Katja from the Punk Band (22 page)

She nods.

“Right now I don’t know what the fuck has been going on, but I also don’t much care.”

She nods again.

“We just go through with as we would have done before anything happened and the rest . . . the rest comes later. Let’s just get this done.”

“Okay,” she says, wiping sprayed blood from her chin. “Okay.”

Smoke curls from his mouth like the whisper of a recently fired gun, like the roll of a rattlesnake’s tongue as it tastes the air. He wraps a hand around the boat’s rails and squeezes until his knuckles turn white.

Under the glare of the floodlights, his suit is the red of infected gums.

Januscz tilts the knife so the very tip presses into Katja’s shoulder blade, his other hand wrapped around her waist, easing her on toward the man in red. They walk briskly across the deck and the man in red notices them, blows out another pillow of smoke and turns away from them, leaning on the rail and looking out to the island.

The two slow as they approach him. He doesn’t look at them and for several awkward moments nothing happens, then finally the man turns around. He looks them both up and down.

Katja with blood splattered across her neck and T-shirt, congealing around her trach tube. Her liberty spikes droop and hang loosely around her shoulders, and one has dissolved completely. Her face is swollen and split, one eye now consumed by her own puffy flesh.

Januscz, his arm coated with new blood, his chest with old.

“Rough sea tonight?” the man in red enquires.

Januscz shifts back and forth, the knife blade moving against Katja’s chilled skin and she tries not to react because she doesn’t want to blow the deal.

“We . . . uhh . . . have the, uh . . . object,” Januscz says.

The man in red’s eyebrow arches. He draws on the cigar but does not exhale.

“Object?”

“The, uh, the . . .”

Januscz licks his lips, looks around nervously. Whispers, “The vial . . .”

He removes his hand from behind Katja and holds out the little glass cylinder in the palm of his hand.

The man takes it before Januscz can do anything.

“So you must be Januscz, is that correct?”

After everything, after all the deception and deals and thefts and switches and fakes and murders. After it all, here they are, as it should be, the deal about to go down and Januscz has the vial that was always intended for him.

Januscz glances at Katja, smiles, then looks back to the man in red.

“Yes,” he says, beaming. “I am Januscz.”

So it has come to this.

Four years. Fourteen hundred and sixty days. Two point one million minutes.

Time that he has devoted to her, that he has entwined her within — and now this.

He has been aware of what she is doing for several weeks but is certain it began months earlier, probably when the man was still just a guinea pig whoring himself for insignificant amounts of money. Dracyev knew she would wander through the corridors and often speak with the lab rats as they waited for their prescribed experiments to begin, and he has tolerated, though never approved, of it.

He promised her more, promised her whatever she desired, and yet she would always return to the festering vagrants lined up outside the labs at the start of each week. Why she had found particular interest in that one creature Dracyev didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

What mattered was that the creature found an interest in Ylena.

For a man such as this, a simple death was too good for him.

So he has summoned Konstantin, telling him to come to his private lab immediately and, while awaiting the man’s arrival, Dracyev retrieves a fresh vial from one of the storage boxes on his workbench.

He unzips himself and pees into the vial, then seals the lid. He wipes the glass down then places it into the inscription machine, waits for it to randomly generate a code number and etch it into the vial, then records the number in his log book.

Konstantin arrives moments later, and at first it looks to Dracyev as if the other man has turned himself inside out — his suit’s dark red hue is a refraction of his soft innards, the creases and rumples are his veins and arteries. His shirt is black, the thin tie that lies atop it like a perfectly described trachea.

“Mr. Dracyev?”

“I have something I need you to do for me, Konstantin. Tomorrow night, there will be a man, he will bring this vial to you to be taken onto the mainland. I need you to get off the island tonight and wait for him there.”

Kostantin has taken out a cigarillo and lit it. Dracyev watches the smoke unravel from the man’s mouth and travel toward the ceiling of the lab where it merges with the muddy stains already there.

