Rules of Vengeance

22

In London, Interior Minister Igor Ivanov lay sleeping in his bed in the intensive care unit of St. Catharine’s Hospital. One IV delivered a glucose drip to his arm. Another administered hourly doses of pentobarbital to keep him in an induced coma. A cuff monitored his blood pressure. Clamps on his fingers measured his blood oxygen. His face-or what was visible of it beneath his bandages-was colored a violent, multihued purple. Gashes on his forehead and cheek had required a total of ninety-nine stitches. He was not a handsome man to begin with. He would be less so upon his discharge, should he survive.

“Do you know who he is?” asked the nurse in charge, a soft-spoken brunette named Anna.

Dr. Andrew Howe, chief of neurology, finished entering the patient’s vital signs on his chart. “Ivanov? Some sort of diplomat, isn’t he?”

“He is a monster.”

“Say again?” asked Howe, taken aback by the vitriol in the woman’s voice.

“At home we call him the Black Devil.”

Howe put down the chart and took a closer look at the nurse’s name tag. Anna Bakareva.

“Where’s home?”

“ Grozny, Chechnya,” she said. “I left many years ago, when I was eleven. But I remember Ivanov. He led the troops who sacked the city.”

Howe was a former military man himself, a surgeon attached to the Royal Scots Guards, and he remembered hearing about the atrocities inflicted by the Russian army during their attack on the Chechen capital in the mid-1990s. It was a grim business.

The nurse had large black eyes that never left Ivanov. “His soldiers came to my neighborhood looking for one of the resistance leaders. When they could not find him, they rounded up all the men from my building and the buildings up and down the street and took them to the soccer stadium. They took old men, young men. It didn’t matter. Seven hundred in all. They took my brother, too. He was ten years old.” She stopped and pointed at Ivanov. “He personally shot every one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Howe.

“Will he live?” the nurse inquired in a tone inappropriate for a care-giver.

“Too soon to tell. Not much damage apart from the cuts and bruises. No broken bones. No internal bleeding. It’s the brain I’m worried about. He got knocked around pretty well inside his car.”

Howe knew a few things about cerebral trauma. A few years back, he’d done a tour in Basra, in southern Iraq. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were the most frequent cause of injury. During his time he’d seen over two hundred cases similar to Ivanov. So soon after the initial trauma, it was impossible to make an accurate prognosis. Some patients regained full control of all their faculties. Others persisted in a vegetative state for weeks or months. Others never woke again at all. Most, though, fell in between, suffering some form of lasting impairment, anything from a faulty short-term memory, to loss of their sense of taste and smell, to more serious neurological disorders.

“His MRI came back negative,” said Howe. “When the swelling goes down, we’ll know more.”

The nurse from Chechnya nodded. It was apparent that the news displeased her.

Howe left the room and walked directly to the aid station, where he made sure that Nurse Anna Bakareva would have nothing further to do with the care of Igor Ivanov, the Black Devil. He did not believe that she would do anything expressly to harm him. She might, however, forget to administer a painkiller or inadvertently dose him with the wrong medicine. It was not a risk he was prepared to take.