Smoke and Mirrors (13 page)

Rodion had contemplated it at one time, but there was no advantage in trading in the devil he knew. He rifled in his pocket for more chewing gum, spilling litter out before he retrieved another piece of gum and shoved that in his mouth too.

The padlocked gate blocking access to the building had already been opened. Rodion, his rucksack securely strapped to his back, his hard hat dangling from his belt, hummed his way toward it, spat out the gum, and slipped inside.

At once, the hairs on the back of his neck rose up in warning. You didn’t have to be psychic to feel the menace, the ill will of the people waiting for him. At least two of them wanted to kill him, and just about all of the others would be prepared to. He heard nothing except the echo of his own footsteps, his own deliberately controlled breathing as he made his way down into what had once been a car park.

They waited for him in silence. Marenko stood nearest the exit in his designer suit, one leg bent so that he could rest his foot against the damp wall. He looked bored, although he couldn’t resist curling his lip at the sight of Rodion.

Rodion winked at him, which he clearly liked even less. His foot dropped to the ground.

Gadarin stood facing him in a smart black overcoat. Beside him was another man, stockier, older, in a similar overcoat, only his was brown. The infamous McLintock, he presumed. Behind them and ranged all over the room were a fine mixture of Russian and Scottish badasses—heavies, addicts, and plain greedy bastards, all prepared to cut their own grannies’ throats for a few dollars more.

“Come in, come in,” boomed McLintock, his voice echoing loudly, presumably deliberately to disconcert him after the silence.

Rodion sauntered farther in. Being good at his job, Marenko eased after him. But everyone knew he wasn’t there as Rodion’s bodyguard; he was there as the Bear’s number two. And the fact that there were only two of the Bear’s people made the size of the opposition’s army look just a bit ridiculous.

“The famous Mr. Kosar, I have to assume?”

“I’m Kosar,” Rodion admitted, coming to a halt before them. No one offered to shake hands.

“I’m a great admirer of your work,” McLintock said amiably. “The Bank of America job was a work of art.”

“I couldn’t possibly take the credit,” Rodion said modestly, swinging the rucksack off his shoulder. At once, a couple of heavies started forward. Rodion laughed. “No rush, guys. It’s for you.”

“In the circumstances,” Gadarin said in his heavily accented English, “you won’t mind if my men search you.”

“Actually, I will.”

“But he’ll put up with it,” Marenko intervened.

Rodion sighed and raised his arms. “I thought you’d be more interested in the goods, but carry on.”

Marenko, who’d obviously not been subjected to the same indignity, smirked at him as a couple of burly men, one Russian, one Scots, patted him down. Well, more thudded than patted, but he bore it without a murmur until the Russian found the passport and handed it to a smiling Gadarin.

Rodion swore under his breath.

“I’ll just keep this until our business is done,” Gadarin said with a nod to Marenko. “If that’s all right with you.”

“Be my guest,” Marenko drawled. “If I’m not guarantee enough for his good behaviour.”

“So this is the goods?” McLintock said, nudging the rucksack with his toe. “I have to admire your casual approach, Mr. Kosar.”

“It seemed better than a crate labelled with your name and ‘Do Not Touch’ stickers.”

“We’re not happy paying for this twice,” Gadarin added.

Rodion raised his brows. “You got two shipments, one at a knockdown price. The first was lost in your custody, not ours.” The Scottish heavy still feeling his way up one leg gave an unnecessarily vicious grope to the top. Rodion ignored him, along with the wave of pain and nausea that threatened from the rough treatment. These things were unimportant.

“And talking of price,” Marenko intervened. “If you gentlemen would be so good?”

The heavies, finished with pummelling him for the present, pushed him backward, farther away from Marenko, who was casting a knowing eye over the case full of money being displayed to him by another man.

Two more of Gadarin’s and McLintock’s men opened the rucksack and dragged the parcel free, not without difficulty. They used a wicked-looking knife to cut into it and reveal the smaller, more manageable packets inside and rearranged the torches to get a better look. The one with the knife took a few grains of the white powder onto the blade and tasted. He nodded at McLintock. The other followed the same ritual and nodded at Gadarin.

Marenko said to McLintock, “We can, of course, deliver more as regularly as you want. Supply is not a problem for us.”

Good old Marenko. Full of himself and as unsubtle as a nail bomb. While McLintock smiled, Gadarin’s face twitched with annoyance. Of course Gadarin knew the score. Letting the Bear into his operation had always come with the risk that Gadarin himself would be squeezed out as superfluous. There was no real need to rub it in. It only served to humiliate Gadarin in front of his own people, and a humiliated man was a dangerous man. The worm would turn. Which may have been what Marenko wanted. It was certainly what Rodion wanted.

