“Hey, what’s going on?” Sam asked innocently when he appeared in the dark crack of the opening door. Under Katya’s hand the door stopped abruptly, where Sam had his foot lodged against the back of it.
“Oh!” she jerked, startled by seeing the wrong face. “I thought Nina was in here.”
“She is. Passed out. All that homebrew kicked her arse,” he replied in a self-conscious chuckle, but Katya did not look amused. In fact, she looked downright terrified.
“Sam, just get dressed. Wake up Dr. Gould and come with us,” Sergei said ominously.
“What’s wrong? Nina is fuck drunk, and she is not waking up until doomsday, it looks like,” Sam told Sergei more seriously, but he still tried to play it all off.
“Christ, we don’t have time for this shit!” a man shouted from behind the couple. A Makarov appeared against Katya’s head and the finger pulled the trigger.
Click!
“Next click will be made of lead, comrade,” the gunman warned.
Sergei started to sob, rambling madly to the men who stood behind him, begging for his wife’s life. Katya’s hands covered her face and she fell to her knees in shock. From what Sam gathered they were not colleagues of Sergei’s, as he first thought. Although he could not understand Russian, he deduced from their tone that they were very serious about killing them all if he did not wake Nina and come with them. Seeing the altercation escalating dangerously, Sam put up his hands and stepped out of the room.
“All right, all right. We’ll come with you. Just tell me what is going on and I’ll wake up Dr. Gould,” he calmed the four vicious-looking thugs.
Sergei put his arm around his crying wife and shielded her.
“My name is Baudaux. I am to believe you and Dr. Gould accompanied a man named Alexandr Arichenkov to our lovely patch of land,” the gunman asked Sam.
“Who wants to know?” Sam snapped.
Baudaux cocked the gun and aimed at the cowering couple.
“Yes!” Sam shouted, his arm outstretched toward Baudaux. “Jesus, will you relax? I’m not going to run away. Aim that fucking thing at me, if you need midnight target practice!”
The French thug lowered his weapon while his companions kept theirs at the ready. Sam swallowed hard and thought of Nina who had no idea what was happening. He regretted affirming her presence there, but if these intruders found him out, they would surely have killed Nina and the Strenkovs and strung him up outside by his balls for the wildlife to find.
“Wake up the woman, Mr. Cleave,” Baudaux ordered.
“All right. Just… just take it easy, okay?” Sam nodded in surrender as he slowly reversed into the dark room.
“Lights on, door open,” Baudaux said firmly. Sam was not about to put Nina in peril with his wisecracks, so he just agreed and switched on the light, grateful that he covered Nina before he opened the door for Katya. He did not want to imagine what these brutes would do to a nude, unconscious woman if she was already spread-eagle on a bed.
Her small frame hardly lifted the covers where she slept on her back, mouth agape in a drunken siesta. Sam hated having to spoil such a perfect rest, but their lives depended on her waking up.
“Nina,” he said rather loudly as he bent over her, trying to obscure her from the leering beasts that hung around the doorway while one held up the homeowners. “Nina, wake up.”
“For fuck’s sake, switch off the fucking light. My head is killing me already, Sam!” she whined and turned on her side. He quickly looked apologetically to the men in the doorway, who just stared in amusement, trying to catch a glimpse of the sleeping woman who could shame a sailor.
“Nina! Nina, we have to get up and get dressed right now! Do you understand?” Sam urged, rocking her under a heavy hand, but she only frowned and pushed him away. From nowhere Baudaux stepped in an walloped Nina so hard across the face that her node bled instantly.
“Get up!” he bellowed. The thunderous bark of his cold voice and the crippling anguish of his slap shocked Nina stone cold sober. She sat up, bewildered and furious. Lashing out her hand at the Frenchman, she screamed, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Nina! No!” Sam shouted, afraid that she had just earned herself a bullet.
Baudaux caught her arm and backhanded her. Sam darted forward, spearing the tall Frenchman up against the wardrobe along the wall. He rained down three right hooks on Baudaux’s cheekbone, feeling his own knuckles shifting backward with every punch.
“Don’t you ever hit a woman in front of me, you piece of shit!” he screamed, fuming.
He grabbed Baudaux by the ears and rammed the back of his head hard on the floor, but before he could land a second shot Baudaux grabbed Sam in the same way.
“You miss Scotland?” Baudaux laughed though bloodied teeth, and pulled Sam’s head into his own, delivering a debilitating head butt that immediately rendered Sam unconscious. “That one’s called a Glasgow kiss… laddie!”
The men roared with laughter, while Katya pushed through them to come to Nina’s aid. Nina’s nose was gushing and her face was bruised badly, but she was so angry and disorientated that Katya had to hold the petite historian back. Letting out a torrent of curse words and promises of certain death at Baudaux, Nina ground her teeth while Katya covered her with a robe and held her tightly to calm her, for the good of them all.
“Let it go, Nina. Let it go,” Katya said in Nina’s ear, holding her so close that the men could not hear their words.
“I’ll fucking kill him. I swear to God he is dead the moment I get my chance,” Nina sneered in Katya’s neck as the Russian woman held her close.
“You’ll get your chance, but you have to survive this first, okay? I know you’re going to kill him, sweetheart. Just stay alive, because…” Katya soothed her. Her tear-soaked eyes glanced at Baudaux through the strands of Nina’s hair. “dead women can’t kill.”
Chapter 6
Agatha had a small hard drive in her possession that she used for any eventuality she might need on her travels. She had rigged it up to Purdue’s modem, and with consummate ease it took her all of six hours to create a software manipulation platform from which she hacked into the Black Sun’s previously impregnable financial database. Her brother sat in silence next to her in the frosty early morning, a hot cup of coffee clamped firmly between his hands. There were few people who could still astonish Purdue with technical savvy, but he had to concede that his sister was still perfectly capable of provoking his awe.
It was not that she knew more than he did, but somehow she employed knowledge they both had more readily whereas he constantly neglected some of his drilled-in formulas, leaving him searching his brain storage like a lost soul a lot of the times. It was one of those moments that had him questioning last night’s schematic and this was why Agatha could so easily find the missing circuits.
Now she was typing at the speed of light. Purdue could hardly keep up reading the codes she punched into the system.
“What, pray tell, are you doing?” he asked.
“Give me the details of those two friends of yours again. I’ll need ID numbers and surnames, for now. Come now! Over there. You put it over there,” she rambled, flicking her index finger, about to point as if she was writing her name in the air. What a marvel she was. Purdue forgot how amusing her mannerisms could be. He went to the chest of drawers where she pointed and retrieved the two files where he kept Sam and Nina’s records, from when he first employed them to assist him on his excursion to Antarctica to locate the legendary Ice Station Wolfenstein.