Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(40)

“You?” Zhoglo began to laugh. “Pavel. Be serious. Who would want your rotten organs after the vodka you have guzzled, the junk you have shot into your veins, the diseased prostitutes you have f*cked? The whites of your eyes are yellow. Your skin is pitted. You look like a walking corpse. I would not be surprised if you were HIV positive and riddled with ten different strains of hepatitis.”

“Vor, Sasha is only—”

“I am sorry to say it, my friend, but your body is useless as a bargaining chip. But Sasha, ah.” Zhoglo was smiling in earnest now, starting to feel much better. “Lovely, sweet, virgin Sasha. His various parts are as clean and fresh as newly plucked flowers.”

Pavel covered his mouth with a veined, shaking hand.

“But don’t despair,” Zhoglo went on. “Your good behavior may still be worth something if it saves Marya and your other little son, no? I must do some calculations and assess my financial losses in this disaster. Your mistakes are expensive, Pavel. I fear it will bump poor little Sasha to the head of the line. Such a shame.”

Pavel made a hoarse sound. Zhoglo reached down, and took the Heckler & Koch from the man’s nerveless fingers. He used the barrel to tip up Pavel’s face. Pavel’s eyes were wide, staring. Swimming with tears.

“Now, my friend,” he said softly. “Tell me everything there is to know about this Ludmilla.”

“I have known her for years,” Pavel said. “From back when she lived in Ukraina. She was married to Aleksei Dubov in the nineties. They operated brothels in Kiev. She and Aleksei moved girls in the pipeline to western Europe, the Middle East, America. Then Dubov was killed.”

Yes, yes. He had ordered the man’s death himself. He had not known, or else he had forgotten, that Dubov had a wife. Zhoglo made an impatient gesture for the man to continue.

“Ludmilla married a Hungarian, who died shortly afterwards, and set up business in Budapest. Then she married an American—”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. He died shortly afterwards? Clutching his throat after a glass of wine?”

Pavel coughed. “Heart attack. After she was widowed, she set up business in Seattle. We have supplied her with girls off and on. I don’t understand. She is not stupid, and she is a good business-woman. She has everything to lose by crossing you, and she knows it. So I think that—”

“Don’t think, Pavel.” Zhoglo dug the gun barrel into the hollow under Pavel’s cheekbone. “The results of you trying to think are damaging to me.”

Pavel closed his eyes. “Shall I kill her, Vor?” he asked, hoarsely. “Or bring her to you, for questioning?”

Zhoglo considered it, tapping the gun barrel idly against Pavel’s temple. He concluded after a moment that it would be unwise to kill this Ludmilla before his imagination had exhausted every possibility of using her. She was his only tenuous link to that stinking turd Solokov and his lying, green-eyed whore. His only tool to feed false information back to whoever had really hired Solokov.

In the end, of course, Ludmilla would die, screaming. He would see to the matter personally.

“Not yet, Pavel.” He patted the man’s cheek with the gun. “Not yet. But you will be paying a visit to your favorite madam very soon. Take him—” he gestured with the gun toward the surgeon “—and get him back to the mainland. Out of my sight.”

“Do you want me to kill—”

“No, Pavel. Deliver him to wherever Yevgeni picked him up. Do not kill anyone. Idiot. And hurry back. It will be your task to dispose of all these bodies. It is the least you can do.”

Zhoglo watched Pavel herd the surgeon out the door. The man’s gabbling, excited questions receded into the distance. He lit a cigarette and turned his gaze away from the spectacle of soon-to-be-rotting meat sprawled on the floor. All that money wasted in recruiting, training. His cadre of bodyguards cut by more than half.

He hated waste. It was an obsessive tic, for a man who was filthy rich, but he was convinced that his thrift was one of the reasons for his prodigious success. It came from growing up on the streets of Kiev, he supposed. Thieving and whoring to eat. Nothing taught a man the value of money like near starvation.

In fact, the idea for this project had sprung directly from his loathing of waste. It had come to him while overseeing the punishment of one of his business rivals, mere months after his own heart transplant. Seeing human organs tossed about with abandon had gotten him thinking.

He’d tallied the resale value of the gory offal that had been scooped out of the fellow’s abdominal cavity. It was a considerable sum.

He’d mulled over this, as he gazed at the moaning, mutilated creature. One could not strictly call it a man any longer, since that which defined manhood had been separated from him.

It was by no means a new idea, but he was sure that no one as well financed and well organized as himself had ever attempted it.

And on the eve of the debut of his project, it had been infiltrated. The audacity of the culprit infuriated him.

Like any intense emotion, it unleashed a desire to eat, despite the large meal he had just consumed. Powerful stress always induced a violent, cramping hunger in his belly, like the hunger he remembered from his boyhood, foraging for survival in maggoty garbage heaps.

The lying whore with bouncing breasts had spoken of a Grand Marnier chocolate torte. God forbid that, too, should go to waste.