Gadarin kept his gaze on Marenko while he spoke to McLintock. “Supply isn’t really the issue. The
organization
of supply is. And all the other unique talents of Rodion Kosar. Which I have just retained at double his old salary.”

Interesting form of job offer, and not so spontaneous as Rodion had imagined. For no sooner had Gadarin finished speaking than a movement in the nearby shadows caught Rodion’s eye. A gun, raised and aimed by one of Gadarin’s men, directly at Marenko’s head.

It was undeniably a bad moment. It wasn’t time for Marenko to die. Fuck, Rodion thought with annoyance, and tensed to spring at the gunman. It would ruin his plan, but right now he had to save Marenko.

He misjudged the Bear’s number two, who hadn’t, after all, survived all these years at the top of a violent profession by being slow. Before anyone had really worked out what was going on, Marenko not only snatched his gun from the waistband of his trousers but fired twice. The shadowy figure crumpled. Gadarin stared in surprise at the growing stain on his fine, wool overcoat. So did McLintock, his eyes widening.

Bloodbath time, Rodion thought grimly.
Where the hell is the fucking cavalry?
What if Nell hadn’t bothered or hadn’t been able to convince Lamont? What if something had happened to her? He wished now he’d given her his number, just so she could text that she was all right. If Gadarin had got to her after all…

The racing, blinding thoughts took only a fraction of a second, a weird, silent instant while everyone absorbed what had just happened. Marenko’s gun now pointed directly at McLintock’s heart. Slowly, gracefully, Gadarin dropped to the floor.

One for Irina, Rodion thought as he catapulted himself across the floor toward Marenko and away from Gadarin’s men. Someone had to pay, and it couldn’t be him, not yet.

“Anyone else?” Marenko enquired with interest. “Suggest you all drop your weapons. Now!”

“Sound advice,” said a Scottish voice, echoing loudly throughout the car park. Even distorted, Rodion recognised it with unspeakable relief as Detective Sergeant Lamont. “Including you, Mr. Marenko. You’re all covered, and we’re all armed. Oh aye,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “and we’re the polis. You’re under arrest.”

Chapter Ten

Nell woke sitting semi-upright on her own sofa. After showering, shopping, and eating, she hadn’t been able to settle to anything, so instead of making the call she knew she should or pacing pointlessly around the flat, she’d forced herself to sit down and think, to plot out a new book in her head, something distracting that had nothing whatever to do with crime or the paranormal or Russia.

Only, she’d fallen asleep and dreamed of her father. She sat forward, rubbing the back of her aching neck. Stupid position to fall asleep in. And why did she have to dream of her dad? Not even the fun dad from her childhood whom she tried not to remember these days, nor even the ageing man in prison overalls she presumed he was now, but her dad with an older, calmer face, sitting opposite her in an armchair drinking tea.

The details were thankfully vague. She couldn’t remember why she was with him or what they were talking about in the dream. But they had been talking.

Stupidly, a lump rose in her throat. It was years since she’d spoken to her father. She’d never given him the chance to explain why he’d robbed the off-license. She hadn’t been interested, since there was nothing he could say that would excuse it or change what it had done to her mother. But people did bizarre, cruel things for many reasons. Look at Rodion.

No, don’t think of Rodion.

It was easier to think of her father, whom she hadn’t seen in three years. She’d never once visited him in prison.

But in the dream, she’d been comfortable with him. Maybe that was prophecy. Although she curled her lip, she couldn’t make herself despise the idea as she should. She liked it. Maybe it was time to visit Dad, before he got out.

Don’t think about Dad.

Too many things, too many people not to think about. She glanced at her watch. It was almost time for Rodion’s big meeting. Away from him, it seemed a stupid, chancy plan that would never work. How come the idiot was still alive?

Her stomach knotted. Anxiety rose up her throat like bile. What if he really did end up in prison? In Saughton, with her dad? What if the drug dealers killed him?

She sprang to her feet, unable to be still. This was ridiculous. Give it another hour—maybe two—and she’d phone Lamont. And then she’d make the call that should have been her first action on being freed.

The trouble was, she hadn’t felt remotely like a prisoner or a kidnap victim being freed. She’d changed sides, and she knew it.

Why hadn’t Rodion given her his number? Why hadn’t she asked for it? Because he was so distant on that last journey. Because he regretted what had passed between them the previous night.

Of course it should never have happened. She should never have allowed it. It was far too soon after Irina’s death—he was consumed with guilt and grief, and she was the only available lust object to distract himself with. He had no way of knowing that it had been the most amazing experience of her life. Touching him hadn’t just been bearable, it had felt overwhelmingly good. Perhaps because he’d made her feel special, beautiful, desirable. She’d given him joy, however transient, and she’d received it. In spades.

Stop thinking about him!

There was no point. She’d let enough of her life languish by refusing to do things. Like visiting her own father in prison, like admitting to the most extraordinary man she’d ever met that she’d do anything just for one more night in his arms.

