Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Gregor
“Kill everyone inside. No exceptions. No witnesses. Then burn the place down.”
Vasily’s words echoed in my ears as I sat up in a tree at the bottom of the Ivanov family’s garden. My dark clothing blended with the shadows, I watched their glowing windows and waited for it to grow late enough that they would darken one by one.
It was freezing out. The unexpected ice storm that had paralyzed Chicago had somehow missed Highland Park, but the temperature had still forced me into insulated clothing. At least I didn’t look out of place in a ski mask in this weather.
The garden was very simple, dominated by tall cypresses which formed a privacy screen on each side of the property. Apparently, the Ivanovs really didn’t like nosy neighbors. But it also meant I could work without being seen and would have a bit more time to escape unseen afterward.
I didn’t know what the Ivanovs had done. All I knew was that my pakhan rarely got this angry about anything. When he did, people died. Tonight, those people would be the Ivanovs—a married couple, and two other adults who lived at the property. The husband was a kindergarten teacher, the wife a pediatric nurse. Kind of obvious they were supplementing their income illegally if they could afford Highland Park. The others were both men who sources claimed were grown sons, but one of them may have actually been a hired bodyguard.
The wife was supposedly a pill addict and never left the house, which made the cover story of her being a pediatric nurse a bit pointless. Other than that, I couldn’t dig up any dirt on them. No idea what they could be armed with, or what to expect. But I did know one thing. Vasily did this so rarely, that the Ivanovs must really deserve what they were getting.
I thought back to the last time I had been sent to kill a household. Three years ago—a group of four brothers who had taken over as counterfeiters for us after the death of their father.
Unfortunately, whereas the father had been brilliant and diligent, his eldest son and his half-brothers cut corners, blabbed to their girlfriends about their work and us, and when one girlfriend left and went to the police, all four of them panicked and turned informant.
Vasily had called me up that evening when his moles within the PD had told him of the brothers’ betrayal. He’d wanted them dead, with proof, and the house burned.
I’d done just that. The only survivor of the blaze had been a half-starved black kitten I’d grabbed from one of their rooms. Feodor was now twenty pounds and spent most of his time patrolling my apartment.
Vasily had laughed at me when he’d heard that, along with some of his other men. But the others didn’t laugh long. I made most of them a little nervous. Some, more than a little.
I was the boss’s red right hand. I did the jobs the rest didn’t have the courage to do—or the stomach. When the pakhan had a problem nobody else could solve, he sent me to eliminate that problem.
Off work, I was a pretty easygoing guy. But on a job, I got focused in a way that scared the others. Maybe even the boss, too. It had kept me isolated, save for a few friends and my pets. It also tended to keep me single. Women in the business got scared off by my professional reputation. Women outside the business got scared off when they learned I was in it.
All I had for the last ten years had been brief affairs. Short-lived friends-with-benefits arrangements, low on drama and low on commitment. I never let myself get attached. I had watched one too many women I wanted to keep in my life walk out of it once they had learned the truth about me. Now, I never kept them around long enough for them to learn about it.
Focus, Gregor. Wait for the right time, get in, kill the inhabitants, rig it to explode, and get out. Hopefully, they didn’t have any big dogs. I hated having to shoot dogs.
My teeth were chattering. I took another swallow from my Thermos of coffee and felt the heat from it sink into me. The family was still awake after midnight when everyone else in this neighborhood had gone to bed hours ago.
Hurry up before I burn the house around you just to avoid hypothermia.
I knew I shouldn’t make jokes. This situation was deadly serious. I might be able to be workmanlike about it—shut off my feelings, shelve any pity, and do the job—but those were still human beings down there. I wanted to at least grant them a quick death, and it was easier to do that with the element of surprise.
Besides, I had to actually check the house before I burned it down. One of Vasily’s shoot-and-burn jobs from years ago had turned out to have a meth lab in the basement right next to a massive fuel tank. I had been forced to improvise a timed device to set it all off without it killing me before I could get out of range. Fortunately, none of their neighbors had been close enough to be in any danger.
Finally, their lights went off.
I slipped and almost fell in my eagerness to get to the house, but caught myself one-handed. Then my gear bag slipped off my shoulder, and I had to catch the strap with my free hand so the whole thing wouldn’t hit the ground ten feet below. I swore through my teeth in three languages as I was forced to re-shoulder the bag while hanging there, then jump down.
