Critical Intelligence

Kiev, Ukraine

KLEGG SIPPED HIS DRINK and watched the clubgoers through slitted eyes.

The vodka was expensive and ice-cold so it went down with little more bite than frigid water. The dance beat, a hypno-industrial blend of tribal-styled rhythms, was two years past hip in New York and three in Europe. Despite this the meat-packing plant turned trendy nightclub was crowded with young, inebriated and apparently sexually frenzied young people fueled with chemical cocktails and copious amounts of hard alcohol.

Next to him Svetlana scanned the crowd with the bored indifference of the nouveau riche. She was fashionably anorexic with thighs thinner than her knees and bare buds for breasts. She was draped in a Pierre Cardin silk number with all the ridiculously expensive space-age, unisex, avant-garde styling that implied. She let a hand drift to the flat plane of her stomach, her eyes as large as a character’s in a Japanese manga above the drawn, stark lines of her cheekbones.

Klegg had known her for three days and in that time he’d never seen her eat anything but the olive from her vodka martini. Her energy, both in bed and out, seem entirely fueled by Stolichnaya Gold vodka and cocaine. She performed the most depraved of sexual acrobatics with the same robotic expression and untouchable eyes she used now to survey the club.

Glassy-eyed women in heavy makeup and tight, revealing clothing made their way past them to the concrete dance floor. Stalking them like wolves, strung-out male Russian urbanites, or the occasional steroid monster, followed in close pursuit.

Svetlana nodded to innumerable numbers of the club crowd. Her true value lay not in her penchant for kinky sex but in her vast, tangled social connections.

The youngest daughter of an extremely powerful and corrupt Moscow oligarch, she was more courtesan than prostitute. Klegg had flown halfway around the world and paid her in Colombian emeralds to secure an important introduction.

Upon accepting his request and payment for her services as social purveyor, she seemed to have slept with him out of habitual reflex rather than any sense of obligation.

Klegg himself had gone along with it because while vapid, she was still beautiful and because he had promised himself, upon passing the New York bar exam, that he would sleep with a woman from every continent.

After that challenge he had further redefined his goal to include economic regions and geographical features. It had only cost him one marriage and a stubborn case of herpes to meet his goal.

Klegg always achieved his goals, no matter what the price.

Kiev, he decided, really wanted to be Moscow and Moscow, he knew, really wanted to be Los Angeles.

His eyes scanned the crowd in a slow sweep like a radar dish. The images came back to him in jumbles: two girls in a booth making out while a crowd of onlookers gathered around. Stoned women on the dance floor slinging chem-lights around on strings while their dresses crept up their anorexic thighs. A long, greasy-haired kid in a thousand-dollar jacket dealing Ecstasy in front of the restrooms under the watchful eye of two hired thugs with bodies by Dianabol and eyes like polished steel mirrors.

The place smelled like sweat and cigarettes and liquor and sex. The din of the DJ’s stereo system was enough to qualify as a sonic weapon. Klegg could literally feel the 2-4 backbeat of the bass shake him with tactile force as it pumped out of the massive speakers.

He wasn’t here to have a good time.

He spoke Russian, among four other languages, and he was young enough not to stand out too terribly in the club during the initial surveillance. His cover was simple and straightforward because it was, in fact, his profession. He was a procurement specialist for a private contractor specializing in large-corporation inventory.

He made deals for engines in Peru, he acquired stockpiles of diamonds in South Africa, he secured binary processors in India, he obtained cooling systems for French Mirage jets and sold them to African dictators.

All the while he built his networks of shady lawyers, street contacts, intelligence agents, criminal syndicates, ship captains and bush pilots. Today he was going to expand that network into the field of soldiers for hire, and Svetlana was going to help him.

“There,” the woman said.

Across the dance floor near where a phalanx of bouncers guarded the club’s entrance he saw Milosevic. The Russian lawyer came in like a visiting emperor, his entourage part Praetorian guard, part sycophantic toadies and part pleasure slaves.

Klegg reached down to where his attaché case rested against his leg. He took the not unsubstantial weight of the thing in his hand and stepped away from the bar. Across the room Milosevic was shown to a private area at the top of a short flight of stairs leading to a balcony over the dance floor.

A massive, impassive-faced thug with the body of a professional wrestler and an Armani suit stood sentry before the red-velvet rope dividing the stair and viewing lounge from the common dancers and general population.

