by Mark Terry
Derek’s parents were missionary doctors. He had grown up splitting his time between Jacksonville, Florida and various African countries, primarily Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Guinea, although he spent some time in Liberia and Cuba when he was very young. If Derek had a place he grew up that he considered “home”—and he wasn’t entirely sure he did—it was Sierra Leone. Although English was the official language of Sierra Leone, Krio was spoken by almost everybody native to the country. Krio was an oddity, loosely based on English and a dozen African dialects, including Nigeria’s Yaruba.
The doctor seemed confused, which was appropriate. Speaking in Krio, Derek pointed to the baggie and said, “Now shut the fuck up and listen to me, you Russian twerp. I’m ninety percent sure Titov was poisoned with a doctored nicotine patch. Either that or he’s a morbidly obese heart-attack-on-a-plate and it was natural causes. But that would be a hell of a coincidence…” Derek was getting warmed up now, voice rising in urgency, going into a full-out shout. He had easily eight inches and sixty pounds on the doc, and it didn’t hurt that in his other hand he was holding a pair of scissors that he was jabbing in the air, more or less in the general direction of the doctor’s eyeballs. “… so why don’t you fucking do your fucking job and run a full tox screen on the body and on this patch, specifically looking for nicotine!”
He flung the scissors against the wall, where they ricocheted around the room for a moment before skittering to a halt on the floor. Slamming the evidence bag against the doc’s chest, he turned and headed for the door, bursting into the hallway, Konstantin right behind him. As soon as the door swung shut Derek whispered in his ear, “Go back in there and tell him it was probably nicotine poisoning from a doctored nicotine patch and he needs to run a tox screen looking for it. It can mimic a heart attack. I’ll meet you outside.”
Back in Konstantin’s Audi, slipping into thick rush hour traffic, the Russian said, “How sure are you about the nicotine poisoning?”
“Pretty sure. When I looked at the patches in the box, they’re in individual wrappers, and the wrappers didn’t look quite right. It could just be Russian manufacturing, I don’t know. But they looked, mmmm, handled. And when I held them up to the light the seals looked a little smudged, like maybe they’d been re-glued. So I think it’s a possibility somebody loaded up his nicotine patches with ultra-high dosages. And if he continued to smoke while he took them, he could have overdosed pretty quickly.”
“He never quit smoking,” Konstantin said. “But he always wore the patches. He was compulsive about it. His doctor wanted him to lose weight, quit smoking, cut back on his vodka. He never did.” He shook his head.
“So it was general knowledge.”
“Da.”
“But how could someone switch them out?”
Konstantin was driving through a working class section of the city, far from the architectural beauty of the Kremlin and the modern money of the Arbat and Ostozhenka areas. This area was factories, grimy high-rise apartments, bars and restaurants.
“A little sleight of hand. He carried them in a jacket pocket. If a pro, like the Gekko, planned ahead, he could have switched them when he went out to lunch. Nothing to it.” He slid the Audi into an open parking spot against the curb.
“What are we doing now?”
Pocketing the keys, Konstantin said, “Doctor, I have just seen my boss naked and dead. I have seen the burned body of a little girl. I am going to have a drink.”
16
Derek didn’t catch the name of the bar, but he’d been in enough bars in enough countries around the world to recognize the universality of a working-class bar—hammered tin ceiling, bottles of booze behind the polished bar, dim lighting. Some version of Russian country music was playing on a jukebox and half a dozen burly men slouched over the bar, beers or vodka cupped in large, rough hands. A haze of cigarette smoke blued the air.
Konstantin led him to a corner booth, waving to a barmaid, who was young and sexy in tight jeans and a tight white t-shirt. She appeared at their booth and Derek upgraded her age by at least a decade. Still sexy, but her face showed a lot of miles.
Konstantin said, “Smirnov.” He looked at Derek, who nodded. “Dva.” Two.
She went away and Derek said, “You don’t like the morgue, I take it.”
