The Equalizer (66 page)

She didn't know who had come along to rescue her. Some good Samaritans who'd seen the assault from far off. A couple, in their thirties, the man white, the girl black. One of them had called 911 on their cell phone. They'd told her she was in the wrong neighborhood. She should not have been walking on her own. The police said the same thing when they arrived. She had been inviting an assault. It was
her fault
.

She couldn't give them a description. She hadn't seen her attacker's face. He hadn't been heavyset or tall. But he'd been very strong.

And he'd
smelled
.

She hadn't told the police that, because she hadn't remembered. It had all happened so fast. But now that memory flooded over her in disgusting waves as she breathed in the air around Kuzbec's body. Her eyes opened wide as she looked into his kind face. She had not been mugged by some gang member in a New York street.

It had been
him,
from the club, one of the enforcers.

He offered her the plastic cup again, as if she didn't quite understand that he was bringing her coffee.

“Cold in here,” Kuzbec said, his voice concerned. “Sorry I can't give you any light. This will warm you up. Okay?”

She took the cup from him. He sat back on his haunches and waited, as if wanting to make sure she drank her coffee and appreciated his good deed for the night.

Natalya struggled a little, trying to remove the lid.

“You can drink it through the little hole there,” Kuzbec said with a patient smile, as if she were four years old, and pointed out the place on the lid where she could sip.

Natalya managed to remove the lid of the plastic cup, took a swallow of the hot coffee, then threw the rest of it in his face.

Kuzbec screamed and fell back.

Natalya jumped to her feet to bolt past him.

Kuzbec had the presence of mind to stick out his leg. She tripped over it and fell headlong onto the floor. He kicked her in the ribs. Pain rocketed through her body. Then she heard the sound of someone else coming into the storage room. There was a scuffle of violent movement. She rolled over and looked up. In a haze, she saw one of the other enforcers—she thought his name was Salam—pulling Kuzbec away to the open door. She heard the words “Leave her!” but they were echoing and faint and sounded like they were coming from down a long tunnel. She gasped to get her breath back after the kick to her ribs. She saw the second enforcer push Kuzbec through the open doorway. Subway tracks gleamed in the light beyond them. Then Salam closed the door to the storage room and she heard the key turn again in the lock.

Natalya crawled to the shelves, avoiding the spilled coffee. She sat up and put her back against the shelves and drew her knees up and hugged them.

She was going to die in this darkness.

*   *   *

She hadn't seen him when the men had come for her at the apartment. She hadn't even known they were there. She'd been late leaving to pick up Natalya from school and was in the kitchen, stuffing a tuna sandwich into a plastic container with a juice box to bring to her. She'd forgotten to give her her lunch that morning. She might be hungry on the walk back to the Dakota. She had heard some muffled sounds coming from somewhere—one of the guest bedrooms. She hadn't thought anything about it. The nice young man McCall had sent to look after them was in there. She'd started to turn around, and then someone had grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms to her sides. Someone else had grabbed her hair. A third man had thrust a chloroformed rag over her nose and mouth. The sickly stench of it had been overpowering. The man holding her by the hair had dragged her away, even as the sweet aroma had brought oblivion.

She'd swum up from dark depths to consciousness to find herself on a concrete staircase. Her wrists were bound behind her back with duct tape. Her ankles were also tightly bound. There was a piece of tape across her mouth. Above her head was an iron railing going down the staircase. There was a mosaic on the tiled wall in brilliant colors. Below the staircase was a platform. She could just see the edge of it. She could hear vague footfalls that echoed hollowly in what had to be a subway station.

Then one set of footsteps grew louder.

Katia watched as the shape of the man climbing the stairs came into focus. She shook off the last effects of the chloroform. She recognized the figure immediately. Someone she knew as well as she knew herself or her own daughter.

Alexei Berezovsky stopped a foot away and smiled down at her. He was wearing all black and had a pistol in a holster on his right hip. He looked like he'd just stepped out of some Western movie, the bad guy, all in black, all he needed was the black hat. His smile chilled her blood. She wondered how she could ever have loved this man. But he had been charismatic in the beginning. She had seen no vicious side of him. She had seen the persona others saw at the art exhibitions and the Dolls nightclubs and the charity fund-raisers where he used his charm as a weapon and a disguise. She had seen the ugly side of him for the first time right after she'd become pregnant with Natalya, when she hadn't wanted to wear a ruby bracelet he had given to her to a ballet opening night. She had said she preferred to wear an emerald bracelet her mother had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He had knocked the emerald bracelet out of her hand, thrown her onto the bed, slapped her face until she thought she would pass out, then told her she would wear what he told her to wear when he told her to wear it.

From that night on she had been terrified of him.

And yet, when she'd told him she was leaving him, fully expecting to be beaten, he had smiled sadly and nodded and said it would be a good thing for her and Natalya to come to the United States. He had opened a Dolls nightclub in Manhattan and she would have a job there. Natalya could go to an American high school. It would do them both good to be out of Moscow. Two days later they had flown to New York.

There had never been any talk about divorce. But she knew it was not a trial separation. It was forever. She understood the reason behind the magnanimous gesture. Berezovsky had simply tired of her. Tired of her company, tired of making love to her, if you could call their violent fucking anything so tender, tired of parading his wife out at charity functions. He'd had numerous affairs that he had never tried to hide from her or anyone else.

She had never been so relieved in her life when that airplane took off from Sheremetyevo International Airport and she had clutched her daughter's hand tightly and thought of the new life they would have away from their abusive husband and father.

She stared up at him.

He leaned down and ripped off the gray duct tape from across her mouth. She gasped in breath.

All he said to her was: “We are waiting for your guardian angel,” and then hit her in the face.