With sudden decision, she strode into the hall, pushed her feet into comfortable sneakers, and grabbed up her bag and coat.

****

“So who’re you going to work for now, you little shit?” Marenko jeered as he and Rodion stood side by side with their hands on the wall above their heads while the police rounded up everyone else into similar positions. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t work for anyone when you’re dead.”

Rodion stopped humming to say, “It’s not so easy to work for someone in prison either.”

“I won’t go to prison,” Marenko sneered with the confidence of one who’s always had the very smartest of lawyers.

Rodion laughed. The sound echoed bizarrely around the car park, where the only other sound was the barked commands of policemen. And the occasional whine of a captured goon.

“Marenko, you shot an unarmed man in full view of the police while in company with the best-known villains of this country and several kilos of heroin. Neither the cops nor the judges have ever heard of the Bear. You can’t threaten or even bribe them. You’re going down.”

As the unpalatable truth began to filter through Marenko’s baby-blue eyes, Rodion smiled dreamily. “But you’ll be all right. Pretty boy like you’ll have loads of friends in prison. You’ll be up to your arse in them.”

Marenko’s fist clenched and left the wall with clear intent. Rodion didn’t move, just stared him in the eye as a policeman barked. “Both hands flat on the wall!”

Marenko flattened his hand on the wall once more but continued trying to stare Rodion down, hatred and fury spitting out of his face while a policeman cuffed his hands behind his back and body-searched him. This was an important part of Rodion’s plan, and when the policeman removed a mobile phone and another gun taped inside Marenko’s shirt, he almost breathed a sigh of relief.

The policeman moved on to Rodion, cuffed him, searched him, and found nothing at all. Even the fake passport—one of many in Rodion’s possession and part of an alternative plan—was with the late and unlamented Gadarin.

Marenko waited until the search moved to the next man, then spoke in intense Russian. “You did this. Somehow,
you
did this.”

“I can get you out of it,” Rodion said. “Right now. All you have to do is tell me where my brother and sister are.”

“Go fuck yourself, Kosar.”

Rodion shrugged. “Beats who’ll be fucking you, unless you prefer quantity, of course.”

“I can still kill with my bare hands,” Marenko said contemptuously. “I can take care of myself.”

But it wasn’t really about that. It was about a loss of freedom and prestige and the reduction to a number; a caught and therefore failed criminal among hundreds, thousands of others. They both knew that.

“Please yourself,” Rodion said. “I’ll just get myself out, then. I’ll give your regards to the Bear. He might send you a postcard.” He went back to humming.

Marenko spoke in a strangled voice. “Can you really get us both out of this? Now?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do it.”

“I need the location.”

“The Bear’ll kill me.”

“He doesn’t have to know it was you. I have other irons in the fire. Oh, and it has to be truth, Marenko. We both know I can spot a lie at a hundred yards.”

Actually, that wasn’t strictly true, but it had happened often enough for the rumour to have started. And in fact, Marenko rarely lied. He rarely saw any need.

“Have to hurry you,” Rodion said as the police began to march the squad of criminals out of the building. He sounded almost playful, although he felt his brain would burst out of his head if Marenko didn’t answer soon. If the assassin just dug his heels in through loyalty, fear, or sheer bloody-mindedness, then this whole operation was for nothing, and the treasure farther away than ever…

“Moscow,” Marenko breathed. “A brothel off Ulitsa Varvarka.”

For an instant, Rodion’s head really did seem to burst. Heat surged through him so fast he imagined it consumed the whole world, starting with this monster who told him so casually his siblings lived in one of the Bear’s brothels. But he couldn’t give in. He still had to get them out.

“Don’t sweat it,” Marenko sneered. “They’re kept in a cellar, too doped to appeal to any of the punters except necrophiliacs. Now do your part and get me the fuck out of here.”

They were pushed into single file, guarded by several armed policemen, while several more waited in the yard outside. Rodion deliberately missed a step so that Marenko bumped into him. He murmured, “When your hands are loose, break for the wall on the left. Get over it and find the blue Audi parked on the other side.”

“What kind of an idiot are you? There are at least ten armed cops, and the wall’s at least ten feet high!”

“Better move fast, then,” Rodion murmured. Fresh air ruffled his hair; a blink of spring sunshine warmed his face.

Four police vans waited in the yard, being filled up one by one. Rodion and Marenko were near the end of the line, as Rodion had hoped and manoeuvred to be. So there weren’t many prisoners in the open for the armed cops to worry about.

D.S. Lamont, in conversation with one of the armed policemen by the broken gate, caught his eye and twitched one corner of his mouth by way of acknowledgment. It was a nasty moment. Lamont could ruin everything by one careless—or malicious—word about where his information had come from.

