Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

“Don’t bother trying anything,” Natasha told Saltanat, and I could see her finger tense on the trigger. “I’ve no quarrel with you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t kill you if I have to.”

Natasha reached into her shoulder bag, pulled out an envelope, threw it toward Saltanat.

“A little present for you,” she said. “Just to show the noble boyfriend you’ve hooked up with.”

I didn’t need to see to know that the envelope contained prints of the photos Natasha had taken while I was unconscious, my face buried in her hair, my hands placed around her waist.

“I hope you’ll take these as proof that Akyl really isn’t worth dying for. Pretty much like all men really, wouldn’t you say?”

I watched Saltanat roll over, open the envelope, flick through the photos, her face expressionless, revealing nothing.

“If you want to stay and die with him, it’s your call. But if I were you, I’d walk out of this room, catch a cab and then the next flight to Tashkent. I don’t recommend you go anywhere where Tynaliev has jurisdiction.”

Saltanat stuffed the photos back into the envelope, placed it carefully on the pillow, saying nothing. She nodded her head, asking permission to get up. Natasha took a couple of steps back, keeping the gun aimed at Saltanat’s head. Saltanat flexed her shoulders as she stood up, her hands well away from her body, always the professional.

There didn’t seem to be anything worth saying. Asking Saltanat to disbelieve the evidence of her own eyes wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want her final memory of me to be that of a whining coward. If I had only minutes to live, I hoped I could manage to die with a scrap of dignity.

In the mirror I watched Saltanat walk to the door. She stared at me for a moment with eyes as dead and lifeless as stones, gave an almost imperceptible shrug, opened the door and walked out of my life, what remained of it.

I’d gambled and lost, and now the croupier was demanding that I pay the bill.

“You’re not going to cut me the same deal?” I asked, determined to keep the tremor out of my voice.

“I can’t risk it, Akyl,” Natasha replied, and I wondered if there was the faintest hint of sadness in her voice. “I know you’d be perpetually after me, bankrolled by Mikhail. If taking the money is my revenge for how he treated me, then his revenge would be to set his bloodhound on my trail. If he doesn’t kill you when you report your failure, that is.”

I could see the logic in her argument, and Natasha’s assessment of Tynaliev’s likely reaction to my failure was all too believable.

Maybe my Tatar genes predispose me to anger, but I felt rage rather than resignation. Central Asians are not as fatalistic as people think, and I certainly had no plans to die on my knees and shot in the head.

But even as I planted my hands on the desk and started to pull myself to my feet, I heard the apartment door open. Before I could turn, the bullet hit me in the small of my back, just above my kidneys, with all the force of a hammer blow, knocking me back down, slamming my head down onto the desk.

And I realized that death, like life, often happens when you’re thinking about something else.

In the past I’ve used my Makarov to take away more than one life, but this time it saved mine. By pulling myself to my feet, I had caused Natasha to miss the head shot she was aiming for, and her bullet smashed into the butt of the gun I’d tucked into the back of my belt. My kidneys felt as if I’d been kicked by an extremely annoyed horse, and I could feel warm blood trickling down to my waist.

Almost fainting with the pain, I managed to haul myself onto hands and knees, to crawl to the bathroom, where I could inspect the damage. I’d never wear my shirt again, that was certain, but as far as I could tell, the gun had taken most of the impact before shattering and driving metal fragments into shallow cuts across my back. Nothing that was going to kill me, although I didn’t think I’d be doing any sit-ups for a while.

I stood under a shower as hot as I could bear it, washing away the blood, before wrapping a towel around my back and stomach, fastening it tight with the surgical tape in my bag. Not an elegant solution, and I’d have to have my back properly cleaned and maybe stitched in the near future, but effective for now.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to find Natasha once she got to the airport, but if I went to the apartment she’d been renting, maybe I could trail her from there. I was getting ready to leave when I noticed one of the pillows on the bed was askew. I lifted it and saw Saltanat’s gun; somehow she’d managed to reach and hide it, all under Natasha’s gaze. Mind you, I hadn’t noticed her do it either. I checked the gun was loaded, pocketed it, headed for the door. That’s the difference between professionals and amateurs; eventually the amateurs get caught out by their lack of tradecraft. And then they die.

I did my best not to wince or hobble as I walked through the hotel lobby and out to the taxi rank, gave the driver directions, then sat forward so my back wasn’t pressed against the seat. It wasn’t the pain that bothered me as much as the possibility of opening the wounds again and bleeding through my last clean shirt.

In spite of my precautions, the driver drove as if he were in a grand prix, and I was slammed against the seat back repeatedly. As we barreled through the streets, I couldn’t help thinking of my ambivalence about Natasha. I obviously couldn’t forget the bullet she’d meant for my brain, but I also knew what a bastard Tynaliev was. You don’t rise to his level without cutting a few legs off at the knees on your climb up the ladder. And once he’d tired of Natasha’s silicone charms, he’d dump her, and the expensive presents and glamorous trips would stop. Worse, no sane man would take up with the former mistress of a man like Tynaliev. Even if she was still breathing and walking, her life would be effectively over, watching the seasons fade from a cracked window in a shabby one-story farmhouse on the edge of nowhere.

I thought of the sort of decisions that weren’t really choices that Natasha had had to make in the past; I’d made a few like that myself in my time. And that was when I knew what I had to do.

I told the driver to park across the street and wait. He started to complain that he was losing money, but I showed him what a fifty-dollar bill looked like. He stared at it, looked at my eyes, which didn’t blink or leave his face, decided to shut up.

We waited for almost an hour, and then Natasha flagged down a taxi as the apartment block guard struggled out with two large suitcases. He put them in the trunk of the taxi, took the tip that Natasha waved in the air without looking at him, nodded, went back inside.

“Don’t tell me, follow that taxi,” the driver said. A comedian. But I wasn’t in the mood for a movie wise guy, so I threw him the stare and crumpled the fifty in my hand. We followed Natasha’s taxi. I was watching the road signs and, as I’d assumed, Natasha was on her way to one of the three airport terminals.

I had no way of knowing which one but guessed Terminal Three, the one that services Emirates. I assumed she intended putting as much distance between Dubai, Kyrgyzstan and herself as possible, maybe losing herself in New York and hiding out in Brighton Beach, where all the Russians live. The upside of that would be she could blend in, the downside that Tynaliev would probably have contacts there. Arrive, hole up for a couple of days and make an appointment for very expensive plastic surgery at some equally discreet clinic in Connecticut. A false passport to add to the one she was traveling under, and then she was home free to go anywhere on the planet.