Trophies of War Page 14

  “Not all of it,” he replied. “Some documents are German and other are French. I will help you when I get back. Just give me a minute.”

  With that, he was gone—back into the darkness of the stairs.

  “This is bullshit,” Lyon said. “I think your friend is flaking out on us.”

  Beth sighed.

  “Yes, well … let’s make the best of it,” she said. “You take that cabinet and start looking for anything that has lists in French or German. And photographs. I’m going to look for inventories. They all follow pretty much the same format no matter what language they’re in. Let’s hope the Russians didn’t decide to get creative when making up lists of the paintings they found.”

  Lyon began searching through the archive. He did find documents in German and French and, not bothering to figure out what they were, stuffed them into the duffle bag. He also grabbed Russian documents that looked like they might be lists of artworks—Cyrillic script followed by a date and then Arabic numerals that could be crate numbers or location identifiers.

  He listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, part of him hoping that Sasha wouldn’t return.

  Maybe he’s waiting in the car, having a smoke break, he thought. That might not be a bad thing. No more surprises, at least.

  Ten minutes went by, then twenty. It was slow work, but without Sasha to translate, they were just guessing at which documents were important. Beth held up a thick photo album she had found, flipping through the pages. She shined her light on it and Lyon could see that it was filled with black and white photographs of paintings, sculptures and objets d’art in every style, each with a number written on the white border. Beth put it in her duffle.

  “Okay, where the hell is he?” Beth asked.

  Lyon checked his watch, the luminescent hands glowing.

  “He’s been gone almost a half an hour,” he said. “You want me to go look for him?”

  “And leave me alone up here? No way,” she replied. “He’ll be back.”

  “Uh huh,” Lyon said. “He’s probably down there drinking with his buddy.”

  Lyon was getting less and less discriminating about what he put into his duffle. Their bags weren’t big enough to carry the entire contents of the filing cabinets, but he figured he might as well take everything that would fit.

  He was sitting on his haunches, searching through the back of the last drawer when he spotted a grungy-looking hardbound book. Picking it up, he decided it was once green, but the cover was faded and splattered with mud and rust-colored spots.

  Is that blood? he wondered.

  He opened the book and saw that it was a handwritten diary, with drawings and notes covering every page. A folded paper slid out of the back and almost fell on the floor before Lyon caught it. Unfolding the yellowed paper, Lyon saw that it was a map with German writing on it.

  The top part looked like a side elevation of a mountain, with the rest of the page taken up by irregular shapes connected by straight lines, all labeled in German. Were these tunnels and rooms under a mountain? In a lower corner, there was a hand drawn section of lines at right angles to each other. Each line had a string of numbers for a label and one line had a dot above it.

  Lyon couldn’t decipher the title of the map—it was made up of typically long German words he didn’t recognize. One of the long words got his attention. The first five letters were Kunst—art.

  “Hey, look at this,” he said, holding up the map. “Think I found a treasure map?”

  Beth gave it a quick glance. “Maybe,” she replied. “You done? I’m done. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Alright,” Lyon said. “I hope Sasha is down there waiting for us. And in a condition to drive back to Moscow.”

  They put their backpacks on and Lyon led the way, shining his flashlight on the rough-hewn floorboards. They both held their duffle bags, which were heavy enough that they had trouble finding a comfortable way to carry them down the stairs. Lyon half-expected to hear drunken revelry coming from the first floor, but there was only silence.

  What the hell is Sasha doing? he fumed. If he had some other job to do while we were here, he should have said so.

  Lyon came out of the stairwell into the light of the first floor hallway.

  “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

  Sasha and the guard were sitting on the floor, the bottle of vodka between them.

  “Look,” Lyon said to Beth. “Like I said—he’s flaking out on us. He decided to have a reunion instead of helping us like he promised.”

  “Goddammit, Sasha!” Beth exclaimed. Sasha ignored her.

  “Hey! Sasha!” Lyon said. He threw his duffle bag down and stormed down the hall. Remembering that moment in the St. Petersburg bar when he couldn’t figure Sasha out, Lyon now knew—he needed a punch in the mouth and he was about to get it.

  “Hey!” Lyon said again as he got closer.

  Neither Sasha nor the guard responded to him. About to grab Sasha by the arm and pull him up, Lyon quickly realized why.

  They each had a knife sticking out of their chest.

  The handles were identical black leather, so they blended in with their clothing, camouflaging the knives until Lyon was right on top of them.

  “Holy sh—.”

  Lyon stopped himself. A floorboard had creaked over his head. It was just one creak and it was followed by silence, but the meaning was clear.

  Whoever had killed them was still inside the Beer Tower.

  He turned and ran back down the hall, catching Beth as her eyes grew wide when she realized what had happened. He clamped his hand over her mouth just as she opened it to speak.

  Pointing at the ceiling, he put a finger to his lips. Beth nodded and he took his hand from her mouth.

  Lyon checked the outer door. Locked. He remembered that the guard had locked it behind them, so they needed the key to get out. It was probably on the guard, if the killer hadn’t taken it.

  But how did the killer get in?

