Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(18)

He tried to think it through on the long, cold walk back to Józsefváros. He and Imre were leaving the country tonight, if he had to club the old man over the head and carry him over his shoulder.

And when they were safe, he just might discreetly contact Tamara Steele and warn her about whoever Hegel might send next. Why not?

It was strange. He had never even physically met the woman, but he had begun to feel almost responsible for her. And her child.

Then his neck began to crawl, as he approached his rented car. His stomach sank. He looked around himself, wishing he’d called a cab.

A mistake. His last mistake. A culmination of an infinite series of mistakes, false moves, errors in judgment that stretched back over generations. To his stupid mother, who should have stayed with the boring pig farmer from the country she’d married after she got pregnant with Val. Who should have been grateful to live a life of hardworking respectability in Romania rather than coming to the big city with nothing but her beauty and her young son, to meet men, drugs, ruin. And her son’s ruin.

That and other irrelevant details flashed through his mind as the flickering shadows converged upon him in the deserted street. He pulled his knife. He should have brought a gun. Another mistake, he thought.

Time to stop thinking. He spun to meet them, staying in constant twirling motion as they came at him. Four men. Five. More.

Lunge, spin, duck, kick. The heel of his boot crunched through the bridge of someone’s nose. Blood spattered the dirty snow. A high parry blocked a blade that slashed through the thick wool of his sleeve. He lunged low, a stabbing blow, blade punching through cloth, piercing flesh, grating on bone. He saw blue eyes widen, stringy blond hair swirl and flap as the man spiraled back, shrieking. Val lost his center of balance as he followed through on the blow, lunging too far forward to jerk back and evade the blackjack that whipped down—

An explosion, all white, all black, and pain blotted out everything.





Chapter


4




Val had been drawing reluctantly nearer to consciousness for a pain-blurred eternity. The bucket of ice water clinched the job.

He gasped, choked. The realization was a hammer blow. He tried a slit-eyed peek, gasped at the searing pain in his head.

There was no need to see. He knew the nightmare smell of the place. Bleach, disinfectant, humidity, mold. Beneath all that, a deathlier smell. Old blood, shit, worse. Novak’s secret torture chamber. Designated for executions, interrogations. No need for luxury here, just privacy, soundproof walls, and a drain in the floor for easy cleanup.

His past had caught up with him altogether. Its fanged jaws clamped down, crunching his bones.

He braced himself against the pain and nausea, and forced himself to look up at the blazing fluorescent lights. Eight men stared down at him. Seven held guns. All were pointed at him.

It had been eleven years since he had seen Daddy Novak. He’d been hideous then. He was a death’s head now: bulging eyes, jaundiced skin, long teeth. An old, pitted skull dipped in yellow wax.

Novak dug an ungentle toe in Val’s kidney. He flinched. Someone had already found the place and given it a thorough pounding.

“Wake up, fool,” Novak said. “We have business to conduct.”

Val ran a quick damage assessment as he rose carefully to his feet. A couple of teeth loose. Ribs cracked but probably not broken. A knot on his temple, sticky with blood. Hot red pain pulsing in his head with every heartbeat. Bruises, a shallow slash across his forearm, clotted and black, oozing fresh blood through the white sleeve.

Not so bad. He’d taken much worse on other occasions. They hadn’t meant to hurt him, just subdue him.

He looked around. He recognized András from the old days. That hulking, beady-eyed sadist had been Novak’s main man for years. Three more he remembered from the old guard, the rest were fresh blood. The blue-eyed blond man he had stabbed was not there. Dead, perhaps, or close to it. Several were marked. By him, he surmised, glancing around at the crushed noses, the split lips, the cold, murderous eyes.

New enemies. God. As if he needed more of them.

His eyes flicked back to Novak. He coughed to clear his throat and tasted blood. “This drama was not necessary,” he said. “You could have e-mailed or called.”

Novak smiled. “You would have ignored me, as you have done for eleven years. Now that you have risen so high in the world, you have forgotten your old friends, no? And besides, important business is best conducted in person.”

Dread settled deep inside him, heavy and greasy and cold. “We have no business,” he said. “I work for another organization.”

Novak steepled his skeletal fingers, smiling thinly. “Yes, of course. PSS bought you from me for a tidy sum, but I always suspected that I accepted too low a price for you. But this is special. I have a business proposition that you might find interesting.”

“I’m out of this business,” he repeated.

“Yes, yes. We know the success story. Vajda, prostitute, drug dealer, and gunrunner, who repented his wicked ways and now conducts a glamorous double life—covert operative by night, pampered entrepreneur and gigolo playboy by day. I follow your cover career on the Internet, you see. Very inspiring. Makes the boys weep with envy, particularly all the women you f*ck. Bad for discipline, Vajda.”

“I do not want to—”