“We meet again, Mr. Kosar,” he drawled. “As you see, I’m better prepared this time. It’ll be a great pleasure to have old Razz back in the station.”

Rodion gave a shrug and a twist of his lips. He really didn’t want to get into conversation with him right now. And fortunately, Lamont said no more—presumably saving the gloating for later.

Rodion moved on. One of the full vans was already driving off. The others were still largely blocking the view of Lamont and the other cops to the right-hand wall. But there was enough space for Rodion to glimpse what he needed to—the tatty firework, a very basic banger, that he’d dropped from his pocket with the litter on the way in. It took him a bare instant to light the fuse. After which, he had only a couple of seconds to melt his own and Marenko’s handcuffs. After that, the bloody Guardian would catch on anyway and thwart him.

Behind him, Marenko gasped as the metal burned his wrists. It almost made Rodion smile with satisfaction, except there was no time. The firework exploded as the cuffs came loose, and Rodion bolted for the left-hand wall.

A many-voiced shout went up. The police reacted with all the speed of their training, pushing their prisoners back toward the gate and safety, crouching for cover, searching for attack in the direction the possible gunshot had come from.

Rodion heard the comforting blaze of a very modest fire as the litter surrounding the banger went up. A rope ladder had miraculously appeared against the left wall, and Marenko sprinted past him to grab it first.

The assassin leapt two rungs at once, bringing one foot in contact with his right hand. Warning bells went off in Rodion’s head. He stared at Marenko’s fingers, ready to burn at first sight of a weapon.

Marenko spoke in urgent Russian. Two words. “Move them.” And he reached for the next rung, all done smoothly, with barely a pause. As if he’d learned from Rodion himself. There was no time for disappointment or fury, only for the hard facts: that Marenko had some kind of tiny communication device in his shoe, and had just warned the Bear to move the treasure.

Well, that had been Plan A: to force them to move the children, giving all Rodion’s psychic contacts a chance to locate and track them.

“Rodion,” warned the Guardian’s voice inside his head as she felt the buildup of heat. “No. No more.”

But he didn’t need much energy to burn the rope, and he forced it past her with a mere grunt of effort. It wouldn’t be so easy next time.

As Marenko screamed and leapt backward off the ladder, Rodion yelled out, “Treasure on the move in Moscow—Ulitsa Varvarka!” Anna at least would pick that up. Every line of communication, physical and psychic, would be humming within moments. It was all he could do now.

Marenko, with all the style of the true survivor, hit the ground running while Rodion was still shouting. Rodion cannoned into him, but the assassin, expecting it, kicked back brutally, almost breaking his knee. Rodion’s grasping hands only tore jacket, and Marenko bolted for freedom and the yard exit.

“Oh, no you don’t.” Detective Sergeant Lamont slammed Rodion back against the wall. The police had discovered the harmless distraction, and the breakaway, and were already loading the rest of the prisoners into the van.

“You’ve lost one,” Rodion said urgently. “That’s Marenko!”

“We’ll pick him up,” Lamont said comfortably.

The Scot had no idea. No fucking idea of the lengths Marenko would go to, to disappear now. And Rodion needed all the clues he could beat out of the bastard. In one lightning movement, he swiped Lamont’s legs from under him with one foot and pushed him to the ground.

He was pounding after Marenko, gaining ground, when he saw the girl at the gate.

Nell.

In spite of everything, his heart surged with warmth because she cared enough to come; and with terror because she’d just placed herself in front of one of the world’s best and most desperate hit men.

She was small, unthreatening. Marenko merely elbowed her out of the way. Just before she tripped him and for good measure gave him a forceful shove that sent him sprawling on the ground.

A groan of laughter sprang from Rodion’s panting lungs. Behind him, Lamont and other policemen were giving chase.

Marenko couldn’t take the time to deal with the amazing girl who’d so causally bested him. He staggered to his feet and bolted onward.

There was no time to waste. The police were nearly on him, and Marenko was still ahead. Rodion needed to be free, because Anna couldn’t rescue the children without him.

And yet, because Nell had done this for him, because she was so amazing, he slowed at the exit, barely two feet away from her. Her dark eyes were huge in her beautiful, anxious face. Anxious for him. But there was no time.

He tried to tell her with his eyes, with the smile that was meant only for her, all the things he’d been unable to say when she’d got out of his car this morning. Her eyes widened impossibly. He had time to imagine some soft, stunned happiness beginning to form there as he let in the surge of energy.

“No!” the Guardian cried inside his head, and this time she had help, combining with the energies of her whole secret council, probably, plus as many of the villagers as wouldn’t require a reason for lending her their energies, to stop him. For an instant, the block held so tight that he thought in sheer panic that they’d won. Then he realised they were going to destroy him. They’d had enough and were going to burn him with his own fire.