by Tom Crown
“We just need another minute,” he said, trying to make his request sound reasonable. “It doesn’t really matter what you say to them, just buy us some time.” He stepped closer and gave her a look that he hoped would inspire confidence. He needed her to handle this just right. The girls had to get to his house, then he would be free to kill off Ryan and Jenny in good order, and finally be back in control. Alex would have to pay him everything he had to get the girls back. The best of them were still worth a lot to Alex’s people, and he would want them back. Alex would probably have to rob a bank or an armored truck to put everything back in order, but that was just the kind of thing he could pull off and get away with.
Jenny nodded, knelt down, and began to fumble with the phone.
Steve sensed Katia behind him and stepped out of the way. She was leading the girls out onto the yard, and they were looking at Steve and Jenny in bewilderment.
“It’s okay,” Katia said to the girls. “They’re with us too.”
Steve tried to smile with what he figured was a reassuring look, but it didn’t do much good. And Jenny was still struggling with the phone call. She needed his help, but if Alex heard his voice he would surely understand that something was up. Still he stepped closer.
“Where I am?” Jenny asked into the phone. “I’m at the hospital. Yes. No, I am.” She grimaced in frustration. “At the vending machine. I just passed the vending machine on the first floor, by the elevators. Yes.”
Jenny pulled the phone from her ear. Alex was shouting on the other side.
Steve heard agitated whispers behind him and realized the girls had recognized Alex’s voice. He turned and saw them look around in confusion, and their voices were rising much too quickly. He couldn’t understand any of the words but heard Alex’s name repeatedly, and the tone of the conversation was plain to read; they were afraid, and suspicious. And getting much too loud.
“He’s gone,” Jenny said, looking at the phone in her hand.
“He must have heard them.” Steve took Jenny’s trembling hands and looked at her intently. “We better hurry.”
“I’m sorry.”
He let go and looked at Katia behind him, who was still trying to calm the other girls down.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “Where’s Ryan?”
“I’ll get him.” Katia looked at the girls and motioned for them to go with Steve and Jenny, but they seemed reluctant. She kept talking to them, her voice fast, stern, and impatient, but finally just left them and ran back into the barn.
Steve took a step to run after her, but the door shut in his face. The code lock was back on. He reached toward the panel, but lifted his hand away before touching it. He couldn’t possibly guess the right combination. It didn’t matter.
He looked at Jenny and the girls around her. He already had everything he wanted.
“All right,” he said. “We better go.”
* * * *
Alex kept his eyes on the road rushing toward them. Suddenly everything was down to this, how fast he could get back to the farm he had protected for over a year and left unattended for only a few hours in all that time.
What he knew for certain, what he had heard with his own ears, was that Jenny was at the barn and the girls no longer in their rooms. His mind raced with various scenarios. Perhaps Jenny had finally tired of Mats and decided to kill him, and had freed Katia in the process, and decided to work with her to set the other girls free. But that didn’t factor in Steve. Perhaps Steve had seduced Jenny to get to Mats. That made more sense, but wasn’t entirely plausible. If that was his plan, Steve shouldn’t have drawn attention to himself a week before by killing Yulia.
There were just too many loose ends, too many unknowns, too much going wrong all at once. The best approach, he decided, would be to start taking out the unknowns one by one.
He glanced at Roman and wondered if it was time to let him go, but decided against it. He had no way of knowing what awaited them at the barn, and he would need all the backup he could get. Roman would stay for another couple of hours.
He felt better, having made that one decision, and he took a deep breath to let himself relax for just a moment. He needed to keep calm. He needed to play everything just right.
“How fast do you want me to go?” Roman asked. They had come to a good stretch of road with perfect visibility.
“How much longer do you want to live?” Alex said, but that spurred no reaction from Roman. “Just floor it.”
It was strange to see the landscape now, remembering all the times they had driven here before, all the times everything had been perfectly under control. Only yesterday.
“Why would Jenny want the girls?” Roman asked with a quick glance in Alex’s direction.
“Don’t think so much.”
Roman grunted in reply, but after a moment glared back. “You don’t know, do you?”
Alex pulled out his revolver and calmly pressed it against Roman’s temple. “What would you do without me? Go to the police? Stay at the barn, eat all the food and drink every bottle, sleep with every girl until you couldn’t stand them anymore, and then what? Shoot them all and then yourself? Or would you try to run the business on your own? I don’t think so. Sergei could have done it. Hell, even Katia could have done it, if she’d been so inclined. But you?”
“I’d go back to Russia,” Roman muttered stubbornly.
“Soon enough, my friend. Soon enough.” He kept the weapon at Roman’s head for another moment, then lowered it and pointed it at the floor, resting his arm against his knee.
“I want you alert,” he said. “I want you to remember what we stand to win and what we stand to lose. We will come out on top. We’ll kill anyone who goes against us, and we’ll come out on top.”
Roman nodded and turned the wheel. They left the asphalt and continued along a dirt track. The forest soon gave way to an open field and Alex could see the barn in the distance.
