Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (58 page)

He could hear crashes from the front of the dacha. Either the
SBU men were attempting to knock down the fiery front door or trying to gain entrance through the same open window he’d used. Either way, he’d run out of time.

He pulled on the cord attached to the knob. The door opened inward, and as he switched on the flashlight, the beam shot out into the night. Immediately, shots were fired by the men who, as he surmised, were stationed at the rear of the dacha.

He dropped the cord and, scuttling across the kitchen into the pantry, climbed through the open window to the area behind the hedge where Annika and Alli waited, crouched over. Even from behind this screening they could smell the fire and, if they craned their necks, see the lick of flames shooting up into the darkened sky.

Jack led them out through the side of the hedge furthest from the back of the dacha and the men who must already be rushing, guns blazing, through the back door. On this side of the house, there was only a narrow expanse until the tree line rose up, black and solid-seeming as a stone wall. Jack took Alli against his shoulder, ran crouched over across the open space and into the evergreens. Behind him, Annika kept pace.

She was almost into the first pines when a black shape shot across the open space and slammed her to the ground. In the lurid, inconstant light of the growing blaze Jack saw the man claw his way on top of her. He had a handgun out, but Annika batted it away with the edge of one hand. He was bent low over her, panting like a bloodhound. The firelight illuminated his long, lupine face, lips pulled back from teeth clamped tight in his effort to subdue her.

Annika kicked upward, managing to upend his balance for just a moment, but she was unable to overcome his superior weight, and he struck her a hard blow on her cheek. Jack saw droplets of blood, black as tar in the light.

“Stay put,” he whispered to Alli.

Her eyes were wide and staring. “Jack!”

He squeezed her shoulder briefly. “No matter what happens, don’t leave the protection of the trees.”

The SBU goon had drawn his fist back to deliver another heavy blow and Jack was already outside the tree line, moving toward him, when Annika drove the arrow or spear or whatever it was that Karl Rochev had used to murder his mistress deep into the man’s chest. His eyes opened wide in shock and pain, his cocked fist went slack. Then Jack was on him, pulling him off Annika, giving her a hand up.

“Come on,” he urged as she bent over the body. He saw her pocket his pistol and then her hands were busy with another task. “What the hell are you doing?”

She had one shoe on the man’s chest, her hand gripping the shaft of the weapon.

“For God’s sake, leave it!”

“No,” she said. “We have to take it with us.” With a great heave, she ripped the diamond-shaped point out of the flesh and fabric.

Then, regaining the dense shadows of the forest, they were off and running from the burning dacha and its complement of Security Service agents.

It was Jack’s dyslexia that allowed him to lead them unerringly through the maze. As they had walked down the driveway on the way in, his mind had formed a three-dimensional map of the area surrounding the dacha. Their car lay just as they had left it, hidden beneath the screen of intertwined hemlock branches. He motioned them down and they sat on their hams while he listened and looked for anything out of the ordinary. It had been the crow’s absence that had warned him of people in the area. The bird would never have abandoned guarding its nest had it not been scared away by the surreptitious creep of huge creatures on the ground.

Still, he had them hang back while he moved cautiously forward, crouched and tense, his Mauser at the ready. Moving against the car,
he pulled open the rear door, stuck the muzzle of the Mauser inside, but there was nothing to see. Climbing in, he stuck it over the driver’s seat back. The car was deserted. Checking the gearshift, he found the toothpick just as he’d left it. He let out a breath. No one had been in the car. Still, he checked the trunk before he signaled Alli and Annika that it was safe to approach.

Gathering Alli to him, he put her into the car. He turned, scanning the woods again as Annika rose and ran toward them. He saw a dim glint in the trees at the same instant a shot spun Annika around. She fell, and Jack, pumping off three shots on the run, grabbed her, hauled her to her feet and, one arm wrapped around her slim waist, brought her back to the car. As he maneuvered her into the backseat he could see the wound, which by its size looked like it had been made by a rifle bullet. He slid behind the wheel as floodlights began to appear through the narrow gaps in the hemlocks and pines.

