The Equalizer (41 page)

A bullet tore across the top of McCall's left shoulder. He dropped the Russian pistol and it clattered on the catwalk and then fell to the floor below. He absorbed the pain. More bullets whined past their running figures. They reached the end of the catwalk and McCall jumped down to the ground floor, lifting Serena down beside him. He had the floor plan of the building in his head. There was a heavy iron exit door just in front of them. The moonlight here was minimal, but he didn't dare use the pencil flashlight. He thrust the girl toward where the door was etched in his mind. More bullets crashed and pinged off the metal structures around them.

McCall heard one of the soldiers off to his left. He swung up the Kedr sub and fired into the darkness. The soldier was hit and fell to the ground. Bullets from his own submachine gun fired blindly. One round went past McCall's head so close he felt the rush of air.

He looked up.

The sound of the helicopter was receding.

*   *   *

In the AH-64, Granny fought the controls. The chopper was still spinning. He couldn't get off any more missiles in the maelstrom.

“Plan B,” he said into the radio.

His copilot did not respond.

Granny looked over and saw that Hastings was hit. Shoulder wound. Granny tapped his helmet. Motioned. We're leaving.

Granny angled the chopper up, still fighting for control. Another RPG screamed up at the chopper, missing it by inches. Granny angled up and over the factory building. He looked at the green-lit area below on the screen. Thought he saw two heat signatures emerge from the east end of the building. Could have been McCall and the target. McCall could not have risked bringing a radio into the facility with him. They had an appointed extraction point three hundred yards from the facility in a forest clearing, north northeast. But that didn't matter now. Control had been very specific—if the helicopter was damaged to the extent it could not land or, if it did, might not be able to lift off again, Granny was to abandon McCall and the target. They'd take their chances in the forest.

“Sorry, McCall, you're on your own,” Granny said.

Then he tried to gain height over the trees.

*   *   *

Below, McCall and Serena came to a halt. The night air was cold. The girl shivered violently beside him in her prison pajamas, her bare feet bleeding profusely now. McCall looked up and saw the AH-64 in the moonlit sky, coming out of a spiral and leveling off, but fighting to stay that way. The tail rotor was damaged. The chopper was listing badly. Granny would not be able to land and pick them up. He'd be lucky not to crash into the forest below. McCall knew what Granny's operational orders from Control were. A moment later the AH-64 had angled over the trees and was gone. McCall put a protective arm around Serena's shoulders and felt afraid.

He was not sure how to get them to safety now that Granny was out of the equation.

McCall looked around them. There was an old UAZ 3172 Soviet Army jeep parked beside the fence. McCall took Serena's hand and they ran for it. She limped badly and he had to haul her along with him. Footfalls pounded on cement. There were cries and shouting in Russian. Soldiers had entered the factory building. They were searching for the fugitives. Their General Palkovnik was dead. There might be a premier/major or a lieutenant in their ranks, but there was confusion and no clear person in command. They would seal off the compound, but they should have done that already, and there'd been no one to give the order.

The sound of the AH-64 was gone.

McCall thrust Serena into the back of the UAZ jeep. He was ready to try and hot-wire the vehicle, but the keys were actually on the driver's seat.

Your helicopter ride goes south, but you find a ring of keys,
McCall thought.

Win some, lose some.

He tossed the Kedr submachine gun onto the passenger seat, fired up the jeep, and pulled away. Ahead of him Russian soldiers rounded the side of the building, throwing up their submachine guns. For a moment they didn't fire—this could be a Russian officer driving
toward
the front of the factory. But as soon as McCall veered off to the right, they opened fire. Bullets slammed into the jeep. Serena slid down so that she was below the level of the seats in a heap.

The back window blew glass shards across where she'd been sitting a moment before. Some of them rained hot across the back of McCall's neck. The gate in the fence was right in front of him. It was slightly ajar, held to the fence by a single rusty chain.

McCall smashed into it. The chain split apart and the gate swung open. He gunned the vehicle out of the compound. More bullets hit the back of it. McCall could not hear over the rush of wind, but he knew some of the soldiers were running for other jeeps and trucks that had transported them to the isolated facility.

