The Survivor (12 page)

Lowering his arms hurt more than Nate could have imagined. His shoulders throbbed. He fought off the pain, then asked, “Russian?”

“
Not
Russian,” Misha said. The first fragment of anger. “Ukrainian.”

Nate gestured with his chin. “What’s with the ice?”

“Just wait.”

Nate looked down helplessly at the freezing block. “You say that a lot.”

“Do not wear yourself out,” Misha said. “It is frozen solid around your legs. We chipped the hole, lowered you in.”

“It take all four of you to think this one up?”

“A sense of humor. Impressive, given the circumstances.”

“I’m ready to die,” Nate said. “There is nothing you or your boss can do to me.”

In response Misha smiled. The grin was all upper gums, as if someone had carved the slit of his mouth too high on his skull.

A bang of metal on metal boomed through the warehouse, Nate stiffening atop the block of ice. An unseen door slid on rusty hinges. Footsteps tapped slowly toward them through the darkness, Nate’s apprehension growing with their proximity. And then a light flared, a directed beam, making Nate squint. Blotting the tunnel of light, the perfect silhouette of a male form. Standing still. Arms crossed high on his chest.

When the man began to walk again, his shadow preceded him, elongated across the floor, creeping up the ice block, Nate’s torso, and finally his face. The man neared but remained perfectly backlit, so Nate could make out nothing of his features.

He halted several feet away, the culminating note of the big stagy entrance. “The width of a cheetah’s canines match perfectly to vertebrae of its prey.” His accent was much stronger, his gruff voice giving him away as decades older than the other men. “To sever the spinal cord.” He made a single clean gesture, planing his hand to cut the air. In the cold his breath rose like smoke from his nostrils. “There are those who are meat and those who are fed. Nature’s design.”

He turned to pace, a slant of light falling across him. Weathered face, ridged and leathery, scored with wrinkles. Wide, rounded mouth. Sapphire eyes, hard as stones. He wore an impeccably tailored suit and, beneath, a form-fitting black thermal shirt with a boxer’s notch at the throat. The fabric hugged his compact muscles; he looked dense, unbreakable, carved from wood. A few coarse gray chest hairs showed at his neck. Hands in his pockets. The sleeves of the suit, tight across his biceps. His skin looked to be nearing seventy, but his lean body and virile bearing seemed that of a man a half century younger.

No doubt, the man from the Town Car.

He halted again. Those stone-hard eyes bored into Nate. “I am
designed
to terrorize you.”

Nate’s heart drummed at the base of his throat. “I killed five of your men.”

“Those were not
my
men. Except the one you did not kill.” He showed his teeth, which were unexpectedly beautiful, and it took a few seconds for Nate to realize that they were of course fake. “My men do not get killed by someone like you. They are different. You do not make this kind of tough in America.”

Nate’s mouth had cottoned. His legs ached through the numbness, and he was having trouble keeping his own teeth from clicking together. “What’s your name?” he managed.

“Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.”

“What are you gonna do to me?” Nate asked. “And can we just get it over with?”

Pavlo’s lips peeled apart from those magnificent teeth again, then he held out his hand. It wore a black glove, but Nate would have bet that beneath the leather the nails were manicured and each knuckle sported a tattoo. Valerik stepped forward, sweat-darkened strands twisting loose from the pulled-back hair at his temples, and placed a few photos in Pavlo’s palm.

“When the human body is severed and the torso placed on ice, the cold preserves the brain function. Sometimes for twenty minutes, half hour. So everything is felt and”—he mumbled a foreign phrase, searching out and finally finding a word—“observed.” He held the glossy photos up to Nate’s nose and thumbed through several.

Nate took in the slide show of pink and red. He said, “Excuse me.”

Pavlo nodded like a gentleman, stepped back, and Nate vomited onto the floor. When he lifted his cuffed hands to wipe his mouth, his shoulders screamed. He noted how the ice stretched to his left like a tabletop, and when he looked back over, Yuri stood beside Pavlo, holding the rescue saw with its diamond-tipped circular blade.

Somehow, despite the ice, sweat trickled down Nate’s face, his back. He fought his stomach still, tried to slow his gulps of air, kept his eyes from the saw.

Twenty minutes
.
Twenty minutes and then it’s all over.

