28. Maxim
MAXIM
At the kitchen door, I stop and listen with my hand flat on the wood. Nothing. No voices, no footsteps. Two SUVs outside, so eight men at least, perhaps twelve. Silence here means their absence.
We go in, Lev at my shoulder and the twins behind, all silent as the grave.
Blood on the flagstones of the mudroom, a trail leading inward. Millhouse, dead by the pantry, his throat opened. Dark eyes staring at nothing. Then Grigor near the east hall. Two daughters in Newark, an ex-wife—
Later.
Galina’s copper pots are scattered across the floor, one of them dented and dark red at the rim. The knife magnet is empty of its largest blade. If she went down, she took some of them down with her. If she didn’t, God help the man who finds her next.
Can Thea fight? Is she in the panic room? Did Pasha get her there in time? Is she in this house at all, or in one of those SUVs already, or is she—
No.
I put the thought down before it swallows me whole and keep moving.
The first of Sokolov’s men stands sentry at the base of the back stair with a rifle and a bored posture.
They’re all bored, save for those who may be engaged.
They are bored because they think that no one is coming.
No one warned them that we are not where they thought we’d be, because no one paid attention to me once their plan was in motion. They thought they had this in the bag.
Perhaps Klaus’s overconfidence has infiltrated Alexei’s men. That may be my best weapon against him. Let them think this was over before it began. Let them celebrate their victory early.
It went well for the guard by the SUVs. No reason it shouldn’t go as well in here.
The man at the stairs hears nothing on my approach. I take him from behind, a hand at the jaw and one at the crown in a hard twist. I lower his corpse to the runner without a sound.
Sound is just as much the enemy as the men in my home.
No gun. A gun announces to the rooms ahead that the fight is on its way. I need those rooms to go on believing they get the luxury of being bored. I will let them for as long as I can. I will stay silent. No matter the voice inside my head.
Part of me is screaming. Since the satellite phone rang into nothing, a single word, her name, screams to be let out. I want to scream her name, to hear her answer, to know she lives.
But that would be a stupid way to kill us both if she’s hiding.
Lev takes the second one in the gallery silently, a forearm on a throat until something cracks between it and a wall. He sets him down among my grandmother’s portraits without disturbing a frame.
Sergei and Chaucer follow behind us, covering our asses while we kill, each taking out any who see us. Until today, I had never seen a proper garroting, but Sergei favors it, according to Lev. We clear the ground floor room by room in silence.
I feel nothing about any of it. It’s housekeeping. Clearing away cobwebs. If I were a better man, I might feel something, I imagine. I have no time for feelings outside of rage.
Then I reach the shadowy corridor outside the study and hear voices. I stop to listen, and my men hold back.
Kirill’s voice says her name in the present tense. Present tense means alive. The relief nearly takes my knees. It means one thing. We keep fighting.
I peer around the corner, ready to draw. But I catch the backs of at least eight heads, so I dip back around the corner. I mouth to my men, “Eight.”
That’s not the only thing I saw.
The study door is gone. Light spills from the wrecked frame, firelight and shifting shadow. The men’s attention is forward on the show inside the study. They aren’t watching the hall, which was likely their order. Good to know Alexei’s men listen as well as my son did.
Past their shoulders, Kirill’s voice. And Klaus. Arguing with him.
“—not the job. We take her out of here alive, remember—” His voice is climbing, cracking. I hear less the words and more his anxious, ineffectual tone.
Klaus is bargaining for Thea’s life with desperation. It won’t move Kirill.
“… that is what Sokolov said to you.” Kirill, patient, amused. They argue, and I cannot figure out why the killer is drawing this out. Or why Klaus is arguing. “…Maxim gets a house full of his dead and no future in it at all. That is the order, and it was always the order.”
My hand goes tight on the pistol. Alexei ordered an execution on Thea. Kirill is here to carry it out, and from their argument, Klaus is in the way.
He argues for Thea. Argues for me. I never expected any of this out of Klaus.
But Kirill’s batting his ego around like another one of his victims. “…You were told the pretty version so you’d cooperate. It worked. Now move.”
“… You’ll have to go through me because I won’t be moving, Kirill, I won’t—“
“Suit yourself.” Then I hear Kirill laugh, soft and final.
I open fire.
The first two men drop before the rest have begun to turn, and then Lev’s firing past my shoulder, deafening me. The twins shoot, and the corridor becomes a killing tube, muzzle flash strobing the walls white.
I race forward into the guns that are turning my direction. A round tears my sleeve open along the arm, a line of heat for later. Another sparks off the doorframe beside my head, close enough to powder my cheek with plaster. I keep firing, and the air tastes like fireworks.
They die, all of them, in the space of four seconds.
I come through the ruined door with the smoke of the corridor still stinging my eyes. The fire burns low. Pasha is on the floor, gray as ash and too still. Galina lies over him, alive for now. Thea. Alive and upright and standing behind Klaus.
Where the fuck is—
Kirill turns toward me from the inside corner, his gun already up. He tucked in there to avoid a stray shot from the hallway. His eyes meet mine across the room, and there is no fear in them, no anger. His barrel is not rising toward me. He fires a half-beat before I do.
I see his muzzle flash and put four rounds through him. Kirill goes down, his body flinging backward like a marionette getting jerked off stage. But he got his shot off. I saw it leave him. Somewhere in this room, in the half-beat that I was too slow.
I look to Thea. To the center of her, where his barrel was aimed. My heart stops in my chest, waiting to see the red.
There’s none. She’s not hit. She’s upright and staring at me, both hands rising toward her mouth.
And then I realize that my view of her is clear because Klaus no longer stands in front of her. He’s on the floor in front of her. His face, when he turns his head toward me, is not afraid. Only surprised. Young. Then, vacant.
Thea tries to lift him to his feet. But he’s too heavy. Dead weight.