Shadow of a Broken Man (13 page)

"Why were you in his office?"

"We were supposed to take pictures of Rafferty's medical records," George said hoarsely. "And I
don't
know why. I swear it!"

I removed the tip of the needle from George's vein but kept it where he could see it. "What do you know about the Fosters?"

"The Russians have them. Everybody in the business knows it. The Russians
want
everybody to know."

My mouth suddenly tasted metallic. "Where have the Russians got them?"

"Russian consulate."

"Why? What do the Russians want with the Fosters?"

"Mrs. Foster used to be married to Rafferty. The Russians figure maybe they can pressure Rafferty into turning himself in, if he's alive." George clucked his tongue. "It's a bloody bad business," he said sincerely. "Got everybody and his brother running around."

"How is Rafferty supposed to find out that the Russians have his ex-wife?"

"You
thought Rafferty was at the U.N. If he is, he'll find out soon enough."

"What if he
isn't
there?"

George shrugged. "You never know what the Russians will do." Suddenly his face went chalk-white as he glanced up and saw something just behind me. "Kaznakov!" he cried in a strangled voice.

I wheeled and froze. The man filling the doorway was huge—well over six feet and better than two hundred and seventy-five pounds, all resting on ridiculously small feet. There was nothing ridiculous about the machine pistol in his right hand. His eyes were like twin moons, pale and lifeless, suspended in an unbelievably ugly, pockmarked face; a large, mashed nose sat in the middle of that face like a broken rocket drifting off to nowhere. The trackers had been tracked, and I doubted that the Russian was looking for information.

    14

 There was no change of expression on the Russian's face as he fired a single bullet into Peter's brain; he might have been a robot. George continued to gape while I stood, paralyzed with shock, for what could only have been fractions of a second but seemed like hours. I couldn't believe that anyone, even a "freak," could cold-bloodedly murder three men, two of whom were helpless. Then I remembered Abu.

I dived at the same time as Kaznakov efficiently dispatched George with a second bullet. I hit the floor and rolled sideways as more bullets beat a staccato tattoo on the floor inches from the base of my spine. It was Circus Time. There was no way for me to get to the gun I'd laid aside, no time to use it if I could, and no place to go except out the window. Head first.

I covered my face with my arms as I crashed through the glass. Something razor-sharp and white-hot sliced across the back of my left thigh, but I had other things to worry about. I was at least thirty feet from the ground; if I didn't hit the tree, I was dead.

I kept my face covered until I felt a branch lash my forearm. Instantly I reached out and grabbed a handful of leaves. I let myself fall freely, leaves whipping against my face, until I hit a thin branch. I twisted in the air, grabbed hold of the branch, and let it guide me down and onto another, thicker one that would sustain my weight. I hung on, gasping for breath, but not for long. The Russian was at the window above me, firing blindly down into the tree.

I quickly scrambled down the major branches and dropped the rest of the way to the ground, rolling to ease the pressure on my wounded leg. I got up and pressed against the bole of the tree while Kaznakov pumped bullets into the ground around me; leaves and shattered bits of wood showered down on my head, but I was safe for the time being. I used the time to remove a few shards of glass from my arms, then looked around me. My position was on one side of the house, near the front. I could see two cars—the green Caddy and mine—parked at the top of a long dirt-road driveway that snaked across a large, corn-stubbled field to a highway. My guess was that Kaznakov's car was parked somewhere out on the highway and that he'd walked in. He must have been tailing the two British agents from the beginning.

The firing abruptly stopped. I winced with pain as I stepped on my left leg, but the leg managed to hold me. I hobbled to the car. The door was open, but the keys were gone. I started to slide behind the wheel, then thought better of it: Even under the best daylight conditions, it would take me a few minutes to jump the wires; by the time I started the car, Kaznakov would be over me playing Taps with his machine pistol. There was no time, no place, left to run.

Sucking some night air into my lungs, I limped back to the house and pressed myself flat against the side while I peered over a windowsill into the inside. I could just make out the dim, shadowy bulk of Kaznakov moving carefully down the stairs.

A quick search for something with which to defend myself turned up the ragged edge of a two-by-four sticking out from beneath the raised foundation of the house. I grabbed it and pulled. The wood was about three feet long; it would make a formidable weapon if I could get enough momentum into a swing, and if I could take Kaznakov by surprise. I picked up the beam, inched my way around the corner and along the front of the farmhouse to the door. I positioned the wooden beam slightly behind me as if I were about to make an Olympic hammer throw, gripped it tightly, and waited. I was soaked with a mixture of sweat and blood.

