Russell Blake - Jet

Grigenko paused to savor the taste of the clear, pungent fluid, appreciating the burn as it trickled down his throat. After another drag of smoke, he turned and retired to the brown leather sectional he’d had specially built with additional lumbar support for his aching back. Such luxuries were perquisite for one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia. His empire spanned the globe with a web of companies, most of them concentrated near home, but some in obscure, far-flung reaches. An oligarch who operated at the highest levels of the administration, his ex-KGB background had ensured his good fortune once the wall came down. Everyone running the country was ex-KGB, and the plum opportunities had landed in the laps of a rarified club, of which he was a proud member.

He stabbed a button on a remote, and one section of the wood-paneled wall slid aside, revealing a seventy-five-inch flat screen television. His finger hovered over the power button, hesitating. Why torture himself?

Because it was time.

He powered the system on, and the LCD flickered to life.

Grainy static appeared, then a fixed image of a driveway, with a slight fishbowl effect from lens distortion, filled the screen. The color footage was clear — amazingly so. The very latest technology camera had filmed it, no expense spared.

There was no sound. At the far edge of the field of vision, he saw motion, a man falling backwards into the view, fifty yards away from the camera, which was mounted at a high elevation, perhaps fourteen feet off the ground. The rusty spray of the man’s blood was plainly visible in the night’s lighting if one paused and enlarged that area, Grigenko knew, but he saw no point in doing so again. He could manipulate the images as much as he wanted, enhancing the luminescence, zooming to the point where he could read the numbers on a key. He had done it all, and then some. He knew everything there was to find.

Then he saw it. There. As he had seen hundreds of times before. A blur of motion. A figure, all in black, moving with unexpected speed and agility. One moment, the area was empty, the next a streak of movement as the figure sped to the rear entrance underneath the camera. A second later, the stream went back to static.

Then the final scene of the familiar drama, the one that Grigenko savored like a fine wine. He had watched it at least a thousand times. Yet another view, this one a hallway, the camera hidden in a molding, he’d been told later. Same incredible resolution.

An interior door. Stationary. Old looking, the joinery and carvings distinctly antique. A time code played along the bottom, counting off tenths of seconds.

The door opened, and a black-clad figure stepped out, blood smeared plainly across its torso, the head cloaked in a balaclava, features hidden by the black fabric — except for the eyes. The figure moved stealthily, softly, footsteps precise, a pistol gripped in one hand.

And then it happened.

The figure looked up at the camera.

For a brief instant, less than a heartbeat, a nano-second, the lens peered into the figure’s soul even as it gazed blankly at something it didn’t know was there. He had been told that the clandestine camera was so skillfully hidden that nobody could have recognized it — incorporated into the ornately fabricated molding that ringed the ceiling of the hall. But every time he saw that piece of footage, he felt like the figure was staring at him, with full understanding that he was watching. An illusion, he understood. Impossible. And yet he was always struck by the same sensation. He felt compelled to stop the show at that point, freezing the image of the watched, watching the watcher. Even if paused, when most footage would have gotten blurrier, this was such high digital resolution that he could enlarge it until he was a tenth of an inch off the eye’s surface without visible degradation.

The moment stretched uneasily as Grigenko studied the figure, searching for something he’d missed, something he hadn’t seen. As he always did, he eventually pushed ‘play’, his scrutiny having revealed nothing new.

Then it was over. The figure moved out of the frame, leaving only bloody boot prints on the richly carpeted floor.

Grigenko swallowed the remainder of his drink as the screen went black, the montage finished. He raised himself from the couch with a lurch and walked back to the table and the bottle.

It would be another long night if he allowed himself to perpetuate this, he knew from harsh experience. Still, knowing and doing were two different things. He poured himself a healthy soak of vodka, fished another cigarette from the pack, and returned to his seat.

Later, he would stagger to his ornately appointed bedroom where his latest conquest, a seventeen-year-old Bolshoi ballet sensation, waited patiently for his advances. Irena could soothe the brutalized animal in him like nobody he’d ever met, which made her both irresistible and dangerous. She had a power over him he feared for its intensity — he couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted someone like he wanted her. It was like a disease. A sickness; an addiction.

Still, he had chosen to watch his little movie instead of availing himself of her passionate charms. For the moment, anyway.

He settled back down and picked up the remote, cueing the playback to start at the beginning again, taking another burning swallow as the screen flickered to life, the phantom that tormented him shimmering on the wall in a kabuki dance that transfixed him every time he watched it, jaw clenching unconsciously, teeth grinding with barely controlled rage.

Three Years Ago, Belize, Central America

The chopper’s blades sliced through the damp atmosphere, thumping a hypnotic beat as the aircraft hovered fifteen hundred feet above the jungle treetops north of Spanish Lookout. The five passengers gazed intently through the windows at the topography below — referring to their bound reports, making discreet notes in the borders, exchanging glances before returning to their study of the land.

The pilot was flying in a methodical grid pattern so that the group could better appreciate the area in which they’d spent the last six months. Professor Calvin Reynolds, a rail-thin man with a largely bald head and round, steel-rimmed spectacles, pointed to a small clearing in the distance.

“There’s A-7. Looks pretty remote from this far up, doesn’t it?”

They slowly drifted towards the site, climbing another few hundred feet in an effort to find calmer air — the heat rising from the earth was creating unpredictable updrafts, resulting in an uncomfortable ride, and the pilot was sensitive to providing as pleasant a trip as possible.

A swarthy, heavyset man wiped his neck with a red bandana and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, obviously ill at ease. The occasional turbulence from thermal drafts wasn’t helping; every time the helicopter jolted, he clutched the sides of his seat with a hawkish grip. He hated flying, but especially hated helicopters. He’d read about their aerodynamics, or rather their lack of them. As far as he was concerned, they were death traps — a conviction that Reynolds ribbed him about mercilessly.

“It looks that way because it’s in the middle of nowhere. I don’t care if I never see the place again, frankly,” he declared in a tone of disgust.

Oscar Valenzuela was a highly competent geologist with over twenty-five years of experience in Central America, but one of his personality quirks was that he complained incessantly about everything. His colleagues had long ago grown used to it, but not so his first and second wives, who eventually couldn’t stomach his worldview and moved on to more palatable possibilities. Oscar threw the pilot an evil glare, as though the turbulence was a personal slight, and swallowed with difficulty, his complexion decidedly pasty.