The Third Bullet - Страница 18

The Russian timed it perfectly, made certain not to look at the man, since some people have a weird gift for feeling the presence of another’s eyes upon them, reached him just as he was at the corner, and turned left. He drove at under thirty to the next block, turned right at the corner, and hammered it, aware only marginally that he was on the railroad tracks of Pacific Avenue, shooting up to sixty-five in three seconds to reach the next corner, found the ideal angle, and hardly lost a mile an hour on his controlled right-hand burn around the corner, then pulled up in the block with the intersection a hundred feet or so ahead of him, and halted, downshifting to neutral, putting his lights out. All was fine. It was no problem at all.

He waited, he waited, he waited. Time sometimes goes slow on the hunt. But at last his quarry arrived, ambling into view at the same distracted old man’s pace, disfigured by the limp so that he had an odd comic bearing. The Russian cracked a rare smile at the old man’s funny walk.

The Russian also had a gift for instantly computing interception angles. He knew not to go to the pedal at the man’s first step into the street or even the second. He had time to check for beams from oncoming traffic out of sight, and he noted there wasn’t any traffic. At the target’s third step, he got the go-code from his deep brain and rammed the car into first, controlling the clutch with a virtuoso’s touch, and a split second later, a really fast throw into second as the car’s 370 horses roared into high gallop and got there as fast as anything on earth except a straight custom drag. The sound of the engine eating gas with a basso profundo growl and alchemizing it instantly into speed filled the air. The car lurched ahead so powerfully, it turned the hard edges of reality into a blur.

Swagger had the gun in his hand along his right leg, hidden behind his comically exaggerated limp, and at the roar, losing no time on surprise, none on regret, nada on indecision, and in his pure-killer move, beautiful and stoic and all-American gunman, he pivoted and, because smooth is fast, slid the gun up so smooth it moved at a rate that has no place in time, and his subconscious acquired the front sight exactly as it came to center, driver’s-side windshield, and the pistol’s double tap lasted but a tenth of a second, recoil not fast enough to catch up to fully firing fast-twitch muscles of the trigger pull, even as one muzzle flash became another and two pieces of hot brass spewed from the ramjet breech eight inches apart. The windshield yielded instantly into a haze of micro-fracture, the car careened right, ate up the curb, hit a building with the sound of metal crunching, flipped, and roared on its beautiful, glossy black flank along the sidewalk, chewing up pavement, spraying sparks and stone debris, ripping sheets of window out of storefronts, its hood bending and twisting like a burning piece of paper, at last halting in a heap of twisted steel, with the stench of gasoline, tendrils of steam and smoke arising from several wounds in the body and engine well.

In the quiet that followed, Swagger slipped the gun into his holster and grabbed his cell.

“Memphis,” came the quick answer.

“I’m at Elm and North Market. He’s piled up to the right, on the sidewalk, no citizen collateral, all of it clean. Get your team here fast, and get me the fuck out of town.”

“What happened to him?” Nick said.

“Bring a body bag,” said Swagger. “And a mop.”

PART II

Mockba “What it is ain’t exactly clear”

CHAPTER 8

Moscow

It was a perfect twilight in utopia as couples strolled, children frolicked, lovers squeezed, dogs yipped, and intellectuals theorized in the park off Ukrainski Boulevard. They glided with the radiant happiness of those who were happy to be who they were where they were when they were. “Life, it’s good” seemed to be the prevailing ethos. Lights winked in the soft darkness, more show than anything else, for in this urban playing field, there was no crime, or very little, nearly full employment, and low taxes. The dark for once concealed the construction frenzy of backhoes, bulldozers, and cranes as daytime Moscow reconstructed itself for about the thirtieth time in its long and convoluted history, this time giving capitalism a good shot even as the citizens ebbed and flowed through and around all the projects, dashing nimbly to avoid being crushed, either by the errant construction machine or that jet-black gleaming Ferrari whistling down the cobblestones at ninety per. Meanwhile, observing without comment, stone or steel men in greatcoats with those clamshell World War II helmets and the old red tommy guns, with their signature ventilated barrels and gangster-style seventy-one-round drums, stood fifteen feet tall every block or two, as if unsure whether this was what all their fighting and dying had protected and made possible.

