Blood Play

The cut on Colt’s lip had scabbed over but all it took was a faint grimace to reopen the wound and give him a fresh taste of his own blood. He spit it out and demanded, “Where am I?”

Cherkow laughed. “Do you really think I’m about to tell you?”

“Where am I?” Colt repeated.

“What are you, a parrot?” Cherkow squawked derisively and flapped his arms as if they were wings. “Bwawk, bwak! Polly want a cracker?”

Colt fell silent. When he took a deep breath, he felt suddenly nauseous, overcome by a cloying, musklike smell that permeated the stark room. It was a vaguely familiar odor, and Colt soon placed it as the scent of javelinas, boarlike creatures that roamed the outer edges of the pueblo as well as other parts of the state. It wasn’t much of a clue as to his whereabouts, but moments later Colt heard the mournful howl of a train engine as well as the rhythmic clatter of steel wheels rolling across a stretch of rail tracks. The sound was close, less than a mile away. Colt knew there was a train line that paralleled most of the eastern leg of Interstate 25 between Santa Fe and Blanchard. It seemed likely, then, that he was being held somewhere along that fifty-mile route. He had doubts that he would be able to put the information to use, but the knowledge gave him some small sense of empowerment.

Steam rose from a cup of coffee Cherkow held in one hand as he paced the room. As with the others, Colt recognized the Russian from the casino. He was tall and lean, wearing denim jeans and a matching lined jacket. His complexion was pasty, and his jaw was outlined with a thin, well-groomed beard the same dark shade of brown as his close-cropped hair. An equally thin red scar trailed down his right cheek. Colt had seen his share of knife fights over the years and suspected the Russian’s scar had come from a similar skirmish.

Outside, the sound of the train faded, only to be replaced by the persistent drone of an approaching helicopter. Cherkow went to the window and glanced out a moment through the shutters, then turned and ambled back toward Colt.

“We both know you’re going to talk eventually,” he told his prisoner. “Why not save us all a lot of trouble and do it now?”

“I already told your friends,” Colt responded. “I live on the reservation and work at the casino. I just do my job and don’t ask questions, so I don’t know what it is that—”

Cherkow cut Colt off, dashing the scalding contents of his cup into the bound man’s face. Colt let out a cry as the coffee burned his skin and stung his eyes. The Russian wasn’t finished. He took a quick step forward and raised his right leg, planting his foot against Colt’s chest. With all his might, he thrust the leg outward. Colt’s feet swung up into the air as the chair tipped and fell backward, taking him with it. His head struck the hardwood floor and he saw once more a cluster of fast-moving stars, but this time he remained conscious. The pain inside his skull magnified, however, brimming his eyes with involuntary tears. The floorboards beneath him shuddered faintly as the helicopter set down, seemingly less than a few dozen yards away. A few seconds later, the copter’s rotors fell silent and the floor went still.

Looming over Colt, Cherkow withdrew the Viking pistol from his waistband. He leaned over and pressed the gun’s cold barrel against Colt’s forehead.

“Here’s something for you to think about,” Cherkow said coldly. “We know where you live. We know your wife is at home with that new baby of yours. If you won’t talk, maybe she will.”

Colt froze in terror, his worst fear realized.

“Leave my family out of this!” he said. Staring past the barrel into Cherkow’s cold gray eyes, Colt could see that he was appealing to the conscience of someone who had none.

“That’s up to you, now, isn’t it?” Cherkow said. “Which kind of hero do you want to be? The kind who thinks there’s something noble about keeping silent or the kind that puts his family first?”

Colt was coming to grips with Cherkow’s ultimatum when the door swung inward and another of his captors entered. The other man shouted angrily at Cherkow, again in a language with which Colt was unfamilar. Cherkow shouted back but pulled the gun from Colt’s head and stood upright, facing off with the other man. They continued to argue briefly, but Colt had no way of knowing what they were talking about. Several times, however, he heard a word that was all too familiar. A name.

Orson.

Colt’s heart sank anew as he realized something far more ominous than heavy rain or slow traffic may have prevented his friend from showing up at the airport. Had these men killed Orson the same way they’d killed Kissinger and the others? Or had the inventor been taken hostage, as well? If so, why? What could possibly be Orson’s connection to what he suspected was going on at the reservation? It made no sense.

Once the Russians had finished arguing, Cherkow turned to Colt.

“As long as you’re laying down, you might as well get some sleep. We have a little surprise in store for you when you wake up.”

Cherkow followed the other man out of the room. They left the door ajar, allowing Colt his first glimpse of what looked to be an adjacent living room. All he could see was a table, two chairs and a sun-faded, overstuffed sofa. Several cardboard boxes rested on the latter’s cushions. Standing beside the sofa was a short, thin man dressed in black. He had long red hair and a matching goatee. Colt had never seen him before.

Thinking back to his last conversation with Orson, Colt remembered the inventor mentioning that he would be leaving Taos for Albuquerque once he finished packing the things he planned to bring to the New Military Technologies Expo. Colt couldn’t be certain, but he felt there was a good chance he was looking the boxes that contained those items.