He turned the ignition, put the car in gear, and sped out onto the road without turning on his headlights. In the rearview mirror he could see figures rapidly receding as he floored the accelerator. Several shots rang out but they either went wide or the car was already out of the range of their guns. He wondered briefly why the sharpshooter who had shot Annika wasn’t firing his rifle. Surely, they were still in his range.

“Alli,” he said as he drove over a rise, “see how badly Annika is hurt.”

Without a word, she climbed over the seat back into the rear, crouching beside Annika, who was lying on the seat.

“It’s her arm,” Alli said.

Jack risked a glance in the mirror. She hadn’t flinched or needed to turn away. Over the rise, he turned on his headlights, looking for a turnoff or a crossroads. The road reared up ahead, devoid of traffic. That wouldn’t last long, he knew. At this moment, the SBU was
probably radioing their coordinates. Therefore, it was imperative they get off this road and change directions as soon as possible.

“Annika,” Jack said, “how are you doing?”

“Nothing broken, I think.” Her voice sounded faint or thin, as if she were far from him. “Just a flesh wound.”

“Nevertheless, we’ve got to get the bleeding to stop.”

“I know a doctor,” she said, “back in Kiev.” She gave him the address and the area of the city.

Jack signaled Alli and she scrambled back to the front seat. “The map I got from the rental office is in the glove compartment,” he said.

It took her a few minutes to locate the street Annika had named, then she traced a route in reverse to where they were now. Since she’d been the navigator on the way out of the city, she had no difficulty planning out a route.

“There should be a turnoff somewhere in the next quarter mile,” she said. “A left turn, then straight for three miles. At the light make a left again and we’ll be headed back to the city.”

The Kharkivskyi neighborhood of Kiev lay on the south end of the left bank of the Dnieper River. It was a fairly new neighborhood, harking back only to the 1980s. It was filled with lakes and beaches; because of its sandy soil few trees lined the blocks of modern high-rise buildings. Dr. Sosymenko lived in one of these Western-style apartment complexes, virtually indistinguishable from the neighbors with which it stood shoulder to shoulder.

Sosymenko had a ground-floor apartment, which was lucky since Annika was as bloody as a stuck pig. Alli had ripped a sleeve from her shirt to tie off the arm just above the wound, so now it was barely oozing blood, but the left side of Annika’s clothes was soaked through.

The doctor opened the door to the sound of the bell. His eyes opened wide at the sight of Annika leaning on Jack’s arm. He must
have seen her like this before, because after his initial reaction he nodded them in, not wasting time with introductions or asking her what had happened—actually, it was obvious that he was looking at a gunshot wound.

“Let me get her into the surgery,” he said in Russian. He was a small, round man, dapperly dressed in a suit and tie despite the late hour. He had a knot of a nose, ruddy cheeks, and a small mouth almost as red. Apart from a fringe of ginger-colored hair above his ears he was bald. He took Annika across a carpeted living room and into a hallway leading to the rear of the apartment. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said over his shoulder. “You understand?”

“I speak Russian,” Jack said.

“Good. There’s food and drink in the kitchen. Please feel free to help yourselves.”

With that, he disappeared with Annika through the door to the surgery, which he closed behind them.

Jack turned to Alli. “Are you okay?”

“I could use a drink.”

“What, exactly?” Jack said, heading for the kitchen, which was through an arched doorway off the living room.

“I don’t care, vodka, anything,” Alli said.

She went off to the bathroom to clean herself up, and when she returned, he had two glasses of iced vodka on the coffee table beside the worn brown tweed sofa in the living room. Shelves on two walls were filled with groups of thick textbooks interspersed with a wide variety of antique clocks, porcelain vases, and copper teakettles. There were paintings on the wall, portraits of an imperious-looking woman who might have been the doctor’s late wife, and a young man who was either his son or possibly himself at an earlier age. The heavy curtains were closed against the night and the heat was at sauna level. Jack took off his coat, already sweating, and Alli plopped herself down on the sofa.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked as he watched her sip the liquor.

“First things first,” she said in her best hard-boiled voice.

He came across the carpet, crouched down in front of her, and set her glass on the table. “How are you?”