Flanked by the nine-story banks of the Kutuzovsky 7 apartment complex and nestled under trees, the restaurant Khachapuri was operating at full meat ahead. It was a place that specialized in animal parts on sticks. They arrived glistening yet crisp, with the fat broiled out of them by raw flame, chunks of pure protein whose odor filled the air and made one think of Cossack camps along the Don after a good day massacring Tsarist infantry in about 1652. The restaurant itself had a Cossack quality, as it was an open-air tent affiliated with the kitchen of a bar in the building across the sidewalk, and a gathering place for those of the new generation seeking sustenance, vodka, and comradeship, at which it excelled in providing.

Swagger, of course, couldn’t try the vodka, knowing he’d end up in Siberia with a new Uzbek wife and nine children, plus some really cool tattoos; he wasn’t hungry, though the meat smells touched some primal thing in him; and the comradeship he sought was of a particular kind.

He leaned alone at the bar, drinking koka, as Coca-Cola was called here in the capital city, and watching the proceedings with a wary eye, not quite willing to buy in to it. Something held him back, history perhaps, his own as well as his country’s and his culture’s. It was hard to believe he’d been nurtured to hate all these people and they’d turned out to be so beautiful, energetic, and happy. Gee, folks, he thought, glad we didn’t blow you to nuclear shreds in about 1977; that would have been a big mistake.

It was his second day in Moscow. The first he’d spent wandering from his room at the Metropol onto Red Square and around the area and being stunned for the first time by the sheer joy of the city, a dusty, ramshackle, still-makeshift-after-865-years place. The ranks of Stalinist apartment buildings, with their dour exteriors and their ancient memories of tears and slaughter, all had been invaded by retail at the ground level and boasted gaudy signals of various frivolous goods, every luxury car and perfume and fashion designer known to man. In at least seven points on the horizon, brand-new Dallases of steel and chrome pierced the sky, lording over the five-story flatness of the now-dead Communist reality at their feet. It was a true gold-rush city, even if over a millennium old and the site of a massacre hall of fame. He couldn’t get over how the place throbbed.

He saw her then. She had the smart, tough look of a journalist, nothing to her of show or pretense, just a kind of irony playing through her eyes under her American hairstyle. She wore pants and a black T-shirt, as fitted the warm weather, and looked comfortable among the natives.

“Ms. Reilly? I’m Swagger.”

“Oh,” she said, “the great Swagger. Nice to meet a hero.” Handshakes, tight smiles, a little awkwardness.

“I’m just a beat-up goat trying to stay on the wagon around all this potato juice,” he said.

“The Russians do squish a nice potato. Here, I’ll get us seated.”

He followed her to the maitre d’s station, and the maitre d’ in turn led them through the tent, past family and office parties of swilling laughers and carnivores, to a smallish table at the margins of the place, which looked out on the recreations of the vast parkland, crosscut with walkers on both two and four legs and other sorts of relaxed civilians.

“You weren’t followed?” he asked.

“This is exciting,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think so. The Russians don’t follow American reporters anymore. They’re much more interested in making money.”

“So I’ve heard. Anything’s for sale in Moscow.”

“Anything,” she said.

“What about rent?” he said. “See, I want to rent the Lubyanka for a night.”

She laughed. “Good luck with that. You must know oligarchs.”

“Since I don’t know what an oligarch is, I don’t know if I know any. What are they, by the way? I saw that word in the English-language paper.”

“Rich guys. Tycoons, billionaires, conspicuous consumers. Mostly ex-KGB goons. They were buddies with Yeltsin in ’93, and when he dismantled the state economic apparatus, they butted their way to the head of the line and got all the pie. In short order, they became mega-rich. Pie, pie, pie, all day long. Now they drive around in gold-plated limos, marry flight attendants, buy American sports teams, try to get on Page 6, and generally run the place. Abramovich, Krulov, Alekperov, Vekselberg, Ixovich. One of ’em is married to Yeltsin’s daughter, as a matter of fact. Will and I did a story on them. Petonin, Tarkio, a couple more I can’t think of.”

“The names would be lost on me anyhow. But it sounds typical. That’s how headquarters towns always work. Anyhow, nice of you to meet me.”