He beat her the way he had always beaten her during their marriage, careful not to break her cheekbones or scar her. Blood spilled out of her mouth. Her left eye closed almost completely. He used his open palm to slap her face, again and again, like he was going to smack her head right off her shoulders. His signet ring gouged out little bits of flesh. When he stopped her face was bright red in the pale light drifting up from the platform below.

She tried to say: “Natalya…” but he slapped the word out of her mouth.

Then he punched her in the stomach. The pain was agony and she thought she would throw up on the stairs. He slapped her head back and it hit the iron railing. She shut her eyes, waiting for more blows, but none came.

She opened her eyes to see Berezovsky walking back down the stairs to the subway platform below. He disappeared from sight. One of the young men from Dolls passed through her line of vision, not looking up at her, carrying a submachine gun over his shoulder. There were occasional shuffling movements and the murmur of men talking softly.

They were waiting for her “guardian angel.”

For Robert McCall.

With submachine guns and handguns.

He didn't have a chance.

*   *   *

Scott McCall was handcuffed to a railing beside the boarded-up ticket booth in the main station of the old City Hall subway station. They'd grabbed him as he'd walked down the street from his violin lesson. Bundled him into the backseat of a black Lincoln town car. A black sack had been pulled down over his head and he'd been handcuffed right there. He'd had no idea where they'd driven to, but it hadn't been that far. He thought they were still in the city. When they'd handcuffed him to the railing and taken the sack off his head, he'd known where he was. City Hall was right beside the Brooklyn Bridge. Obviously the subway station was no longer an operating part of the system, although he could faintly hear trains occasionally down below. They came and went very quickly. Maybe the trains went through the station and then looped around to return to the city. Certainly there were no passengers getting off and ascending the marble staircases up to the station building. This main area was derelict and badly in need of repairs.

Scott was scared. Watching movies he'd always fantasized what he would do in a situation like this. He would figure out a way to escape. He would be a hero. But it wasn't like that in real life. He felt alone and afraid and angry that he'd been taken. What did they want with him? He'd heard them talking about other prisoners. Were they somewhere in the deserted station?

His mother and stepfather were well off, but not rich. They could scrape together a decent ransom, but why
him
? There were really rich kids who would bring in a lot more money for the kidnappers.

But he
knew
.

This was about his
real
father.

His mom had let something slip about his dad being back in New York City. They'd met for a drink somewhere. But she swore he was not coming back into their lives. Scott would not be seeing him, which was a good thing. He had no desire to talk to the man who had abandoned him when he was five years old. He'd broken his mother's heart. Even though Scott knew she loved his stepdad Tom Blake—and he was a
great
guy—Scott had always known his mom still carried a torch for Robert McCall. He couldn't fathom why. The guy was basically a criminal working for some shadowy splinter unit of the government that no one would even admit existed. Doing their dirty work. Killing people.

Scott hated him.

And now this killer was back in their lives and his son had been kidnapped. Was this some kind of retribution? Some old enemy of his dad's? Scott didn't know and didn't care. He just wanted to get out of there.

He wrenched uselessly on the handcuffs that held him to the iron railing. He looked around the deserted station room. There was nothing at all that could help him escape. He didn't want to hope that his real father was on his way there right now to rescue him. He didn't want to owe him
anything
.

He also didn't want to die.

Scott laid his head back against the boarded-up ticket booth and shivered in the cold.

And realized that he
was
hoping against hope that his father would come for him.

 

CHAPTER 46

McCall walked down a long subterranean tunnel, carrying the heavy Adidas sports bag. He couldn't find Candy Annie's half-tunnel home. He thought he knew the way from the manhole entrance on Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, but he'd become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of subway and steam tunnels. They all looked the same without a Subterranean escort. When he'd first started walking the underground passageways, he'd marked them with an orange Sharpie so he could find his way back to his egress point. He came across some of those orange
X
's at the beginnings and endings of tunnels, but now they were meaningless.

Finally he walked down an abandoned tunnel and felt it vibrate. A train was thundering past in an adjacent tunnel. He realized he was in the
same
tunnel he'd walked down with Danil Gershon. He found the iron door with the unlit red light above it and hauled it open. He stepped into the vault that had once been a subway station with its rusting steel girders holding up a low ceiling. Light spilled through the ajar iron door from the subway tunnel. It glowed on the mural of the child holding her mother's hand in the field of daisies. The Williamsburg Bridge still reached out on the wall, as if beckoning McCall to step onto it. Then a memory assailed him.

McCall dropped the sports bag at his feet and felt into the back pocket of his black jeans. He came up with the folded Filofax page on which Fooz had scrawled a crude map. The route to Candy Annie's crib. McCall picked up the sports bag and ran with it, following the route he had taken before. He passed some of the familiar dwellings in the various tunnels and the big open spaces of concrete hemmed in by pipes. He looked for the woman in her sixties in her rocking chair surrounded by good-looking furniture, but her tunnel niche was empty. He did see the young man in army fatigues with wild, curly hair sitting in the same broken armchair smoking a cigarette. It was like time had stopped for him. As if he hadn't moved from that chair in the intervening days and was just smoking another cigarette. Maybe that was true. He stared out into space and took no notice of McCall as he ran past the niche.

McCall looked for one more human landmark and found it: the metal sheeting of a dwelling in which the fifty-year-old man was doing really well on his LEGO town. In addition to the police and the fire station, he'd finished the mom-and-pop grocery store and had added to his High Street a post office, greengrocers, dry cleaners, hair salon, and even a McDonalds' on the corner with yellow arches. Right now he was working on the roof of a red-bricked bank. He set a tiny American flag in the top and glanced up. He smiled at McCall, as if recognizing him, and made a gesture at the LEGO High Street.