  And why would someone want to kill Sasha and his friend? Was there another thief inside the Beer Tower, someone who played nastier than Sasha with his ‘just visiting after hours’ approach?

  Lyon began to feel around the guard’s belt, looking for a key ring. The corpse’s head lolled forward, hitting Lyon in the jaw. He recoiled, then forced himself to keep looking.

  He couldn't find anything—no ring, no retractable reel. Remembering that the key was a huge iron relic, he started searching the dead man’s uniform jacket when he heard footsteps echoing in the stairwell.

  “Shit,” he muttered under his breath. He could either keep looking and hope to find the key in time, or they could hide.

  Or he could fight.

  Lyon thought about pulling a knife out of one of the corpses. He yanked on the handle of the blade in the guard’s chest, but it felt lodged against bone and didn't move. Same with the one in Sasha. The killer had used two knives and left them in the bodies. Did that mean he was unarmed now? Could Lyon take him on? It’s not like he could hit him once and run—they needed time to find the key. He would have to knock him out or tie him up—what were the chances he could do that? Lyon had never been in so much as a fistfight before.

  The approaching footsteps on the stairs made the decision for him—he had no time to wrestle with the corpses and he wasn’t going to take the chance of confronting the killer, armed or not.

  Taking Beth by the arm, he picked up his duffle and pulled her into one of the first floor storage rooms. He followed her into the room, but couldn’t resist a glance back down the hall, towards the stairs. He poked his head out of the doorway, just enough to get one eye past the heavy wood post.

  He caught a glimpse of the man before he quickly pulled his head back, and it was enough to convince Lyon that they needed to get out of there, and fast.

  The killer wore a maroon t-shirt under a black suit two sizes too big for him. Even with the baggy clothes, Lyon could see that he had a body
of large muscles turning into fat, but it was the man’s face that he found terrifying. He had a glowering look, heavy black eyebrows over sunken eyes, his mouth a hard line. He had tattoos everywhere—barbed wire across his forehead, arcs of text under his eyes and some sort of star on his chin.

  This was not the man Lyon was going to choose for his first fight.

  Oleg Tokarev, though he no longer answered to that name, hated working alone. Since Volgograd, he had done every job with Yuri. Together, they were The Hammer and The Anvil, but now that Yuri was back in prison, Oleg—The Anvil—refused to take anyone along, no matter what the bosses said. He trusted The Hammer and The Hammer trusted him. Without the kind of bond that only develops between two men who have known each other since boyhood, The Anvil thought the business of killing was better handled alone.

  Fortunately, neither the guard nor the thief had been too difficult for The Anvil to take care of by himself. The guard had been told to expect him, and had let him in with no problems, locking the door behind. The knife had pierced his heart before he realized anything was wrong.

  The thief, though he dressed like the rough boys in Moscow, had frozen in terror, mouth agape and a bottle of vodka open in his hand. With one hand The Anvil slipped a blade between the thief’s ribs and with the other he caught the vodka before it hit the floor.

  The knives were his personal signature—a flourish he came up with the first time he and The Hammer had gone to prison together. Once a ragged collection of sharpened wire and bits of metal with cloth handles, he now carried several identical high-quality blades and always left them protruding from his victims’ corpses. He carried a big Glock 17 on his hip, but that was only in case of emergency. On the rare occasion when he had been forced by circumstance to slit a man’s throat from behind—he preferred to look them in the eye—afterward he stuck the knife deep in their chests where everyone could see. In the violent Russian underworld, sometimes targets died coincidentally—the knives were his message to the bosses that the deed had been done by him and no one else.

  He found the cap to the vodka, screwed it tight on the bottle and placed it between the bodies where he could pick it up on the way out. He never drank when he was working and this job wasn’t done yet.

  The thief had arrived at St. Sergius just when he was supposed to, but he wasn’t alone, as the The Anvil’s written instructions had said he would be. The man and the woman weren’t part of the plan, but he enjoyed a wide latitude to accomplish his task however he saw fit. Where unexpected people were concerned, his approach was always the same—clean and neat, never a regret about a witness that should never have been left alive. He checked the inside pocket of his jacket and counted three more knives.

  The Anvil closed his eyes and listened.

  He tried to tune out the fluorescent lights, seeking out any sounds behind the hum.

  Nothing.

  The Beer Tower wasn’t very large, but it was full of places to hide with all the art objects and crates stored on every floor. The Anvil decided to sweep every floor, starting at the top and either finding and killing his quarry or flushing them down into the first floor hallway. With the only exit locked, there would be no escape.

  He removed a small plastic bag from a pocket and dipped the tip of a knife into the white powder inside. Snorting the cocaine he smiled in anticipation of the euphoria and energy that would hit him. He always tried to time it so the peak would coincide with the kill.

  He listened for one more moment, then silently made his way up to the third floor.

  At the topmost level, The Anvil took out his flashlight with its steel strike bezel that doubled as a weapon. He clicked it on and swept the beam across the large storage room. Thick wooden beams cast shadows on the endless rolls of textiles and tapestries in a room that looked more like a carpet warehouse than an art collection. He walked the perimeter of the room, shining his light in every corner and then back to the stairwell to check that no one was trying to sneak out behind him.

