Clean Slate

  “But you want me dead.” Andrei’s tone was neutral, not accusatory.

  “Nothing personal,” Chris said, knowing how bullshit that sounded. “You were an objective I was ordered to handle.” He stared down into his cup, then looked up. “It probably doesn’t mean much coming from me, but I’m glad John insisted we save you. You don’t seem like such a bad guy.”

  Andrei nodded, then got up and stood by John. Chris hated the way the Russian rubbed John’s back. Hated worse the way John leaned into his touch.

  “So, where do we stand?” Chris asked. “With GORGON, I mean,” he added quickly. “Are we busted down to being desk jockeys?”

  “There will be a ‘review’ of the case. It would be very, very good if Andrei could remember. Professionally too. They really want to know what Andrei knows, to make the expenses we racked up worthwhile.” John smiled up to Andrei for a moment. “But we can play for time. Your leg gives us a couple weeks, and Andrei can get checked up by every specialist we can rope into this. Maybe by then, we find the key that unlocks his memory. Then all this would have been worth it, and we could progress with this. But right now, we’re a bit fucked.”

  “Yeah. ‘Results, results, results’,” Chris quoted their supervisor. “But since we’re here, we could show Andrei the tapes and photos. They might jog his memory. You okay to do that, Andrei? Do some real forensic work?”

  Andrei paused, but then nodded. “I want to know just as badly as you do.”

  John smiled at them both. “For now, at least, we’re still on the company expense account, so we could rent a suite and get moving on ‘Operation Memory’.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  John frowned. “Chris—”

  “I need to take a piss before we go.”

  Chris limped his way to the restroom and stood with his back to the door. Great, stuck even longer watching the lovefest between John and Andrei. Maybe he’d just go see the boss himself and get off this case. He’d even volunteer for desk duty, maybe someplace back in the States or in London. Yeah, he hadn’t been there in ages.

  Not since he was assigned there on a quick case and met up with John.

  Breathing a tired sigh, he rested his head back against the door.

  Someone outside gave the door a push.

  “Wait a minute!” Chris went to the urinal and took care of business. When he moved to the sink, John’s reflection stared at him from behind.

  “There must be another fucking toilet in the building,” Chris muttered, and he tried to get past him, but John moved into his way. Chris knew from experience that in hand-to-hand, John was his equal at the best of times, and now, his leg being fucked and all….

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “John, please. I’m tired. Just leave me alone.”

  “Is it because Andrei is right?”

  “Of course,” Chris sneered. “Your sweetheart is always right, isn’t he? He has you around his small finger. Is he that good at fucking you?”

  John stared at him, then shook his head. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do I treat you any different? Just because….”

  “Because what?” Chris could almost hear it in the air between them. Because I love him. Sappy idiot. “You don’t need me for that. Just hole up with him and check photos and tapes and whatever. I have nothing to add.”

  “Chris, you’re my partner, my teammate, and—”

  “And that’s the fucking problem.” Chris moved forward, daring John to remain standing in his way. And finally John stepped to the side, unwilling to actually fight him.

  Chris stopped at the door and turned. “You two get a room. I’ll take care of myself.”

  Chapter 8

  John seemed thoughtful and withdrawn. It did feel strange to not have Chris with them, his constant acidic humor and American bluster. Andrei felt bad for the American, but that was a project for another day. Andrei liked to tackle large problems one after the other, and the biggest one was his memory loss.

  Bullet, not car crash. That was a one-in-a-million shot, and he knew it, but from where, he had no idea. The shape and nature of the human skull made it near impossible to project where a bullet would go and how much damage it would do and where. He could just as easily be brain dead now or pissing into a bag fastened to a wheel chair. Against that knowledge, holding a grudge against Chris seemed a waste of energy. He was just lucky to be alive and in possession of most of his critical faculties.

  And Chris had protected him. As an asset, a “job,” but in the end, he was alive because these two men had saved him and kept him alive against enemies he hadn’t even known were after him. The nature of his enemy was as mysterious as his resources. Enough to have Monte Carlo swarm with gunmen who didn’t give a fuck about local police.

  John put the box on the couch table in front of the TV. “I’ll order some room service,” he said after he’d switched on the TV. While on the phone, he took a DVD from the box and slid it into the recorder, handing the remote to Andrei.

  Andrei settled in, a notepad on his knee, pen poised.

  The images on the screen were from security cameras. Men in dark suits leaving buildings, getting into cars, getting out of cars, heading into buildings. One of them, Andrei found with a little start, was him. He was wearing a severe dark suit and his hair nearly reached his shoulders. A strange look, a bit greasy, he thought.

