Chapter 46: No Safe Haven
After a few blocks on side streets, Rudy got back out on the main prospect and made time across the city. He retraced his route “home” toward Ismailovsky, toward Saran’s apartment. Ksenia didn’t shout or direct, just held on. They rode without a word. The rain hadn’t come hard—it was already tapering back to mist—but their clothes were soaked and clingy.
Rudy swung into the alley, killed the light and the engine, and coasted to the garage. The sunset was lost behind low heavy clouds. When the bike stopped, Rudy felt Ksenia shivering behind him, but only for a moment. Once he put his foot on the ground, she swung off stiffly and stamped her bluish feet. She grimaced and grunted softly with each step but kept up her agitated dance, while Rudy entered the garage code and pushed the bike inside. Saran’s Land Rover was gone—were they out looking for him?
They hid from the rain for a few moments and checked their phones. They had signal again. “Nothing from my people,” Ksenia said. “Either captured or running.”
Rudy’s phone had one message, audio, from Galina Filipovna. The timestamp showed just minutes ago, long after midnight in Irkutsk. “Rudy,” Galya shouted over the rattle and roar of an automobile engine, “FSB everywhere, the Institute, the Ring. Vitaly got out, has remote access, deleting—” Another voice interrupted. Galya must have turned her head; Rudy barely heard “South, Maksim, south.” Then she returned to full volume. “You’ve done all you can. Now run. I’m sorry. Run.”
Run where? Rudy wondered.
One weak light strung between the outbuildings shone outside. Rudy looked up and down the alley and up at the apartment block for any sign of watchers. The breeze was strong enough that he probably wouldn’t hear anyone lurking outside and they wouldn’t hear him. Nonetheless, he put a hand to his lips and pointed the way for Ksenia to follow, to the rear entrance of the apartment building. They moved as quietly as they could on the muddy path. Ahead, Rudy noticed the Land Rover parked close to the door, facing him; above, two of the three large windows of their third-floor flat were lit, curtains drawn. Saran and Volodya had to be upstairs, packing, getting ready to run, as Galya instructed. He was lucky to have caught them; there’d be room—
All four tires were flat. In the dim light, Rudy couldn’t see how the tires had been damaged.
“Your truck?” Ksenia asked.
“My friends’.” He glanced up at the windows again. No shadows moved behind the curtains.
Ksenia pulled Rudy out of the open, toward the apartment entry. Rudy punched in his code, and the outer door clicked open. Even in this post-Soviet building, the common area and stairs looked like a dark, grimy passage through 1962. Dirt be damned, Ksenia pulled off her heels to limp silently up the stairs behind Rudy. Lone fluorescent bulbs buzzed behind dusty cages on each landing in the stairwell and cast the only light into the dim third-floor hall. Rudy and Ksenia turned, then turned again, guided now only by faint hints of light seeping out under not fully sealed doors. Rudy heard dishes, a loud television, but from behind Saran’s door, nothing. He touched the knob, and the door lurched open, revealing the splintered jamb.
Instinctively, Rudy gripped Ksenia’s cold hand. They both scanned the dim hall; then Rudy looked at the light spilling from the quarter-open door. He heard no voices, no movement inside, no steps pounding across the floor to grab his arm and break it in the door. He opened the door the rest of the way and leaned in, Ksenia close in tow. He didn’t know which way the FSB would come at him or where to keep Ksenia safest. He didn’t dare call out.
But then he saw Saran’s body, visible through the door to the living room. She lay on the floor, legs splayed, chest bloody, head lolled to the side, eyes still wide with her final shock. Rudy stepped toward the body, trying to keep his ears open amidst the rushing, ringing blood in his head. Around the corner, crumpled over the smashed coffee table, was Volodya, in worse condition than Saran. His holster was empty; his gun was nowhere in sight.
Rudy lost his grip on Ksenia’s hand, lost his footing, and slumped back against the living room door.
