Black Flagged Vektor

Epilogue

The smell of diesel fuel and industrial disinfectant permeated the air, sticking to his clothes and saturating his hair. Even his skin reeked of it. Six days hidden away in a cramped cabin aboard a Liberian flagged container ship hadn’t exactly been what he had envisioned for his first week of freedom. His dreams of booze and prostitutes, compliments of his new Solntsevskaya friends, had been replaced by strict house arrest under the watchful eyes of three stern-faced commandos, who continued to remind him that they lost three of their comrades because of him.

Fucking babies, he thought. They should be celebrating. Now they had more money to split among themselves. He guessed they were too stupid to do basic math. To add insult to injury, the quack doctor hired to examine him in Halifax had insisted that he avoid excessive alcohol consumption throughout the healing process, which his “captors” had interpreted to mean no alcohol at all. How was he supposed to heal without drinking? None of it made any sense.

He stood up and glanced at his watch. The ship had slowed several minutes ago, on their approach to the port. He had been assured by the ship’s captain, who was well aligned with the Solntsevskaya Bratva, that he would be free to move about on his own once they cleared customs and spirited him off the ship to a waiting van. He apologized for the second-class treatment, saying that the instructions for his transit had been clear. He was to avoid contact with members of the crew, who could only be trusted as far as their paychecks lasted.

The Port of Cartagena had a bad reputation for draining a sailor’s wallet, and despite the bratva’s influence throughout the dock area frequented by ship crews, the Americans had no problem throwing money around through their proxies. They needed to get Reznikov as far from the port area as possible. He was still highly recognizable at this point, thanks to Karl Berg.

He turned to face a small square mirror fixed to the bulkhead by two metal clamps. The dirty surface revealed a gaunt, slightly jaundiced face covered in stubble. His left cheek was buried under a large, dingy medical dressing that ran from the edge of his mouth to his ear. He gently pulled the gauze tape from his chin and lifted the bandage to expose Berg’s handiwork. A long, jagged red scar extended across most of his cheek, the skin still held together by black stitches.

He received little more than basic first aid until they arrived in Halifax, several hours after his escape from Vermont. By then, the deep slash caused by one of Berg’s bullets had started to fester, making it nearly impossible for the sham of a doctor the Russians had kidnapped to neatly sew his face back together.

The thought of living with this hideous scar for the rest of his life evoked a murderous rage against the backstabbing son of a bitch who had come to murder him that morning. There was no other explanation for the suppressed pistol Berg produced at a moment’s notice. He should have known better than to trust the man who had authorized his torture at the hands of two maniacs in Stockholm and then had the nerve to put him in the same room with one of them in Vermont. His heart had nearly exploded at the sight of the dark-haired, smarmy psychopath, who so casually toasted to stuffing his head in a toilet. He’d eventually find all of them, starting with Karl Berg. Nobody fucked with Anatoly Reznikov. No matter how long it took, he would patiently wait for the right moment to make them all pay.