There was a last fusillade of bullets. The jeep swerved violently. McCall plunged off the road into the dense forest surrounding the factory. He bounced over a dirt track for a quarter of a mile, then one of the tires blew as it hit an obstruction in the road.

Going too fast.

The jeep sailed up into the air and flipped over.

It crashed down and cartwheeled into some heavy bushes and a tree trunk tore apart the front of the vehicle.

It lay there with smoke pouring out of the hood and the sound of wrenching metal faded away into the silence of the forest.

 

CHAPTER 29

Twilight gathered the city in its arms.

McCall had picked up his iPhone from Brahms who'd told him it would chirp if Jeff Carlson walked up to Karen Armstrong's apartment building. He'd thought about making it chime a Brahms waltz, but had decided a simple electronic
beep
would suffice. McCall had walked from the electronics store to Fifty-ninth Street and bought a hot dog from a vendor outside the Plaza Hotel in front of Central Park. He liked it with diced onions and mustard, no ketchup or sauerkraut. He walked into the park and found a bench on one of the paths. On one of the other benches was a family who'd been to the zoo and were trying to figure out how to carry shopping bags and balloons and small children and ice-cream cones and large pretzels with mustard at the same time. McCall needed to regroup. Something was not right. He was missing something. Or there was something he simply didn't know.

Margaret was on a Greyhound bus back to Minnesota. Karen Armstrong was being stalked, but McCall could not give her surveillance 24/7. If Carlson was going to go after her, he'd have to make his move and McCall had to hope he'd be close.

That left the gang at Dolls nightclub. Yes, they'd flexed their muscles with one of their cocktail waitresses. Wanted her to be a dancer. Wanted her to sleep with certain high-profile clients of the club. Collect what could be valuable information. Set up blackmail. But they weren't running a prostitution ring in the neighborhood. They were working protection on the merchants, but it was almost like they had to do that if they were going to have any standing in the community.

So what was special about Katia Rossovkaya? They had wanted to intimidate her. They had kidnapped her teenage daughter to show they meant business. McCall had rescued her. Without a shot being fired or anyone really getting hurt. That was a humiliation for the Chechens that might not be tolerated. But humiliating enough for Borislav Kirov to send his enforcers to the Liberty Belle Hotel to murder McCall and anyone who was with him?

McCall ate some more of the hot dog. It was a cliché to say there were no hot dogs you could get in any other American city as good as the ones in New York, but he had to give it some credence.

This wasn't just about Katia Rossovkaya.

It was about
him
.

The same thin icy dread he'd felt when he stepped into the alleyway to stop J.T. from beating Margaret to death—the same dread he'd felt when he didn't think he could save Serena Johanssen in that forest surrounding the abandoned automobile factory—took hold of him.

McCall had come into Borislav Kirov's world and it shouldn't have made him break into a sweat. McCall was Bobby Maclain, a bartender at Bentleys restaurant. And even if Kirov was savvy and perceptive enough to sense a past, to feel the threat of violence that could wrap itself around McCall, he was still a stranger and would have stayed that way. And yet Kirov had sent his pit bull Bakar Daudov with ten armed assassins to kill him. Kirov didn't know McCall had been with Danil Gershon in Grand Central Station. McCall might've been spotted with him on one of the station's surveillance cameras, but Kirov would have no access to any of those tapes. He'd sent his enforcers after Gershon because The Company man's cover had been blown. It could not have just been McCall's fleeting visit. They must have been suspicious of him for some time.

At least, that's what McCall wanted to believe.

So Robert McCall was dangerous to Borislav Kirov and Kirov's operation. And that operation wasn't running the Dolls nightclub in Manhattan.

So what was it?

McCall ate the last two bites of the hot dog, wiped his fingers on a napkin, dropped it into a wastebasket, stood up, and walked down the path.

When in doubt,
he thought.…

Go to a Broadway show
.

