“Oh, come on! Vigo’s a big city. It has several luggage stores. It wasn’t hard to find a case like that one, Ushakov.” I smiled.
“But the label…”
“Ripped off the other case. Consider it a show of good faith, proof that the other case is the real thing, Captain. As soon as you give me what I want, Pritchenko will leave the bag on the shore and we can all go our merry way. Now, don’t fuck with me. Let’s talk this over like good little boys, right?”
“What do you want?” Ushakov muttered, as he approached menacingly. Sparks of anger shot from his eyes.
“Very simple,” I said quietly. “My cat, my boat, and Mr. Pritchenko’s package. One of those AK-47s, and food for a week,” I ticked the items off on my fingers, as Ushakov’s face got redder and redder. “Oh! And a carton of Chesterfields.”
Ushakov yelled something unintelligible as he squeezed his fists tight. He stared at the shore for several seconds that seemed to go on forever. “What’s stopping me from killing you and going after your friend onshore and killing him too? Tell me.”
“Simple,” I replied, acting more relaxed than I felt. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes,
Ushakov thought for a moment. Suddenly he turned to a sailor and began barking orders in Russian. After that, he strode toward me menacingly.
“All right, Mr. Lawyer. I’ll give you what you want, but you’ll regret this. I swear.”
Some people say lawyers are sons of bitches. I won’t argue with that. But when it comes time to negotiate, it’s great to be a lawyer.
ENTRY 75
Sometimes the craziest memories hit when you least expect them. A strange image kept coming to mind as I stood on the deck of
I was six or seven, and my parents had taken me to the circus. I was watching the knife thrower. I remember I was impressed that the girl standing in front of the target was so brave that she let a man hurl knives at her. My mother always told me knives are very dangerous and they can cut you. The smiling, relaxed face of the surprisingly calm girl was etched in my mind at that tender age.
At that moment, I wished I had the same presence of mind. The truth is, I was scared shitless. One false step, a wrong word, a miscalculation, no matter how small, and someone might get nervous and shoot me between the eyes. I knew Prit would be all right on his own, but I didn’t want to die that morning.
Ushakov was pacing like a caged bear, shooting me murderous glances. I had to be careful. The bastard must have had an ace up his sleeve to fuck me over with.
A furry blur appeared through the ship’s hatch, attracted by the noise on deck. My heart raced. Lucullus! Instinctively I stepped forward but stopped short when I realized my mistake. It wasn’t Lucullus but a brown female cat, with a bell around her neck and wicked green eyes. She slithered sinuously between the sailors’ legs, then sat on a roll of cable to groom herself, giving everyone the withering look only a cat can.
This cat brought to mind Lucullus with a painful intensity. Suddenly, bouncing out of the same hatch, a couple of steps behind, came another ball of fur, this one a familiar shade of bright orange. Lucullus!
He must’ve sweet-talked the ship’s cook while I was gone, because he was fatter and his hair was glossy. He smugly approached the brown cat, purring, doing what my sister called “the Lucullus move,” twitching his tail seductively and roguishly wiggling his ears.
Typical. I dragged my ass through an abandoned city full of monsters, dying of hunger and thirst, risking my life at every turn, while he spent the whole time stuffing his face and romancing that green-eyed doll.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I cleared my throat. The noise was enough. Lucullus looked up. As soon as he saw me, he forgot all about the gorgeous feline at his side and rushed to me, meowing so pitifully you could’ve heard him all over the city. Before I knew it, he’d planted himself in my lap and was purring with delight, rubbing against my neck.
I grabbed my cat and felt a strong sense of relief. Not only had they not killed him, he was great shape. I’d been afraid I’d never see him again.
I looked up to find Ushakov watching, with contempt tinged with anger. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he thought of me. I just wanted out of there. Who cared if the bastard was furious? But he was calm—too calm, when you consider I’d just fucked him over royally, showing him up in front of his own men. No, the guy was planning something, and I didn’t know what it was.
Time passed very slowly, as boxes of food were piled at my feet. One of the sailors brought me a package addressed in Cyrillic. I checked the part to make sure it matched the description Pritchenko had given to me. A Pakistani handed me a loaded AK-47 and a box of shells.
All that stuff weighed a ton, but no one was helping me load it onto the
Something vibrated in my pocket, accompanied by two short beeps. Before the astonished eyes of crew and captain, I pulled out a small blue walkie-talkie we’d taken from a blood-soaked patrol car, abandoned on a side street.
That car was a real mystery. It was perfectly parked near a ransacked hardware store, between some smelly trash cans and a car with flat tires and broken mirrors. After more than a month and a half of neglect, all the vehicles in the street were covered a thick layer of dust and dirt, but that patrol car was nice and clean, as if it’d just come from a garage. That was what made us stop and take a look. Inside it was empty; the driver’s seat was covered with dried blood. There were no traces of blood on the sidewalk or tracks leading away from the car. The street was completely deserted. A ghostly wind whistled through the dirt and abandoned vehicles. The car was spotless, as if it had just been parked there. It was so unnatural and mysterious, my hair stood on end. Prit and I found a pair of police-issue walkietalkies in the car, as well as a high-powered flashlight. Not a single piece of paper or a weapon, not a clue, not a trace. Nothing. A complete mystery.
Now one of those walkie-talkies crackled in my hand. I pressed the button, knowing Prit was on the other end.
“Talk to me,” I said in Spanish, fairly certain no one else on board spoke Spanish.
“How’s everything going?” The Ukrainian’s voice was staticky.
“Well…too well,” I said, not taking my eye off the sailors. “They’re up to something.”
“Don’t look, but we have problem on bridge,” Pritchenko said quietly in his Slavic accent. “A guy with RPG-7 is hidden behind top rail. I see him perfect.”
A cold sweat rolled down my back. An RPG. A fucking rocket launcher. I should’ve guessed. Anyone with a TV has seen an RPG. The poor man’s artillery. Virtually all guerrillas and Third World armies had thousands of those things, mass produced in the former Soviet Union. The black market was rife with them. They are so simple and effective. You just insert the grenade at the end; a tube serves as a launcher. So easy to use, even a child-soldier from some remote African country can learn to shoot it in ten minutes. So lethal that when the Russians invaded the Chechen capital of Grozny in 1994, they lost dozens of tanks to Chechen guerrillas armed with those lethal tubes.
Their plan was clear. Once we’d left the suitcase in the harbor, that bastard Ushakov would fire the grenade launcher at the
The sailors climbed back on board the