After what seemed an eternity, the door swung open. The Russian stepped out into the moonlight, his gun at the ready as he peered in the direction of the cars. I brought the beam whistling around, and it landed with a sharp crack on his shins. He howled with rage, pain, and surprise, but didn't drop the gun. He instinctively reached down for his shins and almost toppled off the stoop. He straightened up again when I brought the end of the two-by-four up into his face, leaving a large red blob where his nose had been. He staggered down off the stoop and collapsed. Incredibly, he was still conscious—but the gun had slipped from his fingers. I picked it up and pointed it at his chest.

The sudden, giddy elation I felt was probably due to loss of blood and shock. But I had the man who'd tortured and killed Abu, and at the moment that was all I cared about; I'd beat what he knew out of him with the butt of the gun, try to use him to free the Fosters, and then kill him. I was in a hurry to ask questions before I changed my mind. No law was going to touch Kaznakov; Garth had made that clear.

But the Russian had the strength and endurance of a bull, and he seemed to have become indifferent to pain. When I saw him struggle to his feet I was reminded of Antaeus, gaining his strength from the earth, rising from the ground again and again until his opponent's strength was exhausted.

Kaznakov was listing a bit to starboard, but he was standing. He spat blood, then fixed the bloodshot moon eyes in his ruined face on me. He stared at me a long time without saying anything, although I could hear strange, guttural rumblings in his chest, as if he were a volcano about to explode.

"You bastard," I said through clenched teeth. "I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're going to answer them. If you don't, I'm going to start shooting you to death. Slowly. One chunk at a time."

Kaznakov spat more blood, grinned crookedly around broken teeth. "You are tough little fucker," he said in labored English with a heavy accent. "But now I got you. I hurt your friend, the Pakistani, pretty good before he jumped. I'm going to hurt you even more. No one will find you for a long, long time."

"That sock in the nose must have mashed your brains, asshole.
I've
got the gun now. You sneeze wrong and you get a bullet between the legs. Now, let's go see if there's a phone in the house. If there is, you're going to call your people and tell them you want the Fosters dropped here. Tell them you're negotiating with Rafferty; tell them anything you want, but I want the Fosters brought here. You understand?"

"I understand what you say," Kaznakov said as he began to shuffle toward me. "But I think I call and say you are dead. How do you like that?"

"You idiot! Don't you think I'll shoot?" I decided I couldn't take any chances with Kaznakov and I pointed the gun directly at his heart.

"I don't care if you shoot," he said, and he kept coming.

The gun exploded and kicked when I pulled the trigger. The bullet made a thwacking sound against his chest and pushed him back a few inches, but that was all. Kaznakov was a man who hedged all his bets; he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

I aimed for his head, but I'd run out of time. He swatted the gun away with one huge bear paw of a hand and wrapped the fingers of the other hand around my throat. He lifted me off the ground and started to squeeze. I stabbed with my fingers at his eyes, but it was as if someone had pulled the plug on my will and all my strength was draining out. I couldn't even reach his body.

A red cloak of blood was dropping down over my eyes. I kept trying to suck air, heaving my stomach, but nothing was coming in. Kaznakov was still holding me off the ground, and I expected at any moment to hear the sound of my neck breaking. Finally I got tired of waiting. I expected to see flashes of my life, but I didn't even get that. I finally let go of whatever it was I'd been hanging on to and let myself drop into the deep, warm pool of red in front of my eyes.

There was too much pain for it to be heaven, and I doubted I'd done anything in my life to warrant a place in the same circle of hell as Kaznakov, and that's who was walking around me at the moment.

My wrists were tied together behind my back and anchored by a rope that went around my waist. I'd been hauled off the ground by a suspended iron bar lying between my elbows to a point where just my toes were touching the damp concrete of the farmhouse cellar. It was an ingenious truss: if I allowed myself to hang freely, the joints of my elbows caught fire and, with all the pressure placed on my lungs and rib cage, it quickly became almost impossible to breathe. The alternative was to try supporting my weight on my toes, which was only good for about two minutes before pain started shooting up through my ankles and calves to my hips. I would have to release—and then I couldn't breathe. It was a kind of crucifixion; a slow, very painful way to die. It looked as if I were going to be there, as Kaznakov had promised, a long, long time, and the cavalry was nowhere in sight.

Kaznakov was busy with something behind me that I couldn't see, but that I knew I wasn't going to like. I could hear the sound of metal on metal, and it grated on my nerves. Obviously, Kaznakov hadn't yet exhausted his repertoire. He emerged—limping—from the darkness behind me. He was carrying a telephone from which the casing had been removed. Wires from the telephone snaked back into the darkness.