He composed himself. “Okay,” he said.

There was a long pause. And then Misha asked, “Okay what?”

“Do it.” It struck him that he’d rediscovered something in that bank, in the face of those bullets. He was once again the guy who’d saved Janie from the ocean, who’d pulled her through a riptide and delivered her to shore. A dark laugh bubbled out of him, edged with hysteria. “Kill me.”

Pavlo’s gaze moved across his face, as if searching out a way to bore in and crack him open. He stared back. The best part of having nothing to lose was that no one had leverage over him. There was nothing at stake anymore.

Pavlo seemed to read this, finally turning away. “There is little red diary,” he said conversationally, “in the back of a closet. It is kept locked. In it are a girl’s complaints. What she views as hardships. How life treated her unfairly. In last entry, on page eighty-nine, she recalls a childhood memory. Her father bursting into her room one night in the clutch of a nightmare, blood streaming down his face.” He turned. The faintest pursing of his lips. Savoring a reaction.

Abruptly Nate became aware again of just how much the ice had chilled the air. The cold in the bones of his legs, aching. Each breath jerked his chest.

These men. In his daughter’s room.

They broke into the house
today.
Between the robbery and now. They must have moved immediately after the shootings, while Pete and Janie were at work and Cielle at school.

“The ice is not for you. It is”—a black-gloved hand circled—“
demonstration.
”

At once all pain was gone. “Let me be clear,” Nate said. “If you lay one finger on my daughter, my entire life will narrow to the single focus of killing you.”

Pavlo paced, frowning, deep furrows cupping his mouth. “There is a custom in our part of the world. If you step on someone’s foot…” He turned and asked Misha a question in what Nate assumed was Ukrainian.

Misha replied, “Accidentally.”

“…
accidentally,
you must offer own foot for person to step on in turn. Just a light tap. And yet. We right wrongs at once, so resentments do not fester. Understand?”

Nate swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. Nodded.

“You and I, we require
razborka.
Settling of accounts,” Pavlo said. “Much planning we spent for the bank heist.”

Nate said, “I will figure out how to get you money.”

“I do not want money. I have plenty of money.”

“You robbed a
bank.
”

“I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, no longer with us, God rest his soul. We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object. He place object in his safe-deposit box in First Union Bank of Southern California. We know it is there, but we do not know box number.”

Nate thought about how the robbers had sheared off the hinges of all those nests of safe-deposit boxes and yanked off the tiny doors. How the safes and the cash had seemed like a second priority, an afterthought.

“So you robbed the bank as a cover?” Nate asked. “To get whatever Urban had?” No answer. “What is it?”

Pavlo stopped pacing. His gaze turned on Nate. “It is what is inside the box.” His teeth gleamed. “You interrupted my plan to get it. Now you will get it for me.”

Nate felt his mouth fall open a little. “You’re kidding, right? I can’t do that. It’s impossible. Plus, the bank’s a crime scene. The safe-deposit boxes are sawed open—”

“Bank will reopen and have rebuilt boxes within twenty-four hours. They are bank. They cannot afford not to. Customers will be fearful.”

“So you want me to … what?” Nate coughed out a note of incredulity. “Break in?”

“You are VIP at bank now. You play at being big hero. So use your special…”

“Status,” Misha chimed in.

“Status.”
Pavlo repeated the word slowly, tasting it. “To figure out solution. We had our solution.”

Nate stared frantically at Pavlo, but the man gave up nothing. “Just kill me. Let’s handle this now, between you and me. Take it out on
me.
”

Pavlo continued, undeterred, “You will find me at New Odessa restaurant. To deliver. In five days. Sunday at midnight.”

“
Sunday?
It’s Tuesday night. There’s no way—”

The rescue saw in Yuri’s hands revved to life, a deafening roar that faded back to silence.

Pavlo held up a finger. “Five days. The contents of that box in my hand. Or we will take your daughter, slice her in half, and place the top of her on this ice. Here. Where she can look across at rest of her. But you? We will not touch you.” He rested a gloved hand on the surface beside Nate. “Is there any part of this that is unclear?”

Nate shook his head.

“If you run or we cannot find you, we do this to her also.”

“How the hell am I supposed to…?”

A long, patient blink, eyelids like crinkled paper. “If you talk to police or FBI and Agent Abara, we do this to her also.”

