“Freeze! Police!”
Alex watched as his female assistant with dark circles under her eyes ran across the room toward the fake panel. She pushed it inward and was about to crawl through when she was met by the barrel of a gun pointing at her from police inside the tunnel. She held up her hands and started to sob.
It has ended badly after all, thought Alex. Now he wouldn’t be seeing his family for a very long time. He had always feared the whole deception had been too good to be true.
CHAPTER 53
Kit felt weak. He knew he’d lost blood and should have taken the time to put a compress on the wound. He’d also been severely weakened by the migraine. At least now the symptoms had been reduced to excruciating head pain and light sensitivity. But even with the sunglasses still on, the headlights of oncoming traffic felt like staring into a thousand suns.
He focused all of his energy on driving the bike, anticipating Popov’s moves and trying to think of how in the world he could stop the Mercedes. The man had looked… mad? Mad as in crazy, like his mind had snapped. Not only was Popov’s driving erratic, but he didn’t seem to be following a coherent route. If the Benz crashed, Kala would be protected by the solidity of the vehicle and the air bags, but Popov wasn’t even driving all that fast.
Had Popov called for backup with the in-dash car phone? Was he just biding his time until a carload of goons or machine-gun-toting police showed up?
This needed to end quickly for a lot of reasons, number one of which was that Kit was fading. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold it together as he muscled the bike onward.
Dennis wasn’t answering his cell. Neither was Mikhail. Had they made a pact with Bennings? Of course! They were hijacking the deception. This was a coup, a purge, a putsch. When had they approached him? Probably while the major had still been in Moscow. Mikhail, his nephew, the man he’d put though eight years of university studies, had probably set up a second data center and was right now stealing the billions that rightfully were his. Svoloch’! Bastard!
It was finished. Over. He hadn’t seen it coming at all; the marks never do.
What was left? He looked over to the child, Kala. Strange: she was crying, but he didn’t hear a thing. She’d been a sweet little girl and didn’t deserve to have such a sooka, a shluha vokzal’naja, a train station whore, as a mother. She could have killed the child when she fired the pistol! What kind of mother does that? What else could he do but make sure the little girl stayed safe? And she was probably hungry. She liked cakes, the staff had quickly discovered. So maybe he should find her something to eat. But it wasn’t yet six A.M.; what would be open?
He remembered there were many twenty-four-hour cafés in Moscow. In fact, just around the corner—some Internet café with coffee and pastries. It was just over there.
Popov parked right in front of the Internet café and left Kala alone in the idling Mercedes.
“He left her in the car!” shouted Yulana.
Kit stopped the bike ten feet from the Benz as he watched Viktor through the floor-to-ceiling shopwindows. Yulana spun off the motorcycle and ran to the Mercedes. She threw open the door and pulled Kala into her arms.
Kit waved for her to back off, to take cover, as he painfully eased himself off of the motorcycle.
“We can go!” yelled Yulana.
Kit staggered as he shook his head, his tunnel vision locked on Popov.
“I think he’s had a nervous breakdown,” she said.
“People recover from nervous breakdowns.”
“Please, we can just leave!” she pleaded. She held her daughter in her arms. She’d been reunited with her blessed little girl, but Yulana Petkova was shocked to realize how much she now feared for the life of Kit Bennings.
“Shhhhh,” he said, gesturing for her to back off.
Kit slowly entered the shop, each step an act of mind over matter. He felt like his head was going to explode. Sweat beads carved salty rivulets on his ghostly pallor and his blood-soaked and vomit-encrusted clothing caused smarter customers to quickly exit the crowded shop. Even at this hour, geeks and IT junkies with red eyes and über-white skin in goth/slacker attire sat slumped on chairs and bench seats.
Popov stood at the counter, his back to the door. Barefoot, uncombed hair, silk pajama pants, silk robe. The clerk had bagged two cakes.
“Four hundred rubles, please.”
He reached for his wallet, but of course there was no wallet. “I seem to have forgotten something,” he said.
But the clerk saw the big gun in his pajama pants.
“It’s okay, just take them!”
Popov nodded; that sounded right. He turned around and saw a bloodied man standing in the doorway. The man looked vaguely familiar.
Yes! He had been one of them! He was one of the men who had come that night and shot dead his twin three-year-old daughters. Popov himself had tracked down and killed four of the attackers, but the fifth man had eluded him all of these years. And now here he was, standing in front of him. This time, Viktor wouldn’t miss.
Bennings saw the hint of recognition in Popov’s otherwise vacant eyes. The old bull of a Mafia don was moving his hand onto his gun. As Kit stepped forward, the gun came free of Popov’s waist. Kit wrenched it from the Russian’s hands and flung it across the room.
He held Popov with his left hand as he grabbed a tablet computer from a group of slackers and smashed it into Popov’s face, breaking the glass screen. Another slacker hadn’t even noticed all of the commotion, as he mindlessly played a video game on his large smartphone, which was plugged into a socket, charging.
As Popov screamed a howl of rage, Kit grabbed the teenager’s phone and violently shoved it all the way into Popov’s open mouth. He vised his arm around the Russian’s jaw, locking his mouth closed and forcing the phone down his throat. The former KGB strongman’s eyes grew so large they looked ready to burst, and his body violently convulsed as he slowly choked to death, with the phone’s power cord dangling from his lips.
Popov went limp, and his eyes rolled up into his head. Kit dropped him to the tile floor as a dozen strangers watched in awe.
“TMI… too much information.” Kit jerked the power cord from Popov’s mouth and pocketed it.
Barely able to stand, Bennings tossed several thousand rubles onto the counter, dealt out thirty thousand more to the slackers, and then stumbled out.
The cool night air felt good. Kit lurched forward, feeling as physically spent as he could ever recall feeling. But it was over now. He knew an American doctor on Zubovsky Boulevard. He knew he needed medical attention right now. He blinked and looked to the ground, concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other.
Just then a yellow golf ball rolled right up to him.
CHAPTER 54
Kit looked up toward the Mercedes, where his eyes locked on a familiar visage. A face he’d last seen behind the controls of a gigantic bulldozer.
Dennis Kedrov, rosy-cheeked and smiling, ran a hand through his blond hair as he held a Makarov 9mm. Mikhail Travkin stood to the side and slightly behind Dennis. Six goons held guns on Yulana, who was holding Kala.
Kit’s finger found the P90’s trigger; he quickly pivoted the subgun from the oversized shoulder rig. He stood ready to shoot, although he swayed slightly, fighting mightily to stay conscious. Kit had killed Travkin’s uncle, Viktor Popov, just moments ago with his bare hands. And Travkin had to have witnessed that through the huge café windows. Meaning this was now a blood feud for both sides.