Robert Tanenbaum - Bad Faith

“The love of Christ,” the man answered, praying that the password had not changed.

A moment later, another man stepped out of the shadows with his rifle pointed. “James? What are you doing here? You know David exiled you on pain of death!”

“I have important news for him, Brother Harvey,” James said.

“And what might that be?” Harvey replied before a fit of coughing took him.

“That his reign is over,” James snarled. “And so is your life.”

Harvey looked up just as a red beam intersected his chest. The bullet that followed knocked him to the ground, so that he ended up sitting in a puddle of dirty water with his back against the tunnel wall. “Judas,” he whispered.

“How’s it feel, Harvey?” James asked, squatting so that he could peer in the dying man’s eyes with a penlight. “What does it feel like to die?”

“Like freedom,” Harvey replied, and died with a smile on his lips.

The traitor James stood up, confused. He’d thought there would be more satisfaction; Harvey had been the one to escort him from Grale’s kingdom and kick him out onto the streets. But there wasn’t more time to think about it as two more men walked up behind him and stood looking down at the dead man.

“Now what?” James asked.

“We wait for Malovo and Rolles,” one of the men said, and looked at his watch. “They should be here any minute.”

James nodded. He’d been the third man at the meeting with Malovo in Bedford-Stuyvesant and felt important because of the role he’d been given. After being kicked out of the kingdom, he’d brooded over his exile, thinking of ways to get even. Then he remembered a conversation Grale had had with Harvey regarding Boris Kazanov and the Russian gangster’s ties to Malovo. So he went to Little Odessa in Brooklyn and let the word get out that he wanted to speak to Kazanov about “something worth a lot of money to Nadya Malovo.”

The gangster had found him shortly after and listened to his story about the man Grale kept captive in his lair, Andrew Kane. He convinced Kazanov that Malovo would be willing to pay millions for the information and assistance. The brutal Russian had taken it from there.

James found Malovo extremely attractive and fantasized about what sex would be like with the blond goddess. He was surprised and delighted when she started flirting with him, suggesting that one of his rewards would be an intimate one.

Waiting with the two NIDSA agents for word of the explosions from lower Manhattan, James imagined how grateful Malovo would be when he delivered her prize. When they heard the signals, he practically ran through the sewers and tunnels to reach the junction where they were to take out the guard and wait for the others.

The moment he was waiting for soon arrived when Malovo ran up. But there was no sign of Rolles.

“He’s dead,” Malovo answered truthfully when the agents asked why he was not with her. “That son of a bitch Jaxon shot him at the Fourteenth Street subway station. I barely escaped. But I heard the explosions; that part of the mission is complete.”

The two agents exchanged puzzled looks. “I don’t believe you,” one said, and raised his silenced submachine gun. But he never had a chance to pull the trigger before a bullet caught him in the mouth, killing him before he even fell to the ground.

The second agent was also too slow to react. He turned in the direction the bullet had come from but in doing so left himself exposed to Malovo, who thrust her knife up through the base of his skull and into his brain. His body spasmed and jerked before he, too, crumpled to the ground.

James watched the deaths of the two agents in terror. He backed up against the tunnel wall next to Harvey as two more men appeared out of the dark wearing night-vision goggles. “Please don’t kill me,” he squealed as Malovo turned toward him, blood dripping from her knife. “I helped you.”

“So you did,” Malovo said, “and for that reason, I am going to grant your wish and leave you here alive.”

Hope crept into James’s eyes. “Thank you, thank you,” he cried. “I’ll go now. I don’t need any other reward.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Malovo said with a harsh laugh. “But you weren’t listening. I said I would leave you here alive. I’m sure Grale will appreciate the gesture when he returns and finds his home and his people destroyed.” She turned to the other two men. “Tie him to the man he betrayed and let’s go.”

“But why?” James wailed.

“Because no one likes a traitor, James,” Malovo said, patting him on the cheek. “Not even the people he works for.”

James was still crying and pleading when Malovo and her two men left him. She’d needed him as the conduit to the other traitor who still lived with Grale to make sure that Kane hadn’t been moved. And he’d been handy for luring the guard from his secret spot; a man with a rifle in the dark could have held her team off indefinitely. She’d originally used two of her men posing as graffiti artists to probe the defenses of the underground community and had decided that she needed to use James to set the guard up. But she didn’t need him anymore.

The reason she didn’t was because she now knew the way to the inner sanctum of Grale’s lair courtesy of the new super hi-tech GPS chip in the cell phone that Bruce Knight had been given by his old boss. One of her men now led the way, holding a dim screen in front of his face that mapped their path in from those coordinates.

They traveled fast with their night-vision goggles and didn’t encounter anyone along the way. As they approached the cavern where Grale held court and where, according to James, the madman kept Kane chained to a bolt in the ground next to his throne, she and her men slowed down and then stopped at the entrance. All was dark inside; their goggles didn’t pick up a single living thing or any movement.

Malovo listened but there were no sounds other than the dripping of water on stone and the far-off rumble of a subway train. Cautiously she crept in, with her men following. She turned to the right, where, she’d been told, Grale kept his prisoner. That’s when she saw the tall robed figure rise from a chair, and the cowering creature next to him.

She raised the submachine gun she’d taken from Rolles’s man. But just as she was about to shoot, a blinding painful blast of light seared into her brain, stunning her.

Instantly, she knew what had happened. Someone had turned on a very bright light, overwhelming the night-vision goggles. She and her men tore the devices from their heads, but it did no good. They were essentially blind.

All three started shooting wildly in the direction they believed Grale had been standing, and then randomly about the cavern. It was of little use.

Malovo felt a net drop over her that quickly tightened, pinning her arms at her sides, while strong, rough hands grabbed her. As her vision returned, she looked down at the ground and saw her two accomplices lying in pools of blood, their throats slit.

Stunned, she looked up at the platform and saw three men who made her blood run cold. The first was her attorney Bruce Knight, who said, “I’m afraid I have to resign as your counsel.”

The second was Andrew Kane, who laughed insanely before blurting out, “Welcome to my nightmare!”

And the last was David Grale, who held up a collar and a leash. He pointed to the ground next to his overstuffed chair. “Make yourself at home; you’re going to be here for a while.”

Far above the cavern, Halloween trick-or-treaters and partygoers stopped in their tracks as a woman’s scream rose from the sewers and echoed down the subway tunnels. Many years later on Halloween nights, they would still be telling the tale of how their blood had curdled at that cry of sheer terror.