Was this the FSB’s plan? Not just arrest, but murder the opposition? Was this happening in Irkutsk? Were monsters kicking in Vitaly’s door, Maria and the children screaming… bullets hammering Maksim’s truck before he could get Galya away from the city…
Rudy felt sobs, a wail coming from deep in his chest. He forgot himself and let himself fall into darkness.
The next thing he was aware of—beyond his breaking heart, beyond Saran’s stunned eyes, beyond Volodya’s contorted brokenness—was the touch on his shoulder. Some lingering sense told him to spring away, dodge the punch, and fight back, but no muscle moved in response to that impulse.
But it was not Saran’s and Volodya’s assassin. It was Ksenia, her forehead, feverish now, matted with her soaked and stringy hair, now touching his forehead, her eyes trying to draw his out so she could make him lock on and listen to what he needed to hear. “I know this pain, Rudy. I know it. We cannot grieve now. You have to get up, with me, and we have to get out of here.”
Ksenia did not move from Rudy’s side until he nodded back. As he sat up, got to her feet, raw from the wind and wet, reddening now as blood pushed painfully back toward her toes. “We need dry clothes,” she said. She stumbled, gritted her teeth, and continued through the foyer, walking past a chair she had propped against the door and disappearing into Saran and Volodya’s bedroom.
Rudy saw his pack in the foyer, next to his boots. He guessed Saran had placed it there, ready to carry down to the Land Rover. Rudy tried to get to his feet.
Before he could stand, the door blasted open. The chair skittered back to the kitchen. The whole side of the door frame fell, slicing down between Rudy and the block of a man who had kicked the door in. That board saved Rudy’s life, as it fell on the Chechen goon’s shooting hand and sent the bullet he fired from his silenced pistol a few centimeters left of Rudy’s ear, into the plaster by the bathroom door.
Anguish transmuted to rage. Rudy grabbed the frame piece and rammed it up into the man’s bearded chin. Already cracked, the board snapped, leaving the longer piece in Rudy’s hands. Rudy jammed the splintered edge into the man’s eyes. The gun clattered to the ground as Rudy pushed the blinded, howling man back into a second gunman who was trying to follow his partner in. The first man collapsed on the hallway floor. The partner, just as big, similar straggly black hair and beard, another Chechen, dodged and lunged at Rudy. Rudy had just enough time to scan the hall to see these goons had no backup before the second man pushed him back into the apartment. Rudy rode the man’s momentum backward, into the kitchen, caring less about his balance than keeping his left hand firmly clenched around the man’s gun arm, keeping the gun pointed down and away, and pounding away with his right fist at the face and ear and throat. They crashed against the table and the counter, knocking plates and a couple glasses to the floor. They fell and rolled and grappled amidst the shards. Rudy heard the gun hit the floor. He kept the attacker in a clinch and slammed back any way he could, against the floor, into the toppled table, into the cabinets. The attacker brought his knees up, shoved Rudy away, and scrambled back, reaching for the gun beside the fridge.
The attacker froze when the barrel of his partner’s gun touched the side of his skull. Rudy froze, too. Ksenia had stepped in the kitchen doorway and caught the man cold. “Hands out or you die now,” she hissed.
The Chechen did not move his hands—both on the floor, one just a centimeter from his black pistol, but he jerked his head left as far as he dared and rolled his eyes toward Ksenia. “Who the fuck—you! Bitch! you’re n—”
The sentence ended with one chirp of the silencer and half the man’s head spattered across the linoleum. Ksenia fired two more times, scattering the rest of the dead man’s cranium before his body could topple to the floor. The last two shots appeared to surprise her; she crouched frozen for a moment, checking for her self-control. She shook her head once, sharply. Then she scrambled out into the hall and put one bullet through the skull of the man Rudy had knocked unconscious. “Check their pockets,” Ksenia said, as she dragged the dead man through the broken doorway. “Ammunition, cash.” She glanced toward the window. “And stay low.” She scrambled away to the bedroom again.
Rudy checked as she ordered, found the assassins’ spare ammunition, two clips, in their jackets, a knife under the headless man’s belt, phones and a small wad of thousand-ruble notes in the first man’s back pocket. He put the clips and cash next to the pistols on the floor. He checked the phones, got passcode screens, and flung each toward the kitchen sink. Rudy slumped against the fridge. His knuckles were bleeding; his head throbbed.