“If I’m going to leave the island, why don’t I just take the vial?”

“Because he’s fucking her,” Dracyev said firmly. “I don’t . . . ?”

“I know it’s him. I’ve seen them together. Watched them. I won’t tolerate it any longer.”

“So what’s in the vial? Poison?”

“The vial is nothing. The vial will lead him to you. I want you to kill him for me, Konstantin.” Dracyev is talking a language the man in red understands.

“Easily done. Even more easily done if you just give me his address and I go over there now.”

“No,” Dracyev snaps. “They’ll know they can’t get away with this indefinitely, that I’ll find out. I think Ylena already suspects I know something. She’s been talking about the mainland more recently, about moving the operation across there entirely, and I’m certain it’s him who has been putting the ideas in her head.”

Dracyev turns to Konstantin, fixes him with a cold and bloody stare.

“I want him to die within sight of his fucking prize. I want him to die with the mainland at his feet and I want him to know, in that last moment, that he will never see her again.”

Konstantin rolls the cigarillo from one corner of his mouth to the other. “To clarify — you’re going to tell this man to deliver this vial to the mainland and that, what, I’m the contact?”

Dracyev nods.

“And you want this guy taken out.”

Another nod.

Konstantin breathes smoke out through his nostrils, tongues it as it moves through the air.

“So what’s his name?” he asks.

Konstantin says, “So you must be Januscz, is that correct?”

Janusz glances at Katja, smiles, then looks back at Konstantin.

“Yes,” he says proudly. “I am Januscz.”

An expression flickers across Konstantin’s face but it’s too quick for either Katja or Januscz to decipher. The man in red holds up the vial, then opens his hand, letting it drop to the ground. It cracks upon impact and, just to make sure, he stamps on it, shattering it into dozens of tiny fragments.

Januscz stares down at the mess in disbelief, then at the man who has made it.

“What the fu — ?”

His words are first cut off by the sight of a large, badly scuffed gun pointed at his head, and then by the impact of a bullet blasting through his forehead just above his eyes. There’s a moment’s delay, as if his body or perhaps even gravity hasn’t quite realized what has happened, and then he crumples to the deck.

Katja jumps in shock, stumbling backward and away from the killer, and suddenly the moment from earlier that night when she found out what Januscz was going to do to her replays in her head. But this time, this time the shot was good — no doubt about it.

Her momentum carries her and without a thought she is running, just running, knowing that at any moment a bullet will rip through her and end this whole sorry mess, but it doesn’t. She thinks she hears a shot, but it could just have been one of the workers slamming a door.

And that’s when she sees him.

Nikolai.

For a brief moment her instinct is to halt, to get away from him because who knows what part he is playing in all this, but that quickly subsides when she sees the expression on his face, something that tells her she is wrong.

“Katja, where have you . . . ?”

She grabs him as she passes, pulls him past a pair of workers standing in a doorway that leads into the storage area, pushes him down the stairs ahead of her and slams the door shut. She works the locks to secure them and hears the workers mumbling something but ignores them.

“We need to hide, Nikolai!” she shouts at him as they enter the belly of the boat. At the far end they see the light spilling in from the deck and the loading crews beginning their work.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s a fucking set-up!” she cries. “The man in red, he’s just shot Januscz and destroyed the vial!”

“Januscz? I thought he was . . .”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one.”

She’s pushing her way through all the crates, looking for somewhere, somewhere safe, and she finds her guitar, picks it up.

A door overhead opens and they both spin around, ready for the impact of the man in red’s shots but it’s not red they see, it’s orange, the orange of loading crews overalls, just a couple of workers coming, that’s all.

“This way,” Nikolai says, and leads her to the opposite side of the storage bay to a crate, the side of which he pulls open. It looks like it has come off with surprising ease until Katja notices the bent screws and dents in the sides that indicate the crate has already been opened.

