The Equalizer (6 page)

He fitted the night-vision scope on to the rifle, snapped on the stock, loaded five .308 M 168gr HPBT bullets into the chamber.

There was a single metal chain across the platform to the back of the helicopter. He unlatched it, stooped down, and stepped into the stricken chopper. It creaked and shifted position as he did. He grabbed for a handhold and steadied himself. For one irrational moment he wondered if this dead bird
could
just come loose and crash to the ground below. It had to take the weight of at least one man for maintenance purposes. He was not that tall, somewhat heavyset, weighing 240, but a Mi-38 helicopter could take up to thirty passengers and a flight crew of two. On the other hand, this park was a disaster in every sense of the word and he wondered how long it had been since
any
maintenance crew had been up into the chopper.

He walked forward carefully, carrying the M91 rifle in one hand, grabbing for handholds in the padded interior with the other. There were plenty of them, where the padding in the crippled seats spewed out obscenely as if it had been slashed with a knife. He made his way to the door of the chopper. He thought it might be welded shut, but it opened easily. He sat with his back braced against the side of the door. He pushed the steel anchor rod into the floor of the chopper and secured it. He settled in and sighted along the MARS sight. He zeroed in onto the wrecked passenger train and moved slowly across the windows of the first derailed carriage. He wasn't sure which one she would be in. That kind of intel was for the spies. She was in
one
of them and she would exit the way she climbed in to run back to her parked Lada.

He saw her.

The magnified sight made her figure jump up at him through the filthy train window. It was as if she was close enough for him to reach out and touch her. She had dark hair, was probably five-six, unless she was leaning over, if not, five-eight. He made that mental adjustment. The intel he'd been given had said she was five-foot-five. Her face was beautiful, even diffused through the murky glass. That was good. The more beautiful they were, the more exquisite their pain as it turned their features ugly. As soft, moist eyes became dark with terror. In fiction, heroes faced death with a kind of placidity he had never seen. In real life, fear clawed at a man or woman's face, distorting it, changing it forever. It was the last expression of their lives.

He owned it.

Then her face disappeared. He thought she was probably making her way to the train door. From there she would climb down the steps that were permanently in place. She had risked a look outside to make sure she saw nothing moving. No betrayal of anyone who had followed her to this place.

He knew the ex-FTB agents would not arrive. They had received no intel, had just jumped into a vehicle at the art gallery and driven after her. She had lost them easily. They were amateurs. But what of her own people? There would have been an elite cell guarding her, a Control in the field. Where were
they
?

He thought they might be back at the bomb site, making certain their precious agent had not been blown to pieces. They could not have been close enough to see her escape, because he had not seen them, and he would have. He would have seen the car, or panel truck, or a nondescript bus, whatever vehicle they were using for surveillance, go after her.
No
vehicle had left the scene of the explosion after hers except his own.

He took his eye from the eyepiece of the sight. A couple of deep breaths centered him. He put the eyepiece back to his right eye and focused on the stairs leading down from the first train carriage.

He hummed a lullaby he had heard when he was a small boy. Not one that his mother had sung to him. He did not remember her at all. But somewhere … maybe a young woman whose throat he had cut, singing softly to herself before that instant of choking horror. He tried to remember. For some reason it was important to him. Soft lullabies were precious memories.

He waited for her.

*   *   *

McCall bagged his own groceries. It was a mom-and-pop grocery store on the corner of the street and it was a running joke between himself and the old Asian woman who owned it. McCall would pick up his carton of milk, jar of coffee, fruit and vegetables, a six-pack of Diet Pepsi and a bag of M&M's, which he would put in a bowl on the living-room coffee table. The old Asian woman would start to put the items into two big brown paper bags that looked like they were purchased when World War II ended. McCall would gently move her gnarled hands away and bag the items himself.

“You no let me work,” she said. “I sit here all day. I need to work.”

“You've worked hard enough to keep this place on this corner,” McCall said. “You deserve to sit back and rest.”

