Swagger turned back on peripheral motion and settled in for a shot on the surviving gangster now fleeing, saw civilians across the street behind him, possible friendly-fire casualties, and opted not to shoot. The big guy, all athlete and amazingly fast, made it out an exit and dove into the open door of a sleek black limo, which burned rubber on the acceleration.
“Dump guns, get out of here,” commanded Stronski.
“You’ve been hit.”
It was true. The left side of Stronski’s white silk shirt bloomed the dark spread of blotted blood.
“It’s nothing, you go, get out of here. Do it now! I am fine. I cannot run much.”
Swagger dropped the pistol, pulled his watch cap low, and started to walk forcefully away, crossing a street, finding an alley, cutting down it, finding a broad boulevard. Police cars roared along it, looking for a turn to the park, which, as it developed, was not accessible from that thoroughfare. Two passed within feet of Swagger, but in them, youngish men seemed alarmed and unaggressive, unwilling to get any closer until they were sure the shooting had stopped.
Finding a small restaurant, Swagger tried to look cool. He said, “Koka,” and waited as the drink was brought, hoping no one noticed that he was hit too.
CHAPTER 12
Reilly e-mailed her boss at Foreign. “Seems to be a big shoot-out downtown here. They say five dead in an assassination attempt. Some mafia deal. Interested?”
She heard back in a bit.
“Sounds routine. Happens here all the time. Pass, thanks. Stay on that Siberian gas thing for the time being. Maybe if Putin comments on shoot-out, set up a Sunday thumbsucker on Russian mafia-getting more violent? Think about it.”
So she went back to tap-tap-tapping. “. . while concerns about the danger of cold drilling for natural gas under the Siberian tundra continue to rise after last month’s blast, Petro-Diamond spokesmen argue that the explosion was a fluke. Moreover, they say the billion-dollar energy firm will stick with recently announced plans to expand drilling operations beyond the Nebeyaskaya range in the Arctic Circle.”
Her cell rang. She saw the number was local but didn’t recognize it. “Hello?”
“Hey,” she heard Swagger say.
Normally able to handle cops as well as grieving widows, angry generals, and romantic drunks, she was momentarily nonplussed by the voice, arriving as it did from a man who’d vanished ten days before.
“Where are you calling from? Why are you here? I thought you’d left.”
“I’m in the parking lot. I’m under your car, actually. Flat on my back.”
“What?”
“I seem to be bleeding. I made it here on the Underground. I had to get flat or even this small wound could empty me.”
“Jesus Christ, Swagger. You! You were in that gunfight. I should have known.”
“I think I’m the missing bodyguard.”
“And that was Stronski?”
“Stronski and Swagger, the two of us, both old guys, against the world. How is he?”
“They say the purported target is all right. Wounded, but expected to recover.”
“Very good news.”
“Okay, stay there. I’ll come down and get you. I need to get you to a medical–”
“No, no. It just tore through some muscles and skidded off the steel ball I have for a hip. That’s all. Bandages will do fine. In a few days, maybe you can dump me at the embassy, and I’ll be all right. Some corpsman will sew me up. The FBI will verify me, and they can ship me back more or less in one piece. I don’t want any police interviews, believe me.”
“Swagger, you have such a talent for getting yourself into bad shit.”
She got down to the dark lot to find him wriggling out from underneath one of the small Chevys that the Post provides its reporters in Moscow. Once he got himself upright, he was able to move without much more of a limp than he normally had, though looking closely, she saw the small bullet hole and a dark stain that suggested some blood loss.
“No arteries, no veins. Like a whack from a baseball bat. My whole side’ll be purple for a month, but once the laceration heals, it’ll be fine.”
“You’ve been shot!” she said. “It can’t be fine!”
“I’ve been shot before. Please, it’s not a big thing. My main worry is Stronski now.”
“He’ll be all right.”
The small elevator took them up seven flights. They turned through a metal door that could have guarded a bank vault and walked into a spacious double living room apartment laden with sofas, icons, books, textile hangings, art, all of it in splendid taste. Swagger had nothing to compare it to; he had never seen such a den of the mind as opposed to the body, but he imagined it as the kind of place some sort of fancy professor might keep.
“Nice,” he said. “Lots of books. Bet you’ve read ’em all.”
“Not hardly. The office is through the door down the way; it’s another apartment, rigged for business with our computers, which are tied in to the Post’s in Washington. It’s like I’m twenty-five feet away from my boss, not four thousand miles.”
He flopped on the sofa, not that interested in miracles of modern journalism. “This is fine for me. Maybe in a few minutes I’ll head into the bathroom and take a shower. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I can feel it stiffening.”
“Do you want anything to eat or drink?”
“You know, I am hungry.”
She fixed him a sandwich and a koka, which he greedily consumed. Then he told her all about the event.
“God,” she said, her face alarmed, “how can you be so calm? All those men trying to kill you, and it’s some kind of a joke.”
“Sooner or later, somebody will manage it. Or I’ll fall off the porch and starve to death like an old stag with a broken leg. It’ll happen. I’ve seen it enough. It’s a fact. I just want to get this one done, though. That would be enough.”
“How did they find you?”
“They didn’t follow either of us. Maybe they had a GPS planted on Stronski, but I doubt it. I picked the spot, he didn’t, and he didn’t know about it early enough to notify anyone, and neither could anyone else in his outfit. So my guess is they had a bunch of likely Stronski places under static observation, with a kill team near each one, and when we showed up, they got into action in a few minutes. What that tells me again is what someone else said: someone is spending a lot of money on this. Only governments have money like that to spend, or oligarchs, or Hollywood directors.”
“I doubt Steven Spielberg has it in for you.”
“You never can tell.”
“You’d better get some sleep. Do you want to move into the bedroom?”
“I’ll take the shower, sack out. I should be okay to move tomorrow. You won’t tell anybody I’m here?”
“If I told my editors I had a guy on the couch shot up in a Russian mafia gunfight who was investigating the Kennedy assassination, they’d ship me to the Anne Arundel county mall in two minutes.”
“I don’t know what that is, but if you say it’s a bad thing, I’ll take your word for it.”
He lay on the sofa. Escape. I made it. Tomorrow I’m safe, the Moscow thing is over, and nobody’s hunting me. He tried to relax, and in a bit, fed and showered and only marginally uncomfortable from the hit on his steel hip, he fell into a restless sleep.
But escape was the theme of the evening, and as he tried to draw some pleasure from his own, his mind naturally went to his buddy Ozzie Rabbit. That guy had been on the run too, although he never made it. Swagger, reliving the sense of crushing dread that had accompanied him on the walk out of the Park of the Fallen Heroes, came awake in the Moscow apartment. He knew sleep would not visit again. But Ozzie Rabbit would.