Russ Whitlock, like his primary target, Court Gentry, was a singleton asset, and singletons did things their way.
FIVE
Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko sat at his desk, hard at work, even now at four in the morning. He was a night owl, partly due to natural tendencies and partly due to the large quantities of barbiturates he took for his various physical maladies, all of which — both the maladies and the pills to combat them — affected his mood and sleep patterns. He often did not go to bed until after breakfast, and then he remained there through most of the daylight hours.
Behind his back, the young skinheads who worked for him called him vampir, “vampire,” a moniker that also took into account his pasty white skin and sunken dark eyes.
Sid’s office here at his Rochino palace was a large open room with wooden flooring and high ceilings of smooth plaster. The bare floor looked like it would be more suitable for dance parties than mob business. It was half the size of a basketball court and had the acoustics to match, but Sid liked the regal feel of large open spaces. The echoes of the room were only partially muted by bloodred curtains on the wall to his right, and a large crackling fireplace on his left kept his end of the room not warm, but bearable.
Sid’s massive desk was centered at the back wall, facing the door to the hallway across the room. Another door was behind him, and this led to his sleeping chambers.
A large incense burner was perched on the desk near his laptop computer. These items, along with a telephone and a cup of tea, sat amid reams of paper, and Sid read through page after page of the document pile with only the light of the fireplace and the ambient glow of his laptop.
A portrait of Joseph Stalin hung from the wall behind his desk; the dark eyes of Uncle Joe seemed to look over Sid’s shoulder while he worked.
And Sid had been working since early evening. Though his home had been the site of a party tonight, Sid had not even gone downstairs; instead he took his meal here at his desk. The skinheads — he didn’t call them that, he called them “his boys”—threw their wild celebrations on the first floor and outside in the snow; they brought girls and booze and often a little coke, and they had a hell of a time, but Sid did not partake. He wasn’t like them, and they weren’t like him.
That was not to say he was bothered by the festivities. Much to the contrary, his boys could party at his place every night as far as he was concerned. He liked the fact that some fifty or sixty feared and loathed men, all of whom worked for him in one form or another, were here on the grounds. It made him feel safe, up on the fourth floor with only his extended family, his sister and her kids, and his cousins living up here with him. They avoided the freak show on the weekends as well, staying up here away from the skinheads.
Despite the slight inconvenience, Sid knew that no one would dare attack him with a small army of soldiers at the ready — well, sort of ready — to respond to any threat.
Sidorenko enjoyed spending his time at his desk counting his money. He had entered the underworld originally as an accountant for a large crime boss in the early nineties before taking over the reins of his own Bratva a few years later, and he still spent his days, or more precisely his nights, looking over the meticulously maintained ledgers of his various enterprises.
He slurped a sip of his sugary-sweet tea, and then, with a reed-thin finger, he scanned down a printout ledger showing receipts from his prostitution and human trafficking concerns in the Czech Republic.
The phone on his desk rang and he answered it, not surprised at all to receive a call at four in the morning, as he had employees all over the world who knew Sidorenko could be reached throughout the night St. Petersburg time.
“What?” Sid asked distractedly, the index finger of his right hand still skimming a balance sheet stacked on hundreds of others.
“Sir. Ivan at the north gate.”
Sid’s finger stopped moving and his eyes narrowed with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“Probably nothing, sir. I almost did not call. But it is strange.”
“Well talk, damn you!” Sid shouted as he stood from his chair. He was a paranoid man, and it was a short trip for him to switch from comfortable relaxation to shaking terror. He was well on his way from the former to the latter; only his security man’s indecision kept him from bolting the door and reaching for his shotgun.
“Uh… A hang glider just crashed in the forest about twenty-five meters from the north wall. No one is with it.”
Sid cocked his head, his birdlike features pinched tighter in confusion.
“A hang glider?”
Ivan said, “We have two men searching the larch to see if a body—”
“It’s him!” Sid interrupted, his voice tight with tension. “It’s Gray. He’s here. Get everyone to the house! Send men to my office. A lot of men. Everyone else will search this building. You have to find him before he comes upstairs!”
“Sir, he did not pass the gate. I would have seen him. He must still be out—”
“Listen to me! He’s in the—”
Sid stopped speaking when he heard it: the slow creaking of old hinges, the sound of the heavy door to the hallway opening. He could not see the door across the room, as the light from the fireplace did not reach more than fifteen feet past the front of his desk. Normally when the door opened he knew it instantly, as there was a light in the hallway, and a long shaft of light across the cold hardwood floor accompanied the creaking hinges.
But not now. Clearly the hall light had been disabled.
Panic washed over his body; his knees weakened. He fought a wave of nausea and then croaked softly into the phone, “Hurry.” He placed the handset back in the cradle with a trembling hand and sat back down.
Sidorenko had thought of this moment for a long time. It was at the center of his every nightmare, true, but he had also taken the time when awake to put his mind to the situation. If, somehow, all his defensive measures came to nothing and it was down to Court and him, alone in a room somewhere, he had a plan.
Sid’s right hand wrapped around the cold grip of a double-barreled shotgun attached to a swivel hanger on the underside of the desk. He rotated the weapon’s business end to the left, toward the doorway, but he could see nothing past the firelight’s glow around his desk.
He heard no footsteps, but he knew the Gray Man was out there, approaching in the impenetrable darkness.
When Court entered the big dark room he saw the man standing at the desk at the far end in front of the Stalin portrait, illuminated by the light of the big fireplace. The man hung up a telephone and sat down slowly, clearly aware now that he was not alone.
The man looked like Sidorenko, but the distance and a long shadow cast by a chair in front of the fireplace made positive identification impossible.
Court shifted swiftly to his left and then began approaching up the wall along the curtains on Sid’s right, moving through black shadow on the opposite wall from the fireplace.
He saw the man peer into the dim in front of him, his right hand slipping casually under the desk.
Below the desk Gregor Sidorenko’s swivel-mounted shotgun scanned slowly to the left and to the right, searching for a target, belying the calm appearance he attempted to portray with his upper body. His face affected an air of nonchalance; he even smiled a little as he looked into the darkness before him.
And while his eyes searched for a target his mind raced. Sixty seconds, he told himself. Surely the men positioned on the second-floor landing had already heard from the north guard shack and were on their way, and it should not take them more than a minute from receiving the alarm before they came bursting through the door.