“I’ve spent too much time in it.”
The bartender caught his eye and gave him a little salute. Konstantin returned it.
“You a regular?”
Konstantin smiled. “I grew up in the neighborhood. Went to school with the owner. We’re friends.”
“What in the U.S. we’d call a working-class kid.”
A puzzled expression crossed Konstantin’s face. “Working class?”
“Sort of refers to … do you understand the term ‘blue collar’?”
A shake of the head.
“People that work with their hands. Work in factories, in trades, carpenters, plumbers, truck drivers. Versus ‘white collar’ people, who work in an office.”
“Yes. My father was working class. Maybe we are too, you and I.”
Nodding. “Sort of.”
“You did not like the morgue much yourself, Doctor. I thought you were going to be ill. You sort of … went away there for a moment.”
“So did you.”
They stared at each other. The barmaid returned with their drinks. Derek knocked back a swallow of the vodka, enjoying the burn. “I’ve seen too much. Sometimes it comes back at me.”
Konstantin nodded. He did not drink. Rolling the glass between his hands, he said, “Five years ago my wife and seven-year-old daughter were taking a bus across town to go shopping. Chechen terrorists placed a bomb on the bus. They were killed. I identified the bodies.”
“I’m sorry.”
He downed the vodka and made a gesture to the waitress for another. Derek finished off his drink. Derek thought about working-class fathers and thought of hearing the voice of his father in his head when he was freezing to death in the river. There was nothing particularly working class about Daniel Stillwater, MD. Intelligent, articulate, deeply religious, but also sometimes narrow-minded and judgmental. Very, very demanding.
Derek thought of his father telling him, “There’s no way you’re going into the military. I won’t allow it.” And Derek had joined anyway and how it had driven a rift between them, his father the missionary doctor and pacifist and his son the military scientist who tried to stop crazy people from using chemical and biological weapons on innocent civilians. How they had not spoken for years, communicating via email messages sent on by his brother David or his mother.
Leaning forward, Konstantin said, “So I hunt terrorists, Doctor Stillwater. It’s why I hate terrorism. A simple man with simple motives, nyet? I am easy to understand. But you? Do you have simple motives? Why do you hunt terrorists?
Derek sipped his vodka and considered the question. No, he had no single horrible event in his life like Konstantin did that pointed him at terrorists. But he despised terrorism. Terrorism was not warfare, it was a criminal act. Terrorists claimed they were fighting a war, but they targeted civilians, noncombatants, children, then wrapped their psychopathy in political rhetoric and religious dogma.
He had been raised around and by religious people, people who devoted their lives to helping people in the name of their religion and in the service of their God. Some of them were just as crazy and zealous as bombers who strapped C4 and ball bearings to their chests and walked into a crowd. But he knew the difference and he knew he was uniquely equipped to fight the battle. He hadn’t joined the army to fight terrorists. He hadn’t specialized in biological and chemical warfare to fight terrorists. He did those things for adventure, for intellectual stimulation, and a passion for the subject. The terrorists made the ultimate decision for him.
He thought of watching his father treating a girl for schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease caused by a flatworm that would bore into the skin and eventually would infect i
nternal organs. Like so many African parasitic diseases, it was ugly and brutal. As a little boy, he had asked his father why God would allow diseases like these to exist and to infect innocent people.
His father had told him that all human beings were at war with disease and in Africa the war was tougher than in most places. “We’re soldiers in God’s war against disease.”
Years later Derek and his family were airlifted out of the country by British soldiers during one of the many government upheavals in Sierra Leone. The soldiers all seemed ten-feet-tall, gods in the flesh, with their weapons and their uniforms and their casual attitudes about the dangers around them. One of the soldiers who had escorted the family to a waiting helicopter had looked down at Derek, who was ten years old, and said, “Don’t worry, mate. I’ve got your back. Me and my mates, we’ve got your back. Understand?”