As they approached, the man’s head turned on a bull neck like a 20 mm cannon on an APC gun turret. His eyes were cold chips of blue. Klegg felt an instant rising of his own hackles as he drew closer. It was an instinctual reaction to so much rival testosterone. The potential for conflict was intense. It wouldn’t pay to lose his head, and this was what Svetlana was earning her percentage for.

He let a small smile play across his face as the bodyguard’s eyes were drawn away from him, a man with a briefcase in a Ukrainian nightclub, to the slinky form of the icy blonde. The guy might be tough, Klegg mused, but he wasn’t a pro.

Behind the guard up the stairs Milosevic was opening a bottle of champagne. He said something and everyone in the group laughed like marionettes. A flamboyantly gay man with purple spiky hair and tight leather pants shrieked his giggles like a siren and dumped a copious amount of white powder down directly on the glass top of the low table set between the party’s couches.

“Dmitri,” Svetlana pouted. Her hand went to the mile-wide expanse of his chest. “You act like you don’t remember me.” Her chin came down, and her eyes looked up as she made coy into a seduction power play.

She was like a big-league power hitter, Klegg realized. Her technique wasn’t subtle; she’d either strike out completely or knock the ball out of the park. And like a high-paid baseball home-run specialist she’d knock more out of the park than she’d lose…until age and the drugs caught up with her.

Dmitri broke into an easy grin, his eyes trailing down her body like the laser guidance system of a jet fighter locking on to target. He replied in guttural, bass Russian, his chest rumbling like the engine of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“I remember you, Svetlana. That time in Moscow—” he began.

“We stayed up all night,” she answered, and they laughed together.

Dmitri caught sight of Klegg standing behind her and his smile hardened. Catching the shift in him Svetlana put her hand on his chest again, drawing his attention back to her the way a tiger’s eyes will follow a piece of raw meat in the hands of a circus trainer.

“How is he?” she asked. “Does he ever talk about me?” She sounded so sincere Klegg, who had planned the ruse with her, was almost fooled despite himself. Dmitri grinned knowingly and Klegg could see he had bought into the act completely.

“Of course, baby,” the bodyguard purred. “Like anyone could ever forget you.” He shrugged his shoulders and the effect was like seeing tectonic plates shift. “But you know how he is. Everything, all the time—it’s hard to look back. Hard to keep track.”

“Let me talk to him,” she purred.

He started to shake his head no and she slid two crisp folded American hundred-dollar bills into his hand before he could speak. He made the money disappear and reached for the hook to the red rope strung between the stanchions in front of the short flight of stairs.

“Okay, ’Lana,” he growled. “But just you. I don’t know your boyfriend, and Milosevic doesn’t want to make any new buddies.”

He stared at Klegg as if daring him to argue.

Klegg said nothing. Everything was going according to plan. Svetlana reached up and kissed Dmitri quickly, leaving a lipstick mark so red on his pale skin it looked like a wound. Then she was up the stairs and being greeted like an old friend.

Klegg waited patiently, ignoring Dmitri’s hard stare. He waited while Svetlana passed kisses of greetings all around and hugged Milosevic. She laughed at something he said, then helped herself to a line of the coke and a glass of the expensive champagne. Milosevic seemed generally happy to see her and, having spent time with the lady himself, Klegg could understand why.

After a few moments, once she was comfortably ensconced next to the Russian syndicate lawyer, he saw her lean in close, hand on Milosevic’s thigh, and begin whispering in his ear.

Klegg, long attuned to these things, watched Milosevic’s body language change. The smile, a social mask, stayed in place, but when his eyes cut away from Svetlana and down the stairs to Klegg they glittered like a snake’s, sizing him up.

Klegg smiled slightly back in acknowledgment.

It was time to make his play. He was a six plus one.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm

The Bronco pulled out of the dirt road emerging from the orchard and came to a stop at the foot of the hill. Doors were kicked open and the five members of Phoenix Force emerged from the vehicle. Gary Manning unwrapped a protein bar and began eating it.

“Good God, Manning,” Calvin James said. “Are you always eating?”

Still chewing, the massively muscled Manning looked at him and shrugged. “I’m in a bulking phase. I want to see how much weight I can put on and still keep my two-mile-run time under eleven and a half minutes.”

“Christ,” Rafael Encizo groused. “If you get any goddamn bigger we’ll never get the helicopter off the ground.”