Copyright 2017 - 2020 Vasily Poutcheglazov
   
   
    LAOKOON'S LUCK
    A fighting thriller
    by
    Vasily Poutcheglazov
   
   
    PART ONE
   
    CHAPTER 1
   
    The evening was cool and still for a wonder.
    Such evenings would happen sometimes in this northern town in autumn, usually rainy, dank, and cold, and fortunately, one of them fell just on the day of my return home.
    After some months of abiding in the fiendish heat of that arid scorching desert, this humid coolness was true delight for my withered flesh, while this peaceful stillness was particularly pleasurable delectation for my longsuffering psyche, because during those months I worked as an army surgeon in the military hospital, which was placed near the combat zone of one of the local wars being constantly waged by various belligerents in that region.
    I must say that the very absence of any hot sand, rocks, and debris everywhere might be considered as a kind of happiness by a white man like me, for the clean smooth asphalt of the pavements very conduced to idle contemplation and aimless thoughts, not to mention the habitual alertness, rather unnecessary in the small streets lit by lampposts, where I could seldom meet any walking passers-by and riding cars. Although our megalopolis was always overfilled with noise, din, and pother of traffic until midnight, I knew how to find some nooks for relative solitude even in its center since my student youth here.
    It was my first evening in the country, and I already took a nap after my long night flight and unpacked my belongings in my rented flat, but today I decided to pass time alone and not to ring anybody. With a big bundle of bucks in my pocket and two months of rest ahead at the least, I had enough possibilities for amusement without these hours spent on relaxation.
    Nonetheless, from force of habit, I forwent alcohol before my stroll and kept watchful as ever. Not that I had any concrete reason to beware of something, yet my life was too often fraught with surprises, and it was better to be ready for anything in all circumstances.
    "Man proposes God disposes", as my Sambo wrestling trainer used to jest after his throws while beating excessive conceit out of me against the hard mat.
    True his edifying demonstration of my imperfections was quite justifiable in my case, considering that I advanced in my sport career with rare rapidity, winning all my bouts in all the competitions and going from one rank to another. At the fourth course I was already a first-class sportsman and approached the rank of Candidate for Master of Sport, therefore I was indeed a bit bumptious in my twenty years.
    "Don't brag of your skill," the trainer loved to repeat. "The half of success is your natural quickness and coordination. You're a born wrestler with such reflexes and muscular strength."
    He did not exaggerate my fortes, yet to my physical merits, I'd have added some psychological ones, as from childhood, I was endowed with strange sangfroid, so that the more dangerous the situation was, the colder my composure grew.
    I never lost presence of mind in any conflicts and scraps, quite the reverse, I not only was unflappable in a moment of danger but also felt a surge of furious energy and began to act almost mechanically, yet unerringly and with lightning speed, following some ferocious advisability of real fight and getting no whit excited with my icy cruelty.
    My cold-bloodedness in combination with my swiftness and capability to knock down even a tough guy at a blow somewhat frightened me in adolescence by its uncontrollable consequences and its disparity with my humanistic views, that's why my choice of future profession was quite logical in the sense of counterbalancing my nature with medicine.
    Sambo served me as a vent to my brutal force, and no wonder that I succeeded in this wrestling where I experienced the same sensations as in my childish scuffles, but within certain confines excluding any mutilation of others. My body very willingly absorbing new and new holds and techniques made all of them the organic constituents of its instincts and reactions, and as soon as the referee gave the signal to begin the next bout, my brain seemed to switch off, whereupon I instantaneously found myself within that specific "dimension of fight" when my body was acting at its discretion with the speed exceeding any possibility of realization or direction of its actions.
    This notwithstanding (or rather owing to this), I would manage to win the most of my bouts ahead of time by either a Total throw or a painful hold, though, always observing the rules, I could hardly remember my short road to victory. On the mat, my body acquired independence from my mind and decided what to do by itself, and, of course, its liberty required honed skills of me, for I had no time to correct my omission.
    Therefore, my coach placing his hopes on such a "gold fish" as your humble servant did his utmost to perfect me as a wrestler, whereas I tried not to disappoint him in his expectations.
    *
    In short, before the long vacation after the fifth course I already received the long-awaited rank of Candidate for Master and became the champion of the town in my weight category, but in summer, we were obliged to waste a whole month in the crews of some war ships of the Navy as simple sailors in order to take the oath there for assigning the rank of lieutenant to all the future graduates, since for the armed forces we all were medical naval officers.
    Roasting in the sun on the deck of my minesweeper or idling about in the compartment of the other ranks, I did not foresee any forthcoming continuation of the army theme otherwise than in martial arts and maybe in my military service by call-up two years later, because after my graduation I was to work as an intern, and only then I would have turned into a full-fledged surgeon.
    Yet after the lapse of two weeks of trainings and sparring matches in the last academic year of my higher education, that broad-shouldered reserved man brought by our trainer suddenly appeared in our gym.
    Not presented to us, he sat down on the plastic chair of the host and watched poker-faced both all the training during two hours and three concluding bouts, which, for some reason, our preceptor had ordered me to carry in succession and without respite.
    Then the others went to the shower-room, while to me my trainer said brusquely, "Come here".
    "What can you say?" he asked the taciturn man.
    "Sufficiently versed," remarked the man gazing at me with cold eyes. "Weary?"
    The question was addressed to me.
    "Not very," I answered no less laconically.
    "Prove," he dropped drily.
    Instead of answering, I jumped up and turned a back somersault.
    Having landed on both feet, I fell on my hands and immediately began to do jumping knuckle push-ups at a fast tempo until I counted off thirty ones.
    After that, I went into a handstand and started jumping on my hands to the horizontal bar, where for a start I did five one-armed pull-ups with each hand and crowned my set with thirty two-armed pull-ups-to boot.
    "Enough," said the man when I jumped down from the bar. "Are you free in the evenings?"
    "Not every day," I confessed. "I have a job on half-pay in the ambulance service as a paramedic."
    "Can you throw up your job?"
    "I can only change it, or else my grant will be insufficient for normal nutrition."
    "Do you live in student hostel?"
    "Yes. And I'm accustomed to count on myself."
    "It's reasonable. Well, we shall settle this matter later. Now listen to me. Henceforward, you'll be training in our sport club, and I'll be your trainer. I'll write out a permanent pass for you, and besides, you'll get meals tickets for a month in our canteen. It must maintain your subsistence level."
    "That is, I'm passing to combat Sambo?"
    "Just so. However, you continue to wrestle in the present command as before. Let's arrange with you when you come, and be ready for hard work."
    With these words, he gave me his visiting card, not asking me about my consent.
    Having cast a glance at the card, I understood why.
    His name was known to every cultural Sambo wrestler, and his club was legendary thanks to its famous World Champions.
    Thus, I was unexpectedly invited to enter the highest sport elite of the country.
    *
    In the club, which I began to attend shortly after that acquaintance, I was dubbed "Doc" for the first time, and afterwards many people dignified me by this title until my service among the marines who did not call me by another name.
    The very club was situated in the territory of some military unit enclosed by a high brick wall, and I could pass there from outside only through the checkpoint of the many-storied building of headquarter where I had a midday meal in the canteen.
    Needless to say, my gratis feeding and such a freebie as the special training implied my zeal in deserving these expenses, and just for that reason, I did knuckle push-ups before the man who looked like a true authority and turned out to be renowned Phil coaching eminent fighters. I wanted to show him my preparedness for real single combat, for in sport Sambo, any punches and kicks were prohibited, and so the callous knuckles were superfluous-unlike combat Sambo allowing hand blows and leg blows.
    Meanwhile, I needed hard fists from my early days-for safety of my fingers, because my hands were to turn into the chief instrument of my achievements in surgery, strong and sensitive at once. Apart from doing push-ups in free time, I was in the habit of boxing a heavy punching bag every day, although I did not like the box as such, and I had no wish to make a punch ball of my head.
    Anyway, I planned to become a medical student and a physician subsequently, and my brain was asset in my project to such a degree that I regarded danger of concussions as inexcusable thoughtlessness. My circumspection ever induced me to guard my skull; therefore, I preferred to strike the first blow if the situation was too explosive, and with the aim of forestalling, I hardened my fists like two natural knuckledusters not hurting in tussles.
    As I loved to remain independent even among street hoodlums, I took proper measures, and from my fourteen approximately, I could already give every aggressor to understand that I am a man to be reckoned with.
    *
    Subconsciously, I ever aspired to attain my innermost ambition to be some bodily perfection, invulnerable and invincible, as many pugnacious urchins usually dreamt under the impression of the invincibility of the heroes of blockbuster movies demonstrating various kinds of martial arts. From the majority I differed by my natural abilities for these arts and by my purposeful advancement to the desideratum, and in combat Sambo I had a chance of reaching the top of my fighting trim.
    Naturally, it would have been the height of improvidence not to profit by the unique occasion, and yet, with all my savoir-faire, I never forgot to pursue a certain end, which I should have achieved, to wit, my status of doctor, withal of surgeon by specialty. I worked as a paramedic or mate nurse from the beginning of the fourth course just with the object of acquiring the knack of intravenous injections, Novocain blockades, dressings, setting bones, putting splints on fractures, giving artificial respiration and first medical aid and the like, as at the very start of my education I set myself a goal to know what and how to do in my profession and to be able to do all of it unassisted.
    Immediately I had obtained permission to earn my living in hospitals, I ceased unloading trains at the city goods station twice in a week. There I could get payment by the job every time during the three previous years, thereby delivering my not very prosperous parents (engineer and teacher) from lending financial support for their second son who lived separately in the other town and was quite capable of providing himself. Yet I must admit that this toil was exhausting enough for my mentality, and learning did not come as easily to me after my manual labor as even after my trainings, seeing that my tenacious memory could barely cope with taking in dozens of Latin terms of my daily stint that I had to do without fail.
    Because the sixth course was meant for specializing, I scarcely had any time being spent to no avail: becoming a surgeon and accumulating practical experience in medical sphere, I was improving my blow techniques in mix fight in parallel in the so-called sportive club. After my applying of some holds of this combat skill, the opposing contestant might turn into my patient, but the protective helmet defended my head, while the hitting-gripping gloves covered my hands, not to speak of some additional defensive details, and so I somehow contrived to remain safe and sound in body and mind in these two years.
    Moreover, by my graduation, I came with the rank of Master of Sport in civil Sambo, wrestling at some international competitions without defeats as before, and my victorious development in combat Sambo was so impressive that I once had a serious conversation in our commissariat while working as an intern.
    Properly speaking, they tried to lead me into temptation, namely into secret service as an alternative to my forthcoming conscription in the Navy. However, I was steadfast in vocation, for I realized that as an intelligence officer, I would be forced to kill, while I had chosen medicine just in order to avoid using my advantage in such a way (as a racketeer with a bat, for instance).
    In that year, I in effect turned down two proposals equally significant for my future, and although the second was unspoken, it perhaps threatened to change my life still more essentially, since that was a matter of enslaving my spirit, or rather attempting upon my free self.
    I mean my then girlfriend who conceived the idea of fettering the relationship of our love affair with lawful wedlock. While the commissariat was satisfied in the upshot with my written undertaking not to apply my fighting mastery against civil population (for it was considered a kind of weapon), my sweetheart took our cohabitation in the rented accommodation for my intent to propose to her on the eve of my military service and began to hint in bed at desirability of starting a family.
    It was understandable that she regarded me as an excellent candidate for the role of her husband, including my inevitable fatherhood, but in her matrimonial striving, she inadvertently touched my sole sore spot.
    By nature, I was coldly dauntless, though neither daredevil nor imprudent, and I seldom felt any fear until my shifts in ambulance service that was emergency service, after all. In other words, I would happen to deal with cases of fatal outcomes, apart from anything else. By deaths of the adults, I would be strongly shaken, nevertheless, I could stand them without appreciable consequences, and my iron will was especially tempered by them in my young days, yet in respect of children, I was not so imperturbable, and their suffering would tell on my nerves of steel so much so that the death of one little child just on my hands suddenly revealed my Achilles' heel for myself.
    *
    Although I put a drip, and its needle was in his vein, the infusion took no effect, for this trembling two-year-old kid was poisoned some hours ago, and he could not vomit already because of concentration of toxins in his blood. Unfortunately, it was too late to perform gastric lavage, since the cream of the cake left out of the fridge eventually became culture medium for bacteria (staphylococcus, I think), and his sleepy grandmother did not know when he had eaten this cake. It might be called a typical misadventure, and the poor child, unconscious at first, was powerless even to weep or groan, slightly shuddering from nausea and instinctively clinging to me in the absence of his mummy.
    Then his intermittent breathing grew faint, and he, dying, tried to press his limp weak body to my doctor's smock, as though nestling his face wet with saliva and tears against my hard breast while I was supplicating the Almighty for extending his life until our van arrived at the station at the least. God, however, did not hear my prayer, and the small nestling gradually ceased breathing and twitching in my not mothering arms.
    Breathless and motionless, he was getting still colder than he was only just, and unbearable heart-piercing pity for him suddenly struck my soul. I understood what I would have felt, were I his father, and the very probability to experience father's fear of the death of his child horrified me.
    I did not see the despair of his parents, but I saw enough such reactions to deaths by misadventure that I could imagine this scene. Handing the dead body of the infant not saved by me to one of our emergency physicians, I thought about the fear, which would arise in my consciousness after the birth of my own baby to accompany me from then on, and I realized that this fear would be a lead to keep me on during the life of my child. My fear thus would be my greatest dependence, and how could I allow it when just my free will was ever first for me among all the values of the world.
    If I was to replace my freedom for the spiritual bondage of fatherhood after my marriage, what, generally speaking, might I obtain in matrimony instead of my present independence?
    My presumptive intended was a therapist from my course; consequently, she most likely planned to wait for me in the town, where she had a good job and the flat of her parents for nursing her baby; that is, I was supposed to be deprived of any sexual life for the time of my service in the Navy. Query: why must I endure this deprivation? I would fall in love with other girls before her, and to tell the truth, I did not feel any exceptionality of our alliance in comparison with my preceding infatuations.
    Besides, there were some financial reasons in my reluctance to take responsibility for my possible family that my beloved was prepared to foist on me. Not that I was obsessed by parsimony, but I owed my subsistence level to my hard work only, and I intended to save my officer allowance for augmentation of my supply of hard currency with a view to specializing as an army surgeon after my military service. Had I agreed to marry, I would have squandered my earnings on someone's family happiness burdening me with endless troubles and money worries and giving me crumbs of that full-blooded existence which I had without these Hymen's bonds.
    Luckily for me, I had the sense to pay due attention to her sounding my attitude to our joint future, and as I was at liberty to part with her without a glib excuse, just so I did, pleading excessive busyness in medicine and sport at the same time.
    In Sambo, by the by, I did not yield to another temptation either, and the prime motive of my uncompromising stance was also my fear of dependence. True the enticement of large sums for my participation in the tournaments of mix fight was much more alluring than holy wedlock, because my fees could easily solve all my everyday problems and let me stash away a certain starting capital for the future.
    The negative aspect of this way of making money was that the rules of such competitions stipulated some illegal technical actions, but not helmet and leg pads for a fighter (not to mention any jacket for grips, throws, and strangles by its lapels). Thus, I might miss a knockdown blow on my head, which would have interrupted my sport and medical careers instantaneously and forever.
    As I was not going to be a professional fighter, I had no right to risk my health for the sake of "filthy lucre", especially as I quite soberly estimated the prospect of my sportive growth within the inevitable break of two-year duration. My duties of a medical officer excluded any real continuation of my systematic trainings in one of sport clubs, and if it were not for my good luck, I would have degraded in my combat skills in the course of my military service.
    Yet owing to my title and rank in Sambo, I was appointed to serve in the Marines, therefore I was transferred to the reserve afterwards as a consummate expert in hand-to-hand fighting, registered in the commissariat among officers of special units and in essence equated with officers of intelligence.
   
    CHAPTER 2
   
    "It's dogged as does it, indeed," I hemmed seven years later, walking along some deserted narrow street with a solitary car parked partly on the pavement on the other side.
    Indubitably, I could be consented with my then forbearance and perseverance, for by now, my initial plans came to fruition, and I already had a due international certificate enabling my work in the military field hospitals of Red Cross without my service in any armed forces.
    Such a position opened new vistas of promising future in my professional career, because as a first lieutenant of the reserve, I belonged to the category of few chosen trustworthy officers vested with a right to carry out some confidential commissions for my High Command in case of necessity. My present status by no means was any immanent quality of my notability as a sportsman or of my special combat preparedness as a military man, and it was formed when I was gaining an extensive practical experience as an operating surgeon in the Central Military Hospital in the town and in the time of my specializing there after improving my English in the quarters of our naval base during two years.
    From a child, I made it a rule to occupy every day fully with energetic activities, including brainwork, and this principle always worked excellently irrespective of my occupation and the object of applying my energies.
    Here my stream of consciousness was broken by a strange sensation more typical of my alertness in the volatile region of intertribal strife and religious massacres.
    My habitual sensitivity to changeability of the external world caught some new perception directed from outside towards me. As there was not a live soul in the street, the source of attention might be either in one of the faceless six-storied houses or in the car with tinted dark windows.
    It seemed to me that someone watched me from somewhere, which wasn't anything extraordinary in the big town where I ever had a chance to encounter a gaper causelessly staring at me, but I did not love scrutinizing like that, and I would like to know why this watcher chose me as an object of curiosity. He or she was, of course, some invisible bystander or a dweller pensively gazing at me through the unlit window, since there was no sign of someone's presence in the car behind the impenetrably dark panes reflecting the dim light of the nearest lamppost.
    Nobody was cognizant of my arrival save my landlady, whose second flat I once took on a long let inclusive of the months of my absence-in exchange for her keeping an eye on my things. My flatlet adjoining her two-room flat was placed at the same landing, and for my part, I was, so to say, a pledge of security for this intelligent aged widow.
    Perhaps it was an unlucky mugger shadowing me as a prey in his unforgivable fallacy, but any attempt of robbery was predictably sad for its initiator. Yet, having decided to play safe, I glanced ahead and back to make sure that I was alone in the middle of the long street.
    And at once, I heard a crack of a shot at the far end.
    The shot rang out round the corner, in the other street of the city maze, and two more shots followed the first.
    The megalopolis still was not a seat of war, after all, and those who ventured to open fire here were either cops or criminals. In any case, I was somehow indisposed to catch a stray bullet, no matter who would shoot-some local gangsters in their shootout or some minions of the law pursuing them.
    Because I had not enough time to reach the next lane even at the double, I stepped to the left into a single passage between the blank walls of the buildings-in the hope of going through it to the parallel street as I did usually in order to shorten my way.
    This time, however, in front of me I saw the third high blank wall and found myself in the semidarkness of a blind alley.
    I felt uncomfortable in the not very spacious inner courtyard smelling of damp mold, as if I had fallen into the trap. Anyhow, it was too late to go out of this corner, or else I would have come face to face with those shots armed with pistols at the least. Indisputably, AKM or bazooka was a real threat in comparison with small arms, yet every ball could also make a hole in my body, while I did not burn with desire to land upon an operating table.
    My comparative recollections of the bullet wounds inflicted by various types and calibers of firearm lasted only for a few seconds.
    I heard someone's noisy panting, and instantly, some limping well-knit man burst into my barely lit pen.
    He was hobbling because his left hand pressed something on his left thigh (a wound, as it was easy to guess), and I already took a step forward, to push him back out of my refuge, when I noticed a knife in his right hand.
    Such a combat knife every marine had in his equipment, and after two years of my close contacts with technique of knife fight, I formed quite distinct a notion of lethal skills of a possessor of this cold steel. I did not know who the lame man was and how he was able to wield his knife, whereas my underestimation of his professional level might be fatal. All of it flashed across my mind, and I stopped short.
    "You're witness," the man said hoarsely, leaning against the wall.
    Then he subsided on the ground, not bending his left knee. Apparently, he a bit weakened from bleeding.
    However, he said just what was necessary. Now I indeed had no choice but to act.
    "Who are they?" I asked.
    "Gangsters," he answered.
    "Many?"
    "I saw two and a car."
    "Give me the knife," I demanded.
    He biddably put the haft in my open palm, for at the present moment I looked at the passage, considering the minute expired after his appearance.
    From this instance, I was in the dimension of fight, in which all my reactions were twice as quicker than quickness of ordinary fighters, and my body began to react without directions of my mind.
    If your body is an ideal weapon, it will find the best instantaneous solution in every fraction of a second of your action. Sometimes it offered a certain difficulty to refrain from prohibited holds, but in this real fight, I had no restriction, especially because gangsters, as a rule, didn't leave alive any witnesses.
    They barged in the courtyard both at once, and one of them held a big bat in his hands, which predetermined my selection.
    The instant they came into sight I threw the knife from hip at the second one.
    According to the normative criterions, the abruptness of throw must be such that the very perception of it would reach the brain of your target later than the blade would stick into a point of aim in his body.
    The knife swished shortly in the air and cut into the throat of the right thug.
    From the distance of three meters, the throw was extremely hard, and the sharp heavy blade cleaved his cervical vertebras together with his spine cord before he could raise his gun from his hip.
    True, he did not interest me anymore, as the left attacker pitched into me with his bat slantwise before his breast, since he had not a second to swing his cudgel.
    Instead of dodging a blow, I stepped to meet him and seized the bat with my hands, too,-not to grapple with him, though.
    I made no bones about my rigorous attitude to him and, without the slightest hesitation, delivered a side blow with my left boot on his massive head.
    My capability of stretching was often a surprise for such hefty bullies with square jaws when I would unexpectedly strike such a crippling blow, and it was usually a great problem to recover from it. Yet in this case I did not contend myself with the effect of knockdown, and using his temporary faintness, I pushed his wooden truncheon forward in his face with all my might.
    My smashing push crushed his nose with a squelching crunch, whereat this hog uttered a sobbing snort and dropped unconscious on his knees-to flop down on his belly in the final stage of his fall.
    Meantime I turned to the first client who was still on his knees, slumping back with his reclined head and the knife sticking out of his Adam's apple.
    I took the pistol out of his limp hand, and only after that, did I deal a deadly blow on the neck of his prostrate partner with the heel of my boot.
    I didn't forget the driver waiting outside, and it was impermissible with such alignment of forces to forsake these two assassins otherwise than in condition of dead bodies.
    Going through the passage to the exit, I checked the pistol smelling of the burnt gunpowder of recent shots and determined the location of the car by ear from the purring of the running engine.
    The pistol was a standard military PM with 8-round magazine, so I had some balls even after three shots.
    With the gun in readiness, I bounced out onto the pavement and caught a glimpse of the driver's leather shoulder behind the open door of the car. The tinted windshield was hiding him from my eyes, and for lack of visual information about his weaponry, I was forced to suppose the worst and act in conformity with my supposition.
    Moving past the car hood, I shot twice through the dark glass at the front seat where he lolled behind the wheel, and then, returning, I added a shot from above over the windowpane of the door.
    When I glanced into the cabin, he was already in the death agony, but yet his right hand lay on the butt of AK, whose barrel he still tried to pull with his left hand, choking with blood. If I were a little slower in my fusillade, he would have taken his automatic machine and bumped me off for sure by the first burst.
    With a clear conscience, I waited for some seconds until he breathed his last, and the bloody foam ceased bubbling at his mouth.
    Now, alas, the hour struck to blot my copybook, so to speak.
    I had a witness of my murders, whoever he was, and he was somehow connected with the local criminal circles, so he had only himself to blame for the cruel necessity to liquidate him.
    Just as I turned to set to cleaning up the courtyard, the injured man arose in the passage-again with his combat knife in his hand.
    "Hi, doc," he hailed me unexpectedly. "It's you?"
    "Let's assume," I dropped mechanically, peering at his face under his fluffy wavy hair, ready to pull the trigger of my PM aimed at him.
    "I'm a platoon commander, doc. We served together," he elucidated the situation, frozen where he stood, because I was formerly renowned for rapidity of reactions in our brigade, and as an officer of my battalion, he had the pleasure to see the accuracy of my firing and knife throwing with his own eyes.
    I did not recognize him as I never saw him with any hair-do but crew cut on the top of his head, against which he was able to smash an empty bottle or a brick for edification of his newcomers. (To tell the truth, I ever preferred to avoid exercising my head in such a way, being a medical officer, after all.)
    "First lieutenant?" I remembered him.
    "Captain already," he corrected. "It's hard to identify in twilight. But your swiftness betrayed you."
    "Well, it's over. Now we must vamoose."
    "Let's go, doc. My car is parked over there."
    "Can you walk?"
    "More or less. The parking is not far off."
    "Okay, lead me."
    It was indeed only a short step to his car, and limping spryly, he shambled up to its parking lot at some asphalt patch, informing me on our way from the scene of the crime about his gunshot injury, which he tried to tampon with his handkerchief.
    Skedaddling in his company after my feats of valor, I pondered over my inconsistency in respect of this eyewitness. My conduct was unprofessional and fraught with unpredicted consequences when I left him alive, for it was no concern of mine why these mobsters had shot through his leg, and I had nothing to do with it. I should have thought of my own security, and were I a real killer, I would never have balked at a murder of my acquaintance in such a hazardous situation demanding to resort to extremities.
    Regrettably, this skirmish was in effect my debut as an undercover agent showing his true colors, and the very unexpectedness of the incident made my actions impulsive. That is, I did not kill him for the same reason that I killed his pursuers-I was simply reacting to their participation in the sudden action.
    Of course, I could dispatch him at present, but my cold-bloodedness slightly differed from the unfeeling cruelty of some cutthroats, and withal I decided to wait for unfolding the events on account of such an unforeseen meeting.
    To be on the safe side, I held my pistol at hand even after he threw his knife on the back seat and settled down behind the steering wheel. Anyway, I was sitting next to an excellent machine for killing, and elbow strikes were included in his arsenal as well.
    "Stop the car in some dark place," I said as we rode away far enough from the dangerous quarter. "I'll dress your wound. I hope you have a first aid kit in your car or something like that."
    "Naturally, I have," he answered. "If only you won't hole me once more."
    "That depends," I forewarned him, too. "I'd like to know what's what."
    "I shall explain it later," he promised. "The story is too long. By the by, I'm your debtor henceforth."
    "You'd do the same in my place," I jested. "I mean when your life is at stake."
    "You may be right," he gave a short chuckle. "They caught me unarmed, and they had questions to me. So I was to die slowly but surely."
    "Sure as death," I confirmed. "Explain then why are you so shaggy."
    "What, I look like a fag?"
    "You said it. You're in retirement?"
    "Say, on furlough. I obey orders as before, though."
    "It's something secret?"
    "It's top secret. I'm a paw, yet in the game of big bosses."
    "Sorry to hear that. I shun any games of bosses."
    "Why?"
    "I'm conversant with the consequences as a surgeon. You're one of them, for example."
    "A coward has no scars, doc. As to marines, we always were adventurers."
    "And swashbucklers," I added ironically. "Brake here and I'll take a look at your wound."
    He stopped his car and switched the light on in order that I could examine his thigh, but the trousers leg was saturated with blood as his hanky pressed to the entrance point hardly stanched the wound.
    "Pull your bags down and give me a first-aid packet," I commanded in my usual tone of a surgeon.
    "The packet lies in the glove box," he said pulling off the tight jeans from his hips and gritting his teeth with pain.
    His injury had no exit point; consequently, the bullet stuck in soft tissues, though it didn't touch the tibia and large arteries or nerves, judging by his mobility.
    "I shall put a bandage for a while," I explained to him, "but you need a small surgical interference in hospital. I can't extract the bullet without instruments."
    "Too bad," he sighed. "Official contact with your colleagues is rather dangerous for me."
    "Are you afraid of involving cops?"
    "Yes. I was somehow traced today, obviously not without their assistance."
    "I got you, but I have a lot of my own problems," I said indifferently. "I've bound your wound and that's all. Good wishes."
    I was just going to open the door and alight when I again heard his voice.
    "What about an occasion of private practice?" he asked amiably. "A grand of bucks goes as your fee. Will it suit you?"
    "You're so rich?" I turned my head, very interested by the sum.
    "Is it sufficient?" he asked again in reply.
    "Well, if you insist," I gave my consent, since such a fee for such a trifle was quite acceptable. "The question is where. Besides, I cannot operate without lancet and other things."
    "It's a deal!" he agreed with my demands. "Just a minute-I'll find out about one possible variant."
    "Hello," he continued into the cellular phone fixed on the dashboard before him. "It's me. May I drop into the club within half an hour? I'll be with a guest if you have no objection. Yes, it is a matter of urgency. I can't explain until we meet. Bye."
    "What's there, some infirmary?" I inquired as an interested party.
    "I'd call it a medical unit," he grinned. "And the host is your old friend-I'm glad to bring it to your notice."
    "Who's he?"
    "Captain Bob. You were pally with him in those two years, as far as I remember."
    "He is on furlough, too?"
    "It's top secret, doc, as I said. Now he is major by rank and a big shot by status. Well, it's time to go lest I swoon like a sissy."
    With that, he started up the engine.
   