"You wanted a telephone," Kaznakov said. "I found one for you and have gone to trouble of hooking it up down here. It's on what I think you call 'party line.' It will ring when anyone else gets call." He came close to me until his smashed nose was only inches from my face; it stared at me like a red third eye. "It will hurt you very much," he whispered.

I'd been hanging for a minute or so and it was getting hard to breathe again. Hot lightning was flashing through my elbow joints, across my back, through my lungs. I stood on my toes and gulped for air. Within seconds my toes began to cramp.

"If you want answers from me, you'd better get me down from here," I gasped in a voice that creaked like an old man's. "In a few minutes I'm not going to be able to say anything."

"I don't
want
you to say anything," Kaznakov said evenly. "I only want you to hurt.
Bad."

"Do you have proof Rafferty is alive?" The pain in the lower half of my body had become unbearable. I released the pressure from my toes; my lungs and elbows immediately began to burn.

The Russian's answer was to tear my clothes open. He then attached two thin wires to terminals in the phone apparatus, and he securely taped the other ends to my body. He'd made me part of the circuit, but I was past caring. I didn't believe that any pain could be worse than what I was already experiencing, and every fiber of my being was assigned to the monumental task of drawing air through my mouth and nostrils.

"Something else for you to think about while you wait to die, dwarf," Kaznakov whispered.

And then the Russian was gone; the door to the cellar slammed shut and I was left alone with the silence and the pain. I would die there, I thought; not from the pain, but from suffocation or thirst. I went up on my toes and tried to catch a quick breath. I could no longer feel anything below my knees, and my stomach had begun to cramp.

The telephone rang. Instantly my body was engulfed in pain bouncing back and forth between my belly and brain like a ball of molten fire. The ball became a column that flashed between rings, expanded between each flash and the next, filling me up, hurtling me toward madness.

The ringing stopped just as the sour taste of bile crept up into my throat. Someone in the neighborhood had answered the phone. I imagined two people talking: about the weather; making plans; exchanging gossip.

I was crying, precious breath robbed from me as I heaved on the bar, gasping with great sobs, spewing mucus.
Now
my life started to pass before me—and I was astonished to find that it had been so brief. Now the last of it was melting away under a searing blowtorch of agony. I passed out. But there was no escape from the prison of pain, as I woke up again almost immediately. My face was wet with tears and mucus; I cursed my endurance and will, whatever it was inside me that wouldn't let me die.

I heard—or imagined I heard—the cellar door creaking open. The phone rang, and once again I was hurled into a dark hole filled with pain and cracking joints. When it was over, my body was consumed by a flame that wouldn't go out.

But there
was
someone else in the basement with me; I was sure of it; I
felt
it. Someone, or something, Death? Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the pain was gone.

I assumed it was madness, that the sensory paths to my brain had finally, mercifully, burned out. At the same time there was a soft, steady buzzing in my ears; the sound was soothing, like white noise blocking out the terrible pain. The sound suggested that I sleep. It was a good suggestion, and I took it. I let my head slip down onto my chest; I sighed and closed my eyes, allowing myself to drift away into the warm, welcome embrace of death.

Fooled again. I wasn't dead, but I was still hurting, my body wrapped in a blanket of torment. But the pain was not the same as what I'd experienced before; the difference was that I was lying on the cool concrete of the cellar floor, and I could breathe. I drank in great drafts of the cold night air.

I rolled over on my back and looked up toward the ceiling. One of the ropes that had held the iron bar had parted, and I'd been unceremoniously dumped onto the floor. The only explanation I could come up with was that my thrashing under the deadly tickle of the electricity had done the trick. The wires were still attached to my body, but they'd been torn away from the phone terminals when I'd hit and rolled. I couldn't tell if there were any bones broken—there was too much pain all over my body. But I was alive. I waited for some kind of elation that wouldn't come; I felt as though I'd already died.

There was a dial tone when I knocked the phone receiver off its hook with my jaw. The area code on the plastic disk in the center was for Rockland County. I dialed "0" with my nose. My throat felt swollen shut and I wasn't articulating too well. Still, I managed to make the operator understand that I wanted to get through to the New York City police department. I got Garth's precinct, but Garth wasn't in. I talked to another detective, garbled a truncated version of what had happened to me, told him I was somewhere in Rockland County, and asked him to trace the call and send someone out to get me. Then I passed out.