Jack said, “Hey! I don’t want tea. I want answers. How did this happen? How did you manage to—”
Oxley wasn’t listening. He pulled a mug down from the little cabinet, blew into it to clean out the dust, and then he tossed in a tea bag. The kettle began whistling soon after, and the white-haired man filled the mug with hot water. He dropped in two sugar cubes he picked with his fingers out of a cardboard box, then glanced over his shoulder at Ryan.
“Looking at you, I’d say no milk. You aren’t that refined, are ya?”
Ryan did not answer. Right now his head was spinning with the implications of this situation. He was the son of the sitting President of the United States, and he was here in a tiny one-room flat with two bodies at his feet. The man who killed them was walking around as if it was no great concern, but nearly every nerve and muscle in Ryan’s body was screaming at him to get the hell out of there now.
There was, however, only one thing in this world Ryan wanted now more than getting away from this scene.
Answers.
He sat there, waiting for Oxley to talk.
The big Englishman put the mug of tea down in front of Ryan and sat back in his chair. Only then did he speak. “So, drink up quick, mate, because I’m tossing you out in a moment. Before I decide if I kick you out my door or throw you out my window, why don’t you tell me what you know about this?”
Ryan said, “I am not sure, but there is a good chance that this is about you. Your history with the British government.”
The Englishman shook his head. Disbelieving.
Jack added, “Or maybe, I should say, this is about Bedrock.”
Oxley did not seem surprised at all to hear his old code name. He just gave a half-nod and took a sip from his own mug.
Ryan said, “I came yesterday to ask you a question about some events on the continent thirty years ago.”
“Bedrock is dead and buried a long time, lad. And digging him up now is only going to get more people killed.” He motioned to the two dead men on his floor. “Not just Russians.”
Jack’s head spun to the two corpses. “Russians? How do you know they are Russians?”
The Englishman looked at Jack for a moment, then struggled to get down on the floor on his knees. He moved awkwardly, wincing as he climbed out of the chair, but Jack couldn’t determine the exact location of the man’s pain. Jack put his mug down and leapt from his own chair, trying to help the old man before he fell on his face.
But Oxley made it down, then reached for the jacket of the first man on the floor. He pulled it off roughly. Jack thought he was going to search the man for identification, but instead he tossed the jacket aside, then reached back down to the body and unbuttoned the man’s belt.
“What, in God’s name, are you doing?”
Oxley did not answer. He opened the belt and then untucked the dead man’s shirt and undershirt. These he pulled up, and he struggled with them, fighting to get them off the man’s body.
Ryan was sickened. He shouted, “Oxley! Why the hell are you—”
Ryan stopped shouting when he saw the tattoos.
The man was covered in them, all over his chest and stomach and neck and arms.
On his shoulders were tattooed epaulets; there was a Madonna and Child on his left pectoral, an Iron Cross below his Adam’s apple, the image of a dagger piercing his neck.
Ryan could not make sense out of any of them, but he could make a guess. “Russian mob?”
“I’d say so,” said Oxley. He ran his hand across the man’s stomach. A large tattoo that depicted some sort of grouping of stones, seven in all, took up the width of the man’s torso.
“He is Seven Strong Men.”
He motioned to the other tattoos on the man’s body. “The dagger in the neck means he killed in prison, the epaulets on the shoulder means he holds—he held—rank in the Seven Strong Men, like a lieutenant. The Iron Cross means he doesn’t give a bleeding shit about anyone. The Madonna means he’s religious, Russian Orthodox, although he’s Russian-assassin religious, which isn’t terribly religious, I don’t suppose.”
Oxley motioned to the other body. “Your turn, lad.”
Jack grimaced, then moved over to the other body and pulled the jacket and shirt off. This man was as festooned with ink as the other man, and he had the same Seven Strong Men tattoo on his lower torso.
“Why are these Seven Strong Men after you?” Jack asked.
“The same reason they are after you, I guess.”
“Which is?”
“Lad, I don’t have a fucking clue. I’ve had no run-ins with Russian mafia. Ever.”
“You think the guys that jumped me today were part of the same group?”
“Did they have little banana knives?”
“One had a small hooked blade. Is that what you mean?”
“Yep. Seven Strong Men.”
Jack could not fathom it. “Here? In the UK?”
“Of course they are here. London is Londongrad, after all. My God, if you are not as dense as your daddy.”
Jack sat back in the chair. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you such an asshole?”
Oxley just shrugged and sipped tea.
Jack was still trying to find some sort of connection between his work at Castor and Boyle and the past of Victor Oxley. The fact he had been under surveillance since before his father had mentioned Bedrock meant that the two situations were related somehow, or else it was one hell of a coincidence, and Jack had been at this game long enough that he naturally leaned to the former. One question occurred to him: “How do you know all this about Russian prison tattoos?”
Oxley looked at Ryan. For several seconds there was no sound in the flat except for the ticking of some unseen clock, but with a shrug the white-haired Brit reached to his waist, grabbed hold of his threadbare sweater, and pulled it up.
