The Equalizer (44 page)

McCall stood up fast. He threw off the overcoat, then grabbed the prison shirt off the dog's face and tossed it to Serena, who stood half-naked and shivering in the cold. She put it back on. McCall closed the bloody blade on the knife, grabbed the fallen Kedr from the ground, and took Serena's arm.

The alpha dog lay motionless, its face bloody.

The other wild dogs were still, watching, but whimpering now, a low keening sound that was like something from Hell.

McCall unfurled the overcoat and put it around Serena's shoulders. They backed up, away from the pack of wild dogs, their eyes never leaving them. They walked behind the ruined building.

And then they ran.

There was no sound of the wild dog pack coming after them.

There were snarls and the awful sound of jaws snapping as they tore the alpha dog apart. One of them would become the new alpha.

McCall had no desire to stick around for the ceremony.

He and Serena plunged into the thickest part of the woods. Branches of the trees tore and clawed at them again. Their hands and faces were both cut and bruised, but they kept on running. Then, ahead of them, the trees were not so tightly packed together. They came out of them, not into a clearing, but into a space the size of a prison cell. McCall signaled for them to stop. Serena tried to regulate her breathing. They found a huge fallen log and sat on it. She pulled the overcoat tighter around her. She looked down at the ground. Her voice came out in fitful bursts between breaths.

“If you had really been Arbon, the Devil, I would have told you everything. About The Company, Control, agents' names, safe houses. Everything.”

“Except I wasn't. And you didn't.”

She continued to stare down at the ground. She shook her head. Her voice was a little stronger.

“I'd have told him.”

“Me, too.”

She looked up at him. “No.”

“Everyone has a breaking point. In fear, in love, in grief. Better not to know what it is until you have to.”

She looked out into the dark forest. The moon was going in and out of clouds, throwing pale splintered light through the trees and then extinguishing it.

“Do you have a plan?” she asked.

“Keep going.”

“That's not a plan.”

“Best I can do on the spur of the moment.”

She took in a deep breath and let it out again.

“So wonderful to breathe the night air. To walk … to
run
 … even if it is away from men with guns and rabid dogs. I didn't remember what all this space around me could feel like.”

McCall nodded. He didn't appear to be listening.

“Is this a good moment to thank you for saving my life?”

“It's what I'm paid to do.”

“I can still thank you. We're not strangers anymore,” she said softly.

She kissed him gently on the cheek.

He stood up.

“What is it?” she asked, alarmed. “What can you hear? The dogs?”

“No, it's in front of us.”

A sound had been creeping into the heavy silence of the night. A low, slightly shrill thrumming noise. At first he couldn't place it. Serena tried to get to her feet, but staggered. He steadied her and pulled her up beside him. She listened hard.

“What
is
that noise?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Are those voices I can hear?”

“Yes.”

“You said there wasn't a town or a village within thirty miles.”

“There's not.”

“So what is that?”

“It's a train,” McCall said, finally recognizing the sound. “Not moving, idling, stopped on the tracks.”

There was no train stop in the area, he knew that, but the tracks did run through the forest. McCall looked at her.
Okay to move on?
She had regulated her breathing. She still shivered violently, even in the big overcoat. It was open at the front. McCall could see her breasts thrusting against her thin pajama top, the nipples hard in the cold. He buttoned up the coat. She smiled at him. Took his hand and held it tightly.

They ran through the trees. They started to peter out quickly. Through them, McCall could see the train on the tracks, gleaming in the moonlight.

It had stopped.