She steps inside the container, cringing at the pungent smell that emerges from it, then freezes.

“Holy shit.”

Nikolai chews his lip as he says, “I should probably have mentioned that before I opened the door.”

Katja kneels down next to the body of Dracyev, his blood having soaked into the sacks and polystyrene blocks around him.

“What the fuck happened?”

“I shot him,” Nikolai says. “Well . . . I didn’t mean to. I mean . . . I didn’t know it was him — you know, Dracyev.”

“He found you?”

“Not exactly. He was talking to someone. He had a gun. I just . . . reacted.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know, some guy and a woman. They ran off after I shot Dracyev.”

Katja shakes her head. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

The sounds of the loaders is getting closer; they’re reeling off code numbers to each other one by one as the cranes haul crates out of the storage area and into the night air, ready to be lowered onto the docks. Great chains rattle and scrape against one another, the whine of a winch rising in pitch then falling again. The thud of wood on metal echoes around them.

“Get in,” she says, and they both duck inside the crate, in with Dracyev’s body and his sticky blood.

She pulls the side of the crate shut after them, jerking it hard enough to impale the soft wood on the bent nails. She lets go gently and is relieved to see that it holds, though there is a small crack of light at the bottom left-hand corner.

They both retreat to the back of the crate, trying to avoid Dracyev’s body where possible.

“What’s going on?” Nikolai whispers.

“I don’t know. Either it’s a set-up or Januscz has been up to something bigger than I first realized. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to have the vial after all, I don’t know.”

“He stole it?”

“I don’t know, Nikolai.”

“Where’s the vial?”

“The vial’s gone, destroyed.”

“But . . .”

“Look,” Katja snaps, and has to force herself to be quiet again. “The one thing I
do
know right now is that there is a killer up there and he’s just shot Januscz and he’s probably coming after me next, and if you don’t shut the fuck up he’s going to fucking well find us!”

Nikolai swallows the chunk of nail he’s just bitten off and it catches in his throat.

“What happened to your face?” he asks.

“Nikolai, shut the fuck — !”

And she stops speaking abruptly, stiffens.

Shuffling outside.

A shape flashes across the gap, then returns.

Katja hears the man’s hands running across the wood, exploring it. She feels something touch her and turns and it’s Nikolai, he’s holding a gun out to her. The end of the weapon is crusted with blood but she’s lost track of whose it might be. She takes it, aims it at the crack and Nikolai mirrors her with another weapon.

The crate creaks as someone leans against it, and a hand becomes visible.

He pulls on his heavy-duty gloves and follows the others up the loading ramp, just one of many workers about to start their shift.

But he doesn’t line up with the others, to wait until the cranes are ready to begin as he normally would. This time he strides right past them, his attention briefly grabbed by a man in a red suit tipping a body over the edge of the boat, and he knows who the man works for so keeps going, keeps walking until he reaches the doors that lead into the storage bay below.

Another worker is already there and holds open the door for him. Smiles are exchanged.

He goes down the steps, then pulls back his glove to reveal the number etched there. This is the number he had been given earlier that night by his colleague on the island, the number that lead to the promise of more cash than he could expect in a month with his regular wages.

He walks amongst the crates, scanning the numbers stamped onto them as he finally finds the one he is looking for. One of the sides has been crow-barred open and then closed awkwardly again, leaving a slight gap down one side. He mutters a criticism about his fellow conspirator’s sloppy work, gives the wood a shove and impales it further on the nails until the gap is closed.

He checks that no one is looking, then reaches up and runs his hand along the top until he touches something small and plastic. He pulls it down and looks inside, breaks a smile when he sees the thick blocks of notes.

“You need a hand there?”

One of the other workers, hands on his hips.

“No, it’s fine. I’ve got this one.”

Shit, we’re moving,” Katja says, gun still pointed ahead of her into the darkness, waiting for the assassin that so far hasn’t come.