Don Pendleton - The Judas Project

Malenkov realized from the start that she was not just trying to scare him. She made him aware of this by making a token cut across the soft flesh of his stomach. Deep enough to make him bleed and feel the pain. Not enough to incapacitate him. As the warm rivulets of his blood settled in his groin, Malenkov realized he needed to make a swift decision.

Refuse to answer the woman’s questions and suffer further living pain, or tell her what she wanted and accept the bullet through the back of his skull that would end his life far quicker. He was under no illusion. One way or another, he was going to die today. The only question was whether he gave up the names of his partners and sent this woman after them, or tried to protect them and suffered by the knife in her hand. It was not much of a trade-off either way.

In the end Malenkov found out he was not so much of a man as he had anticipated. He gave up names and locations. He told her everything he knew. But not before Natasha Tchenko made him suffer because of his early resistance. Her use of the knife was crude, and Malenkov spilled a great deal of blood on the cellar floor. Whatever his resolve, it faded quickly, his pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears. So he gave her what he could, asking for her forgiveness. He did that with no sense of shame. Only because the pain he was enduring had to stop.

It did stop.

Suddenly and without warning. He experienced a sudden powerful impact to the back of his head, and before he even had time to realize what it was, the bullet from the gun in Natasha Tchenko’s hand ripped into his skull and reduced his brain to mush.

Tchenko returned to the main part of the house and made her way into the living room where she had finished her search earlier while waiting for Malenkov. She had found the laptop he had stored in a cupboard. Now she connected it to the power and ran the modem cable to the telephone socket. Once on the Net, she opened the link and tapped in her own password to access the OCD’s central computer database and ran a check on Malenkov. She had to utilize different strings before she pinned down his file. Her first attempts at getting deeper into the files were blocked. She had to employ her not inconsiderable computer skills to get around the blocks.

Interestingly she found herself in the FSB database and managed to extract data files before she was closed down. Despite her repeated efforts, Tchenko was unable to get back into the FSB computer. She had been locked out once her intrusion had been discovered and knew that a trace would already be in operation to find out where she had been working from. It would confuse Moscow when they learned she had been hacking in from an FSB link. She picked up a flash drive from the table beside the laptop and placed it in the USB port, quickly downloading the data she had saved. With the flash drive in her shoulder bag, Tchenko composed a short e-mail and mailed it to her OCD boss, Commander Valentine Seminov. She cleared the computer, making certain it was disconnected from the Internet, then pulled the modem and power plug.

Minutes later Tchenko let herself out of the house’s rear door. She walked along the cracked stone path, through the untended garden and out through the gate. The alley at the rear took her almost to the end of the street, where she rejoined the sidewalk, checking the area. No one saw her leave the house, as no one had noticed her original entry to the building. It was that time of day when the majority of people were at work. Tchenko picked up a taxi shortly after reaching the main road. She rode it into the city and made her way to the river. Here she bought a ticket and boarded one of the Thames’s excursion boats. Partway through the trip, alone, she leaned on the stern rail, waiting for her moment, then calmly eased the pistol from her coat. It was wrapped in a duster she had picked up in the kitchen and had used to wipe the weapon clean. Now she let the gun slip from her grasp and watched it hit the dark water and vanish. She repeated the move with the knife, then remained at the stern until the boat turned and started its return journey. Only then did she move away from the stern to wander along the deck, her thoughts racing ahead as she planned her next move, which would see her arranging a flight to the U.S. where she would carry on her search for the other men responsible for the deaths of her family.

THREE DAYS LATER, in the air over the Atlantic, Natasha Tchenko huddled in her seat, grateful at least that no one was sitting beside her, and refused to even admit that what she was doing bordered on the impossible. In her mind it was clear and direct.

She was going to America to find the people responsible for the deaths of her family.

And when she did find them she was going to kill them all…or as many as she could.

Ilya Malenkov had furnished her with a mix of information and, combined with what she had gleaned from the computer, it was enough to give Tchenko a starting point.

Malenkov, an FSB agent, had been part of the team responsible for the slaughter of her family. The initial hunt had been orchestrated by Leopold Bulanin. Bulanin was a Moscow racketeer, an opportunist who would involve himself in any venture that offered a profit. He was a careful man, who covered his tracks well and managed to stay ahead of the law through high contacts and bribery. From Malenkov’s confession Tchenko learned of Bulanin’s involvement with the search for information her father had gathered on the FSB’s involvement with something he called Black Judas. Pieter Tchenko’s investigation had brought the covert team of FSB and gangsters on his trail. Though she didn’t know whether her father had given up the information he had collected, her family had still been murdered. Coming to terms with that was proving difficult for Natasha Tchenko, and she was not even sure that if she actually completed her mission her pain would be ended. All she could do now was go through the motions, pushing the memories to the back of her mind while she conducted her search.

She had names and locations.

The e-mail to Seminov pinpointed the names she had extracted from Malenkov. Her hope was that it might kick-start another investigation into the connection between the FSB, Krushen and Leopold Bulanin.

Her starting point was the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Malenkov had told her the Russian team led by Mischa Krushen had just moved. Once she had her flight arranged, she had asked the London travel agent to book her into a hotel there. It would give her a base, somewhere she could work out of. She knew she was going in cold, with little advance information about her enemies. When she was on undercover operations for OCD, there was always a pre-ops period to study the opposition to learn about their habits and their propensity for violence, whether the undercover operative might be known to the target. It was standard procedure, necessary so that the undercover agent had less chance of facing the unexpected. It didn’t guarantee total safety. There was no such thing in undercover work.

This time Natasha Tchenko was walking in blind. All she had were sketchy pictures of the men she was stalking. She had read up on what OCD had on the suspects. It gave her some physical images, but little else. But she knew they were dangerous individuals, used to working in the shadows. If it hadn’t been for Commander Seminov’s generosity, she might never have been able to look at their thin files.

It was late afternoon when she finally checked into the hotel. She went directly to her room, undressed and relaxed under a hot shower. After she had dried herself she fell into bed and slept through until the following morning from sheer exhaustion.

TCHENKO AWOKE from a deep and troubled sleep with a shocked gasp bursting from her lips and sweat coursing down her face. Panting for breath that seemed to have difficulty forcing itself from her lungs, she stared across the hotel room, barely aware that sunlight was ghosting through the curtains. The bedsheets were tangled around her lower body, almost imprisoning her legs, and she kicked them free with frantic actions until they slid to the floor. In a protective response she pulled her arms around her body, lowering her head, and fought back the tears threatening to flood her eyes. She remained in this position until her emotions calmed and she was back in control. Only then did she uncoil and slowly swing her legs off the bed, pushing to her feet where she remained motionless. She fought to eliminate the dark horrors flooding her mind, concentrating on reminding herself who she was and why she was here….