Something had clicked.
To Konstantin, Derek said, “Because I can.”
Konstantin studied him.
Derek said, “And because I’m good at it.”
They drank some more in silence, listening to the music, brooding. Finally Konstantin said, “What’s next?”
“I think a little background on the Red Hand might help. I’m supposed to talk to a guy who might be able to help me out.”
“Who?”
Derek considered. How far to trust Konstantin? And if he approached this guy, Viktor Solomov, with an FSB agent in tow, would he get anything out of him?
“Just a possible source. I’d rather not say yet. Tell me about the Red Hand.”
Konstantin gave a distinctly Russian shrug, one that apparently carried all the history of tsars, Bolsheviks, gulags and purges in it. “A couple years ago they were a bunch of malcontents getting together at meeting halls and bars, drinking and complaining about the new capitalism and how the Americans, the Ukrainians, the Jews, the Uzbecks, etc., were ruining the country.”
“Like militias in the U.S.”
Konstantin frowned. “I don’t…”
“Timothy McVeigh, the Michigan Militia, the Hutaree, the Arizona Viper Militia. The list goes on.”
“Ah. Yes, McVeigh, yes. I remember. Yes, a lot like that. Anti-government, racist, often ex-military who like to go out into the woods and play soldier and talk about how there is a government conspiracy to keep them in their miserable lives.”
“That’s the Red Hand?”
“It was. But some faction of it seems to have gotten more organized lately, more violent, more … almost as if someone is providing backing. Someone with money, someone with government connections. Someone with ambition who is guiding them.”
“Any idea who?”
Konstantin shook his head, seemed to consider ordering another drink, then changed his mind. “I thought maybe Titov. But he wasn’t high enough. Someone killed him. And with the Gekko clearly in Moscow, as you proved, I suspect he killed Titov. But why? And why try to kill you?”
“Lots of questions and no answers.”
Again with the shrug.
“Do you know of a bar called The Real McCoy?”
Frowning, Konstantin turned his empty glass between his hands. “I’ve heard of it.”
“There’s a guy there I’m supposed to talk to. Might know something about the Red Hand. But I doubt he’ll talk to me if you’re around.”
Konstantin stood up. “We’ll see.”
The Gekko knelt before a row of candles in the Cathedral of the Dormition, dropped several ruble notes into the donation box, and lit three votive candles, one for the soul of Derek Stillwater, one for the soul of Erica Kirov, and one for the soul of Pietr Titov. He was not sure when he had started this tradition, lighting candles for the souls of his victims. Perhaps it was in his final year in the Russian Army, in 1988, in Afghanistan. It was at that point where his skills in killing people matured, when his bosses in the Russian Army realized that this Spetznaz soldier had unusual skills at up-close killing.
Mostly, he knew, it was during his final year in that godforsaken country that he was called into his commander’s tent and informed that his mother had died. The Gekko’s father had died a year after he was born. Growing up, he had been told by his mother, his beloved mother, of his father’s heroics in the Russian Army, of his many medals, of how he died in battle during the Sino-Soviet conflict, when the Russian Army and the Chinese Army fought skirmishes near Damanskii Island.
He grew up wanting to be a soldier, a hero, like his father. An athlete and exceptional student, he had wanted to be Spetsnaz, the best of the best, the Russian military’s special forces.
It was only years later, years after his mother died of pneumonia while he fought in Afghanistan, that he discovered his father had been a tread mechanic, trained to fix Russian tanks. That he had been drinking on the job and stumbled in front of a moving tank and was crushed beneath it.
By the time he discovered the sad truth it didn’t matter. He was not his father’s son, he was the son of the man his mother had invented for him, a hero of Mother Russia.
The Afghanistan conflict had honed his skills and built his reputation. He was a man who could move silently behind enemy lines, infiltrate an enemy encampment, slit the throat of a mujahedin warlord in his sleep and return to camp without anyone even knowing he had been gone. Among the Afghans he became known as Gekko, because he always hunted at night and he blended in. They feared this Russian Gekko who could kill as if by magic. They were afraid he was a deo, a spirit that could take the shape of an animal.