The mention of Abara gave Nate a fresh stab of dread. So Pavlo knew about him already. How much access did this man have?

“Five days,” Pavlo continued. “Or the precious handwriting in little red diary will never make it to page ninety.”

He held up the handcuff key, which glinted in the faint light, then dropped it. A metallic ring, and then his dress shoe pinned it to the concrete off the bounce. He nodded, and Yuri revved the saw again. He walked up to Nate, forearms tensing to control the powerful tool, and drew the biting blade back over one shoulder. Nate tried to lean away, ice pressing into his hamstrings, and as the carbide teeth whistled toward his chest, he closed his eyes.

A scream of impact, frozen chips flying up at his face. The ice shuddered around him, and then the block shifted, a crack zigzagging from the incision and moving between his legs. As Nate blinked away the ice flecks from his eyelashes, the men withdrew. Their shadows crowded the beam of light. Then one of them kicked over the source, and the darkness was again all-embracing. Pattering of footsteps. The rusty door slid open, then shut.

Silence. Cold. Terror. Another reappraisal of what it meant to hit bottom.

Nate strained, shoving his numb legs this way and that, the ice giving by degrees. He fought one leg free and finally the other, sliding down onto the floor, where he lay for five minutes or thirty, panting, waiting for life to seep back into his lower body. His hands cuffed before him, he rolled painfully on the concrete, searching for the key that Shevchenko had dropped. At last he felt it beneath the numb tips of his fingers. It was an agony of cramped muscles and near misses until he finally guided it into the tiny slot and managed to twist. Freeing his wrists, he slung the cuffs away. They slid in the darkness a good distance, unobstructed.

It took several attempts to rise and a few more for him to feel his legs beneath him well enough to walk. Staggering in the gloom, pinwheeling off crates, he considered the task before him. And what hung in the balance.
Five days. The contents of that box in my hand.
Or they would kill Cielle.

There’d be no offing himself now.

Finally he groped his way to the door and stepped out, soaked jeans chafing him, T-shirt askew, into an alley. He limped toward an unfamiliar intersection. A few gangbangers sitting on the shell of a Camaro looked up from their brown-bagged forties as he passed.

He was, he realized, a long way from home.

Chapter 13

Pavlo Shevchenko woke with a knot in his throat and his lungs clutching for air. He drew in a screech of breath and rose, slapping off the sheets. He sat up, basted in sweat, eyes darting, making sure the walls were far away.

Space. There was space here.

His California king mattress sat centered in the two-thousand-square-foot bedroom that was the second floor. When he’d bought the mansion in the bombastically titled Mount Olympus community in the Hollywood Hills, the first thing he’d done was knock out all the upstairs walls to give himself more breathing room. He would’ve taken out the pillars, too, if they weren’t needed to hold up the roof.

Floor-to-ceiling glass looked out at a steep stretch of canyon and the boulevard below, alive with light and movement. He rose and paced the vast room to show himself that he could, that he had the freedom to roam.

His history was defined by cages. His great-great-grandfather was a Cossack highwayman who’d died in the prison camps of Peter the Great, where the
vory v zakonye,
“thieves-in-law,” first rose to power. Populating the sparse branches of Pavlo’s family tree were more sworn criminals with allegiance to nothing but the thieves’ world, the
vorovskoi mir.
A grandfather who survived the NKVD torture chambers only to succumb to the terrors of Babi Yar. An uncle who sliced off his finger in a corrective-labor camp in the Urals to show defiance to the conventions of the world outside the bars.

Pavlo was born on the day of Stalin’s death in Donetsk, an industrial city in a bleak corner of Ukraine. At the time his father, who had taken the thief’s vow—to turn his back on all family except for his fellow criminals—was busy dying of dysentery in the Omsk Colony, where he’d been sentenced to six decades of hard labor. By his thirteenth year, Pavlo had made his way to the black markets of Odessa, where he came up among the syndicate, rising to the prestigious position of pickpocket by the age of fifteen. He did the bidding of the old-school
vory,
growing skilled with a blade. For his first execution, he cut off a man’s fingers, locked him in a car, and set it on fire. He never forgot how the man stared at him through the windows, never crying out. An early lesson taught by that hollow gaze:
There are those who are meat and those who are fed.