The Equalizer (37 page)

“Don't move!” McCall hissed.

Bullets splintered wood from the dais.

“Sorry, sorry,” she murmured.

It was almost a whimper. She was shivering violently. Her new blouse clung to her breasts like sodden tissue paper. Her hair was like lank, dripping seaweed.

“I'm getting you out of here,” McCall said. “Don't leave my side.”

“As if.”

He gripped her hand with his left hand, holding the M92 pistol in his right and they ran out from behind the protection of the dais.

No one fired on them.

They slid on the slippery floor. McCall stopped, both of them crouched low behind a table of brochures. They squinted through the blinding deluge the sprinklers had created.

There was no movement in the ballroom.

McCall heard faint sirens and then they ceased. Cops arriving. Daudov would have cut his losses and got the hell out of there fast. His window of opportunity had closed.

But McCall waited five long seconds in the torrential downpour to be sure.

Then he silently urged Margaret on toward the back of the ballroom.

They skirted around the large piece of boat scenery with the shuffleboard deck and ran to where a door was outlined in the wall. McCall pushed it open, gun held up. Outside was a dimly lit back corridor.

Deserted.

They moved into it. They looked at each other and Margaret burst out laughing. A combination of terror and genuine surprise.

“We look like drowned rats!”

“Stay with me,” McCall said, running a hand through his saturated hair. He motioned to one end of the corridor where another narrower staircase led down to the ground floor. Margaret nodded. They ran to the staircase and descended.

At the bottom on the ground floor the gift shop was closed and dark. The gifts looked like they'd been put into the window when people wore “I Like Ike” campaign buttons. There was an archway off to their right through which they could see a small sliver of the lobby.

It was a madhouse. Paramedics were pushing a gurney with Sam Kinney on it. His shirt was soaked in blood. His face was the color of faded parchment. McCall couldn't see too much of it, but there was something wrong with his eyes. The paramedics were giving him oxygen and a makeshift saline drip had been hooked up. There was a brunette hotel desk clerk running with them. She was holding one of Sam's hands tightly. McCall could see firefighters and cops in the lobby and some of the guests, old and young, and small children who looked around wide-eyed. From the sound of it there must have been thirty people in the lobby, if not more.

There was no sign of Kostmayer.

McCall changed position so he could get a better look at the paramedics wheeling Sam away.

I don't want any trouble here, McCall. I'm too old for guys in dark coats with guns to come in looking to blow your head off.

The paramedics wheeled Sam through the lobby doors out of the Liberty Belle Hotel. The brunette desk clerk went with them, still holding on to Sam's hand.

McCall dropped the M92 pistol into a gilt trash bin. He didn't want to be armed if he ran into one of the cops.

“What do we do?” Margaret asked, shivering again.

“Walk out of here. We heard the fire alarm and left our hotel room like everyone else. There's a side entrance to the hotel beyond the gift shop.”

“We're soaking wet.”

“We can't do anything about that. Come on.”

McCall knew the cops would lock down the multiple homicide crime scene within seconds. They walked quickly past the gift shop. McCall looked over his shoulder. Through the archway he could see uniformed police were gathering the hotel guests along one side of the lobby. A couple of detectives were questioning old Mrs. Gilmore. She held on to her poodle as if they were going to physically wrench the animal out of her arms. She looked at the place where Sam had disappeared.

She was crying.

McCall and Margaret reached the side entrance to the hotel and stepped out onto Amsterdam Avenue.

“Keep walking,” McCall said.

They walked down to the corner of Sixty-fifth Street.

Kostmayer was waiting for them there.

“How'd you guys get all wet?”

“Doesn't matter,” McCall said. “How bad is Sam?”

“Gunshot wound in the shoulder. And his right eye is hanging out of its socket. The paramedics are taking him to Lenox Hill.”

McCall nodded. Kostmayer could see the anguish in his eyes.

“He had our back, old Sam,” Kostmayer said.

“Yes, he did.”

McCall raised his hand at a passing yellow cab that pulled up to the curb.

“Get her to the Port Authority. Give her that envelope of money. Wait until the Greyhound bus pulls out.”

“No one's after her.”