When the Soviet Union fell and the military began to disintegrate, the Gekko went to work for a Russian Mafioso, Ivan Denisov, as an enforcer, as an assassin. But Denisov’s ambitions weren’t matched by his intelligence, and a bomb beneath his armored Rolls Royce killed him.
The Gekko had placed it there. It was his first freelance job and it had paid well enough that he left Russia and for a time moved to Paris and spent five years acting as a military and intelligence advisor to various governments—Iran, Serbia, North Korea. That was his official job title. His name then was Timofei “Tim” Gavrik.
From time to time his contacts in various governments and in the Russian mafiya asked him if he knew someone who could do a “special job.” Tim Gavrik did. He knew of a man known as Mikhail Grechko, the Gekko, a name that amused him a great deal. Tim Gavrik would put these people in touch with Mikhail Grechko and funds would be placed in numbered accounts and people would be killed. And the reputation of the Gekko grew.
A man approached where the Gekko knelt before the candles. He was short and bearded and wore all black. The man fancied himself an artist, a painter, and he wore a van dyke beard and his hands were stained with paint. The Gekko knew a lot about this man, knew that he was not a very talented painter, and that he was the son of a man who called himself Z. Z was the real power behind the Red Hand. Z believed that he was going to overthrow the Russian government and become the new tsar.
The Gekko believed Z was like his first boss after the military, a ruthless man with endless ambitions who, nonetheless, overrated his own intelligence. Z stole weapons from the Russian military and sold them to support the Red Hand.
The Gekko thought it was not so much greed as power. Z did this because he could.
The Gekko supposed he should understand that himself. He had made a lucrative living as a military advisor. He was an assassin because he could be. And because he was good at it.
And if he turned down these jobs, the employer would merely find someone who would.
He glanced over to the son of Z. “You called this meeting?”
“Z has a message.”
The Gekko nodded. “What is it?”
“Derek Stillwater is still alive.”
The Gekko felt his heart beat a little harder in his chest. “This is a fact?”
“Yes. Our sources in the FSB have verified it. As is the American woman, Erica Kirov, although you are to leave her alone. She was collateral. Z is not happy. You still h
ave a job to do.”
The Gekko nodded again. “Indeed.”
“See that you do,” the son of Z said, trying to sound threatening, but sounding like a bad film.
The Gekko merely stared at the young man, who finally got up off his knees and walked out of the cathedral.
The Gekko reached out and snuffed out the flame on two of the three candles.
Derek Stillwater. Still alive.
Interesting.
17
The Real McCoy had a gray stone facade and an arched window that belonged on a library, not a nightclub. False advertising, for sure, although the pulsing techno beat gave it away. It took Derek only seconds to realize he was a little bit outside the club’s demographic. A little bit by maybe a decade. Or two.
The Real McCoy had an American feel with a bar littered with beer bottles, a tiki-bar, and girls in tight jeans and bikini tops dancing on tables. He had the sense of a place where young women went to pick up foreign guys—young expat women mostly, although there appeared to be a few middle-aged Russian women. The music was loud, the beat fast, the dance floor crowded.
Konstantin had suggested he leave the ushanka in the Audi. “Go in, hit the bar, have a drink, get a sense of things. Ask about your source. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
The women were generally a little young for him, probably in their twenties. Not that Derek was that discriminating. He liked women of all ages. He heard a lot of English, some French, some German, not too much Russian. A lot of the guys looked his age, expats looking for younger girls. He didn’t know if he was projecting either the money or the looks, but some girls checked him out as he moved toward the bar.
“Wanna dance?” a young blonde asked, a touch of Texas twang in her voice. “Maybe later,” he said with a grin, holding his hand to his mouth like he needed a drink.