  Photos in a restaurant in London. Goddamned London CCTV. They must have had excellent connections to get that amount of coverage on anybody. He thought he remembered the place. Nobu? Japanese? Overpriced? He noted down. The other man gave him chills. Shaved head, goatee. Andrei remembered the feel of a machete against his skin. He pressed the pause button, even though that froze the man on the screen. “Him. He’s… that’s him.”

  “Are you sure?” John asked, regarding the man on the screen with a neutral expression that seemed entirely too unimpressed.

  “Yes. Who is he?”

  “Yevgenij Nicolayevich Zaitsev. Corporate crime lord and former right-hand man of an oligarch called Fedor Liushin.”

  “The oligarch they murdered in London a few months ago?”

  John gave him a long look. “You remember that?”

  “Of course. It was….” Important, Andrei wanted to add, but he had no idea why.

  “It’s just that it wasn’t murder, but a heart attack.”

  Andrei snorted. “Yeah right. Tell me more. Zaitsev is behind this? Why? What’s important about him?”

  “Zaitsev is on a number of suspected death lists for—don’t laugh—tax evasion.”

  “I’m not laughing.” Andrei remembered the man’s voice, his cold stare. Tax. That rang a bell somewhere in the mostly empty corridors of his mind. “Whose death lists?”

  John gave a deep sigh. “That’s not that easy to determine. Let’s say the Russian government has indicated they wouldn’t send condolences if somebody bumped him off. And there are enough corporate barons who’d be happy to curry favor with the Russian twin czars. Punishing this guy would be such a favor.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We suspect London, at the moment. That’s where they all are.” John studied his face. “What did you do for him?”

  “The way he intimidated me, anything. I did absolutely anything he wanted.”

  John reached over and touched his shoulder, slid it up to his neck, a reassuring touch. “What did he do?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Andrei only knew in the marrow in his bones nobody, not ever, had scared him so much. He looked away, rifled through the box, distributing photos on the table. High-res black and white photos of men, invariably men, in various combinations. Many of them looked familiar. “Who are those people?”

  “Connected in one way or other to Liushin and Zaitsev. His tax advisers, his lawyers, his associates, art dealers, henchmen. Some we’re working on, but they might have been one-offs.”

  “I’ve seen many of them before.?
??

  “Well, a few are now dead.” John pointed at four photos. “Heart attack, drowning, house burning, suicide.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Well, yeah.” John smiled a little. “You must have been important to be number five.”

  Andrei lapsed into thought, and John remained silent, not wanting to disrupt any memories he might be pulling free. His brow creased when he didn’t quite succeed. “Perhaps I was more inconvenient than important.”

  “Or a combination of both, eh?”

  “Perhaps.” He gave John’s hand a squeeze, which John returned.

  Nothing much came to him from viewing the rest of the DVD, and Andrei sat back in frustration. “I’m drawing blanks. All I know is that I was involved in that tax matter. What am I? A corrupt accountant?”

  “Are you sure you want to know and not remember on your own? Do you trust us that far?”

  “Not ‘them’, but you, yes.”

  “You’re a partner at one of the Magic Circle law firms based in London, with extensive experience working in the Moscow office.”

  “I must be smart, then, never mind utterly ruthless. A hotshot lawyer. God help me.” Andrei gave a short laugh. “Did you at least call in sick for me?”

  “You’re on a sabbatical. The current economic situation means there’s not quite as much work in your field as it was before the economy went tits-up, so taking a year off is no big deal.” John pointed at the box with the photos. “What we do know is that you worked for the Russian mob and possibly a couple oligarchs who have taken certain ‘liberties’. You helped your clients skirt certain legal boundaries with money they chose to invest outside Russia. The Russian government is doing anything and everything to claw back all tax money it can. In this case, we are still piecing together the whole picture.”

  Andrei clicked the remote to turn off the TV and gave the box and top documents a cursory look, but he set them aside to turn his attention back to John. “Why did you choose your career? You and Chris were sent to eliminate me, but obviously you couldn’t let nature finish the job those other assassins began….”

  “I didn’t choose GORGON as much as they chose me. I enjoy the challenge of it, the excitement of the situations we find ourselves in, but if I had it to do over—”

  A knock on the door and voice of a waiter announcing room service interrupted.

  Andrei smiled. “I am more intrigued.”

  Chris took a bite of his burger and waited for the light on the voice-activated transmitter to turn green. Yeah, it had been a bastard move to slip the listening device onto the cart, but really, what else but Fate had seen to it he and John had gotten the same room service waiter?

  It wasn’t as if he’d planned a way to spy on his partner and the Russian. This way of thinking and acting was ingrained, as natural to him now as breathing. Besides, it was the waiter’s fault. He shouldn’t have lingered or been so flirtatious when dropping off a burger and small carafe of wine.

  He was the reason Chris’s thoughts roamed to Andrei turning that same come-on grin to John, who’d let himself become too attached to the Russian.