“Wait anyway. I'm going to the hospital.” McCall took Margaret's hand. “You okay?”

“I'm drenched from head to foot, these are the only clothes I got, and I'm going home. I'm great. I hope your friend Sam is okay.”

She kissed McCall lightly on the mouth.

He turned and walked farther down Amsterdam Avenue. Two more police cars passed him, lights turning, sirens blaring, and pulled up to the side entrance of the Liberty Belle Hotel. Uniformed cops jumped out and sealed off the entrance.

Kostmayer opened the back door of the cab.

“He's not much for good-byes,” he said.

“Sure, he is.”

Margaret slid inside. Kostmayer followed her onto the backseat and leaned forward to the cabbie.

“Port Authority.”

The cabbie nodded. “Fire at the Liberty Belle, huh? That place has always been a death trap.”

Kostmayer nodded at the unconscious irony.

“Yeah,” he said.

The cabbie pulled away from the curb. Margaret turned to look out the back window, but McCall was gone.

*   *   *

McCall stayed at the hospital most of the night. He wanted to make sure Daudov didn't go there to finish what he started, or send one of his enforcers. Sam had killed one of his own. But they didn't arrive. Chloe, the desk clerk, had stayed for about an hour, then left. After that, no one had come into the quiet waiting room. McCall knew Sam had lost his wife to heart disease some years before. He thought there was a daughter somewhere, but she and Sam were estranged. There might have been a son in New York, also estranged, like McCall's own son. Sam was good at estranging. No son, daughter, sister, brother, or friend came to the hospital as McCall sat there hour after hour. They operated on the old spook at 10:49
P.M
and removed the bullet from his lung in a three-hour procedure. The lung had collapsed, but they repaired it. They had saved his right eye, but his vision from it would be permanently impaired.

You don't have friends, McCall. You know why? Because they don't live very long once they shake your hand or crawl out of your bed.

They took Sam out of the recovery room just before 3:00
A.M.
McCall waited until he knew Sam was in a hospital room in intensive care, then went home and slept for eight hours. Kirov and Daudov didn't know where he lived. He showered and changed clothes and had breakfast at the Cup & Saucer on Canal Street.

McCall's thoughts were churning. Granny
had
probably saved his life in Grand Central Station and he had needed his backup. Old Sam Kinney was clinging to life. Kostmayer was a target now and Brahms would be if Kirov found that bug under his favorite table and traced it back to him. But if McCall was going to help people who had nowhere else to turn, he knew he couldn't do it alone.

The high school was on Seventieth Street and Ninth Avenue. McCall walked up behind Katia who was waiting away from the other mothers picking up their kids. She stiffened for a moment, then relaxed when she turned to him.

“This is Natalya's school. It's only six blocks from my new apartment.”

“I know,” McCall said.

It looked as if she wanted to say more, about the apartment, but she didn't. She looked at the doors where teenagers were streaming out, watching for the first sign of her daughter.

“I went back to the club last night,” she said. “No one bothered me. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Melody said she talked to you. She didn't know your name, but she described you. She said you went into the alcove and spoke to Boris Kirov for ten minutes.”

“I did.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him you were only going to dance.”

“And he agreed to that?”

“He didn't agree or disagree. It's understood.”

“I didn't see Daudov at the club last night. In fact, a few of them were missing. Kuzbec, Salam, Rachid, and they're always there, watching us.”

“They can't be there every night.”

“But it's very unusual for all of them to be gone at the same time.”

McCall shrugged, like these things happen. Katia put a hand on his arm, as if she was finally going to say what was in her heart, when she caught sight of Natalya coming out of the front doors of the school. The teenager looked around, spotted them, and ran toward them. McCall was searching the faces in the crowd. No one he knew. No one he didn't want to know. Natalya reached them and gave her mother a hug. There was something different about her to McCall. The way she moved, the radiance in her big liquid eyes, the way she turned her head.

She wasn't afraid.

She turned to McCall and he thought he might get a hug also.

But then Natalya did something quite extraordinary.

She said softly, “Thank you.”