It was the same things they said to each other every time he went in, just like Luigi asking him if the fusilli was good and him saying it was superb as always. A ritual. He liked it. His life was pretty regimented these days. Except for the incident with the hooker and her pimp. That had broken his rhythm.

Maybe permanently.

McCall paid the old woman and she rang it up and gave him some change. Her husband, who McCall knew had fought with Americans in Vietnam against the Viet Cong, shuffled up to her and put a Parkinson's hand on her shoulder.

“You honor us with your business, Mr. McCall.”

“The honor is mine.” He started to turn away, then turned back. “No trouble in the neighborhood?” he asked.

“What kind of trouble?” the old man asked, but his eyes said he knew exactly what McCall meant.

“Young men with vacant eyes wanting to protect you. Keep you safe. Make sure your establishment is not robbed or either of you are harmed.”

The old man shrugged. “This is New York. There are always men like that. They don't bother us. We mean nothing.”

“You mean something to me.”

The old man smiled a tolerant smile. “We are old. We get by. We don't need your help.”

“I wasn't offering any.”

The old man nodded. “You once carried the troubles of the world on your shoulders. But not anymore. That is good.”

“You can tell that from my buying milk and bagging my own groceries?”

He just shrugged and shuffled off to the other end of the counter to restack the lottery tickets. The old woman insisted on handing McCall his two bags.

“Thanks. Good night,” McCall said.

The old Asian woman smiled vacantly. McCall wondered if she'd paid any attention to the conversation with her husband at all.

He walked out of the store and down his street.

 

CHAPTER 5

Halfway around the world, he watched Elena jump down from the passenger car platform. She took two steps toward the Lada, then stopped, standing still. Listening. What could she have heard? Maybe the wind scraping through some debris. Maybe the rats scurrying in and out of the wrecked airplane. Whatever, she was in a perfect position. He danced the red dot across her forehead and down her right eye and cheek.

Then she surprised him.

Suddenly, in an instant, she was
gone
.

He moved the telescopic sight to one side, then the other. Her reflexes were faster than anyone he'd ever targeted. She had dropped like a stone to the ground and
rolled
under the first train carriage. Now he saw her legs pulling in and fired twice, certainly hitting her right leg once. He caught the puff pink explosion before she was under the train. He traveled the sight along the bottom of the train carriages. Flash of movement. He fired again, into darkness, hating to waste the bullet on a random shot, but it would discourage her from crawling out again. He took the sight from his eye, got to his feet, and climbed quickly back through the helicopter, which swayed alarmingly. Now he wasn't so certain the steel lines were going to hold it. He thought he should have stayed on the platform, but the idea of shooting her from a helicopter perched on power lines had been too tempting. He cursed himself for the misstep. He didn't make many of them. Not that it mattered. His prey was wounded, and she had nowhere to run.

He climbed out of the helicopter onto the platform. The wind whipped at him. The snow swirled in front of his eyes, obscuring his vision more than he thought it would. The storm had escalated. It was supposed to blow itself out well before midnight.

He left the pelican hard case where it lay open on the platform. He didn't have time to disassemble the AWC M91 and carry it down to the ground. He would climb back up to retrieve the case. There would be plenty of time afterward. Seconds now were precious. She was wounded, in pain, and adrenaline would be pumping through her body. She would be armed, maybe with more than one gun, but it was doubtful she had an automatic weapon with her. There would not have been one in the Lada, in case the
poltisya
stopped the car for some traffic violation, and he doubted there would have been one hidden in a compartment in the derailed train. So she would have handguns, nothing for him to be concerned about. He would not get that close to her.

He climbed down the steel ladder as quickly as he could, holding the high-powered rifle in one hand, letting the slick railing slide through the fingers of his other hand. He scanned the Disaster Park as he did so. Nothing stirred or moved except the wind and the rats.