    CHAPTER 3
   
    Indeed, I was on friendly terms with Bob in the time of my military service-with the reservation that I called him "cap", not by name, and that it would be an exaggeration to regard these relations as chumming up with him.
    He was not such a man to confide anything to anybody, and I was also indisposed to unbosom myself to my comrades-in-arms.
    Nevertheless, we were neighbors in our officers' barracks as two bachelors and excited reciprocal curiosity by our distinctiveness.
    In my case, the reason was quite obvious: being a civil physician, I had been appointed one of medical officers in the brigade of the Marines, which was rather an exception to a rule. Whereas my relative pal, being in charge of hand-to-hand and close quarters combat at present, had participated in a pair of real war conflicts after the military college, and the composure of this taciturn strapping captain in combination with the redoubtable might of his muscular torso and bull neck made a not very pleasing impression, which the straight look of his grey eyes enhanced, for it was a look of a cold professional in wiping out the active military manpower of the enemy.
    As I was conscripted in September, the autumn weather of my first day in the unit was propitious for my usual morning exercises, and at the barrack-square, I found both high bar and horizontal bars for them. Although I began my everyday complex before the reveille, I was forced to do its considerable part under the eyes of two hundred robust shirtless chaps, and the presence of such captious spectators prompted me to prove myself to my new milieu.
    It is understandable that I won special recognition by the final series of one-armed pull-ups and other stunts on the bar. Thus, my reputation of "tough guy" was established, and I would reinforce it thereafter when opportunity offered.
    Yet my acquaintance with the chief specialist in fighting efficiency was much more intensive and thorough.
    Soon after I was housed in the officers' barrack, I encountered him in our long corridor, and this time he greeted me not only with a nod of his head in a black beret.
    "I heard you're a master of Sambo," he said, fixing his steady look on me. "Combat Sambo including."
    "Such a rank I have in sport," I answered. "In Combat Sambo I have useful experience."
    "That is, hand-to-hand combat doesn't frighten you?" asked he.
    "It depends who will be my opponent," I remarked circumspectly.
    "What about me?" he asked seriously.
    I wanted to say as a joke that this way of suicide is too painful, but his tone did not predispose to playfulness.
    "After such a bout, I may be incapacitated," I foretold the outcome.
    "Don't worry. I'll simply test your qualification. Have you free time now?"
    "For verification of my rank I can spare an hour or two."
    "Then I wait for you in the gym."
    "Okay, I'll bring my own uniform."
    It is senseless to enumerate all the holds and blows, which were performed by us in the furious whirligig of our bout; suffice it to say that I had no moment of respite during fifteen minutes. Besides, I was forced thrice to somersault in an acrobatic jump in order to break away from his strong grip, and every time he hemmed approvingly at my dexterity and flexibility. Surprising though it may seem, he did the same when I managed at times to reach his boxing helm with my Sambo shoe.
    My tactics were conditioned by his physical superiority, not to mention his technical dominating, for in Ground position, he could crush my counter-attacks with his weight, and by every painful hold, he would have broken down my resistance or wrenched out one of my limbs. I need hardly say that all his blows and strikes were extremely dangerous, even if he fetched them not at full strength as he promised.
    As we were fighting with no holds barred, I had an occasion to demonstrate my wide range of defense and my evasiveness, but for all that, I took some sufficiently heavy, telling blows on my wise head and gave thanks to God for my prudence in the moot point whether to put on the full equipment or not.
    In the end, he fell intentionally on the mat together with me, and we were wrestling thus for a few minutes until he caught my arm in a painful lock, unbending my elbow by lever. Yet, I didn't waste time on lamentation and, violently wriggling, twisted his knee with my legs in my painful lock.
    "Break," he commanded with a gum shield in his mouth, releasing my arm. "Stand up."
    Puffing and panting, we rose from the mat.
    "Well done, doc," he said, having taken the gum shield out. "Who was your coach?"
    "Phil," I answered. "That is, Philip-"
    "I know whom you mean," he interrupted me, pulling his helm off from his close-cropped head. "You have a sound schooling, doc. Moreover, you're devilishly agile."
    "What else could save me in a fight against you?" I inquired respectfully, for he undoubtedly deserved all respect as a fighter.
    "I'd say you lay it on with a trowel, but you needn't do it," he observed. "How about marksmanship?"
    "I usually hit the target ten out of ten," I did not conceal my next talent. "However, I will shoot once in a while, and I not very often fire an automatic-machine."
    "So, you have all needful merits," he summarized. "I think you should master knife fighting and techniques against held-hand weapons. Are you ready to take participation in our training?"
    "Why not? Only I must coordinate your courses with my duties."
    "No problem. And another thing. I'd like that you will be my sparring partner."
    "It's an honor for me, but on the same terms as today. My head is my greatest value, after all."
    "Don't belittle the rest, doc. I sure you won't expend you time for nothing."
    *
    He was right: thanks to him, I seldom if ever dawdled away my time; conversely, I was busy acquiring something vital from morn till night.
    In accordance with the program of my preparation prescribed by my new stern instructor, I participated in training other ranks as a volunteer, learning at leisure how to defend against weapons of various kinds in close combat, practicing at the shooting range, and even bailing out with parachute as it behooved an officer of parachute troops. My duties did not allow me to run a due distance every morning with the rest of my battalion, because laying produces in cauldrons by cooks was also among my responsibilities as well as my control of cooking and my supervision of the sanitary state of the galley, latrine and barracks or my abiding in the infirmary in turn with my three colleagues-doctors, not to speak of everyday routine and escorting marches with full kit in our medical jeep.
    This notwithstanding, my extra-curricular bouts with captain Bob were frequent enough, and he was the best examiner of my learning in the midst of the aggressive hefty lads esteeming exclusively brute force and striving to gain the upper hand over "the cool doctor" in their field as these simpletons supposed until our immediate contact.
    I in a sense remained a stranger in our local medical coterie, seeing that I was a teetotaler unlike the other members of company, though all of them were as hard as a nail, too. Meanwhile, Bob held in contempt those who were fond of the bottle, as he disliked people having weak places, and there our views concurred.
    Among other things, I arranged with the major that was my chief to absent myself from the unit in order to operate in the hospital in my rest-day if I would be really free then, of course, since the service dictated its own roster sometimes. As a matter of fact, it was just the major who did me such a good turn when I once began to grieve incidentally for my surgical qualification, which might be lost without any practice during two years. It turned out that the chief of the department of surgery was his fellow-student, and I did not fail to seize an opportunity and begged him to put in a good word for me.
    Although I mainly assisted at various operations and only from time to time operated by myself, for appendicitis or hernia, for example, nevertheless, I could thus free someone of the surgeons for some other affairs, and I did my work absolutely gratuitously. For the time being, I did not covet any advancement in my craft, and my unambitious task was to maintain the proper level of surgical technique, not very high yet necessary to me for my future career after my military service.
    Withal, I chanced to have a love affair in the hospital with one divorcee who was, as you can easily guess, a doctor like me. My selectivity in choosing women for liaisons among medical personnel was actually caused by my hygienic caution. The ebullient promiscuity of many licentious scatterbrained coquettes was fraught with a certain spectrum of venereal diseases, and so my squeamishness about loose morals and dissipation was accounted for by my inurement to sterility, not by my moral rigorism.
    It must be said, this happy alliance was practically ideal, considering that my good-humored thirty-year-old "gal" desired just our sex on occasion and had no intention of being married to me or to anybody; that's why I rather loved her more sincerely and openly than my former "passions" seeking to hook me as a husband.
    Anyway, soon I settled down in my new life, now training now performing my duties now visiting my present girlfriend now standing at the operating table, and in my twenty-five, I felt splendid, especially as my skills in martial arts were growing owing to my bouts and sparring-matches with Bob, who profited by my phenomenal swiftness and ability to fix new techniques instantly and fast.
    The advantage of my partnership was that he needed not correct my actions by words if he succeeded in striking a blow or in applying a chokehold. While fighting I was quick in the uptake, and afterwards I repeated every point where I committed any miscalculation until perfection and reflex infallibility. With my force of a blow, I was almost invincible, and Bob did his utmost to complete my invincibility so as to try its strength on the mat, since he liked to take the line of most resistance in such fights.
    In exchange for his coaching, I was helping him in his acquaintance of English, which I improved constantly in the free evenings.
    Overall, I kept moving ahead unceasingly in conformity with my mode of life, and as ever, I needed no more than five-six hours' sleep a night, devoting some time before beating retreat to studies of the detailed techniques of some feasible surgical interferences and their diagrammatic drawings as well as the illustrations of topographical anatomy and learning all of it by heart while poring over my thick medical books and anatomical atlases. Who could tell when and where my knowledge might be required; meanwhile, it was impermissible for me as a professional to be unversed in those cases which I should have coped with. Furthermore, for refreshing my memory by nights, the volume of Operative Surgery always lay on the bedside table at my right hand.
    At the beginning of the second year of my service, I felt I was in a rut in a manner of speaking; and when the circumstances afforded me an opportunity for a little adventure, I naturally jumped at the chance.
    One fine day the aforementioned major looked in at the room of our medical unit, where I was a duty officer at this juncture, and immediately got down to business.
    "What do you say, lieutenant, about participation in war?" he asked without beating about the bush. "I mean an action in one local conflict in the Middle East."
    "Until I am a serviceman, I obey orders," I stated my position, a bit stumped by the question. "Did the High Command really decide to fling us into the battle? At last!"
    "Joking apart, sonny," he smiled at my imperturbable cheerfulness. "Our brigade dispatches a special troop there, and we must man this operational unit, including a doctor."
    "What's the hold-up? I'm ready to carry out all the orders without exception."
    "Nobody questions your readiness, but the situation isn't so simple. The operation will be secret enough; therefore, those who take part in it are allegedly volunteers. Most of the men are contractors, so their consent is stipulated by certain contract points, but the officers have to be on furlough with leave passes."
    "Now I understand," I said. "Beside our consent, we must put in applications."
    "That implies your own responsibility only," the major informed me. "In case of some misadventure, you may have problems with being invalided out of the Army and with receiving disablement allowance."
    "Anyhow, I don't pretend to rake the army pension," I grinned at such thrifty clandestinity.
    "True your independence will be rewarded by a decent fee-in compensation for the risk," he gladdened me. "I'd thought that you're unmarried and have a zest for life. In my youth, I was eager to participate in a real sally."
    "I cannot compare with you," I jested, deadpan, considering that the major was thirty-seven years old at the most. "You're a professional warrior, while I'm a peaceable philistine."
    "Yes, of course, you are a well-known peacemaker," he confirmed ironically, "especially when you're fighting at close quarters against three big boys. So, what's your answer?"
    "Predictably positive," I answered. "When is this action appointed?"
    "Tonight," he gave me a surprise. "The job is pressing, and the complement of the group is defined. As your commando will be acting under fire, it consists of the seasoned soldiers hardened in trouble spots. Before the noon, you're obliged to put in a request for week's leave, and an hour later, all of you are mustering in the conference hall."
    "I wonder who will be briefing us and setting strategic tasks. It is not our colonel, is it?"
    "Curiosity killed cat," the major snubbed me amicably. "I knew that I can rely on you."
    He indeed could count upon my consent in case of emergency, because I ever thirsted for cognition in the matters of interest to me; and war was one of these spheres of great significance. If I wanted to become a true army surgeon, I should have my own experience of work in field hospitals. As to danger, my lifelong motto read thus-"nothing venture, nothing win"; and I had no reason to change it.
    *
    The first thing that I couldn't but notice in our group assembled in the not very spacious hall was small number of the chosen, as the collecting subunit in full strength amounted to a platoon at most. Yet four subalterns under command of a captain would be obvious overmanning for a platoon; besides, some of the sergeants were not of my battalion but of the amphibious assault company.
    Withal all the present guys were tall enough even in comparison with my six feet and with usual height of lanky recruits-marines, and all of them had impassive weather-beaten mugs of bandits, from which it appeared that they were not men to be trifled with.
    However, the lieutenant colonel of the paratroopers (of the intelligence in actuality) heading our band was of medium height, though this distinction without difference did not detracted from the impression of ruthless sternness and inexorability he made on subordinates.
    "Henceforth you all are at his disposal," our strapping colonel said after he had presented this forty-year-old commanding officer. "His word is law for you."
    It was understood without explanation who was vested with a right to administer justice and mete out punishment-from his overbearing manner of behaving suggesting his being accustomed to obedience of others and to bending everybody to his will for achieving his end. He was of the category of indubitable leaders that I liked both in sport and in medicine, since such leaders hated rigmarole and shillyshallying about decision and never feared to take full responsibility for their business. As determination was my distinguishing feature, too, I felt some affinity with those who could not only take the bull by the horns but also tame this bull unassisted, always being first even in pecking order.
    Meantime our new commander shortly expounded the heart of the matter and the tasks, which we were to fulfill in one foreign country waging its endless intestine war, partly religious and partly intertribal, as it was customary in the Middle East. In essence, we did not care a bit what country we were going to visit, for the injunction from on high was binding us to confine our sortie to a day; plus the scope of our operation was bounded by the borders of the province where the village being our object was situated.
    According to the plan, we should land from the combat helicopter far away from the village and come up to it under cover of darkness; then the helicopter fires a pair of missiles at one of the houses, after which we are bursting into the village and finishing the work of the airstrike.
    The story was very simple and common: some elusive Islamic terrorist was supposed to pass this night there, and it would be criminal negligence to let this unrivalled opportunity slip, as till now our local informer never had time to warn the intelligence about his location beforehand.
    Properly speaking, the marines became necessary so urgently because there was no time to prepare something more secretive, while the situation might be fraught with a real combat in adverse circumstances. The very inclusion of a medical officer in the number of twenty fighters was caused by the probability of some mischance and misfire entailing the autonomous disengagement of the small striking force that would have had to hew its way through the territory of enemy.
    After the lieutenant colonel showed the detailed scheme of our raid on the terrain map enlarged by the projection screen, he motioned to captain Bob:
    "Your instructor will tell you in a few words about the rules of survival."
    "There're two chief rules in zone of operation," Bob began dryly. "Firstly, don't trust anybody. Secondly, open fire in case of suspicion, whoever was before you. Any other weapon is not prohibited either. Remember that even child may bear suicide belt, and that even woman can stab you with knife. In other words, everybody is potential threat, and it is better not to have such a threat behind your back. Your cellular phones you leave here; the form of dress is camouflage without insignia. Now we change uniform and take firearms with all ammunition in order to be ready within two hours. Then we fly by a transport to one of our airbases, and from there we shall be transported by helicopter to the appointed place. From this moment, you remain in the group, and any external contacts are forbidden. Any questions?"
    Silence ensued. We all were sure that no one would venture to starve us, considering the importance of our mission; meanwhile, due grub was an only unanswered vital question from our viewpoint.
    *
    Although I had a rare wealth of experience in sleepless vigil by nights and dozed during all the hours of our flight in one of the soft armchairs for general officers, our landing in the darkness from the army helicopter with its buzzing propellers on some stony flat ground seemed somewhat unreal to my consciousness.
    Both my first-aid kit and my shortened AK with a folding stock slung over my shoulders were quite tangible, and my strong body did not lose its agility and explosive might, obeying every impulse of my keen five senses and instinctive intuition, but yet, as an integrated personality I was split by alienation into two parts, active and contemplative. While I jumped down onto the dark patch edged with dark rocks and broke into a run together with the others after the shadow leading our column, my alter ego watched me as a detached observer.
    Given that our landing party came about in springtime, the night was hot and muggy, and at the finish of our two-hour cross-country race in bulletproof vests, we were all in a sweat and thirsty, however the water was rationed in view of the uncertainty of the near future.
    The next hour we passed resting under the shelter of the steep bank of some dry riverbed. Only when the starless black sky got lighter did our chieftain make a warning gesture, whereupon the twenty breechblocks started clanging in the grey stillness.
    The ululating voice of a muezzin from a distant minaret reached our ears, and some seconds later, we heard the faint familiar buzzing afar and a sharp hissing sound of the missiles whizzing above our heads.
    A command "Forward!" just coincided with a muffled explosion in the distance.
    Running with our guns at the ready, we saw a big fiery cloud, which lit the clayey windowless flat-roofed huts and the clay walls of fences; but here one of us stopped and did his bit by dint of a grenade launcher into the blazing chaos of the burning village.
    I thought on the run that our presence was, maybe, superfluous if there was a real possibility of demolishing a dozen of these wretched hovels by airstrikes. Yet I was unconversant with the viability of the local folk, since they did not take long to respond to the infringement on their right of prayer in due time. Fortunately, our running fire in the direction of the conflagration and the dense smoke mingled with clouds of dust and sand enabled our successful approach.
    I shall spare you any description of the baneful consequences of our entry into the ill-starred village, though my eyes would perforce light on them here and there, because I was in the rearguard of the storm troop attacking this hornet's nest. The furthest I can go is to say that all the attackers followed the advice of their instructor not to leave any threat behind, and indeed, there was not a living soul among the ruins behind them.
    I realized how far they were justified in indiscrimination when I was thrown to the ground by a sudden thump on the back. Quickly turning the barrel to shoot from the side, I caught a glimpse of a bloody burst of someone's head not far off, and then I saw captain Bob who had fired a shot over my body in passing.
    I leapt to my feet without as much as thank-you, for I felt the equal gratitude to my bulletproof vest and to the captain already disappeared in the smoke and dust.
    Meantime the short rattles of the bursts of the automatic machines in the center of the village were alternating with the popping bangs of the fragmentation grenades blowing in every corner, which might shelter somebody, because the marines always kept their immutable rule to sweep the inner space with fire before looking in.
    I was told to avoid getting into the thick of the fighting, and at present, I was rather on guard duty, but the inhabitants of this hamlet hid in their pise huts or among stones, and there was no one desiring to try his luck on the outside. Apparently, they knew from experience how they had to conduct themselves when such a battle flared up near the walls of their houses.
    Then the fusillade of the shootout gradually ceased, and a quarter of an hour later, our thickset commander appeared out of the dusty-smoky clouds still settling around. Almost all the guys followed him in a wide semicircle, their guns being leveled in all directions to react instantaneously to every stirring.
    "We withdraw!" he ordered into the microphone of the headset on his combat helmet, going past me while I cursorily inspected the exterior of the fighters.
    I did not find the injured, yet who have good luck in this mortal coil without a fly in the ointment. On the outskirt of the village, the rest of our group joined us, and one of them was carrying another on his back.
    Taking into account our equipment and helmets, I expected wounds in face and limbs up to groin, and my foresight had come true, as the guy was wounded in the shin.
    Because we waited for the helicopter right here, in the open flinty field between the houses and the precipice of the dry riverbed, I could prepare the leg for transportation under cover of twenty barrels, notwithstanding that our air vehicle landed by us without delay.
    We made off without incident; nonetheless, four of us constantly looked after the situation on the earth until the touchdown of the helicopter at the airbase.
    *
    After we disembarked, and the injured one was laid on the stretcher, the lieutenant colonel unexpectedly called me.
    "Look here, doc," he said. "Tell me how I can preserve it."
    And he showed me one dark thing in the small polythene bag.
    The thing was someone's sooty hand, cut off some time ago and smeared the bag from inside with blood.
    "For what must it be preserved?" I asked politely.
    "For identification. We have to take his finger-prints."
    "Keep it in spirit then. As I have enough spirit in the flask, I'll share it with you."
    "Maybe you give me your own supply?"
    "No. I am a specimen without addictions."
    "Yes, you're a great rarity, doc," he observed without smile.
    "But it is not my only merit," I kept the conversation, unscrewing the cap of my medical flask.
    "I know. You are, withal, balanced, persistent, and intrepid," he remembered the reference of my private file.
    "I'm also wise enough not to demonstrate my fortes without necessity," I added, pouring the spirit into his polythene container with a hermetic zip.
    "In spite of your youth," he confirmed.
    "Owing to my youth," I continued in the same vein. "Medicine is very good school."
    "Thanks for help, doc," he zipped his bag. "What about the injury?"
    "I'd like to put a splint on the leg. Have we any time for this manipulation?"
    "Four hours at the least. Okay, you can do it in their medical unit."
    After that, he left our group by the helicopter and headed for the distant buildings and hangars across the airfield to arrange our pastime for the hours of awaiting our flight.
    Captain Bob was about to follow him for solving the problem of supplying our temporary camp with water and food, but he couldn't go past me without a sign of approval.
    "What do you think of it, doc?" he inquired casually. "How'd you like your baptism of fire?"
    "So-so. As a marine, I expected one missing thing."
    "What did you lack, doc?" he asked condescendingly.
    "Seashore. I hoped to take a dip in the Mediterranean Sea."
    "Next time, doc," he promised, having smiled at my joke. "You're a born soldier of fortune, as I see."
    "Maybe, but I prefer to battle in my field."
    "Soldier doesn't choose battlefield, doc. Anyway, you've passed the test. Attaboy!"
    Having given me an approving glance instead of patting my shoulder, the captain went at his easy stride of predator towards the control tower of the aerodrome from our compact group habitually holding all-round defense.
   
    CHAPTER 4
   
    Immersed in the sensations and feelings of my retentive memory, I just remembered how I was reflecting after that action on irreconcilability of my military hypostasis and Hippocratic Oath when our car stopped in front of the high steel gate with two big red five-pointed stars in the centers of its halves and a lit booth of checkpoint on one side.
    The sight was quite standard and so familiar that I seemed to return to the surroundings of my officer's life in reality, not only in my imagination.
    Captain Bob came in the surgery of the medical unit at the decisive moment of extracting the bullet, so I could devote attention to him only after I ended this operation.
    "Greetings!" I said, putting aside my long surgical clamps with a bullet. "I am glad to see you, major."
    "Hello, doc," he responded evenly, as usual. "Who would have thought that we may meet again?"
    "Especially when it had happened in this town and in such circumstances," I agreed with him, dressing the wound. "Through some quirk of fate, I'm again patching a marine."
    "The Navy in my person will recompense you for your trouble," he assured me. "What did he promise you?"
    "A thousand bucks," interjected my patient relaxing after gnashing his teeth while I was probing his wound and removing the bullet.
    "Doc will never stoop to such pittance," Bob declared. "The Navy pays three grands in cash for his work. But the bargain implies top secrecy. You must erase this evening from your memory, doc."
    "It goes without saying," I did not object. "I'll keep mum about it."
    "Done! Why is he so sweaty?"
    "I have no drug, whereas he needs a shot of anesthetic."
    "No problem, doc. Take an ampoule from their first-aid kit on my responsibility. Say when you are free and I pay on the nail."
    "Just a minute, major," I muttered, unzipping the aforementioned kit. "It's my sacred duty to give him a jab of Pantopon at parting."
    While I did the injection, my former instructor counted out thirty hundred dollar bills from the thick bunch of currency that he had drawn out of the pocket of his camouflage jacket without shoulder straps and any badges.
    "Get well soon!" I dropped, washing my hands under the tap in the corner of the surgery. "Don't forget to change the bandage. As to me, I call taxi and say goodbye to you."
    "I'll go with you," said my enriched old friend, handing me my fee. "I have to bring you out of the unit."
    "Many thanks, doc!" my patient sighed with relief. "You've saved me today twice."
    "It's nothing," I swept aside his gratitude, slapping the bills against my palm.
    Just as I took a step to the door, the cellular phone rang in the pocket of major Bob.
    "Wait a second," he stopped, pulling out his phone.
    "Speak briefly," he continued to someone there.
    He listened to someone's explanation for some time, and I waited for the end of this report.
    At last, he switched off the cellular.
    "Let's go?" I asked.
    "I think you should delay for a while," he looked at me. "The question may regard you."
    "What a question?"
    "How did he find you?" Bob asked me in reply. "By telephone?"
    "I don't know his number," the captain answered instead of me from the operating table. "It was a chance meeting in the street."
    "Here's how it happened," I explained. "He was running from bandits and bounced wounded into the yard, where I waited until the firing went past. We didn't recognize one another, but the situation demanded real action in any case, and I was forced to intervene in the conflict."
    "He felled them all, three of them," the injured informed the major. "It was a very professional liquidation, after which I guessed that it is our doc."
    "Who did shoot at the driver?" Bob interrupted him.
    "Doc was shooting, naturally. I could hardly move then."
    "Is anything wrong?" I asked, worried.
    "Yes, very likely. I hate to involve you in this shady business, but you ought to be in the know. Those, who wounded you, were familiar to you?"
    The question was addressed to the victim of the assault.
    "Only one of them. He was a man of-"
    "Without names," Bob stopped him. "So, the motherfucker decided to unleash a war. Well, this criminal freak will get his comeuppance. I'll tear off his balls personally. Yet we have a problem with doc now."
    "What a problem it may be?" I was somewhat surprised. "I leave you, and henceforth we go our own ways. What's up?"
    "I have a message from my informer in the police. He asked me whether my guys were implicated in that massacre with three corps. I said I'd answer after receiving all the reports."
    "What does it matter to me?"
    "The problem is that gangsters have their informers, too. And they were on the spot earlier than the police experts arrived there. In short, they took the car camera in spite of the protests of the patrol cops."
    "How so?"
    "These mugs had encircled the scene of action with their cars by the time the patrol appeared. Some ruffians were blarneying the cops while the others looked over the yard and screwed off the car camcorder. Now they have a video with you in the central role."
    "Bad news," I remarked. "What may it entail?"
    "Serious complications. With their connections, they are influential enough to search through the databases of all the special units in Ministry of Defense and in Ministry of the Interior. The one who can cope with three fighters is certainly a pro. Don't forget that our bandits are usually either sportsmen or paratroopers in the past."
    "Good turn deserves another, forsooth," I smiled a frosty smile. "In other words, I am in for a battle against the whole criminal syndicate or cartel. The prospect is very promising, I'd say."
    "No, doc, you should disengage from the further fighting. If you have nothing against disappearing for a time, we shall finish with them, I think, in a month. What would you say about a seaside resort on the Mediterranean Sea? Have you a valid travel passport?"
    "I have, but such pastime will be too costly for me," I twigged at once how I can take advantage of my unexpected disaster.
    "You will be there at public expense," Bob again extracted his impressive bunch. "Tell me-maybe you have Schengen visa in the passport by any chance? Do you have? Then you fly to one of my pals, and he will go to expense in case of necessity. For my part, I want to add five grands to your fee. Okay?"
    "By the by," he remembered. "Must you solve any problem at your work? I mean your sudden holiday."
    "I am on holiday at the present time," I reassured him. "I only wonder why you splurge on me so generously. What does it matter to you whether I shall be caught by bandits or not? It isn't humanistic ideas, is it?"
    "No, doc, it is pure practicality. You know us, while they know how to loosen the tongue. Besides, you're in the game already, and you may be useful in the future. Well then, I'll try to catch that fellow for you and reserve a ticket for the nearest flight."
    While Bob was calling his foreign acquaintance and connecting with the ticket offices of the airport, I thought over the new situation.
    In essence, the forced offer of one of the belligerents afforded me an opportunity to save expenses for my deserved holiday and to enlist the support of the local resident in some foreign country at the same time. It was naturally payment for my spontaneous feat, and for one evening, I had earned quite decently.
    Anyway, today I really had no choice but to do just what I did, and as a man always prepared for any eventuality, I simply concluded this incident in my biography, taking into account its probable unpleasant consequences and deriving the possible profit from it due to a conjunction of circumstances.
    "Look here, doc," said major Bob at length. "There is a ticket for a flight early in the morning. How is it for you?"
    "Acceptable," I nodded assent. "I only need to jump off by my house on the way to the airport. It'll take half an hour at most, and then I'm again free for adventures."
    "Okay, I reserve a seat for you."
    Here he resumed his conversation with cashiers, and I had enough time to place my illegal income in my inner pockets.
    "That's all," Bob turned off his cell phone. "So you ride in our car and with my driver. He is your bodyguard, and he pays for your ticket."
    "Well, as you wish. How shall I recognize that expatriate?"
    "Here he is," Bob showed me a photo on the display of his mobile. "I'll send your face to him for identification. He must keep me posted of your affairs there. Thanks for your help, doc, and let's go to the car."
    *
    The chappie, who was detailed to drive the same car that had brought me to the unit, towered above me as a real heavyweight, and he kept silence virtually for all the hours of our intercourse, mainly nodding in response to my information.
    As I did not trust this thug, I concealed my true address from him and alighted from the car in the other street in order to pass through two gloomy damp double-exit yards to my front entrance without his knowledge.
    Having notified my landlady of my next departure and packed something in my shoulder bag, I returned to the awaiting car. Because the sum of currency in my bag amounted to twenty thousand dollars now, I was rather glad to have such an ally as my driver, on whose qualification I could rely if anything cropped up.
    I was sure, true, that any inquiry about my person wouldn't begin till tomorrow; consequently, I was still out of danger at the border control point even with my declared capital.
    Indeed, about four hours later, I already dozed with a cup of hot coffee in one of the armchairs in the international departures lounge of the airport after my successful passing of the passport control, summarizing the events of this evening.
    Although all those events happened to me by sheer accident, a strange suspicion haunted me for some reason, and their sequence appeared artificial and not accidental. Clearly, this dubiousness arose because I encountered my military comrade in the extremely incredible situation of the peaceful life, where the very probability of our meeting was minimal, let alone such coincidences.
    Over a year ago, one occurrence like that took place and even entailed an unprecedented love affair, which became my first genuine passion, short and tempestuous, but then the surroundings quite corresponded to possibility of a chance meeting, as my hospital was in the zone of a local war conflict, and the presence of that former lieutenant colonel could not arouse my suspicion. I did not wonder, too, at his plain camouflage making him inconspicuous there, given that "colonel" was the generally accepted form of address to him then; nor did I feel any chagrin over his ostensible forgetfulness, for I understood, of course, that an officer of the intelligence always had to conduct himself in accordance with his current tasks. Therefore, I did not pester him with my reminders, especially as I never was a lover of reminiscing, either.
    So I did not like the chain of events that had pulled my two dangerous quondam pals out of my past and carried me off from my life to this lounge of the airport, and what was more, such a chain seemed to me some boa constrictor, which had suddenly flung its first coil on my body, wreathing itself slowly round me.
    I should have escaped its entwining and slipped away from its coils before it started strangling, for, notwithstanding the imaginariness of the existence of this snake, I felt the cold slippery touch of the enormous invisible serpent more and more tangibly when I thought about the reversals of fortune in the last nine hours....
   
   
    PART TWO
   
    CHAPTER 5
   
    As after getting into a mess I was overstrung, it wouldn't have hurt to have a snooze in the aircraft, and my mirthless meditations did not hinder my sinking into a deep sleep immediately I took my seat and fastened my belt beforehand.
    Deficiency of sleep inured me from my youth to snatch any free time for taking a nap, so I was awoken by the stewardess only for having a good meal, since I should have been ready for anything in the unfamiliar country with some stranger meeting me.
    That is why I did not hurry to exit with my luggage into the terminal and preferred to ennoble my face with my electric shaver, washing, and lotion Cool Wave by Gillette before a new unpredictable acquaintance.
    I scarcely believed in the good intentions stated by the most ruthless master of killing from my erstwhile life, and the scenario of liquidating me in foreign parts as an unwanted witness could not be ruled out. Fortunately, I traveled frequently enough in the last two years, and it was hard to confuse me by any turn-up or to catch me defenseless by any surprise, because I was a hard nut to crack, so to speak.
    The man receiving me was too puny for an active fighter, and it came into my head that this foppish lean middle-aged playboy of sufficiently prepossessing appearance was an expert of poisoning. For that reason, I was constantly alert with him, letting him walk ahead on the way through the spacious concourse of the airport to the parking lot of his car and keeping his well-groomed hands with a big signet ring in sight.
    He had called himself John Fox, but his name was as doubtful as his exterior of a prosperous rentier-yachtsman obviously having no yacht with his ordinary Toyota, where he got talking a little on the motorway.
    "So, Victor, you'd like to pass a pair of months in a secluded spot?" John asked courteously.
    "I'm afraid I may attract more attention in such a spot than in a big tower," I answered. "Meanwhile, I'm seeking anonymity and obscurity."
    "I've caught your meaning. Besides, you had better stay in another country in order to avoid locating your registration."
    "In principle, I'd prefer to lodge without registering. Is it possible?"
    "Money talks, as you know. Okay, your requirements are defined quite clearly. I know one place that will suit you. It is a seaside resort and a big town at the same time. And I can rather find there a flat or a house being rented relatively cheap and without excessive formalities. But we must cross two countries for that, and we shall be there only in the evening."
    "Never mind," I said. "I have much time for faineance."
    From the snippets of information in the course of our travel, I understood that John was familiar with the customs of that littoral district after his being on holiday there many times, and he promised me to help with looking for a flat.
    To cut a long story short, by night I was already the only lodger of a small poky hut having two merits-its masonry and patio. As the whole house was put at my disposal, I could do my everyday specific exercises in the open air and in solitude, without any onlookers and admiring glances.
    My athletic body ever was a magnet for the weaker sex, so I decided to find some desolate nook beyond the public beaches and avoid demonstrating my perfect muscles among gapers and loiterers. Anyway, the rainy weather was unpropitious for swimming for the present, since the choppy sea was driving heaving billows, still not turning into a real storm yet damping my sportive ardor by the dirty foam of the roiling waters, though hypothetically, I was quite willing to breast waves even in the bad weather after the months of the scorching sun and droughts.
    With my local curator, I arranged to keep in contact and call him on his mobile if the need arose, whereas he assured me that he would keep me informed about the situation in Russia, visiting my hermitage from time to time. I had changed the location and number of my cell on our way across the two aforementioned European countries, and none but John knew my new number, so I could not fear to be found because of someone's call, which might enable locating the owner of the telephone in the world.
    Considering the uncertainty of the impending danger, I ought to have armed myself for self-defense, but the law prohibited carrying unlicensed firearm and combat knife or another cold steel, and having such things on me, I would have incurred the great displeasure of the police.
    The solution was prompted by my recent successful throw of the knife that had proved the usefulness of maintaining due readiness for this action during the last years. I bought a set of throwing blades the size of a palm and weighty enough, and while going for a run at dawn every day I began to spare half an hour for throws of these blades from various positions at the trunks of the pines in the small park with the aim of learning to wield my weapon properly.
    So I led an idle life, training and practicing as usual, and I was wary of appearing in the public places too frequently, even if the town wasn't inundated with tourists in this season, and the narrow streets of our quarters in the coastal strip weren't overcrowded, rather conversely.
    Because the swimmers venturing to get into the rough sea were rare, and in the wet weather, the beaches remained almost empty, the holidaymakers strolled along the promenade, where they could always have a snack in one of many café and restaurants or visit one of many salons of spa, massage, cosmetics etcetera.
    Although I still had no need of care of such a kind, I was also gadding about among the loafers, sitting sometimes on the wet parapet like them and gawking at the big shop-windows with headless mannequins in costly attire and jewelry. Just here, it was possible to breathe fresh air inconspicuously, and in my dark waterproof jacket and leather cap, I easily mingled in the crowd, as my physiognomy was quite ordinary, while outwardly, I wasn't sociable or amicable. Naturally, I did not endeavor deliberately to look like uncommunicative loner, and the strong features were simply some adequate reflections of the main traits of my character hardened by my mode of life.
    *
    This day, at noon I sauntered up and down the long pedestrian walkway, or rather avenue, of the promenade when one of the passers-by stopped me.
    It was a typical muddleheaded compatriot, a burly countrified goof knowing no foreign language and being unable to read the map of his guidebook with his stupid brains that were pretty befuddled with various sorts of wines and beer.
    This strayed gregarious Russian tourist guessed who I was by nationality and stuck like a leech, hardly understanding my explanation how he could get out from here and reach the center of the town.
    While talking with the intrusive dimwitted clodhopper I was observing the usual life of the street as before, though cursorily, until I suddenly flinched at the sight of a woman coming out of some beauty parlor on the other side.
    As she pulled the hood of her crimson cloak over her head, I only got a glimpse of her face. However, when she went down the street from the entrances of the public beaches, her deportment and gait also appeared very familiar to me.
    "No," I said aloud, flummoxed by such a happenstance, "it is impossible."
    "What do you mean?" asked my boobyish interlocutor.
    "Nil significant," I answered mechanically. "In a word, you must go over there and take your bus. I leave you now."
    "A big thank you, brother," he shook my hand folksily with both his sweaty paws. "You've saved me in this fucking town!"
    After that, he steered for his bus stop, whereas I crossed the street and came in the salon left by her.
    "Good day, ma'am," I greeted the portly madam-receptionist of uncertain age. "May I ask you one confidential question?"
    "Please, sir," she smiled professionally. "I hope the question won't be too confidential."
    "Oh no, by no means," I exclaimed. "The point is that I've agreed with one girl to meet at your salon, and I'm late, as you see. I made her acquaintance only yesterday, and here's such a misfire! Perhaps you can help me to find her. She is over twenty-seven approximately, and she has light-brown hair, short enough. Besides, she is nice-looking and rather sportive. Her name is Lucy, as she called herself."
    "Ah, you speak about mademoiselle Hoffman," remembered the madam affably after I pronounced the name. "She'd gone only just, five minutes ago."
    "But you have no reason to be so crestfallen, sir," she soothed me patronizingly. "She will visit us every day in the same time, and you can see her tomorrow."
    "Really? You're simply revitalizing me, ma'am!"
    "It's natural. Revitalizing is our specialty," she jested hospitably.
    "But don't tell her that I'll be here tomorrow, okay? I'll give her a surprise and plead something in excuse of my being late."
    "I see you are a slyboots. Such a sturdy chap will always deserve absolution, though," she added coquettishly.
    "My heartfelt thanks to you for your kindness," I hurried to say, retiring from the vestibule of the beauty salon.
    Why, one might ask, I couldn't overtake my acquaintance and make sure of her identity.
    I didn't do it just because it was highly probable, while I was undecided whether I should appear in her life once again or not. Our short liaison occurred one and a half years ago, and that week's fit of passion could scarcely be regarded as a real liaison, strictly speaking. Therefore, it was hard to foresee her present attitude to me for certain, and I was disinclined to importunate her if she attached little importance to that episode.
    At first, I must have watched her for some time and understood what life she led here, since I did not want to meet with her boyfriend, even with the former colonel who was indebted to me for my then aid, very essential, to say the least.
    In the evening, I settled myself in the soft armchair under the lean-to of the circular eave of the patio, lounging with a big cup of hot strong tea and remembering some adventures of my past in the lulling susurration of the drizzling rain beyond the thin plastic roof above my head.
    Gazing at the dark mist of the watery dust before me, I again saw that arid stone wilderness with rare stunted trees and dry dusty scrubs, in one of the small towns of which I happened to pass the months of my first humanitarian mission, posted as an army surgeon to the local military hospital....
   
