The Equalizer (64 page)

McCall brought back the image of her stabbing the sadistic rapist.

Maybe it wouldn't bother her that much.

*   *   *

Emma Marshall picked McCall up at the St. Regis the next morning. He'd left the Kia Rio in the parking lot for the Hertz guy. Emma drove a 2007 Cadillac XLR Convertible in metallic silver. On their way to Dulles, McCall handed her the padded envelope with the Glock 17 and the silencer in it.

“Don't forget the most important item.”

McCall handed her her iPad. She put the iPad and the Glock 17 and silencer into the glove compartment.

“How many bullets out of the magazine?” she asked him.

“One.”

“I'll replace it with a full mag. Control will count.”

She didn't ask him who he had used the bullet on.

“Things are quiet in Prague,” she said.

“Good.”

“So you're not going to be Chatty Cathy on the way to the airport. Fair enough. I guess I can talk enough for both of us. Just ask my friends. Did you hear about our serial rapist? They got him last night.”

“I heard something about it on the news in my hotel room this morning.”

“Yeah, he attacked another AU student on one of those jogging paths in Rock Creek Park. Why do young girls jog at fucking midnight in a dark park? It's like when they run back into a creepy old house in the movies where they know there's a maniac in a scream mask wielding a big knife. Or Sigourney Weaver going back into the spaceship to get her fucking cat when there's a monster in there ready to eat her.”

“No one thinks it's ever going to happen to them.”

“Yeah, well our rapist picked the wrong jogger. She turned the tables on him somehow. Stabbed him to death.”

“That's what I heard on the news.”

“Good for her. I presume I'm not to tell Control that you were in contact? I mean, not that you borrowed the spare Glock he keeps in his safe, but you were passing through D.C. and met me for a drink?”

“He'd know there was something more to it than that.”

“Why? You could fancy me. I always thought you did.”

“You could be right.”

“And that's where you're going to leave that little bit of sexual innuendo?”

McCall didn't answer. She smiled and shook her head.

“Control says you're a bartender now in New York City. How's that working out for you?”

“Hard on the legs.”

“You have highly trained skills. You should be using them.”

“I've been thinking the same thing.”

He didn't elaborate and she knew better not to push. She stopped talking, which for Emma was a feat of self-control. Fifteen minutes later they pulled up to the terminal at Dulles.

“Thanks,” McCall said.

Emma looked at him.

“When was the last time you got laid?”

“Four nights ago.”

A grin spread over her face. “That puts me in my place. Lucky girl.”

She gave McCall a chaste kiss on the cheek.

“Aren't you going to tell me to take care of myself?” McCall asked.

“You always do.”

McCall got out of the Cadillac, picked up his carry-on bag from the backseat, and walked into the terminal to catch a 12:40
P.M
. flight to New York City.

*   *   *

McCall took a cab from JFK to Crosby Street and asked the driver to wait. He went up to his apartment, dropped his carry-on bag in the bedroom, and made sure the apartment was exactly as he'd left it. It was. He took the cab to Seventieth and Ninth Avenue. He waited across from the high school on the corner. Katia was not in the crowd waiting to pick up their teenagers from school. That probably wasn't unusual. McCall had not got the impression that she picked her daughter up every day. She
was
seventeen.

But most days.

A bell rang shrilly and the front doors to the school were thrown open as if a hundred students had been waiting breathlessly just inside for that bell to ring. McCall watched them all stream out, some of them going up to parents, others walking down the street, others hanging in groups, some of them lighting up cigarettes, most of them on their smartphones.

The last ones came out. The whole process took about twenty-five minutes.

Natalya was not among them. That, in itself, was also not startling. She was a fragile girl. There were any number of reasons she might not have gone to school today. When no more students came out of the double doors into the Manhattan sunshine, McCall hailed another cab and took it to Chase Granger's apartment building.