It took them another few strides to reach the edge of the trees and see what had happened. It was a horrific accident. There was an old gray VAZ-2107 that had been flipped thirty yards and landed on its side, upside-down. The front of it was crushed. It must have stalled on the tracks, or the teenagers inside had raced the train. McCall could reenact the tragic scenario in his mind. The train driver slamming on the brakes, sparks flying from the rails—too late. The train had ground to a halt some sixty yards on. There were two bodies lying beside the wrecked vehicle with a blanket thrown over them. Glass was strewn everywhere with a few pieces of twisted metal. Amazingly one headlamp on the wrecked vehicle was still on, throwing a square of bright radiance onto the ground. There was a crowd of spectators around the tragic scene, passengers from the train. A couple of train personnel and the conductor were conferring to one side. Faces were pressed against the windows of the carriages.

McCall hated to do it, but Serena needed shoes.

“Stay here,” he said.

He ran across the edge of the forest until he was parallel with the wrecked VAZ and the bodies. Then he walked forward, as if drawn by the tragedy like the others. The people already there looked at him, a little guiltily, as if they had been caught doing something very wrong.

The blast of the train whistle made all of them jump. Almost as one, they turned back toward the train. The conductor was shouting in Russian, waving an arm, telling them to come back.

Four rail personnel were pushing through the crowd, two of them carrying stretchers.

Quickly McCall knelt beside the blanket and removed the shoes from the dead teenage girl's feet. They were Jive silver yellow cab sneakers. He straightened and lost himself in part of the crowd, all of them with their backs to him. The train guards knelt down and lifted the bodies of the two teenagers onto the stretchers. They carried them back toward the train through the dispersing crowd.

McCall ran along the edge of the forest. Serena was still in its shadow. He reached her and dropped the yellow cab sneakers onto the ground. She thrust her bare, bleeding feet into them. They were a tight fit, but better than nothing. McCall took her hand and they ran out of the protection of the trees.

People were climbing back onto the train, moving through the bright windows in the various carriages. Nothing they could do about this sudden tragedy. McCall noted one businessman, in a window, looking down irritated at his watch. The death of two innocents was making him late for whatever awaited him in Moscow.

McCall and Serena reached the steel steps between two of the carriages. He pushed her up ahead of him and climbed up. They entered the carriage to their right. It was not full. Some people were still standing at the windows looking out into the bloody night.

They made their way to one of the rows of seats on the side of the carriage not looking out on the tragedy. Serena took the seat by the window. McCall slid into the seat beside her. Across from them sat a heavyset woman in her fifties, folds of flesh making little pigs of her eyes and erasing her chin and neck. She wore an old black coat and a flowered dress beneath it and flat shoes. She reacted to their sudden presence. They had not been sitting there before.

“It's crowded in the next carriage,” McCall said, in Russian. “Not so many people in here. We're not disturbing you, are we?”

The old woman just shook her head. Whether she believed him or not, she didn't want to talk to a stranger. She certainly didn't think they had just
boarded
the train
here
in the forest on this desolate section of track.

McCall waited to see if any of the onlookers turned back and found their seats occupied. They didn't. The conductor came through, telling them all to take their seats, the train was pulling out. In fact, it had already started to move. He glanced at McCall and Serena and stopped. If he asked them right now for their tickets, and discovered they had none, he would put two-and-two together and realize they'd only just boarded the train.

The Kedr sub was in the pocket of the overcoat, which Serena had pulled over her body like a blanket.

The ticket conductor looked down at her scratched face, then looked at McCall.

“Terrible thing,” the conductor said in Russian.

“Da,” McCall said.

“The driver did not see them in time. He was not going fast through this stretch of forest. He braked, but it was too late. You could hear those brakes yeah? Screaming in the night. There was nothing he could do.”

“It is a tragedy,” McCall said in Russian, and then shrugged. Like these things happen, so what? He looked down at the watch on his wrist—Gredenko's watch. “What time will we get into Moscow now?”

“Just over three hours.”

McCall nodded curtly, then indicated Serena beside him, wrapped in the overcoat, shoes on her feet.

“My friend wants to sleep,” he said in Russian.

The conductor shook his head at such disregard for human tragedy and the loss of innocent life and moved on. The train picked up speed. McCall caught one last fleeting glimpse of the wrecked VAZ through the far window before it was replaced by forest glowing in the moonlight.

