Together they lifted the man and placed him on a table.
“I need more light.”
Timko ducked behind the bar and returned with a battery-operated lantern. Jack carefully rolled the man on his side to check for exit wounds. There were two. One, as large as a tennis ball, had taken out part of the man’s spine.
The man on the table gasped in distress, opened his eyes, and thrashed about on the table. Despite his wounds, he fought with great strength.
“Alexi, Alexi! Keep looking at me. Stay with us,” Timko urged.
He calmed when he saw Timko bending over him. Alexi coughed, then slumped back onto the blood-soaked table.
“I’m here, Alexi,” Timko assured him, his eyes damp as he took the man’s hand and squeezed it.
Alexi looked up at Timko and managed a smile. He closed his eyes and muttered in Russian. “I can hear the helicopter. They will be here soon to take me away…”
A minute later, Alexi was gone.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said quietly.
Timko nodded as a tear escaped his eye, lost its way in the stubble of his unshaven cheek. “Alexi was a decent man…for a Russian pig.”
Jack studied the dead man’s naked hide, crisscrossed with old scars. Someone had used a knife to inflict deep wounds that had shredded the flesh on his abdomen and chest. Jack knew that type of cut was meant to cause the most agony a human could endure. He looked up, met the heavy-set man’s stare with his own.
“This man. He fought in Afghanistan,” said Jack.
Georgi looked away. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Scars don’t lie,” Jack replied. “This man was tortured by the mujahideen.”
“Who are you? What do you want from me?”
“My name is Jack Bauer. I’m not from around here. I’m in town for a job. I came right here from the airport because I was supposed to meet an associate—”
Timko snorted. “Now who is lying, Mr. Jack Bauer? Before I came to America, I was trained in the most difficult school in the world — the criminal underground in the former Soviet Union. I learned one thing while outsmarting the Communist enforcers. I learned to recognize the stench of police, no matter his country of origin.”
Timko sniffed the air theatrically. “You, Mr. Jack Bauer, have a very strong odor.”
A gun barrel dug into Jack’s ribs. He turned to find a toothless old man pointing an Uzi at him.
“Meet my friend, Yuri. Do not let his looks deceive you. Yuri understands no English but he knows trouble when he sees it and can kill a dozen different ways.”
Then Georgi Timko slapped Jack on the back.
“Once you have handed over your weapon, we will sit down together, share strong tea, and talk like civilized men.”
The black Mercedes moved along a dark stretch of Roosevelt Avenue under the elevated subway tracks. Steel support beams encased in crumbling concrete moved monotonously past the tinted windows. Though traffic was minimal at this time of night, cars were parked and double-parked along both sides of the busy commercial thoroughfare, making navigation tricky. Shamus Lynch skirted every obstacle.
He pressed the gas to beat a yellow light. The car hit a pothole and Shamus heard — or imagined he heard — the heavy missile launcher bounce in the trunk. Reflexively he glanced in the rearview, caught a glimpse of his ruddy, clean-shaven jaw, his fiery red hair, neatly cut — a professional look to go with the professional suit, the professional act.
For as long as he could remember, Shamus had despised looking younger than his years. Now, at thirty-five, crow’s feet clawed his eyes. Creases gouged his brow. Shamus hadn’t noticed the exact year, month, and hour his boyish face had fled — when the lines around his thin lips had deepened, his cheeks had become lean and angular like his brother’s, his brown eyes as hard — but he was lately beginning to wonder if he’d been daft to ever long for it.
He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t admired Griff, ten years older, ten years wiser, the one to follow without hesitation. A stop sign compelled Shamus to tap the brake and consider with a glance the man sitting beside him, staring intensely into the shadows between the streetlights.
In his beige, summer-weight suit, gold Windsorknotted tie, and polished loafers, Griff could easily pass for your typical harried New York businessman. The handsome young freedom fighter was long gone. Not a strand of black Irish hair was left on his silver head and his normally pale features were looking downright ghostly. There was nothing faint, however, about Griff’s resolve. For as long as Shamus could remember, he’d displayed more than enough raging certainty for the two of them, along with a vague paternal contempt toward any questioning of his decisions or plans. Not that Shamus had ever really challenged his brother.
Their father’s death in ’72, at the hands of the British Army had ignited Griff’s sense of injustice. He’d spoken in church basements, organized civil rights protests, lobbied local politicians. Then their mother was murdered in a pub bombing. Gasoline on Griff’s fire, that was. The IRA was Griff’s family after that, vengeance his propeller. Shamus had been too young to sustain true hatred. He’d functioned mainly on need — need for his brother’s affection and, eventually, his respect.
Even as a ruddy-cheeked child, he’d found a way to make Griff see his value. The cherubic freckles, which Shamus had always detested, allowed him to plant plastique unnoticed — at a bus stop near a Royal Ulster Constabulary post, a pub frequented by loyalist paramilitary groups, a British Army checkpoint. It had become a thing of pride for him, a measure of accomplishment to hide the thing and get away, to watch the explosion, to gain the approval of his brothers in arms.
They were fighting to free their countrymen, weren’t they? From repressive, imperial, colonial rule. Human rights commissions were on their side. Hadn’t the British allowed their army to detain and “question” his countrymen for as long as seven days without charges? Allowed their courts to convict based on confessions obtained through abusive treatment during that questioning? Taken away their right to a fair jury trial? Griff had made things clear for him back then, made things right.
Whether their war was justified or not, in the end, Griff and Shamus both realized they’d been the losers. What was supposed to have been the highest achievement of their lives, the most important accomplishment for the Cause, had left them barely escaping the British Army, hiding on a tanker bound for North Africa. Everything had changed after that spring of ’81. They could never again return to their homeland, never go back to using their real names. Yet Shamus had trusted Griff and he’d come through — found a way for them to continue the fight.
“
Of course, Griff had said all that a long time go, almost seventeen years. Since then, their homeland— what they could remember of it — had changed its outlook. Peace agreements renouncing violence were now being struck by the IRA’s political arm. While their comrades were rotting in hellishly long sentences in British prisons, the thrust of their people’s will was being spent on disarmament.
Griff’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out, flipped it open. Shamus’s eyes were drawn to the twisted blast scars on his brother’s hands, wrists, the callused knob that was once a finger. The wounds went deeper, spidering up his arms. The extent of their reach was hidden beneath the neatly tailored suit. For years, Shamus had seen them as badges of honor. Only in the past few weeks had he begun to ask.
“What are we doing, Griff? This job has nothing to do with the Cause.”
Griff had said the writing was on the wall. Adjustments were necessary. Shamus had disagreed. Weren’t there still splinter factions like the real IRA who were still fighting the good fight? The Omagh bombing alone had
