The Survivor (25 page)

The question of how to sign off caught him by surprise. He was still searching for words when the escalator sank into the floor and he stepped out into the chaos of the baggage-claim area.

At once the phone was snatched from his grasp, an arm slid around his waist, and a point dug into the side of his lower back, pressing so hard it seemed his skin would pop at any quick move.

He grunted and jerked away, making out only the bill of a baseball cap just behind his shoulder. The arm tightened across his waist so that he and the small man moved as a piece, their bodies in lockstep. Twisting, he craned for a look beneath the cap.

Misha’s boyish face peered up, dense bangs shoved down nearly to his eyes. “Keep walking or I will push the screwdriver straight through your kidney.”

The pressure intensified, sending flames across the band of Nate’s lower back and down the back of his thigh. “Okay,” he grunted. “Okay. Where are we going?”

“To Pavlo.”

“How do I know he won’t just kill me?”

“Because you’re still breathing.”

They hadn’t stopped moving, a brisk pace across the floor. People clustered all around, and yet no one paid them any mind. The automatic doors rolled open, the dry midday heat enveloping them. As they stepped to the curb, a white van pulled up, the side door rolling back with a screech. Valerik waited on a bench seat, gun resting flat against his thigh, the sleek stub of his ponytail so solid it looked carved from wood. The point of the screwdriver prodded Nate up and in, and a moment later Misha hopped up front with Dima.

Valerik pressed the barrel of the pistol to the top of Nate’s knee, and they coasted out into the flow of traffic, Dima returning the traffic cop’s polite nod as they passed.

Chapter 32

The van deposited Nate and Misha on a seedy downtown block where, with mounting concern, Nate was led up a set of cracked marble stairs into a sweat chamber announced as a
banya
on the sole sign providing translation from Cyrillic. They moved through several thick oak doors, passing hoary valets manning cash registers and towel booths, Misha’s mere presence dispensing with procedure of any sort. Broad, hewn-featured men lounged naked on long benches before lockers, eating pickled fish, sipping chocolate-colored liquid from mugs, and arguing in rough Eastern tongues.

The temperature rising with every step, they passed a bank of urinals and a stone arch, entering an open antechamber where men of all makes and models sank into icy plunge pools, lolled corpselike in steaming claw-footed tubs, and rinsed beneath shower nozzles protruding from the walls at inexplicable intervals.

Misha shoved Nate onward through the furnace and a sturdy wooden door into a miasma of steam so dense that Nate choked against it. Bodies sprawled about the stone ledges framing the large room, glimpses of marbled flesh visible here and there through the mist. The men were naked, save a few who were absurdly accessorized with oversize mitts and bell-shaped felt caps. A worker fed a firebox with logs of white birch, the scent and taste as biting as eucalyptus, though less medicinal. The outside air from Nate’s forced entrance blew a wavering corridor through the haze, revealing a masculine form sitting centered on the stained stone slab, his flesh an angry red beneath the elaborate ink.

Pavlo Shevchenko lifted a hand, and the room emptied. No rush, no ado. The others simply exited, sweat dripping, feet padding moistly, leaving them alone.

Nate’s clothes clung to him, damp and oppressive. The heat was like nothing he had ever experienced. An approximation of hell within sweating insane-asylum-white tiles. What kind of men would subject themselves to this for leisure?

The steam reintroduced itself, rendering Pavlo’s outline vague and ghostly, smudging the tattoos into bloodstains. The slab was elevated, thronelike. Misha shoved Nate forward, bringing him eye level to the stars tattooed across Pavlo’s knees.
I kneel before no man.

Pavlo’s face was little more than an impression in the heavy air. “I know
everything
you do. I have eyes on computer screens in important offices. You file police complaint, you spend on credit card, you make flight arrangement, I will know.”

Nate stepped forward again until he could discern the old man’s eyes. “You
never
said my wife and daughter couldn’t leave. You said
I
couldn’t leave. And I haven’t. I’m still here, working on getting into that safe-deposit box.”

“You had ticket, too. In your name.”

“Just so I could make sure they got on the plane. I didn’t go.”

Pavlo stared, his face carved from stone.

“Where are they?” Nate asked.

“In Los Angeles. Flight was canceled thanks to your clever call. Everyone was questioned. And released. It is fortunate Yuri has proper work visa. I need one man who can travel.”

