though Scorpion didn’t think Gabrilov knew about his taps, somehow Gabrilov had set up Pyatov as a red herring and he and Iryna as the fall guys. The whole thing had SVR fingerprints all over it, he thought grimly.
Assumption: the Russians wanted to invade and were using Cherkesov’s assassination as an excuse. But why? What were they after? Somehow the answer involved the Chinese. The Lianhuay China Trading Company could be a front for the Guoanbu Second Bureau, the Chinese CIA. But what the hell did they have to do with this? What did China want in Ukraine?
He shaved, trimming his stubble to form a mustache-another little something to change the image-and got dressed. He was getting antsy. What was taking Iryna so long?
He took out the Glock, took it apart, cleaned and loaded it and did the same with the SR-1 Gyurza. He was just finishing up when Iryna came back from shopping. She looked frightened.
“I think I was followed,” she said.
Scorpion went to the door, Glock in hand.
“Who was it?”
“A man. He wore a black parka and a wool cap. I had a sense someone was following me when I left the building, but I didn’t see anyone. But when I left the supermarket, he was behind me. I went up a side street and came back on the other side just to make sure. He stayed with me. This stupid wig isn’t working!” she said, pulling off her blond curls and throwing it on the table.
“It’s not the wig,” Scorpion said. “Did he follow you into the building?” he asked, pressing his ear against the apartment door.
“I don’t think so. He was across the street when I came in.”
Scorpion stood beside the window.
“Come here,” he said. “Peek out just for a second, then duck back. Tell me if you see him or anybody in the street watching the building.”
She came over beside him, peeked out and ducked back.
“No. No one,” she said. He could feel her body trembling against his. He wished he could tell her it was going to be all right, but it wasn’t.
He got his minibinoculars. Checking the angle of the light coming from outside to make sure they wouldn’t reflect, he peeked out from behind the curtain. The sky was leaden gray. There were no reflections and he didn’t see anything in the street or in the windows of buildings. Then he spotted it. A break in the roofline of the building across the street. The silhouette of something, someone.
“Shit,” he said, pulling back and closing the curtain. “They know we’re here. We’ve got to get out now. Pull your things together.”
“It’s my fault,” she said, getting her carry-on. “I’m no good at this.”
“It’s not the wig and it’s not your fault,” Scorpion said, throwing his things into a backpack. “Until a few hours ago even we didn’t know we were going to be in this building in this raion. They were already on to us.”
“How could they be?”
“Only two ways. You used your cell phone to call Viktor. It was the first time you used it, so they weren’t tracking you, but ten-to-one they were tapping his phone. Once you called, they could’ve GPS-tracked your cell. That’s not Syndikat blatnoi. Those are pros. The second explanation is even simpler.”
She stopped for a moment.
“The building manager,” she said, talking about the fat man with a wheeze who couldn’t take his eyes off her chest when they rented the apartment. “He seemed shifty to me. I don’t think he believed our story.”
“Not for a minute,” Scorpion said, grabbing his pack and jacket. “My screwup. Between your chest and the money, I thought it would hold him. Either that or everybody’s favorite busybody, dear old Pani Pugach. Too bad I don’t have time to deal with either of them.”
Iryna packed her carry-on and zipped it up. She put on her outerwear, wig, and Ushanka hat.
“Give me the cell phone you used to call Kozhanovskiy,” he said, holding out his hand.
She gave it to him, and making sure it was on, he put it in a kitchen drawer.
“Now what?” she asked, watching him go to the door, the Gyurza with its silencer in his hand.
“We leave. How do you say ‘Come here’ in Ukrainian?”
“Idy syudy.”
“I’ll go first. You stay back but follow close enough to hear me. If I shout, ‘Nadia,’ come fast. If I shout, ‘Idy syudy!’ do the exact opposite. Run back to the apartment, lock yourself in, call Kozhanovskiy to come with his bodyguards and get you.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
“Good. It’s about time you understood what game you’re in. Ready?”
She took a breath.
“What about the TV?” The TV was still on. It was a soap opera about an upper-middle-class Kyiv family. The wife had been kidnapped by her evil identical twin sister.
“Leave it on.” He put his finger to his lips, cracked the door open and stepped into the hallway, looking both ways, ready to fire. The hallway was empty. He listened at the door to Pani Pugach’s apartment and moved on. He checked the stairway in both directions, up and down. It looked clear.
He went back to the elevator, pushed the button, took Iryna’s hand and led her to the staircase. He told her to wait on the landing till he called her with one of the signals, then walked down slowly, pivoting at each landing, Gyurza ready to fire.
Just as Scorpion approached the landing of the fourth floor, two men came up the stairs from below, one of them in the black jacket and wool cap described by Iryna. They all saw each other at the same time. As they started to point their guns at him, he fired twice, hitting the first man in the head, the second-the one in the wool cap-in the shoulder. The man in the wool cap managed to fire twice as Scorpion leaped down to the landing, the bullets just missing, ricocheting off the metal stairs. He tripped as he landed, dropping the Gyurza. The man in the wool cap kicked the Gyurza away and aimed his own pistol. He smiled, showing broken teeth.
He was still smiling as Scorpion ripped his Glock from its holster at the small of his back and fired into the center of his forehead. The door to the landing opened then, and another man was on him, using a Russian Sambo kick to his middle along with a forearm that knocked the Glock from Scorpion’s hand. He was a big man, broad as he was high, and looked as strong as an ox.
Scorpion bounced off the wall to close in, using a CQC strike and parry combination with a leg sweep that took the big man down. He broke the man’s nose with an upward palm smash and put a guillotine choke hold around his massive neck, using the crook of his elbow and forearm to cut off the flow of blood through the carotid artery to the brain. The big man struggled violently, repeatedly slamming Scorpion back against the wall. He groped for Scorpion’s eyes with his sausagelike fingers. Scorpion barely held on, his ribs and back feeling like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer. He grabbed his wrist to tighten his grip around the man’s neck and pulled up with all his strength.
The man slammed him again, knocking the wind out of him. All Scorpion could do was hang on, desperately squeezing his neck. Then all at once his efforts succeeded. The man went limp, falling back, a dead weight on top of him. Scorpion kept the choke hold tight another thirty seconds till he was sure the man was dead.
He squeezed out from under the massive body and, staggering, retrieved the Glock and the Gyurza pistols from the stairs. A woman with a little boy, who had no doubt heard the shots, peeked at him from the landing above.
“Ischezni!” he snapped at her in Russian. Beat it. She and the boy disappeared.
“Nadia! Nadia!” he called up to the landing above, and after a moment he heard Iryna’s footsteps on the stairs. He went through the dead men’s pockets. They carried cell phones and ammo clips, but none of them had ID of any kind. Even the labels from their shirts and jackets had been removed.
“Christ,” he said to himself as Iryna knelt beside him.
“What is it?” she asked.
“They have no ID,” he said as they went quickly down the stairs toward the back exit he had checked out when they first moved in.
“So they’re not politsiy or militsiyu.”
“Or Syndikat blatnoi. The thugs have to carry ID in case they get stopped by the cops.”
“So who are they?”
