39. Alexei
Alexei
On the runway Papa takes out his battered silver hip flask. “I want you to have this.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I can’t take that, Papa.”
“You are the only person who knows its story.” He smiles as he presses it into my hands.
“Without a story, no object has meaning. Drink from it the freedom Aleksander and I fought so hard for, and the friendship that carried us toward it. Carry it not in memory of me, Alexei, but as a reminder that no man can live his best life behind prison walls—and that freedom only exists when we choose it for ourselves.”
Papa’s dignified figure is the last thing I see as the plane leaves the Paris runway.
He stands beside the sedan, hands clasped before him, spine ramrod straight, uncaring of the persistent drizzle and gathering chill.
As we lift into the air, he raises one hand in salute.
From my seat by the window, I raise the hip flask in return—though whether he sees me or not I can’t tell.
I unscrew the cap and take a mouthful of the Graf vodka inside, feeling its warmth trickle down through my body, as if my father is still at my side.
“Aleksander’s voice is more real to me than those who still live,” he said.
I turn the hip flask over in my hands, thinking of all the times since Lars was shot that my best friend’s voice has rung through my own mind.
Something tells me that even if he doesn’t make it through this, his voice will live in my head just as clearly, and for as long, as Aleksander’s has lived in my father’s.
And what would he say to me now? I think. The immediate stab of pain that accompanies any direct thought of Lars is so great I drink again, longer this time.
I search my head for his familiar acerbic replies, but for once, I hear nothing.
Oh, I mentally chide him. So now you choose to go silent, you contrary prick?
But instead of Lars’s voice, rather unusually, it’s Dima’s that I hear: “You don’t need to get your hands dirty like this. Not anymore.”
I shrug it off impatiently. I would never delegate the filthy tasks ahead of me to other men. Some tasks a man must do himself.
My father’s voice is next: “Vengeance is hatred. Hatred is a gulag . . .”
I turn the hip flask slowly in my hands, my thumbs rubbing over the scarred surface, the dented base, thinking of what lies ahead of me.
Kiril Novikov must die.
That is business in our world. I gave him a chance, long ago.
He used that chance to come after Ofelia.
That, I won’t forgive. It is a matter of honor, one I can’t in all conscience allow to go unanswered. I feel no guilt about taking his life, nor any hesitation about the task itself.
Marty Hunter Jr. and his daughter I feel similar contempt for. Hunter has grown fat on my money, and on the Orlovs’ coin before that. Now he has climbed into bed with those intent on destroying not only me, but Renata Cardenas, one of the most honorable and honest people I know.
Cold fury rushes over me at the memory of her pale, set face the night she was raped. It’s a fury I remember well, one which back then had coalesced into a hard, fierce focus toward only one possible conclusion: Carter Thorne’s death.
I don’t regret one cut of my knife that night, nor any of the pain I inflicted. If I was back in that room again, I would make the same decision, a thousand times over.
But his father—Silas Thorne?
I shift uncomfortably in my seat.
Mak told me Silas Thorne is a piece of shit, and going by the deplorable actions of his son, not to mention the vile activities of his digital media network, I have no reason to doubt him.
But he is also a father who lost his son.
And I am the man who took that son from him.
If I take every other consideration out of play and ask myself simply what my own father would do in that situation—I already have the answer, from my father’s own confession.
And where does that leave me? I wonder, rolling the flask between my hands again. Am I seeking vengeance—or building a new set of prison walls?
My thumb slides across the base of the hip flask, and I realize the marks I can feel there aren’t random, but some kind of inscription. I turn it upside down and squint at the engraved words, long turned smooth from wear.
Glaza boyatsya, a ruki delayut, I read.
The eyes are afraid, but the hands do.
My heart catches in my throat. I wonder when the inscription was made. While Aleksander was still alive, or did Papa have it done to remember him after his death?
I don’t know the full story, Papa.
It seems, suddenly, extremely important that I find out, before it is too late.
And what do those words mean to me now, in the context of what I am flying back to?
Does it mean my hands should murder Silas Thorne, even if my eyes are afraid of what might be built as a result?
The plane flies on, every minute bringing me inexorably closer to men who want me dead and others I know I must kill.
Farther away from Ofelia and the life I dared to dream I might have.
