Chapter 29: Blade And Bravazzo
Blade - a dashing young man.
Bravazzo - a swashbuckler, a swaggerer, a ruffian.
Sark told himself that he wasn't worried when he still couldn't get James Dodgson on his mobile when he landed back in Russia. She'd probably wangled to have the phone switched off at her end, he thought - the conniving cat! Not that it would do her any good, what? –she thought she could stop him?
He told himself he was only slightly unsettled as he was still unable to contact her as he drove away from the airfield.
He was still fighting down an unwanted unease even as he couldn't get contact speeding up the drive toward the Dacha.
And then he saw the house.
The place was burned to the ground. A charred, smoking, stinking wreck. Utterly incinerated, along with everything in it.
The car squealed to a halt. For a split second he wondered if it were a hit and that the driver were in on it. Unthinkingly Sark's hand was on the butt of his automatic, and then he saw the driver's face and knew the man had known nothing about this. The driver looked behind him to check the rear and then flung the car into reverse and made to get away. Sark roared at him to stop.
He kicked the limousine door open and stumbled out into the smoky air. The fire had obviously been burning for hours and had only just burned down, the air was full of motes of ash. It stung his eyes. He could taste it in his throat. A few upright scorched timbers made the place look like the blackened skeleton of some great beast which had been slaughtered and then cremated. Pulped ash was the only other residue. He lurched toward the remains, his eyes wild, his mouth open in some mindless, soundless scream, his hands in his hair, the sight almost sinking him to his knees.
He knew that in three seconds he was going to start screaming, and that he might not be able to stop, ever.
And then he saw flickering movement just inside the tree cover to his right and took action.
There were three men in the trees, no woman. Not one of the men was his. His driver yanked out an automatic rifle from the front passenger foot well, and emptied the magazine at the enemy from behind the cover of the driver-side door. Sark simply stood his ground in the open without any cover at all and slammed bullets at them. He didn't even try to move, he simply stood there and shot at them, defended only by the shield of his own wrath. He wanted at least one of them alive, but there was no time for delicacy of aim and he did not get his way.
Two cars tore up the driveway.
He turned to fight them, but there were too many men. He steeled to face whatever was coming and saw a massive FPG haul himself out of the first car, weapon in hand. At the sight of the carnage and the smoking Dacha, FPG was utterly horrified and Sark knew then that whatever had happened it had not been the result of some co-ordinated internal coup.
A cell-phone rang on one of the dead men.
Sark felt almost mindless but his training broke through. He answered it, speaking in Russian: 'Hello?'
There was an annoyed click of the tongue from the other end. "Fackin' 'ell you stupid bleeders, 'aven't I told you to speak English?"
Simon Walker.
Sark was assailed by a boiling wrath, a screaming rage and a horrible hope that James might still be alive somewhere. His mind was almost white with fury but he instinctively knew that the way to play this was not to give way to his wrath but to be Mr. Sark.
"Hello Wanker, still can't get the hang of the filthy foreign lingo then?"
There was a silence following Sark's vicious, flowing delivery and then a blurt of laughter. "You bastard, I knew you weren't gonna be easy to kill! Dead are they mate?"
Walker was obviously referring to his own men – the group from which Sark had taken the cell-phone.
Sark knew that information was power.
"Not quite, one's still alive enough for me to question." A lie, but Walker didn't know that. Sark forced himself to broach what he feared most, horrified that the answer might be 'no': was James still alive?
"You've stolen someone who belongs to me Walker," he hissed silkily, "and I never like people who touch my things."
"Ah, cheer up. We 'aven't touched her. There's only one bullet-hole in her mate, and that's the one you put there."
Sark's mind twisted with a spasm of rage at the accusation even as he analysed what Walker had said: they've got her and she's still alive. His voice was like boiling pitch. "Give her back or torturing you to death will become my hobby." He offered an alternative. "On the other hand if you release her, then instead I will make you a wealthy man."
Carrot and stick.
There was a silence down the other end, and then someone else spoke.
"Ah, Mr. Sark, so youthful … " the voice was slow, insinuating. "If only you'd listened to me earlier. You see, Mr. Walker isn't in the business of making deals as he works for me in this matter, and I require to keep Dr. Dodgson until I'm finished with her - "
Until I'm finished with her – the words detonated in Sark's head, their threat implicit.
" – I did say she was far more useful to me than you were, don't you recall?" The voice slowed further, deploying its usual unctuous tone. "Goodbye Mr. Sark. You know, I shouldn't think we shall meet again. However, I'm not without politeness so I will give you the opportunity to say farewell to Dr. Dodgson."
Sark blocked a scream of rage and horrified disbelief in his throat.
At his end Arvin Sloane handed the cell-phone back to Simon Walker, who gripped a struggling James. Walker held the phone tauntingly close to her. Before she was silenced her last word to Sark was a shriek of: "Echelon!"
At the sound of her panicked scream Sark snapped and began snarling out threats down the line; an untrammelled spate of words. The contact went dead with Sark still roaring down his end of it. As he became aware that the connection was defunct he looked at the mobile in his hand, his expression almost comically quizzical, looking at it as though it were some impertinent thing which had dared to let him down. He abruptly punched to redial the caller. There was no answer from the far set. At the other end, the phone had been switched off.
What? They don't even want to negotiate? I've lost her?