I landed in a flexed crouch and let out a grunt as the impact rattled every bone and joint. I had to stop and check myself as I straightened, setting the bag down and rolling my shoulders, then flexing my hands. I would be sore in the morning, but everything was working.
I made my way up the yard, keeping my eye out for any security cameras I had missed through my binoculars. Nothing besides the ones I had already noted—two on the corners of the house and the one above the back door. I snuck up on all of them and disabled them with the help of some black spray paint.
Then, a stroke of luck, these morons had left their back door unlocked. I got out my shotgun and slid it into its back sling, buckled on my ammo belt, and clipped the holster of my silenced pistol onto it.
Time to earn my paycheck.
I slipped into the darkened house and gave my eyes several seconds to adjust before moving on. It was warm, the heater rumbling away as the family wasted a pile of money keeping every corner of the huge house toasty. Vasily was paying them well for something. They lived like they were rich. They had two Teslas registered at this address and no normal cars. I wondered what they told their coworkers when they rolled up in a rich guy’s toy.
Discretion was important. My cover employment was security consultant, and a chunk of my pay came through that cover business. The rest of my income, I had to hide. Offshore accounts, investments, and land off in the countryside that I was slowly converting into an off-grid getaway. I lived in a modest apartment, not a suburban mini mansion. I drove a pickup truck.
It wasn’t lack of discretion that landed them on Vasily’s shitlist, though. That would get them a visit and a warning, maybe a beating if they got obstinate.
I cased the entire ground level carefully, there were no occupants. No pets either. I hesitated at the basement door, noticing that there was a bar lock on the outside.
I unlocked it and found a black, musty space, a concrete box with a well for a sump pump and the usual fuel tank dominating one corner. My flashlight revealed no signs of life, but I saw something strange in the dust on the ground, small footprints, the size of a child’s.
A cold finger of wariness slid down my spine. Did they have a kid?
Children were off-limits for me. Vasily knew better than to even ask. I had never hurt a kid, never even scared one if I could at all avoid it. But Vasily was insisting all occupants be executed, no exceptions. I couldn’t believe he knew about a child in the home. Vasily and I had an understanding, damn it.
I scowled down at those little footprints. I would have to keep an eye out. If there was a child, my whole game plan would have to change.
I left the basement and headed upstairs. The house had three levels, including the converted attic. The second level looked to be all bedrooms. I listened at every door before I opened it to check.
The second one I checked had snoring beyond it. When I opened the door, I saw a large shape curled up in bed alone. The silencer thumped softly as I put two bullets into him. The snoring stopped.
Silence behind two more doors, which were empty bedrooms. This house seemed to have a lot of them—and most of them had locks on the outside. Like you might see in a mental ward or a prison.
What the hell was going on here?I was a hard man, but something about all this was giving me the creeps.
I found a bedroom without an outside lock, the glow of a computer screen and the faint scent of marijuana trickled around the edges of the door. I turned the doorknob gently and pushed the door open a crack. A large man with a 9mm pistol on the table next to his laptop was sitting there raptly watching some kind of porn, a joint hanging from his lips. I ignored his fondling with himself under the desk as best I could.
“Yuri, for the third time, no, you can’t have any—” the man grumbled as he looked up. I shot him between the eyes, and he fell out of his chair with a startled look frozen on his face. I stepped inside and shut the door. He was alone. No cameras. The one on his laptop was covered with tape.
Then I noticed what was on the screen. I closed the laptop quickly and turned to the dead man in disgust. “Sick fuck,” I growled, wanting to scrub those images out of my brain. I even put another bullet in him out of sheer outrage.
I didn’t want to think too hard about the fact that a child and a kiddie porn enthusiast might have been living here in the same household. Maybe I would get lucky. Maybe the kid was just a visitor, and, gone now, I was worried over nothing.
I was almost at the master bedroom. The Ivanovs would be there, and I would have to be quick. I didn’t want to give them time to cry out, even with both bodyguards dead.
I checked my weapon before listening at the door. No movement inside, just soft breathing punctuated by slow, rumbling snores. I slipped inside, into a darkness that smelled of sweat, whiskey, and talcum powder.
