The Specter (12 page)

The weapon silenced as the man stepped back, out of Aaron’s reach.

He’d failed. He cringed and waited for the inevitable, his heart in his throat.

“Move the big man off you,” the shooter said. “Or I will shoot through him and into your face.”

Aaron waited a heartbeat. He had tried. There was nothing else he could think to do. The only weapon he had was his hands. He didn’t have a knife or a gun. He was out of options.

He eased the bouncer off and stared into the eyes of the man Aaron had hit in the throat at the airport that morning. The same man Aaron saw on camera taking his sister out of her apartment building.

Anger coursed through him. The man with all the answers stood right in front of him. The man who kidnapped Joanne and probably killed her.

“Stand up,” the man ordered as he gave Aaron space.

He knows I’m dangerous.

Aaron got to his feet, slowly, methodically, every muscle in his body ready to take the man out. “Why?” he asked. “Tell me. Why’d you do it?”

The man offered a crooked smile. “Vodka. Believe it or not, it’s all about vodka. But you have to tell me how you knew. What brought you to the airport this morning and now here? Tell me everything before I kill you.”

“One day, when you die, your life will flash before your eyes. You should’ve made that movie worth watching.”

Before the shooter could react, something knocked him into the doorframe so hard Aaron heard the wood crack. Aaron dropped and dove aside as the man’s weapon went to full automatic fire again.

Then it stopped as Alex drove his foot into the man’s face and throat.

“Enough!” Aaron shouted. “Don’t kill him.”

Alex stopped instantly.

“I asked you guys here to help. I couldn’t live with myself if you were up on murder charges.” Aaron got to his feet and brushed himself off. “Oh, and thanks. You saved my life. I owe you.”

“That’s why you brought us,” Alex said. “I’m here to help.”

Aaron wondered how he would explain this to the police. The DJ was dead. The bouncer was now bleeding in three spots as the second round of bullets caught him in his sleep. It looked like he wouldn’t be waking up again.

They had to leave, disappear.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

He started out of the booth with Alex on his heels when an explosion rocked the building from somewhere by the back door.

“What the
fuck
?” Aaron yelled, covering his ears.

The lights flickered and dust drifted down from the tiled ceiling.

“We have to get out of here,” Aaron yelled. Two tables over, he spotted the shooter’s driver from the airport. Daniel and Benjamin nodded toward Alex, who shrugged and smiled.

Alex, always the top of his class, the most dangerous.

They owed their lives to Alex, but the celebration had to be postponed.

He spied an exit sign in the far corner to his right.

“Come on,” he said as the distant wail of police sirens resounded throughout the building.

Another explosion knocked them all to their knees. The lights went out. Aaron balanced on a chair and got to his feet. The battery-operated emergency lights flickered on above the exit door. There was enough light for Aaron to see that all of them were holding hands now, including the waitress from the bathroom.

I wonder if she knows anything.

He guided them to the exit door and kicked it open as police cars roared into the parking lot.

“Follow me,” he shouted behind him as everyone released each other’s hands.

The emergency vehicles were lining up at the front of the building on The Queensway, multicolored lights flashing across the walls of the buildings on the street. Only two cruisers had come to the back of the building so far. A fire had started by the back door where most of the customers came and went. He quickly deduced that the two men from the airport that morning had shown up with explosives, intent on removing the rest of the evidence that the British guy was ever there.

The waitress had run away, heading up the street toward the flashing lights. He motioned for his friends to follow him. Getting to Daniel’s camper van was now out of the question.

He led them across the street, away from the burning strip club, toward his car a few blocks over, wondering what the hell was so special about vodka that so many people had to die.

He resolved that he would find out at all costs because Joanne deserved better.

Chapter 14

Clive Baron reclined in his plush La-Z-Boy chair, grabbed the remote and flipped on CNN as Jessica, his assistant, fixed him a vodka. He hadn’t heard from Jackson or Hugh since he landed at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow and met his driver, who took Jessica and him on the over thirty-kilometer ride to his central Moscow condo. A disposal team stood on standby to clean the plane and have it readied for whenever Clive would need it again. That meant
all
the garbage, including a drugged-up young man who happened to succumb to the barbiturates in his system. The disposal team worked for Clive personally. None of them protested the good money or the good life he offered them. Going along with that, they didn’t protest certain jobs they had to clean. It was that or they would find themselves being
cleaned
one day in the most unusual way.

Two security men met him at the door of his condo and escorted Clive and his assistant upstairs. During the rest of the flight, his cell phone had remained quiet. No call to his private line or his encrypted line and no message from his men in Toronto that the mission was complete when he got to the Moscow condo.

Absolute silence.

He changed the TV channel and brought up the Internet where he began following the Toronto news agency’s Twitter accounts.
CP24
and the
Toronto Sun
were the two he felt were most accurate, tweeting in real time.

As he browsed the tweets to see if there was anything on the House of Lancaster explosion, Casa Loma’s grisly find or the apprehension of his men, he thought about his early departure from Canada.

Maybe he should have stayed behind to make sure everything went as planned. He had the utmost confidence in his ex-Mossad men, but with no phone call, he wondered if they had failed in some way.

Clive thought back to his early days. Hustling kids in grade school, beating others up just to take their wallets to finance a night out. He had a few run-ins with the law, but for the most part, the kids of his day didn’t want a repeat beating for ratting him out.