  If the waiter hadn’t lingered, Chris wouldn’t have noticed the menu card with John’s room number and been tempted. It wasn’t as if he’d sought out John’s whereabouts. That he could blame on the chatty blonde desk clerk he’d spent a weekend with his last time in Paris.

  The rationalizing came to an abrupt end once two familiar voices came through Chris’s earpiece.

  Where were we? Ah. You say the organization found you? How so?

  It figured the Russian would lead off with a variation of the trite old “What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?” line.

  I was in my last year at Oxford; experimental psychology was my focus. Each year at the start of the term, there had been one or two scattered incidents: women in the area attacked with no apparent connection. The first time it happened, I’d been passing the area while it was still being investigated. I’d got an impression, feelings, jumbled, fright mingled with cold calculation. I didn’t think much of it. But then it happened again with the second incident, and again at the start of the following year. I went to the police. They investigated me for a bit, then brushed me off entirely once I proved not to be a suspect or know any potential suspects.

  So you eventually beat the police at their own game?

  Chris frowned and took a drink of his wine. He could almost see that sexy grin of Andrei’s generous mouth and that sparkle in his pale eyes. John would be falling hard for that one-two punch. Bastard.

  Not really. The first girl assaulted that last year was the daughter of a GORGON supervisor. He actually listened to me, and with the random impressions I’d gotten, he had his team use their considerable resources to broaden the base of suspects. He let me observe interviews with those new people. The moment the perpetrator walked in the room, I knew she was the one responsible. I was supposed to simply observe, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking why she advised new young women in her department if she so loathed women being successful.

  It was like springing open a floodgate. The woman went on a verbal rampage and ended up implicating herself in similar crimes in other locations. The head of GORGON’s London office recruited me the following day.

  Chris was about to take another bite of his burger, but let it fall to the plate. John had never told him that story, and they’d been partners for two years. He ripped the ear piece out, then dropped it and the receiver to the floor. He polished off the wine, dressed, and took himself down to the hotel bar to properly drown his sorrows and ignore that annoying little voice that kept saying, He might have told you if you’d given him the chance—if you’d shown a genuine interest in his life.

  It didn’t make him feel better. He didn’t even want to pick up any of the patrons, even though a couple attempted to draw his attention away from the bottle. He didn’t want them, and most of all, he didn’t want to blubber to them about a loss if he’d never had it in the first place. That would have been just too pathetic, even in this little pity-party he was hosting for himself and the bottle.

  God, Chris, when did you turn that way? He’d never needed anybody. He was great on his own. He made decisions, got stuff done; he was an above-average operative in an organization full of freaks and specialists and James Bond wannabes. Two years, and then that Russian came along and messed up everything.

  The barkeeper approached him. Chris glanced up to tell him he was okay for the moment and didn’t want a second bottle yet, but the barkeeper only offered him a phone. For you, he mouthed.

  Chris took it. “Yeah.”

  “I have a suggestion to make. You could become a very rich man today.” The voice had a faint Russian accent. And it certainly wasn’t the voice of Andrei Voronin.

  “I’ve got enough money, thanks.”

  “A meeting could be mutually beneficial in many ways, Mr. Gibson.”

  God help him, he was just drunk enough and bored enough to be intrigued. “Let’s meet.”

  “My driver will pick you up in five minutes.”

  That gave him enough time to get his Beretta.

  The car pulled up exactly five minutes later, and a uniformed driver opened the door for him. Paris at night was even more gorgeous: all the worn, faded bits were blanked out by darkness. They drove towards the city center, the Eiffel tower looming, shadowing the surroundings, at once elegant and strangely out of proportion, with nothing around it rivaling it for height. Tourists were still idly wandering between its feet, and that was also where the driver pointed Chris. A meeting in public—no doubt to make him feel safe.

  A man stood there, looking toward him, just taking another drag from a cigarette. Bald, goatee, a short, solid man who looked like he could turn violent in an instant.

  “Mr. Gibson, I’m glad you could make it.” He gave a cursory smile.

  Chris nodded. No point bothering with the feigned niceties of a handshake. ??
?Good evening, Mr.…?”

  “Zaitsev will suffice.”

  It would be something obviously fake like that.

  “Let’s walk, shall we?”

  Chris did a quick scan of the immediate area as he turned to follow Zaitsev. One goon at three o’clock, two more at nine. All bigger and burlier than their boss and armed. “Let’s cut to the chase, Zaitsev. What do you want from me?”

  The Russian flicked his cigarette away. “I love the directness of you Americans.” He nodded. “Cut through the shit and get to business is the way I like it. You—and I mean ‘you’ in a general way—have something I want.” Zaitsev smiled, seemingly aware of that cheap movie line. “Andrei Voronin. My side wants him back.”