The Equalizer (33 page)

“Did you know either of them?”

“I know them now.”

McCall stood still for a moment, looking at the fountain of water in the reflecting pool cascading into the sky, spilling rainbows down onto the memories of the fallen. Then they walked on, away from the deferential crowd, amid the trees, where the white benches were spaced out. McCall looked at his old Control.

“Why do I think you've known where I was every minute of the last year?”

He had made it a rhetorical question, but Control answered it anyway.

“We tracked you to that Home Depot you worked at in Boston. When you left there, you went completely off the radar. I suspected you'd have come home to New York.”

“It was never my home before. But now I live in a neighborhood with people I like.”

“Have you contacted Cassie and your son?”

“Not exactly. How did Elena die?”

The question gave Control pause for half a step.

“Kostmayer found you.”

McCall didn't tell him Kostmayer had known where he lived in SoHo for several months. He didn't reply.

“How much intel did he give you?” Control asked.

“I didn't ask for any.”

“Elena was on a mission that took her to Moscow and…”

“I don't care what mission she was on or who she was up against,” McCall said. “I want you to tell me how she died. Kostmayer said it was a sniper's shot.”

“Two bullets. One in the right leg. The second round hit her right hip and shattered it. She couldn't move. She bled out.”

“Why wouldn't the assassin have gone for a kill shot?”

“Bad weather, low visibility.”

“Not through a sniper's scope.”

“I don't know, Robert. Maybe he wanted to take her alive.”

“If he'd have wanted to do that, he would have come for her at ground level.”

“So he's a cat who likes to play with the crippled mouse before he kills it.”

McCall said nothing. He remembered what Gershon had told him about one of the assassins that might be on Borislav Kirov's payroll:

He wants his targets to suffer pain before he puts them out of their miser
y.

Something was on the edge of McCall's mind, just out of reach. It wouldn't come into focus. He let it go and stopped and looked around them. Checked the crowd. Saw no faces that worried him.

Control said, “Elena had a message for you. When I found you, I was to tell you to: ‘Get the bastard for me.' Those were her last words.”

McCall nodded. Said nothing. Control took something out of his coat pocket. It caught the sunlight.

“She stole a flash drive. There's only one file on it. It appears to be part of a blueprint. Maybe an industrial complex. A series if tunnels or passageways. I want you to take a look at it.”

“It won't mean anything to me.”

“Probably not. But you owe Elena that much. She gave her life for it.”

“No, she gave her life for
you
.”

Control's voice was low and charged with uncharacteristic emotion.

“I thought I had all the bases covered and I didn't. Her blood is on my hands. Take a look at this blueprint. If you recognize anything, no matter how farfetched you think it is, get in touch with me. Do it through Kostmayer if you don't want to talk to me.” He paused. “The Robert McCall I know would avenge Elena's death.”

McCall looked back toward the memorial pools.

“Maybe that man doesn't exist anymore. Maybe he shouldn't.”

“I need your help.”

“I'll think it over,” McCall said.

Control followed McCall's gaze.

“You knew Danil Gershon, didn't you?”

McCall had been hoping that his chance encounter with Gershon had not got back to Control. And his use of the past tense hit him in the stomach.

“Our paths crossed a few times.”

“He died today. In a New York street. Hit-and-run.”

McCall took a long moment to absorb this. “An accident?”

“I doubt it. There was a bullet wound in his arm. It had been cleaned up and professionally bandaged. Maybe at an ER somewhere, although, according to the police report, there's been no report filed of a gunshot wound. He was undercover on a mission. There's a funeral service at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Wednesday. In case you want to attend.”

McCall nodded. Debated whether to tell Control that he had left Danil Gershon three hours ago, alive and functioning. Decided against it. Control didn't need to know that. Not yet.

But the guilt McCall felt about Gershon's death was overwhelming.

“Are you going to send anyone more seasoned than Chase Granger to try and bring me back into the fold?”

“I've kept the wolves off your back,” Control said. “I don't know how much longer I can do that. There's a lot of sensitive information in your head.”

“It'll stay there.”

“Everyone has a breaking point, Robert. You found yours when…”

He stopped. Didn't want to go there.

“Don't walk into Bentleys again,” McCall said. “I have a new life there. You represent something old and faded and worn out. Values I no longer care about. If someone from The Company comes to kill me, I'll send him or her back to you in a body bag. That would look bad at Langley.”

“If there's a termination order issued, I'll make sure you know about it.”

“In time to escape?”

“How much time does Robert McCall need?”

“More than you think,” McCall said. And he smiled, although there was little humor in it. “We're two old warhorses. Newer, smarter, tougher versions of both of us are being manufactured and nurtured. We won't last long out in the cold.”

“So come back to where I can protect you.”

McCall shook his head.

But he took the silver flash drive from Control's hand before he walked away.

 

CHAPTER 24

The village was called Stepanovićevo in the Novi Sad municipality of Serbia. He heard the mournful whistle of a train in the far distance. It reminded him of home. He'd grown up near railway tracks in Grozny in Chechnya.

Alexei Berezovsky had never been to a cage fight. They were outlawed in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, but that had only sent the hugely popular sport underground. It was being held in a field behind the ruins of an Orthodox church on a country road at one end of the Stepanovićevo main street. Berezovsky sat on the top tier of wooden stands that had been hastily put together. It would hold fifty people comfortably, but there must have been over a hundred Serbians in the stands, sitting and standing and crowding around the large cage. The crowd was almost entirely male, although there were several young women hanging on to the arms of their boyfriends. No children. That was one of the only rules. But Berezovsky noted many of the leather-jacketed males had to be teenagers. Some of them looked barely fourteen.

