"How much is it?" Archie eyed the man with suspicion. The waiter frowned, as if he had misheard the question.
"How much? Nothing. You are Viktor's guests."
"Oh, right." Archie turned to Tom with a smile. "You see, I told you we'd be looked after."
"What about that one?" Tom pointed to an empty table farther away from the stage.
"Oh, no" — the waiter looked momentarily panicked — "Viktor says that table. Please to sit."
Tom shrugged. With a look of relief, the waiter showed them over and refreshed their ice bucket as they sat down.
Dominique took a sip from her glass. "So what now?" she asked.
"I guess we wait," said Archie.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Tom was getting restless. Thirty minutes had gone by, and there was still no sign of Viktor. Even the pole dancers in the cage, who had started out with seemingly limitless energy and the ability to bend their bodies into the most unlikely positions, appeared to be flagging.
He was about to ask one of the waiters where Viktor had got to when a man, no older than twenty, flanked by a blonde who looked even younger, approached their table and shouted something in Russian. "What?" said Tom.
"He says this is his table," the blonde translated in a thick accent.
"Like hell it is," Archie countered.
"He wants to sit here," she insisted.
"Well, that's going to be difficult because, as you can see, we're sitting here. But he's welcome to try the floor."
The girl translated and the man's face broke into an unsmiling grin. He said something and the girl translated again.
"He says he's happy to sit on floor, if he can rest his feet on your head." Archie leaped to his feet and the man stepped back. In a flash a bodyguard jumped between them, his right hand already reaching inside his jacket, his left hand braced against Archie's chest.
"Okay, okay…" Tom stood up with a conciliatory smile, his palms raised in defeat. "Our mistake. Here — it's all yours. Leave it, Archie."
Muttering angrily, Archie followed Tom and Dominique to the other side of the room.
"It's the fucking Wild West out here," he complained, flicking his cigarette butt to the floor.
"You need to stay out of trouble," Tom reminded him. "It's not worth getting shot over a table."
"Okay, okay," Archie conceded, throwing an angry glance back at their former table. The man and his blond companion were laughing at something as the bodyguard busied himself by pouring champagne.
Tom took a sip of his drink and scanned the room, wishing this Viktor would show up soon. Tom hated waiting at the best of times, and right now the traveling, the cold, and the afternoon's confrontation with Renwick were catching up with him.
Two men near the entrance suddenly caught Tom's eye. For a moment, he couldn't put his finger on exactly why they stood out. Then it struck him: despite the heat, they were both still wearing their thick outdoor coats.
The crowd seemed to part in front of them as they strode to the table where the man and the blonde, closely monitored by their bodyguard, were clinking glasses. Then, without warning, they opened their coats and each swung an Uzi from under his arm in one fluid movement. Before any of the table's occupants could react, they started firing in precise, controlled bursts at point-blank range.
At the first sound of gunfire, people dived to the floor screaming. Those nearest the door scrambled toward it, falling over each other in their desperate struggle to escape.
The music stopped, the palpitation of the bass replaced by the mechanical thud of gunshots echoing off the ceiling like a succession of thunderclaps, the spent cartridges plinking off the floor as if someone had dropped a handful of change.
Incongruously, the strobe lights continued to flash, the killers' movements intermittently registering on Tom's retina as if caught in slow-motion replay.
His clip empty, one of the men drew a handgun and calmly fired a bullet into the temple of each of his victims' heads. Satisfied with their handiwork, they retreated across the room, nonchalantly stepping over the people cowering there, and disappeared up the staircase.
As soon as they had gone, real panic set in. Women screamed hysterically, men began shouting. There was a stampede for the exit, shards of glass flying across the room as the bar was upended.
"We've got to get out of here," Tom shouted above the noise, hauling Archie and Dominique to their feet, "before they realize they got the wrong people and come back."
"You think —?" Disbelief and shock spread across Dominique's face.
"Yeah," said Tom. "I think that waiter was a bit too insistent we sit at that particular table. Three minutes earlier, we'd have been there instead of them."
CHAPTER SIXTY
People surged toward the stairs, only to be swept back into the club as flashing blue lights heralded the arrival of the police. Women screamed, men shouted, and guns clattered to the floor. Small white envelopes fizzed through the air as people tried to rid themselves of incriminating evidence, some bursting open midflight so that the white powder they contained danced through the still-pulsing disco lights and settled on the floor like a dusting of fresh snow.
"That way," yelled Tom, pointing at a group of people who were heading through a door by the cage. "There must be another exit."
They found themselves in a narrow corridor; a door on the left led to the men's toilets and a door on the right to the women's. At the end was a small janitor's closet with mops, brooms, and industrial-sized bottles of detergent propped up against the concrete walls. Set into the far wall was a ladder formed of narrow iron hoops that led up to ground level. A chaotic, writhing stream of bodies was scrambling up the ladder's rungs.
"Come on," Tom shouted, fighting his way through to the base of the ladder and holding people off so that Dominique and Archie could climb up ahead of him, before clambering up himself. A woman's shoe, presumably dropped by someone above, flashed past his face, and he felt the sickening crunch of someone's fingers underfoot as he stepped on their hand.
After about twenty feet, the ladder emerged through a submarine-type hatch onto a narrow strip of wasteland. People streamed up the ladder behind them, the women flinching as the cold night air bit into their bare flesh. Tom slipped his jacket around Dominique's shoulders.
"Let's go," he called, the growing cacophony of sirens telling him that it would be only a matter of minutes before the police located the rear exit and rounded up everyone in the immediate vicinity.
They set off, Dominique running in long, effortless strides, Archie huffing after only a few hundred yards. A couple of stray dogs ran alongside, barking with curiosity, until a particularly interesting lamppost brought them skidding to a standstill, their tails wagging furiously.
"I thought Viktor was a friend of yours," Tom observed as they ran. "You must have done something to really piss him off."
"I didn't do anything," Archie wheezed. "It's some sort of mistake. It must be."
They reached a junction and Tom slowed down, trying to get his bearings amid the identical rows of decaying Communist-era concrete apartment blocks whose doorways smelled of stale urine. Before he could orient himself, however, three black Cadillac Escalades roared up the street behind them, rounded the corner, and screeched to a halt, surrounding them in a crude semicircle.
The rear passenger door of the middle car flew open, and the waiter who had shown them to their table leaned out, his face pale, eyes wide, body turned so that they couldn't see into the car beyond him.
"What the hell do you want?" Archie challenged him.