The First Billion (35 page)

Gavallan was their man, plain and simple.

Dodson read a little further. Even with the glasses, he had to squint to make out the letters. Though he tried to focus on the words, all he could see were bodies. Bodies pitched onto their desks. Bodies strewn across the floor. Bodies slumped in the corner. A tear slid down Dodson’s cheek and fell to the paper.

Removing his bifocals, Howell Dodson rubbed at his eyes.

It was time he got a new prescription.

45

In the clearing, the pickup’s engine grumbled, then died.

Grafton Byrnes lay in the corner of the shed, curled into a fetal position, his face half bathed in mud. A steady rain fell. His clothes were sopping wet, as if he had just emerged from a swimming pool. His hair was matted and dripping. The sky was darkening, choked with clouds. He had no idea what time it was, only that it was evening.

A little longer,
he told himself.
You’re almost there.

An eerie wind whistled through the pines as rain blew through the cracks in the wall, peppering him like sand on a windy day at the beach. He was cold. He shivered in waves, violent spasms that racked his body, the tremors beginning in his lower back, then traveling up his spine with icy, muscular fingers that wrapped themselves around his ribs and squeezed mercilessly, provoking terrible, wrenching grunts.

The truck’s door opened and closed. Byrnes clamped his jaw. By force of will, he stopped shivering. He lay still. Absolutely still.

Boots trudged through the mud, slurping and sucking. Keys jangled. Metal scratched metal and the padlock to the shed opened.

Byrnes gripped the stone close to his chest, the stabbing of his wounded thumb stoking his resolve to act. This was his chance. He was sick and getting sicker. His throat was raw, and he had begun coughing. He was starved and feverish. Another night in the open and he’d be too weak to stand, let alone escape.

A boot landed near his head. The mess tin holding his ration of tepid soup dropped into the mud, spilling half its contents. He made no move toward it. That morning, like the night before, he’d played the dying wretch, murmuring “Doctor” over and over again. Now he was silent. He sensed his jailer’s presence, could smell the pig shit on his boots. He urged him closer. He wanted to feel his breath, to look into his eyes. Then he would strike.

The jailer hawked and spat on Byrnes’s back, then he muttered a word and laughed.

The boots moved away. One step. Two.

No!
screamed Byrnes in private torment.
You cannot leave.
He gripped the stone harder. It was blunt and heavy. Trying to dig his way under the wall, he’d found it beneath six inches of topsoil and clay. Great treasures had been more easily won.

The jailer stopped, and Byrnes heard his breathing, the jagged wheeze of a lifelong smoker. He sensed the man’s indecision. There came a new sound—the rustle of clothing—followed by a distinctive two-tiered
click.
The rain seemed to amplify it, and Byrnes knew it was a firing pin being cocked. He clenched his body, willing himself not to move.

Lie still. Lie absolutely still.

The gun fired, a deafening explosion inside the shed. The bullet impacted the ground an inch from Byrnes’s eyes, blasting him with mud and stone.

Lie still.

Seconds passed.

The boots approached and prodded his ribs. First gently. Then less gently. Byrnes scrunched his face, biting back the pain. A labored groan as the jailer knelt on his haunches and slid his hands beneath the prisoner. Another grunt as he turned him over.

Byrnes opened his eyes. And in the moment before he smashed the rock against the Russian’s cheek, he met his jailer’s gaze.

“Bastard, go spit on someone else.”

“Chto?”

The rock crushed the man’s face, toppling him to the earth, leaving him sitting upright, stunned and immobile. A jagged gash on his cheek leaked blood.

Rushing to his feet, Byrnes brought the stone above his head. He was slow and awkward, and by the time he’d clamored to his feet, the jailer was up too, a mean, dumb grin on his face. A hand fell to his belt, and dropping his gaze from Byrnes, he searched for his pistol. Byrnes charged, ramming the Russian with his head, driving him against the wall. It was then he knew that his jailer was drunk. It wasn’t the smell so much as the man’s general lassitude, the confused coordination.

Throwing his left arm high and pinioning the man’s neck, Byrnes scrabbled for the pistol, his infected thumb screaming at every contact. “Stop it,” he yelled, retreating a second later, the pistol held in his right hand. He was irate, crazed, divinely pissed off. “You think you can lock a man up, barely feed him, leave him to die slow? Do you? Answer me!”

The Russian was leering crazily, teetering on his feet. He wasn’t drunk—he was absolutely shit-faced. Three sheets to the fuckin’ wind. “You ready?
Eh, Amerikanski
?”

“Don’t,” said Byrnes, his anger seeping from him. “
Nyet.
You stay there.”

Muttering, the Russian took a step forward, spreading his arms as if entering the wrestlers’ circle. “Come. You want fight?”

“Stay there.”

The pistol was an old .22 long barrel. A peashooter. The cylinder held six slugs. Holding it proved difficult, but Byrnes managed by using both his hands, the palm of his left hand pressing the butt firmly into his right. “Stay right there,” he said again. He had no desire to kill a man.

