a moment. Finally, he said, “How much of a finder’s fee are we talking about?”
Court realized he had judged this guy well. “Ten grand.”
“Fifteen.”
Court would be using Hanley’s money, at least until Hanley cut off the spigot of funds.
He said, “Done.”
To this the pilot replied, “The flight will be twenty-five thousand, plus the rental of a midrange executive jet. There is a Hawker 1000 at the airport in Aruba available. That will make the trip with a stop in the Azores. Fifteen hours, give or take.”
Court cocked his head. How did this guy come up with all this without even talking to the pilot? He thought it over a moment. “Let me guess . . . you’re going to fly me to Leipzig.”
“Give me a couple hours to get it arranged and a couple hours to sleep. We’ll touch down in Germany in less than a day. Don’t forget the finder’s fee.”
“A finder’s fee for finding yourself? You didn’t have to look very hard, did you?”
The pilot grinned for the first time since Court met him the day before. “You look like a man who needs something, and needs it now. We’re all just trying to make a living out here, amigo.”
FIFTEEN
The man in apartment 3C jolted upright in his bed, looked around the small room, and then lowered back down slowly. He listened to the rain beat against the window next to him for a moment, and then, like most mornings, he wondered where the fuck he was.
Is this still Minsk? No . . . it’s Warsaw. I’ve been in Warsaw for weeks.
He asked himself if the fog in his brain was from the early hour or from the pain raging between his temples.
He looked to the clock on the wall. It was almost nine a.m.
So . . . it wasn’t the hour.
He’d drunk too much last night, again, and the bite in his stomach from all the vodka competed for supremacy against the pounding in his head. He had an ulcer; this he’d been told, and he’d also been told drinking himself to sleep each and every night would do nothing to improve his condition.
But Maksim Akulov didn’t give a shit about his body anymore.
He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, then reached for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke straight into the air above his bed.
It had been a rough night. The rough nights were lining up one after another these days.
It wasn’t just the drink, and it wasn’t just his health. Well, not just his physical health, anyway.
It was the dreams. The dreams had haunted him again.
The fucking dreams.
They stopped with the morning; he’d grown so accustomed to them he only needed to open his eyes to send the nightmares packing for another day. But they’d be back tonight, he knew, and he also knew there was no sense in worrying about things he could not control.
Maksim Akulov was a survivor. He had survived an abusive father. He had survived special forces training. He had survived Chechnya. He had survived Georgia. He had survived Dagestan. He had survived Syria. He had survived Ukraine. He had survived wounds, sickness, every dangerous place, and every dangerous mission his nation had thrown his way.
But these days, the only danger he felt was from the demons in his mind.
And with each passing day they grew in strength and in number.
The forty-three-year-old Russian knew what he needed to do to make the nightmares stop. He needed new challenges, a new purpose, in the real world. The problem, as he saw it, was not that he had the nightmares. The problem was that he had nothing else to devote his time to but the nightmares, so they owned his soul.
He didn’t have to wonder about the origins of his dark subconscious. Akulov was an assassin, after all; he’d seen things, done things, that he would never be able to erase from his memory banks.
But walking a razor’s edge between life and death was the only existence he had known for many years.
He’d been in the Russian army, a member of an exclusive Spetsnaz unit, and then he had been hired into domestic intelligence, the FSB. There he worked in Vega Group, the most elite covert fighting force in the nation. After a few years kicking doors and bashing heads on behalf of the white, blue, and red flag that he wore on his shoulder, however, he was asked to resign his federal position and to go to work