But he had to keep moving. He ducked into the living room, keeping himself below the line of sight to the ground. Before retrieving his regular clothes, he pulled the bedsheets off the crisply arranged couch and spread one over Volodya and the other over Saran. Trying not to look again at the shrouded corpses, Rudy stripped off his suit—soaked, torn, worn once and done—and dried himself with the clean towel Saran had laid beside the couch for him. Then he dressed and scuttled back to the foyer.
As Rudy pulled on his boots, Ksenia returned from the bedroom, crouching. She wore Saran’s gray sweater, a pair of Volodya’s wool pants, and some thick gray socks. She sat beside Rudy, pulled one of the pistols close to her hip, and put the other by Rudy’s feet. “Take the gun,” she said, looking over the row of shoes. Saran’s shoes were two or three sizes too small; Ksenia reached for Volodya’s rain boots, which were a couple sizes too big. Even with that extra room, she winced as she pulled them on. Her eyes flitted from the boots to Rudy to the door, watching for anyone else who might come to finish the Chechens’ work.
Rudy handled the second pistol uncomfortably, trying to figure out the safety, afraid of bumping the trigger. “I don’t shoot much.”
“Let’s hope not at all,” Ksenia said. “But if you have to…” she took the gun from his hand, showed him the clip release, unloaded, reloaded, and pointed to the safety. “Safety off, safety on. Be ready.” She handed the gun back to him.
Rudy’s vision wavered. The image of Ksenia, the girl on the back of his motorbike, contended with the vision of Ksenia, Black Crane’s boss, killing those Chechens, who themselves had killed Saran and Volodya. Now Ksenia was handing him a gun, and he might have to kill. Killing, madness—Rudy’s stomach heaved, his body wrenched with his effort to fight his insides back, and he doubled over, head on hand on cold parquet floor.
When the last convulsion passed, Rudy sat up, blinking his eyes against the sting of tears of cold sweat. Ksenia—which Ksenia? the same Ksenia?—now knelt in front of him, hand on his shoulder, face close to his.
“Yulia,” he gasped. “She misses you.”
For the first time tonight, Ksenia’s eyes showed shock and sadness. Ksenia bowed her head. Her hair, still wet, fell forward and hid her face. “Yulia,” she whispered, eyes on the floor. “I miss her.”
Ksenia reached up to brush her hair back, but stopped mid-motion. Puzzled, then alarmed, Rudy looked toward the window, listened out the door. He didn’t sense anyone coming.
Ksenia reached into her back pocket and pulled out a damp red fabric square. She shook it free of its folds. Faded red, white pattern… “I missed you.”
Ksenia held Rudy’s old bandana.
“I brought it to the meeting,” she said. “For luck. I don’t know if it’s working.”
She sniffed sharply, then she snapped her head up and used the bandana to tie her matted hair back. “They’ll come. They’ll kill us. We have to go.”
“Go where?”
“Just a minute. Stay down.” She crawled backward, switched off the lights in the kitchen and the foyer. The only illumination came through the broken doorway from the hall. She sat near the doorway, back to the wall, unloading the pistol and counting rounds in the clip. She reloaded and pocketed the gun, then checked her phone. “Nothing, from anyone. Rudy, what’s your escape route?”
“Would’ve been Irkutsk, but there’s no way. My people—” Rudy thought of Galina’s message, how far away she was, how he could do nothing to help her. “They just said, run.”
“Then… run with me. Take me to Galich.”
Rudy’s eyebrows jumped. “Galich? Your parents?”
“They no longer live there. FSB will be watching the airports, train stations, direct routes to the border. But we must go now, overnight, and then… then we’ll see.”
Rudy stared at Ksenia in the shadows, fixed his eyes on hers to keep from looking at the dead bodies around them, his friends and their killers.
“Please,” she said, her blue eyes flashing and urgent. “Galich, one more time?”