Tsar (7 page)

“Friends of mine?”

“Hardly. I would scarcely imagine we travel in the same social circles, Mr. Hawke. No, friends of mine found the number of your cottage for me.”

“You have friends who know my number?”

“I have friends who know everything.”

“Well, look here, it’s been lovely chatting with you, Miss Korsakova, but I’m afraid I’m late for a dinner engagement.”

“Will you consider my offer, Mr. Hawke? I’m really most anxious to get started on you.”

Hawke held the phone away from his ear a moment and accepted a frosted silver cup with a sprig of mint from Pelham. It was really a bit early, but what the hell. He took a sip. Delicious. A fleeting image of a nude goddess emerging dripping from the sea appeared suddenly before his eyes as he put the phone back to his ear.

Get started on me?

“Sorry,” Hawke murmured, sipping. “Rum delivery man at the door.”

“Well?” Korsakova asked, impatience frosting the word.

“I’ll sleep on it.”

“Do that. I call you first thing in the morning.”

The line went dead.

“Bloody hell,” Hawke murmured to Pelham. “She wants to paint my picture.”

“So I inferred, sir.”

“Ridiculous. Absolute rubbish.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“Are you completely mad?”

Pelham’s bushy white eyebrows went straight up.

“Really, m’lord. One hundred smackers an hour is nothing to sniff one’s nose at. Pretty good gravy, in my view, sir.”

Hawke laughed aloud, threw his head back, and took another healthy swig of Pelham’s delicious concoction before padding off toward his bedroom to strap on the black tie and his Royal Navy dress uniform. It was Saturday night. Congreve had told him they still dressed for dinner at Shadowlands. A quaint practice, but, to Hawke, anyway, an agreeable one.

The muffled strains of the calypso song soon resumed from down the hall, his lordship singing at the top of his lungs, “Smarter than de man in every way!”

“Trouble in paradise.” Pelham sighed to himself, wiping clean the varnished bar and smiling at his reflection.

“Trouble in paradise,” echoed Sniper, Hawke’s pet parrot, who’d just flown from his perch and alighted on Pelham’s shoulder. Hawke had cared for the bird, a black hyacinth macaw, since childhood. Despite her name, her color was a glossy ultramarine blue. She was almost eighty years old, had a very sharp tongue, and would probably live to see one hundred.

“Oh, hush up,” Pelham said, and slipped the bird a few crackers from the bowl on the bar.

“Thanks for nothing, buster,” Sniper squawked.

“Do sod off, won’t you?” Pelham replied.

P
addy Strelnikov waltzed into the warden’s office at Little Miss Penitentiary at eleven o’clock. Sleet was rattling against the windowpanes. Stumpy’s midnight date with destiny, in a little more than an hour, was going to happen right down the hall. Hell, he’d seen them getting ready, coming up the stairs to the warden’s office.

The door at the end was open, and you could see inside to the pale green tile walls of the death chamber. Bright lights, like an operating room. Medical equipment. There was a lot of activity, and Paddy, catching a glimpse of the gurney, was curious about all of it. But he was on a mission.

It had taken Strelnikov ten minutes just to negotiate the Mustang through the mob scene of press and protesters at the gate. Then another twenty or so to get through the check points at Wing Block D, the maximum-security building at the rear of the Little Miss complex.

It was a long three-story building made entirely of concrete block with a guard tower rising at either end. In addition to the warden’s office, D Block was home to Death Row. Sixty-one inmates were awaiting execution, including some of the most notorious pedophiles, sexual sadists, and serial killers west of the Mississippi.

Little Miss had replaced Terre Haute Correctional Facility in Indiana as the federal government’s new special confinement unit for inmates serving federal death sentences. A couple of botched lethal injections (needles passing right through veins and injecting the sodium chlorate into the muscle) had led to public protests and the shutting down of the Indiana facility. Powerful lobbyists in Washington had made sure the new federal correctional complex ended up in North Dakota.

No one was ever quite sure who’d hired all of these expensive lobbyists, but no one much cared, either. In Washington, someone was always pulling the strings. Often, the true maestro went unseen and unnoticed. Like back in Russia.

Overhead, searchlights and TV lights lit the snowy skies like a Hollywood premiere. Lots of excitement when you pan-fry a guy as world-famous as Charles Edward Stump, when he walks that lonely last mile.

The warden, named Warren Garmadge, a short, wide toad of a man in a double-wide paisley tie, stood right up when the deputies escorted Paddy Strelnikov into his flag-bedecked office. He stuck out his meaty hand, a big smile on his face. He seemed to be having a good time, being on TV a lot recently. Interviews and all, CNN, Fox, all the biggies. Also, he saw the beautiful alligator carrying case in Paddy’s hand and figured it had his name on it.