  Once he was sure that no one was on the third floor, he descended to the second where he followed the same pattern—sweep the perimeter, check the stairs.

  Along the stone wall, two old filing cabinets caught his eye. They were closed and it wasn’t obvious that anything had been taken, but what The Anvil had noticed was the disturbed dust still in the air, floating in the beam of his flashlight. This was where they had been.

  He was about to recheck the room when he heard a shout downstairs.

  The Anvil spun in place, back toward the stairwell, the floor creaking beneath him. He silently cursed himself for his carelessness and made his way down to the first floor.

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, listening and watching for any signs of movement. There were none, but he noticed that the guard’s head was slumped forward on his chest. Not how he had left things. He pulled a knife from his jacket pocket and fondled the stacked leather handle. There were four rooms off this hallway, two on either side. The space was probably the same as the upper two floors, so The Anvil guessed he would be on his way in fifteen minutes and back in Moscow before the clubs closed, two more corpses behind him.

  As he had done upstairs, The Anvil started his search at the far side of the tower. He would either find the man and the woman or flush them toward the door like a hunter running down a pair of rabbits.

  He entered the first room to his right, sweeping the beam of his flashlight back and forth, looking and listening. Nothing but crates. They were packed so tight from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling that there were no places to hide.

  Back in the hall, he stopped and listened again before moving to the next room, to his left. This one was full of furniture—tables, chairs, armoires, cabinets—all piled to the ceiling. His light cast many shadows. He would have to check each one.

  Lyon realized they were trapped. Without the key, they had no way to get out of the Beer Tower—the windows were too narrow to climb out of and there was only one door. He could hear the killer’s footsteps at the end of the corridor, searching room to room.

  He and Beth were hiding behind a wooden horse with a knight’s suit of armor perched on the saddle. It blocked them from view of the storage room's door, but if the killer was searching each room, they would soon be found. Lyon felt adrenaline rushing through his body, causing his heart to race and his hands to shake. He forced himself to take several deep breaths to steady himself.

  If the killer is in one of the other rooms, that means he’s not in the hallway, Lyon realized.

  It could be a window of opportunity to search the guard’s pockets again. But what if the killer had the key? Lyon decided that since there was nothing he could do about that possibility, he would put it out of his head.

  His eyes found Beth’s in the dim light and he raised his hand in a wait here gesture. She nodded.

  Taking another deep breath, Lyon slowly made his way to the door and slid his head past the jamb, just enough to see that the hallway was clear. For the moment.

  He stepped carefully to the guard’s body and began searching his pockets. Starting with his blue workman’s jacket, he found nothing but cigarettes, a lighter and a phone.

  Keeping his head turned to the right so he could catch a glimpse of the killer if he re-emerged, Lyon moved on to the guard’s pants pockets. He patted the corpse’s thighs where his front pockets should be.

  Nothing.

  The corridor was still empty, but Lyon could hear no sound coming from either of the storage rooms at the other end. He had no way to know whether the killer was deep within them or just about to come into the hallway and see Lyon sitting there in the open.

  His hands were now slippery with the blood that had drenched the guard’s clothes as he bled out. The man’s phone was sliding out of Lyons fingers. He shoved it into his own jacket pocket, lest it slip to the floor and make a noise.

  Every possible hiding place checked, The Anvil closed the door to the furniture room and
made his way to the next one. Stopping again in the hallway, he listened, but heard nothing but the hum of the florescent lights.

  He smiled, in his element. Normally, he found his prey after some routine surveillance and then made the kill. Sometimes, he didn't even need to do that. The target’s location was known, The Anvil found him, killed him and left. It was like any other kind of boring job. Do A, then B, then C and collect your pay. Come back and do it again. Boring.

  But this was fun.

  Two more rooms to go.

  Reaching around to check the guard’s back pockets, Lyon felt the rough shape of the iron key.

  It stuck out so far Lyon didn’t know how he could have missed it the first time, but now he had the key. He pulled on it, but the weight of the body and the slipperiness of his hands made it difficult. He used his shoulder to push the body up just enough so that he could pull the key out of the pocket.

  It took less than a second, but moving the corpse blocked his view of the corridor. Settling the guard back down, Lyon snapped his head up to look, half-expecting to see the killer’s tattooed face inches from his own.

  Still nothing.

  Lyon felt another adrenaline surge and a panicked sense that his luck was about to run out.

  Shit … the car. Sasha has the key.

  Going over to Sasha’s body, he started with the two hand-warmer pockets of the Russian’s leather motorcycle jacket.

  This time, he got lucky.

  He felt the hard plastic of the BMW key fob and yanked it out of Sasha’s pocket.

  Lyon scurried back across the hall and found Beth behind the wooden horse, waiting for him. Lyon motioned for her to pick up her duffle bag as he did the same. Putting his mouth next to her ear, he whispered as quietly as he could.

  “On three, we both run to the door. I will be in front so I can unlock it. Then we run to the car.”

  Lyon took a deep breath and slowly stuck his head into the hallway, this time clutching the heavy iron key like a weapon.