Nightfire (19 page)

Finally, Mike stopped moving, his head nestled against her neck, huge shoulders heaving as he pulled in breaths as if he’d run a four-minute mile.

Mike opened his hands and she stood on shaking legs.

He kissed her neck and slowly pulled out of her, still hard.

“I think we need that bed now,” he said.

Chapter 14

The Meteor Club

T
he prostitute screamed, struggled. Coughed, screamed again. Struggled.

Stupid cow.

What did she think she was going to gain? She was fastened to the board and her hands were in police restraints. Unbreakable restraints.

And yet the human will to live was strong, no one knew that better than Nikitin. He’d done this hundreds of times. And even when the man on the inclined board knew it was going to end badly, he struggled.

Dmitri continued pouring water over the three layers of cloth covering the woman’s face and looked over at him.

Nikitin waited, taking another long puff on a Marlboro. American cigarettes were excellent. How stupid of the Americans to put all those warning signs on the packages. Of course cigarettes killed. What didn’t kill? Life itself killed.

The cloth was sucked in as the woman instinctively tried to breathe. But the cloth was soaked in water and the only effect was a trickle of water coming into the nose and mouth. The body considered this an imminent threat, as invasive as a gunshot wound, and reacted accordingly. The bucking and writhing increased. In silence, though, as there was no breath to make a noise.

Nikitin hated it when they made noises.

Nikitin breathed out the smoke, counted.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen
. He nodded. Dmitri immediately stopped pouring water over the cloth and lifted it.

The naked woman was writhing crazily. She was young and strong, kept herself in shape. Lean sleek muscles moved beneath that deep honey-colored skin.

She wasn’t going to break her bonds—they’d been tested on battle-hardened soldiers, after all—but she could do herself an injury. Pull or strain a muscle. Nikitin had known men who’d broken their own bones in anguish, trying to get away from the water.

There were soft cloths between the restraints on her wrists and ankles and her skin.

The whole point of waterboarding this
prostitutka
was to avoid marring her. Avoid leaving any tangible signs of torture. She was an expensive commodity. Nikitin knew how much she earned the club. His masters, the
vory,
would be over here soon and would make inquiries if they saw a drop in income.

Nikitin blew another plume of smoke out of the side of his mouth, got up from the stool where he’d been watching the proceedings, and walked over to the woman. Her forehead was strapped to the board so she couldn’t turn her head, so she did the only thing she could do. She closed her eyes.

“Look at me.” Nikitin didn’t bother putting menace in his voice. He wanted this over and done with as soon as possible. He needed information and as soon as he had it, he wanted to get away from this woman, fast.

She didn’t open her eyes.

“Dmitri,” Nikitin said quietly, and his second-in-command placed the cloth over her face again and slowly poured more water onto it.

She held her breath for as long as she could, but the breathing reflex is the most powerful reflex of all. Primordial. There are many ways to use the body to kill itself. You can bash your head against the wall until you fall bloody and unconscious. You can cut your arteries at the neck or the wrist. You can even swallow your own tongue. But you cannot hold your breath until you die. Your body won’t let you.

After a minute the cloth bulged inward as she breathed in water and writhed madly.

Nikitin waited a second, two, judging. Lifted his finger. Dmitri stopped immediately. Removed the cloth. “Look at me,” Nikitin said again, no change in his tone. “We can do this all day and all night.”

Her eyes popped open.
Da
. This was more like it.

Defiance was written all over her face. Clearly, Sands treated his women too well. If this woman only knew what Nikitin could do to her . . . He wouldn’t because she was still a money-earner, but he was tempted.

“Hijo de puta! Pendejo!”
she spat.

Interesting. Nikitin knew her background, knew she was born on the streets of Tijuana. She’d educated herself out of that. Her English was, as far as he could tell, accentless and perfect. She’d turned herself into an American whore.

But under stress, her origins showed.

The board was inclined, feet up, head down. Nikitin dragged his stool over, sat next to her head at the bottom of the board. He leaned over, knowing his face covered her entire field of vision. Good. Right now, he needed to fill her world. He was her God and she had to appease him.

She stopped wrenching at her restraints and lay there, breathing hard. Nikitin looked at her carefully, going from her face slowly up the board to her feet.

She was naked for a reason. Being naked thrust you back into defenseless childhood, stripped you of all dignity. Not that a whore would know much of dignity.

She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, head to toe, though Nikitin was immune to her charms. Was immune to all women. But he could easily see that she had the kind of body and face men would pay a great deal to rent for a while. Very few men had something like this at home.

Intelligently, Sands made sure his whores ate well, slept enough, exercised in the club’s downstairs gym; he also had a strict no-drugs rule which was enforced with pain.

The merchandise was protected and treated to last more than most in the field. Nikitin had once seen a whore on the streets of Odessa who looked forty but whose papers showed she was sixteen. Life on the street was measured in dog years. Each year on the street was like seven. Except at the club, where the goods were pampered and had a much longer shelf life.

His gaze drifted back from her feet to her face, the message clear.
I own you. All of you
.

He hitched his stool closer, bent down to her until their noses touched.

“Two of my men are missing,” he said, voice cold and clear.

The woman blinked, taken aback. This wasn’t what she was expecting. A frown appeared between her eyebrows. “You think I did something to them?”

“Yes.”

“To your . . . men?” She looked down at herself, then back up to him. If she’d said the words aloud, the message couldn’t have been clearer. What could one woman do to two of his men, former Spetsnaz?