Then everything happened quickly, but in distinct steps, so that afterward Byrnes was able to dissect them in minute detail.

The Russian leaped forward, growling like a bear. Byrnes fired the pistol into his gut. A meek geyser of blood spouted forth, then died. The Russian swatted at it as if it were a fly, nothing more, and kept coming. Byrnes raised the gun. At a distance of two feet and closing, he fired into the man’s chest. It was a bull’s-eye. The jailer collapsed at the knees and fell face forward to the ground without uttering so much as a whisper.

Byrnes looked down at the body, the acrid scent of the spent cordite sickening his stomach. His ears rang from the shots, dizzying him. “Stupid fool,” he said, half out loud, kicking the corpse lightly.

Kneeling, he turned the Russian over and began unbuttoning his coat. He started at the neck and worked his way down, helping the buttons through the eyelets with his index fingers, not daring to let his thumbs do the work. Even so, the pain was nearly too much. Several times, he drew his hands away and swore viciously.

Trouble arrived with the third button. It was stuck. He tried everything to get it undone but it would not advance through the eyelet. “Sonuvabitch,” he said, taking a deep breath, looking toward the door. He needed the jacket. He needed something dry, something warm. Oh Jesus, he needed it.

“Slowly,” he urged himself.

Moving closer to the body, he leaned over the Russian’s chest. There was surprisingly little blood and the coat was not as dirty as he’d expected. With iron discipline he commanded his fingers to move. His left index and middle fingers carefully spread the eyelet wide. With his right index finger, he maneuvered the drab gray button through it. A smile creased his face. “Gotcha!”

“Nyet!”
screamed the Russian, sitting up, wrapping his hands around Byrnes’s neck, squeezing with all his might, sharp uncut nails digging into his flesh.
“Nyet, Amerikanski.”

In a moment, the jailer was on top of him, straddling his chest, the man’s weight full on his neck, strangling him. Byrnes fought at the hands, but could not grip them. The gun. Where was the gun? Byrnes groped around in the dirt. He was oblivious to the pain, to the daggers flaying his arms. Then he had it. Grasping the barrel, he bought the handle in a wide arc and struck the Russian across the bridge of the nose. Once. Twice. Blood gushed from both nostrils, but still the hands kept their grip, still those mad, leering eyes bored into him.

Byrnes felt the life ebbing from him, his vision dimming. Lowering the gun to the dirt, he turned it quickly and took hold of it by the grip. With a single fluid motion, he brought it up, laid the barrel against the jailer’s temple, and pulled the trigger. Gunpowder exploded and a spigot of blood blew out the opposite side of the jailer’s head. The death grip on Byrnes’s neck lessened. The light went out in the Russian’s eyes. Slumping, he collapsed on top of Byrnes, stone dead.

The engine rumbled roughly while the heater blasted him like a wind from hell. Behind the wheel of the pickup, Grafton Byrnes sat staring at the fence. The sliding ten-foot gates granting one entry and exit to Konstantin Kirov’s “dacha” were closed. Next to him on the seat was a remote-control device with a nine-digit keypad. He picked it up, held it in his right hand, using the fingers of his left to peck out a couple of tries. It was hopeless. He didn’t even know how many digits the code required. Three? Four? Five?

“Fuckin’ useless,” he muttered, dropping it on the seat.

Byrnes was wearing his jailer’s jacket, as well as his socks and boots. The gun was back in the shed with the dead Russian. It turned out it was loaded with five bullets, not six, and between them, they’d fired them all. He had drunk his soup and found a chunk of bread in the pickup. He was alive and relatively well and had a few hundred rubles, a pocketknife, and a pack of cigarettes to get him to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

If, that is, he could get through the double fences.

He stared at them awhile longer, wondering what twenty thousand volts would do to a car. If he drove over the metal, would it short out? Would the rubber tires ground the charge? Or would the touch of the fender conduct the electricity through the chassis and fry him like an egg on a griddle?

There was only one way to find out.

Byrnes put the truck into reverse and backed up about a hundred feet. Finding neutral, he gunned the engine a few times. He was a hot rod driver on a Saturday night. “Big Daddy” Don Garlits waiting for the green light. He imagined the Christmas tree counting down. The lights blinking red, red, red, and finally green.

Ramming the gearshift into first, Byrnes floored the truck. He passed the main cabin, the radio shack, the crematorium. And as he hit the fence, he loosed a savage howl.

Metal buckled, wire bent and moaned, the engine roared, and then he was clear, hurtling down the rutted dirt road at sixty kilometers an hour.

It was only then that Byrnes looked at the fuel gauge.

The needle hovered on empty.