*   *   *

It was the opening night of the revival of
Les Misérables
on Broadway at the Imperial Theater on West Forty-fifth Street. McCall was glad to see that some people still dressed up to go to the theater, at least to an opening night. There were men in business suits, even a few tuxes here and there. Women were dressed in cocktail attire with lots of jewellery. And then there were the appliance salesmen from Ohio in shapeless corduroy pants and loud sport coats that even Paul Drake on
Perry Mason
wouldn't have worn and the sweatshirt-and-jeans women who needed to be comfortable more than they needed to make a fashion statement.

McCall himself was dressed in a dark blue suit. It was the only one he owned and it didn't see much use. There had been a small photograph in one of the pockets that had been dry-cleaned along with the suit. It was of Elena Petrov, in a restaurant somewhere, holding a glass of wine and toasting the camera, or rather, the camera
man
, her face radiant in the candlelight. He had stared down at it for a long time.
I'd tell you he feels badly about what happened,
Kostmayer had said,
but with Control you never know. Cologne in his veins. She died in his arms
.

McCall had taken the photo and put it into a shoebox in the top drawer of the dresser in his bedroom. There wasn't much in the shoebox. Some photos, some letters. He hadn't looked at anything else in it. He'd closed the top of the shoebox and shut the dresser drawer.

Then he'd gone to the theater.

The lobby of the Imperial Theater was packed. People milled around, drinks in hand, five deep at the bar, a general sense of excitement in the air. It was an exhilarating show and this was a big Broadway revival.
Les Miz
was McCall's favorite musical. Its high emotions and sense of humanity resonated with him on a very visceral level. Not that he tried to analyze his feelings about it.

It was just one hell of a good show.

McCall knew Borislav Kirov was going to be at the opening night because he'd listened in on the bug under his alcove table. Kirov had called his wife and promised he wouldn't be late to pick her up. He was standing near the bar, drinking a vodka-and-tonic. He was dressed in a black suit with a dark crimson tie held in place with a gold tie clip. Rings sparkled on his fingers. Beside him was a very attractive American woman, early forties. Kostmayer had found out her name was Kristine, with a
K,
she came from Swedish stock, her folks had owned half of the Upper East Side and she was an interior decorator who Trump called in the middle of the night. She was blond and a little raucous and laughed a lot. When her husband motioned that he was stepping outside onto the street to smoke, she nodded and smiled lovingly at him. She would allow him one vice. McCall wondered if she knew he was a man who ordered people killed. Or maybe she did and had long since compartmentalized it somewhere she could not access it. Her husband was a good man. He was the father of their two teenage sons. He loved life and embraced it in a big way.

McCall followed Kirov out of the theater. The Chechen took out a package of Sobranie of London Cocktail cigarette 100's, took the silver lighter with his initials on it from his pocket, shook out a cigarette, and lit it. He took his iPhone out of the right-hand pocket of his suit coat and checked for messages. There didn't seem to be anything urgent. He dropped it back into his coat pocket with the lighter. He looked down Forty-fifth Street, smoking, lost in thought. His body language showed no tension. If anything, a little resignation about the waste of an evening.

He was too isolated out here in the street. McCall would have to wait until he was back inside the lobby.

But that didn't work out, either. Kirov smoked three cigarettes in quick succession and then the lights were flashing in the lobby and a polite but somewhat urgent voice was telling the theatergoers to take their seats as the performance would begin in five minutes. Kirov walked back into the theater and moved over to his wife. They were with another couple, a balding man in his forties in a gray suit with a much younger woman who looked like she'd just stepped out of a Playmate calendar and had rushed to join him, throwing on a beige silk handkerchief to cover her serious endowments and wearing beige high heels. McCall recognized the man's face, but couldn't remember his name. A high-powered criminal attorney. Probably Kirov's.

McCall might have had a shot with the crowd surging toward the auditorium doors, but they weren't doing it like the place was on fire. It was kind of leisurely, even though the ominous voice told them the performance would begin in three minutes and the lights kept flashing. Plenty of time. These shows always went up late, particularly on opening night.