McCall had no trouble breaking into Chase's apartment. It was in shadows. McCall didn't have a gun with him. He'd given away his Sig Sauer 227 to Danil Gershon in the subway tunnels below the city and he'd lost the Beretta Storm 9 mm and the Ruger .357 Magnum in Prague. He could've taken the Smith & Wesson 500 revolver out of the microwave in his kitchen, but he liked leaving it there. He hadn't been expecting to find anything wrong.

He'd need to get another firearm.

He walked into Granger's bedroom. The bed was neatly made and had not been slept in. McCall opened the closet door. Not many suits or coats hanging in there. He opened a few drawers. Bereft of underwear and socks. McCall nodded. Granger had moved in with Katia and Natalya for the time he was gone. Their new apartment at the Dakota had four bedrooms, two main ones and two guest rooms, so that wouldn't have been a problem. He'd told Chase to
observe
them, not move in with them. A little overkill, but that was Chase, and it did keep him close to them.

McCall glanced at his watch. Just before 6:00
P.M.

He took another cab to the Dolls nightclub.

There was the usual crowd outside being held back by the bouncer. McCall moved to the front. The chunky Brooklyn kid didn't even make eye contact this time. He just stepped aside and McCall walked in.

The nightclub was jammed with clones of the young people waiting outside. There was the usual crowd of good-looking movers and shakers at the cocktail tables, at the bar, a few of them dancing with the girls. Abuse was playing his music at levels only dogs should be able to hear.

McCall saw Melody at the brass railing separating the cocktail tables from the area in front of the bar. He walked toward her, sweeping the big room. He did not see Kuzbec, or Salam or Rachid, any of the usual suspects. He glanced into the big alcove as he passed it.

Bakar Daudov was in there with three men McCall had not seen before. They looked Chechen. No one was saying anything except Samuel Clemens, who was talking animatedly, with his usual energy, but without the forced camaraderie. He wasn't telling a crackle-barrel homespun story for the amusement of the Chechens. He was earnest and demanding. Probably wanted to take over the Manhattan nightclub. Add it to his new nightclub in Fort Worth. Start an empire. The atmosphere in the alcove seemed deadly.

McCall was sure this postmortem was over the demise of the boss, Borislav Kirov. They must know by now he had been shot to death outside Prague.

Bakar Daudov glanced up as McCall passed. His eyes were sunk in his head. His complexion was sallow. Their eyes locked, but there was no expression on Daudov's face. He didn't move.

Then McCall was past him. He walked up to Melody at the railing.

“Is Katia here?”

“No, her shift doesn't start until eight o'clock. Is something wrong?”

“Everything's fine,” McCall said. “When you see her, ask her to call me.”

“Bobby Maclain, right?”

“That's right. She has my cell number.”

McCall started to turn away. Melody caught his arm, turning him back.

“I was very ashamed that you saw me with that man,” she whispered.

“I'm not here to judge you.”

“I only want to dance, like Katia, but Daudov says if I don't do what he tells me I'll be kicked out to the street.”

“Mr. Daudov might be worried about his own job right now.”

McCall gave her arm a reassuring squeeze and walked out of Dolls and caught a cab to the Dakota.

He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and walked down the corridor to the corner apartment. The door was very slightly ajar.

McCall slowly pushed it open. He was greeted with silence, except for the ponderous soft ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. The kind of silence that said no one was home. He walked through the hallway into the big living room. He had never actually been to Katia's new apartment. He looked around at her furniture and paintings on the walls. There was a trace of her distinct perfume in the air.

McCall walked into the master bedroom. The bed was made. Everything was spotless and tidy. But it
did
look lived-in. There was a pile of books on the bedside table to be read, bottles of perfume on the bureau, and her midnight-blue dancing dress for Dolls lying at the foot of the bed.

He was about to leave the room when a framed picture on the other bedside table caught his eye. He walked to it, his pace slowing as he recognized the people in the photograph. He picked it up. There was Katia, looking virtually the same, standing outside the Vienna Opera House. Beside her was Natalya at eight years old. Holding her hand was Alexei Berezovsky. Across the bottom of Katia's figure she had written, “I love you, Alexei.” Across the bottom of Natalya's figure, in a child's scrawl, was written, “Love you, Daddy.”

