22:10 - Part I - The Crooked Chain of Ghosts

Chapter 7

Cold water thrown across his face brought Nikolai back to consciousness. He felt the sharp headache.

A large hand slapped him. "Wake up," a gruff voice ordered.

Nikolai opened his eyes with painful sobriety. A bear of a man with dark, cool eyes stared down at him. The first feature Nikolai noticed was his mostly bald head with tightly cropped hair around the ears. Given his thick, round face and tree trunk for a neck, the man had the appearance of an Olympic weightlifter. Nikolai noticed a prison tattoo on his neck—a skull with a knife through it and dripping blood. The skull and knife were surrounded by barbed wire laced with the outline of a rose and stem. Underneath it were the letters "ЯTY".

The bear turned his head. Looking off to the side, he said, "He's back."

The man slapped Nikolai once more for good measure and then stepped away, his shadow now gone. Nikolai's body lay exhausted and limp on the bed.

What happened?

Fragments of memory found their way to the surface. He held his hand up to block the light and squinted to look around. Nataly leaned forward in a chair. The side of her face was lit by the austere lamp, but only enough for her visage to gradually vanish back into the darkness like the moon in phase. She gave no expression for Nikolai to read. Even the glint of the vodka in her hands stood motionless.

"What is this? What have you done to me?" Nikolai said as he shook his head, regaining clarity.

"Be calm, Nikolai. There's no need to get excited."

He looked around. Now Nikolai could clearly see that the bear was, indeed, as big as a doorway and nicely dressed in dark trousers and a button-up shirt under a leather jacket. To say he looked serious and formidable was an understatement.

To his right sat another comparatively younger man in jeans and a gray sweater. He had a broad, round face except for his square jaw. A little shorter than Nikolai, although stockier, the man looked somewhat Central Asian: dark eyes, black straight hair, wide eyebrows, and a slightly darker tone to his skin—a mixture of Slavic and Chinese features. His scowl and aggressive stance were awkwardly thuggish, like a shy, timid man trying to act the part.

"Who are these guys, Nataly? What are they doing here? What is going on?"

She calmly took out a cigarette and lit it methodically. "I'm changing the nature of our relationship," she said smoothly.

"What do you mean 'change'? What is there to change? We're supposed to help each other!"

"Don't shout, Nikolai. I can hear you just fine. Settle down. Yes, you've helped me, and, yes, I'm going to help you. This is a very complicated matter you have gotten yourself into. More complicated than you know. I'm not the compassionate investigative journalist you think I am, and I have no intention of making the information you gave me public. Let's just say I'm here to fix things for everyone involved. That includes you now. But I need you to be rational."

"I'm naked on a bed. There are two strangers with us, and I have no idea what you are talking about. Explain what the hell is going on right now."

She took a slow drag on the cigarette and then exhaled. It reminded him of how Tatyana had looked when he left their apartment.

He glanced at the clock next to the bed. Only two and a half hours had passed, but to Nikolai, it seemed closer to morning.

She was in control and slowing things down, and he realized it.

"Nikolai," she said tonelessly, "when I usually have this kind of conversation with a someone, it follows a progression: I first leverage their friends, then their finances, and finally their families. The idea is to start with the least amount of damage and build up to the next level, hoping they will break early for their own sake. And they always break. It's just a matter of what they lose before they do. But you have stolen valuable information from serious people, and the damage it could do to them is so absolute that I have to make an exception for you and go in reverse order."