Katia went very still. Tears flooded her eyes as she looked at her daughter. She didn't say anything. That would have spoiled the moment. McCall didn't know why the teenager did not speak. But he thought he knew why she did now.

“You're welcome,” he said, and smiled.

Then Natalya hugged him.

McCall put his arms around her, protectively, and looked away, into another time and place and was afraid.

 

CHAPTER 27

They'd moved her.

They'd come to get her in the black hole where she lived twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. They'd had her in isolation and darkness for months. She'd lost track of time. It didn't matter if it was day or night. But she'd tried to keep a calendar going inside her head. It wasn't accurate, but she clung to it, as if it were. It was spring, she thought. The one hour she was allowed to go out of the prison block, to walk around the narrow exercise area, it had not been as cold lately, with the smell of thunder in the air. The concrete had been wet most of the time. Spring showers.

They had allowed her twice into the front courtyard to walk to the main gates with other prisoners and look across the Neva River. On the embankment on the far side was a monument built “To the Victims of Political Repressions.” It consisted of two bronze sphinxes with women's faces on one side. But on the side facing Kresty Prison the inmates could only see bare skulls. She saw
her
face in those skulls. There was a stylized window with prison bars between the sphinxes. She thought of that as
her
cell, except hers had no window. There was an urban legend in the prison. Originally it had 999 cells. The architect, Tomishko, in 1890, reported to Tsar Alexander III that he had completed building the great prison for him. To which the tsar had replied no, Tomishko had built it for
himself
. Then the architect was thrown into a secret cell, cell number one thousand, where he rotted to death.

She was being kept in a secret cell apart from the other prisoners. She believed it was this same phantom cell where the body of Tomishko was whispered to be rotting. She had not found his bones, but the cell smelled of death.

She repeated her name over and over to herself, so she would not lose her identity. That's what they wanted. To reduce her to an animal with no human connections. She reached back into her memory for trips she'd taken with her parents. But they were fading. She could not see her mother's face any longer. She could see her father's countenance, but it was in profile, some moment when she'd disturbed him in his home office and he'd turned away from her. He'd never been particularly interested in her. He'd wanted a boy. She had been four. But that memory of him was precious, because it was one of the only ones she could grasp and hold on to. And even that remembrance was paling, growing old with her, becoming transparent to the point where it would soon vanish altogether.

She remembered her husband, Peter, being gunned down in a Tbilisi street in Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union. Rain sheeting across his body, glistening off the cobblestones, running red, his arteries spewing out the blood as fast as his heart could pump it around his veins. That horrific image was always with her. She could see the face of the Russian colonel she had killed. She had knifed him in the stomach and the surprise on his face would never leave her. It had been very satisfying. Up until that moment he had been arrogant and smug. He had kicked her dead husband in the ribs like he'd been a dog he'd found lying on the cobblestones and was seeing if it still yelped. There were fragments of other times: luncheons in Berlin … being on a roller coaster in an old fairground that had traveled around Europe for six hundred years … running across some railway tracks with bullets hitting the earth around her with dull thuds, like doors slamming … making love to a man, not her husband, before she had met him, when she was an art student in Paris, a strong young man with pale limbs and a kind face, stroking her body, whispering in her ear how beautiful she was … his longing for her had made her cry. She tried to remember why they had parted, but she couldn't.

There was one other strong recollection she clung on to. A man she could see leaning over a sheaf of blueprints on a table in an old farmhouse. He was impeccably dressed in a light blue pinstriped suit, a blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, gold crossed golf club cuff links, a red tie with small chess pieces on it. A handsome face, if a little severe. Not kind eyes, but not cold, either. She could conjure up the smell of his cologne, like limes. Her Control. He had outlined her mission coolly, articulately, in detail. He was precise and meticulous. She had felt confident. She could do this. It was an easy infiltration for her. She spoke fluent Russian, from her mother's side of the family. A Russian mother, a Swedish father. She looked very much like the young woman she was impersonating. That woman was dead. All of the paperwork had been immaculate. Or so she'd thought. At first she had fooled them all. She had been very close to her objective: the names of the men in a terrorist cell operating out of Georgia. She had been one day and night away from accessing the intel on that cell and getting it back to Control.