“Don’t hurt them. That wasn’t the deal. I haven’t broken the deal.”

“Kneel,” Pavlo said.

“What?”

“Kneel.”
Shevchenko pointed down, a dog-training command.

Nate stood, dumbfounded, his shirt pasted to him. The cut on his shoulder from the letter opener gave off a healing itch so intense he wanted to reach back and claw it open with his nails. The heat was wreaking havoc with his symptoms, his hand and arm aflame, his legs weak, his lungs straining to draw full breaths in the soupy air.
This is what it will feel like soon,
he thought.
All the time.

Pavlo sprang to his feet, causing a violent disruption of the steam around him. He towered, enraged, glistening with sweat.
“On your knees!”

A blow from behind knocked Nate down, Misha kicking out one of his legs. Nate’s kneecaps ground against the stone. His muscles screamed beneath the heat.

Pavlo leaned over him. “If you have hope of success to get into safe-deposit box, why do you panic and go to LAX?”

“I
have
a plan. I know Danny Urban’s safe-deposit box is number two twenty-seven, and I’ve acquired the key. Agent Abara wants me to retrace my steps through the bank one more time to see what I can recall. For obvious reasons the bank manager wants to do it on a Sunday when the bank is closed. Tomorrow afternoon I’m gonna walk the crime scene again. I’ll ask to be left alone when I get to the bank vault.”

“You will need—”

“A master key. When I went to the bank Thursday, they gave me the VIP treatment, left me behind the teller bank alone.” His brain raced a quarter second ahead of his mouth; he was lying as fast as he could speak. “I got to the master key and made an impression. I cast the duplicate Friday.”

Shevchenko frowned, impressed. “If you can deliver, why do you put your wife and daughter on plane?”

Nate moved to rise, but Misha shoved him forward again, back onto his knees. He was having trouble breathing, thinking, his left arm trembling. Sweat stung his eyes.

He forced the words out. “My daughter is willful. She gets in my way. It’s easier for me to do this with her gone. And”—he sucked in a moist breath—“I don’t trust you.”

The silence, dense as the air. Then Pavlo gave a resonant laugh. Genuine amusement that seemed to catch him by surprise. “These are first words of yours that are not lies.” He chuckled a bit more, a deep sound that held little mirth. “You have daughter you struggle with. Who no longer cares for you. Americans let their children speak to them with disrespect. This is why they do not obey.” For the first time, his face held a sentiment that Nate found familiar, human. “They are impossible creatures. Daughters. They wind barbed wire around your heart and tug.”

He gestured mercifully for Nate to rise. Nate found his feet, stooping in the heat, his legs aching.

“You have a daughter?” Nate asked. “I thought you made some Russian-mafia promise to have no family. Only the brotherhood of thieves.”

“Russian mafia.” Pavlo chuckled. “Sounds frightening. Like your Marlon Brando. We are not mafia. We are not even Russian. The only real criminals from Russia live in the Duma and the Kremlin. There are no laws. Only loopholes, favors, bribes. We have been under the heel of war for generations. We fear no God. We believe in nothing. To survive you need muscle. And
will.
Here you need only lawyers. And I have them. A team of them—Jews—working in concert, burning midnight oil. They protect my businesses. My freedom.”

His gaze sharpened, zeroing in on Nate’s aching arm, which Nate had been holding against his stomach. He dropped it, letting it dangle, though the skin felt scoured by sandpaper. “Your guy twisted my arm at the restaurant,” he said quickly. “Tore something.”

Pavlo sneered at him. “We are not our bodies. We are more. Greater. This, our skin, is a cage. We must be
more.
”

The firebox leaked a steady stream of heat. Nate’s vision dotted. He had never felt the disease so acutely, his muscles hanging about him like rags.
It’s not always that easy,
he thought.

Pavlo’s expression demanded a response, so Nate gestured at his tattoos. “But your body defines you.”