46

Gavallan watched the lake slide by, a moss green mirror shattered into myriad shards by the sun’s piercing rays. It was eight o’clock in the evening. After twenty-seven hours in custody, he’d been released with hardly a word, escorted from the rear of the police station, and ordered into the backseat of an unmarked Audi. Every time he asked a question the plainclothes officer next to him would mutter
“Ça va,”
and give him a smile like he was the dumbest fuck on the planet Earth.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Ça va.”

“Where is Miss Magnus?”

“Ça va.”

“Is Mr. Pillonel in jail?”
Or was the rat ever taken there in the first place?

“Ça va.”

They played stop and go through a succession of traffic signals, turning left on the Guisan Bridge and crossing over the lake. Angry gray clouds spilled over the mountains on the French side a few miles up, gathering low above the surface and advancing toward them. A flash of lightning exploded from the sky. They were in a for a gully washer.

The car slowed and came to a halt at the center of the bridge. Reflexively, he dropped a hand to the door and let his fingers toy with the handle. He had no illusions about his status. He might have been relieved of his cuffs, but he was hardly a free man. The car’s doors were locked, the windows rolled up. One glance at his taciturn companion with the sinewy forearms assured Gavallan he was still a prisoner. The only question was where he was headed.

With a jerk, the car took off, zero to fifty in five seconds flat. The storm clouds were moving quickly toward them, a sheet of black rain dicing the water. The driver continued along the Rue du Mont Blanc, past the tourist shops selling cuckoo clocks, Swatches, and chocolate bars, veering left through a tunnel that took them under and around the train station. A sign ahead showed Annecy and Lyons to the left, Lausanne, Montreux, and Genève Aeroport to the right. The Audi shunted right.

Two minutes later they were out of the city, accelerating down an open stretch of highway. Green fields stretched to their left and right. Bales of hay sat rolled and wrapped in opaque plastic, ready for pickup and transport to the farmer’s loft. The driver lowered his window an inch. Immediately the rich, loamy scent of ground under cultivation flooded the car. He shook loose a cigarette and, half turning, offered it to Gavallan. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.”

A whistling roar built in the air around them and suddenly an MD-11 passed directly over their heads, its pale metal belly close enough to touch. Strobing yellow landing lights beckoned to Gavallan’s right, and beyond them the crenellated façade of the landing terminal.

The airport.

He was going home.

He didn’t like the idea, but there was no use fighting it.

It wasn’t until the car passed through a sentry gate and drove onto the tarmac that he started questioning the mechanics of his release. Didn’t extradition require weeks, if not months, of legal wrangling? Shouldn’t he have been asked if he wished to fight the order? If he hadn’t been charged, by what authority were the Swiss loading him onto a plane to send him back to America? And why the hell were they letting him climb back aboard the chartered G-3?

He could see the plane crouched on the apron a few hundred yards away, landing lights on, turbines spinning lazily, an iridescent stream of exhaust escaping the engines. He had to wonder who was waiting at the other end. Dodson and his crew from the Joint Russo-American Task Force? Or would representatives of the Florida police comprise his handpicked welcoming committee? And why was he being smuggled out of the country like a plague bacillus?

Another Audi was parked next to the plane. He saw a door open and Cate’s figure emerge. She seemed to hesitate, not wanting to board the plane. Two policemen bracketed her and began walking her to the aircraft. It was then that Gavallan sat up straighter, his nose pressed against the window. The plane was too big. It had too many windows. It wasn’t a G-3 but a G-5; no mistaking it. The detailing was different too. A red pinstripe that hadn’t been there before ran the length of the fuselage just below the windows. It wasn’t the chartered jet at all.

And then he spotted the flag painted high on the tail, and he shivered.

The white, blue, and red tricolor of Russia.

He caught up to Cate as she was about to mount the stairs.

“You okay? Did they keep you locked up this whole time?”

Cate lifted her shoulders, giving a fatigued nod. Her eyes were red, her hair being blown about her by a whipping wind.

Two familiar faces waited at the top of the stairs. Boris and Tatiana. A few hours behind in their forty-million-dollar jet, but no less vigilant.

“Hello, Mr. Jett,” said Boris, as if they were old acquaintances from the club. His jaw was blue, swollen like a grapefruit, but his eyes said “No hard feelings.” “You come now. We hurry. Storm will be here fast.”

Gavallan glanced behind him. The Swiss police had formed themselves into a phalanx, and their stolid expressions said there was no going back. Offering Cate his hand, he guided her up the stairs. She mounted the first step, then stopped. Turning, she grabbed his shoulders and kissed him. “Tell me you’ll understand.”

Gavallan searched her eyes for an explanation, but saw only confusion and hurt. “What?”

Fighting the wind, Cate drew back the hair from her face and wiped away a tear. She opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head as if the thought were not worth mentioning. With a silken touch, her hand slipped from his. As quickly, she was herself again. The eyes cleared, the jaw firmed.

She mounted the steps rapidly, nodding perfunctorily to Boris as she entered the cabin. Over the wind, Gavallan was only just able to hear what he said to her.

“Good evening, Miss Kirov. Your father sends his regards.”