    CHAPTER 6
   
    In the only civilized hotel, where all the members of our mission resided, as well as the most of the personnel of the hospital, the colonel arose in the middle of my term.
    As all of us were acquainted with each other, my nodding to him and his nodding to me looked like common etiquette, and I reasonably showed no interest in his secret affairs here, while he usually cast a cursory glance at me in passing and that's all.
    His nice-looking secretary or girlfriend caught my eye twice or thrice, but I never had enough time for striking acquaintance, and besides, it was too risky to touch anything among the property of this possessor. Apparently, she was well aware of the danger of touching, too, and kept her countenance when going past me in the lobby.
    Occasionally, I encountered the colonel at the shooting-range, yet I was occupied with the rapidity of firing my PM, and his practicing was of no interest to me, since I did not intend to vie with him. Although I became a dab hand at firing and throwing knife very long ago, I was obliged to be in due condition because some armed freaks scoured the devastated country, and they might always prowl nearby, waylaying a white man without convoy.
    There was civil war around, after all, and every day I operated the victims of this war, though many of them were rather its active participants and consummate ruffians.
    To tell the truth, I would have killed some of them with my own hands, were they not my patients, considering their atrocities in the intestine slaughter. Good that I heard little of their feats of ferocity, otherwise I could have considerably increased a quantity of work for our pathologist.
    However, such an attitude had the advantage that I was acquiring skill in new operating techniques on the guys arousing even less my compassion than the stray doggies I operated in my student days.
    As a surgeon, true, I seldom felt any emotions, continually engrossed in my work and absorbed in reading some recent issues of the journal of surgery or in confabulating with my colleagues, for I never ceased learning.
    So, everybody minded his own business, so to speak, and my scanty sexual relations were pragmatically reduced to humping one surgical nurse-mulatto from time to time. That was altogether her initiative and implied nothing but some alleviation of our existence here in constant readiness for a sudden awakening in the middle of the night and for long hard work irrespective of our state of health and mind at any time.
    Those copulations were neither love nor liaison but something rather friendly and biological, and we would gratify each other without any ulterior motive, exclusively in order to relax a bit in our everyday overstrain. I ever opined that people set great store by coitus as such by a common deep-rooted fallacy; therefore, I didn't understand what impelled a rejected suitor to commit suicide if there were so many other females with the same secondary sexual characteristics in the world, not to speak of the more perfect women's bodies at porno-sites or of crowds of sex-starved girls at discotheques.
    As to me, I regarded sex as a kind of sport competition, and I couldn't stand someone's imposing any elevation on my real feelings, even if it was comforting to someone to comprehend my stance as cynicism.
    Such was my sober medical view on this subject until that hot summer morning when I rode away from the hospital for a pair of hours to some distant part of the neighboring oriental country town.
    Because our military hospital was situated at a distance from the town quarters, I was to cross the open space of the abovementioned wilderness along the breakstone cart road covered with brown sandy dust. Fortunately, my battered army jeep canvas was created in days of old just for these so-called roads.
    The tarpaulin was removed on both sides, or else the metal cabin would have turned into a sheer hell-oven in the forthcoming stifling heat, and I felt somewhat defenseless in my jalopy in comparison with the territory of the hospital well protected with the electric perimeter security fencing and guarded by two APC and the American marines; yet from our cantonment to the needful point in the town was about half an hour's journey only.
    Due to my being exposed to the reigning dusty sultriness, properly speaking, I instantly caught the short thump of a muffled burst behind the rock protrusion of the steep slope jutting out across the road that made a turn here and was invisible ahead.
    As soon as I heard this report, I put on the brake. The burst might be an explosion of booby-trap or grenade, and consequently, someone might run into an ambush there. Whoever had the bad luck to get into trouble, I should have known what happened before riding further.
    Thinking that, I was running up the slope so that I could cast a glance down from above at the incident, and having crossed the narrow scree, I appeared on that side of the rock with my pistol prepared for firing.
    And indeed, my foresight was not superfluous, and my PM played a central role in the swift action within a few seconds after I saw the scene of the attack.
    The car smoking below was the second hospital jeep, much more modern than my rattletrap, and it wasn't mined, for it was struck by a shot of some explosive small shell from the left side. Accordingly, the driver's door was warped with a gaping shell-hole, and the black smoke was pouring out of the car through the broken windows, though the engine wasn't blown up, just catching fire at this moment.
    However, having glimpsed the jeep, I willy-nilly gave all my attention to the four men, local insurgents in appearance, hurrying with their small arms to the burning car. Three of them were in a semicircle in front of me, still not noticing a new player, so I had one and a half seconds for three shots.
    Standing straight, rooted to the ground, I pointed the gun at the first one in this casual row, and my PM moved along the semicircle, stopping for a fraction of a second two times after the first shot.
    I was acting too quickly for preparing, since such experienced fighters reacted instantaneously, and they would have swept me off by the fire of their submachine guns. Luckily, unexpectedness afforded me an opportunity to fire a triple shot, and I did not miss any target, especially as they were without bulletproof vests in this sweltering day, and their trunks were open to a sudden slug.
    Immediately I ended my rapid movement, I jumped and did a forward roll downhill through some bushes; therefore, a burst of the fourth submachine gun lashed the place left by me when I rolled down the slope.
    From the squat after my roll, I jumped again and, still being in the air, fired a shot at the head of the fourth attacker turning the barrel in the direction of my moving.
    Before my falling body knocked him off his feet, he was already a discard, and now I was worried about the state of his three associates lying behind the jeep in various degrees of being alive.
    I leapt to my feet and made a short round, putting a bullet through each head and liquidating any potential threat.
    Only after that, did I step to the car and jerked its right front door.
    Sooty as a chimney sweep, she was trying vainly to haul out the unconscious colonel from his seat behind the wheel.
    With "Let me!" I pulled her out of the jeep that might explode every instant.
    She was slightly contused by the burst and cut here and there with fragments of glass, yet there weren't big spots of blood on her dirty blouse and skirt, and she most likely had no serious slash or injury.
    "Take the first-aid kit!" I snapped, gripping the khaki shirt of the colonel under his armpits.
    While she drew out the kit (included in the equipment of the hospital transport, as I knew) along with a silver briefcase and a submachine gun UZI through the smashed rear window, I dragged the heavy body out of the car into the hot shadow of the beetling rock at the turn, far enough from the smoking jeep.
    He was still breathing, twitching his legs on the sand, but his trousers were wet with blood bleeding from a lacerated abdominal wound in the groin, and his face was pale from such a loss of blood.
    "What's with him?" I heard behind my back.
    "Bad wound," I diagnosed, removing the shirt from this bloody hole of the abdominal wall.
    To put it mildly, the colonel was not long for this world, because this injury required an immediate operation, while he had no chance to get to the hospital in his present state of dying.
    Meantime I pressed the bowel falling out of the abdominal cavity with my handkerchief in order to staunch the wound.
    "I need a big tampon," I said, turning my head to her. "I must plug it."
    "I got you," she muttered, laying the firs-aid kit, briefcase, and UZI on the ground.
    Then, with two jerks, she tore off her blouse from her shoulders, having remained in her grey bra, and thrust this batiste bundle under my hands into the wound.
    Now we were face to face, and she looked me in the eyes.
    The dilated pupils of her blue eyes seemed to blaze with black fire as she pronounced despairingly, almost in a whisper, only two words:
    "Save him!"
    For lack of artistic subtlety, I am hardly able to convey what just united us when our looks collided. I felt as if my soul plunged for an instant into the blazing abysses of her gaze and became the same dark flame of her soul.
    I can swear that the reason was by no means the nakedness of her body and the closeness of her breast, which, maybe, indeed created a conducive aura of sweaty flesh about her.
    Anyway, a passion shook me as a sudden earthquake shock, and by all my being, I realized in a flash that she is the chief woman of my life from now on. But at present, I had no time to investigate my mental metamorphosis.
    "I'll try," I promised a second later and unbuckled my cowboy's belt.
    "What blood group he has?" I asked, tightening our improvised compress with the belt slantwise between the thighs across the perineum and marking the consoling intactness of the imposing genitalia of the colonel.
    "A positive," she answered, pressing her crumpled blouse.
    "I have AB negative," she added, understanding at once, what I want to do.
    "It's incompatible," I dropped, ending to put my bandage.
    And here it dawned on me that we have a donor for transfusion.
    "Give me the two biggest syringes with thick needles," I ordered her, buckling the belt, "plus an ampoule of iodine."
    She obeyed my order in a jiffy.
    Only when I jabbed a needle into the vein of my left arm could I continue instructing her.
    "Take tourniquet there," I commanded, filling one of 10-milliliter syringe with my blood. "Put it superficially, without compressing his vein. Can you do intravenous injections?"
    "Yes, of course," she said, putting the tourniquet on the arm of the colonel, whose bloodlessly pallid face was covered with cold sweat.
    His lips were already cyanotic, and his powerful body was shivering in the scorching heat.
    "Inject the blood without hurry, during a minute," I enjoined. "Don't pull the needle out of the vein. We ought to exchange our syringes very quickly so that the blood won't coagulate. Thrombosis it is death. I'm ready, let's go."
    For a wonder, she acted irreproachably, although she was transfusing blood to her dying patron, after all. The girl undoubtedly had the guts, so to say, and she could control herself.
    After the fifth syringe, the colonel ceased shivering, but we were obliged to infuse two hundred milliliter at the very least, otherwise we would scarcely have brought him to the hospital.
    To sum up, after pumping over twenty syringes of blood out of my vein into his one, the colonel began to look like a more or less live man, balancing on the verge of bleeding death as before.
    Notwithstanding my slight dizziness, I had no time to lose now, or else my sacrifice might be futile.
    "Take the UZI and run to my jeep," I said, handing her my key ring with an ignition key. "Turn it and draw backwards here."
    "Okay," she dropped, already darting off towards the rocky steep of the turn with her UZI and briefcase in her hands.
    Fortunately, my cellular phone was in the zone of transmission, and the number of the reception wasn't occupied.
    "It is Victor," I informed the nurse-receptionist. "Our car was attacked, and the colonel is badly wounded. Prepare all for laparotomy and a big operation in abdominal cavity. Bring a drip for transfusion to the entrance, the blood group A positive, half a liter at least. And find a glass of red wine for me. I was a donor for him, and I'm going to operate him together with the second surgeon. Okay? We'll be within twenty minutes."
    The colonel did not recover consciousness when I pulled him to the jeep and dragged his heavy limp body in on the back seat, so I could make do without narcotics, dangerous in his state but necessary in case of pain shock.
    "Step on it!" I barked out, scrambling into the car onto the front passenger's seat and bending half-turned to the colonel to press the bandage for the time of our fast ride.
    And the jeep dashed forward down the road to the medical cantonment.
    Apparently, the organism of my patient had sufficient resources of resistance, because he did not kick the bucket despite the jolting at full speed and sultriness.
    While our paramedics transported the colonel to the operating room, I quaffed a glass of sweet red wine by the reception desk and told the nursing sister to give my half-naked helper a smock and examine her cuts duly.
    "I shall stay with him then," announced my protégé, wiping her sweaty smutty face with her palm.
    By then, she had passed the security guards in the lobby her UZI, remaining inseparable from her briefcase, though.
    "Don't run ahead," I remarked, returning the empty glass to the receptionist. "We'll talk after the operation."
    "I hope," she breathed out, again looking me in the face with her bottomless eyes, whose blueness only set off their blazing fathomlessness.
    "I'll do my utmost," I promised, as though drinking her mad glare at one gulp as well before going to my operating table.
    As it turned out, the wound was even worse than it seemed at first sight; and when I clamped one extremely important artery with the artery forceps at last, I thought that the colonel had been being on a razor-edge during this half an hour, and his life was teetering on the very brink of profuse bleeding.
    "He is a lucky dog," my associate observed in this connection, putting clamps on the torn intestine. "Here we have enough to stitch today."
    He was right, and in the course of the operation, I was forced thrice to sniff ammonia in order to avoid falling into a swoon. But my weakness was quite pardonable in that case, considering that no one could call me mollycoddle, while our surgeon's mates were always on the alert to help me in a weak moment.
    Thus, after putting many ligatures and stitching blood vessels, bowels, mesentery, muscles, peritoneum et cetera, we had the lawful right to send our patient to the intensive care unit.
    Soon I went to visit him, and naturally, she was there in the corridor by the door of his ward.
    "He's all right?" asked she.
    "Time will tell," I answered. "At first, he must come round."
    "Thank you for everything," she said in an undertone.
    "Don't hurry," I warned her. "The outcome is still unpredictable. And please, eat and drink sometimes. I'll give instructions about your stay here, and I'm in the hospital till night every day."
    *
    My prognosis was guarded not without reason.
    Although the colonel had some rubber tubes of drains in his abdomen to perform lavage of his abdominal cavity with antibiotics at times, nevertheless, his grave injury might entail peritonitis with high probability, and for the present, his chances were fifty-fifty. Besides, he still did not regain consciousness after narcosis, and so our neurologist could not examine the state of his health, obviously deteriorated by the burst, which had ruptured his belly and torn to shreds his entrails. On his X-ray picture, we did not find any fragments in his kidneys and spine or elsewhere, but who knew how he was injured in actuality, if we resuscitated him with such difficulties from such deep insensibility.
    We indeed had a lot of trouble with him during the following week, because he came to his senses only for burning with fever and tossing delirious, strapped to his bed, and our nurses would never have coped with such a bull, but for his mate who watched selflessly at his bedside night and day.
    She slept in snatches on three chairs in his ward and immediately leapt up from her improvised daybed to sooth him, giving him to drink or changing his bedpan, for he did not obey anybody but her, and only to her voice, he reacted without sudden blow while abiding in his inner inferno.
    As my swarthy girlfriend estimated her treating him, "She can love, his white woman".
    Of course, I quite agreed with my simple-hearted merry concubine, however I noticed some tinge of obduracy in her selflessness, or rather embitterment, with which she struggled for his life, and it was caused, as I saw it, by her chagrin, not by her compassion. Because I watched such conduct more than once in my practice, I understood that she was vexed with the fatality threatening her future where she pinned all her hopes just on the colonel. In other words, his death would have blighted her plans, apart from anything else, and this heroism did not very square with any purely elevated love, rare enough in reality.
    The next week the colonel passed relatively conscious, but in a drowse from drugs, and his heavy state constantly required someone's and nurse's control, though he avoided sepsis and gangrene and was in condition to undergo the second operation, after which we really began to hope for his recovery from his injury.
    Needless to say, she remained beside him as before, spending all her time for tending him, and she was visibly emaciated by the day of transferring the colonel from the intensive care unit to the individual ward of our department of surgery. Nonetheless, when I looked in on him between my operations next day, she was sitting with an open laptop computer by his bed (so that her patron could see the display) and typing some text to his dictation, using the memorable silver briefcase as a desk.
    "Well, well," I exclaimed, coming in the ward. "Here's a gladdening sight! So you're already in good form!"
    "Time presses, doc," said the colonel still lying with the needles of two dips in the vein of both his arms. "When must I rally from this wound?"
    "You'll be on your legs no earlier than after a month at best," I prognosticated honestly. "And then you should take a long course of rehabilitation."
    "Is it so serious, doc?" he asked.
    "It is actually less serious than I feared. Lucky for you your spine wasn't touched, or else you might be paralyzed," I informed him. "Thank God, your privy parts are intact, too."
    "Indeed, thank God," muttered the colonel. "Leave us for a pair of minutes, Lucy."
    Silently, she put aside her computer and briefcase and went out of the ward.
    "I think my service here will be concluded very soon," the colonel continued. "They're going to replace me and convey me from here to our central military hospital for treating. That may happen unexpectedly, and I am afraid I shan't have another occasion to converse with you."
    "Okay, I can spare fifteen minutes for conversation."
    Anyway, the colonel was the last man whose request I should have refused.
    "To begin with, I'd like to know something about that incident on the road," he came to the point without further ado. "How did it come that you got involved in it?"
    "By chance. I heard a burst and went thither along the hillside for estimation of situation. When I saw our smoking jeep and the running attackers, I opened fire."
    "You had only your pistol, right? Meanwhile, there were four fighters with automatic firearm against you."
    "But I fired from above. And don't forget surprise factor and my rapidity."
    "That is, you dispatched all of them. Let's go on to your next step."
    "Then I found you in the car and rendered first aid to you with her assistance."
    "First aid doesn't include direct transfusion, doc. She said you transfused your own blood to me."
    "I had no choice but to become your donor. My blood group was just compatible with yours, and this transfusion was extremely urgent in my opinion."
    "What, I was at death's door, doc?"
    "You had opened its door yet and overstepped the threshold with one foot."
    "That's why you stayed there for half an hour instead of running away? You might be attacked once again, doc."
    "I was aware of that. Yet we had UZI, two submachine guns, and two automatic rifles, not to mention one ball of my PM. Agree that it was the whole arsenal."
    "One ball was left for suicide, as far as I understand," the colonel commented my warlike declaration parenthetically. "Thus, you've saved my life, doc."
    "It was nothing," I dropped politely. "I simply thought that this brooks no delay, your case."
    "And you've saved her as well. It would be worse than death for her to fall into the clutches of the local freaks. Judging by everything, they wanted to capture us, otherwise they would have riddled the car from afar."
    "Don't exaggerate my heroism. I acted rather spontaneous that deliberately."
    "It's no matter, doc, why you risked your life for our sake. Any gratitude for such deeds is somehow ridiculous to my mind. Besides, you deserve to be rewarded with something more substantial. As I haven't enough means now, I'll give you a promise. Whenever you need my help, I shall do everything possible to help you."
    "I'll bear it in mind, of course, but the probability of our new meeting is very small."
    "Who knows, doc. Perhaps I shall do you a service someday. Call her, please, for we must make up leeway."
    *
    Ever since that day, I could see the same idyllic scene of their clerical work in the daytime from morning till night, but to sleep the colonel permitted her in the hotel. True, she would leave a nurse attending him instead of her and pay cash by the shift to this individual attendant, thereby winning our nurses' favor, including my practical mulatto.
    As a consequence, I was doomed to lead a lone existence during the following week or two, taking into consideration the packed schedule and nursing staff rota in our hospital. Having no other ladylove, I hardly supposed that any events of such a kind might diversify my usual solitude in the sufficiently cozy room with air-conditioner between the performances of my duties every day and by night at times.
    Nevertheless, the excessive freedom of two magnetized halves played its fateful role very soon.
    In the evening of the third day after resuming their joint activities, she suddenly hailed me in the corridor of the hospital.
    I thought she wanted to ask me about something, and she indeed asked a question, but it was not what I expected to hear.
    "What would you say if I came to you later?" such was her question.
    For some reason, I refrained from asking her why she would like to come to me.
    Although both of us were in doctor's smocks not disposing to erotic fantasies, I shuddered inwardly with sensual anticipation and averted my eyes from her lowered eyes-so much I feared she would raise them and look prematurely into my soul.
    "I'd say-welcome," I answered. "Usually I stay up late. Do you know my number?"
    "Yes, of course," she said. "Are you alone today?"
    "Certainly," I said. "I wait for you after nine, okay?"
    "Okay," she agreed, and we parted for two hours.
    There was not a hint at voluptuousness in her behavior, and yet, after taking a shower, I prepared myself body and soul for the close contact and changed my bed just in case. Tense with expectancy and refreshed with my deodorant and lotion, I drank black coffee and cleaned my teeth then, though I gave up the thought of ordering some refreshments for my glass coffee table, since I was still uncertain whether she really intended to give herself to me or I put a wrong construction on her words.
    I might be deluded by my own imagination, which had taken her innocent politeness for her intention to commit adultery, especially when the circumstances afforded us an opportunity for that. I knew nothing about her past, and my biased opinion that young wives are inclined to infidelity, albeit often unrealized or unrealizable, was mistaken, maybe, in her case. Naturally, if I made no error of judgment, we should have kept our date secret, because it would be insanity to incur the wrath of such a terrible monster as the colonel was sooth to say.
    The moment I opened the door to her, I understood that my treatment of her ulterior motive proved correct, since she was obviously naked under her plain khaki dress with zipper up the front, which looked like some unostentatious uniform but was in essence a flimsy dressing gown for throwing off easily and quickly. Her present sex appeal, reinforced with her moisturized skin and with the fragrance of her perfume, made her a personification of seduction, notwithstanding that her enchanting face was without a vestige of cosmetic, and it did not seem really fascinating to me before.
    Although the purpose of her coming left no doubt, she didn't hasten to resort to usual tricks of an ordinary temptress to indicate her intentions by action, and I decided to cede the initiative to her in such a delicate situation.
    "Maybe you want to sit down?" I motion her to one of my two armchairs.
    "No," she answered in a low voice. "I want to clarify something. I'm indebted to you for some time now."
    "He also said that he owes me a debt of gratitude," I remarked. "But I don't like to have any debtors. Whatever you and he might owe me, I remit your debts."
    "It's not that," she interrupted me. "What you had done there wasn't a simple service. But for you I would have lost everything."
    "When I came to your rescue, I didn't know who was in the car," I confessed honestly, standing in front of her so close that I could sense her breathing. "I was going to clear the way, and that's all."
    "Therefore, you ventured to stand against four gunmen," she muttered, not raising her eyes.
    "Three of them hadn't enough time to realize that," I explained. "I am a good shot, you see. It was simply a lucky coincidence for you that I appeared there just in time."
    "It was a marvel that we escaped death," she said. "And it is you who did this marvel. You cannot imagine how much his life means to me."
    "I'm very glad to conduce to your advancement in your secret service."
    "I am an interpreter by profession, not one of military women," she responded to my irony. "When you saved him, you saved me for the second time. Today I'd like to pay my debt partly."
    "It is unnecessary."
    "I think not. I hope not. At any rate, so it seems to me. No?"
    Here he raised her eyes and looked right into mine.
    "He will kill us," quoth I, flying into the chasm of her magic gaze.
    "He might have killed perhaps if he'd been informed," she pronounced in a chest-voice enveloping my sober mind in befuddling sensuality. "Yet I learnt to keep mouth shut."
    "In other words, you'll repay me for his saving with your unfaithfulness to him," I summed up the situation, trying to resist the overmastering attraction. "I can't receive your self-sacrifice."
    "It's rather my covert desire than sacrifice," she let me into her secret, increasing the arisen tension to maximum. "I never met a man like you."
    "Do you imply my occupation?"
    "I am implying you wholly," she lowered her voice to a feverish whisper. "I'd never forgive me if I'd missed the opportunity to profit the occasion."
    "You're too sincere, Lucy," I reproached her gently, putting my hands on her shoulders.
    As soon as our barely covered bodies touched, I felt a piercing discharge of some inexpressibly happy shared passion, which fused us instantaneously into an indissoluble single entity, and we were locked in an embrace of our first kiss so long that only necessity of flinging off our clothes forced us to unclasp our arms for a few seconds.
    Till then, my attitude to woman's body was always within the bounds of reason, especially as my profession continually enhanced my consumerism in this sphere. From my adolescence, many girls coveted my body and importuned me for my courtship, and so I could satisfy the lusts of the flesh in my youth even without wooing. On the contrary, it were they who solicited my favor and hankered for my athletic perfection rousing their prurient interest and instinctive sinfulness; that's why I was seldom starved of affection and sex as such, and my love adventures were restricted not so much by deficiency of desirous wantons as by my sport regimen. Moreover, this disparity of supply and demand made my inchoate fastidiousness keener in my student days when I began to approach the coitus with certain gynecological sobriety, eschewing any sluttish dissoluteness and desisting from any enjoyment of someone's doubtfully healthy sexuality.
    It is unsurprising that suicide for the reason of unrequited love-that is, because of inaccessibility of one vagina among a great number of the others quite accessible-was ridiculous absurdity to my way of thinking. In my comprehension, copulation was akin to a kind of sport, and the technologies of petting and frigging were a means to an end on the road to victory, namely to a decent quantity of orgasms, including, of course, her ecstatic exclamations and contented exhaustion in the upshot.
    Figuratively speaking, I was able to heat every sexpot and capable of satisfying every sex-starvation, but giving pleasure, I could never plunge into this passionate lovemaking with abandon, and in some degree, I usually remained an observer, condescendingly ironical or cynically alien to my sex partner.
    In the present case, I unexpectedly forgot all my proficiency in love foreplay and in arousing carnality, because any techniques of stimulating sexual desire were absolutely superfluous for both of us who entirely became the flames of one sudden passionateness blazing indivisibly in its exultant self-immolation. Intermixing in this insatiable fire, our thrilling souls were merging in the surging waves of soaring now tempestuously billowing and tossing us now slightly subsiding and tenderly lapping, and it seemed that perceptibility of our corporeality turned our sense of touch into some all-seeing insight enabling us to sense one another from inside while our interlaced heated bodies reveled in their desired flesh.
    Unlike all the preceding sexual intercourses, this possession could not be disassembled into its component parts by a backward glance, and even our breathers were powerless to separate us. It was a strange sensation to be such a soul pervaded by her passion compounded with my own voluptuous craving flooding her soul and to feel the reciprocal tides of our mutual attraction that made our mutuality some blissfully heaving abyss of flaming fervor. Flushed with conquest and intoxicated with gratifying, we were immersed in love utterly and completely, having described a magic circle of impregnability around us by our first touch, and the objective reality remained beyond this circle, while we abode within a shining cocoon of our interflowing united feelings and were aware only of ourselves.
    It goes without saying, we forgot about the running time in the eternity of our interminable supreme happiness, and when we were exhausted at last by our unquenchable desire, gradually calming down but embracing one another as before, my electronic clock registered almost two hours elapsed after her knock at my door.
    Although both our bodies were adoringly kissed all over in our passionate cognition, and she was lying motionless, having clung to me and nuzzled her face against my chest, her stirring lips continued to slightly caress my sweaty skin, tickling it in the felicity of her weariness, whereas I buried my face in her fragrant soft hair, absorbing the very presence of her adorable nudity cuddled up to mine. If this state might be called "celestial bliss" and "divine serenity", we had reached all that at present beyond any doubt.
    And then, I suddenly felt some warm wetness under her closed eyes pressed to my still throbbing heart.
    "Hey, cutie," I whispered gently and stroked her hip comfortingly with my palm resting there. "It's too early to shed tears. You may indeed fall for me with such sentimentality."
    "No way!" she countered through tears, rubbing her wet cheek against my breastbone. "It is impossible because I am in love long ago. I am head over heel in love, you silly. I am in Paradise with you, and so I'm weeping. I never thought that it exists at all, this seventh heaven. I never experienced such dying from happiness that I feel with you."
    "Don't hurry to die," I interjected an apt pleasantry in her impassioned muttering, moving my hand upward under her armpit and slipping it under her breast. "Perhaps you still have a pair of nights for your passing infatuation. For my part, I'll try to prove that I have a crush on you, too. Anyhow, I'll do it unless you disappear unexpectedly."
    "I shall be praying for procrastination," she sighed. "Say when I should leave you, or else I'll stay here till morning."
    "Don't worry," I assured her, fondling her breast and understanding that our intercourse must be prolonged. "Very soon I'll be able to curb my feelings."
    Truth to tell, her request was quite germane to the question of paramount importance in our situation, for we both risked sleeping after overindulging in voluptuousness and being found by somebody in the circumstances completely discrediting us; meanwhile, the consequences of our imprudence might be simply catastrophic, notably for Lucy.
    We made it a condition from the very beginning to conceal our true relations and not to give the slightest cause for suspicion; therefore, our direct obligation consisted in taking precautionary measures in order not to allow her visits to become common property, which would have happened unavoidably if she had been noticed coming in my room or going out of it in night time.
    Apart from danger of gossip, we had to remember the next day fully occupied with work, and we couldn't afford a wakeful night before such a day, even if every time we parted thrice at least, since an innocent kiss at parting was enough to return us to resuming our canoodling in spite of our tiredness.
    I heard, of course, about a phenomenon of mutual obsession arising between two individuals of the opposite sex as some reunion of two halves, but I was taking this improbable marvel of integrating for a metaphor, because from my point of view, the existence of such a primary androgynous subject halved by births of two human beings was against Nature's laws and pertain to the sphere of mystical mythology, deeply alien to my pragmatic atheistic mind.
    However, in the present case, I was faced with an accomplished fact: we were really joined by our love as a doubled integrated personality, and she always remained in me by the obsessive memory of my flesh and spirit, an integral part of which she had become henceforth. When I made my morning and evening rounds, I reasonably avoided looking at her in the ward of the colonel for fear of disclosing our two-faced wholeness even by a fleeting glance, and Lucy tried not to plague me with her presence in the daytime.
    With all that, I don't think that our liaison could have been clandestine during some sufficiently long period under the involuntary constant supervision of all the staff and patients in the hospital and the guests in the hotel, yet it was suddenly broken on the sixth day of our unlawful happiness, and I learned about its end only after the last operation from my cellular phone switched off for the hours of my work at the operating table.
    Her message on my display was concise and quite impersonal for safety's sake:
    "We're urgently departing to the capital. Best wishes, doc, and thanks for everything. Your debtors."
    I also decided to play safe and went immediately to the ward of the colonel to evince the greatest feigned surprise at its unexpected emptiness to the nurses. Then I visited my chief, and he confirmed the fact of the departure of my patient officially.
    Naturally, I did not exhibit regret for my loss in any way, except that I was forced to decline an offer of my playful mulatto missing me to meet in the evening under the pretext of fatigue.
    Not that I was so shattered by this sudden disappearance of my beloved, but I must have got used to her absence and put her back from the foreground of my consciousness as a recollection of our pleasurable pastime in the foreign country.
    The only snag was, as it turned out, that since then she never gave up her place on the proscenium to anybody, and it was unlikely she might exit the stage of my memory a month later or whenever, although I didn't hope to see her once more, or rather I feared our new meeting, which would have been a new burst of unpredictable emotions.
    Today such an encounter had actually occurred, and this fluke somehow alarmed me. Reclining in the deep wicker chair, my heels set on the ledge of the stone socle of one of the small columns supporting the lean-to encircling the open patio, I took a sip of the cold tea forgotten by me in reliving old memories, and, apparently because the drizzling rain cooled the night air, I again felt the same chilling touch of the scaly coil slipping round me.
    The former gigantic invisible boa flung its heavy slippery body on my independent freedom and went crawling around, gradually constricting circles. The imaginary monstrous python or anaconda still did not squeeze its defenseless prey, but I could easily imagine how the bones of my skeleton would be breaking like brittle twigs in the mighty coils of the snake wrapping itself around me and strangling me inexorably.
    No one in the world had reason or cause to impute such a fault as timorousness to me, and yet, the unpleasing chill of foreboding ran down my spine when I realized what gave rise to my disquiet.
    There was something brewing somewhere, and I smelled danger, but I had no notion how to ward off this impending danger threatening me more and more tangibly....
   
   
    PART THREE
   
    CHAPTER 7
   
    Next day I waited for Lucy in due place half an hour before her appearance from the cosmetic salon.
    I was still uncertain what I should do with my knowledge of her presence here, and I proposed to shadow her up to the house where she resided in this town-in the hope of clarifying my mind about her current status. I might thus receive prompting for resolving my doubts, as I was not going to embarrass her by an indelicate reminder of an episode of her distant past when she abandoned herself to her forbidden passions if she possibly preferred to consign her incidental dissoluteness to oblivion.
    Anyway, she was the first woman whose slap in the face would have really hurt me, and it was better to preserve our short happiness intact than to sully its purity and vulgarize its uniqueness with bawdiness of reality. To shy away from anything never was characteristic of me, but a threat of debunking my goddess made me dither, because to me, her rejection and unrequited love were tantamount to a personal insult.
    In short, I was sitting at a small round table under the awning of one of the local café, sipping my hot coffee and keeping the entrance of the aforementioned salon in my field of vision.
    The image of the yesterday's omnivorous serpent did not haunt me in broad daylight, yet that misgiving stuck in my mind, and I racked my brains over the reasons of the strange coincidences in my life. My chance meeting with an acquaintance of mine from the time of my military service was quite natural, but a succession of events connected consecutively with the Marines, as well as my next meeting with captain Bob and with the woman of the colonel, was absolutely inexplicable and very suspicious, for all these people were of one circle, and they again arose from nowhere within a week.
    The question was why after that incident with the participation of my two former fellow-soldiers, Lucy and I came to be in one and the same place in these days. It was either unbelievable good luck or someone's devilish scheme, and I intended to elicit some facts from my shadowing.
    So, when Lucy appeared at last at the promenade and went along the street, I followed her at considerable distance, keeping her in sight.
    Then she turned to the right and vanished in a narrow by-street, whereupon I quickened my pace, fearing lest I lose sight of her, and I reached the turn just in time to see her walking up the empty pedestrian street descending to the sea among the other still lanes with the limestone fences of their private mansions and the walls of some many-windowed two-three-storey houses.
    She was in the end of the short passage, and she ought to have turned there or continued to rise towards the blind alley of the next crossing. There wasn't a soul in the street, and I could attract her attention as a sole passerby; therefore, I stopped at the corner in the beginning of the street, following her with my eyes while she approached the crossing. I was ready to take a step back on turning her head and to hide round the corner as a real spy, but I by no means foresaw what would happen to her in the reigning stillness.
    Unexpectedly, some black-faced bloke stepped from the open gate on the right side, and immediately, the second one blocked her way. In the twinkling of an eye, they grasped Lucy by her arms and pushed her into the gateway before she uttered a sound.
    I sprang to her help earlier than any thought came to my head, nonetheless one idea crystallized in my mind with the utmost clarity in a few seconds of my run, and it consisted in three words "To kill them".
    This aim was engendered not by wrath and fury but by simple advisability, because the guys were obviously migrants, and they undoubtedly had knives if not firearm. Since they were capable of violating a woman right in the street, they wouldn't stop at murder, as I knew from my experience of working in the military hospitals, where I just treated such savage natives. Withal, I must have killed them quickly and noiselessly, otherwise I would have risked landing up in prison.
    As ever, I did not think of my forthcoming actions, relying exclusively upon my body always striking a blow unerringly and hitting the target without missing. In the given real fight, I had no restriction in holds and blows, which made me a true predator literally: like an attacking lion, I acted by instinct, feeling nothing but cold ferocity in my purposefulness.
    I saw the scene of the crime a fraction of a second before bursting into the small backyard with a one-storey blank wall opposite the gate.
    The third mugger standing on the left side and unzipping his jeans was apparently a chieftain, and his two pals already straddled Lucy struggling desperately under these rotters sitting on her breast and legs. The one, who pressed her stretched arms with his knees, was pushing a gag into her mouth, while the second rapist just drew a big knife to rip the dress and underwear of the spread-eagled "white bitch", and both of them were preparing to commit an outrage upon her with their backs towards me.
    I never was too tenderhearted, and from childhood, I accustomed myself to cruelty, yet here I reached the peak of my frenzy and rather surpassed any beast of prey.
    Having bounced into the yard, I sharply kicked the nearest man on the organ that he was baring so imprudently. As after this hard blow smashed his testicles, he wasn't man anymore, he gasped with pain, doubled with my kick and paralyzed with shock for some seconds.
    Meantime the guy holding the legs of the resisting victim swung his knife, trying to cut my stomach slantwise, however the turn of his trunk in the sitting position only opened his black face for my attack. Without any subtle holds, I flung his hand gripping the knife aside, and instantly my right knee hit him in the face. Blinded, he recoiled, but I jerked his head forward with my free hand, and his physiognomy again collided with my knee, after which his body went limp, since I slightly wrung his neck in the end.
    By this time, the last lover of assaulting rolled from the woman's body and jumped to his feet. Naturally, he would have taken to his heels, but for a savage wild beast standing in his way to the exit.
    I was eager to kill him on the spot, and as soon as he dashed, I struck him. My time was limited, and so I delivered a blow right on his breastbone with the rear of my palm. It was a jab, with which I could break a thick board, and its abruptness made the impact lethal. The force of the blow was highest, and the moment this swift ram displaced the heart with a jerk within the chest, the second adversary dropped dead.
    In a trice, I was in front of the writhing leader holding his groin with both his hands and attempting to shift toward the gate. Because my hand was open, I applied a similar jab, except that it was a sock on the nose from below, and it drove the bones of the nose in his brain, putting an end to his suffering.
    After that, I turned at once to Lucy still lying under the body of the knife-fighter fallen on her desirable hips.
    "How are you?" I asked, bending to pull off the corpse from her legs. "No injuries?"
    "Is it you, doc?" she panted out in amazement. "Where did you spring from?"
    "It's a long story," I said, giving her my hand. "Stand up, and let's go away from here."
    "Did you kill them?" she cast a glance at the battlefield.
    "That's just it. Better to slope off than to get into trouble," I explained, leading her out of the yard. "Where do you live? I don't know the town."
    "Don't worry," she said, taking my arm, in the street. "You've again saved me."
    "What to do if I must carry the can for your bodyguards."
    "I have no bodyguards here. I thought I was safe from such assaults."
    "In all probability, you seldom stroll in solitude. True, you indeed were under the best protection if you hadn't parted from the colonel."
    "I am not going to part with him for the time being," she notified me of her marital status, steering a course through the tangle of lanes, "but here I live alone. Without men, I mean."
    "And how did he permit you to be on holiday abroad without any escort? What, he was so bogged down in his service that he couldn't share time for his girl?"
    "No, he had left his service recently. At present, he is abroad, too, and at times, he finds me by mobile phone. But he is in hiding for some reason."
    "That's why you've changed surname," I understood. "Nothing serious, I hope?"
    "It's hard to say. Anyway, I follow his directions as usual, and I didn't see him till now."
    "Consequently, you should avoid meeting with cops," I concluded.
    It required no deduction to infer that her and my incidents were the links of one chain. The only problem was that such an inference had no ground corroborating it in reality, because all the clue events of this chain were undeniably accidental.
    The armed gangsters killed by me in the first incident were quite genuine, and it was a matter of luck whether I would get the better of them or not, hence any sham was absolutely excluded.
    The town, where I had met Lucy, was chosen by me at random, and I had noticed her by lucky chance, to say nothing of those shitbags that had pounced on her with the unambiguous object of violation without knowing about my presence nearby.
    I declined to believe in accidentalness occurring repeatedly three times in rapid sequence, but the fact remained, and it boded no good. Some inexorable course of events was carrying me from bad to worse, and in vain, I endeavored to grasp the logic of its interconnections. Nonetheless, in the last episode, fate threw us together, and henceforth, I could not shirk responsibility for her until it was necessary.
    I still had no notion of her present attitude to me, yet beside her, I felt the same insuperable passion as one and a half years ago, even if it was inopportune and rather indecent. I love her, and I desired her-such was the state of my emotional sphere after my swooping upon her offenders in the role of her savior.
    "Well, as to me, I reside in Europe for a long time," she said after a pause. "I wonder what wind blows you here."
    "In my town, I inadvertently incurred someone's animosity," I confessed vaguely. "Now I'm forced to wait till that is over."
    "Who is this "someone"?"
    "He's some big boss in the local criminal circles. My self-defense was too effective, and he'd harbored grudge against me for his losses."
    "Your so-called defense is definitely effective," she remarked, keeping pace with me. "And as I see, you're not in the least excited by it."
    "Why I must be excited? There was no other way to prevent this gangbang. They might draw a pistol every second or be mercenaries. I had one chance in essence, and at stake was your life."
    "I don't reproach you. However, it seems to me that you felt no emotions there. Am I right?"
    "It would be strange if I felt anything in earnest. When acting I have no time for feeling. Both fight and operation doesn't imply emotions, because I must be concentrated on the very action. And after I've done what I have to do, what's the sense in being agitated about it?"
    "You are the same ironman as he," she sighed. "Nothing touches you both on the way to reaching your target."
    "It's useless to try to stop the rushing train," I grinned. "I somehow doubt, though, that you could see your patron in action."
    "That's true, yet I interpreted for him sometimes when he questioned captives," she divulged a bit of secret information.
    "Then enough said," I hemmed. "His service requires ruthlessness, as you know."
    "Yes, I know," confirmed she dryly. "I'm simply somewhat dismayed by your cruelty."
    "Say-by my professional skill. Since we have met, you can always count on me in case of necessity."
    "I'll take it into consideration," she nodded. "Only I'm afraid your skill will cost somebody too dear."
    "I never apply it excessively," I reassured her. "But it happens in separate instances that my sense of proportion enjoins to be resolute."
    "Thus, I had the luck to take part in one of these instances."
    "Just so. Thanks to this resolution, by the by, you are able to blame me for inhumanity."
    "I don't blame you," she refuted my reproach. "Yet I'm unaccustomed to your invincibility of such a kind."
    "You mean you're scared?"
    "You've found an apt word. My milk may dry up from such a shock. Meanwhile, I am a nursing mother, after all."
    "Really? Receive my congratulations," I reacted mechanically to the surprise that instantly reduced my lustful fervor to sympathetic solicitude.
    "That's slightly belated to receive them-I already began to wean him from breast."
    "So, it is boy?"
    "Yes, my sonny. His name is Victor if this is interesting you."
    "He's my namesake, withal? He was called in my honor, wasn't he?"
    "Naturally. Without you he wouldn't exist at all."
    "Thanks, I am flattered. Soon you'll probably acquaint me with him?"
    "Certainly. We should consider the matter in all its bearings. I don't like strange coincidences, to tell the truth."
    "I don't either. Then let's talk later, Lucy," I called her by name for the first time from the beginning of our conversation. "Notably all of it is suspicious when both of us left our country not quite of our own free will."
    *
    The house rented by Lucy was a small villa enclosed with a rectangle of stone fence almost two meters in height. Although the two-storey whitewashed mansion did not create an impression of sumptuousness, its front entrance had French windows on both sides, and two colonnades of concrete columns converged to the central marble steps of its porch. Besides, there was a green lawn with a wood pergola before the frontage of this typical provincial cottage pretending to be a manor.
    "Wow!" I exclaimed, coming through a wicket-gate in the courtyard. "Judging by the rent for this palace, your colonel is a prosperous man. Have you any domestics here for your living in the lap of luxury?"
    "I have the whole staff as an appendage to the house," she parried my irony. "To wit: charlady and home help in addition to my dry-nurse. And I also pay the cleaner and the guy that trims the lawn and hedge."
    "In that case, your chief is a clandestine tycoon," I joked. "Apparently he decided to reserve a cushy nook here for himself for the future. But, of course, it is a family secret."
    "Come in, please," she said stopping before the entrance door of the porch. "Your namesake ought to have put to sleep, so we have a pair of hours in stock."
    While Lucy inspected the nursery and took a shower in the upstairs rooms, I was sitting with a glass of orange juice on the white leather divan in the salon furnished in a featureless seaside style of comfortable solidity characteristic of the middle classes: two soft armchairs matching the divan, a big square glass coffee table placed on the cream carpet with the soft pile in front of a big flat TV-screen, ceramic flower vases on the light-grey tiled floor and so on. For a more or less rich man it was quite standard an interior combining coziness with respectability, however with my plebeian past, I felt alienation in such furnishings resembling some hotel hall.
    I intended to see some local newscast, yet it was only Lucy who had a good command of its language apart from English. True I thought that the bodies in the empty yard might remain unnoticed a long time, for those sods made no noise but Lucy's strangled wheezes, whereas I did not permit them to open their mouths, and thus not a sound was heard there, save the sounds of my kick, kneeing, jab, and slog. After that short massacre, we met no passerby in the street and hoped nobody was a chance bystander then.
    Lucy was down freshened up and changed her dress; but with her scowling face, she did not look like a hospitable hostess, and in the armchair, she settled down with a glass of whisky in her hand.
    "What is it-a remedy for a post-stress tremor?" I inquired gallantly.
    "Do you think alcohol won't help?" she glowered at me with her feverishly flashing eyes.
    "I think you should forget this incident," I advised her. "If no one saw us there, let's regard it as an insignificant misunderstanding. Agree that they got their deserts. And it was some special Providence that I just followed you. Imagine what they might do without my first aid."
    "I shudder to think of it," she took a sip of whisky. "By the way, how came it that you followed me?"
    "I wanted to make sure that it is really you," I answered not quite frankly. "I noticed you from afar and waited for an opportune moment to renew acquaintance."
    "And those freaks had afforded you such a moment," she muttered, not taking aside her gaze from my face. "You said you're ready to commit yourself to guarding me?"
    "I can repeat it."
    "Why?"
    "Such explanations are not destined for satisfying idle curiosity," I evaded the question. "Let's assume that I love risk and unpredictability."
    "Maybe you love not only that?"
    "I would say-without "maybe", but I still have a question without answer."
    "As you know, I'm able to give an answer in five languages. Yet you mean the most convincing one, methinks."
    "You've guessed right. I am a surgeon, not a linguist."
    "In my judgment, you're rather a warrior than a physician," she opined with a note of deference in her voice. "It's strange to see how your dauntlessness fails you now."
    "Now I'm risking too much," I said, "because I have nothing to influence the issue. Meanwhile, the decision may be determinant in my life."
    "I never supposed my favor was so important for you," she belittled her significance somewhat victoriously, putting her glass on the coffee table. "I thought you counted it a short adventure."
    "It was too short indeed, but you misinterpreted my attitude to it. Then, perhaps, I was unsure of my definition, yet afterwards I had much time to analyze my feelings."
    "That puts me in a predicament," she estimated the destructiveness of my confession.
    "No. My feelings don't bind you to anything, as well as my help. I simply cannot but profit by the occasion if we meet by chance for the second time."
    "It is because you don't hope for our third meeting?"
    "It would be incredible. In essence, I've told you quite enough. As they say in Latin, "sapienty sat".
    "That is, you aren't against the role of a noble knight?"
    "If you need me in this role, I'll have played it," I promised her. "But then I mistook in the character of our relations."
    "I wouldn't call that craziness "relations".
    "I'm speaking of the aftermath."
    "What do you mean?" she asked suspiciously, staring at me. "It is unlikely that you are living in the past till now."
    "You are not the past," I said bluntly. "Not that I ever dreamt of meeting with you, yet nothing has changed for me since then. I can't explain why it is so, but I'm unable to do any harm to you, as well as allowing anybody to do it."
    "Your word is as good as your bond, beyond any doubt," she remarked, musing on something with her eyes riveted on me. "I hardly deserve such devotion."
    "I decline to judge you. Anyhow, you're the only woman with whom I feel such an affinity. Tell me not to meddle in your affairs, and I shan't burden you with my presence any longer."
    "As you can easily guess, I shan't do it, especially when you've become the chief guarantee of my security."
    "Okay, I agree to be even your hireling. In any event, I am not bad as a bodyguard."
    "I once told you who you are in my opinion," she reminded me, and her reminder instantaneously revived that atmosphere of our mutual obsession, in which she whispered her words of admiration in a fit of passion.
    We both seemed to elide our life during the elapsed time-and suddenly found ourselves within that dimension of the absolute bareness of our bodies and hearts. The impression was so strong that we were speechless with unexpectedness for some seconds.
    "You overestimate me," I dropped at last.
    "It is no more fallacy than your idolizing me," she said, not averting her abysmally darkened eyes from my face as before.
    "I can't define what you are for me," I answered to her gaze opening some resplendent heavenly infinity of happiness before my thirsty soul. "When I try to see you in my mind's eye, you seem incorporeal to me."
    "But I am not incorporeal," she said under her breath.
    "Yes, you aren't. And just it is a marvel. It is incomprehensible that someone's flesh may be so magic, for I am dealing with human flesh every day, after all. It is inexplicable for my surgeon's reason-why did your body turn out to be my insatiable felicity. Why on earth are you my real goddess, given that I am an atheist?"
    "I am your goddess only because you are a demigod yourself," pronounced she, as though drawing back the last curtain and opening her face radiant with unconcealed adoration. "Sometimes I'm ready to believe in your ability to fly."
    "You deem me so omnipotent?"
    "Till now, you gave me no cause for doubt or for overpersuading me. You always do what you want to do."
    "More often, I do what I must do," I corrected her. "I am in effect a slave of necessity in the most part of my actions."
    "Love is an exception?"
    "On the contrary, just love enslaves entirely, inclusive of bodily dependence. Do you understand me?"
    "I do. It is when you feel belonging to your true half, whoever possesses you in reality. I would define it as distorting self-identification. You are yourself not alone but in a pair, and this cardinally changes the very conception of individual freedom. Such dependence amounts to liberation, provided that halves complement one another mutually."
    "We are lucky in complementing, aren't we?" I poured oil on the flames, resisting the strongest temptation to recommence our reciprocal interdependence immediately.
    "Overly," she confirmed, obviously feeling the same. "Where do you live here?"
    "Not far away," I answered, beside myself with joy. "I'm renting a private shanty with patio and without neighbors. But you wanted to show me your baby."
    "I've changed my mind yet," she informed me not without humor. "You can see him tomorrow-he is in no hurry unlike me. In the evening, I'll send away all the servants, and we'll spend an hour in family circle before his going to sleep."
    "Okay, let's exchange visits," I approved her plan. "Then call taxi, please, and we should control the local news."
    "We can watch TV until the taxi arrives," said Lucy, taking her remote from the coffee table.
   