By the time he hit seventeen, Clive had buggered and killed three different boys. After losing control on the first one and taking what he wanted by force, he learned at an early age that the broken and bleeding fifteen-year-old lying with his pants around his ankles in the alley had to remain silent about what had happened to him. There was only one way to guarantee absolute silence. Clive strangled the boy with the boy’s own belt, wiped his hands off, cleaned himself up and walked away.

Six months later, the police were still hunting the man who had raped and killed the boy in the alley. They had even interviewed the boy’s friends, Clive included, but suspected no one so young. It was eight months later when Clive did it again, and again he got away with it.

On his seventeenth birthday, after his third murder, he decided that the only way to enjoy all that life had to offer him would be with money. He had watched the O.J. Simpson court case, all the while knowing that Nicole had to have been murdered by O.J. He saw how O.J. played with the glove and how his legal team created reasonable doubt. He had recently read that O.J.’s legal team was under suspicion for tampering with the glove in some way.

Clive learned one thing from those days: it was all about money. If Clive had enough money, he could deal with any problem he ever encountered.

He also knew the difference between the rich and the poor was that the rich decided to be rich. So Clive decided to go after money like a predator hunting impalas.

Soon after his rough teens, Clive moved to Moscow and got into the Moscow Institute of Finance, where he attained his Bachelor of Arts and Science. He took some of the inheritance money from his father and invested in nickel. By his mid-twenties, he was part owner of Siberian Nickel, a metals giant, where he flourished for eighteen years, keeping his urges under control, only murdering four male youths in the cold snowy darkness of the Siberian winter in all that time.

He sold his interests in nickel at forty-two years of age to pursue more lucrative ventures. He maintained a large stake in one of the wealthiest banks in Russia and had investments all over the world by his mid-forties. Now, at fifty-three, he still had stakes in steel giant Evraz and mining firm Highland Gold.

According to Forbes magazine, his net worth has been estimated at $12.7 billion, making him the eighth richest man in Russia and the sixty-fifth richest man in the world.

A few years ago he was asked to become the Deputy Prime Minister of the Economy for Russia, but he refused. He had never married and had no kids. To the outside world he was a philanderer, flying women in from all parts of the world to enjoy. Jessica Nockler, his personal assistant, was an ex-prostitute he decided to bring on full time after a brief six-month stint in Switzerland fifteen years ago.

No one knew about his fetish for young boys but Jessica. Only one man ever discovered that secret and he was executed instantly.

On the TV screen, the
Toronto Sun
had a small story about the bodies found at Casa Loma, but the police weren’t giving out too many details. They had another tweet about firefighters fighting a blaze at a strip club in Etobicoke, but again, he couldn’t find out what was happening and none of his phones were ringing.

At least it sounds like Jackson and Hugh got the fire going.

Jessica carried a glass of vodka, neat into his large office.

“I want you to call Jackson and Hugh’s cell phones,” he said. “Report to me the minute you reach either one.”

“Yes, sir,” Jessica said, and walked out the door.

He flipped the TV back to international news and let his mind wander as he sipped his beverage. The vodka reminded him of his beginnings. Since Russia was the birthplace of vodka and they were the largest spirits consumers in the world, it was a great country to sell vodka in.

Three years ago he had been determined to become the biggest importer of vodka to Russia. He even came up with his own brand:
Absolutely Russian Vodka.
He had a plan to out-seat Lars Olsson Smith, whose vodka became known as
Absolut
, and who had been named the King of Vodka. Clive’s famous claim is to have the clearest vodka on the planet, which is seen as purer and healthier.

His rival, Roust Incorporated, is currently one of the largest importers of premium spirits in Russia. In the new year, Clive would claim to have outdone Roust. He had recently purchased an American distillery of grain alcohol from where he imported all his
Absolutely Russian Vodka
grain alcohol base directly to Russia. Because it was one of his own companies, he raised the profits to large margins at his American facility.

Russian import duties on alcohol had increased to enormous amounts. Clive directed his small team of scientists to solve this problem, which they did.

The secret they came up with would make Clive the richest man in all of Russia, a secret so valuable that Clive could never have anyone discover what he was doing. Clive would kill for that secret, the one Frank and Gary Weeks discovered at the Toronto Island Airport after stealing one of Clive’s pieces of luggage. It was the secret that cost them their lives and everyone known to them whom they may have been in contact with in the short time they held his luggage.

For Clive, the cost of silence was always death. What did Clive care about a few dead Canadians? Disposing of one dead body randomly was something Clive had become an expert on. Killing dozens in Toronto needed the right kind of person or people.

The plan was ingenious. Everything was working perfectly. Until that brother showed up in Toronto.

And now Jackson and Hugh hadn’t reported in.

Clive’s secret had to be protected at all costs or he would be crucified, and not by the legal system alone, but by the common people.

He had to get more proactive. He needed someone on the case who would know what to do. He needed Nick Sturnam on board, even though Nick would charge exorbitant costs. It was time to make the call.

He set the remote control down on the table beside him as Jessica knocked lightly and entered. “Nothing from Jackson or Hugh. Also, I can’t find out if they’ve been arrested or anything about their current status, but I’ll keep checking.”

“Get Nick Sturnam on the line.”

“Nick?” She sounded surprised. “Are you sure?”