He blinked out the sweat and kept his eyes fixed on the pistol.
When the unarmed doctor finished releasing Valentin from the leather straps, he stepped back to his colleague. Valentin sat up slowly on the gurney, keeping his hands slightly raised and his eyes locked onto the pistol in the quivering hand of the man who had just murdered the other patient.
“What do you want?” Valentin asked.
Neither of the two men spoke, but the one with the pistol — Kovalenko identified it now as a Walther PPK/S — used the barrel of his tiny weapon as a pointer. He twitched it toward a canvas duffel on the floor.
The Russian prisoner slid off the gurney and knelt down to the bag. He had a hard time taking his eyes off the gun, but when he finally did he found a full change of clothes and a pair of tennis shoes. He looked up to the two older men, and they just nodded at him.
Valentin changed out of his prison garb and into worn blue jeans and a brown pullover that smelled like body odor. The two men just watched him. “What’s happening?” he asked while he dressed, but they did not speak. “Okay. Never mind,” he said. He’d given up getting answers, and it certainly did not look as though they were about to kill him, so he allowed them their silence.
Were these murderers actually helping him escape?
They left the infirmary with Kovalenko in the lead and the doctors walking three meters behind him with the Walther leveled at his back. One of the men said, “To the right,” and his nervous voice echoed in the long and dark hallway. Valentin did as he was instructed. They led him up another quiet corridor, down a staircase, through two iron gates that were unlocked and propped open with waste bins, and then to a large iron door.
Kovalenko had not seen another soul during the entire walk through this part of the detention center.
“Knock,” instructed one of the men.
Valentin rapped on the iron door lightly with his knuckles.
He stood there for a moment, silence around him except for the thumping in his chest and a wheezing in his lungs from where the bronchitis affected his breathing. He felt dizzy and his body was weak; he hoped like hell this jailbreak, or whatever was going on right now, would not require him to run, jump, or climb any distance.
After waiting several more seconds, he turned back around to the men behind him.
The hallway was empty.
Bolts in the iron door were disengaged, the door creaked open on old hinges, and the Russian prisoner faced the outside.
Valentin Kovalenko had experienced a few hours of semi-fresh air in the past eight months; he’d been taken to the exercise court on the roof once a week and it was open to the sky save for a rusted wire grille, but the warm predawn breeze that brushed his face now as he stood at the edge of freedom was the freshest, most beautiful feeling he’d ever experienced.
There were no wires or moats or towers or dogs. Just a small parking lot in front of him, a few two-door civilian cars parked along a wall on the other side. And off to his right lay a dusty street stretching as far as he could see under weak streetlamps.
A street sign read Ulitsa Matrosskaya Tishina.
He was no longer alone. A young guard had opened the door from the outside. Valentin could barely see him as the lightbulb in the fixture above the door had been removed from its socket. The guard stepped past Valentin, inside the prison, and he pushed Valentin outside, and then he pulled the door.
It clanged as it shut, and then a pair of bolt locks were engaged.
And just like that, Valentin Kovalenko was free.
For about five seconds.
Then he saw the black BMW 7 Series sedan idling across the street. Its lights were off, but the heat from the exhaust rose to diffuse the glow of the streetlamp above it. This was the only sign of life he could see, so Kovalenko walked slowly in that direction.
The back door of the vehicle opened, as if beckoning him forward.
Valentin cocked his head. Someone had a sense for melodrama. Hardly necessary after what he’d been through.
The ex-spy picked up the pace and crossed the street to the BMW, and then he tucked himself inside.
“Shut the door,” came a voice from the dark. The interior lights of the backseat were off, and a smoked-glass partition separated the rear from the front seat. Kovalenko saw a figure against the far door, almost facing him. The man was big and broad, but otherwise Valentin could not make out any of the man’s features. He had been hoping to find a friendly face, but he felt certain almost immediately that he did not know this person.
Kovalenko closed the door, and the sedan rolled forward slowly.
A faint red light came on now, its origins difficult to determine, and Kovalenko saw the man back here with him a little better. He was much older than Valentin; he had a thick, almost square head and sunken eyes. He also had the look of toughness and importance that was common among the upper levels of Russian organized crime.
Kovalenko was disappointed. He’d hoped a former colleague or a government official sympathetic to his plight had sprung him from the prison, but instead, all indications now were that his savior was the mafia.
The two men just looked at each other.
Kovalenko got tired of the staring contest. “I don’t recognize you, so I do not know what I should say. Should I say ‘Thank you,’ or should I say ‘Oh, God, not you’?”
“I am no one important, Valentin Olegovich.”
Kovalenko picked up the accent as being from Saint Petersburg. He felt even more certain this man was organized crime, as Saint Petersburg was a hotbed of criminal activity.
The man continued, “I represent interests that have just spent a great deal of treasure, both financial and otherwise, to have you removed from your obligations to the state.”
The BMW 7 Series headed south, this Valentin could tell from the street signs that passed. He said, “Thank you. And thank your associates. Am I free to go?” He presumed he was not, but he wanted to get the dialogue moving a little faster so that he could get answers.
“You are only free to go back to prison.” The man shrugged. “Or to go to work for your new benefactor. You were not released from jail, you just escaped.”
“I gathered that when you killed the other prisoner.”
“He was not a prisoner. He was some drunk picked up at the rail yard. There will be no autopsy. It will be registered as you who died in the infirmary, from a heart attack, but you can’t very well return to your previous life.”
“So… I am implicated in this crime?”
“Yes. But don’t feel like this will affect your criminal case. There was no case. You had two possible futures. You were either going to be sent to the gulag, or you were going to be killed right there in the infirmary. Trust me, you would not be the first man to be executed in secret at Matrosskaya Tishina.”
“What about my family?”
“Your family?”
Kovalenko cocked his head. “Yes. Lyudmila and my boys.”
The man with the square head said, “Ah, you are speaking of the family of Valentin Olegovich Kovalenko. He was a prisoner who died of a heart attack in Matrosskaya Tishina prison. You, sir, have no family. No friends. Nothing but your new benefactor. Your allegiance to him for saving your life is your only reason to exist now.”
So his family was gone, and the mob was his new family? No. Kovalenko brought his chin up and his shoulders back. “Ida na hui,” he said. It was a Russian vulgarity, untranslatable into English but akin to “Fuck you.”
The mobster rapped his knuckles on the partition to the front seat, then he asked, “Do you think that somehow the bitch that left you and took your kids would react pleasantly to you showing up at her door, a man on the run from the police for murder, a man who had been targeted for termination by the Kremlin? She will be happy to learn of your death tomorrow. She won’t have the continued embarrassment of a husband in prison.”