And as darkness begins to fall beyond the window, I think of the swamp I first survived and then went on to make my own.
I know it is the gulag my father spoke of.
I know I’m going back to Miami because I need to escape it forever.
What I don’t know is if I’m destined to keep building bigger walls—and condemning those I love to die behind them with me, even if they never chose to.
I hitch a ride on one of the Cardenas narco-subs to Cay Sal Bank in the Bahamas, where the Guapa has been anchored since we gave up the pretense that Lars was on it.
“The crew haven’t seen a photographer for weeks, apparently,” Andrew greets me as I climb aboard. He’s left a temporary crew aboard the Quantum Drift and brought my best people out to the Guapa.
Christ knows I’m likely to need them.
“Anyone tracking me will follow a flight trail back to Sicily,” I say. “Mak covered my journey here, and I have his assurance it was untraceable.” I don’t need to add that when he gives that kind of guarantee, it’s ironclad.
Andrew nods. “We’re just over eight hours’ sailing time to Miami.
We’ve booked the Guapa in for routine maintenance, so we’re expected, but we’ve ensured there’ll be a vessel in distress near Haulover Inlet by the time we’re fifteen miles offshore.
The Coast Guard will scramble north to attend to it, leaving a window for Dima to come out and meet us.
He’ll take you in through the southern bay and dock at the Grove before anyone has any idea you’re here. ”
“Good.” I check my watch, yawning. I’m no good at sleeping on planes, and between the events of the past days, I’ve barely closed my eye.
Not least because when I do, all I see is Lars’s face.
“Why don’t you get your head down for a time, sir?” Andrew nods at the dark water in front of us. “We’ve got people watching everything. I’ll wake you in time to get ready for Dima’s arrival. Do you want a drink brought to your room?”
“No.” I glance around. “Is the bar stocked with Graf?”
“Of course.”
Heading over to it, I fill my father’s flask to the brim, then raise it in Andrew’s direction.
“Catch you in the morning, then. Or midnight. Whatever.” I turn away without waiting for an answer, suddenly barely able to keep my eye open.
In my cabin, I take a shower, down half the hip flask, then fall face down on the bed and pass out completely.
“Nice James Bond shit,” Dima greets me as I jump down into the boat.
I grip his outstretched hand. “Thought you’d enjoy it.”
“Are you kidding?” He still has the engine running and takes off before I’m seated, moving so fast that Andrew’s dark figure is swallowed by the darkness in minutes. “I love it. Haven’t done a midnight run in years. Miracle I can remember how to drive the boat.”
“Given your advancing years, I was more concerned about your ability to see at night. Although dementia is also an option, I guess.”
“At least I still have both my eyes, you ugly prick.”
“And whose fault is that, motherfucker?”
Bickering contentedly, we speed toward the shore, then dock the boat with the silent efficiency of long practice before melting into one of the underground tunnels leading into the compound.
“Get ready for some changes,” Dima warns me as he touches a biometric lock to open a heavy metal door.
“You said you wanted the basement done fast. The boys took you at your word. And while they may never be construction workers,” he adds as the door swings silently open, “they know a thing or two about making other people get shit done in record time—and they haven’t been shy in exercising those skills. ”
“Holy hell,” I say, as the watertight blast-style door closes behind me with the weighted finality of a submarine hatch.
Dima grins as I step over the low steel flood lip at the threshold. “Told you.”
It’s the cold I notice first. After the muggy warmth of the Miami night, the dry air and aggressive chill is like stepping into an industrial freezer.
Next I’m hit by the deep, relentless, all-encompassing roar of the cooling fans, a white noise so total it feels almost physical.
The grim chipped concrete and waterlogged basement I knew is utterly gone.
I stare in amazement at the vast industrial space that has replaced it.
Row upon row of server racks—tall louvered metal cabinets—are arranged in long parallel aisles, blinking with amber and green LEDs like a living thing.
Overhead a tangle of cables runs the length of the rows like parallel rivers.
“If you remember that brief I sent through,” Dima says as we walk down the raised antistatic floor above the concrete base, “the existing concrete wasn’t good enough quality.
We removed most of it and replaced it with a waterproof membrane and a rubberized tanking system, applied to every wall, floor, and ceiling.
No more dripping,” he says, casting me a sideways look.