He stuck his hand out, and Strelnikov shook it.

“Mr. Strelnikov, welcome to Little Missouri Prison. I’m honored you made time in your busy schedule to pay us a visit,” the warden said, showing off his white Chiclet-capped chompers. Guy was a real pol, you could tell that by the firm, slightly moist grip of his fat little hand.

“Exciting time to be here, Warden Garmadge,” Paddy said, taking one of the two red leather chairs facing the warden’s desk. He put the case on the floor beside him, casual like, no big deal. Make the guy wait for it.

“Everything’s going according to schedule, you’ll be glad to know,” Garmadge said, plopping down in his big executive swivel chair.

“A lot can happen in an hour,” Paddy said, lighting up a big Cuban stogie he’d been saving for this meeting. He had another sticking out of his breast pocket with his hankie, but he made a point of not offering it to the warden. What he did, he crossed his legs at the knee, lifting the material of his grey silk trousers so that it draped nice, and smiled, expelling a stream of fragrant smoke at the warden.

“So. We’re all right? We’re a go?” Paddy said.

“Yeah. Don’t worry. The governor has given me every assurance that there will be no last-minute surprises. As you know, the governor and I had a meeting of the minds on that subject one month ago.”

Paddy laughed. “Yeah, an expensive meeting, from our point of view. What’d we finally do for hizzoner the governor? Two-fifty large? Two-seventy-five?”

“I believe that was the number.”

“Which one?”

“The latter.”

“Yeah, the latter, that’s right.” When shitbirds like this guy used phrases like
the latter
, it made him want to punch their friggin’ lights out. Paddy looked casually around the office, one wall covered with photos of the warden with a lot of people nobody he knew had ever heard of. Local pols, police officials, et cetera. Martians.

“You ever witness an execution, Mr. Strelnikov?” Garmadge asked him.

“You mean other than the ones where I was personally pulling the trigger?”

The warden shifted in his chair, laughed uncomfortably, and said, “Yes, I mean a…court-ordered execution.”

“Just one. Allen Lee Davis back in 1999. You familiar with that one?”

“Old Sparky, down there in Starke, Florida.”

“Yeah. Starke was the only weenie roast I ever saw up close and personal. Soon as they flipped the switch, smoke and flames started to spurt out from Allen Lee’s head, must have been flames a foot long or more. Like blue lightning coming out from under the little metal yarmulke on his head. Burned his eyebrows and eyelashes right off. It was some shit to see, I’ll tell you. They shut the power down, then cranked it two more times before he finally fried. Must have taken him twenty minutes to check out, stick a fork in him, boys, he’s done.”

Garmadge was impressed, you could see it.

“Well, we pretty much got that all figured out now here at Little Miss. What happened down in Starke was, see, the saline-soaked sponge inside that little metal skullcap is meant to increase the flow of electricity to the head. In that case, the sponge was synthetic, which generated the problem. Starke uses only all-natural sponge now, and that solved that issue pretty much.”

“Gone green, huh, warden? All-natural sponges?”

He smiled. “Lethal injection is much more humane, as you’ll see down the hall in a few minutes,” the warden said, glancing up at the clock, eager to move on.

“Humane, huh? I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, warden, some of these animals you got sitting on Death Row don’t deserve humane.”

“Well, there is that,” he said, coughing into his fist.

Strelnikov got to his feet.

“Anyway, I won’t be sticking around for Stumpy’s send-off, warden. I’m only here to make a delivery from my employers and your benefactors.”

Paddy reached down and picked up the alligator case. Then he walked around the desk and placed it right in front of Warden Garmadge.

“Our organization is very grateful for your help over the years and especially your work with the governor in expediting tonight’s main event, warden. The management asked me to personally show their appreciation with this little memento.”

“Beautiful hide, absolutely gorgeous.” He was feeling up that case as if he had a raging hard-on under the desk.

“Isn’t it?” Paddy said. “Genuine alligator. Go ahead, open her up, warden.”

“This is for me? What the heck…”

The guy’s fingers were trembling as he twisted the gold-plated clasp on the top and finally pulled the case open. The case was lined in black velvet. The object resting inside caught the light and sent silvery shimmers across the walls and ceiling. Garmadge sat back and stared.

“Omigod.”

“Yeah. Something else, ain’t it? Here, let me remove it and place it on the desk for you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a computer, warden. The Zeta. The Platinum Edition, by the way.”

“You’re kidding me. Looks like a sculpture of a brain or something.”

“That’s the idea. It’s our most popular design. You’ve seen the ads. ‘Zeta, the last word in computers.’ Get it?”

“No.”

“Zeta’s the last word in the Greek alphabet, I understand, but what the fuck. Some marketing bullshit. Kids have nicknamed it the Wizard or the Wiz, for short. See, the cord pulls out of the base of the brain stem. Let me plug it in for you, and I’ll show you how it works.”