The fight cage was made up of interconnected steel rods. It was thirty feet across and forty feet high. Berezovsky had been told the entire structure, the cage and the stands, took less than an hour to put up and twenty minutes to strike. Sometimes they had to erase all signs of it fast, if the Serbian
policija
were called. The ground was dirt. There were two stools at either end of the cage. At one of them stood a big brute of a man. He was at least six-six. His face was lacerated with healing cuts and dark purple bruises. He had survived a cage fight recently, maybe even the night before. Berezovsky didn't know his name. It didn't matter. There was no fanfare here. No announcer, no blond bimbo in a bikini carrying a sign to tell the spectators which round it was. No managers, no seconds. There
was
a referee, but he was there to count down the rounds, not to make sure the Marquess of Queensbury rules were observed. There were spotlights at the top of the cage that illuminated the fighting area in a harsh, white light. The monster looked a little punch drunk, as if he wasn't sure where he was. He blinked in the light, his breathing labored, as if he was already fighting.

Jovan Durković stood beside the stool in the other corner of the cage. He was completely still. His entire focus, his body, his mind, his soul, were on the brute in the other corner. His breathing was measured. His hands were held loosely at his side. His bullet wound was just a raw scar. He had forgotten about it.

He just waited.

Both men were dressed in jeans. Both were bare-chested. Both were in bare feet.

The referee, a small Serbian man in a rumpled black suit, held up a white handkerchief.

Both of the fighters took two steps forward and stopped.

There were no cautions, no instructions.

The crowd was already going wild in anticipation. The betting was fierce. Berezovsky saw fistfuls of money changing hands. He wondered how many were betting on the bigger, stronger man? His money would always be on his assassin, if he was a betting man. And he was. But not with his own money.

The referee dropped the handkerchief. It fell in Berezovsky's mind in slow motion, as though he were watching a movie. It hit the ground and the two fighters simply rushed each other. There was no circling, no weaving and jabbing, no determining the opponent's weaknesses.

They went in swinging their fists.

The only rule in the actual cage fight: no kicks. It was a boxing match. Two men, stripped of all weapons, fighting with raw courage and savage strength.

To the death.

The brute got in the first punches, hard ones to Durković's ribs and some punishing blows to his face. He did not even flinch. He backed away, came forward, and went right for the brute's face. The blows hurt him. Berezovsky could tell that. He was winded already and stumbling a little.

Durković hit his opponent again in the face, a vicious right, that knocked several teeth out. They flew into the dirt. The big man came back, dodged under a left hook, and slammed a fist into Durković's right eye. The sheer force of it staggered him. The big man got in two more blows to Durković's solar plexus, sending him back.

The referee leaned down and picked up the handkerchief. He waved it in the air. Both fighters saw the flash of white. Both backed off. The rounds were very short. Berezovsky glanced down at his Rolex. Hadn't even been a minute. But the punishment the two fighters had taken would have amounted to several rounds in a Vegas casino.

The grace time was also short. Berezovsky counted thirty seconds. Then the small ref waved the white handkerchief, dirty now and actually streaked with blood where one of the fighters had dripped down on it, as if to catch their attention. Then he made a big display of dropping it to the ground again.

The crowd went wild, shouting and screaming encouragement to whomever they were rooting for. Berezovsky could tell most of them were for Durković. He was the hometown boy.

The two fighters just ran forward and wailed on each other. The blows were vicious and barely blocked. The big man swung a fist into Durković's genitals. He staggered for a moment, and his head snapped up, as if that low blow had actually pissed him off. The pain would have to have been excruciating.

It only made Durković pause.

But long enough for the big man to swing another fist at the right side of Durković's face. The force of it spun him around. Berezovsky could see, with a start of alarm, that Durković's right eye was almost entirely closed.

You can't block punches if you can't see where they're coming from.

Durković compensated, turning more sideways on to the brute, who came in again, throwing more punches. Durković blocked most of them. He took a right on the chin that would have sent another opponent to his knees.

Durković shook it off.

And then he moved forward, head down, as if he wanted to finish this now.

The referee picked up the soiled white handkerchief, held it high, but Berezovsky didn't think he was going to drop it again.

Durković slammed a series of punches into the brute's solar plexus. They were expertly placed. If the crowd hadn't been so zealous, Berezovsky could almost imagine hearing the big man's ribs crack and split apart. Durković followed these blows with punches to the man's face. The big man punched back, but his attack had no effect whatsoever.

Durković rained more blows in on the brute, very fast, like a machine.

The crowd was on its feet now, yelling for blood.

Durković swung his fist at the big man's face, smashing his nose, shoving the splinters of bone up into the brute's brain.

Berezovsky thought he was probably dead before he crashed to the dirt floor.

The referee raised up the white handkerchief as high as he could.

The sign of a victor.

Durković turned slowly, looking around at the rabid crowd. There was no expression on his face. And then Berezovsky saw something he had never thought he would ever see from this man.

He smiled.

He acknowledged the crowd.

Berezovsky knew that Durković had grown up with these people. They had been his neighbors and drinking buddies. Maybe he'd fucked some of the women, although it was difficult for Berezovsky to think of his assassin in bed with any of them. But then, perhaps in those moments he was a different person.

Two heavyset villagers came forward and carried the big man's body out of the cage. Another two picked up the two wooden stools. The referee didn't walk to Durković and raise his arm in triumph. He just turned once in a circle, holding up the fingers of both hands.

Ten.

Berezovsky took that to mean this was Durković's tenth victory.

In his cage fighting career?

Or just that year?

And once the fight was over, everything happened very quickly. The crowd moved away from the stands. Men started breaking down the steel cage and the stands.

Twenty minutes,
Berezovsky thought. That's what Durković had told him. He heard no telltale
policija
sirens, but obviously the local populace wanted all evidence of the death struggle erased as quickly as possible.