Lying on the cold floor, Colt tried to piece it together. What did it all mean? What had he gotten himself into?

Moments later, Colt heard the front door open. A cold draft swept its way toward him, carrying the pungent stench of javelinas. Franklin’s stomach clenched and he retched, bringing up little more than saliva mixed with more blood from his cracked lip. Out in the living room, the front door slammed shut and there was renewed arguing among his captors. Soon a fourth man strode into Colt’s view, wearing a knee-length black leather trench coat over his well-tailored suit. He was bald, thick-chested and carried himself with an air of authority.

If there had been any doubt that his abduction was linked to what was going on at the reservation, those doubts quickly vanished, for Colt found himself staring at the Roaming Bison Casino’s Director of Operations, Freddy McHale. When McHale glanced his way and the two men shared a look of mutual recognition, Colt realized as well that there was no way he would be allowed to live now that he knew who was behind his abduction.

CHAPTER NINE

The Roaming Bison Casino was not Frederik “the Butcher” Mikhaylov’s first foray into the wagering industry.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, gambling establishments had sprung up in nearly every major city throughout Russia, and, as was the case in many of America’s early casino ventures, organized crime had been quick to latch on to the phenomenon and turn it into one of its primary cash cows. Mikhaylov had been a thirty-year-old low-level goon for freelance mobsters in the suburb of Dolgoprudniy when the first casinos opened down the road in Moscow. His reputation as a brutal enforcer for loan sharks made him a natural choice when several small, competing mobs merged into the dreaded Dolgoprudnenskaya and muscled its way into the capital city’s more upscale gaming halls. Over the next dozen years, Mikhaylov specialized in “negotiating” the payment of gambling debts incurred by high rollers, and in those rare cases when physical assault and torture failed to produce desired results, the one-time slaughterhouse employee had no qualms about putting his butchering skills to good use, killing debtors in ways gruesome enough to earn press coverage that helped serve as a deterrent to anyone thinking they could welsh on monies owed the mob without dire consequence. By his own count, during his years as an enforcer, the Butcher settled over sixty million dollars’ worth of gambling debts and executed at least fifty individuals who were either unable or unwilling to honor their markers.

There came a point, however, at which Mikhaylov tired of what, for him, had become mere drudgery. He yearned for advancement within the ranks and a chance to set foot in the casinos for reasons other than targeting his next victim. He liked the idea of wearing a well-tailored suit and consorting with Moscow’s upper crust at the tables instead of in dark, back alleys, and in 2000 he carried out the vicious execution of a rival gang lord in exchange for an opportunity to become pit boss at Dolgoprudnenskaya’s crown jewel, the Regal Splendor Casino, located only a few blocks from the Kremlin. He flourished in the position, quickly becoming fluent in five languages and developing a personalized sense of savoir faire that combined a newfound cosmopolitan sensibility with the rakish charm that drew on his lower-middle-class upbringing. On the side, Mikhaylov ran a high-price escort service that allowed him to freely indulge in the sexual favors of some of Moscow’s most comely women. As his stature rose, the Russian forsook his modest apartment in Dolgoprudniy for a lavish penthouse suite at the Regal and began to dine regularly at the casino’s five-star restaurant, Nostrovia, where he would often use a private booth to entertain valued guests and conduct the sort of business negotiations that couldn’t be discussed out on the gambling floor. With a personal tailor at his disposal and no less than five customized luxury vehicles stored at a private garage adjacent to the casino, Mikhaylov, on the whole, had enjoyed an extravagant, privileged lifestyle that he couldn’t have even imagined in his youth.

Of course, part of Mikhaylov’s job at the tables required that he continue to deal with gamblers prone to wagering beyond their means, but the Russian had an uncanny knack for judging people and, unlike his predecessors, he routinely made a point not to extend credit in cases where he felt it would become necessary to execute the debtor and write off his or her debt. Yes, there had still been the frequent need for back alley “persuasion,” but Mikhaylov was now in a position to delegate the dirty work to others. He trained his own crew of goons, including Petenka Tramelik and Viktor Cherkow, and he trained them well. Over the next eight years, there were barely a dozen instances in which torture or blackmail failed and his men were forced to commit murder.

All seemed right with Mikhaylov’s world when, in 2008, the Russian president decried the proliferation of gambling in Russia and pushed through legislation banning casinos from urban centers throughout the country. Over the next two years, the Regal Splendor, as well as its illustrious counterparts in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities were closed down, leaving the Russian populace with the daunting proposition of traveling to Siberia or some other godforsaken hinterland to indulge in any form of wagering other than the national lottery. Some crime syndicates rolled with the punch and reluctantly set up shop in these remote wastelands, but Mikhaylov was among those who decided to leave Russia in pursuit of greener pastures. With Tramelik and Cherkow in tow, the Butcher pulled stakes and moved to Bolivia, where Dolgoprudnenskaya, through a shadow company, had poured nearly three hundred million dollars into the Andean Splendor, a gambling mecca modeled after the Moscow casino where Mikhaylov had reinvented himself. The resort was slow to catch on, however, and felt too much like a step down in the world to leave him satisfied. He continued to go through the motions as a duteous pit boss, but all the while kept his eye open for other, better opportunities.