    CHAPTER 8
   
    Considering my usual orderliness and cleanliness, I could always bring a guest in my two tidy poky rooms without being ashamed of any disorder in this bachelor's lair, and the first thing I did after taking up my new abode was a thorough cleaning of the house with a good scour of a relatively white small bath.
    In my roving life, I was habituated to building a temporary nest in every place and in every condition, irrespective of availability of modern conveniences, and here I even had such luxury as a big metal bed with a thick spring mattress covered with the new bedding bought by me in the town.
    Only the fanlight above the front door looked onto the street, lighting the passage dividing the rooms and my tiny kitchenette, while both the other windows opened onto the courtyard under the lean-to shading the house, and both had jalousie against the summer sun.
    Although the clouds hiding the sun let this eye of day peep out very rarely, and so the sunshine could hardly disturb us, I still passed through the narrow space between the wall and the steel side and drew down the Venetian blinds at the head of the bed so that the daylight would penetrate into the semidarkness of my bedchamber through its slits.
    Meantime Lucy already took off her cloak and hung it unassisted on one of clothes hooks in the short corridor with the front and back doors at the opposite ends.
    "Is it for clothes?" she asked appearing in the doorway.
    She meant the chair standing at the foot of the bed, as it was the only piece of furniture in addition to the unambiguous bed of love occupying almost all the room.
    "Yes," I answered. "May I help you?"
    "No, please," said she, looking at the chair. "Leave me alone for some minutes."
    "Of course," I understood her. "Say if you need something."
    She was truly tactful in her wish to omit all technical details of preparing for our genuine meeting, and thus she gave me some time for my own preparation.
    Briefly speaking, when Lucy called me, I came in the alcove's duskiness in my birthday suit.
    She was lying half-covered with the soft silky coverlet, and the thin stripes of the dim light across the bed made the flesh-colored silk indistinguishable from her bared flesh, which created the strange illusory atmosphere of a mirage in the room seeming some live sphere full of the shimmering sensuality.
    I never was befuddled with any opiate or intoxicated with any alcohol to excess, and the sensation of inner weightlessness was new to me, but being besotted with her, I felt at present as if I could levitate indeed, floating in the warm glimmer of anticipation that her shining eyes radiated. Enchanted by her fascinating gaze attracting me, I set my knee on the side of the bed and threw away the coverlet from her nudity.
    "At last," I thought, embracing her captivating beauty at once with my eye.
    "At last," she whispered, flinging her arms around my neck and clasping me to her bosom.
    And the moment our bodies touched each other, the reality again melted away, and we remained alone in the blissfully luminous infinite space of our joint carnal desire. And again, our passion, exhausting us, was not a jot diminishing our mutual attraction and our thirst of possession. And we plunged again into our endless happiness wholly, and our passionate flesh was our heavens and Paradise, as though our earthly love was really everlasting and eternal.
    Because I was a surgeon by profession, not a psychiatrist, I was lacking due experience of observing various psychological quirks and paradoxes to explain the incomprehensible fusion of such contrasting feelings as carnivorously rapacious lust and reverential worship of the beloved body, but we were both obsessed just by this wonderful unity of emotions, and the exulting divine harmony of our inseparable souls wasn't distracted by any discrepancy even for an instant.
    I would not have exaggerated if I had been describing our lovemaking as a triumph of spirit over matter, for we seemed to hover in our embrace over our mortal life, where nothing but our desired nakedness was tangible in the fondling and penetrations of our interminable voluptuous joining. She was not merely the sole woman on the earth for me in this flight of fancy-she was the very embodiment of the eternal feminine, just as I was masculinity personified and the sole man for her in this sublunary world.
    That is why no kisses could dispel my inexpressible subconscious sensation of being enveloped in some motherly protection, as if I were not a hunky guy heated with sex, but a fetus snuggled down in the amniotic sac of his mother's womb, at the approach to which, my reciprocating matured Willy was working tirelessly in striving for happiness.
    And from inside of her heated body swinging in the rhythm of my striving, I sensed that she was also feeling something alike in her girlishly infantile imagination, where I was some translucent protective shell of all the conceivable fatherhood and manhood, in the life-giving warmth of which she was enveloped as a defenseless happy embryo.
    After the birth of her son, she was shapely as before, and breastfeeding only a bit rounded her bust, so in my arms, all her lissome anatomy was acquiring the plasticity of some heaving yielding sexuality inflaming me again and again just by its accordance with the slightest nuances of my passion. Giving herself to me, she was getting my changeable ardent reflection, whose audacious erotic fantasies were being reflected in my instinctive coincidences with her desires.
    Become one flesh, we no longer perceived ourselves within our bodies, finding the perception of our own flesh gropingly in the responding of another half of our whole, and with all my spiritual independence therefore, I couldn't but equate the unity of our copulation with self-knowledge.
    "How can it be so?" I thought, lying beside her and leaning on my elbow, my cheek resting on my palm.
    "How can it be so?" she whispered, half-opening her eyes under my look.
    "Marvels will happen," I answered, peering into the dark depths of her blue mirrors still hazy after the last climax.
    "What is the past then?" she asked-rather herself. "Nothing is passing."
    "You've spoken words of wisdom," I joked mildly. "Did you expect me to repel you this time?"
    "I expected me to be not so enamored," she smiled a little with the corner of her mouth. "But I've sustained a defeat."
    "And you're surrendering at discretion?"
    "What else can I do? Now my only hope is placed on the mercy of my victor."
    "It is play on words. If victor is yours, it is you who should be merciful."
    "And I was, wasn't I?" she stroked my face tenderly.
    "Were I a rhymester, you would know what I am powerless to express in prose," I kissed her sweetly smelling palm.
    "You have expressed it yet-without verbalizing."
    "Did you guess what it is?"
    "Yes, your body is uncommonly eloquent. I am afraid, true, mine is no less garrulous."
    "There is no doubt about it," I witnessed candidly. "You have said your say, too. But I am not averse to receive the comprehensive commentary on your irrefragable confession."
    "You will have to restrain your curiosity until tomorrow," she gave an inaudible chuckle. "Now my speech would be too inarticulate after our previous talk."
    "It's for the better," I subscribed perforce to her sober view on our exhausted state at present. "Whatever I plead, it doesn't befit such a brutal macho to lisp like a puny bibliophile."
    "I'd never employ the word "brutal" towards you," she said so lovingly that I felt awkward for my incapacity for continuation of our dialogue.
    "You aren't unbiased to my virility," I smoothed the sudden awkwardness.
    "Yes, I am not unbiased," she enhanced my embarrassment. "I am awfully not unbiased, you're right. If it were not for my kid-"
    "For him I shall be killed twice," I tried to evince certain sensibleness, though she would have taken me in hand by one transparent hint-so deeply was I moved by the sincerity of her love instantly flooded my soul.
    However, no hint ensued.
    "You are the last man whose life I am able to endanger," she muttered, lowering her magic eyes and rubbing her cheek languorously against my breast.
    "I am last but one," I corrected her.
    "You're both," she breathed, and her lips tickled my skin with a parting kiss.
    "By the by," she said rising, "it's time to depart to Victor the second. I will kiss him before going to bed."
    "With Victor the first you're acting contrariwise," I said, admiring her adorable svelte body while she was sitting up in bed. "Maybe you want to take a shower?"
    "I'll take a bath secondly at home," she refused my offer with a sigh of regret and got up. "Or else we'll begin all of it anew."
    *
    While waiting for the called taxi, Lucy checked in her cell phone what information about criminal incidents appeared in the local news.
    Those three swarthy louts were found by now, yet the police inclined to think that they most likely had a scrap with some other migrants mooching around the town, and that someone simply settled accounts with them, as this vermin was wont to do when quarreling over money. Since no firearm was used in that case, their deaths looked like a result of clashing with some professional militants, for there were enough such "dogs of war" among the illegal refugees. In a word, it was the sort of crime that often committed in the underworld, and no one witnessed this felony.
    Having left Lucy in her villa, I decided to have a stroll before returning home and went in the drizzling twilight of the wet evening towards the sea, thinking about today's events.
    It was understandable that the second twist in some unknown plot undoubtedly constituted one of the stages of someone's scenario, because the circumstances had forced me to kill again in the similar situation leaving me no other choice. Although I did not pay the penalty for committing three murders at once, and no consequences threatened me for my calling to order with resort to force, I couldn't escape the feeling that both the collisions were designedly organized for involving me in the implementation of some cunning detailed scheme. I was not sure that our encounter here was a matter of luck, since it appeared that now I got doubly tied with my past, which augured certain subsequent unexpected challenges to my excellences and my unpremeditated responses adequate to them.
    I was unable to puzzle out this evil design or catch a clue for unraveling the cryptic concatenation of circumstances remaining an unsolved riddle that I couldn't rede, but I surmised what might link the seemingly separate events occurring in my life in ominously purposeful sequence, for all the active participants of my story were officers.
    Hearing how my feet were crunching the wet slippery pebbles in the muffled heavy booming of the heaving waves of the dark choppy sea, I crossed the deserted coastal strip at some distance away from the municipal beaches slightly lit along its endless parapet with the diffuse light of the streetlamps of the promenade and approached the edge of the whitish foamy surf seething in the forefront of the surging billows and rolling breakers.
    In spite of the boisterousness of the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea in the rainy darkness, the wind wasn't as ragingly rampageous as it was usually in the bluster of the winter storms of the Black Sea, and I wouldn't have said that I was chilled to the marrow with my hardiness in such moderate windy weather.
    To the wash of waves on the bleak shore of the ancient sea, I was standing there, breathing the fresh damp air and piercing the cloudy murky boundlessness with my gaze, and it occurred to me that if I had sailed from here in the diagonal direction, I would have landed in the region where the archeological excavations corroborated the hypothesis of the conjectural location of Troja; meanwhile, just with this mythological town, my haunting nightmare was connected.
    "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts," said the priest of Poseidon, Laokoon, to the Trojans about a big wooden horse left by the allegedly departed besiegers, thereby attempting to thwart the schemes of Athena, and the goddess did not allow him to foil her plans. While Laokoon with his two sons made a sacrifice to his sea god, some gigantic serpents appeared out of the seawater and killed them. It was interpreted by the Trojans as a proof that the horse was a sacred object; the trick thus succeeded, and Troja fell.
    My life was in a sense in the power of Poseidon, too, and perhaps the sinister serpent of my premonition had been sent to me as prescience, suggesting a reference to my incidental intrusion into some plans that I somehow imperiled.
    I had no notion whom I could hinder and how this ill-wisher contrived to arrange those two critical situations requiring my active actions, but the compulsoriness of my implication in homicide was associated for me with swathing my free will like a mummy, and every my step was in effect the next lap of winding by which I was strapped still tighter, just as in the coils of the imaginary serpent, whose irrepressible voraciousness had been unleashed by some of the Olympic host.
    I didn't remember what had become of Laokoon in the legend, yet as I saw it, he was dragged down by the monstrous snakes into the deep from where he ululated in the howl of the wind, lamenting his indiscreet initiative for the edification of those who dare meddle in tiffs of the powers above. However, with all my gumption and perspicacity I had too low a rank to ascertain when I might cross the path of some army demigod.
    If I became a tool in someone's hands in a multistage secret operation, what an object did it pursue?
    Neither Lucy nor I was its target, beyond any doubt; hence, one could guess that some influential functionary had opened the season of hunt for the colonel who was a connecting link between us. Till my meeting with Lucy, I did not think of him at all, but after her information of his disappearance from Russia, it was easy to draw the inference that we were deliberately brought together with the aim of hounding down him.
    Anyway, I had met her again, and for such a rendezvous as ours, I was ready to jeopardize my life, even if I had known for sure that just it was at stake. Not that I was a daredevil swashbuckler bragging of foolhardiness and defying danger, but in the arising skirmishes, nothing threatened me personally, and although I rather felt trapped after the second intervention in the fight, I still had no concrete enemy to fear for my life in earnest. Withal the present resumption of our love was, after all, a gift of fortune, and this gift was worth struggling for possession of it, whatever was destined for me.
    In adolescence, it happened once or twice that I was seized by a feeling of superhuman omnipotence when I could have stood up against the whole horde, and those fits of megalomania frightened me every time, to tell the truth, inasmuch as in such a state, I was fighting in reality with extreme cruelty and becoming invulnerable owing to my innate rapidity and power.
    In this evening, I was overwhelmed by the same feeling once more, and I imagined myself being strong enough to break the grip of any strangler and crush any all-powerful foe, whoever he was. I hardly had much time ahead for my selfless love, but I was going to defend it to the utmost, and I was capable of affording my woman due protection.
    For all that, with the cold look of a detached observer, I viewed the louring space of gloomy cloudiness spitting into the growling rote of the innumerable breakers rolling onto the shore, spreading flatly over the pebbles as some wide frothy tongues hissing inimically, and receding in the endless rotation of rising and falling, while new and new countless rollers were sliding on the undulating sea surface over the abysses of this formidable immensity, whose bottomless disastrousness no human kind could fathom, not to mention one presumptuous mortal turned against this sea of troubles in his valorous blindness.
    "In any case, I have a date tomorrow," I flung indomitably into the gloom and rain covering the Med, as it was called among the marines. "Ultimately, that's quite enough."
   
    CHAPTER 9
   
    When I arrived at the villa, Lucy opened the front door by herself.
    Meantime a curly-headed blonde cherub, settled on her right hip and clung to her like a marmoset, was eyeing me with curiosity and without smile.
    The likeable blue-eyed fruit of her womb was outwardly robust and healthy, and he was too grave a chappie to ingratiate himself with the grown-ups by means of indiscriminate credulity; on the contrary, he sized everyone up as potential danger or good for him.
    In principle, I was usually indifferent to child's charm, because children would fall into my clutches as some cases for surgical interventions, and so my attitude to them was entirely defined by their immunity to postoperative infections and by their viability in the sense of convalescing. Surgery required my diagnostic correctness and irreproachable techniques, but not emotions irrelevant to the matter, and in essence, it was my first contact with a normal baby without any illness or injury.
    "Here's your namesake, kiddy," said Lucy to her rubicund chubby sonny. "On him, you can rely."
    "Trust me, buddy," I corroborated her characterization. "Tell me who have offended you, and that shall be my care."
    "He can't speak yet," the happy mummy grinned.
    "Well, Vic, simply point at them," I instructed the attentive little man. "Do you see my paw? It's on your side."
    He assessed my estimable fist at its true worth and pressed still more closely to his mother.
    "Don't fear, chap," I emboldened him. "I'm goody-your ma won't let me lie to you."
    "He seldom fears anything," Lucy slightly passed her palm over his curls. "But he isn't reckless, and at first he estimates the situation."
    "That's sagacious," I approved the behavior of her nursling. "It's good that he doesn't understand what rival in love he has in my person. Hey, suckling, don't be greedy-I want her, too!"
    "Don't muddle him with your male chauvinism," Lucy disapproved of my indecorum, yet she was too flattered to express some other feeling but undisguised pleasure, if not joy.
    Here this rogue, being infected with her exhilaration, puckered his angelic face into an impish grimace and smiled at me.
    "Look, he's mocking me!" I ejaculated. "He's sure that I'll be defeated in his field!"
    "It is quite natural," Lucy sympathized with me, holding her son by one hand under his armpits. "He has the advantage that I cannot refuse his request concerning my body."
    With these words, she went to the salon, carrying her egoistic proprietor on her hip.
    "Do you mean my request may be refused?" I asked indignantly, following her.
    "Not now," she dropped, seating her precious on the thick carpet between the divan and the coffee table. "He is a big feeder, and after my milk he sleeps like a top till morning. That redeems even his biting my breast sometimes."
    "I promise to lick all your wounds," I said sitting down into the armchair near Victor Minor.
    "Only hope for this sustains me," she said, electrifying the atmosphere of sinfulness reigning in the empty house still more.
    "How early he has breakfast?" I inquired, trying to suppress an answering smile at the sight of the charming moppet basking in the aura of our love, which he sensed in his mother's attitude to the good giant towering above him.
    "Don't worry, he loves to sleep in," Lucy assured me with very immodest subtext. "And tomorrow we shall be only three alone all day."
    "It will be my first experience of babysitting," I summed up.
    "I'd like to show this lovely creature in all his glory," she put her cards on the table. "Besides, you might have examined him as a doctor and given recommendation for his physical development as a pro in sport."
    "What, have you noticed some deviations from normality?"
    "No, it is rather merits, but their degree somewhat disquiets me."
    "Give me a concrete example, please."
    "For example, he is very strong. And he very rarely weeps or whimpers."
    "That is, you aren't a cry-baby?" I turned to the tough guy playing on the carpet.
    "He shouts with indignation instead of crying," the anxious mammy confided a family secret to me. "And he is too intrepid for such a tot. True he is bold in conformity with his capabilities, and he always repeats what he has learnt to do till it becomes habitual."
    "Then he is a born sportsman," I made a diagnosis, laughing. "What about aggressiveness?"
    "He seldom contacts with other children, yet he is usually amicable enough."
    "That's reparable. Life will teach him to be cruel."
    "God forbid!" Lucy flung up her arms in comic horror. "It would be a terrible slaughter!"
    "You're overestimating his mightiness. Let me look at him, and I'll check whether he has excessive muscle tension or not."
    "He's yours." Lucy raised her sonny and set him on his feet, holding him as a toddler by his arms stretched aside. "He cannot walk yet, but he is able to stand like a pile."
    "I like your simile," I hemmed and gave him my thumbs. "Grasp it, pal!"
    He gladly gripped these hard handles, smiling at me as before.
    "He's awaiting when you're going to lift him," prompted Lucy.
    "How long can he be hanging?"
    "He's dangling until his mother has the strength to swing him."
    "Okay, buddy," I said to this joyful acrobat. "This time you deal with a real stayer, not with the feeble weaker sex."
    Judging by the willingness with which he seized my thumbs, the kid was amenable to reason in the question of romping, and he had a grip like a vice.
    Although he couldn't pull up in his age, he, nevertheless, bent his legs at the knees and hung thus, with contented look, slightly swinging and babbling something.
    I raised my hands a little, but he remained imperturbable even suspended in the air on the level with my face.
    "I see he doesn't fear height," I observed. "What is it, peculiarity of babyhood or strain of bravery running in the family?"
    "The latter," answered Lucy watching my test. "After he masters every next action, he did it unerringly and with striking accuracy every time, therefore he apparently felt self-confidence while repeating familiar actions."
    "I got you," I interrupted her. "It is confidence of knack. Then, kiddy, let's try to whirl."
    During a quarter of an hour, I amused the cheerful romp with turning, flexing, rolling, and hanging his feet up, and he obviously delighted in this gymnastics. It would have been vain enterprise to seek bodily flaws in such a sound fellow, because his resilient body was strong and pliable at the same time, and his muscular distinction did not make his limbs less supple.
    "I must say that your sonny is lucky enough," I told Lucy in conclusion. "He is graced with the merits of both his parents."
    "To my mind, he was born as a rare combination of his mother's litheness with his father's sturdiness," I continued, demonstrating the very exemplar of the successfully compounded genetic qualities sitting on my palm. "I don't know what other hereditary traits he had inherited apart from the best ones, but to all outward appearances, he is quite healthy and normal. By the by, you could have consulted in the local children's clinic."
    "He is registered there," she informed me not without sarcasm. "He has to have many various inoculations in his first year, so he should be under medical control."
    "And what are they saying?"
    "They are admiring him, and I don't like this. As to his fortune, I'm very superstitious."
    "In that case, I agree with you: to praise child is permissible only to his face-in avoidance of putting an evil eye on him."
    "Especially as he is growing up principally among women and without man's upbringing," complained Lucy.
    "I haven't noticed any effeminacy in him somehow," I pleaded on his behalf.
    "Nonetheless, he feels man's influence once in a while, for since the summer, he lives with me abroad."
    "This notwithstanding, he hasn't turned "sissy", right?" I hoisted this suckling listening attentively to our consideration of his personality on my hand.
    "He trusts you, in my opinion," she marked satisfactorily. "Birds of a feather flock together, so to speak."
    "Hey, chum, do you trust me indeed?" I asked the unfledged nestling that had no feather yet. "What would you say, then, to a little stunt?"
    After that, I laid him with both my hands on my left shoulder and put my right palm under his feet as a prop.
    "You must stand like a nail, Vic. Okay, eh?"
    Holding him under his armpit with my left hand for safety, I slightly moved my loaded hand up and down, trying how much inflexible his legs and trunk were.
    "Keep your knees straight and don't wobble," I commanded him and took my supporting hand aside.
    The chap was standing without stirring, really like a pile. As he felt my support keeping his balance, he fully relied on my sense of equilibrium and was absolutely immovable, not rocking and not changing the position of his arms stretched down, though his spread fingers betrayed his tension.
    Anyway, he was undergoing such an experiment for the first time, yet from some inexplicable sudden propinquity, he believed the unfamiliar uncle in such a degree that feeling of safeness wasn't leaving him on my palm elevating him.
    However, I did not venture to lift him too high. He could believe in me as in God, but I couldn't risk, depending on his self-possession, otherwise misfortune might happen by the mere accident.
    "He can obey orders, though," I said to Lucy. "He indeed stands like a nail."
    "It is a sight not for my nerves when he is standing so," she heaved a sigh of relief.
    "That's all, buddy," I lowered her child on the carpet. "Soothe your mammy for me."
    "Your attraction was really hair-raising," she acknowledged her cowardice, taking this mother's darling in her arms and giving him a smack on his forehead for the trial of his fearlessness endured by him. "He might fall any second."
    "I would have caught him in any case. As his steadiness is rather uncertain for the time being, I desisted from the idea of raising him on my straightened arm."
    "My heart was in my boots, as it is," she muttered, fondling her pet climbing on to her lap.
    "Just for that reason, such a promising specimen needs man's tending, or who will make a man of him?"
    "Turning into a man is the most terrible thing for mother." Lucy caressingly mussed up the ringlets of her fair-haired cupid. "He is so pretty in babyhood."
    "Don't forestall the future changeability," I cautioned her. "Let him grow up at first."
    "If only I could visualize his future," she sighed sadly.
    "Say-future as such," I corrected her implicit exclamation. "Medicine teaches us relativity of foreseeing. As a matter of fact, life is one ongoing instant, and this point of current events is fraught with unexpectedness."
    "That is why people believe in God," she concluded, embracing her little boy standing on her knees. "No, no, kiddy, your mammy cannot repeat this trick. Tomorrow you shall be playing together all day, and I hope for prudence of your adult partner."
    "I follow the principle-when in doubt, don't!" I guaranteed. "Surgeon hasn't a right to mistaken."
    "Okay, lads," she cast a glance at the wall clock. "Time is up. It is very risky to linger longer than fifteen minutes, or else my gormandizer will rebel. Meanwhile, we must bath him before feeding."
    "Can I help?" I offered my services.
    "Oh, yes!" Lucy accepted my offer willingly. "I'll be grateful to you if you bring this heavy piglet to the bathroom and assist in his ablution."
    "Come here, Vic," I called the merry piglet accustomed to his strict daily routine. "Isn't it calumny to impute excessive heaviness to such an airy porker?"
    "Never mind, sonny," Lucy was enlightening her well-proportioned offspring while I transported him on my bent arm to the chief lavatory. "Soon this scoffer will see you in the nude and envy your build."
    "I envy him beforehand," I played up to her when she began to undress our bather. "He can already permit himself to appear before you in a state of nature, whereas I must wait for my turn so long."
    "I haven't enough moral firmness to wash both of you at once," giggled Lucy, taking off the soggy diaper. "Hold him under the faucet and may wash his tushy."
    "I regard this bottom as a temporary palliative," I elucidated my indulgence to the naked contented favorite prattling with delight under the spurt of warm water.
    "Let's wrap him," Lucy ordered, preparing a big particolored towel. "And carry him to his bedroom."
    "Aye, aye, ma'am, may I go?" I answered, handing her the slippery body of her lively hedonist. "Maybe it is too cold for him in the house?"
    "He loves the coolness. I even leave his window half-open until he falls asleep."
    "I see he is duly hardened by his ma."
    "What to do if his pa is absent."
    "Excuse my indelicacy, but tell me-your marriage is registered?"
    "No. He didn't want to tie me to his service," explained Lucy, ascending the stairs to the bedrooms. "As it turned out, he was absolutely right."
    "I wonder what happened to him in Russia."
    "Nothing good happened, judging by his directions. I was forced to change too much because of that, although I didn't see him after my departure from the country."
    "Does he maintain you here, at any rate?"
    "Naturally, maintain. Otherwise, I couldn't afford such a mansion. Nonetheless, I'd prefer the former plain living to the present prosperity on the edge of a volcano."
    "However, you haven't any options to choose from."
    "Perfectly true," she ended our conversation by packing her poppet in pampers and fastening two adhesive strips on his tummy. "Leave us, please, for he approaches the subject of satiating very earnestly."
    "Nighty night, pal," I smiled at my new friend being dressed in sleeper and already scowling at me in anticipation of sucking the long-awaited breast, which he didn't intend to yield anybody.
    *
    The breastfeeding and lulling the satisfied eater took about twenty minutes, and I passed this time in watching TV-news from European countries, or rather in looking at the screen with the alienation of a stranger. Seeing that the newscasts were, as a rule, some sets of calamities, disasters, misfortunes, and accidents, my absentmindedness saved me equanimity and placidity. I seemed to be a real paterfamilias returned from work in the evening, who made sure that all his family had gathered at home, all of them were sound in body and mind, and that there was no danger for them now in their homey family circle.
    The similar sensation I felt, maybe, only at Christmas in childhood, and I understood why Lucy arranged such a date for us, whose closeness got welded by this New Year's Eve of passion to the truly fathomless profundity. It was, of course, a certain risk, since she couldn't be sure that I would take a liking to her son, and the motive force of her deed was very likely her desire to share her innermost affection with me. Anyway, her ploy proved a worthwhile undertaking, and henceforth I loved her together with her charming bonny baby, my acquaintance with whom I proposed to continue tomorrow.
    "Long live the freedom!" exclaimed Lucy in a stage whisper, appearing behind the banister of the balustrade of the upstairs rooms. "He is sleeping."
    "We'll wait some time," she added, descending the stairs, "and I'll close the window in his room."
    "He won't wake?" I asked, lowering a voice.
    "After half an hour of breathing fresh air, nothing can wake him. Therefore, we had better summon up patience."
    "Everything comes to him who waits," I humbly accepted inevitability of delay. "We have the night ahead, so such a deduction will scarcely diminish our resources very much."
    "The best of your good qualities is that you are an incurable optimist," said Lucy, settling herself in the second armchair.
    "Despondency is analogue of passivity," I let her into the secret of my unflappability. "Meanwhile, I must be active almost in every situation. Optimism conduces to abiding in fighting trim-that's the reason."
    "Then what's within you in actuality?"
    "You may rest assured that this will be consigned to oblivion without pouring or unbosoming."
    "Why?"
    "During my life I saw many things that aren't intended to those who don't belong to a medical corporation," I explained, eliding my military experience in a mental reservation. "Without a professionally callous heart, someone else's suffering becomes your torment and makes your life a hell on earth. Sincerity by no means implies truth."
    "Do you think I don't know it?" she smiled.
    "I think you know this topic perfectly." To mention the colonel as an instance was obviously unnecessary. "But I mean truth of another kind."
    "I can guess what you mean after that incident on the road," said she. "In Hispanic poetry, love is always interwoven with death, and flesh and spirit exist inseparably, as a portrayal of a beloved."
    "You have an overly acute mind for female," I grasped the nub of her allusion. "It must be acknowledged that I was indeed somewhat smitten by excess of flesh without any spirit in my palmy days. As a student-medic, I was excellently schooled by the then all-embracing physiology and corporeality, yet since then I could hardly perceive people in any other way. Such a perception appreciably facilitates full contacts with men in combat, but it makes contacts with women in love exclusively carnal."
    "What's wrong with it?" she asked-not so much to hear my answer as to spur my candor, not characteristic of me till now.
    "Nothing wrong," I answered frankly. "Until I embraced you for the first time, I even thought that it is the only possible level of mutuality."
    "And what happened in that time?"
    "I'd compared."
    "What with what?"
    "I am too bad an expert in Hispanic poetry to word these niceties. Roughly speaking, you are happiness, while all the others are no more than delight."
    "Your comparison is rather worth the poetry," she pronounced with slight huskiness, and I understood that she also restrained her genuine feelings pending due time for exhibiting them.
    "It was Nature that juxtaposed then, not my consciousness," I disowned such an undeserved fame. "That revelation with you was neither true nor false-I simply found myself beyond the former dimensions, and all the usual estimations and criterions no longer worked in your case. What I was feeling was barely expressible, because words would have imparted definiteness to that radiance, and utterance would have materialized that spiritual shining. It looked like some translucence of the visible reality, and I feared to screen that spectral space of my new vision by calling my emotions and things."
    "You are a good diagnostician," Lucy said, gazing at me. "You're right-every definition confines an elemental feeling in a case of appellation and mortifies it by the very restriction of a term."
    "Although it is a speech of a real philologist, I've caught your meaning," I said, again spellbound under her gradually darkening cerulean gaze. "Designation of some moments of our reticent introspection amounts to dividing our soul into parts."
    "Precisely," she supported me in my taciturnity. "Moreover, this lexical vivisection involuntarily kills what is living as a whole. It is probably because our feelings are only some superficial layer of the unconscious, and beneath the perceptible surface, we are sensing the primeval abyss engendering all our flesh."
    "And since we can't be endowed by any self without incarnating, our reason realizes just the origin of all flesh as a source of spiritual light," I developed her mental image.
    "Perhaps our earthly life really grew from a spark," she went on with her forcedly protracted meditation. "That is, it was some germinating spore of cosmos, which had gotten into the Ocean of our planet and survived."
    "It proved prolific enough withal," I remarked. "And it eventually created such a marvel as you."
    "In short, we may cease airing?" she asked, immediately rising from the armchair.
    "Undoubtedly," I showed her my wristwatch. "It is time to second words with deeds and to verify our theorizing."
    "Then I shall lower his window," she muttered and made for the wooden staircase.
    Having gone up the stairs, she opened the door left ajar by her and came into the room of her son.
    And instantly, I heard a scream.
    It was a despairing heartrending scream of mortal horror well known to me, for it was a wild scream of those who had suddenly lost a close relation.
    This terrible scream resounded in the empty house, and a second later, I heard the thump of a fallen body.
    No sooner had the sounds reached my ears than I flied upstairs and burst into the room.
    My three glances in the semidarkness of the room were like three shots, and the trajectory of casting them was such: Lucy in a swoon on the floor on the right-the empty crib on the left-the dark embrasure of the raised sash window straight before me.
    "He's live!" the thought flashed in my mind when I darted to the gaping embrasure.
    There was an extending stepladder leant against the wall under the window on the outside, but I did not find any kidnappers in the courtyard or any sign of car riding away from the gate.
    "Fuck it all!" I thought, turning to my senseless beloved. "All the plans miscarried!"
    Here I noticed a scrap of paper in the crib.
    Before bringing Lucy round, I switched on the light in the room and read the text printed in English on this quarter of a list. As I knew what might break out after her regaining consciousness, I had to be fully armed (by patience in particular).
    The text was simple and banal:
    "It is kidnapping. Wait for our call. Don't turn to cops, or else you will get his head without him. You must pay ? 500.000."
    My body reacted to the impudence of this declaration earlier than I restrained an outburst of rage, and there was a snap of the wooden side rail together with a furious blow of my fist, since for an instant, I was beside myself with fury.
    However, instead of destroying the furniture, I should have performed my medical duty. In the circumstances, my frenzy was fruitless, and I couldn't permit uncontrolled emotions to obfuscate my mind, considering that I had no notion what to do in such a situation.
    When Lucy opened her eyes, her look was vacant, as if I had disturbed her sleep, and she still did not awake to her surroundings.
    Then she shifted her limpid blue eyes from my face to the crib-and her pupils flashed with black bursts of horror.
    "Don't cry," I forestalled her new scream. "He's kidnapped but live."
    "What?" she asked and convulsively gulped the air.
    "They left a note in the crib," I said. "Stand up and look at it."
    In her state, she needed to do anything; no matter with what she was occupied. Shock might kill her or send her mad, and my task was to cushion a blow in order not to allow her mind to be clouded, otherwise her sonny would have lost the only hope for saving.
    "Losing her reason, she is losing her son," I formulated the gist of the real danger to myself.
    "I've read it," said Lucy bent over the note lying on the big pillow still crumpled with the head of her child.
    "Don't touch it," I warned her. "Maybe it will prove useful. How are you?"
    "Save him, save him, save him," she began to repeat hysterically, seizing me by the hands.
    "Get a grip on yourself!" I barked at her. "Tell me-have you any connection with your colonel?"
    "Yes, yes, he gave me a number for case of emergency," she answered in feverish excitement.
    "Where is it?"
    "It is in my mobile there," she jumped at the chance, already hurrying to the stairs leading down to the coffee table on which she had put her cell phone in the beginning of our conversation.
    "He must be here as soon as possible," I was telling her while going downstairs, "even if you have such money."
    "I may only send a signal to him." Lucy grasped her mobile from the table. "Just a minute... It is a secret number, without name... Okay, here's it."
    She pressed a dozen of buttons of her phone and waited for some seconds.
    "Now he will ring me when he can freely talk," she informed me. "But we must do something."
    "You personally must take something sedative," I said sternly. "Much will depend on your presence of mind."
    "What if I drink whisky?" she asked obediently.
    "You should forgo alcohol," I prohibited at once. "Relaxing your attention will entail mistakes, while you have to concentrate on your tasks."
    "Well, well, I shall be sober."
    "What about the medicine?"
    "I'll glance what is in the medicine chest in the bathroom."
    "We'll glance together. And you will be forced to endure your fretfulness till the promised talk with those bastards."
    "Then we can look for sedative after it."
    "No objection," I agreed with her, though I was alarmed by a dangerous gleam in her eyes, which was evidence of being high-strung. "And let's specify our functions. With the kidnappers, you speak as though you are alone at home. But as to the colonel, I shall be much better as an interlocutor. You're too wound up, while he will be giving you instructions, and very important."
    "Okay, I'll hand you the cell."
    Just here, her cell rang, and Lucy snatched up it.
    "Yes, it's me," she answered quickly. "Victor is kidnapped-only just. They'd written that they'll call me, and that his ransom is five hundreds of thousands in euro. No, they'd forbidden the police. And they threatened to cut his head if-"
    "That's enough," I interrupted her. "Give me to converse with him."
    "This is Victor, that doctor who saved us," she said into her cell phone. "No, it was a chance meeting yesterday. He wants to speak with you."
    "Hi," I said, having taken the phone. "She's too nervous now, and she may miss some of necessary actions."
    "Hi, doc," the cold voice of the colonel damped my ardor. "How it happened?"
    "They kidnapped him sleeping while we were in the salon. The note was in his crib, and their stepladder was left under the open window."
    "Well, doc, listen to me. When they call, she must talk with them as long as possible and with frequent pauses. I need their sound background for identifying. She must say that she will procure the needful sum to the early evening tomorrow. She must implore them to care about her son until she can ransom, and she should arrange with them to get in touch between four and five in order to meet for paying the ransom. Naturally, all the talk must be recorded. After six hours approximately, I'll arrive, and we'll begin to act. Look after her till then."
    "Don't worry," I opened my mouth, but he already broke connection.
    "So, remember what you should do," I set about instructing Lucy. "Firstly, you must record your conversation with them. Is it possible?"
    "Yes. There is a recorder in the telephone set."
    "Secondly, for locating their telephone, he wants to have the maximum of sounds of their surroundings. Therefore, you must procrastinate, entreating to feed your baby in time and to change his diapers, weeping and promising to get the money of his ransom, and stopping from time to time so as to hear what resounds there in silence."
    "I got you," Lucy nodded.
    "Say to them to call you after four o'clock tomorrow, because you can obtain such a sum only by then or a bit later. The colonel is going to be here towards morning, and apparently, he plans to end the matter before this time."
    "Didn't he tell you something more?"
    "Nothing, as ever," I answered. "He is a man of action, as you know. Now we can hope for the better, if only you are able to be really sincere."
    "I am," she assured me bitterly. "In that case, I cannot be insincere."
    *
    Fortunately, the unknown villains did not take long to call their victim, and Lucy was quite ready for the decisive conversation, about the concrete content of which I could only make guesses, as they were talking Italian and Spanish alternately.
    Anyway, Lucy was equal to the task, excellently playing the role of a hysterical mom frightened to death by the terrible event, who was thinking in panic exclusively about paying the ransom for her precious sonny and about returning him safe and sound to her without delay. At times, she stopped now for weeping voicelessly now for sighing fitfully because of a lump in her throat now for picking words in her consternation, and she left so many phrases in the air that the father of the stolen baby had enough information to work up. In the end, she even delivered a short speech, persuading them of something, but her ardent plaints were finished by her sudden obscene interjection.
    "These swines laid down the receiver," Lucy notified me.
    "You've been nattering quite sufficiently for analyzing," I comforted her. "What did you convince them of?"
    "I said that he is too little to be a witness, and that he cannot speak yet. Besides, I said that he never cries if he eats and drinks in time and has a dry diaper. I explained them, too, that he needs a certain baby-food and feeding bottle, and I told them how frequently to change his pampers."
    "If his pop calculated the time of the operation till four, he will be hungry for some hours at most. The worst that may happen is their intimidation, for they will frighten him then."
    "I've warned them not to browbeat him; otherwise, they will have a noisy baby instead of a tractable reasonable child."
    "Can they kill him?" she asked unexpectedly.
    "They will hardly decide on killing without serious reasons," I answered, not in the least convinced of any logicality of such riffraff. "After murder, they cannot avoid an intervention of the police."
    "Well, let's hope for their self-interest."
    "By the way, what they said about his present state? It slipped my mind somehow."
    "They're satisfied that he is sleeping as before."
    "What, he didn't wake when they carried him away?"
    "No, he never wakes without cause. As he has eaten his full and gotten into his sleeping bag, he will be in the arms of Morpheus till morning."
    "I think you should be in the same arms, too."
    "How can I sleep now?" she put a rhetorical question.
    "You must be up to the mark tomorrow," I said in a doctor's didactic tone. "You need a night's rest lest you should fall into a swoon once again. So, lie down on the divan without demur and sleep. I'll bring some medicine from the bathroom and be guarding you. Night shifts are habitual to me, after all."
    "I'll try," mumbled Lucy completely enervated by her talk with the kidnappers. "Then bring, please, a plaid from the cabinet under the staircase."
    When I returned with the plaid, Lucy was already sleeping, so I covered her and went to the bathroom where we was washing her cupid no more than an hour ago-to prepare to the sleepless night in the armchair and to coming to the aid of my poor cutie in case of necessity.
    Withal I had to reexamine the chain of the events, the links of which had wound itself round me in the last week, because the fateful serpent had constricted its coils today to the limit and patently proved its existence in the objective reality....
   