They were back-to-back, as distant as the mattress would allow. The woman wore a sleep mask, the man had a chestful of dark, wiry hair that clashed with his bald spot. Both of them stank of whiskey. I shot the wife in the head, and, unexpectedly, Mr. Ivanov opened his eyes as I took aim at him.
He stared at me over the barrel, his dark eyes full of drunken confusion. “Why?” he managed after a few seconds.
“You already know,” I growled a second before I pulled the trigger.
But I didn’t know. From the resignation in his eyes before they went dull, I guessed Ivanov did. But there was nothing in my night’s orders about questioning him.
I had to check the rest of the place before I turned it into their funeral pyre. I moved quickly around, grabbing laptops and external hard drives and disabling a few more security cameras as I went.
After the austere basement, I didn’t know what to expect as I mounted the narrow staircase to the converted attic. But once I entered the room, I was stunned to see something like a movie set. It wasn’t very large, and since it focused on a wide, low bed covered in luxuriant fabrics, I could guess what kind of films were being made.
My eyes narrowed. There was another set of rooms across from the staircase, as with the ones downstairs these had locks on the outsides of the doors, though all were unlocked. I kept my pistol drawn as I opened them one by one.
Three of the windowless bedrooms were empty, of those, one showed signs of a recent occupant. Makeup smears on the tiny vanity. Rumpled bedding. A bodice-ripper romance paperback sat open on the bed, facedown.
The room still smelled of cheap perfume. The trappings left behind, coupled with the locks on the outsides of the doors, told me an adult woman had been in here—maybe staying willingly, maybe trapped. Whoever it was, they weren’t a small child. Small children didn’t read bodice-rippers and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
I went to check the last door and froze when I heard movement behind it. Shit. Well, if it was a captive, maybe I could get some answers out of them.
I unlocked the door and opened it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I gasped.
Inside was a tiny, elfin girl, maybe three or four years of age. Pale, thin, with enormous crystal-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair so light it was almost platinum. Her face was very solemn, and fear lurked in her eyes as she looked up at me from her perch on the bed.
Damn it, sometimes I hated being right. “Hey, kid,” I managed after a moment.
She waved shyly but didn’t speak.
My mind started racing and landed on a conclusion that suddenly made things a lot more complicated. I couldn’t kill her, but I wouldn’t leave her there to die either. I’d figure out what the heck to do with her once we were safely away.
She was in pink footie pajamas, the kind with a hood. Still not warm enough for her to go outside in. “Have you got a jacket?”
She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then shook her head.
“Okay. Look, we need to go now, there’s a fire.” I started stripping off my parka without even thinking about it. “Put this on, it’s cold.”
Even as I wrapped the girl in my parka and scooped her up in my free arm, I knew I was going off script. Against Vasily’s orders. But right that moment, as I made my way outside with the girl bundled against me, I knew one thing, Vasily’s mistake was not going to be my downfall. Or hers.
She was completely quiet as I carried her outside, I didn’t know whether she was in shock, or if she was used to being ordered around and my heart went out to the poor kid, but at that moment her silence and quiet obedience was good. She hid in the bushes at the bottom of the garden like I told her, and took my hand and walked with me when I returned from setting the explosives. She didn’t seem scared at all, only kept looking at me quizzically, as if she was more confused by everything, than worried about her home or the fate of her parents.
If they were her parents. Everyone in that house had been tall and dark-haired, closer to me in looks than the little girl who calmly walked beside me. She was tiny, pale in eyes and hair, and so delicate looking that I worried about holding her hand too tightly.
In fact, she reminded me of someone I once knew. But that had to be a coincidence, didn’t it?
I got us on the road just as the first whisps of smoke started rolling off the house’s eaves and tumbling into the sky. She looked from me to behind us as the house dwindled in my rearview mirror, but didn’t protest, fidget, or even look nervous.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” I asked her as I drove. She shook her head, and I sighed. “That’s probably for the best.”
If Vasily found out about her and called me on it, I could point out that she was too young to act as a witness against us, she didn’t talk, and she was just an innocent child. He knew where I stood on such things, and should have expected it.
But her silence still kept her from answering any of the questions that nagged at me as I drove us home, toward the apartment where I hoped to get to work solving the mystery of this child, and why she looked so familiar.