wouldn’t be the end of the world. I told him no.
“That’s unacceptable,” I said. “We play by the rules, Jimmy. You know that. That’s what separates us from them.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Frank,” he said.
Which is just what I need to do now. Stay focused. Remain dispassionate. Detached.
Remember the law.
[Entry Ends.]
THREE
His name was Otto Krieg.
And Otto Krieg was in a world of trouble.
“What is this?” Micky Duka shouted, looking around the dock wildly. “What’s going on? Otto?”
Duka’s eyes met Krieg’s. Otto reached into his belt and drew a gun.
“You brought a cop, Micky,” he said. “And he brought his friends!”
“Don’t look at me!” Duka shouted. “I swear, we didn’t—”
“Shut up,” Krieg said, and turned.
Astrov’s men had formed a protective circle around Yuri, and were backing away from the unloaded crates, back toward the gangway leading to the ship. Krieg’s eyes found Astrov’s, and the two men exchanged a look of understanding.
Otto knew exactly what his boss was thinking. Stay calm. Don’t panic. That’s our only chance.
Good advice, Krieg thought.
This Bobby whom Duka had brought, though . . .
He wasn’t listening.
“This is not good,” the young man said, shaking his head. “My father’s going to kill me.”
Krieg frowned. He didn’t understand.
“Your father? Who is your father?”
The man ignored him, continued to look around in fear. He had reason to be concerned, of course; the pier was filling with law enforcement personnel.
FBI, local police, SWAT teams in full body armor—it was hard for Krieg to tell who was who, there were so many of them.
His eyes fastened on a man in a suit at the head of one group—a black man, in a SWAT team helmet, carrying a megaphone.
The man’s eyes, in turn, fastened on him.
“You are under arrest for the importation and sale of contraband firearms,” the man said, continuing to move forward. “Drop the gun.”
Krieg considered the situation a moment. Astrov and his bodyguards had stopped moving, halfway to the gangplank. Duka had stopped, too, had his hands high up in the air, rooted to the spot.
Bobby, though, was still looking around frantically, searching for a way out.
The fool didn’t understand yet that there was none.
“Drop the gun,” repeated the man advancing on Krieg. “I won’t say it again.”
Otto shook his head, his eyes still fastened on Bobby.
In the countless number of times he’d played this scene out in his mind, it had never gone quite this way. He’d arranged this deal between Astrov and Duka, thought he’d calculated every possible way it could unfold, but the presence of this man, this Bobby-whoever whom Duka had brought to help finance his deal . . . it was like a joker turning up in a game of straight five-card draw. It threw everything off.
But there was nothing he could do about it now, other than play the cards as they’d been dealt.
Krieg turned suddenly on the agent with the megaphone, raised his gun, and took aim. For a split second, he had the drop on the man. Had a clear shot.
But, somehow, it was the other who fired first.
The bullet struck Krieg square in the chest. It felt like getting hit with a battering ram—he staggered backward, and swayed on his feet. The pain was incredible.
“Otto!” Duka shouted.
Krieg toppled to the dock. His head hit metal—hard— and his vision swam.
He looked up at the night sky, and saw blinking lights. A plane flying high above.
He looked down toward his chest, toward the pain, and saw red. A stain on his shirt that spread as he watched.
He looked up, and his eyes found Micky Duka’s.
And just beyond Micky, he saw Bobby’s hand reach into his belt, saw the glint of metal there—a gun, why had the man brought a gun?—and he knew the joker was wild, wilder than he had thought possible, and that everything was about to go horribly wrong.
He searched for his voice and managed only a croak.
“Drop the gun!” the man who’d shot him yelled, now turning on Bobby, his weapon still raised. “DROP THE GUN.”
Bobby wasn’t listening.
“This wasn’t my deal,” Krieg heard Bobby say, his voice sounding very far away, distorted somehow, almost as if it were coming from underwater. “I don’t even know these people.”
Bobby’s movements matched his voice—herky-jerky, awkward. Unpredictable. The worst possible thing to be in the middle of this kind of standoff, where the slightest wrong move could trigger unimaginable violence.
And then it happened.
By the gangplank, one of Astrov’s guards, maybe reacting to a movement of Bobby’s, or a sudden shift in position by the SWAT team, drew his weapon, uttered a curse, and fired.
The response was immediate and overwhelming.
Gunfire blazed across the dock, sounding like string after string of firecrackers going off.
The bodyguard who’d drawn his weapon jerked in the air like a marionette, then went down. A second later, so did Astrov, and then another bodyguard, who managed to draw his weapon and fire as he fell.
Bullets flew everywhere, ricocheting off the dock, splashing in the water, bouncing off the hull of the cargo ship. Micky Duka dove to the ground and covered his head with his hands.
Duka’s friend Bobby, though, stood stock-still in the middle of the pandemonium he’d created, then a split second later was caught in the cross fire.
He danced for a moment in the spotlight, spraying crimson everywhere.
No, Krieg thought. No.
“Bobby!” he heard Duka scream. For a moment, the sound echoed.
And then there was silence.
Time slowed. He was vaguely aware of sound, and movement, and pain, above all pain in his chest where the bullet had hit him. An ambulance siren. Duka whimpering.
Two men in white uniforms—EMTs hovering over him— pressing something to his chest, then shaking their heads.
“He’s done,” someone said. “I’m calling it. One thirty-seven A.M.”
Krieg tried to move and found he couldn’t. He felt his legs being lifted, then his arms, and the sensation of something plastic against his skin. A body bag, he realized.
The zipper closed over him, and everything went black. He felt movement, as if he were being carried down a long dark tunnel. And in the darkness, his mind continued to race.
The first thing he thought was this: Yuri Astrov was done, as was the arms-trafficking organization he ran, the organization for which Krieg had spent the last two years of his life working. No one would emerge from the ranks to take Astrov’s place, because no one else had the personal connections to so many of the old Kremlin higher-ups.
The second thing that came to mind was an image. The image of Duka’s friend Bobby, standing frozen on the dock as the bullets struck him.
