Besides, someday this pain and rage would fade, and on that day he wanted to be able to live with himself.
He maintained control of the man he had captured until his men had secured him. Then he sheathed his blade and said, “Get them the hell out of here.”
Spinning away from them, he started the process of searching for survivors. It had been a long night already, and he knew that it was only going to get longer.
FORTY-THREE
“Yuri Vostov,” Gordian said to his desktop videophone. His voice was dull, inflectionless, almost mechanical. It somehow reminded Nimec of the way robotic voices had sounded in science fiction movies that were made in the 1950s. He’d never heard Gordian speak in that sort of tone before, and it disquieted him perhaps more than anything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours. What was going on inside the man?
Gordian sat there in his office and continued looking at Max Blackburn’s image in the small LCD monitor. Across the desk from him, Nimec sipped his third coffee of the morning. None of the men had gotten any sleep, and it showed in the dark crescents under all their eyes.
“According to everything Pete’s got on him, Vostov’s a black marketeer. A drug dealer. A cheap John Gotti knockoff,” Gordian said. “Are we really expected to believe he’d be behind a plot of this complexity?”
Blackburn’s voice came through the speaker. “What Korut Zelva would like us to swallow isn’t important. He probably decided that by flushing Vostov he could throw us off the trail awhile.”
“Whose trail? And long enough for what?” Nimec said. “I don’t care if this guy’s some kind of dimwit, he has to know we’re going to look into his information.”
“That’s just it, Pete,” Blackburn said. “I tend to believe there’s a very large grain of truth in the things he’s told us about Vostov. I mean, it makes perfect sense that he’s the next link up in the chain from Nick Roma’s outfit.”
Gordian shook his head. “That still doesn’t address Pete’s essential point. How far does knowing about Vostov really get us? I don’t care how deeply the Russian mafia are involved, they wouldn’t have brought Zelva and the woman…” He glanced down at the notes in front of him, searching for her name. “… Gilea Nastik into this. Those two are professional terrorists. Freelancers.”
“With a grudge against the United States that goes back to the days after the Gulf War,” Nimec said. “From what Ibrahim’s told Max, they blame our government for having reneged on a promise to support the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. And God help us, there may be truth in that.”
“Their grievance doesn’t concern me, not after they’ve butchered thousands of innocents,” Gordian said. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that Vostov could have used his own people and kept it simple.”
“Roger—”
“It doesn’t sit right,” Gordian interrupted. “It doesn’t goddamned
Nimec saw Roger’s hand clench and unclench in the air, and again wondered what the deaths of the Steiners, and all the others, were doing to him inside.
“Gord, listen, it seems to me we’re all saying the same thing here,” Nimec said. “If we’re agreed Vostov’s in it, then our next step is to go after him. Squeeze him hard. See what he’ll give up.”
“I don’t think we can assume he’d give up anything.” Gordian looked at Nimec, then turned back to the screen, a set expression on his face. “Don’t you see? According to the reasoning I’ve heard from both of you, this Korut gave us Vostov as a diversion. But why bother if he thought Vostov would crack and send us in the right direction?”
Nimec pursed his lips, thinking.
“Maybe he underestimated the sort of pressure we’d be willing to apply,” Blackburn said in a low, meaningful voice.
“Somebody left a dead body for us to find in a Milan hotel room, and another corpse on a beach in Andalucia. The first man was hanging from a noose. The second man’s throat had been slashed almost to his spine. And both were members of the bombing team. Whoever killed them is obviously convinced we intend to get to the bottom of this affair.”
“Roger,” Blackburn said, “I’m only saying…”
Gordian went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “They slaughtered Art and Elaine Steiner in cold blood — two of the kindest, most decent human beings I’ve ever met, married forty years, both looking toward retirement. They killed dozens of our technicians, administrators, and construction workers, people who’d never lifted a weapon in their lives. People who were just out there doing their jobs, making an honest wage, and perhaps doing a little good for this world in the process. They killed my friends and my employees and tried burning my ground station to the ground, Max. They know we’re in it up to our necks. They know, and they’ve been trying to scare us off, and yesterday they took it as far as they could. But they made a mistake. Because I swear to God, I’m going to bring those bastards down for what they’ve done.”
He closed his eyes then, and sat there in silence, his lips trembling, hands balled into fists. Nimec looked at him a moment and then shifted his eyes to the wall, feeling somehow like a trespasser.
“Roger, I want to go after Vostov, see where that takes us,” Blackburn said after what seemed a very long time. “But I need your permission to do it fast and dirty. And if it means putting a real hurt on the sonovabitch…”
He let the sentence hang in space somewhere between Russia and the west coast of America.
Gordian didn’t make a sound for another full minute. Then he nodded, more to himself than to anyone else.
“There’s to be no killing on our part unless it’s in self-defense,” he said. “I won’t sink to the level of these scum. And I want this done so the entire world can learn the truth.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do, Max. And I’m sorry for jumping down your throat.”
“No problem,” Blackburn said. “These are rough times for all of us.”
Gordian nodded again.
“I want to make sense of this,” Roger said, swallowing thickly. “I need for it to make sense.”
Neither of the other men said anything to that. Neither of them knew what to say.
Make sense?
Sitting there with his eyes fastened to the wall, still reluctant to look at Gordian, Nimec found himself wondering if it ever possibly could.
They came prepared for a siege.
They had a warrant, but nobody was expecting Nick Roma to open the door and stand quietly and calmly while they cuffed him and read him his rights.
They figured they were going to have to work for this one.
So they brought out all the good stuff — high-tech surveillance equipment and low-tech battering rams, full- body armor and tear gas grenades. Everything they could think of, and more.
They even had the SWAT team on standby.
They never expected to find the Platinum Club as silent as a tomb.
Or the door wide open.
But that’s exactly what they found.
“Dammit, the guy has snitches everywhere. He knew we were coming for him. He’s probably halfway to Russia by now.” The officer in charge, police lieutenant Manny deAngelo, flipped off his radio and pulled his gloves back on. He’d have cussed a blue streak, but it was too cold to waste the energy.
“Think it’s a trap?” one of the cops asked.