    CHAPTER 10
   
    Thus, I faced some thoroughly elaborated scheme of an operative plan purposing to trace the colonel after his disappearance, and the one who headed the operation was influential enough in High Command of the Armed Forces to detach the officers of the Marines acquainted with me to the town just by my arrival and to organize our meeting in that incident with the gangsters. And what was more, he could bring into action one of the residents of the external secret service, who most likely conducted the arrangements for the two other incidents in foreign parts.
    Clearly, someone had the full information about all the contacts of the colonel and decided to make me a decoy for luring out Lucy, whose presence here was figured out, and whose personality I had been brought to identify by spotting her in the sparse crowd of the loiterers strolling up and down the promenade. The rest was intended to draw the colonel out of his concealment for saving his son, which was clear as mud, too.
    Yet, for the time being, this assumption was no more than a figment of my imagination, and if I wanted to substantiate my conjectures, I was obliged to scrutinize all the events from the first shot somewhere round the corner and pay attention to every detail, turning all of them over in the aggregate in my mind and drawing the inferences. Such an analysis was supposed to reveal some pre-arrangement in every episode in spite of its seeming accidentalness, and I was really a sufficiently good diagnostician to cope with this scrutiny and notice the smallest particulars.
    So then, by the soft pinkish light of the standard lamp, I was sitting beside my uneasily sleeping re-found lover (who did not curse, for a wonder, her untimely sinfulness and me as an abettor for criminal negligence and inattention, having let no reproach escape her lips) and reviewing the total recall of the first scene of action.
    I did not attach significance then to my sensation of being under observation, as I ascribed it to a post-war syndrome after my long alertness in the combat zone, and besides, somebody might indeed watch me from pure curiosity from one of those houses. However, the sensation had arisen just in that street, while someone's eyes would fall on me and run over my face everywhere in the big town; consequently, it was not a glance or gaze but my honed hunch that caught some specific attention concentrated on me and singled it out among the other everyday impressions.
    That was why I thought about a presumptive observer in that car with tinted windowpanes, although I could not appreciate its position as an observation post. Meanwhile, the car was parked opposite the narrow passage into that blind courtyard, the only passage there, in the long empty street. Keeping my movement under control, they could easily calculate the moment of the beginning of fire so that I would turn off the pavement down this lane, to go through it and evade a contact with gunmen. I acted just so-and found myself in the closed space, where I had no choice but to do what I did after that.
    In other words, some brigade of professionals had set a trap for me in that evening, following me while I strolled about the streets until fell into this trap, since availability of cellular phones made the arrangement of such a trap quite feasible.
    Okay, they had been shadowing me up to that suitable street, marking the possible places for their action on the map of the town and leading the participants of the show after me by parallel course. It is understandable, too, that the wounded platoon commander wore a wig in order not to be recognized at once, and that his wound was inflicted by a pro having enough competence in the topographical anatomy to shoot him in the thigh by a signal.
    Needless to say, the thugs pursuing the supposed fugitive were in ignorance of my existence and of their function in the whole plan, and they did not suspect, of course, that they had been sent to chase an unarmed stooge not as actors but as lambs to slaughter for giving verisimilitude to the episode. The peculiarities of my personality were probably introduced by captain Bob whom some commander had seconded for participating in the scenario of involving me in the hunt for a big game, and he recommended the organizers to count on my rapidity and skill, especially when the pursuers would be taken by surprise; nevertheless, to make assurance doubly sure, a combat knife also figured in the plan, and the pistol was loaded with live ammunition, not with blank cartridges.
    The task was to create the situation forcing me to react just by killing (my wigged pal definitely had another pistol in his pocket for this goal if the thing went wrong), for their hunt required my presence abroad, moreover in the concrete town, where they had supposedly located a woman resembling the colonel's common-law wife who was wanted by them.
    Whatever Bob told me about the investigation and the gang, which had grabbed the camera that recorded my firing, all of it was swindle, excepting the routine police inquiry without any film inculpating me as a perpetrator. True three bandits were killed, and I was the culprit of their deaths, while the backstage producers that implicated me in playing at their game certainly had some irrefutable evidences of my crime. Henceforth I was completely in their hands, since transmitting this information to the comrades of my victims would have been tantamount to death sentence (with some long tortures before my last breath).
    My spontaneous self-defense made me a tool of their searches, and John, who had incidentally suggested due choice of my dwelling-place in the foreign countries, carried on with their design of bringing Lucy and me together. By the way, it came to my head now that the loutish bumpkin at the seafront stopped me deliberately; otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed Lucy by the beauty parlor.
    Although the superiors of the project enlisted many people in a cause, every participant did a part of the planned work, incognizant of the rest and of the factual object of this part. Therefore, the two officers entangling me in the story might be guided by their local plan and unaware of the essence of their task to oust me from the country to John's field, while John acted within the framework of his functions, not delving deeply in all the whys and wherefores.
    So, I was accommodated in the necessary place, and someone constantly kept me under observation, informing the chief that arranged the following turns of the storyline. To all appearances, some informers had put the commanders of the colonel in the picture concerning my relations with Lucy, and this information had been registered in his file then-to be used at the present time. It was difficult to define which of us was a hook with bait and which-a fish rising to it, but when the watchers had learnt from that madam-receptionist of my visit in the beauty parlor, they had got both the point and time of my presence on the morrow, and what, properly speaking, might prevent them from preparing a test for her identity?
    The one who was familiar with my reputation could fearlessly hire three penniless blackguards to assault "a white bitch", say, for teaching her a lesson, because their collective fate was sealed by the very fact of my help. Whoever were those migrants in their former life, now they had been sent against an infuriated lion, and they hardly had any chance of surviving such a mortal combat, in consequence of which I had become a felon in this country, too.
    Not that I regretted anything or repented of my deed, however I got bogged down in someone's game over head and ears after the second slaughter. Meanwhile, the circumstances were pushing me towards new struggle and fights, and it would have been well to find some proofs of the malicious intent driving me so inexorably into corners of impasses in order to resist this fatality somehow.
    Suppose they had access to my personal file in the ministry of defense and knew both my address and the term of my return from abroad, which enabled them to shadow me and ensnare me in the end. But how could they follow me here? With my heedfulness and instinctive watchfulness, I would have noticed the sleuthhounds treading on my heels, for there were not many people in the streets, and the promenade wasn't crowded by pedestrians gadding about towards evening.
    Accordingly, they were tracing my location not only visually but also by some mini GPS tracker that had been set on my belongings owing to John's sleight-of-hand. It was most likely pinned to my leather jacket hanging on the wall coatrack at the anteroom between the salon and the front door.
    Noiselessly, I rose from the armchair and tiptoed out of the salon to the narrow anteroom.
    Having a certain bent for deductive method, I quickly twigged where to search the antenna attached unbeknown to me. And indeed, it was palpable in one of two short straps on the sides of my jacket-as a needle with a bead.
    I could easily pull out this spy device stuck through a small slit of the strap, but I preferred not to do it, lest John should understand that I had uncovered his game. Yes, without the tracker pinning me to this game I was able to vanish into thin air and escape the impending danger, yet I would have counted it ignominy even to assume such a possibility, especially when Lucy was in such a dire situation.
    The worst of it was that now I couldn't be replaced by the colonel as her guardian angel; quite the contrary, just through his fault she got into a mess and found herself on the brink of despair.
    Without him, we simply had no solution of this problem of the vital importance, but it was crystal clear that the very problem had been created for pulling him out of his hole somewhere. Both of us understood the true aim of the kidnapping, and neither Lucy nor I had mentioned the real circumstances of our chance meeting, since by silent agreement, we decided, so to speak, to exchange father for son, considering innocence of one and guilt of another.
    Anyway, the colonel had incurred all this persecution, while we had nothing to do with his affairs; therefore, whatever retribution might befall him, he ought to have saved his child. Naturally, he was no longer any shield for Lucy and their offspring, and I virtually remained thus the only one who was capable of taking responsibility for them at present.
    I ever regarded him rather as daddy than as hubby, seeing that my mutual passion was a short episode in the family life of Lucy and him, and I dared not even dream of any next meeting with her, with her alone withal, without her patron and with her merry suckling.
    As I had gotten the first material evidence in corroboration of my conjectures, I did not doubt anymore that all our troubles originated in the escape of the colonel from his secret organization, where a current byword was such: "The entrance for one penny, the exit for two".
    It was of no importance what he had done, for in either event, he was turned by his offence into a quarry, thereby bringing misfortunes upon us, not privy to his relations with the ruthless system hunting him.
    That's why the colonel was obliged to return the son to Lucy at any cost, and if he might pay for this return with his life, it would have been only equitable in the case that the life his baby was at stake because of him.
    As to me, I was not going to let the hunters off their dirty tricks and spare any of them brought to light. For Lucy, I was ready to kill everybody, including her colonel; though, for the present, I intended to do what I could and to render assistance to him in his unimaginable undertaking of saving my little namesake.
    I was still undecided whether to say to the colonel about John Fox or not, because on the occasion of his mission of liberation it was better to waive the regulations and draw a veil over the snare set for him here so as to acquaint him with all the preceding events when the child was rescued.
    I was unwavering in my readiness to sacrifice him, provided that he would accomplish the mission as a rescuer, although during his operation he had the most reliable partner in my person. My attitude to him was utilitarian, of course, but we were to counteract the same enemy, and he could perfectly trust me, as well as relying on me, even if I had no scruple about giving him up in our risky game, where I was acting on Lucy's behalf. Ultimately, his sudden retiring did entail too many worries for three of us, and he could partly expiate the evil unintentionally done by him only by doing his utmost.
    So, while Lucy took a rest before tomorrow's trials, I was immersed in thought, and my pondering the present situation alternated with my vigilantly light sleep, within which I heard every sound and rustle as before, being on the alert as my night shifts inured me from my youth. I had to rest, too, since the next day promised to be very eventful, and by morning, I must have got into trim, not counting on my superiority as such.
    As an experienced sportsman and winner of many competitions, I was versed in techniques of psychological balancing, and I knew how to avoid sapping my strength with futile efforts in imaginary battles on the eve of real combats. It was a kind of skill-to be prepared for everything without being worn out from nervous strain, yet I had a great command of this skill long ago.
    Nonetheless, in a drowse I continued to go round in a circle of the same thoughts and could not but feel that my closed circle was narrowing more and more like a body of a gigantic snake constricting its coils round our lives and fastening its cold pitiless eyes on its preys before a hammer-blow of its first attack. No one was strong enough to withstand the force of such a monster; therefore, taking to flight was the only resort in that case; but the solid ring of the stirring scaly wall was unassailable, leaving us no loophole for escape....
   
   
    PART FOUR
   
    CHAPTER 11
   
    My keen hearing gave warning of the promised arrival earlier than the car of the colonel drew up at the gate.
    As soon as its remote purring arose in the space of the relative stillness around the villa, I pricked up my ears, slumbering yet listening to the new sound, and at its approach, I rose springily and woke up on the way to the intercom of the front door.
    The moment the colonel touched the button on the outside and I heard his "It's me", the gate was opened.
    I came out of the house to meet him and show him where to park his car, but it was evident from his behavior that he knew the environs well enough, as he turned at once to the left to the open shed of carport.
    Only after he parked his Mazda there and got out did he pronounce the first word.
    "Hi, doc," he said, peering at my face in the dank twilight. "You again help me in the hour of danger."
    "I was simply paying a call to her," I lied. "She'd acquainted me with your sonny, and here this nice chap was kidnapped. Naturally, I extended sympathy to her and such like. The problem is that I'm powerless to do something real."
    "If you agree to go further, I shall find this "something" for you today," he promised, and one glance at his grim face was sufficient to understand what he meant.
    "It would be good to have a safety-valve for my indignation," I responded to his hint. "Tell me, by the by, how is your health after your rehabilitation?"
    "I'm fit as a fiddle," the colonel answered, opening the back door of his car. "True they'd transferred me to work in the office, but it is not only paperwork. Well, let's go to her."
    He took out a laptop computer and a weighty briefcase, which were lying at hand on the back seat, and slammed the door.
    "Is it the ransom?" I asked while letting him in the house with his cases.
    "Not likely," the colonel growled out. "I won't put up with such bullshit!"
    *
    Lucy was already sitting on the divan, and she looked very wretched with her disheveled hair and sunken eyes darkened with horror.
    "How are you?" the colonel fixed his leaden gaze upon her.
    "I'm capable of acting," she answered, still dozy. "What's the time?"
    "About six," the colonel informed her coldly. "And I am here like one o'clock."
    "I see," she muttered with a guilty look. "I know I mustn't expose you to danger, but-"
    "I'm also dangerous," he remarked in an icy tone. "Did you record your talk with them?"
    "Yes, I have the recording in the telephone."
    "Then show me his bedroom, and I need a room with computer for work."
    "The desktop computer is in the cabinet under the staircase. Maybe you want to take a snack before?"
    "I'll be eating during the work. Time presses; otherwise I wouldn't ride hell for leather for eight hours running."
    I thought that even at hundred odd kilometers per hour on the motorways he could thus cross half-Europe this night.
    "Handle this with care, doc," the colonel warned, putting his cases on the coffee table. "Everything depends on these gizmos."
    "I've got the message," I said, assuming the role of his subordinate in the forthcoming operation. "I'd like to hear your opinion of this predicament."
    "Is anybody else in the house?" the colonel asked Lucy, stepping on the stairs.
    "No, I gave all of them a day of rest today," she answered following him.
    "Okay, ring them and prolong their rest by a day," the colonel ordered. "I am not seeking publicity. Where, you said, it happened?"
    By this time, we were already in the room of Victor, and Lucy turned on the light instead of answer.
    "We didn't touch anything," I told the colonel. "They left a note in his bed."
    With a louring expression of his poker face, the colonel looked round the room, leant out of the window, and bent to the note in the bed of his son.
    "Sons of bitch don't fear investigation," he dropped. "The printer may be identified by the text. And they used gloves, as they are sure of absence of fingerprints on the ladder. Anyway, I shall examine the list later."
    He took the note with his handkerchief and added:
    "Be so kind, doc, as to bring the ladder on to the verandah. You may close the window, darling, lest you catch cold."
    While I fetched the ladder, the colonel had time to settle down in the cabinet with his apparatus, and Lucy was busy preparing some refreshment for him in the kitchen.
    "How are things?" I asked her, observing decorum. "Did he deign to explain his plan?"
    "He isn't in the mood for explanations now," Lucy said, demure as before in the presence of her former demigod precipitated from Olympus. "He is as cross as two sticks because he is forced to act against his own rules."
    "I also have propensity to pedantry," I expressed my solidarity with the colonel. "Apparently, there is some affinity between you and such formalists."
    "In essence, I chose only you," she called my generalization in question. "As to him, I had no option but to combine my functions. True, I could decline his offer, yet we were to remain together during many months without strangers, so why not? Besides, he reminds me of my father, who was an officer, too, though retired."
    "That's why you are such a judicious girl."
    "I was such indeed," she confessed. "But for you I would have been always such."
    "So would I," I thought it better to be frank as well, considering that the appearance of her constant partner ruined all our plans of any further fornication. "Yet now I am at his disposal, and who knows how this day will end for me."
    "I'm praying for your success."
    Here Lucy all but dropped the plate with sandwiches-so hard her hands were quivering.
    "If we have some free hours, later I'll offer you one more interesting occupation," I promised. "I'll be teaching you to throw blades."
    "What do you mean?"
    "I carry a set of throwing blades with me-for resisting the superior forces of the enemy. It is in fact a knife without haft, and you can use the pergola in the yard as a target. You should apply your energy somehow, unless it rains."
    "Do you prescribe me exercises in the open?"
    "Just so."
    "In any event, I must serve him food and drink at first. And then I am to notify the servants of their additional free day tomorrow."
    "It makes no difference when you ripe for physical training, as I shall be waiting here for his order until I take it from him."
    "Why are you sure that he is able to find solution?"
    "He's a pro in this sphere, just as I'm in medicine. And he will do his utmost as I did it then on the road. How could I predict for certain whether he would come through or not? I was simply doing all in my power for him as he is undoubtedly doing for all of us at present. The most difficult thing in our situation is to know what to do, and he is only one who knows it."
    "You are an adept at comforting the sufferers," Lucy sighed. "After your speeches, it seems that I already have some reasons to hope for the best."
    "Now you rather really have," I heartened her still more.
    *
    The day wasn't rainy, though the sky was overcast, and by nine o'clock, Lucy was through with all her domestic affairs.
    As she was highly strung, obviously balancing on the brink of hysterics and moving like a somnambulist, I took the first opportunity to bring her out of the house to get some fresh air, notwithstanding her nervous shivering.
    "What if they observe for us from somewhere?" she supposed, muffling herself in a crimson poncho of coarse wool.
    "Don't exaggerate IQ of these degenerates," I refuted her assumption, although there couldn't be the slightest doubt that the villa was under observation, and that some of the telephone conversations were being bugged. "Presumably, they were quite satisfied with your blue funk, and they are convinced of your abiding in a flat spin."
    "I feel like that. Whereas he has said not a word about the promised ransom, I am altogether muddled."
    "He understands that after receiving the ransom, they won't be interested any longer in the life of our nipper. Then they may try to get rid of him as they do it usually. Therefore, the best solution will be to punish their cupidity dully and in full measure."
    "Kill them all," Lucy requested me unexpectedly without raising her voice.
    Nonetheless, a tinge of bloodthirstiness in her low voice was so impressive that if those shitters were here, my assistance in killing them would have been scarcely necessary.
    "I think they won't leave another choice to us," I said and, by association, remembered my controversy with Sigmund Freud about his "libido" as an all-embracing essence of human being.
    It is not that I disputed this point in my student days, but my own experience contradicted the omnipresence of such sexuality originally dominating. According to the theory, this libido, seeking satisfaction, was a subconscious inducement for actions of every personality in various spheres, and in my youth, I used to satisfy my lusts of the flesh to the top of my bent. However, taking delight in sex and being cloyed with pleasure at times, I couldn't be fully satisfied for some reason until my true love with Lucy, while in sport I now and then achieved the unattainable satisfaction (say, after my victory).
    Meanwhile, the subject of stimulating certain zones of human brain was very popular in those years, especially when we already knew what a specific hormone excited the zone "Paradise" in psychological processes like electrodes in the brain of a laboratory mouse.
    Although I did not presume to argue with the world-famous psychoanalyst in principle, I supposed, nevertheless, that the reciprocal regulation and influence of every biological organism and its consciousness might pave the subliminal ways to the aforementioned brain "Paradise" from sources having nothing in common with Freud's "sublimation".
    It was understandable, too, that multitudinous variations of the contrasting "Hell" originated in dissatisfaction, viz. in omission of a unique individual way to happiness natural for a concrete subject or in attempts of substituting some foreign ways for a due one becoming, therefore, the eternal desideratum that was hardly ever realized.
    It stands to reason that I applied my psychoanalysis to my own individuality, and the self-examination revealed the striking correspondence between the core of my "self" and my name, for just my striving for victory was the essence of my nature. I wouldn't have called it "trait" because it related to me wholly, and this striving was characteristic of me in such a degree that I ever eschewed any addictions, for example to alcohol or drugs, which were the earliest ways to many private Paradises.
    As a physician, I saw the replacing character of these widespread substitutions, but as a born victor, I had mixed feelings of pity and contempt for dipsos, drug-addicts, and the other poor wretches-softies and, naturally, scorned their methods of attaining impersonal bliss.
    Yet winning a victory wasn't connected with deriving pleasure from violence on my way to spiritual satisfaction; on the contrary, I was usually magnanimous to losers, as it was a consuetude in sport.
    Still, after the curt request of my beloved, my former feelings had undergone the radical changes.
    In my attitude to the unknown enemy, I caught a note of sadistic fierceness, and this thirst for mauling somebody reminded me of my anxiety over my adolescent cruelty in fights. It might be just because I apprehended such a contingency as an involuntary brutalization of my character under favorable (or rather adverse) circumstances, in prison for instance, for my inhibited inner savageness would have come to the foreground there.
    While studying psychiatry we observed some of maniacs, and as a rule, the haunting quirks of their ferocity would become their obsession of atrocities in a certain age of their life, quite normal till then, when they could no longer resist the temptation to commit their gruesome crimes and were forced to take their horrible ways of satisfying their perverted proclivities.
    By and large, it was a banality that wild beast lived in everybody to some extent, and I flattered myself I would always rise to the occasion and be able to subdue and tame my wildness, all the more because I willy-nilly told the difference between the overwhelming majority born to be animals in a herd and those who were created by nature as predators like me. From childhood, I was aware of this danger of overstepping the mark by accident (under the influence of drink as an example), so I accustomed myself to keep my hatred and rage within bounds even in the most critical situations.
    But now this self-discipline did not work, and the cruelty inherent in my soul of a beast of prey responded consonantly to Lucy's call to kill.
    As a matter of fact, I had become a murderer yet, for I contrived to put six murders down to my account in a week and a half, even if I didn't feel like a killer.
    However, I considerably evolved since then, and neither self-defense nor righteous indignation justified me in my vindictive resolution to make the kidnappers suffer for imperiling Lucy's ewe lamb in the highest degree, tormenting them as a pitiless torturer. In my genuine love, I somehow stirred the deepest levels of my soul, which were concealed under my controllable self, and all my primeval cannibalistic nature rose in a furious struggle for the female.
    *
    The foregoing, in spite of the duration of its exposition in writing, took only some seconds of my stroking her shoulder.
    "Believe me, we aren't disposed to render good for evil and be lenient towards any creep crying quarter," I said to Lucy in a soothing tone. "Look, there is a pair of side shields, so we can use these planks as a target and throw blades from the central path."
    "I've a bit tired," Lucy dropped, sitting down on the wooden bench of the swing within the massive construction of the pergola.
    "It is stress," I explained, pulling a hard plastic case with blades out of the inner breast pocket of my leather jacket. "You must act lest it gnaws you completely."
    "I'd rather drink something."
    "If our searches end successfully, I'll pour you whisky by my own hand. But till then abstain, please, from drinking. Okay?"
    "I cannot say you no," she forced a wry smile.
    As it turned out, Lucy had some notions about wielding a knife and throwing it, and she hit the mark at the first attempt.
    "Good throw," I encouraged her, because the target was a small square made of two thick short planks, and her accuracy deserved my approval. "If you aren't going to miss, I'd advise you to put your anger into throwing."
    "I'm afraid I shall splinter the board in that case," she remarked and hurled the second blade with such abruptness that it stuck into the wood with a distinct dry knock.
    "Were it a combat knife, the pergola would be hacked and felled in the twinkling of an eye," I fortified her in her self-confidence. "But some nicks from such blades may only pattern this timber."
    I slightly belittled the force of impact with which the blades could stick into the wooden surface, for sometimes I was forced to shake loose the blade deeply come into the trunk of the tree after my throw and to pull it out with great difficulty.
    "Withal, you will be accurate when you throw blades with might and main. Knife-throwing requires hardiness," I was about to continue my instructions.
    Here the cell phone hanging on her breast rang, and Lucy hurriedly brought it to her ear.
    "He waits for you," she gladdened me tersely.
    "Don't break training," I advised, leaving her three blades and putting the case with the rest back in the inner pocket of my jacket. "I hope to apply them soon."
    "Don't forget my request," she said, twiddling with the last blade.
    "I can reassure you on that point."
    With these words, I made for the house, as we couldn't lose time.
   