“Because I am decorated? No. I am my body no more than you are yours. I have pride in my
code.
These?” His hands slid across his sweat-slick skin, moving from tattoo to tattoo. “They are my passport, my story. They cannot lie. In prison do you know what most valuable currency is?” His thumbs rubbed across his fingertips. “Pigment. One burns a boot heel. Sifts the ash through handkerchief and mixes with urine. The needle? A guitar string sharpened on strip of a matchbook. In the worst conditions, we find a way to speak our truth. To say, ‘This is my promise. It is carved into my flesh.’” He slapped his flushed chest, leaving white handprints on both pectorals. “I fulfill every promise written here.”

“Then fulfill your word to me,” Nate said. “I didn’t break the code. Don’t touch my family.”

“Go home. Your wife and daughter will be waiting. They must now behave. You do not know when we are looking.” At last Pavlo sat, his bare flesh slapping the stone wetly. “Enjoy them for next thirty-six hours. The next time you see me, I will either release you or force you to watch your daughter die.”

Chapter 33

Dima pulled up in front of the house, Valerik lifted the gun barrel from Nate’s thigh, and Misha rolled back the door and prodded him out. A few shaky steps up the walk, Nate heard a whistle. When he turned, his cell phone was flying at him, and he moved to catch it in front of his face, but his hand couldn’t clench in time. The phone bounced unbroken on the pavement, and he stooped painfully to pick it up. The door slammed shut as the van pulled away, leaving Nate alone in the thickening dusk with the smell of wet grass and a cell-phone screen showing seventeen missed calls from Janie.

Moving toward the front door, he sensed a tingling in his ankle and realized that his left foot was dragging, ever so slightly, along the concrete. The first sign of the dropped foot that heralded, for the afflicted, the beginning of the descent. No wonder Lou Gehrig started having trouble with grounders. With concentration, Nate returned his stride to normal, his pace quickening at the thought of seeing Janie and Cielle.

The front door flung open, two backlit feminine forms crowding the opening, their bearings conveying distress and trepidation and—yes—relief at the sight of him. Firming his leg, he kept on, even as Janie and Cielle rushed out to meet him. His dread, as enveloping as the creeping nightfall, was penetrated by a single prick of light, a sharp gratitude for the embrace to come.

*   *   *

Three
A.M.

Kneading his forearm, Nate sat on the couch with Janie, Cielle looking on with chagrin and flicking the edge of her scarf fretfully across her lips. Watching his daughter, he was reminded of what was at risk and had to look away to keep the dam of emotion from breaking inside him. It had been a day without beginning or end, just a prolonged episode of trauma, twisting through the hours like a trapped creature that refused to die.

After stumbling in from the coerced
banya
visit, he’d showered, changed into fresh clothes, and driven Janie’s car down to find Wendy Moreno—that last name they had from Urban’s list. His knock had gone unanswered, and he’d waited outside for six jittery hours until, assuming that Ms. Moreno would be spending the night out, he’d driven home in a state of exhaustion he could describe only as a stupor. While he’d been on his fruitless stakeout, Janie had scavenged every nook and cranny of the Internet to see if she could find anything about Patrice McKenna, the murdered schoolteacher from Brentwood, that might connect her to Pavlo Shevchenko. Janie had turned up little more than stunned testimonials from neighbors and relatives, variations on a common theme: Patrice was a pillar of the community, the last woman they’d ever expect something like this to happen to.

Twenty-one hours to zero hour, and Nate had not one scrap of evidence to bring to Abara. In fact, every dead end they hit reaquainted them with the alarming reality: They didn’t even know what they were looking for.

Now they were rehashing the contingency to their contingency plan. First thing tomorrow he’d drive back to Wendy Moreno’s and hope that he found her and could, through some Sherlockian miracle, scare up a piece of leverage that might flip the script on Shevchenko. Moreno’s house was near the airport, so on his way he’d drop Janie and Cielle at LAX to retrieve his Jeep from short-term parking, where it had been languishing since he’d been snatched by Misha. Janie would get the Jeep home, pack it, stay visibly present in the house in case Shevchenko’s men were watching, and wait to hear from Nate. Short of his finding the magical clue at Moreno’s to bring to Abara and the FBI, he’d race home and they’d go on the run together well ahead of Shevchenko’s midnight deadline.

“No credit cards,” he said. “No flight or hotel reservations. No phone calls.”

Janie looked across at Cielle. “That includes Jason.”

Cielle’s face wrinkled at the injustice of this, and she was about to reply when she registered something in Nate’s face. “What’s wrong?”