Fuck.

For the first time, it occurred to Nikitin that she might not actually have any information.

If so, he was in deepest deepest shit. He’d come with only three men. How hard, how dangerous could it be to invest in a brothel? The mission had been more economic than military and Nikitin had chosen his men accordingly.

He hadn’t brought his entire A team. Most of them were involved in protecting a diamond route in Sierra Leone. Stupid, stupid. Because this investment here might prove to be even more lucrative than diamonds. Particularly diamonds that had to be mined a thousand miles from civilization and then accompanied to market.

He’d underestimated this, thinking there would be no opposition. They were flying right under the radar of the authorities and Sands had assured him that one of the mayor’s assistants and two D.A.s were members of the club and they’d be protected.

And yet, there were enemies of the club out there, had to be, otherwise his men would be here now.

Two men—two good, smart soldiers—couldn’t simply disappear from the face of earth, could they?

They had gone to give a lesson to an
Amerikanskaya
who was a minor annoyance, like a piece of grit in a shoe. Creating disharmony among the women. Nikitin had even debated sending one man for such an easy task, but in the end decided on sending two. Ivan was harder but Lyov had better English.

Nothing to it. Have a talk with the woman who was disrupting their business, convince her to stop, call in mission completed. They never called in. They had dropped off the face of the earth.

Ivan and Lyov’s cell phones were offline and they weren’t contacting him.

This woman had to know something. She went to the shelter often. Sands was just now waking up to the fact that he’d allowed insubordination to seep into his stable of women.

“Where are my men?” he asked again. He kept his voice low, even. He didn’t have to scream to make his point. His point was clear. She was trussed like an animal and he held the power of life and death over her.

She tried to shake her head and forgot that it was bound. A sound like steam escaped her lips.

This was getting them nowhere. Nikitin looked up at Dmitri, flicking his finger.
Get ready for another round.

Dmitri poured water from a large pitcher into a smaller one, so the trickle of water could be better controlled.

“My men went to the shelter, where that woman indoctrinated you. They were going to talk to the woman, tell her how she was making a mistake with the whores of the Meteor and had to stop.”

Consuelo panted, black eyes shiny with hatred. Had Nikitin been the kind of man to care, it might have bothered him. But he’d been hated by the best. One whore’s hatred didn’t mean anything at all.

“You
hurt
her!” she screamed, spittle flying.

Nikitin averted his head, pulled back from the spittle, full of distaste. “The fact is,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “my men never came home. I have no idea what happened to them. I need to know from you where they are.”

Nikitin was aware of the fact that Consuelo might have no idea what had happened to Ivan and Lyov. But women, like primitive tribes, had some kind of jungle system of information, which spread among them like a virus.

He had no alternatives. He was alone here, in this strange world. Dmitri was muscle. Decent muscle, true, and he’d been well-trained, but his English was minimal and he had limited use outside enforcement.

So Nikitin was reduced to waterboarding whores.

Nikitin drummed his fingers on his thigh, the only expression of frustration he could allow himself.

He had no resources here in this country, none.

He had resources back home.
Pirat,
the best hacker in Russia. Nikitin had no idea where he lived or even what his name was. It made no difference. Pirat was a genius and always came back with an answer.

Except now. Pirat had hacked into all the hospitals, all the police stations, all the news feeds, even the morgues, because surely two men could not just disappear into nothing? And yet they had.

Nikitin desperately needed to keep this news from the
vory
back home. Lots of money was involved and the
vory
did not want even a hint of trouble.

Losing two men into the void was the very definition of trouble.

Chert!

This whore had to know something. “Again,” he said.

Dmitri placed the cloth on her face.

The whore started keening with terror, which was exactly what he wanted. He watched dispassionately as the water was poured, the cloth sucked into her mouth as she tried to breathe. He judged the right moment, just before drowning . . . ah. He lifted his finger and Dmitri lifted the cloth.

Tears were streaming down the whore’s face, she was choking for air, trembling all over. She was screaming, but had very little breath, so it came out more a gurgle than a scream. She was terrified.

And she wasn’t talking.

Dmitri moved to place the cloth over her face again but Nikitin held up a hand. Dmitri stopped, obediently.

Nikitin inched his stool closer. “Tell me everything about this woman who is spreading discontent among you. Her name is Chloe. Chloe what?”

Even bound, she was able to shrug one shoulder. “Mason. I think.” He opened his mouth to tell Dmitri to start again when she spoke. “No one uses last names at the shelter. It’s forbidden. So I don’t know her last name for sure and no one else would. I just saw an envelope in her purse once. It said ‘For Chloe Mason.’ That’s all I know.”

“She’s a volunteer?”

The whore nodded. “They all are.”

Nikitin didn’t truly understand that. Volunteer to work with whores? For
free
? What would she get out of it? But he had long since resigned himself to the stupidity of humankind. Volunteering to work with whores was right up there with the men he’d seen who’d destroyed themselves over the love of a woman. Or what they thought was love.

Nikitin didn’t understand that, either.

No matter, there were plenty of other things he understood just fine.

“What else?” Because there was something else, he could tell. “What else do you know about this woman?”

The prostitute’s throat worked, the sign of words not wanting to come out. “Again,” he said quietly to Dmitri.

“No!” The prostitute screamed. The skin over her left breast was trembling with the rapid beating of her heart. “There’s something else, the only thing I know.”

Nikitin didn’t answer. He simply waited. She could see Dmitri holding the cloth. He didn’t have to talk.