    CHAPTER 12
   
    By then the sullen countenance of the colonel reached the state of some baleful icy inexorability. An aura of implicit threat was always about him as it is, and now the tension of this dangerous zone was physically perceptible at a distance.
    The situation of acting out of necessity noticeably exasperated him, because he had a strong reason for going into hiding, and he naturally wanted to keep away from the people who might involuntarily put his pursuers on his track.
    "All is prepared," he said, folding his silvery notebook. "We can begin searches."
    "How is it working?" I asked, heartened by his words.
    "I shall explain in the car. Have you any weapon?"
    "I have only throwing blades," I answered. "But I am weapon, too."
    "I remember it. Take that case, doc, and follow me."
    Loaded with his electronics, we left the cabinet, went through the salon to the front door, and come out of the house onto the verandah.
    Lucy waited for us on the central path at the stairs, yet the speech of the colonel was extremely succinct.
    "The searches may take much time," he told her. "Be in touch with me, and I'll ring you when we'll have done with it."
    "Practice throwing," I reminded her in order to soften his sternness a little with my considerate treatment.
    Nevertheless, Lucy did not venture to say any parting words to us, apparently keeping her fingers crossed inwardly.
    In the carport, the colonel placed his cases on the back seat of his Mazda, but instead of sitting at the wheel, he began to install some contraption with two thin mires on the roof rack, or rather within it, so as to hide a reticulated butterfly of his miniature radar behind its steel rods.
    "As far as I understand, we're going to take the bearing of something," I supposed.
    "You're right, doc," he answered, mounting his construction connected with the case of his laptop computer. "There's a program of identifying sounds in my comp. It is actually a secret program, and it has an immense range of hearing and incredible sensitivity. I'd borrowed it in my department before my disappearance, and I'd been forced to confiscate the hard disk, for I couldn't copy it in any way. So we have the latest contrivance, by sheer fortuity."
    "I'd like a bit of additional information," I tried to fish out as much as possible.
    "The program is fixing all coincidences and comparing them," the colonel acquainted me concisely with the principles of the program functioning. "I've decomposed the sound-recording by layers, and thus I know whereabouts to look for the public telephone from which they had called."
    "To my mind, the town is too big for locating this telephone."
    "Yes, but I had prompts. The noise of the sea is heard only in the coast zone, and in one of the layers, I caught some signs of either market or port. As they called at night, the ordinary folk mustn't work in that time. In short, I've defined the area of searches on my interactive map, and just there we shall be questing."
    Here the colonel finished with mounting the antenna and took his computer from the back seat.
    "Because I must drive the car, you will have to control the indicators of the display, monitoring all the sound changes at that," he initiated me into my part of the task. "As soon as you hear and see something, let me know."
    "Okay," I dropped, scrambling with the computer into the car. "Say when to attach earphones."
    *
    The following three hours passed uneventfully.
    While our Mazda sailed slowly along the narrow streets and lanes, stealing through the town labyrinths, which the colonel was untangling in accordance with the interactive map of his iPod, I listened to the silence in the earphones and looked at the oscillating waves of the diagrams of the display.
    My surly driver was in a black mood as before, and not a word escaped his lips, let alone talk, so I could entirely immerse myself in thinking out the matter, namely the new situation arisen in my life after his appearance.
    The situation was extremely ambiguous, because I had to turn to the colonel for help for the sake of my beloved, notwithstanding that I tried to avoid meeting him as long as possible and his presence aroused my jealousy, which had been gathering latently without him.
    Strangely, I never thought about him and Lucy together, separating her in my memory from all the foregoing and subsequent to our passionate craziness, but the unexpected resumption of our passion in the other circumstances created the new context for our love. The very existence of her son completely changed our former relations, and she attempted therefore to include the child in the space of our closeness, though the sudden kidnapping had frustrated her plans; however, the colonel always remained beyond this space, as if he were some phantom in the outer world.
    Yet his arrival made him tangibly real, and I could hardly vouch for my friendliness towards him, whereas my possessiveness was fraught with causeless hatred.
    Such feelings showed irrefutably how reasonable was my decision to conceal the preceding events from him and expose him thus to a stroke of his colleagues. I was conscious of what threatened him in consequence of my perfidy, but henceforth he was my rival in love, so, to be honest, I had nothing against getting rid of him, especially as till then I couldn't claim my rights to the woman belonging to him not only in the present critical situation but also after having found the way out of it.
    The colonel was a professional diversionist, killer in particular, and in our single combat, I wouldn't have staked on me, even if I were at the top of my form, while to remove him by any surreptitious villainy was against my rules. That's why I gave up the function of removing to his destiny, and implicit in my inactivity was an inevitable retribution due to the colonel from his secret department.
    Naturally, I would never have undertaken the dirty work of nark and deliberately betrayed him for getting shut of his presence in the life of my woman, but as the incident with his son afforded me an opportunity to solve this problem forever, I desisted from averting the danger threatening him. As I said, I had chosen the son, not the father that was a culprit responsible for the catastrophe, and the fate of the latter was auxiliary and secondary in my opinion in comparison with the value of the saving of the child who turned out an innocent victim through his dad's affairs.
    Here my train of thought was interrupted by a slight peep in the earphones, whereupon the line of the oscillograph on the display made a tiny wave.
    "Stop the car," I said quickly to the colonel. "We have a blip."
    "Let's glance where it is," he reacted to my notification. "Give me the comp for a while."
    "So, this is the voice of the guy that called Lucy," the colonel explained, enlarging one of the town quarters on the map of the display. "The signal is registered in this area, consequently he is indeed there."
    He pointed at the quarters around the central market.
    "Can we catch him with this thingummy?" I asked.
    "Just for that it had been devised," the colonel assured me. "But he may be useless for us if he doesn't know where they hold the baby."
    "What's then?"
    "Then we shall inspect all the places known to him in connection with this crime. Now that we have determined his location, the chief thing is to keep him within the range of the sensitivity of the identificator. As you see, the signal is getting more and more distinct, and judging by the map, he is moving in our direction."
    "Yes, he's going straight into the trap," I confirmed, looking at the display. "Question-how shall we locate the baby without information about his place?"
    "Firstly, I'd copied his voice from the video in her mobile phone. It goes as number two in the program."
    "What if he is silent? He may fall asleep, for example, or be befuddled."
    "It is secondly, doc. We deal with a secret device, and the secrecy consists in its possibilities. To tell in a few words, it can be adjusted for detecting bio-fields."
    "Really?"
    "At first I also thought that our physicists try to fool us," the colonel acknowledged his mistake. "For testing it by means of experiment, I made the data input of our six-months-old sonny when his mammy was with him in the department, still at her work. Yet the verification went off successfully, and Victor's data remained in the bank of the program until I was forced to slip away soon after her retiring, since I decided to leave the country not empty-handed. In for a penny, in for a pound, so to speak."
    "In other words, we have his indicator. What distance is necessary for locating it?"
    "As close as possible," the colonel sighed. "For that reason, we must learn where we should search him-in what houses or basements. Let's go towards number one, and I hope he will enlighten us after our meeting."
    I was quite certain that the meeting with the colonel would impress the approaching scoundrel in such a degree that he would be incapable of lying and being cagey about what he knew.
    *
    The square, where our car rolled out very slowly, was crowded with the local folk, but our detector reacted only to one of a lot of voices, and luckily, this voice still sounded as before.
    "Here he is over there," the colonel detected the needful subject, gazing at an unremarkable man speaking on his cell phone.
    Indeed, as soon as the suspect ceased talking the signal broke, and when he opened his mouth, the same blip arose again, so we could easily spot him as our target.
    For a pair of minutes, the colonel looked about-whether the guy was alone or in company.
    "Well, I begrudge the time," he took a decision. "Keep an eye on the display, doc."
    After that, he got out of the car and opened the back door.
    Then he backed to the guy, who was practically within arm's reach, and lifted his hand, turning.
    The behavior of the colonel looked absolutely natural, and a short sudden jab of his two fingers at the throat of the guy given in passing attracted no attention of the people around.
    Meantime the colonel, as though supporting his friend, already senseless, moved the guy to the open door and seated him on the back seat.
    His action took fifteen seconds at most, and it seemed that nothing extraordinary happened here.
    "Continue to watch it," the colonel said, sitting at the wheel. "The talk won't last long."
    A minute later, he turned to some narrow cul-de-sac and, having stopped there, dragged the insensible body out of the car.
    After a weighty slap in the face, our captive came round and instantly reached for his side pocket.
    Without a word, the colonel took him by the throat and squeezed it tight.
    When the choking guy grasped at his steel arm with both the hands, he thrust his left hand into the dangerous pocket and extracted a switchblade knife, which he threw on his seat through the open door.
    By his supercilious manner of treating the detainee, the colonel resembled an experienced chucker-out, and the guy being very likely a pilferer-coward feared to resort to kicking, apparently knowing how risky it was to incur the real anger of such a bully.
    "Look here, asshole," the colonel pronounced in a low voice, as hard as a fist. "You must answer to all my questions in English. If you deceive or try to cod me, I shall proceed to third degree. Get me?"
    "Yes," wheezed his interlocutor.
    "Then say to me why did you call as a kidnapper."
    "From whence, dude, do you know that I called at all?" the guy asked, fazed by his knowledge.
    The strong fingers of the colonel again squeezed the throat of his victim, while by his second hand he gripped all that was in the fly of the trousers of this dolt.
    "I'll tear off your balls," he promised the guy wriggling with pain in his hands. "And you'll eat them. Anyway, I'll wrest your confession. Now speak anew."
    "I only called and nothing more," the martyr confessed at once. "They'd bullied me into calling her, and I couldn't refuse. But I am not a kidnapper, dude, and I don't hobnob with gangsters-"
    "Shut up," the colonel stopped the spate of words without raising his voice. "Stick to the subject. So, who are they? Can you find them for us?"
    "It is a nodding acquaintance, dude," muttered the frightened associate in the crime. "And they may kill me as a stool-pigeon."
    "Your choice is "maybe" versus "for certain"," the colonel dotted his I's. "The difference will be in your torments as well. Go on speaking. Where can we catch them?"
    "I don't know where they are at present," said our new-fledged squealer. "But there are some places where their ringleader sometimes appears."
    "How many members are in the gang?"
    "This time it wasn't the whole gang, but only three-four of them. At any rate, so it seemed to me. One dude instructed me what to say, and another waited for him not far off. The first one was just their ringleader."
    "Okay," the colonel summed up. "Mark on the map where you saw him."
    Not trusting the ostensible submissiveness of the client, the colonel took the guy by the left wrist and swung him round to face the display of the computer, having bent his twisted arm behind his back at the same time.
    "Show him the map, doc," the colonel commanded. "And fix the points that he will remember."
    "Point at all the places you can designate," he warned his informant. "Your life is depending on our success."
    "Even if you spare my life, they will give me no quarter," the involuntary traitor grumbled peevishly, viewing the terrain on the display.
    "After my visit, they won't give you anything, indeed," the colonel remarked. "That's why you must be interested in this visit. Or else I shall be forced to part with you."
    "No, thanks," the guy declined such a variant. "You're a cool dude, and I want to see how you'll give them short shrift. So, he may be here or here. Besides, here is the bar with bitches he haunts, and I know one den where I happened to meet with him."
    "What's more?" the colonel whipped him up. "Has he any fixed abode?"
    "Yes, yes, he has," our delator hastened to answer. "It is a detached house over there, in that quarter, not among the market rabble."
    "Is it a villa?"
    "No, this is a simple house. He is not such a big boss, and he bewares of flaunting his wealth."
    "Then we shall begin with his lair," the colonel concluded. "Doc, be as kind as to vacate your seat and sit down behind him."
    "And take the knife, please," he begged a favor. "If he stirs, stick the blade into his neck."
    "No objection," I agreed while the colonel was seating his obedient tipper-off on the passenger seat.
    *
    As every small fry, the guy had a good flair for danger, and in that case, his sense of defenselessness was unerring, and he cottoned on to what threatened him actually, for the colonel did not browbeat him but extract information with cold implacability.
    Therefore, as a guide, this ancillary accomplice endeavored to be very complaisant, prompting the direction to the redoubtable driver who could be guided by the voice of the driver's navigator without someone's additional recommendations.
    "Here is his house," the guy notified us when he caught sight of a small cottage roofed with brick-red tile and enclosed with the hedge.
    "Don't budge and speak in a whisper," the colonel ordered him. "Can I ride round the house?"
    "Yes, of course," our passenger whispered. "There is a lane at the back of the house. You can go, too, through the passages on both sides."
    "It's good. Doc, give me my comp," said the colonel. "And be ready to kill him at one blow if he utters a sound."
    Not stopping the engine, the colonel put his open notebook on the dashboard behind the wheel and adjusted some parameters of the program. Having attached the earphones, he raised the tinted windows hiding us from the eyes of any onlooker or bystander.
    "Now hush," he dropped starting.
    Moving at a snail's pace, the Mazda went down one of the side passages past the low hedge and turned to the left into the aforementioned lane, where we saw the back wall of the cottage, without windows, but with a white wooden door above the four stone steps, and naturally, a private black garbage can standing at this back door.
    The car already crawled past the cauldron-like plastic container, and here the colonel suddenly stopped it.
    With baited breath, I waited for his inference.
    "It works," he said barely audibly at last.
    "Fuck," I breathed out with the knife slightly pricking the neck in front of me as a warning. "What is there?"
    "He is here," the colonel answered, changing something on the display. "Let's try to locate his place more precisely."
    "Do you know the house?" he asked the motionless guy.
    "No, I don't move in such circles," the local spiv dissociated himself from his pals.
    "Well, it doesn't matter to us," the colonel lulled his suspicions.
    I understood, however, that the guy passed the sentence of death on himself by his dissociation, because he was no longer useful to us-say, for sending him to those ruffians to open the front door and let us in.
    "Look, doc," the colonel continued. "He is by the right wall, at the distance of six-seven meters, in the middle of the house approximately. I wonder what may be in that place."
    The car went slowly further and turned to the left into the second passage.
    "Aha, there is a window there," observed the colonel. "Presumably, it is a side room. We still have a signal from there, though it is weaker because of the distance."
    Having rounded the house, the car rode out of the passage, crossed the street, and disappeared round the corner from the field of view of those who watched it maybe through the dark glass panels of the front wall that passers-by could see over the top of the carved decorated gate.
    "What we know is that they keep him in the house," the colonel broke silence after having stopped the car. "The glass of the frontage is undoubtedly armored, not to mention the doors. That is, the attack will take too much time in any case."
    "Do you mean they will kill him?" I asked, ignoring the presence of the third one just as my commander.
    "They will use him as a live shield in firing. And when we come in, we have only one pistol against three or four guns. We mustn't imperil his life, and yet, we must penetrate into the house."
    "What's about the side window?"
    "I'm just thinking over that," the colonel said, gazing at his neighbor with indifference of a hungry python. "We have to chart a course of action. What is our advantage?"
    "If we have any, it's suddenness."
    "Just so, doc. In other words, our task is to knock the window out together with its frame. Since the window sash is wooden, it is real. Thus, you break it and burst into the room. As to me, I follow you with the pistol. Because we don't know, where they will be at that moment, you immediately fall on the floor for some seconds, because I must have a free field of fire. After that, all depends on circumstances, but his safety first."
    "Do we take captives?"
    "Sorry, but no," the colonel said brusquely. "In essence, we should have questioned someone-by whom they are sent. It would be more professional. Yet we cannot risk his life."
    "The plan is clear, but I am afraid the window will be a hard nut to crack. I would have avoided hurting me if I had had some ram. Perhaps we can find something suitable in the boot."
    "Do you need ram?" the colonel asked rather affirmatively. "The problem is solvable."
    And unexpectedly, he made an abrupt movement of his bent right arm and thrust at the upper part of the chest of the gawk beside him with his elbow.
    It was a blow of a skilled and experienced killer, and the head before me instantly drooped, though some weakening gurgling was heard for about ten seconds.
    "For ram he will do," the colonel marked, again starting up the engine. "We shall approach from the rear and attack without delay. The body will be on the roof, and you will be walking beside the car. As soon as it stops, you jump up onto the roof and step on the hedge. There is a metal frame under the shrubs in the hedge, so you have a foothold. Then, at once, you fling yourself on the window from above and break down it with your ram."
    "What if there are cameras everywhere?"
    "I don't think they want to shoot film about the child here, and they are hardly sitting at the monitors without any reason for anxiety. Anyway, you ought to cope with your task within some seconds, and after that, all of them will be my targets."
    Although I acknowledged the advisability of the actions of my companion, nonetheless, his professional behavior gave me a jar owing to the commonness of killing, for his commission of homicide was too habitual and bordered on indecency. There was no need for Lucy to instigate me with such a mate who apparently intended to exterminate all the insects in this hornet's nest and felt quiet before the extermination.
    *
    True the colonel did not allow me to be lost in reverie too long. Very soon, his Mazda drew up at the corner of the turn to that familiar passage.
    "Let's throw him up on the roof," said the colonel. "I hope he isn't excessively heavy for you."
    "He is featherweight, while I am middleweight," I grinned, opening the door.
    The colonel dismantled his antenna, and we laid the body on the vacated place.
    "Now to keep quiet, doc," the colonel ordered, drawing a strange dark pistol out of the inner pocket of his jacket before settling down behind the wheel. "Don't slam the door."
    His pistol was evidently ceramic (for passing through metal-detectors), but big enough, which told in favor of the caliber of its cartridges.
    I had only a knife and was more vulnerable under fire, even with my protective shield, but I was going to get firearm for me after the inevitable shootout.
    "So, you go on foot, doc," the colonel instructed me briefly. "Immediately I stop car, you attack from the roof. I leave the windows open so that you will use them as steps."
    My answer was needless, and I simply went alongside the crawling car.
    As soon as the noiselessly moving Mazda reached the line of the closed window and stopped, I sprang up and was on its roof in two seconds.
    Having picked up the body by the lapels, I stepped onto the hedge and plunged forward, pushing the body as a ram.
    Because I swooped from above and rammed the window with all might, the corpse smashed the transom in and flew inside through the breach of the broken window, while I crashed into the room after him and fell on this safe mattress securing me against splinters and jags.
    The sudden stroke was really hard, and it had wrenched the frame from the thin brick wall with awful crash, yet falling, I saw in the timeless space of the instant, where I had burst uninvited.
    The room under the former window was partitioned off from the spacious salon with the sliding door, the two leaves of which were moved apart, and the four men jumping on their feet on my unexpected intrusion to grab their guns were looking in my direction.
    But no sooner had I landed and they had time to arm themselves than the first shot of the pistol rang out in the breach.
    The rapidity of the firing was such that the four shots resounded as a short rattle of machine-gun, and not a bullet was wasted.
    When I rolled off my shield banged down on the floor slantwise into a dive because of the low settee standing at the wall, I just caught the scene of the consequences of this accuracy. It looked like a start of some spontaneous stampede of those men in the salon, but the blood spurting from their heads enabled you to understand that their disorderly tumbling was caused by the reason more essential than scare.
    Meantime the colonel being rather a burly fellow threw his bent trunk over the remains of the sill and slipped sideways through the gap with rare agility.
    The instant he jumped lightly to the ground we heard a child's cry from the right, and the colonel dashed into the doorway, but instantaneously turned to the left. His pistol cracked out while I made a rush for the voice from the floor.
    By then the knife was already in my hand, and the guy that bounced out of the adjacent room appeared too suddenly for thinking and choosing.
    The technique of knife combat requires automatism, and I stabbed the blade straight into the chest between the ribs, as though making a lunge together with my next step. Although the knife was not very long, its length quite sufficed to pierce the heart.
    The body impaled on the blade sharply straightened and fell forward.
    I pushed it away and yanked the knife out of the chest. As my eyes were directed at the torso, for I feared lest I should be bespattered with blood, I did not glance at the face of my rival, and only after the clatter of his gun fallen out of his hand did I get to know about his firearm.
    Then his body toppled, and I darted into the room where the baby was screaming his head off.
    It was good that there was semidarkness in this windowless box-room, because with my bloodstained knife, I apparently resembled a butcher.
    "I'm here, Vic!" I said loudly to the crying small shadow curled up on a rug in the corner. "Everything is all right!"
    I squatted and embraced the cringed scared child, and his arms instantly enclasped my neck. Still shuddering with sobs, he pressed his trembling weak body to my breast, and slightly kissing his curly head, I established by smell that they did not change his diapers.
    "All is over, buddy," I muttered, rising with him.
    Some strap held him, and it was a dog's lead fastened round his waist, as though he was put on a leash. I cut off this tether and hastened to go out of his stuffy sell.
    "Close your eyes," I whispered to him, meaning the gruesome sight of the slaughter in the salon and corridor. "Don't look around, and we shall go to your mammy."
    Here a muffled shot rang out in the distant end of the corridor, supposedly in the kitchen, and the second one that followed the first was doubled and accompanied by a wild short shriek.
    Then on the other side of the salon, I saw the colonel, whose further actions were advisable and quick.
    Having glanced over the lying bodies, he made for me across the hall, stepping over the blood on the floor and the carpet, and while walking he put a bullet in the brain of one gunman who wasn't completely dead in all probability.
    Thank God, I held the child with the back on his daddy in order that he could look at the sky through the breach, not concentrating his attention on the dead bodies and the blood everywhere.
    "He's all right?" asked the colonel, stopping by me and casting a glance at the corpse beside the box-room.
    "Yes, the knife proved useful," I answered.
    "Okay, we can get away. Now it is clear here," the colonel notified me of the results of his inspection.
    I thought it best to refrain from going into details, since, as I knew, he made no distinction between men and women and children in his "clearing".
    "Give me him when I'll be outside and leap to the car," he said, taking a step onto the breast of the body spread supine on the inclined window. "And wipe the shaft properly."
    He laid his hands on the jamb and jumped with the dexterity of an acrobat, his bent knees forward, through the breach outside.
    Willy-nilly, I was forced to step on the same body so as to hand him the child.
    At first, I wiped the shaft with the lapel of its owner and put the knife in his palm, having pressed his fingers to it for fingertips. Then I leapt through the hole and over the hedge at once and landed by the Mazda.
    When his son was in my hands, the colonel sprang over the fence, too, only his heavy body flew over the top of the hedge horizontally and his landing shook the ground.
    The impression was as if a nimble rhinoceros had vaulted swiftly over the fence, and the imperturbability of the colonel enhanced the impression.
    "Take the back seat," the colonel dropped, casting his eye over the empty lanes and the deserted street.
    "No one witnessed it," he added, sitting down at the wheel and closed the tinted windows. "Hi, sonny, cease whining. Your daddy can stick up for you."
    I thought that such a daddy could have bumped off all the chance onlookers as well and stroked my trembling smelly baby hugging me desperately, despite the presence of his father, whom, true, he did not see for some months.
    *
    "What if someone noticed our number?" I asked the colonel when the car turned from the street where we left the carnage of our "cleaning operation" in the havoc of the house.
    "Just now I'm changing it for the third time," the colonel responded to my remark. "Call his mummy, please, and say that we shall be back within half an hour."
    I drew my cell out of the pocket and pressed the needful number in the list.
    "What?" I heard Lucy's voice.
    "He's with us," I told her. "Soon we return, so be ready to wash and feed him."
    "Give me him for a trice," her voice broke.
    "Only you must soothe him," I warned her. "Don't be too effusive."
    I put the phone to the ear of her little son, and he, looking at me in amazement, suddenly pronounced quite distinctly: "Mama".
    After that, I waited for a minute until his tremble stopped and resumed my talk with Lucy.
    "That's enough," I explained to her, "for you, not for him. You need a respite before your meeting. Okay, mummy?"
    "Okay," she murmured.
    "So, bye-bye," I exclaimed and broke the connection.
    "Your ma waits for you, kiddy," I whispered to the babbling moppet. "But you should rest a little."
    "It would be good for her to have a real rest," the colonel entered into conversation. "This evening we depart by the whole caboodle."
    "I shall miss you, old chap," I said to Victor number two. "You're a nice guy."
    "It goes without saying," hemmed the colonel, steering a course for the vista of the noisy big avenue.
    I was, however, quite sincere in expressing my feelings.
    I need hardly say that the clever chappie gained my sympathy yesterday, and that his muscular fearlessness was to my liking as some close affinity between us, yet what happened today seemed to bring out my attitude to him on another level.
    When he flung his arms around my neck, so cowered and miserable, catching at his sole saving in the darkness of the unfamiliar house among some terrible strangers without his mammy and habitual coziness, I felt as if I again held in my arms that dying child in the ambulance, where for the first time, I had experienced all the horror of such a loss.
    But now I wasn't powerless against the fatality, and he wasn't doomed therefore, whatever dangers I had to ward off. Now all threats issued from some external sources, not from his inside, and I could remove them and defense him who entirely depended on our care and our resolution in protecting him from the pitilessness of the real life engendering a lot of freaks and villains.
    Perhaps it was because I unconsciously sought to atone for my then inability to save the helpless kid, and maybe the selflessness of the colonel in that case was explicable by the same thirst for expiation, though, unlike me, he had on his conscience many deeds much more worse that my own cemetery which every surgeon has according to our medical adage. His cemetery was undoubtedly vast and the graves of the children killed by him in his operations constituted its considerable part.
    The colonel was in essence a ruthless unfeeling monster, and as every big predator, he couldn't bear encroaching on his rights in anything; that's why the attempt of extortion attended with the risk of his son's life aroused the cold rage of this professional killer, and there was not a shadow of doubt that he would never have stopped at any slaughter in the solution of his task and in his retribution to those who had set the task by their impudence.
    Massacre was in fact the expression of his superciliousness in respect of all ordinary criminals and the civilian, and I partly shared his attitude to the ordinariness, as I was also such a superman, only ennobled with my vocation intended for saving lives in contradistinction to his killing.
    To tell the truth, I had no desire to consort with him after our acquaintance in that sudden sally abroad and that demolition of the Muslim hamlet, but through some quirks of fate, I again got into the story where the colonel was a key figure.
    Anyway, in the evening, the colonel was supposed to disappear together with his woman and offspring, and thus he involuntarily relieved me of responsibility for them. Nevertheless, I felt no relief from the forthcoming loss, and even with Victor Minor, I didn't want, for some reason, to part. He seemed to become some inalienable part of my love, so it pained me to realize that very soon, I would lose both of them forever, because the colonel was to go into hiding, leaving no trace, and he knew how to cover up his tracks.
    *
    Meantime the tired hungry child drowsed, wrapped in my leather jacket, in my arms, while the car rode among the other cars, moving away from his temporary dungeon to the motherliness of his happy childhood, though in a roundabout way. I gazed at the massive back of the colonel in front of me and thought of his view on our strange relations.
    Although I was definitely singled out by him as his treble savior (by weapon, by blood, by surgery), and with all his insensitivity to common emotions, he felt indebted to me in such a degree that he could probably disobey an order to kill me, my unexpected presence beside Lucy obviously implanted a doubt about its innocence in his mind. I had no notion of his moral standards, yet I was sure that he was indisposed to share anything being in his possession with anyone.
    That is, his possessiveness might originate in his proprietary attitude towards his female, not necessarily in his love or affection for her, and the lot of the one who dared to touch his property would have been very deplorable.
    Apparently, I constituted an exception to the rule, since both our chance meetings and our behavior betraying us by some insignificant nuances looked extremely suspicious, and it was the height of naivety to hope to deceive this professional of investigation. Naturally, he rumbled us with all our dissembling, and if I appertained to a category of "sacred cows" for the hardhearted specialist in murder, Lucy was in for subsequent explanations, which made me feel animosity against the colonel who had the lawful right to punish his infidel helpmate. But I couldn't contend for her, nor could I offer her to elope with me nowhere, especially as she was a mother putting the care of her child in the first place, whereas my life at present boded only trouble.
    At last, the Mazda rolled up to the familiar gate that immediately opened before the car, and a minute later, the colonel parked it in the carport, where Lucy, having gone out of the house through the side door, already waited for us.
    "Here's your sunshine," I said, handing her the tot stretching out his arms from my jacket to his mammy and crying at the top of his voice in her embrace while she smoothed him with kisses.
    "He's safe and sound," I assured Lucy, alighting from the car. "He is simply letting off steam."
    "He's caught it, indeed," the colonel remarked and got out of the car, too.
    The sight of family reunion didn't move him visibly, and he reached for his laptop computer lying on the back seat.
    And when he straightened with the computer in his hands, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by four men whose submachine guns were directed at us.
   
