it different? You promised me you weren’t going to be cryptic.”

  She was right. “Do you want the long answer?”

  “I would love the long answer.”

  To signal my commitment to acting partner-like, I moved from the breakfast table to the couch that had served as my bed. Plunking down onto the course green fabric, I signaled her to join me. “My work at the CIA revolved around the neutralization of very bad guys. As my employers put it when talking to their congressional overseers, these were ‘individuals actively engaged in actions sufficiently hostile to the American people or government to warrant targeted covert action.’ Do you follow?”

  “Are you saying you hunted down the CIA’s equivalent of the FBI’s most wanted list?”

  “Pretty much, although my list was unpublished. Too sensitive. For that reason, my work was not officially sanctioned either, so if I got caught doing something unsavory on foreign soil, there was always the chance I’d be on my own.”

  “You volunteered for that?”

  “I jumped at the chance. It was exciting, meaningful work. And special operatives don’t think about the downside any more than policemen or firemen or soldiers do. I suppose that’s a testosterone thing.”

  “Uh-huh. I trust that neutralize is a euphemism?”

  “For lead therapy?”

  Katya elbowed me.

  “Actually, the more beneficial and interesting operations involved turning the perpetrator into an asset. That was my specialty. Of course we had to locate them first. Given that these were people working very hard to stay hidden, I had to get creative. The secret to my success was becoming adept at arranging circumstances that would bring our targets to a predictable place within a predictable window. Rather than hunting them, I’d figure out a way to draw them to me. The corollary to this, as y
ou would say, is that I’ve become well-attuned to not acting predictably.”

  I paused there to let Katya digest.

  She didn’t take long. “And going to the clinical trial site is predictable.”

  “Very. Assuming we’re right, and all this is somehow related to Vitalis.”

  “Well then we’ll just have to be extra careful.”

  I wasn’t about to challenge her informed decision. For all I knew, she’d be the one saving the day again.

  We arrived at the medical school campus promptly at nine o’clock and ostensibly undetected. We’d camouflaged ourselves within a group walking from the metro, so I was pretty sure we hadn’t been spotted. Yet.

  Tarasova’s building bordered a construction site on one side and the Palace of Youth’s park on the other. Number 28 was a long, eight-story structure clad with white tile and adorned with wraparound balconies on the higher floors. Lots of places to put a spotter, but I didn’t see any. Speaking loud enough to be heard over the rattle and hum of earth-moving equipment, I said, “Nice building.”

  Katya had apparently been thinking the same thing. “The medical school’s lucky to have it. I’m sure that renting it out to commercial enterprises helps to keep their lights on.”

  Speaking of keeping the lights on, a sign on the elevator door recommended using the stairs on account of frequent electrical outages. A result of the neighboring construction. A couple of students approached and bravely pressed the up button while we read. “Which floor?” I asked Katya.

  “Top one, of course. The eighth.”

  “Feel like some exercise?”

  I felt my stomach squirming as we began to climb. If this visit wasn’t successful, I wasn’t sure what we’d do next, but I did know that losing momentum could be deadly. Speaking of which, I slid my hand into my jacket pocket and around the butt of Scar’s Glock.