The Solomon Effect

26

The Lada coughed. Caught.

Jax threw the old car into gear and stepped on the gas as the motorcyclists came up behind them. October skewed around in her seat to watch them out the back window. The Kawasakis were nearly identical, one dark blue, the other black.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What are they doing?”

“At the moment, they’re just following us. It’s when we get out of town we’ll need to worry.”

She cast a quick glance around at the dwindling houses. “This is a very small town.”

“I’d noticed.”

Leaving the last straggling houses behind, they cut through wild dunes of soaring sand that disappeared beneath a thickly planted pine grove. But beyond the trees the sandy dunes reemerged, untamed and windblown. Deserted.

“Shit,” said Jax as the leather-jacketed men gunned their engines, roaring right up on his ass. He already had the accelerator floored.

“Why are they getting so close?” she shouted over the whine of the engines.

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as the bumps and dips on the pavement bounced the old car wildly from side to side. “Because this road’s so bad, they’re going to need to get close to get a good shot at us.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw one of the riders reach beneath his coat. He jerked the steering wheel violently to the left and yelled, “Get down!”

The rear windshield shattered in a rain of glass.

Tires squealing, he spun the wheel to the right again, careening back and forth across the centerline to keep the motorcyclists from getting a steady shot. He heard a ping, then another as bullets buried into the Lada’s metal frame.

“Sonofabitch,” he swore. “Brace yourself!”

He stood on the brakes. The Lada’s backend broke loose, sending the heavy car into a sideways skid that filled the air with the screech of tires and the stench of burning rubber.

Too close to stop, the thug on the blue motorcycle jerked to the right, laying down a line of black rubber as he shot off the side of the road to crash head-on into a massive pine tree. They heard a whooshing explosion, and rider and bike disappeared in a ball of fire.

The black biker’s reactions were a split second slower. Hitting his brakes, he slammed into the Lada’s left rear fender with a tearing shriek of metal and a jarring thump that reverberated through the heavy old car. And then he was airborne, a black leather blur that sailed over the Lada’s trunk to land in a sprawling skid that carried him far down the old blacktopped road and ripped off his helmet. When he finally slid to a halt, he didn’t move.

“Oh, my God,” whispered October.

Jax was out of the car almost before it stopped. The air was thick with the black smoke from the burning bike down the road. A sickly sweet stench of charred flesh mingled with the smell of the pines and the briny breeze blowing in off the sea.

Crouching down, he stared into the second cyclist’s wide, unseeing eyes. He glanced up and down the narrow deserted road and pushed to his feet. Walking back to the Lada, he straightened the rear fender enough to be sure the wheel would turn. Then he got back in the car, threw it into gear, and hit the gas.

They drove on in silence, the Baltic a sun-struck shimmer of endless water on their right. Finally, Jax glanced over at October and said, “You all right?”

She pushed the loose hair out of her face with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. “Yeah.”

She was quiet for another moment, then said, “Someone seems to be pretty serious about making sure we’re dead. How can you be so positive it isn’t your buddy Andrei?”

“Andrei is not my buddy. But if he wanted us dead, he’d do it quietly, in a basement, or an abandoned quarry somewhere, with a single shot to the back of the head. He wouldn’t send someone to hit us in the middle of the city or ambush us out on an open road.”

“So who are these guys?”

“Someone who thinks we’re getting too close for comfort.”

“You’re kidding, right? We don’t know jack shit.”

“Yeah. But they don’t know we don’t know jack shit.”

She put her head down between her knees. After a moment, she said, “Do you ever rent a car without wrecking it?”

They found the town of Zelenogradsk near the tip of the Sambian Peninsula, where the dunes of the spit just began to rise. It wasn’t on the map, and they’d driven right past it on their way to Rybachy.

“I don’t see how an entire town can be a military secret,” said Tobie as they rolled down weed-choked streets nearly empty except for the inevitable stalls selling amber. “The map makers must have left it off by mistake.”

Once a thriving resort, Zelenogradsk did not appear to have fared as well under the Soviets as Rybachy. Most of its elegant, prewar seaside villas had been reduced to rubble by the fighting of 1945, while the few old houses that remained were largely abandoned and covered in moss.

“I don’t know,” said Jax. “I think I’d be tempted to keep this place a secret, too.”

Jasha Baklanov’s office lay on the second floor of a seedy, two-story Soviet-era concrete block a few hundred feet from the water. Leaving the car parked in the rubbish-strewn square out front, they entered the open street door and climbed a set of dirty concrete steps to a frigid second-floor hall lined with rows of battered slab doors. A small, chipped sign on the door at the end of the hall read BAKLANOV SALVAGE.

“Why did he need an office?” she whispered, hugging herself against the chill of the concrete building. “A smalltime operator like this?”

Slipping a silver pen from his pocket, Jax quickly disassembled it into a set of picks and eased a slim tension wrench into the lower portion of the keyhole. Applying a light torque to the wrench, he thrust a pick into the top of the keyhole, his eyes closing with concentration as he deftly eased each pin out of the way. There was a faint click, then the cylinder turned and the door opened. “I suspect the people our Jasha was doing business with weren’t exactly the type he wanted visiting his family.”

Tobie watched him pack away the lock-pick set. “They teach you to do that in spy school?”

“Yes.” He put a hand on the door and pushed it inward.

The hinges squealed in protest. A single, uncurtained dirt-encrusted window on the far wall let in just enough light to show them a square cubbyhole sparsely furnished with a desk, a table with a couple of chairs, and a battered filing cabinet that looked as if it had been salvaged from an old ship. A chessboard, a half-empty bottle of vodka, and a couple of glasses littered the tabletop. But the chess pieces had been knocked into disarray; a glass lay on the floor, shattered. The drawers of the filing cabinet and desk hung open, their contents spilling out onto the floor.

“Looks like whoever hit the Yalena beat us here,” said Jax, quietly closing the door behind him.

“How do you know it wasn’t the militia?”

“Because the militia would have taken the vodka.”

“Ah.” She reached to turn on the light, but he put out a hand, stopping her. “Better not.”

Her gaze met his, and she nodded.

While she started on the files, he went to hunker down beside the shattered drawers of the desk. After ten minutes of searching, she let out an exasperated sigh. “If there ever was anything here to find,” she said, picking up another handful of scattered papers, “it’s gone. You know that, don’t you?”

But all he said was, “Just watch out for broken glass.”

They worked in a tense silence punctuated by the rustle of paper, the thump of furniture being righted. She was gathering up the last of the scattered files when she found a half-spilled box of business cards, printed on cheap stock. They looked new.

She pulled one out and held it up to the fading light.