   
    PART FIVE
   
    CHAPTER 13
   
    My first impulse was as ever to rush to meet the danger.
    "Don't!" the cold voice reined in my outburst. "Obey, doc."
    Here we saw the fifth one who was a bit heftier and held a pistol fitted with silencer.
    "Obey the order, doc," said he, and I recognized captain Bob in this fifth.
    The compact submachine guns of the four sturdy guys were also fitted with silencers, and their dark parkas were loose enough to hide their weapon. Their faces were rather inconspicuous, though they had strong features, and their bearing spoke of their belonging to the same military operational service as the department of the colonel.
    The latter very likely knew these guys and their regulations, and he might perchance even accomplish the tasks of some missions with their participation, which accounted for his immediate surrender after he gauged the balance of forces.
    Indeed, in such an encirclement, our counteraction had no other outcome but to be captured with bullet wounds.
    "You know rules," my old friend confirmed my guess at once. "Both lie down with hands behind back. Any attempt-and she will be killed first."
    Lucy froze where she stood, paralyzed with fright, whereupon Vic fell silent.
    Under the barrels of the comrades-in-arms of the colonel, we silently prostrated ourselves by the car, and one of the guys keeping their reasonable distance from us clicked manacles on our wrists.
    This time, true, that did not suffice to guarantee our submissiveness, and two steel collars clicked on our necks in addition, after which they were fastened to the manacles with chains on our backs so that our arms would be a little twisted up.
    Then we were stood on the feet, and Bob motioned to Lucy to go to the open side door.
    "Show us the house," he ordered. "Your son is hostage."
    Notwithstanding this order, the first group that came in the house consisted of two captives and four escorts, while Bob stooped to the comp of the colonel left on the hood.
    In the salon, one of the guys searched us and put my set of throwing blades and the ceramic pistol of the colonel on the coffee table. Thus by the appearance of the hostess, whom the commander of the special team conducted under escort, too, we were completely disarmed.
    "I must wash and feed my child," said Lucy in a pleading tone to Bob. "May I request you not to occupy his room? He needs a day sleep there and such like."
    "The room will be yours," Bob condescended to her supplication, taking our weapon from the table. "But to your tending you'll get down after our settling here. Now show us what you have."
    Having looked over the house, Bob went out of the cabinet to our company without the computer.
    "Let's hold them in the bedroom," he expounded the disposition of the group to his submachine gunners. "One will be at his post by the upstairs rooms; another is responsible for the ground floor. Two of you keep watch at the front gate and at the back wicket, where you must remain unseen. The changing of the guard will be every two hours."
    "You don't come in the cabinet and in the bedroom," he fixed the conditions of Lucy's conduct. "And the door of your room must be open."
    As after obtaining his mammy, Vic grew quiet, watching perplexedly what was going on around, Lucy was also very tractable. She knew well what the colonel was capable of, and so his sudden passive obedience to those who arrested him gave her to understand the extent of the impending danger. Both her son and she were caught in the snare that was set for the colonel; besides, she dragged me down with her in the same snare and couldn't repair anything.
    Meantime one guy already aimed the barrel from above at the colonel, and the three others sent us in a single file upstairs, for the stairs were narrow.
    The bedroom was situated just in front of the stairs, and through the open door, I saw the broad back of the bed, in which we did not manage to make love in the past evening. It was a massive solid wood slab with a crescent slit, and when the guy that handcuffed us pulled out two chains with fetters from under his parka, I realized how they decided to keep us under arrest.
    "I think we should take a leak," I opined, casting a glance at the half-open door of the lavatory.
    "Let them piss in turn," the familiar voice commanded behind our backs. "But fetter them at first and fasten the chains."
    Needless to say, his order was executed, which took fifteen minutes in the aggregate, and soon we were left kneeling and almost hanging by the chains passed through the slit and fastened to the chains of the collars and manacles. Although such metal accoutrements necessitated unzipping our trousers and pulling down our underpants by our guards in order that we could relieve ourselves, they did not jest at us and were watchful as before.
    *
    For a while, we recovered our judiciousness in silence, looking at the guy with the submachine gun on his lap, who was sitting on the chair taken away from the bedroom at the balustrade before the two open doors so that he could see the rooms.
    The guy gazed indifferently at us, and we reciprocated.
    "They are your colleagues, right?" I asked in an undertone.
    I expected the guy to call me to order, yet he did not bat an eyelid.
    "Yes, I happened to fulfill some tasks with them," the colonel answered. "It is clear that her cell was bugged."
    "Do you mean they had been sent from there after your call to her?"
    "Naturally, every action required preparations. Besides, they're informed about the absence of the domestics in the house today and tomorrow. Consequently, she once came under observation, and they arranged a state of emergency for me."
    The colonel paused for comprehending the very fact of his capture, and I thought that he also felt the same strangling heavy coil of an invisible boa constrictor on his neck just as I felt after this immaterial coil materialized into a tangible steel collar squeezing my throat.
    "But why the commanding officer was appointed from the Marines?" the colonel continued his summing. "It is against the rules."
    "It is because he is privy to the scheme of the whole operation," I slightly unveiled the plan of snaring him. "In this plot, they assigned the central role to me, and without captain Bob my role might not be played."
    "That is, your landing here has its prehistory?"
    "I regret to say that I was the starting point of this prehistory, though without knowing."
    "Recount your story, doc, not omitting anything. What might connect you with me?"
    "As far as I understand, my presence was needful for identifying Lucy. Apparently, they were uncertain whether it was she or not and couldn't begin to use her as a bait."
    "Why do you think so?"
    "They resorted twice to one and the same move. When I was forced to start a tussle with some bandits in the street for the first time, it was quite plausible as an accident. Yet, a week later, already abroad, some riffraff seized Lucy before my eyes and tried to rape her, thereby forcing me to come to her rescue."
    "You extricate her from a scrape, and your meeting allows them to make sure of her identity," the colonel noted to himself. "And of course, you left no witness."
    "I couldn't be too meek against three so-called refuges with cold steel."
    "In this way, they verified their supposition and proceeded to the next stage, viz. to the move with kidnapping. As they had set bugs in her telephones when they singled out her as a presumptive candidature, it was easily feasible to decoy me hither. Had their team arrived in the morning, we wouldn't have freed my son."
    Here it occurred to me that during all the time, I was in my leather jacket with a mini GPS tracker in its strap, and yet, being under observation, we could act quite freely. Undoubtedly, Lucy's cell phone was an excellent helper in elucidating the situation, but our quest was also provided by the organizers for gaining time, and just owing to our being occupied with the saving of the kidnapped child, their operation passed without hitch.
    "Well, the scheme is clear," the colonel returned me to reality. "How they hooked you there?"
    "Just that is the crux of the matter. They obviously knew about that incident when I snatched you by a miracle from the jaws of death, so to speak, and they chose me because Lucy trusted me after that story with the spontaneous transfusion and so on. She was very grateful to me for saving you, and I was supposed to remember her and be glad to see her again, unlike her other acquaintances."
    "It is indeed an unerring psychological calculation," the colonel agreed.
    "Then they had to take into account my own psychology for implicating me, and no wonder that they enlisted captain Bob in a cause. He is my erstwhile friend and the best expert in my character. At a rough guess, he was included in their team as an executor of a certain part of the project, and he calculated how I would act in the extreme circumstances. In addition, he could use both his pal-officer and the local military unit for achieving his ends. Thus, in conjunction with your colleagues, he devised this trap for me immediately after my return to the country."
    "Hence, they had let him into some details of the operation," the colonel dropped.
    "So, how all of it happened," I said. "I was walking along the deserted street in the evening and heard pistol's shots. I came into some passage in order to take to my heels, but found myself in a closed courtyard."
    "And it was the only passage in the street."
    "Yes. Then some wounded shaggy guy runs into the yard, plumps down at the wall, and says to me that I am a witness."
    "And thus, you're presented with a fait accompli."
    "What can I do if he runs with bandits in hot pursuit? When two of them appeared, I greeted the first comer with the combat knife of the wounded, felled the second one with his own bat, and armed myself with their PM, as there was a driver outside. For my luck, my firing was more rapid than his AKM, and the instant I was going to liquidate the witness of my feats, it turned out that he was a platoon commander of the Marines with whom I served."
    "It's a good find," the colonel appreciated the inventiveness of the move.
    "After that, I ride with him to the military unit to operate him, and there I meet captain Bob. And when I'm going to leave the unit, someone allegedly informs him by cell phone that the aforementioned bandits has taken the car camcorder from the car and have the video of my firing registered by it. Therefore, I should depart abroad until it is all over with their war against that band."
    "Did somebody receive you here?"
    "Yes. As a result, all the accidental events have joined into the chain, which holds me at present."
    "Now I understand why the marine heads our team," remarked the colonel.
    "Why?"
    "He knows too much about the operation, so those who instructed him won't permit him to go out of the game."
    "Excuse me, I'm a bit stupid. Then what they intend to do with him?"
    "They'll kill him in the end. He isn't admitted to any top secret, but he is a participant of such a secret action that I doubt whether the others will be alive after accomplishing their mission. Judging by the delay, they wait for the arrival of one big shot, and I shall have to tell him what he wants to know. Because your Bob will be present and hear my relation, he is doomed."
    "Why he ought to listen to your conversation?"
    "He will be torturing me, or else my confession won't be convincing enough. Meanwhile, in exchange for my confession, I shall be requesting to spare the lives of my son and his mother."
    "What's about mine?"
    "I cannot console you, doc. You were their means to an end, and now your life is worth nothing. You're simply an unwanted witness, who is subject to liquidation according to the rules. The question is only when you will be removed, and in that case you're powerless to avoid inevitability."
    "Thanks for candor," I hemmed.
    "I'm sorry, doc. You'd saved me, whereas I'd become the reason of your ruin."
    "Your apologies are accepted, colonel," I responded unfriendly to his first inkling of repentance, for I did not believe in his conscientiousness. "But I very doubt that any remorse may mitigate your eternal torments in the hell fire."
    "Hell exists only in this world, doc," declared the colonel. "And I am at home there."
    "I wonder why they hunted for you," I said. "If I must die in any case, I'd like to learn more about the first cause of the maelstrom, in which I went whirling a week ago. Before having been killed, I want to satisfy my curiosity. Anyway, we are to await their activity for some hours, since they had noticed their commander of the successful capture after it, while their big boss is scarcely master of all his time. Most likely, he will take some night flight to visit us, and we can talk to our hearts' content till then, instead of aggravating our dejection by awareness of the irreversibility of the events."
    "Do you want me to tell you why I'd been forced to do a bunk?" the colonel asked gloomily. "I can, of course, confide some of my secrets to you, yet in general outline, because I intend to haggle over the most dangerous ones with the interested party."
    "Please, keep such secrets for a rainy day. I am far from wishing martyrdom, and I shall crack at the first sight of locksmith vice."
    "It's good that you're incognizant of our methods of interrogation, doc. We are able to make instruments of torture of everything and wring a confession out of everybody. The worst of it is that they won't permit you to conk out until you divulge all your secrets."
    "These will be your secrets. As to me, I'll follow you at once. And I don't like to depart this life as a dummy. What a disaster befell you on your service of the cause of peace?"
    "I was an interrogator in one case," the colonel ignored my banter. "I had rather a crank under investigation, and it was a very odd character, since he was one of the cleverest and most dangerous hackers in the world, and for all that, he seemed somewhat otherworldly to me. Our department tried to figure out him during a year and hunted for him for some months, so you can imagine how we treated him after he was locked up at last in the comfortable cell of solitary confinement in our prison. However, he was not in the least worried about his future, although he was threatened with life imprisonment for his deeds."
    "What could he do against your department?" I wondered. "Did he steal someone's credit card data?"
    "I think he would procure money for his idleness in this way. But, as a rule, we don't care a bit about such scamps snitching insignificant sums from bank accounts. It is outside our sphere of action and far from our usual tasks and affairs. Yet this freak loved to break various sites aimlessly, and as a genuine genius, he remained untraceable in his amusement. The problem was that owing to his elusiveness he could sell some important information to some byers, thereby fomenting the fury of belligerents for pleasure. Meanwhile, he could disclose such secret things as technique parameters of weapon to some armed groups of Islamic terrorists and such like, enjoying his impunity in instigation."
    "How did you guess that he existed at all? Such shitters are usually in the habit of changing their comps and location."
    "Yes, indeed, he was invisible to the last, but he conceived a desire to arrange a fray between some Islamic cutthroats and our contingent in the combat zone. After those local insurgents suddenly destroyed our secret convoy with the latest anti-missile complexes, our command required to ascertain how the leakage might happen. In the end, he was traced for the first time, and sooner or later, our net would have had to locate his comp. Further, our counter-intelligence determined the country and the town and began to glean some separate crumbs of useful information until they made up his identikit. Because such a prodigy had outstanding abilities from youth, the details of his appearance enabled to identify him among the most advanced talents. After that, his fate was decided, and to catch him was only the matter of time. When such an immense mechanism as our system gets down to sifting all the available material, in the residue we always have grains of gold. In short, he was detained and imprisoned, and I was appointed to investigate his case. Thus, I was obliged to dig out the truth in every episode of his activities, while he tried to conceal what he could, and there was nothing extraordinary in my everyday work, excepting his very personality, for I never met anybody like him. He supposedly penetrated many inaccessible secret sites and servers, and my task consisted in pumping him for information so widely, thoroughly, and gradually that he, endeavoring to hide one secret, would let out another inadvertently. Our department has its own sophisticated technologies for that, and I have a good command of all of them, so I little by little accumulated the facts and trifles slipping out of his mouth incidentally in our conversations. At first, he should have spoken out as much as possible without violence, and only then, I intended to set about wringing frankness out of him by means of electrodes and intimidation."
    Here some associative recollections emerged in my memory, because I happened to see certain consequences of such methods of interrogation in my practice in the war hospitals, and I wouldn't say that the sight of someone's scrotum burnt through with the aforementioned electrodes gratified the eye. Considering that the colonel already made himself disliked earlier, my hostility to him grew rather embittered now. From childhood, I did not love those who tormented cats or dogs, and it never entered my head that my retribution often surpassed their sadism in cruelty. The colonel sort of reflected me in the distorted mirror of his imperturbable ruthlessness, and this reflection showed my nature in the very unattractive aspect.
    "Then I once detected his excessive reticence about one zone of his spectrum of actions," the colonel resumed his narration. "Therefore, I began to sap trenches to this zone from every side in order to circumscribe the boundary of the restricted area and collate my surmises with the technical material and available facts. And I eventually winnowed what he concealed from what he brought forward as a screen, after which I got the outline of his innermost secret and hints for the sphere of the secrecy. Yet the son of bitch apparently foresaw such probability and underwent blocking his consciousness by hypnosis so as to resist examinations on this subject."
    "How is that possible?" I asked perplexedly. "What, he couldn't remember some events or things?"
    "No, he could, but only when his comp reminded him of his mental cache at the appointed time. He had a certain key as a reminder, and thus he controlled his intricate system. He was an incredibly cunning subject, and he lived entirely in his computer game, comprehending the reality as a part of his adventures on his display. As a matter of fact, he played at killing for art's sake and never felt guilty of murder; quite the opposite, he was proud of his backstage organization of such catastrophes. He liked his omnipotence as some invisible agency acting in the Internet, and his blocking the forbidden sector of his memory might be explained by the extreme danger of his knowledge that he had as a result of his incidental breaking of someone's secrets. I did not know about that until my night examination with a preliminary injection of special drug, and I simply wanted to unseal this zone in his consciousness if I succeeded in it."
    "Do you have a command of techniques of suggestion?"
    "It is my profession, doc, to extract information by fair means or foul. This time my task was to induce him to reveal what he hid behind the wall of his artificial taboo, so I had to act in the direction of delivering him from his fear of divulgation. I'll avoid going into details and begin with making rapport. Because the content of his revelation might be very secretive, I was bringing him to hypnotic state in our special interrogation room, completely isolated and fitted for continuous recording-both audio and video. As there wasn't any one-way mirror for observation in the room, my client did not feel anyone's presence, and I could conduce to his speaking out without hindrance. It took pretty much time to get him talking in his somnambulism, while I hypnotized him, naturally, in the evening, and the department was deserted by then, except some of the offices and the guards. So, I asked questions to him, and he answered me more and more loquaciously, until I unlocked his blocking by a casual key. Then his relation got coherent, and I only had to direct it sometimes, intending to analyze the recording subsequently.
    "As it turned out, he managed to penetrate some top-secret site and open the files of someone's archive dossier, thereby having opened by chance the data of one very high-ranking military functionary. I shan't say to you who it is, but at present, he is a man of such influence that every prudent hacker would have instantly closed this source of information and never mentioned its existence. Nonetheless, our motherfucker yielded to temptation of omniscience, and besides, there were codes on access to secret bank accounts in those files, with tidy sums and with some extremely compromising documents appended to this evidence of backstage enrichment. Unfortunately, I learnt whose files he opened and what was there later than I provoked him to show me the very codes."
    "How's that to show?"
    "He was typing the codes on the table that was his imaginary keyboard, while I was reading them by the movements of his fingers."
    "But it is too quickly for reading."
    "Yes, it was quickly enough, however as a professional, I coped with it and remember all the combinations of figures and letters. It was particularly important because the cameras couldn't record his typing from above and nobody but me saw what he did on the table. Thus, I became a repository of his dangerous secrets, and soon I was to know the degree of their danger."
    "I don't understand," I interrupted the colonel. "What danger might be to you in his information?"
    "You forget, doc, where we were talking. Although no one listened to us, our conversation was being recorded. Meanwhile, he confessed, too, that he decided not only to preserve this bank treasury available to his appropriating partly or wholly if need be, but also to secure himself against detecting his presence in that archive. He devised a system of interrelations, which he must have updated at times when his comp would remind him of the expiry of a certain term, and in the case that he wouldn't do it, all the information would be simultaneously sent by the system to hundreds of sites in order to ruin a lot of reputations."
    "He is a consummate psychopath," I diagnosed.
    "He was crazy about his omnipotence, and he prepared a global explosion if he was caught. While telling me about his device he typed both the codes and passwords on the entry in his system mechanically, and I remembered them, too. As I had received the keys to his secrets and unblocked his memory, I turned to concretizing the content of the files found by him in the Internet, and he willingly unbosomed himself to me. I should have stopped him immediately he mentioned our nuclear weapons, but then he wouldn't have reverted to his state of automatic sincerity. To put it shortly, he blundered upon the fact of treason; or rather, it was the treason of the whole group of the officers. You are too young, doc, to remember that time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that treaty of nuclear disarmament hardly signifies anything for you."
    "That's right," I confirmed my ignorance.
    "According to that treaty, the soviet party liquidated one class of our intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, while the American party was bound to remove and utilize them in United States at its own expense."
    "The terms are strange enough, I'd say," I raised an eyebrow.
    "That was allegedly their aid to us. Anyway, the missiles were brought out in secret, yet as it appeared from the opened files, together with them our magnanimous partners took many other nuclear warheads from our "atomic shield" to boot. It was organized, of course, for individual payment and on the State level, not as a private initiative, and the scale of our real disarmament was much larger than we could have imagined."
    "To tell the truth, I cannot imagine even the very probability of selling the country in such a way," I couldn't but resent. "It is not enough that these corrupt swindlers in authority appropriated what they wanted, embezzling the rest everywhere, but they contrived to have feathered their nests by surrendering the chief weapons of their defensive capacity to their purported enemy."
    "They were peace campaigners then, and declared that they were stopping the arm race," the colonel reacted to my indignation. "As you see, their struggle for peace was not disinterested, but then first of all they needed possibilities of transferring their future capitals abroad and legalizing their admission to the western banks system. Meanwhile, their own soviet system was condemned by them to disintegrating and looting."
    "If you understood these things then, I wonder why you continued to serve."
    "Firstly, I had no time to think of their goings-on in those years; secondly, I was also too young and too ambitious to think of anything save my military career. And when I was flabbergasted by such unexpected knowledge, the whole picture of bluffing and imitating during a quarter of century rose before my eyes. As you know, the Army keeps all the nuclear warheads in special arsenals, and seeing that the nuclear test ban treaty is valid from then till now, it is quite real that there are common heads instead of atomic ones there."
    "That's why the bosses in the so-called enemy's camp don't fear their ostentatious sabre-rattling and atomic threats," I commented on his supposition.
    "Most likely, they always coordinate their politics with those bosses under cover of their empty threats," the colonel observed. "However, listening to his monotonous account, I was absorbed in squeezing confession from him and had not a moment for reflecting on his speeches. Withal I was all tensed up, for I kept the succession of the movements of his fingers in mind, substituting some letters and figures of the imaginary keyboard for his instinctive manipulations. And just by reason of my utmost concentration, I missed out one most important phrase, which I had no right to permit him to pronounce."
    "What it was?"
    "It was a name. Among other things, this asshole called the name of the owner of those accounts, who figured in that dossier as one of the organizers of undermining the war potential from self-interest. Only then, I realized that I made a mistake, and the terrible danger of the situation struck me at last."
    "Why on earth the situation suddenly grew dangerous?"
    "Remember where I served, doc. All that sounded in the room was recorded, and by ten hours in the morning tomorrow, the recording of our talk was supposed to lie on the table of our chief as the regulations said. For me it was tantamount to sentence of death, and I would have been arrested when reporting of the results of my work."
    "Why so?"
    "The name belonged to one highest functionary. As he acted in conjunction with his associates in crime, had this crime received publicity, he would have been subject to immediate liquidation as a weak point of the system of their invulnerability."
    "I don't believe that anything threats them even if the affair leaks out."
    "Their prosperity at the present time is based on their collective guarantee, and besides, there are those who paid them for their venality in the world, so in these circles no one can risk and hope on someone's vow of silence. Certainly, after my report of the interrogation, the breach in the Internet would have been closed thanks to the codes, and yet, I remained a bearer of this leakage of information, whereas the very information was quite adequate by its destructiveness to nuclear weapons. It was absolutely clear to me that tomorrow my chief would notify that big boss of the unmasking penetration in his Holy of Holies or remove all the discreditable materials, and either of the variants implied liquidating those two possessors of the forbidden knowledge whom such a secret made two swords of Damocles hanging over the present life of that high-ranking spoiler. I weighed the consequences and my chances after he unconsciously confided his secret to me, and my conclusion was not comforting."
    "And so you began to act," I interjected.
    "Yes, I was forced to act, since the time I had was very limited. I put this "mother-hacker" to sleep and went to my office for a while, having left the guard to stand sentinel over the interrogation room. Out of my safe, I took my protected laptop comp and checked all the combinations that I bore in mind on its real keyboard. After correcting some details, the display seconded his words with the objective reality, and out of my writing table, I took a fountain pen, which I usually carried with me when I couldn't use firearm. The pen might be used for an imperceptible jab of a tiny poisoned needle, which entailed the sudden cardiac death six hours later without a vestige of poison. Having returned to the room, I jabbed the curious idiot in passing, woke him, and ordered the convoy to lead him to the prison. I spent the next half an hour for visiting one room more, where I had admittance with my individual magnetic card, and for taking needful things in my office. After that, I left my department forever, carrying away both my comp and the hard disk with the secret program, not to mention other papers and appliances useful in my escape. During about an hour, I parted with my flat, and throughout the night, my car was racing westward to the border, to one point through which I could get unimpeded out of the country, as I did it before. The rest is not very interesting, and although I understood that the kidnapping was a trap, I hoped I would manage to find my kid and disappear with all my family earlier than their team would have arrived."
    "By mischance, you hadn't enough time to vanish into thin air," I said. "And this miscalculation will cost us too dear."
    "Well, doc, it is my fault. If you feel better from my repentance, I would tear my hair without these shackles."
    "Were you without shackles, colonel, you would tear your colleagues, not your hair. And I would help you. Instead of this, we must wait for that big plunderer who will have whitened himself before his accomplices by bumping off all the ones having the misfortune to learn of his meanness. It offends my sense of justice."
    "I share your sense of injured innocence, doc," the colonel joked. "But for him you are expandable material and inevitable victims. As an elite government official, he has strong views on the subject of the true worth of the others."
    "Thus you may become an inveterate freethinker, colonel," I supported his gallows humor. "By the by, that archive was really a bomb?"
    "Otherwise I wouldn't keep it at hand as insurance, doc, and close the entry by myself. Luckily, I had some former hiding places in Europe, and they would never have found me if it were not for my darling, whose identification was fateful for both of us. And as it follows from your unexpected adventures, you were the clue to that."
    "I am sorry. My involuntary complicity will be duly requited as far as I can judge."
    "If I were alone, doc, I would die in silence, because after my death, the starting of the system of simultaneous messages would trigger off the process of destructing the life of this scoundrel. But now I have to try to save her and our son at any rate."
    "In other words, you must hand over all your codes and hopes for your prevarication? What if he obliterates the access to the site at once?"
    "Perhaps he will release them before receiving this information," sighed the colonel hardly believing in the happy end of his meeting with one of the cruelest predators in the animal kingdom of officialdom.
   
    CHAPTER 14
   
    The guy lolling in the chair in front of us by the banisters stood up, and I thought he was going to relieve the sentinel on the outside, but he stepped into our room and put on the electric light, as it was getting dark behind the window.
    We heard someone's steps on the stairs, and at once my old friend Bob, former captain and present major, appeared before us, accompanied by the second home guard.
    "It is time to have a talk with you, colonel," Bob proclaimed. "I must convey somebody's greetings to you in private."
    "Don't be shy," the colonel encouraged him unconcernedly.
    "Take him," Bob ordered the two members of his team, drawing out his pistol. "Lead him down to me and wait beside. But keep both the rooms under observation from there."
    The guys unfastened the chains of the colonel and set him on his feet. Yet they were forced to hold him, because he couldn't stand after the hours he passed on his knees.
    "I see, you feel shaky today, colonel," Bob marked. "Let's agree not to tempt fate. I shan't kill you until the arrival of our guest in any case."
    "I appreciate your charity," the colonel thanked him, trying to keep his feet.
    "As to you," said Bob to the right, apparently to Lucy standing in the doorway of her child room, "don't cross the threshold, or else they will shoot. Come on, chaps, I'll be behind."
    The guys started lugging the colonel downstairs without ceremony, while Bob followed them with his gun in spite of the helplessness of his captive maybe malingering powerlessness.
    And almost immediately, Lucy's voice sounded from the neighboring room.
    "Do you hear me, Vic?" Lucy asked in an undertone.
    "Yes, I do," I answered in a low voice.
    "Excuse me, Vic," said she.
    "You don't have to apologize," I cheered up her. "Everybody may have a run of bad luck."
    "I ask you pardon for another reason. He probably told you his story, didn't he?"
    "Yes, in our deplorable conditions, we wanted to while away the empty hours. True his story is very distressing for us."
    "Are we doomed to die?"
    "Most likely," I considered it inexpedient to equivocate. "Otherwise I wouldn't hasten to become his confidant."
    "That's what I thought. I decided therefore to say something to you."
    "Is it something pleasing?"
    "I am afraid that it depends on the circumstances. Anyway, I evidently have the last opportunity to talk with you."
    "Here you're right. Speak while we are alone."
    "I wasn't perfectly honest with you, Vic," confessed Lucy penitentially.
    "Do you mean your love?"
    "Yes, it is in a sense my love if you like. I hid one thing from you, and now you must know about it."
    "I must know because I am to die? Do you intend to reveal some secret to me?"
    "I'd never load you with this secret, for you love freedom."
    "Maybe, I love you, too."
    "In this matter I couldn't rely on "maybe". And so I deceived you for the sake of my secret."
    "You've said so much already that I shall venture to guess your riddle," I said. "Your secret goes under the name of Victor?"
    "You've guessed," Lucy pronounced barely audibly. "He's your son."
    "Eh? Probably you hope to encourage me before my violent death?" I supposed, having not the slightest doubt about the truth opened by her.
    "No, I hope only for a marvel. If the colonel fails to save his son, they will kill both my boy and me."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Such are their rules. They'll kill us for a certainty."
    And here the sudden powerless rage that surged within me like the boiling lava of an explosive volcanic eruption seemed to displace some locked gear in my brain, as though the desperateness of her words just brought this bright idea home to me.
    "Say, where are the blades that I gave you in the yard?" I remembered.
    "Do you mean the blades, which I was throwing?" Lucy asked hurriedly. "Wait, let me remember. If I don't mistake, one of them was in my hand when I went upstairs to his room to take his cloths after your call... Yes, I have found it under his things. What's further?"
    "Listen to me, Lucy, and think. We have the only chance if we succeed in this wile. You must get in the cabinet and lay the blade unnoticeably under one of the armchairs. Is it possible?"
    "I'll go with Victor and hide the blade between his two diapers," Lucy instantly collected herself.
    "What can be your cause for a visit?"
    "I shall promise their commander to give myself to him if he releases me with my son in the end of the operation. It's okay?"
    "Okay. It is a good cause indeed."
    "And I shall endeavor to be very convincing in my promise. Judging by the situation, my chastity won't suffer until the beginning of the investigation."
    "They are waiting for the arrival of some nob from our establishment, and they will refrain from violating you till then because you are their instrument to nip his stubbornness in the bud, as well as your son. But when they set to eliciting the secrets from the colonel, you will be used as a victim in order to pressurize him into laying bare all his dangerous knowledge."
    "All right, I'll do what you request. Perhaps you will save us for the third time."
    "If you cope with your task, I have a chance to cope with mine."
    "Then I go to wake our sonny," Lucy ended our heart-to-heart talk.
    Actually, there was not a chance but a hundredth of a chance in my plan, yet even that was anything, and I began to stir my numbed limbs so as to feel them again, for just on the success of limbering up my calculation was founded.
    *
    Meantime the same guys dragged the colonel upstairs back to the bedroom under the supervision of their vigilant commander with his gun at the ready. The colonel was again fastened to the massive back of the bed beside me, and Bob recommended him in conclusion with his usual hard impassiveness:
    "So you have enough time for meditation. Or else blame yourself for everything."
    As Bob went out of the room, I heard Lucy's voice calling to him.
    "What's the matter?" Bob asked evenly.
    "May I also have a talk with you?" Lucy asked in her turn. "I mean tete-a-tete."
    "Do you want to talk right now?"
    "Yes, if you agree."
    "Good, descend to me after a while."
    Bob went downstairs, and I understood why he does not return to his headquarters in her company. He bewares lest she remains without the double control even for a trice, and he waits till the second guard takes his post again. Undoubtedly, his war experience taught him to distrust the weaker sex.
    The general silence lasted until the guards took their initial positions and Lucy disappeared with Vic in her arms under the stairs.
    "What's the news?" I broke the silence.
    "It might be better," the colonel said dejectedly. "Your crony gave me to know that the term of the forthcoming examination will be very short, and that he is obliged to limit himself to half an hour. Thus I haven't time to haggle."
    "Why so?"
    "The shortened exam differs from the common one, doc. When time presses, the interrogator cannot be too scrupulous."
    "And what he proposes to do in this half an hour, the concrete interrogator?"
    "He will be forcing me to give the codes of that fucking important person by means of various atrocities. As he had got the order to procure this information at all costs, he notified me of his intentions. For lack of time, he intends to torture Lucy and Vic."
    "He is capable of tormenting a baby?"
    "Who is not capable among us, doc," dropped the colonel. "The rules of our service are hard and fast, as you know. To all probability, God punishes me in such a way."
    "I'd never think that you believe in God, colonel."
    "I don't, doc, but he requites me like for like for my former deeds. And now I must choose between their horrible suffering and their death."
    "You know what, colonel," I said dryly. "Although I am a humanist, I can't show compassion to your feelings."
    "I hardly need anyone's compassion," the colonel muttered through the teeth in reply to my defiance obviously not wounded his sensitivity. "I need only a minute of freedom."
    After I saw what the colonel could do for some seconds, I did not doubt that a minute would have sufficed for him to tear all the team to pieces. But regretfully, he hadn't such a minute without which the problem defied solution.
    Meanwhile, I endeavored as before to recover the lost sensitivity of my limbs, since my body was the sole instrument of my rescue attempt, and it must have been acting unerringly in every moment. For the time being, my endeavor was not rewarded with any perceptible changes, and I began to remember all the muscles consecutively from the fingers and toes upwards in mind, straining them mentally if not physically, because I had to be prepared to the start of my plan. That's why I was entirely concentrated on my active introspection, stirring every muscle until I felt pins and needles in it and not resuming my conversation with the colonel who fell into a brown study, too.
    About ten minutes later, I heard the familiar woman's voice in the salon.
    "Say to me, Vic, where is your room?" Lucy edified her sonny, going upstairs. "On the left or on the right is it? Yes, it is indeed on the right, where you have your right hand when facing it. Understand me, Vic?"
    Having cast a fleeting glance at us, Lucy proceeded to the second doorway of the floor and came with her son in the room.
    I knew two things now: the laying of her blade passed successfully, and the blade was laid under the right armchair before the writing table. Thus, the first stage of my almost unrealizable plan was gone just as it had been conceived by me.
    "Nothing succeeds like success," I said to myself, continuing to revive muscle after muscle under the cold impassive look of the sitting guy with submachine gun.
    Ever since I was bemused by Lucy's truth and the idea of the last attempt dawned upon me, I could not think of anything, excepting my concrete actions for preparing for this attempt, as from then, I did my utmost to overcome all the obstacles on this road.
    Time was going, whereas I was struggling inwardly with my numbness for the survival of my beloved and son, which completely depended on me. I never thought that the struggle for the state of my own body might be so hard and cruel, but it was just so, and it took forty minutes at least, for my wristwatch was behind my back, and I couldn't see the course of time.
    To cut a long story short, my relentless efforts were crowned with relative success, and I decided not to shelve the fulfillment of my plan any longer.
    "Hey, buddy!" I turned to our watchman. "I'd like to say a few words to your commander."
    "Why do you think that he should hear these words?" he asked lazily.
    "We served together formerly," I grounded my wish. "I shan't request too much, believe me."
    "Well, I'll call him," the guy yielded and dropped down to his comrade:
    "Tell the major the doctor wants to see him."
    Soon major Bob already stood before me.
    "What, doc, do you suffer from insomnia?" he inquired.
    "Your guess is near the truth," I said. "There's a question gathered within me, and I expect you to resolve my doubts."
    "You're a funny subject, doc," Bob characterized my conduct. "But lucky for you I have plenty of time to spare at present. What question disturbs your sleep?"
    "I feel uncomfortable about considering such a delicate question so publicly," I explained my bashfulness. "Possibly I don't deserve such condescension; however, I venture to express the wish for some more confidential atmosphere."
    "You'll remain scoffer even in Hell," Bob appreciated my intrepidity. "Okay, doc, I'll order to lead you to me for confabulation."
    "Order, please, to escort me to the loo as well. It would be ingratitude to wet your furniture."
    "It's good that you are so farsighted, doc."
    Then Bob left me and ordered his two subordinates to attend to my needs. While they unfastened me, dragged me to the lavatory to urinate, and lugged down to the cabinet, Bob stood leaning against the banisters with his tough bum and watched their actions.
    It must be said, what he saw wasn't quite true, considering that I used every movement for limbering up, hanging deliberately on the strong arms of the attendants to stretch myself and relax my body. But when they held me shifting from one foot to the other and going limp on my bending legs, they suspected nothing like Bob, as no one knew what was purpose in trying futilely to stand on my feet.
    *
    In the cabinet, I had a windfall, so to speak, and very unexpectedly.
    In view of my professed instability, the guys threw me into one of the two armchairs to wait for the major, and the guard of the second floor went away to change the commander, while the number first lingered at the open door, keeping an eye on me.
    As my hands were pulled up to the scapulae, I could lower them a little only when I subsided into the armchair. Naturally, I sprawled lopsidedly, worn to a frazzle outwardly, and loosened my right shoulder as far as possible in the slackened chains. Incidentally, I marked the end of the blade under the armchair opposite mine, for it was partly visible to the one who was in my place.
    Although I was still far from fighting trim, I already had the use of my body, and my muscles answered to reflexes comparatively adequately. I did all in my power for restoring my former condition and intended to procrastinate with the forthcoming conversation to the last, dilating on every subject and expatiating on every occasion.
    "Return to the post," Bob commanded, appearing in the doorway. "Come on, doc, lodge your objection."
    "There is no sense in my objection against arbitrariness when I am unarmed and the shackles of conventions don't permit me to be sincere," I riposted.
    "Then what do you want?" Bob asked, settling himself in the office armchair behind the writing table with the desk computer and the colonel's laptop.
    "It may seem ridiculous to you, but I want the truth," I answered, not ceasing doing the same insignificant manipulations loosening my shoulders.
    "Who doesn't want the truth, doc? The question is what you denote by this term."
    Judging by everything, Bob was disposed to beguile some of the time with a natter for want of any other amusements, and that served my purpose excellently.
    "The colonel told me about some secrets, which he must disclose to some big shot," I said. "By his words, you wait for appearing this nob in person."
    "He didn't lie to you," Bob remarked.
    "He also said that I am simply a chance bystander in this story and that I might be released in essence if I forgot who-what-where. I thought I had better disappear before the arrival of that person in order to avoid knowing any unnecessary things."
    "Alas, doc, truth is not so cloudless," Bob crossed my innuendoes.
    "Why? What clouds it?"
    "Your problem is that all of us are subject to the rules of procedure," Bob enlightened me. "You are a witness to the things, which are too secret for you, and so you must die. As you want to hear the truth, I will be plain with you. You will die, doc, for this is laid down in the regulations."
    "The colonel hinted at such an issue," I observed. "Properly speaking, that's just the reason for my appeal."
    "Do you fear death?"
    "That depends. But I hate a passive wait for death. I am not a lamb for slaughter; I am a fighter, after all."
    "I wonder what death you would choose, doc, if it were within your power."
    "I'd like to die as a Viking in some battle, implying that subsequently I would wassail eternally in the Valhalla as a real warrior and eat my favorite roast meat."
    "This picture made my mouth water, doc, yet I cannot present you any battle. So you are to wait till the end of the investigation and to die together with the others."
    "I didn't catch your meaning," I said, visibly surprised. "Who are these others?"
    "It is your chick in particular," Bob unmasked me. "If the colonel were less important to us, I'd play such rivals off against one another and hold the stakes."
    "Are you going to kill her?" I asked, staggered (professedly, of course, as before). "What will her baby do after her death?"
    "I am afraid she will survive him," Bob comforted me. "Unlike them, for you the colonel feels no affection, which considerably alleviates your lot."
    "It is comforting to know that I'm ineligible for stopping his tergiversations. The topic hasn't changed, though. I don't want to die inactively."
    "Don't think that you are live till now owing to my protection. Simply, as a rotting corpse, you would make trouble for us, so you are allowed to idle for some time."
    "Yes, it is really the truth!" I exclaimed ironically. "Thus, my worst misgivings came true, and I shan't escape death, but may I ask you a favor at least?"
    "What favor do you mean?"
    "I mean your fight with me," I played my trump card.
    "Huh... Do you say it earnestly, doc?"
    "It is my only desire in the present situation. Firstly, I shall again become myself for some seconds and chance my arm; secondly, I prefer your sudden blow to any causes of my death."
    "I understand you, doc," Bob said, thinking about my offer that was not extraordinary for such a man of action, whose state of mind had a close similarity to his own in the same plight.
    "Besides, I'll try to do my best and attack you more or less successfully. Ultimately, everyone has his chance in a single-combat."
    "Your megalomania is commendable, doc, but you are deprived of this chance."
    "Who knows," I threw down a challenge by my tone. "I might advance in skill in the last years, and I am agiler than you are."
    "It won't be a competition, doc," Bob warned me. "It is a real combat without rules."
    "That suites me, as after being chained up, I've lost the needful coordination for correct holds."
    "I'd say that you are a suicide, doc, if it weren't so inappropriate."
    Bob indisputably liked the very idea to fight with me, all the more because I was now in the same category of "dummies" as those criminal prisoners on whom he would hone his techniques of the aforementioned "real combat", since their supreme penalty made them the suitable material for such fights. It was clear as mud that he could kill me when he saw fit, and that he was at liberty to do as he wished with impunity, while I was spoiling for a fight. By bidding defiance to his combat omnipotence, I put this temptation before him so that he would realize all the advantage of his position, and because he did not risk anything, the temptation turned out too strong.
    "Okay, doc," Bob concluded, pulling out the central drawer of the writing table. "If you assert that you're able to withstand me, I'll give you a chance."
    Then Bob drew out his pistol together with his combat knife and put them in the drawer.
    "I shan't kill you until the end, or else you presence will be excessively onerous, but I promise to knock you down a peg and mutilate you a bit for your impertinence."
    "I'll reply with action," I fanned the flame. "Without chains I am more impressive as an interlocutor."
    Bob came to the open door and closed it, after which he made for my armchair, bent to my fetters, and unlocked them with a tiny key.
    I willingly turned my back on him, and he unclasped the hoop on my neck and unfastened the manacles.
    At last, I was free, though my freedom was very relative in the room with the thug belonging to the highest elite of the professional fighters. Needless to say, I never dreamt of hand-to-hand fighting with him, and I had no illusions about winning against all the odds, yet during two years I trained with him as his sparring-partner and studied his usual combinations by heart. Now I was going to apply this knowledge and avail myself of this experience.
    Bob carried away my bonds to his weapon and slid the drawer into place. I got up and stood so that the right armchair would be behind my back, and he moved from the table behind the left armchair while I was swinging my arms to show limbering up before the mortal combat.
    "Are you ready, doc?" Bob prefaced his mutilating with solicitude about my due resistance, taking up his position in the space between the armchairs. "May I defend myself already?"
    It was his specific humor, and I reacted therefore to his sudden kick in the next moment.
    After that, my body acted by itself, since his first series was swift as lightning and I hardly dodged the final blow by which he knocked me down. Had his fist hit my face more accurately, I would have been really stunned and unable to feign a knockdown.
    "All right, doc, you're still quick enough," Bob approved my actions.
    "I am unsure if it is so," I mumbled, leaning on my right hand behind my back under the armchair, for I fell on its very edge. "Do you mind if I rise on the feet?"
    "Rise, please, doc," Bob hemmed, stepping back, and just then I felt the steel of the blade under my palm.
    "Excuse my weakness," I muttered faintly, rising on my knees with my right hand by the hip of the right side that Bob did not see. "Soon I shall recover."
    Although Bob looked at me, he was a little diagonally on the left by the opposite armchair, and my hand with the blade was covered with my body from his eyes.
    The only forte in which I surpassed him was rapidity, and all my calculation was built on it.
    As soon as I reached the pose of genuflection, I sharply threw the blade from the hip in a fraction of a second and with all might.
    My sudden movement of a straitening spring was so swift that Bob did not recoil when the blade cut into his throat.
    As the blade came in almost wholly, the effect was predictable. Bob tried to fling his arms, but in vain, and instead of any voice the blood spilt out of his mouth. The expression of the greatest perplexity appeared on his face when his brain realized that he is killed, and at once, his eyes got glazed, whereas I hastened to support his limp heavy body and lay it on the floor.
    "Everyone has his chance, captain," I whispered, watching the last twitching of his breathless flesh.
    Only then, I unexpectedly felt how I hated him, this potential murderer of my little son.
    *
    However, my success was only the beginning of the affair, and I should have thought of my further steps, not of some dead body.
    I took the pistol and knife of the killed marine out of the drawer, checked the readiness of my firearm for firing, and slightly opened the door.
    The guard of the ground floor was sitting on the divan in the salon, his submachine gun lying beside, and I had an ideal target before me. But after my first shot, even with the silencer, I myself would have become a target for the gun of the second guard firing from above down. Besides, before our duel, he might kill Lucy and our baby, and the very duel looked too unequal.
    Thus, I had to kill that guy first while he was there by the banisters in front of the upstairs rooms and I could hit him from beneath. As he was a professional, I had a second at most for my shot upwards, and then I was to fight against this guard.
    I remembered those two who stood sentry in the courtyard and thought that at present on one scale of my choice was the whole country, whereas on another scale was my little Vic, as after killing the rest of the team, my fate would be decided. I couldn't say whether it did me honor, yet I chose without the slightest hesitation.
    "How many foes can you kill for his sake?" my fighter's "self" asked my surgeon's "self".
    And the latter replied with a Latin formula of prescriptions, "Quantum satis."
    On reflection, I stepped to the corpse, unbuckled the belt of its trousers, and took off the sheath without which the knife was dangerous for me as well. I girded my sword and noiselessly sent the first cartridge from the magazine into the barrel.
    The visible guard was about five-six steps from me, so I should have fired until our collision and hit it at the first shot. Luckily, I had recovered the rapidity of my reflexes by now and the guy was of my weight.
    "Quantum satis," I repeated to myself. "Come on!"
    Suddenly as a bullet, I bounced out of the cabinet and fired exactly in the middle of my dash.
    Notwithstanding the swiftness of my movement, I aimed at the head and hit the target. But next instant a kick of a heavy boot knocked the pistol out of my hand, while I went bump into the breast covered with bulletproof vest and pushed the guy off the divan.
    We leapt to our feet both at once, only he managed to pick up his submachine gun in contradistinction to me, because my pistol fell too far and was beyond reach.
    Instantaneously, I pitched into him to prevent his shot, and he suddenly flew back, as though he was thrown back by an explosion.
    Earlier than he slumped to the floor, I was on him with my combat knife that I drew out the sheath, and I thrust the knife right into his face.
    Having split the face between his eyes, the blade knocked against the bones of his skull, and his body shuddered in death agony.
    Then, at last, I looked at the balustrade and saw Lucy with the submachine gun, the shot of which I did not hear because of its silencer.
    "Thank you for help," I said, still not believing in such a successful outcome. "You should aim at the head."
    "I know," she said, gazing at me in amazement. "But I feared to miss. What has come of your idea with that blade?"
    "All came right in the end-I didn't miss either," I answered. "Wait a bit-I'll take the key for the colonel."
    "You're an incredibly lucky man, Vic," she slurred with a short sob. "You saved us once again."
    "Don't hurry to weep, since the affair must be ended," I soothed her in passing and made for the corpse of my quondam friend to take the key.
    *
    The colonel greeted me with his usual sang-froid.
    "Describe shortly how you could cope with it," he inquired while I unfastened his chains and manacles. "It is beyond my grasp."
    "It was difficult but realizable," I began my explanation. "I had remembered that I left some throwing blades for Lucy, and she found one of them. While her visit to the major with Vic she put the blade under the armchair. For my part, I convinced my old friend to do me a favor and kill me in a single-combat instead of keeping chained to the rock as Prometheus till my inevitable demise. As his techniques of fighting were familiar to me, I caught a moment when I could use the blade. Then I took his pistol and shot one of his men, whereas Lucy helped me to get another with the knife of my poor captain Bob."
    "With such luck, doc, you can play Russian roulette," the colonel commented on my true narration. "I hope you took his cell phone, too."
    "Yes, of course."
    "Give me it and let's solve the problem with the rest. I need some time for restoring, and it falls to your lot therefore to remove those two sentinels. You will be forced to shoot in the semidarkness and at the head, so you may choose between pistol and submachine gun."
    "I prefer the latter because it has a butt," I chose, being unsure of my toughness after the trials experienced together with my companion in adversity. "If I am not mistaken, there is a small window in the bathroom."
    "Yes, it looks onto the yard at the back of the house," Lucy added details.
    "Consequently the rear wicket is visible from there?"
    "You must shoot when you hear the noise of some car before the front gate," the colonel instructed me. "Your gun has a silencer, yet he may utter a sound which will alarm the second one. At first, doc, let your eyes get used to the darkness and discern the target, and then shoot twice at the head. I shall be covering the second guard at this time, but I am still incapable of firing properly. Therefore, when you are through with the first, come to the front door, and we'll decide what you do further."
    "I got you," I said. "I need the darkness in the bathroom, so I'll turn off the light in the salon. Now I go to finish the work."
    Indeed, I could hardly find the dark figure in the corner of the two fences through the small window, and the very window was located so high that I had to stand on the bathtub before opening it.
    As the guy reacted, of course, to the slightest changes around, I opened the sole hinged leaf very slowly, because the pane might reflect some dim light from the outside, which would have drawn attention to the window by its quick disappearance.
    Looking at my target from the inner darkness, I waited for his possible peering at the suspicious blackness of the embrasure of the rear wall, but the sitting silhouette did not stir, and I raised the submachine gun to the square loophole, pressing its short plastic butt against my shoulder.
    "Quantum satis," I thought, listening to the street sounds in the local stillness, and then I heard the remote purring of the engine of the approaching car.
    As soon as the purring growing louder reached the front gate, I put two bullets through the dark outline of the head one after another without interval.
    Since I already saw what striking force the bullet had, it was of no importance where the bullets hit the sentinel in his head, for in any case the head would be shattered.
    My shots were both accurate, and their muffled pops drowned a soft bang of the bursting skull, however the shadow of the dark body in the corner changed, having remained motionless as before.
    Some seconds later, I was in the anteroom by the colonel.
    "How's your client?" I asked him, looking through the pane of the front plate-glass door.
    "The client shows no sign of alertness," answered the colonel that had been led here by our joint efforts and yet sent Lucy back to mind the child. "His vigilance isn't weakened, though."
    "I don't plan to take him unawares," I shrugged my shoulders. "I shall merely kill him. What is the best position for realizing my modest desire?"
    "As you see, he is sitting on the right side of the gates, and there is some lighting from the street there. Naturally, all the panes of the facade are reflecting this light, and from here you can shoot only straight through the door."
    "That will be too noisy," I rejected such a variant.
    "You're right, doc, and you have another option if you are able to shoot in lying position."
    "From where can I shoot so?"
    "Apparently they'd switched off the light in the carport. You can crawl out of the side door and lie by the car in the darkness until you aim at him. I mean at his head."
    "I remember it," I said, fixing the place of the second sentinel in my mind. "Cover me till then, please."
    "I'll cover you without fail, doc," the colonel promised seriously.
    It was not absolutely dark in the carport, as the streetlamp somewhat spoiled the night idyll, but the tiled path between the wall and the car was in the shade of the house, and I moved out of the doorway by the leopard crawl so that I would be lying within the shadow. I crawled these two meters very slowly, resting the elbows of my arms on the path and holding the submachine gun suspended in my hands. Besides, I began to move when I heard the engine of the next car going past the gates, and my appearance went unnoticed.
    Now I had no shelter, and I was without bulletproof vest, serving as a target to every gunman who could make out my figure here. But the guy was sure that nothing threatened him from inside of the house, and I could unhurriedly get my gun ready for firing. The extreme strain of acting excluded any thinking, and my attention was entirely focused on one point, namely on the silhouette of the head hardly discernible on the black background of the stone fence.
    Without any emotion, I aimed at the center of the target, waiting for the sound of the engine, not necessary but desirable. It was in essence the time for the local inhabitants to return home from work, and soon the new car passed by the gates of our villa.
    The purring partly deadened the pops of my shots and the bang of the smashed head, yet an abrupt snort of the killed guy thrown back with the two balls resounded quite distinctly.
    I rose and suddenly noticed slight tremble in my knees.
    "Look how nervous we are," I muttered reproachfully.
    It was, of course, aftermath in consequence of not so much the nervous strain as my long physical crookedness, but maybe I simply had never before taken responsibility for my own child, moreover in such a crazy scheme where I was obliged to gain a victory in every episode, or else my sonny would have suffered the cruelest torments in his horrific dying. That's why I blocked all my feelings with the concrete tasks of my purposeful actions in order that neither hatred nor fury could distract me from the cold advisability of my conduct on which the outcome of this matter of life and death in fact depended.
    While acting I was the same machine of killing as the marines were in the battle, but subconsciously, I bore in mind what was suppressed by the concentrated purposefulness of my hard will, and now that my adventure had ended with my real complete victory despite everything, I was overwhelmed with all my diverse emotions at once.
    At last, I felt both the burning hatred for all those killers killed by me and some enervating relief after warding off this ineluctable danger, so the wonder was rather that I wasn't all of a trembles with my emotional gamut.
    Meantime the colonel shambled already to the gate to make certain of the irrefutability of the death.
    Satisfied, he went across the courtyard to the back wicket, and I also made for my first target along the wall.
    Thus, we converged behind the house by the half-sitting dark body leant against the fence.
    "Very good, doc," the colonel approved my accuracy. "Later we shall get rid of them, but now we have the problems much more urgent."
    "Let's hope your hanging on the rack won't tell too perceptibly on your physical condition," I sized up the degree of his steadiness, following him going to the side door out of which I had crawled five minutes ago as a real army sniper.
    Lucy came out of the child-room immediately she heard our homecoming, though without Vic, considering the sight of the two dead bodies in the salon and on the balustrade, one with a bloody hole in his face, another with the big knife sticking between his eyes.
    "All right?" she asked, understanding that we had done our work successfully.
    "Soon we'll remove the bodies," the colonel said to her, passing by the corpse into the cabinet.
    "All will be well," I added, smiling encouragingly at her. "He knows what to do."
    And then I hurried after the colonel.
   