Her eyes searched his face.

“Doesn’t matter, really.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged, took a long pull of her vodka, made a face. “God, this is awful, why do they drink this stuff?”

“To take away the pain.”

She turned her head for a moment, as if remembering something important. “‘I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’” She recited the lines from a William Blake poem that was Emma’s favorite. “‘I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.’ When I say that, I know she’s still here with us, that for some reason she hasn’t left both of us. Why is that, Jack? Is it because we still have something to learn from her or that she has something to learn from us?”

“Maybe it’s both,” he said.

“Have you seen or heard her? You promised you’d tell me if you had.”

Jack bit his lip, recalling the sound of his daughter’s voice in his head when he was falling into unconsciousness.

Alli, growing anxious at his hesitation, said, “You have, haven’t you? Why don’t you want to tell me?”

Jack took a long swig of the vodka, feeling the liquid fire all the way down to his stomach, where it began to burn like a furnace. “It’s part of the reason Annika’s here with us. Two people were trying to kill her. I intervened and was almost knocked out.” He wasn’t going to tell her that he’d shot Ivan to death. “I heard Emma then, she was calling to me. I felt so close to her, closer than I’d ever been.” He took a ragged breath. “I think I was close to dying. Her voice led me
back.” To that blood-spattered alley behind Bushfire, but he didn’t finish the thought.

“Oh, Jack! So she
is
here with us.”

“Yes, but in some way I can’t pretend to understand.”

She let out a long sigh. “She’s looking out for us, protecting us.”

The vodka fumes were rising up into his esophagus. “I don’t think it’s wise to count on that.”

Alli shook her head as if shaking off his words. “I told you once that growing up I felt like I was in a cage—so many rules and regulations, so many things I, as a fast-rising politician’s daughter, was forbidden to do. All I could do was look longingly through the bars and try to imagine what the real world might be like. And then you came along and I began to see what it was, I began to understand that quote from Blake and why it was Emma’s favorite.”

The door at the end of the hall was opening. Annika emerged with Dr. Sosymenko.

“Jack,” Alli said with some urgency because their time alone was coming to an end, “I like it here, outside the cage.”

“Even when you’re puking your guts up?”

She nodded. “Or when I’m crouched in a forest or tying a tourniquet around what’s-her-name’s arm. Especially then, because I can breathe without feeling a pain in my chest. I know I’m alive.”

Jack, noting that it was the first time she’d referred to Annika as anything other than “the psycho-bitch,” rose to welcome Annika back and to thank Dr. Sosymenko.
One step at a time,
he thought.

“The wound was clean,” the doctor said as soon as he and his patient entered the living room, “and because of the tourniquet the loss of blood was acceptable. I’ve cleaned everything, bandaged the wound, and given Annika a shot of antibiotics. She also has some painkillers and a vial of antibiotic tablets she needs to take twice a day for the next ten days, not a day less.” He turned to Annika, whose left arm was in a sling. “You understand me?”

She nodded, smiled, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

He clucked his tongue and, addressing Jack, said, “Please take care of her; she does such a poor job of it herself.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jack said.

“All right then.” Dr. Sosymenko rubbed his hands together briskly.

Annika adjusted her arm in the sling. “There’s one other thing.”

Dr. Sosymenko produced a wistful smile and said to Jack, “With my dear Annika there is always one more thing. She’s like that American detective, what’s his name, Columbo. That detective makes me laugh—and he’s so clever!”

Annika, unperturbed, said, “I wonder if you’d mind giving us the name and address of your antiques dealer.”

“Not at all.” The doctor went into the kitchen and rummaged through several drawers, returning with a small notepad. “Are you thinking of becoming a collector of teapots?”

“I found what might be an old Russian weapon. I’d like it identified.”

He nodded. “A weapon, of course, what else would appeal to you, my dear?” He chuckled. “In that event you want Bogdan Boyer, a Turk, but his first language is English, which makes things easier. He’s a specialist in many things, weapons included.” He neatly wrote several lines on the pad with a ballpoint pen. Tearing off the top sheet, he handed it to Annika.