He felt his heart begin to pound and he told himself it was all right. He knew now that he was facing a smarter opponent than he had first anticipated. This was all-out war, and he had been foolish not to see it before.
He rolled down his window and peered into the distance. He could see people moving about and raised his revolver and aimed at them out the window. He was still too far away, but given another few seconds, he would be ready to fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
RYAN WAS POWERING up a laptop on the desk in the last room down the hall, an office used by the men who ran this place. It was different from the other rooms, with a dirty desk and a worn armchair instead of a double bed, magazines scattered on the floor, and a current centerfold calendar hung above the desk. The room was messy and uninviting, but it was not a prison cell.
The laptop on the desk finally finished booting up, never even asking for a password. Its Windows desktop showed a picture of a ’65 Mustang cruising through a desert landscape and it struck him as the ultimate image of freedom. Even his Afghan captors would have recognized it as such, and then turned that Mustang into a patrol car.
He wondered for a moment if he would ever stop thinking about them. Any of them. His captors. His interrogator. The boy at the door. The bodies scattered across the yard after the missile strike. The bodies he’d left further down the road.
“We have to go!”
He immediately recognized the footsteps in the hallway as Katia’s but still reached for the rifle leaning against the desk. She appeared in the doorway, her face agitated, her body still moving, but then her gaze drifted to the laptop and she froze.
“They know we’re here,” she said, still looking at the screen.
“What? How?”
“They called again and must have heard the girls talking.” She looked up. “We have to go.”
“I’m coming,” Ryan said, beginning to disconnect the laptop.
“No, leave that! Come on!” She pushed away from the door and spun around. He looked at the
laptop again, hearing her run back to the stairs. He understood the urgency perfectly well, but the computer was too valuable to leave behind. There would be an aftermath when this confrontation was over and they would need all the evidence they could lay their hands on.
He disconnected the power cord and stepped out into the corridor with the rifle in his right hand and the laptop tucked under his left. Katia was already gone. He looked back again and scanned the room one last time. He hadn’t found his passport, but time was definitely up.
He raced down the stairs and found Katia on the ground floor, just pushing the front door open, but outside he saw the van already rolling onto the yard with Alex waving a gun around.
It was too late to cross the field undetected.
Steve and Jenny and the others must have already made it to a hiding place somewhere, but he couldn’t see where.
Katia pulled the door shut. “They’re already here!”
He put the laptop on the floor and grabbed the rifle with both hands. The nearest window was so dusty it was barely transparent, and hadn’t been visible at all from across the field.
“Did you see where the others went?” He could see Alex and Roman get out of the van, but there was still no sign of Steve or Jenny.
“No,” Katia said, peering out through a different window.
He lifted the rifle and aimed carefully from a decent angle. The two men were treading across the yard outside, both holding weapons in their hands.
“Go,” Ryan whispered. “Further back. Where they can’t see you.”
Katia shook her head.
He gestured for her to go but kept his eyes on the men outside. He saw them switching weapons, Alex handing his gun to Roman and getting the sub-machine gun in return.
Katia still hadn’t moved. He glanced at her and saw her shake her head again.
“Please,” he tried.
She finally got to her feet and began to move across the floor, and he kept watching as she receded into the shadows.
A window exploded behind him.
Katia dropped to the floor.
Ryan spun toward the shattered window and felt glass showering over him. He closed his eyes and threw himself to the floor. Onto the glass. Bad idea.
Katia was quiet. Too quiet.
The rifle was still in his hand. He looked back and forth between the spot where she had fallen and the window above him. He couldn’t see the men outside, just the radiant sky, and he couldn’t see Katia anywhere behind him. He couldn’t see if she was hurt. He couldn’t see her at all. Crates, a work table, a trailer, those he could see. And dust everywhere, molding hay, swirling in the shaft of sunlight that cut into the hall through the broken window. The rays bounced off the shattered glass covering the floor, sharp like razors, not like the grainy remains of a car window designed to help you survive. This glass was dangerous, and it covered his clothes and his hair, and his eyes were hurting from something too. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“Katia?”
He still couldn’t see her. Too many objects were blocking the way, and he hadn’t seen how far she had made it before the shot. He shouldn’t have told her to run. She had been safer below the window, behind the concrete wall.
He looked back and forth between the broken window and the shadows deeper inside the barn. It wasn’t the right thing to do. His eyes never got the time to adjust to the light and he couldn’t see anything. Perhaps she was hiding, perhaps she was hurt. Perhaps she was bleeding on the floor.
There was no time.
He took in the situation outside. The two men were still hiding behind the van. But no, not hiding. That was only wishful thinking. The men were carefully coordinating their assault.
He considered aiming for the fuel tank but immediately decided it was too much of a gamble. He wasn’t sure where to aim, or if the tank would actually explode if he hit the right spot. The bullet itself wouldn’t ignite the gas simply because it traveled through the liquid. It would have to cause a spark, and that could only happen with enough oxygen. There were too many factors, and either way, firing at the fuel tank would give away his position. He didn’t want to do that. And he didn’t want to waste ammunition on an object that was already dead.