He jumped down the last two steps and ran toward the derailed passenger train. He was light on his feet, not an ounce of fat anywhere on his body. He prided himself on his appearance. It was not vanity; it was correctness.

He ran around the twisted passenger car closest to the power lines platform and the hanging helicopter. She would not hear him coming. The ground was slushy and his boots made no sound. He saw the dark blood trail before he saw her body. She had crawled out on the other side, but had not been able to get up. The second shot must've also hit her. A stroke of luck, not accuracy, but he'd take it. It looked like he had hit her right hip. Probably shattered it. She was attempting to pull herself up onto the end platform of the last passenger car. But there were no steps on this side and it was too far above her. She had managed to reach up to the actual steel platform and was slowly, so slowly, hauling herself up, inch by inch. It was a good strategy. If she was inside the shelter of the train car, she might have a chance with a handgun. She might see him coming in the broken moonlight across the empty space between the crippled airliner and the derailed train.

But he had not come that way. He was behind her. He had hoped to have her on her back, staring up at him, eyes filled with hatred or terror or resignation. He had seen all three, and savored them. But now he didn't have time to indulge himself. He'd shoot her in the back of the head and be done with this.

The bullet shattered the train carriage window an inch from his face. He fell to one knee, swung the rifle up, the magnified MARS sight to his right eye. He saw the figure, silhouetted against the moonlight, rifle aimed at him. He was beyond the wrecked train about fifty yards. He put the red dot on the shooter's forehead and fired. His head exploded and he fell back. Reinforcements for the agent-in-the-field had arrived.

He ran toward his car. There were voices shouting. Either they had a homing device in the Lada, or her Control knew the location of the backup safe house. It was a complication he had not anticipated. He cursed softly. He should have made the kill shot as soon as she'd jumped down from the train platform.

But he'd wanted to see her suffering.

More bullets sliced through the snow at his feet. He stumbled. Perhaps his foot had hit a rock hidden in the snow. It doubled him over and he actually felt a bullet scream past his ear, taking a small piece of it. He reached the Gaz-3102 Volga, wrenched open the back door, threw the high-powered rifle inside, slammed the door, slid into the driver's seat, fired it up, and took off. He had studied the back way out of the Disaster Park on his iPhone map. It was a labyrinth of small roads, most of which led to abandoned buildings and dead ends. But the one that twisted through the maze to a major road blazed in his mind.

Darkness swallowed him up. He did not dare turn on his headlights. He looked down and saw that his left boot was torn up. That was where a bullet had hit him. He could dig the bullet out himself, no need for medical attention. He was as skilled as any doctor he'd ever come across, and more than most of those quacks.

He calculated how long it would take for her to die. Not much more than five minutes. There was nothing she could tell them. She knew nothing. He was a faceless man in the darkness with a sniper rifle. But he had not recovered the flash drive from her. Berezovsky would be angry. The mission had not been successful. He would only collect a percentage of his fee. That was the price of failure. It was a rare occurrence, and it burned in his mind. But at least the target had been eliminated.

To him, that was what mattered.

He made two fast turns and pulled the Volga over into the shelter of a group of burned-out buildings. He got out into the snow, which was now almost blinding, the wind whipping it back and forth, big swirling flakes. He left the AWC M91 in the back. They would find no fingerprints or DNA on it. He punched in a number on his iPhone and pressed
send
.

The helicopter must have been very close by, because within twenty seconds it was descending onto the snow-laden field to his right. He ran, limping on his wounded left foot, into the field. The wash of the rotors pulsed over him. Waiting hands pulled him up into the KA-32A11BC chopper. It was one of the helicopters that the Emergency Situations Ministry (EMERCOM) had used in Kazakhstan.

Berezovsky had influence.

He watched the ground drop away. As the chopper banked, he could see the distant Disaster Park. There was a man on the steel platform beside the helicopter on the power lines. He was holding something—the pelican hard case. That would tell them nothing. If they were able to dust the railing, they would find no fingerprints, even without the snow.