Jack saw now. Victor Oxley did not have the Seven Strong Men tattoo on his torso, but he wore an incredible amount of ink nonetheless. There were stars and crosses and daggers, and a skull with a teardrop and a dragon, all just on the small portion of the big man’s chest and belly he’d exposed to Ryan.
Jack said, “You were in a gulag?”
Oxley lowered his shirt and reached for his mug of tea. “Where the hell you think I learned the bad manners you keep complaining about?”
62
Oxley finished his tea sitting over the dead bodies of the two Russian mafia hit men, then rose from the table and began slowly pacing the little room; each time he arrived at the windows over the road out front, he glanced through the curtains. Jack’s mug had cooled somewhat on the table next to him, but he hadn’t touched it.
For the past few minutes, Jack had tried questioning Oxley, although the Englishman’s answers had remained vague and evasive.
“When did you leave SAS?”
“Eighties.”
“And you joined MI5?”
“Don’t know where you heard that.”
“When were you in the gulag?”
“Long time ago.”
“When did you return to the UK?”
“Long time ago.”
Jack growled in frustration. He was not nearly as calm as the older man was. “You have a problem being specific, don’t you?”
“It’s all ancient history.”
“It might have been ancient history until the Russian mafia kicked in your door, but these dead guys indicate to me that your past is pretty damn relevant to the present.”
A phone started ringing on one of the bodies, but Oxley ignored it. Instead, he said, “Go home. Leave me be.”
“I can’t just leave. You aren’t safe here.”
“You going to protect me, are you? Look, as far as I can tell you are the reason these gents came kicking in my door.”
“The next crew might have guns, you know.”
“Seven Strong Men doesn’t use guns. Not in the UK, anyway.”
“That’s the first good news
I’ve heard today.”
“They don’t need guns. They favor knives, metal truncheons, that sort of thing. They work in pairs or teams of three or more. They are right brutes.”
Jack said, “What are you planning on doing with these bodies?”
Oxley shrugged. “I’ve got a saw and a bathtub and some garbage bags. I can make this problem go away.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am serious. I ain’t going to the police. I live a very quiet life, forgotten by my government, and that’s the way I like it. The moment the British government learns Russian gangsters are trying to kill me, then I will become interesting to them again.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything is wrong with that. The British government are the people who turned on me.”
“Turned on you?”
Oxley stopped in the middle of the room. “Turned on me.” He walked back to look out the curtains for a moment, then paced across the floor, all the way to the little kitchen. He turned around and walked back in the other direction.
Jack knew the man was trying to figure out what to do. Jack himself was thinking about the dead men, and what this would mean for him. There was no way he could hide this, but revealing this to his father would put an end to Jack’s time here in London. He’d be on a plane before nightfall, or else a Secret Service protection detail would be sent over from the embassy to keep him company 24/7.
Shit.
As Ryan considered his own predicament, he noticed Oxley had stopped his pacing. Now he stood at the front window, looking down into the street.
Jack said, “Listen. We’ve got to come up with a plan here.”
Oxley did not reply.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
“I don’t like you.”
“You don’t even know—”
Oxley stepped back from the window, shielding himself behind the wall. “No, lad, I don’t know you, but I will sign a truce with you for the time being, because I also don’t know the two bastards that just climbed out of a car at the end of my street. I do believe they are on their way here to check on their mates.”
“Shit.” Jack stood quickly. “More Russians?”
Oxley shrugged. “Dunno. You piss anyone else off of late? These two out front are coming fast. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have at least one more heading up the back stairs. Make yourself useful and check it out.”
Ryan leapt up, pulled a small knife out of a drawer in the kitchen. Oxley pulled a pair of brass knuckles out of the pocket of his trousers and slipped them on his hand.
Jack raced down the hallway toward the back of Oxley’s little building, and here he looked out the window. The back garden had just enough room for a few washing lines and a car park large enough for four vehicles. Jack scanned the tiny car park and the linens hanging over the garden, but he did not see anyone approaching the rear of the building. He checked the other back gardens on the street, looking for any threats, but he saw nothing. Quickly, he turned to run back up the hall to Oxley’s place to help him with the two men heading there, but he’d taken only a couple of steps when he heard footfalls on the rear stairwell.
Whoever was coming for Oxley was already in the building. From the sound, Jack determined there were two of them, they were big, and they were ascending the stairs quickly.
Jack flattened his back to the wall in the hallway next to the entrance to the stairwell, and he held the carving knife in his right hand.
A man stepped into view on Jack’s right; he was surprisingly big, but his attention had been focused on the flat at the front of the building where Oxley lived. Jack took advantage of this and fired out a left jab just as the man turned in his direction. The blow took the big man in the jaw and snapped his head back; he rocked back into the second man out of the stairwell, but before Jack could execute a second attack, both men were charging forward again.
Jack saw the knives almost instantly. Both Russians swung their short blades at him in the hall; Jack ducked left, went low and raised back up between the attackers, then struck out with his own knife and felt the tip of his blade sweep across the outside of the first man’s right shoulder.