The sun outside was shining from his left. He could see the shadows of Alex and Roman move behind the van. The shapes were barely human, but he could see movements that he interpreted as urgency and impending action.
Suddenly Roman burst forward around the front of the van.
Ryan moved into position in the window and fired off a single shot. A tire blew and the van knelt hard into the dirt. Roman stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide, his arms wielding as he struggled for direction.
Ryan moved to the other corner of the shattered window and aimed again, but he was too slow. Roman found his composure again and rolled down back behind the van before Ryan could fire off another shot.
He lowered the rifle and moved away from the window. He didn’t know if he actually could pull the trigger unless he saw the other man draw first. But, he reminded himself, they had already drawn first. They had already fired.
He looked into the darkness again.
“Are you all right?” he called, keeping his voice to a low whisper. “Katia?”
Silence.
He cursed himself. He shouldn’t have waited. His experiences were dragging him down again. It was still with him, the waiting in the Kandahar mountains, watching out for passing vehicles, for mule trains appearing over the nearest ridge, for anyone at all, wanting to kill him. That everlasting waiting.
“No,” she finally answered, “I’m bleeding, but not bad.”
He felt his heart race. She sounded scared.
The waiting had to end.
He looked out again and saw Roman and Alex bolt from behind the van. Perhaps he had hit something vital, after all, or perhaps they too had decided it was time to end this once and for all. Just like he had.
He steadied the rifle against the concrete wall and aimed carefully for Roman, the larger man, the slower man, the easier target, a step behind. He squeezed the trigger. Roman twisted in mid-step and blood squirted from his chest. He stumbled, and collapsed to the ground. Ryan moved the rifle to stay with him, but realized he had killed the man with a single shot.
Ryan tilted the rifle slightly up again and saw Alex take to the ground and roll to a safe spot behind a pile of firewood, expertly aiming with the sub-machine gun as he moved.
Ryan fired off another shot and then backed away from the window. He only had two bullets left. He absolutely couldn’t miss the next time he pulled the trigger.
He stayed low and finally made his way across the floor to Katia. She had fallen behind a wooden crate. He could see blood stains on the wood where her hands had landed. She smiled when she saw him.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
She nodded.
“Can you move?”
“Yes. It’s not that bad.” She turned around and showed him the injury. She was a brave young woman, and he could very well have imagined her speaking the very same words if she had been mortally wounded. This bullet, however, had only graced her shoulder, and the bleeding would be easy to stop.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think we can move.”
“Please.”
“Careful though.”
He helped her up and pulled her further into the barn. They climbed the stairs and managed to get to the top just as Alex cracked the door open below.
Ryan pulled Katia toward the corridor but felt her pulling hard in the other direction. She certainly knew her way around better than he did. He let her lead the way, past the stairs and out on the loft, to a spot behind some boxes with a partial view of the ground floor below. They stayed low and watched Alex move across the floor below with his weapon raised.
Ryan watched the wound on Katia’s shoulder. Enough blood was pooling for it to start dripping to the floor at any moment. But Al
ex would probably smell it first.
He was moving right toward them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“KATIA! I UNDERSTAND it’s you up there!” Alex’s voice was strong and confident, as if he was entirely convinced things would work out to his complete satisfaction.
Ryan tried to move the rifle fully in his direction, but the space was too small, the angle too awkward, and he didn’t want to reveal their position.
“We were thinking about that,” Alex continued. “Where we’d find you. I had my money on right back here. Roman thought you’d run straight into the forest and be eaten by wolves. But he never knew you very well. Not like I do. So, come on! You were doing so well. You got two girls recruited. I’ve been keeping good money for you. I told you to trust me!”
Ryan glanced at Katia and saw her pull back. He felt a stab of guilt, knowing she had probably seen the very first flash of doubt in his eyes. She was shaking her head, silently telling him not to listen, telling him to trust her, but he didn’t know what to believe. He’d always had patience, had always seen the best in people, certainly in women, and sometimes it didn’t turn out right. He had learned that much about himself, but he hadn’t learned what to do with it.
“Katia! You’re smart and ambitious, and I like that. You know I do!”
Katia closed her eyes.
“And I understand what you’re trying to do. Take the girls, set up your own shop, strike while the iron’s hot. You’re a fast thinker, light on your feet. I like it!”
Alex was right below them now, easy enough to hit from this distance even if the angle was still bad. Ryan kept the rifle aimed at the man’s head, but he didn’t want to silence him just yet.
Suddenly Katia reached for the rifle. Ryan pulled back and shook his head, but she wrapped her fingers around the barrel and he found that their grips were equally firm.
Then the wood beneath them creaked.
Ryan pushed Katia away and rolled to the side, catching a glimpse of Alex below raising the sub-machine gun. The sound when he fired was like a jackhammer, physical and metallic, and the bullets ripped through the loft like it was paper thin, showering splinters and dust all around. The wood cracked like winter ice. And their bodies were too heavy. The wood itself was too heavy. The outcome was inevitable.