Now McCall understood why Berezovsky had instructed Kirov to send his enforcers to kill him. Not just because Berezovsky thought he was back in the game and threatening his imminent assassination mission. Because he had stepped over the line and had been with his wife, or ex-wife; McCall couldn't know if they'd ever divorced. Probably not. He had rescued Berezovsky's daughter from Bakar Daudov, an irony McCall was certain Berezovsky could not live with. McCall was an old enemy. Interference with his family, even if they were estranged from him, was an insult that the Chechen could not tolerate. Katia had never mentioned him to McCall, but why would she? He was a well-meaning bartender who had come to her aid. Even when she realized he was something more than that, she would never have associated him with her vicious husband.

McCall set the photo back in its place on the bedside table and walked into Natalya's bedroom. Not so neat and tidy. Video games and DVDs were strewn around a PlayStation and a TV set, clothes scattered on a bed, not made up yet, and piled up on an old antique chair.

McCall moved down the corridor to the first guest bedroom. Empty. He walked into the second guest bedroom. This one had been lived in. The bed was not made, the sheet rumpled and splattered with flecks of blood. Bottles from a bureau were smashed on the floor. There was the overpowering scent of Granger's cologne.

Chase Granger lay on the floor with two bullet holes in his chest.

McCall had an instant memory of him wolfing down his cheeseburger at Bentleys, when his mandate from Control had been to work his cover as a real estate broker and get into conversation with whoever matched Robert McCall's description. He remembered Granger's frightened eyes looking up at him from his bed when he'd awakened him. He remembered the ingenuous determination in his voice when he'd said, “You can count on me, McCall.”

They'd probably used a silencer; no one would have heard the gunshots. He knelt down and gently closed the young agent's eyes. He walked back through the apartment, careful not to touch anything. He picked up the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign from the top of the bureau in the hallway, closed the apartment door, and hung the sign on the door handle. When he got to the lobby of the Dakota, he found it empty. He dialed Emma Marshall. She picked up on the second ring.

“Now you've seen me again, you just can't get me off your mind?”

“Chase Granger is dead,” McCall said into his iPhone. “He's in an apartment at the Dakota. You know where that is?”

“Where John Lennon was killed.”

“Seventy-second Street and Central Park West.”

He gave her the apartment number.

All playfulness had left her voice. She was clipped and formal and businesslike.

“What happened?”

“I don't know. He was shot twice. Control won't want the cops to find the body of one of his agents here. Too many questions will be asked. You need to send a cleanup crew.”

“Got it. Does his death have to do with The Company?”

“It has to do with me. Get this done in the next half hour. I closed the apartment door and put a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on it, but housekeeping has to go in there sometime.”

“I'm on it. Are you in danger?”

“Probably.”

McCall hung up.

He walked out of the Dakota onto Central Park West and his iPhone rang. He looked at the caller ID.

It was his ex-wife.

“Yes, Cassie,” he said into the phone.

Cassie's voice was calm, but he could hear the ragged emotion in it.

“You need to meet me at the 21 Club as soon as you can get there. How far away are you?”

“Ten minutes by cab. What's happened?”

“They've taken Scott.”

 

CHAPTER 45

The lounge of the 21 Club was jammed as usual. The maître d' greeted McCall as warmly as if he came in there every night, not just a few times in ten years. McCall saw Cassie sitting at the same table they'd sat at before, in front of the fireplace, which had a fire roaring in it. It was cold outside and rain threatened. McCall walked across the lounge. The last time he'd been there, Chase Granger had been up at the bar in the Bar Room. McCall looked through the archway, the Goodyear Blimp catching his eye, hanging from the ceiling along with the other toys and sports memorabilia. The small tables and the bar were packed. He didn't see any of Kirov's enforcers.

McCall slid into a chair beside Cassie. She was pale and her eyes glittered with anger. This was a Cassie he had not seen in a long time. Her voice was barely above a whisper.