“Where’s the keyboard?” the warden asked.

“Wherever you want it,” Paddy said. “Watch.”

Strelnikov found an outlet and plugged in the silvery machine. A small hidden lamp in the frontal lobe projected a virtual keypad onto the warden’s desktop.

“Holy smoke,” the guy said, tapping his fingers on the nonexistent keyboard.

“Hit enter,” Paddy said. “And there you go, you see the screen? It’s a holographic image. See? Kinda floats in the air above the brain.”

The Zeta machine was a piece of work, all right. From the supernaturally brilliant mind of Paddy’s ultimate employer, a very reclusive Russian multibillionaire who didn’t even have a name. Less expensive editions of the Wiz (with hardware made of mirror-polished aluminum, not platinum) would retail for about sixty bucks worldwide. Whole countries were already back-ordered for millions of these machines. India alone had ordered 10 million units at a discount price of fifty bucks. You didn’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure the margins, how much that did for the company’s bottom line.

“It’s engraved,” Paddy said. “Right here. ‘To Warden Warren Garmadge, with everlasting gratitude.’”

“The most fantastic-looking thing I’ve ever seen,” the warden said, stroking the sculpted brain’s polished surface.

“Yeah, well, the
quesos grandes
I work for can be very generous when people see things their way. In your case, it’s keeping these wild animals caged up. And taking a personal interest in Mr. Stump’s going-away party. Nice meeting you, warden. I’m going to take off now. Sorry to miss the big bang tonight.”

“Will you give your employer my deepest thanks when you see him?”

“See him?” Paddy laughed. “Nobody sees the big man. Nobody even knows his name.”

“Why not?”

“He’s the guy behind the curtain, warden. Like in that old movie,
The Wizard of Oz?
The boss of our operation? He’s the friggin’ Wizard himself.”

P
ADDY DROVE SLOWLY
through the crowd gathered outside the prison gates. It seemed to have grown larger during the short time he’d been inside. The snow had let up some, now it was just cold, and hundreds of people were holding candles aloft, chanting some fruitcake-brotherly-love-a-weem-away song he couldn’t hear the words to because he had the windows up and the radio on.

WKKO Chicago was still on the air, and the airy-fairy tree huggers and Stumpy supporters were still calling in, some of them wailing in despair as the final minutes approached. He looked into the rearview mirror and carefully peeled off his walrus mustache and the bushy eyebrows. He left the white wig atop his bald head, thinking it wasn’t half so bad-looking as most of his wigs.

The show’s host, the hyperkinetic night owl Greg Noack, was going back and forth to a WKKO reporter he had standing with the crowd at the gate, and now Paddy could hear the song. It was “We Shall Overcome,” which Paddy thought was a slightly weird choice, since Stumpy was pure white trailer trash, not even a poor black dude who needed to overcome anything. But who could tell anymore what was correct or incorrect with these fruitcakes. In a country where “Merry Christmas” had replaced the F word as a big no-no, who could figure?

And Paddy wasn’t even a Baptist, f’crissakes. He was Russian Orthodox!

Then Noack broke in all excited and said there was breaking news coming out of Bismarck, and they were going live to their man Willis Lowry, standing with the press corps just outside the governor’s office on the capitol steps.

Lowry said, “In an amazing turn of events, Channel Five News has just learned that the governor has issued a last-minute stay of execution for Charles Edward Stump. Everyone here at the capitol is stunned at the news, because as late as eight o’clock this evening, the governor’s office was insisting there was no chance of a pardon. But now we’ve learned that—”

“Fuck me,” Strelnikov said, and turned off the radio. He reached over and grabbed his cell phone from the seat beside him. Flipping it open, he speed-dialed a number in New York.

“You watching TV? You believe this shit?” he asked Ruko, the guy who answered. “The asshole governor just pardoned the Stump. Hello?”

“Tell me you made the warden’s delivery,” the voice at the other end said.

“Done.”

“Good. Do what you gotta do, Beef.”

Because of his size and muscular build, all the boys in the old neighborhood had nicknamed him All-Beef Paddy. Pretty funny, right? Not.

The line went dead.

Paddy looked in his rearview. He could still see the prison back there, searchlights lighting up the sky. He pulled over onto the shoulder and set the emergency brake.

From his inside pocket, Strelnikov withdrew a small black radio transmitter. A tiny green light was illuminated. Paddy pushed one button, and the light turned red. Then he pushed a second button and held it down for three seconds. A signal went from his black box to a company Comsat satellite orbiting high above central North America.

The whole world lit up behind him, and a second or two later, the shockwave of the massive explosion rocked his rented Mustang nearly off its wheels.