His mind skittered about, horrified, unable to lock onto anything logical. Her last word to him was 'Echelon'? What, that was all she could think of to say? She didn't want to tell him anything else? She despised him that much? And then he got it: she'd been informing him. Arvin Sloane had either accessed Echelon or had he had somehow bugged Sark's mobile-phone, either way he had tracked the few calls Sark had made to her at the Dacha and had tracked her down that way. How did she know about Echelon? Why wouldn't she? Geeks talked to each other, he guessed. The relentlessly logical James had worked it out and had used her one chance to tell him. She had not wanted him wasting valuable time on working out who had betrayed him when she already knew. Staring ahead, face a white mask marked only by livid red on his cheekbones, Sark tightened his fist round the mobile phone at the knowledge of just who the traitor in his organisation really was.
Among the men at the burnt out Dacha, the person who had betrayed Mr. Sark, was Sark.
Thousands of miles away and well out of Sark's range, Walker felt a gnawing unease as Sloane cut the call to Sark. The deal with Sloane had gotten worse from the moment he'd hopped on board. It had started as some hired muscle with a bit of cunning attached and now it was devolving toward a case of the cold blooded murder of a woman half his size.
The woman in question struggled in the grip of his left hand.
"Get the fuck off me you goddamn BoySkank!"
Walker looked down at her. Uh? BoySkank? Is that even a word?
James continued to struggle as Sloane moved toward her, holding his hands out, palms forward, as though approaching a panicking animal.
"Dr. Dodgson, things will go much more smoothly for you if you do not struggle."
Simon Walker had time to think, things'd go much more smoothly loony-tunes if you'd just fuck off, when James went for his balls.
Using it like a base-ball bat she slammed her forearm back and down in a hard quick arc, straight into his crotch. The whole of Walker's body jerked up and he half-screamed as he let go his grip on her. James set off running, knocking aside Arvin Sloane as she aimed for a far door. She was wrestling with the handle when a bullet blasted a chunk of plaster from the wall next to her. The sound of the gunshot reverberated in the room.
Her head jerked in the direction of the shooter, Arvin Sloane was holding a gun on her.
He won't shoot – he needs me for this Rambaldi crap!"Hey Arvin? Did you know that your name means The People's Friend? Why don'tcha try living up to it for once?"
Sloane aimed the gun squarely at her head, effectively silencing her.
"My wife is dead."
Sloane's four words stilled any possibility of verbal exchange, their tone and content conveying just how empty he was. James didn't need to ask if the bereavement had been recent and she didn't dare think of its circumstances. He approached her, gun straight out, coming at her with slow, measured steps until the muzzle of his pistol was inches from her face.
His eyes held all the life and spark of two brown pebbles.
She stared at him in round eyed disbelief. Christ, he's going to kill me!
"Two weeks ago Dr. Dodgson, I would have done anything to keep you alive, but now I just don't care any more, because my wife was murdered two days ago by the CIA."
Sloane lied so smoothly that often you couldn't tell when he was doing it, but when he was telling an unpalatable truth? That was different, he was so unpractised at 'truth' that it quivered like a shivering, naked, new-born thing in his eyes. When he told James he'd kill her, she knew he meant it.
He quite audibly cocked the next round into the chamber, steadying his aim at her head.
From away at the other end of the room, crouched over and holding his balls, Simon Walker had one thought: shit, this wasn't part of the deal!
"Sorry about that Mr. Sloane."
"What?" Sloane's concentration broke off from a horrified James as he turned toward Walker.
"Sorry about that, she got the jump on me." Walker kept talking, saying anything really, anything to take Sloane's mind off squeezing the trigger. Walker didn't go in for cold-blooded murder, thieving was more his game, and besides although she'd whammed him in the balls – twice - when it came to Dodgson … he liked the little nutter. "What can I say, won't happen again."
Sloane stared at Walker and then turned slowly back to James, uncocking the gun and directing it away from her face, shaking his head in an almost paternal exasperation. "I just can't seem to get the help these days."
He let the gun hang loose in one hand, almost as though he had forgotten it, and lead James back into the centre of the room as though leading her into a dance.
As Sloane rambled on at her side, James could feel her heartbeat thumping in her chest. Her legs almost wouldn't hold her up. Black speckles dotted before her eyes. She had come that close to death, and at the hands of the man who only seconds later was now making polite conversation with her.
If she hadn't realised it before, she was aware of it now – of just how unstable Arvin Sloane really was.
As Arvin accompanied her his mind was drifting off into some dark space, a place where he had to view over and over again what had happened to Emily. And then to what had happened to her afterward, after he had abandoned her body there. The CIA had autopsied her, and for what? They knew 'cause of death', she died because they had shot her!
And then even worse had come. He had seen a file of the results of the autopsy, and had not even been left with the memory of the Emily he knew. Because the autopsy had found something out about her that he had never known: Emily had once given birth.
Such a devastating secret, and she'd kept from him. They'd lived a life together and she'd kept it in her own private little world, a realm all to herself that he had never even known existed, let alone been invited to share. He wanted revenge for that now, an excoriating revenge for the pain he felt, a revenge so great that it would cleanse him of the unwanted wrath he felt toward her. He did not want revenge upon Emily – he revered her even now, loved her even now, would do anything to get her back, even now - but instead wanted revenge upon those who had killed her, a revenge upon the CIA.
That would be suitable.
That would be fitting.
He wanted a burnt offering so great that it would appease his uneasy spirit and publicly avenge Emily's death.
Without realising how terrifying he looked as he drifted along, he smiled to himself, because shortly he would have just such a revenge.
