McCarter ignored the dancing lights as he caught motion behind him. The bartender swung. McCarter had known a lot of bartenders who kept baseball or cricket bats behind the bar. He had about one heartbeat to note that this was the first bat he had seen that had been scored with shallow, cross-hatching saw cuts and filled with several dozen safety razor blades. He stepped into the blow, caught the bartender’s wrist and heaved his sagging bulk over the bar. He kept the weapon as the barman landed badly in a clatter of bar stools.
McCarter regarded the hideous bludgeon he had acquired. “Nice hate stick, old son. You just earned yourself an appointment with your old Doc Marten, and the doctor is in.” McCarter gave the bartender his boots until the big man was reduced to twitching, bleeding and wheezing.
The floor of Luffy-Land was a sea of broken, moaning, screaming Russians. None of the girls had moved an inch or batted an eye, much less screamed. They seemed to have found the spectacle slightly more interesting than their soap opera. They watched avidly to see what might happen next.
McCarter turned to his team and held up the razor-enhanced baseball bat. “Did you see this?”
Propenko grunted. “I have seen this. In Vladimir Central Prison. It was used for rectal purposes.”
Manning gazed heavenward. “Could have gone my whole life…”
Propenko held out his hand.
McCarter handed him the hate stick. The Russian went and took a knee on Artyom’s chest. “I told you. You do not want to screw with these men. Now, answer their questions.”
Artyom bubbled and gasped around his shattered septum and the blood filling his mouth. “Listen, Nika, we can—”
“Do not talk to me.” Propenko glanced back at McCarter. “Talk to him.”
Artyom babbled. “Christos…”
“Do not talk to Jesus. These men are your god. God helps those who help themselves.” The Prison Spetsnaz officer spit on the razor club meaningfully. “Help yourself, Artyom. Help your brother. While you still can.”
Artyom Gazinskiy whimpered and began helping himself and his brother.
The Annex
Akira Tokaido sang to himself. “Money, money, money, muh-nee… Money!”
Kurtzman and Wethers exchanged weary looks of mutual sympathy.
“Boy couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket…” Kurtzman muttered.
Wethers glanced over at the young Japanese-American hacker. One of these days someone was just going to have to tell him that ponytails for computer geeks had gone out of fashion. “And he has exactly as much rhythm as one would expect…”
However, Kurtzman admitted to himself, Tokaido’s instincts were correct. When you lacked a face, a fingerprint or a smoking gun—though Phoenix had rather boldly latched onto a pair of smoking automatic cannons—you followed the money trail.
The brothers Gazinskiy had told a fascinating tale and almost none of it made any sense. It would have been clear to a child that the Gazinskiy boys were tools and nothing more. No one would miss them.
Nikita Propenko was a power tool—a tool of a higher order—but even if he died badly and in public, little more would happen than a few dangerous men in Moscow drinking a shot of vodka in his name, shaking their heads and muttering “He never should have gone into Poland.”
Propenko had been offered a big fee, big enough to tempt him from his lucrative private work in Russia and its former republics. They had hired a small army of hammerheads but they had also hired a very dangerous and disciplined man to run them. The cannons had been his idea and he had enough pull to buy artillery on the black market. Anyone other than Phoenix Force would have been wiped out, captured or extracted, taking heavy casualties every step of the way. Propenko had demanded cold, hard Euros.
The Gazinskiy brothers, besides being low-rent muscle and peddlers of extremely low-rent flesh, were also low-rent cyber criminals. They had a fairly lucrative sideline running online scams in former stan-suffixed Russian republics where entire rural areas were just starting to explore the internet and connectivity.
The Gazinskiys had accepted bitcoins as payment.
The Central Bank of the Russian Federation had issued a statement stating that it considered the exchange of bitcoins for goods, services or currencies a “dubious activity.” This was a veiled threat, but both an admonition and an admission that the Russian Federation currently had almost no ability to regulate it or control bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoins were the first, real, online alternate currency and, despite many national governments trying to crack down on their use, they were still the choice of cyber geeks who wanted their transactions off the grid, as well as cyber criminals that wanted the same.
The Gazinskiy brothers had used their massive infusion of bitcoins to buy and sell drugs in Kaliningrad without the Russian mafiya “made men” above them knowing about it. Bitcoins were the currency of the cyber savvy; the technology behind them and the people running it continuing to evolve faster than governments and traditional financial institutions could adapt. The jury was out as to whether they were an abomination, the way of the future or little more than a temporary blip on the world economic radar. What they offered was anonymity and transactions at the rate of high-speed cable that left regulators scrambling.
Akira Tokaido was the kind of man who left entire intelligence agencies, state security services and militaries scrambling in his wake. This was just his game. His current problem was that he was not cracking government agencies, terrorist cells or databases; he was fighting people exactly like himself.
He was relishing the challenge.
“Money, money, money, muh-nee…” Tokaido howled tonelessly. “Money!”
“Akira?” Kurtzman asked.
“No, these guys are good, really good.” Tokaido stared at the lines of code scrolling down his massive main screen. His cursor moved across the streams like the planchette of an Ouija board. “This is going to take a while.”
“No, Akira, I mean—”
“Could you shut up?” Wethers finished.
Tokaido gave Wethers a vaguely hurt look and shoved in his ear buds. He went back to examining data and began nodding his head. Without thinking his lips started moving. “Money, money…”
Kurtzman stared at Wethers helplessly. “Phoenix still at Luffy-Land?”
Wethers cracked his first smile of the day, and it had been a long day. “Word is they’re getting us T-shirts.”
“Didn’t know it was a franchise.”
Wethers considered the file they had compiled on their subjects. “Mrs. Gazinskiy raised herself some ambitious boys, if not bright ones.”
“Phoenix has put the Gazinskiys to work. They’ve put out the word that Propenko is alive, very pissed off and wants either payback or to get paid.” Kurtzman grinned. “Now we wait to see who comes knocking and whether they’re carrying checkbooks or more automatic cannons.”
“They’ve worked with less,” Wethers pointed out.
Kurtzman was very well aware of that, but Kaliningrad was a bad neck of the woods to get caught in.
The exclave was very nearly a militarized city-state and while Phoenix could run roughshod over the local criminals,