He didn’t have long to wait.

Fourteen months into his Bolivian tenure, by which time he’d been promoted to Chief Officer of Gaming Operations, Mikhaylov was approached by seventy-year-old Evgenii Danilov, whose global renown as an eccentric billionaire was little more than a well-orchestrated front for his allegiance to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which in 1991 had replaced the notorious KGB. Danilov, with SVR’s blessing, had bought a stake in the Bolivian casino to help keep it afloat but he’d also chosen what he considered to be a more promising—and lucrative—gambling frontier to infiltrate: reservation casinos in the United States. Danilov’s various American enterprises were all affiliates of Global Holdings Corporation, which the elderly financier had painstakingly created as an Antwerp-based entity supposedly made up solely of investors from the European Union. GHC had recently won a bid to take over operations of the Roaming Bison as well as the nuclear waste facility located at Rosqui Pueblo. Mikhaylov was presented with an offer to come to America and help oversee the casino’s table action. It was, for Mikhaylov, the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse. That offer was gilded even further when Danilov arranged for The Butcher, Tramelik and Cherkow to be sworn in as agents for SVR’s special operations force, Vympel.

Following several months of training and SVR debriefing at GHC’s Belgian headquarters, Mikhaylov and Tramelik were given forged identity papers along with extensively fabricated personal backstories and put on an international flight bound for the U.S., where, as Freddy McHale and Pete Trammell, both men spent the next two years slowly establishing themselves as an influential presence at both Roaming Bison and the nuclear waste facility. As much as the casino was a perennial moneymaker, for Danilov and SVR a stake in tribal gambling profits wasn’t an end in and of itself, but rather a means to help finance clandestine activity at the waste plant. The activity there served a long-standing agenda dating back more than fifty years to the height of the cold war, when Russia had squared off with the United States as the one country most capable of thwarting its aspirations for world domination. Part of that covert agenda was dependent upon securing access to a ready source of uranium beyond that contained in the nuclear fuel rods stored at the waste facility, hence Mikhaylov’s fervent lobbying with Taos Pueblo’s tribal leader Walter Upshaw and the decision to put Upshaw under increased surveillance when he balked at partnering with GHC. It was a bugged phone call carried out as part of that surveillance that had pinpointed Franklin Colt as the informant who’d aroused Upshaw’s suspicions about GHC’s ulterior motives for wanting to place the Taos reservation under its umbrella. Given what was at stake, the Butcher had made a point to be flown to Glorieta so that he could personally ensure that Colt would divulge the information he’d only alluded to in the cryptic phone message he’d left with Upshaw earlier in the day.

There was a second reason for Mikhaylov venturing this far from his duties at the casino, and it was the other matter the Russian chose to first deal with once he’d entered the modest five-room farmhouse that served as a base of operations for more than two dozen lower-tier SVR agents charged with dealings that fell beyond the scope of debt-collecting at the casino.

After confirming that Colt was still alive, Mikhaylov briefly chastised Viktor Cherkow and the other three SVR agents for having caused so much disruption in the course of abducting the security officer. Afterward he sent them to prepare for their next assignment, raiding Colt’s house to look for the evidence he’d collected against GHC. Once he and Tramelik were alone Mikhaylov told his red-haired colleague, “I hope you managed things a little better on your end.”

“Everything went smoothly,” Tramelik replied. “Upshaw and Orson are both dead, and it’ll be pinned on Upshaw’s kid. We took care of him, too. Vladik stayed behind to monitor things and keep an eye on the safe house.”

“What about Upshaw’s cell phone?”

“I got that, too,” Tramelik reported, “but there’s only one call between him and Colt and that was two weeks ago, before we visited him.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Mikhaylov said. “You said Colt called him while he was in his car just this morning.”

“I know,” Tremalik said. “He must have deleted the call afterward.”

“I’m not so sure,” the other Russian said. “Ilyin took Colt’s cell phone right after they grabbed him at the airport, and the only call to Upshaw was the same one from two weeks ago.”

Tramelik frowned. There seemed only one likely explanation. “They must’ve each gotten separate phones for when they called each other.”

“Smart move if that’s what they did,” Mikhaylov said. “Upshaw didn’t have a second phone on him?”

Tramelik shook his head. “It’s not like I had time to search through the whole car,” he said. “Besides, when I found the one phone I figured it was the one we were looking for.”

“You’ll need to get back to Barad and have him sniff around a little more,” Mikhaylov said. “If Colt and Upshaw were exchanging text messages or attachments, that other phone might have the proof we’re looking for.”

“The car will end up at the police impound yard,” Tramelik said. “If they haven’t gone through it, maybe Barad can beat them to it.”

“It’s worth a try,” Mikhaylov said. “And when Cherkow gets to Colt’s place he’ll need to look for his other phone, too.”

“What if Colt kept it in his car?” Tramelik suggested. “We should probably try to get to the impound yard in Albuquerque, too.”

“Let’s wait and see what Cherkow can come up with,” Mikhaylov said. “Now back to Orson. Did you get hold of his inventions?”