Paul Christopher - Red Templar

Built-in nineteenth-century cupboards and shelves covered the walls, which were painted a uniform sallow cream color. One area of open wall six feet wide and eight feet high had been painted flat white, for some unknown reason.

Outside the bustling street seemed to be a combination farmer’s market, tailgate junk sale and pickup stroll for hookers. According to Gennadi, the party went on twenty-four/seven and drew no ethnic or religious borders. Jews, Asians, locals and anyone else sold whatever people wanted. Gennadi specialized in selling documents.

Bondarenko had been born on the Lower East Side of New York in the old Ukrainian part of the city and spent most of the first fifteen years of his life in a fourth-floor walk-up on Second Avenue. In 1999, his grandparents from Odessa had died, leaving the family farm to his parents. The parents went home, and with nothing else to do the young teenage Gennadi had been forced to go along with them.

Now he was what his mother and father called a charter member of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Brotherhood, a colloquial term for the Russian-Ukrainian-Georgian crime family run by the Solntsevskaya gang out of Moscow. Bondarenko denied it, but the tattoos of crowned skulls and ornate stars that covered both arms told a different story. Now in his late twenties, Bondarenko was lean, with a shaved head, hooked nose and dark, suspicious eyes.

“Five thousand dollars U.S. for everything,” he said, sprawled on the big couch smoking an evil-smelling Veraya cigarette. Natasha was curled up beside him, a vision swelling out of bulging silver hot pants and a red Victoria’s Secret push-up bra. She was either sleeping off a drunk or stoned out of her mind. Bondarenko used her large, upthrust hip as an armrest.

“I don’t have that kind of cash on me,” said Holliday. “I’d have to go to a bank. Besides, I’d like to see what I’m getting first.”

“Not a problem, bro,” said the Ukrainian thug. “I take Visa, MasterCard, Carte Bleue.”

Using Natasha’s ample rear end to brace himself, Bondarenko levered himself off the big couch and disappeared from the room. When he returned he had a fistful of various passports. He sat down on a bar stool at the eating island and spread them out. Holliday picked one up at random. It was a genuine U.K. passport in the name of Simon Toyne, London resident at 2 °Cheyne Walk. Holliday knew London well enough to know that Simon had big bucks; Cheyne Walk was for big-time high rollers, often in the music or the writing game. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the English poet, had once lived there, as had Henry James, George Eliot and Mick Jagger. Holliday wondered what Simon did to make his pile, and also wondered how the rich man with the twinkling dark eyes and the slightly unnatural-looking silver hair had come to lose his passport in Odessa.

“U.K. is better for your Cuban pal than Puerto Rico. Lots of blacks in England these days. He speak any African?”

“Nenda kajitombe, mkundu,” said Eddie with a smile.

“I’m not even going to ask,” said Bondarenko. He picked up another passport, this one American. It belonged to a man named Michael Enright, a professorial-looking man about Holliday’s age, half-bald, with a silver-gray goatee and a pair of thick Harry Potter spectacles that made him look a little silly. Both the U.K. and U.S. passports were definitely genuine.

“Where do you get them?”

“I’ve got pickpockets at the train stations. Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg. Airports, too. I buy them wholesale: two hundred per. Kids work the whole railway system like Gypsies. It’s the only kind of work they can find these days.”

“How do you work all the electronics and the biometrics?”

“I toss out biometric ones, just keep the older ones. I’ve got a laminator in the back and a heat delaminator as well. I print out your picture on ultrathin Mylar and drop it in over the existing one. We leave everything else the same, name, age and all that.”

“All right,” said Holliday.

“Let’s see your plastic.”

Holliday reached into his wallet and took out the Carte Bleue card that he’d found in the safety-deposit box after reading Helder Rodrigues’s bloodstained notebook. He never got printed statements, and apparently the account it drew against was infinitely large. He handed the card to Bondarenko. “How long is this going to take?”

“No time at all. Half an hour or so. I’ll take your pictures and get right at it.”

“All right,” said Holliday.

Bondarenko stood up and then paused, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Where are you guys going?”

“Do you have to know that?”

“No, but it’s better if you don’t fly. The cops here are pretty uptight about airport security after all these crazy suicide bombings.”

Holliday thought about the Korovin.25 and the Stechkin APS he and Eddie were still carrying.

“What do you suggest?”

“Train. The cops at all the stations are usually local militsiya . Slobs. Except for Moscow, maybe. Everyone travels by train. You’ll fit in better.” He glanced at Eddie again. “If that’s possible,” he added.

“Okay.” Holliday nodded.

“While I’m doing the documents you should go down to the market and get some luggage, backpacks or something.” Bondarenko crossed the room, opened a cupboard and returned with a Nikon D3X. Now Holliday knew what the blank white space on the wall was for.

“Since you’re being so helpful, Gennadi, maybe you can get something else for us,” said Holliday.

“Yeah?”

“Ammunition. Twenty-five-caliber hollow-point and nine-millimeter Parabellum.”

Bondarenko gave Holliday a long, thoughtful look and nodded slowly. “Sure, I could do that, but if the militsiya or the OMON catch you, you never met me, okay?” The OMON were special police units stationed in every district. They were the Russian equivalent of an American SWAT team.

“Okay,” agreed Holliday.

“How much you want?”

Holliday thought about it for a second. The Stechkin on full auto went through bullets like popcorn. “Five hundred of the nine and a hundred of the twenty-five.”

“I can do that,” said Bondarenko. He paused again. “Just in case you and your friends are going through Belarus I’ll throw in the transit visas for nothing-it’s just a stamp.”

“Thanks,” answered Holliday. “If that’s everything, why don’t you get your credit card swiper and we’ll let you get to work.”

“No problem,” said the Ukrainian with a pleasant smile. “I can do it myself.”

“No, you can’t,” said Holliday. And he wasn’t smiling at all.

At six thirty-one that evening the three men carrying the passports and transit visas of Michael Enright, Simon Toyne and Andre Belekonev left the city of Odessa on Russian Railways train number twenty, the Pivdenny Express fast train to St. Petersburg. Thirty-four hours later, they arrived in the city of the czars.

Less than twelve hours after their departure, Gennadi Bondarenko and his girlfriend, Natasha Bohuslava Shtokalo, were found brutally murdered and their apartment ransacked. Bondarenko had been tortured savagely before he’d been killed by a bullet to the back of the head, and gaspazha Shtokalo had been raped a number of times before receiving the same treatment.

In a statement to the press, Odessa colonel of militsiya Yuriy Fedorovych Kravchenko stated that Gennadi Bondarenko was a well-known member of the criminal establishment and the murders were clearly gang related. In addition, robbery might well have been a motive, since there was some evidence that Bondarenko dealt in large amounts of cash. There had also been rumors that Bondarenko might have been soliciting for gaspazha Shtokalo’s services as a prostitute, although that had not as yet been confirmed.