He didn't know how many stops there were before the train pulled into Moscow. He knew that he and Serena would get off at the next one.

Because there might be another conductor, and he might not be so easily fooled, if he was fooled at all. Word of their escape, and the manhunt going on for them in the forest, would be reaching new ears by now.

McCall closed his eyes.

The
ping
was like a gunshot in the silence.

 

CHAPTER 32

Jeff Carlson was sitting on a bench in the little park opposite Karen Armstrong's apartment building. Her doorman was named Harry and he was the last of a dying breed. A man who had a strict work ethic. But his apartment building wasn't Buckingham Palace, where the Beefeaters, or whatever the fuck they were called, had to stand at attention and not move a muscle. Not even when bratty little girls kicked their shins or American tourists tried to engage them in witty conversation. Carlson had a mental image of a gorgeous American student visiting London, standing outside Buckingham Palace in a summer dress, looking up at the Beefeater standing there stalwart and unmoving, no expression on his face. She'd say: “Hey!” and lift up her skirt, till it was above her panties, then pull them down, revealing a triangle of pubic hair. Sometimes it was blond and sometimes it was brunette, depending on who was on Carlson's mind at the time. What would the Beefeater do? Would his eyes flick down to that treasure between her legs? Or would he keep that stiff British upper lip, along with a stiff cock hidden beneath his formal robes, and stare straight ahead?

Carlson knew what Harry would do. He'd look right at the money in a New York second, never mind a minute. Carlson had watched his favorite new doorman for nine hours. He took a lot of breaks. Carlson knew
exactly
when to return to get into the building without Harry standing outside.

He just had to pick the right night.

*   *   *

The laptop pinged again. McCall turned from looking out the kitchen window at the rooftops to his laptop on the kitchen table. He closed out his memory of Serena and went through Borislav Kirov's documents. A lot of accounting, a mass of information about the Dolls Club opening in Manhattan. A great many business investments all over the world. None of it told him anything more than Kirov was meticulous and his personal empire was far-reaching. About 1:00
A.M.
McCall started on the e-mails and text messages. There were a number of them from a phone address with the initials
AB.
The tone of the texts were deferential from Kirov, demanding and dismissive from
AB
. But the final text message, dated two nights before, caught McCall's attention.

It said:

YOU WILL PERSONALLY SUPERVISE DIABLO IN THE FIELD. DATE MOVED UP. YOUR OWN PASSPORT OK. AB.

McCall started going through Kirov's pictures. It took him ten minutes to find the one he wanted. He isolated it, sent it, then picked up his iPhone and dialed.

It took Brahms two rings to pick up. McCall could hear nothing in the background, just the old man's soft breathing.

“No Brahms tonight?” McCall asked.

“Silence can sometimes be just as soothing. How is Sam Kinney doing? That robbery at the Liberty Belle Hotel is all over the news. I tried calling the hospital, but they won't release any information unless I'm family.”

“His condition has been upgraded to stable.”

“Was it really a robbery?”

“No. The gunmen were after me.”

Brahms let the silence linger for a moment. He knew McCall would feel guilty about Sam, so he didn't comment.

McCall said, “You're working late.”

“How do you know I'm not at home?”

“I'd hear Hilda. She'd want to know who in the world was calling you in the middle of the night and what did they want.”

“That's why I don't work at home. What
do
you want? You get the intel you needed?”

“Mostly. Borislav Kirov's firewalls and protection screens all came crashing down. How did you know his password was ‘Sardolov'?”

“I took a stroll around the Dolls nightclub a couple of nights ago. I had on a rumpled suit and looked like Warren Buffett. I said I was from the city planning commission. There was talk of rezoning the street. I didn't speak to Mr. Kirov, but I did admire his taste in art. It was a guess.”

“A good one. There's a surveillance picture he took off one of his security cameras of me. I've just sent it to you.”