The man grabbed at his wound and cried out, but the second attacker moved past him and stabbed at Jack. Jack parried the strike away with his left hand, and realized at the same instant that he needed more room to maneuver. His back was to the door of the flat next to Oxley’s, so he donkey-kicked the door as hard as he could when the two Russians both lunged at him again, waving their blades.
The door flew in; Jack fell backward against it and tumbled on his back to the floor, dropping his knife in the process.
The men were above him now, and he kicked the wounded man in the inside of his knee, buckling the joint and sending him crashing to the floor.
Behind him, an elderly woman called out, not screaming in fear—rather, she was yelling in anger at the intrusion. Jack did not look back at her; all his attention was focused on dealing with the two knives sweeping the air toward him. He rolled to his right, just avoiding the curved blade of the second attacker, and as he shot back to his feet, he immediately had to spin away from a whipping blade.
The attacker missed, spun almost all the way around after his wild swing, and Jack stomped down on the back of the man’s leg, dropping him to his knees.
The second Russian struggled to climb back up off the floor. Jack could hear the woman shouting, as well as angry screams in Russian from the thug, but he concentrated on the closest armed man, who was now on his knees, facing away from him. Jack dove onto the man’s back, slamming him face-first into the floor. He took the Russian’s head in his hands and banged it down again, knocking the young Russian out cold.
The other man was up now, and Jack had his back to him. Jack knew his only defense was to leap back up to his feet and run out of the little flat. He did this, sprinting back into the hallway, and he heard the armed man right on his heels. Jack stopped in the hallway, dropped low, and spun around with a sweeping kick to the running man’s legs. The Russian was caught by surprise, and he fell onto Jack just outside the doorway.
Ryan and the Russian rolled around on the hallway floor, both men struggling desperately for the curved knife.
—
Victor Oxley had met the two men racing up to his flat when they were still in the front stairwell. His swing of the brass knuckles took the first man at the top of the stairs in the jaw and sent him tumbling all the way back down to the ground floor in a crumpled heap.
But the second man leapt to the right so his partner wouldn’t take him down in his fall, and then he continued to the top of the stairs, his knife out in front of him, maneuvering for an opening to stab the big fifty-nine-year-old Briton.
“Davay! Davay!” Oxley shouted at the younger Russian mafia assassin. Come on! Come on! The Russian was wary, clearly afraid to commit to a lunging attack with the knife against the bigger man with the bloody brass knuckles on his fist.
But finally he did come on. He stepped onto the landing with the first swing of the knife. He went for Oxley’s chest but struck nothing but air. Oxley took the opportunity to strike out himself, but his right hook missed its target as well.
Another jab by the knife caught the loose arm of Oxley’s sweater, cutting it through but missing flesh. Oxley threw himself at his attacker, slamming into him, chest to chest, using his left hand to keep the threatening knife from plunging into him. There on the landing between the ground floor and the first floor the two men, one in his early twenties, the other nearly sixty, wrestled in a bear hug. Oxley could not bring the brass knuckles into action because his arm was held up by the Russian, and the Russian could not put his knife to use because his wrist was held down by the Englishman.
Finally, Oxley got the man in the corner of the landing, and then, with brute strength and intense effort, he scooted the man across the three feet of wall to where he was pressed with his back t
o the plate-glass window overlooking the street from the landing. The attacker looked back over his shoulder quickly, realizing the danger he was in, but all he could do was try to pull his knife arm free of the vise-grip clench of Victor Oxley’s left hand.
The two men made brief eye contact. The Russian was afraid, the Englishman, exhausted but resolute.
Victor Oxley slammed his forehead into the face of the Russian assassin, and he kept pressing with it until the window glass shattered behind the Russian’s head, his head carried on back out the window, and the jagged glass below his neck cut into him, digging through skin and muscle and stabbing between cervical vertebrae, where the sharp glass then stabbed his spinal cord.
The knife fell from his hand, and Oxley let go, pushed off the man, then stepped back away from him.
The Russian flailed for a moment, eyes wide in terror and in pain, but then he fell off the broken glass and collapsed to the floor in an expanding pool of blood. Bloody broken glass rained down on his dying body as the window shattered completely and fell in.
Oxley reached out and put his hand on the banister to keep from collapsing. His heart felt like it could rip out of his chest with its next powerful beat. He sucked in a deep lungful of air, and only when he held it in did he hear a noise below him on the ground floor. He looked down to the bottom of the stairs and saw the man he’d punched in the face a minute earlier. Remarkably, the man had made it back to his feet, and now he stood there, wobbling a little, and he raised something out away from his body, pointing it at the big Englishman on the landing.
Oxley cocked his head. Slowly he raised his hands when he realized it was a gun.
A gun?
Oxley saw the muscles tighten in the neck of the Russian as he began to squeeze the trigger, then Oxley looked up quickly, above the gunman, alerted by sudden movement there.
Jack Ryan, Jr., appeared at the railing on the first-floor landing and launched himself over the banister, dropping ten feet straight down to the gunman below him. He crashed onto the man just as a wild shot rang out. Oxley lurched back; he thought he’d been hit at first, so loud and percussive was the crack of the bullet in the enclosed stairwell.