    CHAPTER 15
   
    In the cabinet, the colonel vouchsafed the dead body of the marine with a perfunctory glance and set about inspecting the paraphernalia inherited by us as victors. Apart from our cell phones and documents, he retrieved his ceramic pistol and found a small leather chest with sling under the writing table.
    "Look here, doc," the colonel showed me the chest. "It is a portable laboratory for forging every kind of official papers. If you need a new passport, you have no problem with this magic casket at your elbow."
    "The thing may be useful in the future, but I am much more anxious about the present time."
    "Indeed we are in a predicament for now," the colonel agreed, searching the lower drawer of the table. "He who receives that dignitary must somehow inform the commander of the group about his arrival and be sure of the readiness of the position here. Since Lucy's cell is bugged, it will be turned off as well as yours. Let's think what we have in the telephone of your pal."
    The colonel sat down in the office armchair behind the table with the cell phone of Bob.
    "In his list, he has only four figures and one message with the letter X," he said, looking at the luminous display. "It is easy to understand that the figures are his direct connection with his men. As I took their mobiles from those sentinels, we can check how it works."
    He touched one of the figures, and we heard a slight vibration in his side pocket.
    "Well, that's simple," the colonel concluded, gazing at the display. "However his X implies dialing some number every time in avoidance of someone else's knowledge in case of losing the mobile. Thus, when the local coordinator sends his message, you should send your message in response, and your reply confirms your identity, for without knowing the number you are unable to connect with the sender."
    "In short, we are obliged to answer and haven't the number," I summed up impatiently. "Such explanation is excessive even for my stupidity."
    "I don't explain, doc," the colonel continued to scrutinize the display. "I am thinking. New message may be sent every moment, and it mustn't be unanswered, otherwise all your feats will go to naught."
    "Perhaps I know the number," I assumed. "It occurred to me that the coordinator is none other than John with whom I can get in touch sometimes."
    "Dictate the number," required the colonel.
    I dictated the number from memory, and he nodded his head:
    "Hopefully we've guessed right. Soon it will be clear, but we had better pack some of our things, because if we are mistaken, everything will go to rack and ruin and we shall be forced to escape without lingering a minute."
    "In that case, we should have a snack in the first place," I reminded. "I got hungry for some reason."
    "Here you're right, doc," the colonel approved my practicality, rising from the table. "The past is certain, the future obscure, as the Greeks say."
    I did not ask the colonel why we could not escape right now, as the five killed members of the special team remained the same coil of the gigantic state serpent even after their death. Although the circle was slightly expanded, it might be narrowed the instant the coordinator would have suspected something wrong with the situation in the seized house. Besides, it was inadmissible to leave the dead bodies here and incur the police inquiry by that. For the time being, we had some advantage, yet there was the threatening expanse of the unknown beyond the inner circle, and we shouldn't have ventured to plunge imprudently into this unpredictable unknown, unless it was a last resort.
    So we ate what we could find in the fridge, and the colonel did not fail to toss off a glass of whisky, which had a salutary effect upon him to all outward appearances.
    "Maybe she would drink, too?" I showed concern about the hostess.
    "No, she ought not to relax her attention," the colonel refused my softheartedness. "She is to do many things in the evening and be ready to depart at once if necessary. We must go to her and carry away that stiff in order not to frighten the child. Don't worry, doc, I am all right yet after replenishing energy."
    It must be said, the colonel really recovered, and the whisky invigorated him not only spiritually but also corporeally.
    We brought the corpse from the balustrade down into the short side corridor leading to the carport, and laid the second body on it as a sleeper. As captain Bob couldn't get into the field of vision of the child, we decided not to encumber the narrow passage by his carcass until it was determined whether we had to vamoose or would remove the five cadavers and clear up after us.
    Thus, Lucy received the liberty of action for feeding and washing Vic who was tired of playing in his cradle and playpen by then and paid no attention to the light-brown wainscoting spattered with blood between the doors of his room and his parents' bedroom. True his mother held him in her arms, and his father with Uncle Victor smiled at him from below while he was descending to the kitchen, so he again looked on the bright side without those terrible baddies vanished from his happy life.
    "May I ask you to wipe the floor and wall there?" the colonel motioned to the banisters over us. "Later she will wash away the rest."
    "For my chum Vic, I'll stoop even to floorcloth," I did not object. "It is in the bathroom in my opinion."
    My cleaning took only some minutes, because the blood had splashed on the wood and I easily wiped it out with the wet floorcloth.
    Considering that the head of the guy with the knife in his face had fallen beyond the carpet, it left only a small red puddle on the tiled floor, but in the cabinet, Lucy was to take some pains.
    *
    As the colonel charged Lucy to wipe away the blood shed by me, after having put her precious to bed, she set to washing all the gore in the salon while we carried out the body of the hapless major to his two colleagues in the corridor, where this addition imparted the perfect similarity to a stack of wooden sleepers to the piled bodies.
    "We need five sacks or bags for packing the corpses," the colonel said to Lucy finishing her clearing, "preferably oilskin. If nothing untoward happens we'll bring out this rubbish by night."
    "I shall look for them in the pantry," Lucy promised, working.
    "Look, too, for a nylon rope. And tell me the chief thing-have you some inflatable boat here?"
    "Yes, there is a rubber dinghy with a pump in the shed," Lucy answered, looking up in surprise. "True it is pretty worn."
    "Then you may count it died natural death. Apropos, I'd advise you to take a bucket for your next job."
    "That's all," Lucy notified us with the wet floorcloth in her hand. "Now you can settle down in the armchairs."
    "Squeamishness is an ornament to every decent housewife, isn't it, doc?" the colonel boasted of his helpmate incidentally.
    "My ideal is a surgical nurse," I made a joke in reply.
    And just as we were going to sit down, the mobile phone that the colonel put on the coffee table started buzzing and its display got lit.
    A second later, the phone was in the hands of the colonel, and the message appeared on the display was rather checking connection-"OK?"
    The colonel quickly pressed the needful buttons and sent one word "Yes" to the number of my guardian John.
    In tense silence, we waited for a quarter of a minute.
    Then the display responded with a new message consisting of sequence of figures, two letters, and a word "Wait".
    "Fuck it," the colonel breathed out with the former outward impassivity. "You hit the nail on the head."
    "It is sheer luck," I exhaled at last, too. "What do these signs stand for?"
    "As your pal had put me in the picture beforehand, we can decipher this conundrum," the colonel grinned for the first time since his car had drawn up at the gates early in the morning, and I wouldn't have called his grin an engaging smile.
    "It is the flight number and the time of its arrival," the colonel began his discourse with the same grin of ferocious anticipation, from which one's blood runs cold. "The letters are the name of the airport, and I think he will connect with us on the way from there with his distinguished visitor. Let's find the flight for monitoring it, though I am sure that it had departed yet."
    While searching the flight by his own cell phone the colonel did not cease expounding the program of our actions for the night hours, very tight as was to be expected.
    "At first we must remove the bodies and bury them in the sea," the colonel was enumerating our tasks while browsing in the Internet. "Then we should clean the courtyard and be in the airport by the arrival of the flight. There we have to spot your acquaintance and follow his car."
    "And what shall we do then?"
    "We shall see what we shall see, doc," the colonel answered evasively, and I understood that neither John nor his guest would pay their respect to Lucy.
    "So the flight arrives in three odd," the colonel closed his cell. "By the by, doc, do you know some secluded spot on the shore?"
    "I will do exercises there every day. Not that it is the wilds, yet the place is desert enough."
    "Darling," the colonel stopped Lucy going out of the bathroom with a plastic bucket, "you'll tidy up later. Now, as a matter of urgency, we must procure bags, rope, and craft."
    "It follows from this that everything turned out all right?" Lucy asked.
    "It is still not everything, but we are improving the situation. So furnish us with all the necessary."
    When Lucy noticed that the colonel was in high spirits, she instantly calmed down. In all probability, such mood of her man signified his capability of sorting all the things out in his own way and taking the most drastic measures for that.
    As to the colonel, since he had obtained the real possibilities of reaching the culprit of his hardship in the last months, he saw the invigorating bloody light ahead and strove to return a hundredfold for the losses sustained by him.
    Anyway, I was left as a babysitter by the married couple that united again to go and fetch the aforementioned equipment for removing the defeated team, so I had a short respite in solitude.
    I felt as if I were some antique Titan that broke the chains binding him in a desperate attempt and found the stirring snakes instead of the broken chains at his feet. I understood that all our uninvited guests were to disappear without trace at the first stage of our slipping out of the trap, and that at the second stage we would have to liquidate John and the arrived dignitary, but I could not imagine how to do it as a mere accident. Otherwise, we would have remained within the same invisible coil, which might narrow again and strangle us in the upshot. Meanwhile, my sonny was sleeping in his room at present, and his two fathers saved him twice today not for spoiling their achievements through some blunder at the final stage of their joint struggle for survival.
    The colonel returned with an armful of large sacks and a hank of orange rope for abseiling in the mountains.
    "Before packing, confess to me honestly, doc," he told me, letting Lucy pass to the cabinet to resume her cleaning, "have you the strength to swim in the sea? We shall use a rubber boat, of course, but it is too small for the autumn waves and it will be overladen. Thus, you will have to be in the cold water during about forty minutes if you take it on you."
    "Explain, please, my task in that case," I offered politely.
    The colonel could not endure begging anything of anybody, and it was clear that he did not want to spend his strength for the secondary overcoming in view of certain tiredness after the events in the last thirty-six hours of his sleeplessness at the least. The mission lying ahead of him was chief in our scenario of self-defense, whereas my condition was no longer a decision factor and I could afford to fritter away my energy without skimping.
    "We shall put them into these bags with their guns fastened to their feet and add stones to it on the shore. Then we ties the bags by two and pull the rope over the boat so that the bodies would float standing beside it while you row out to sea. At sea, you cut the ropes, and they go to the bottom. If your boat is still afloat, you row in, back for the shore. If it is sinking, you may rip it and swim, as you like."
    "You've sketched out the very promising prospect for the rest of my life. Yet without a woolen swimsuit I'll freeze to death," I warned. "Maybe there are some warm clothes in the house, shirt and trousers in particular?"
    "I heard what you said," Lucy's voice sounded in the cabinet. "Begin to make your preparations, and I'll try to find something suitable."
    "The order is received, doc," the colonel remarked, playing with the cell phone of our communication. "Come on, carry out the order."
    *
    Laying the five corpses in the sacks was tedious enough, especially as the colonel had to tie the submachine gun of each to the ankles and tighten the slings before pulling the sackcloth shrouds on the bodies, and I should spare the impressionable souls the repulsive details of our dirty work, which was ended when all the bags were carried in the darkness to the car. Three of the "stiffs" were placed on the back seat and two of them-in the boot.
    Then the colonel went to the shed to take the inflatable dinghy, while I came in the house, where in the salon Lucy prepared a bundle of clothes and a big China thermos standing on the coffee table.
    "Look, Vic," she said, rising from the divan. "Here are the thick ski-pants for you, somewhat baggy on me, and my biggest flannel shirt. I think it will fit you. Besides, you must take two pairs of woolen socks, hot coffee, and a bottle of spirit."
    "Don't exaggerate my abilities-I shan't manage even a glass."
    "The spirit is intended to rub you for warming after your swimming," Lucy failed to smile. "And you must take this plaid as well."
    "You always make the offers which I cannot refuse," I jested again, taking the bundle, plaid, thermos, and bottle from the divan, armchair, carpet, and coffee table.
    "I would like to make one more afterwards, but for that, you have to return safe and sound."
    "I promise you to overcome the raging deep and the blustering gale for you, though by now, we have only a light rain for struggle."
    "It is fine. I am just going to wash out the stains on the fences."
    "Do you want to leave Vic alone?"
    "When he is sleeping, no cannon shot may wake him," Lucy assured me.
    "How I envy him!" I exclaimed and went to the carport through the side corridor.
    By my vaunt I had jinxed the climate, and by the end of our ride to the seashore, the rain got harder, yet the bad weather favored the conveyance of our suspicious sacks without any additional homicide, which might happen, because before the departure, the colonel put his ceramic pistol behind the wheel on the dashboard, and being forearmed, he looked very sinister, boding no courtesy to the policeman that would have stopped our catafalque.
    As the gusts of the rainy wind were cold enough, the local loiterers preferred reasonably to pass the evening time in various bars, café, and restaurants and not to loaf about such wastelands as the wild beach where we unloaded our sacks.
    "Well, doc, put your swimming costume on while I prepare the boat," the colonel distributed the obligations, folding the polythene tablecloth that was laid under the bags on the seat. "Scramble into the car and change clothes until I finish it. With this job I can cope without you."
    What he meant I could see through the tinted panes during twenty minutes, for he acted very energetically.
    Having placed four of the bags by two head to head at the distance of two meters and one as the perpendicular to those petals, he thrust some weighty stones into the mouth of each of the sacks and tightened the rope on their mouths. Then he spread the flat rubber pancake of the boat on the pebbles between the sacks and pulled the rope's ends through the four side rings of the boat, tying the ends together by two over the rubber flatness, whereas the stern rope was tied by him to the back transverse towrope.
    Thus, all the sacks were roped together, and when the colonel began to inflate the dinghy by its foot plump, I estimated his foresight, since the wind all but swept off the slightly swollen boat from its place, and only its braces held it back.
    After inflating my frail punt, the colonel made for the car and opened the right front door.
    "In essence she'd provided you with the most necessary things," he marked at the sight of the thermos and bottle standing on the passenger seat. "For my part, I can guarantee the warmth in the car after your row. And take it for a complement."
    He opened the glove compartment and took out a black knitted Balaclava.
    "Thanks," I said, pulling down the missing headgear on my head. "Now my hair-do will remain intact."
    A minute later, the colonel already pushed the fore pair of the bags into the water, while I was pushing the very boat forward into the rolling foamy waves of the surf crashing onto the shingle.
    Then I stepped into this rubber tub and sat down into the cold seawater to the short plastic oars, rowing out in order that the boat wouldn't be cast away on the shore, while the colonel sent the rest of my ballast after the two sunken bags so that I could steer my craft away from the surf.
    The last words I heard were "No more than thirty minutes!", and the combat knife hanging in its sheath on my hip was intended to cut the ropes on the expiry of these minutes.
    As soon as I found myself alone among the heaving billows being lashed by the driving rain, I came to hate the colonel in every fiber of my being. For withstanding the fury of the elements, I had to be infuriated, and the colonel was the most suitable object for hatred, as at the mere thought of involving me fraudulently in someone's hunting for him through his professional miscalculation, I again and again flew into a fury blazing at the humiliating recollections of my helplessness in chains in the face of danger to my son and beloved. Every time I imagined what those cutthroats might do with them if it were not for my incredible luck, the frequency of the strokes of my oars were getting so frenzied that my cockleshell did not capsize only because it was half-swamped, wherefore I alternated rowing and bailing out the boat.
    Although the bags of the ballast imparted some stability to my lightweight lifeboat for beach entertainments, such a load would have drowned it, were it overfull, and I continued to splash out the water falling from the dark heavens and washing over the rubber sides.
    Notwithstanding my furious activity, my bottom immersed in the cold water became numb, and I was remembering, horror-stricken, with what urological grave consequences the present hypothermia was fraught.
    "That's enough," I dropped, panting, in the bluster of the rather stormy sea and drew my knife out of the sheath.
    I cut the rope in the wake first for keeping balance, and then I cut the aft and fore Gordian knots consecutively.
    Freed from the burden my inflated vessel bounced as a cork popping out of the neck and started bobbing on the surging waves.
    At last, I could care about my health.
    True this time all the reanimating measures consisted in rubbing my thighs and slapping on my buttocks, nonetheless I was prostrate now on the rubber oval bolster, moving my legs without restriction, and such freedom of movement was a sort of happiness in comparison with sitting doubled, the knees bent and the feet set against the stern, in the icy hipbath, though the wet wool of my strange garb wasn't much warmer in the piercing wind showering me with volleys of the lashing rain.
    Shaking with cold, I was swearing at the colonel, shouting obscenities in the deafening howl and roar of the gale and sea united with the downpour, and at the same time, I tried to discern the distant shore, as I was in fact in the open sea.
    The dim glow over the town indicated the direction of my rowing in, and I spent the next fifteen minutes for approaching as such, after which I again turned to the barely discernible coastline.
    Judging by the string of lights of the promenade along the public beaches, my boat was carried away to the left, and the black strip of the desert wild beach stretched from that string for kilometer or two.
    I just opened my mouth to hurl a new portion of abuse at the cursed colonel when I descried the light that flashed in the darkness of the long strip.
    It was undoubtedly flashlight because it continued to flash at intervals of half a minute, and I immediately headed my lone shallop for those signals, turning my head at times to steer the right course.
    Soon I espied two bright lights instead of one and understood that the colonel used the headlights of his car as signal lamps for me.
    "Son of bitch forgets nothing," I grumbled, rowing while my teeth were chattering and my body was shaking irresistibly. "He is indebted to me for the third time for this sea trip."
    To crown it all, one of the rampageous rollers of the surf suddenly threw up my toy boat and overturned it, whereupon I was tipped out and dived perforce, after which I broke into a run away on all fours from under the rolling billow to the shingly land whither the waves could not reach.
    The colonel arose from the rainy darkness almost at once.
    "I'll catch the boat," he cried in the wild noise around. "Throw off your rags and get into the car. There's what you need there."
    And indeed, in the lit warmed salon of the car I instantly wrapped up, naked and wet, into the plaid and hugged the big thermos, being unable to open it.
    After a while, shaking as before, I put the thermos aside and contrived to unscrew the cap of the bottle of spirit with my stiff fingers.
    After rubbing my knees and feet, I already had the use of my hands, and massing my pelvic girdle, loin, and poor frostbitten buttocks restored their sensibility more or less.
    Since at present I was strong enough to draw a cork, I put my lips to the opened thermos and began to gulp the hot coffee greedily until I sucked out about a liter.
    Having replenished my drained energy, I had relatively recovered, but out of my clothes, I only pulled my dry trunks on, seeing that I had no wish to exchange the warmth of the air for the dampness of my trousers and decided to warm my frozen body till a hot shower at home.
    Meantime the colonel shoved the folded dinghy with its oars and my wet rags into the boot, and a pair of minutes later, he opened the back door and plumped down a boulder the size of my head on the back seat beside me.
    "What is it, souvenir?" I asked sarcastically.
    "Yes, it is my gift," the colonel did not initiate me into his plans for the future as ever. What's about a gulp of coffee?"
    "Indeed, it is somehow fresh today," I made a catty remark. "I've noticed it, too."
    "I appreciate your fortitude, doc," the colonel said, slamming the back door and opening the front one. "However, we have an awfully difficult task ahead, and we cannot afford to muck up its fulfillment."
    While speaking the colonel sat down at the wheel, closed the door, and raised the half-empty thermos.
    "I drink to your health, doc!"
    "I am moved," I answered, getting the thermos back. "I hope we have time to dry our clothes."
    "Of course, we have," the colonel gratified me, turning off the light and starting up the engine. "Till now, we are up to schedule."
    *
    If I was warmed with the long-awaited hot shower, the colonel neutralized the capriciousness of the autumn weather with the same Scotch, which he was sipping in the armchair in front of the TV flatron monitor. By then he robed in Lucy's terry dressing gown, and our clothes were drying on the two big radiators heating the air of the salon.
    It was understandable that he also had no objection to take a good hot bath, but he was attached to the cell phone connecting us with John, and besides, he watched the local channels showing the scene of the consequences of the last criminal clash, or rather, of paying off old scores. Supposedly, some rival band caught those ruffians off their guard and made such a slaughter in the house of the leader of the gang.
    Thus, all the suppositions confirmed the guess of the colonel about the cameras not working for the time of kidnapping.
    "For the present, we have left no trace," the colonel informed Lucy sitting on the divan.
    "God loves the marines," I grunted, flopping into the second armchair in Lucy's bath towel.
    "Soon we shall go to solve the last problem," the colonel continued to sooth Lucy looking haggard and exhausted after her long nervous strain. "He who is cognizant of our case will be in the airport to receive the one who arrives for meeting with us. After the meeting, the last connection with this crime will be broken."
    "Do you intend to imperil his life again?" Lucy asked the colonel tiredly.
    "That depends," he looked attentively at her. "This time I play first fiddle."
    "Don't let it trouble you," I advised her merrily. "I've got accustomed to peril in such a degree that without it I am bored."
    "As you see, doc never loses presence of mind," the colonel observed. "We cannot spare more than half an hour for a rest, doc, so we should begin to prepare to departure."
    "Then I'll go and eat something," I said, leaving the soft armchair very unwillingly.
   
   
    PART SIX
   
    CHAPTER 16
   
    I am omitting our preparations for the forthcoming sortie and our ride through the night town, for in the space of forty minutes, nothing essential happened, except that we felt much better in our dry clothes after I could eat my fill and the colonel restored his equanimity by means of a due dose of the Scotch. For lack of events, we enjoyed our temporary repose to the full, not dissipating it for idle chat, and such idyllic uneventfulness relieves me of the necessity to describe this intermediate stage of our plan.
    Yet going out of the town, the colonel turned off the main road leading to the airport, and that seemed somewhat strange to me.
    "Is there a roundabout way there?" I asked, reverting to the vital subject of our specific hospitality.
    "Yes, there's a surfaced road along the mountains," answered the colonel, consulting the navigator of his cell phone lying before him on the dashboard. "It goes at a sufficient height and has quite a few hairpin bends if the road map is correct."
    "Why are you sure that they will take just this road?"
    "According to the map, the police checkpoint is situated only on the lower highway. Although the local cops don't stop the cars without reason, there is a slight risk of being stopped for all that. Meanwhile, no one should behold his mug in the town. I mean the visitor, naturally. Since your John is, of course, in the know, he will choose the road that is a little longer but more secure."
    "And then your comrades-in-arms would have butchered all the beholders save themselves, wouldn't they?"
    "It goes without saying, doc. But now we also play at their game thanks to you."
    "As the game is attended with risk, I shall be pleased to assist you in the next adventure once again."
    "I'm glad to hear it, doc. Without you, I shan't manage to play my trick on them. Wait a bit, and I'll explain what we're to do on terrain."
    Meantime our car was riding already on the upper road with two-way yet single-line traffic, though the very traffic was reduced to the separate cars crawling with the lit headlights through the rain in the darkness, and these cars appeared rarely one at a time.
    "The terrain is really godforsaken and suitable for villainies," I underrated the local level of civilization.
    "Nevertheless, the road signs are renovated," the colonel made an amendment to my categorical judgment.
    Indeed, the signs on the roadsides fluoresced in the light of the headlights, and the road surfacing was too smooth for an out-of-the-way place.
    Our unhurried advancement with rounding the rocky slopes, where they were jutting out into the bends of the road falling steeply down here, had been lasting for half an hour when the colonel suddenly began to turn his car round.
    "Why are we returning?" I inquired.
    "I have found the best spot for a car crash, and we have to inspect it," the colonel explained.
    "Aha, now I've caught what you've conceived. Their car goes into a skid at the awkward turn of the road and falls from the steep."
    "Yes, doc, just so they will meet with an accident, because this crash must be reducible to natural causes."
    By one of the speed limit signs, the colonel glanced at his watch, and when he rounded the bend, he glanced again and made the second U-turn.
    "They will be here early in the morning, doc, and you will see them. You will be in hiding on the slope and in touch with me. As your cell is probably bugged, you give only two sound signals: the first-when their car comes into sight, and the second-as soon as the car will be level with that road sign. Your John will decelerate the car before the curve, and thus we know its speed from this point. Consequently, I can calculate how many seconds I have for closing."
    "Thanks for such an intelligible elucidation," I let fall not without raillery.
    "Not at all, doc," dropped the colonel condescendingly, accelerating his Mazda.
    *
    In the square before the airport, our car was parked at some distance of the glass wall with two sliding doors, and I thought that it would be difficult to spot John from afar in the sparse bunches of passengers gathering and dispersing at the entrance in the spectral blue light, but the colonel opened the glove compartment and extracted binoculars from its cavity.
    "John will appear most likely by the arrival. From here, we can keep the car park in the area of vision and notice him. We must know, too, what car is his and go ahead of him, or else our pursuit may arouse his suspicion. Let's watch, doc, and tell me when he appears. The occupation is boring enough, but such is work of diversionist."
    "With you, colonel, I'll become jack of all trades," I sighed. "It only remains to me to blow up an airliner."
    "To blow is easier than what you've done, doc," the colonel pointed to my deserts with objectivity being smack of a taunt. "In my life, it happened twice that I landed in a hopeless situation, and you rescued me both times. I think no one else is capable of this."
    "It is because I always seek nonstandard solutions," I laughed it off, for my coming to rescue was by no means an act of pure humanity, and the colonel himself wasn't a man whom I was burning with desire to succor.
    "Don't fish for compliments, doc," my debtor impugned my self-depreciation.
    Since we arrived well in advance, we were forced to wait for our coordinator for about an hour, but then his lank spindle-legged figure arose by his Toyota on the edge of the parking lot, and the binoculars confirmed his identity.
    "Here he comes," I handed the colonel his binoculars.
    "Okay, doc, I see him," the colonel followed John with his lens. "When the aircraft begins the landing approach, I have time to go and look at his car. If our dignitary is on board, John will send a message after their meeting."
    "By the way, he may depart by the same flight," the colonel added, looking at the display of his chief cell phone. "Within two hours, he can visit the captives and return to the airport. That's why they wanted me to crack in half an hour, and it would be a terrible thirty minutes, doc."
    And his narrow dry lips slightly curved into a cruel wry grin, the same horrible grin of ferocity seeing the possibilities of its full satisfaction.
    No, the colonel wasn't a sadist, yet he was a beast of prey, and I felt as if a man-eating tiger suddenly bared its fangs beside me, snarling muffledly in anticipation of mauling its agonizing quarry. The impression was strong but heavy.
    Here I thought, however, what would have been my own attitude to the torturers of my little son, and I couldn't but confess I rather shared his ferocity, even if I had killed all of them yet.
    Soon after the colonel went to see the car-target and remarked scrambling into our car:
    "A bit of the explosive in the engine would be indisputably the best way to do them in, doc. Nonetheless, we mustn't break Nature's laws, by which stones may roll down the slope sometimes."
    "Now I seemed to fathom the subtlety of your device," I said to that.
    "Anyway, you shouldn't hurry to the place of accident, unless everything goes haywire. There will be a probability of exchange of shots there if my trick misfires."
    "I shall be acting gingerly as ever," I promised. "But I am also the injured party, and I shan't miss such an opportunity to retaliate the injury."
    "Well, doc, act according to circumstances," the colonel permitted me graciously.
    There was something in his collectedness that appertained to his contemptuous aversion to the high-ranking traitor, whom he was eager to trample underfoot as an abominable viper, and the righteousness of his concealed contempt sort of clarified my mind about the very core of his personality.
    As every real and true officer, the colonel had his code of honor, or he couldn't have killed by order; and "the last ditch" of his service was ever his faithfulness to the country, whatever it was. Losing the country as his last and highest sense of life, he was losing the only justification of his bloody service, for whose sake he was capable of anything; therefore, he regarded someone's cutting this ground from under his feet as an attempt to destroy all the significance of his lifelong heroic selflessness.
    And by a sheer coincidence, he met the treachery just where he expected to be on firm ground; moreover, it was a triumphant high treason pulling the strings of the machinery of State and having the power to make him an outcast being pursued by his own department. I could hardly imagine the degree of the hatred the colonel felt for this omnipotent scoundrel arriving hither to avert the danger and suspecting nothing while his sworn enemy looked forward to meeting him with a prepared trap.
    What I knew for certain was that the colonel would kill his persecutor irrespective of a means to an end, because for him this representative of the oligarchic corrupt elite embodied the loathsome spirit of venality and betrayal, and his sense of justice was so defiantly insulted by the very situation of the total supremacy of the unpunished meanness that he would never have reconciled himself to such humiliation.
    The colonel was, of course, a cruel monster, but apparently, the collapse of all foundation stones of the soul might touch even a monster on the raw.
    *
    The cell phone lying behind the wheel on the dashboard suddenly started vibrating, and "OK?" again appeared on the lit display.
    The answer was the same "Yes", and the next message read, "Be ready".
    "Let's go, doc," the colonel said, starting up the engine. "We can watch them from afar and wait a little till they take the way. And we must be ahead of them."
    Having descried tall and elegant John walking through the sliding glass doors, I noted the unremarkable appearance of some old buffer going with him, since I imagined the guest to be burly and portly.
    As to the colonel, he only cast a fleeting glance at them making for their car parked at the square and continued to steer for the outside roundabout where the upper hairpin-bend road branched off from the others.
    On the viaduct over the roundabout, the colonel stopped his Mazda.
    "If they take the lower highway, I'll be improvising," he muttered, looking down. "In any case, I'll get them."
    However, our pair came up to expectations and turned rightly.
    "Come on, my hearties," the colonel commended them, satisfied, for their predictability. "We shall be waiting for them at the turn."
    Meantime the twilight grew greyly watery, and the rain grew drizzly, so I could see the misty outlines of the rocks on the left and the narrow side of the road on the right, beyond which there was some cloudy duskiness filling all the visible space, though the mountains weren't fog-bound at present. The colonel took into account even the time of his diversion, as in the darkness, I couldn't have given him due notice from my observation point.
    By the appointed road sign, the colonel braked.
    "Take the binoculars and alight here, doc," he commanded. "Hide so that they won't notice you. So, you make two signals-on their appearance and on their passing by this post."
    "Yes, sir," I saluted him, opening the door.
    "But you must discern the number of the car," the colonel instructed me at parting, and I slammed the door.
    When lying low behind an obliquely sticking rocky ledge overgrown with some wet shrubbery, I felt as if I really became a member of diversionary group who lay in wait for an object of attack. Through the interlaced branches, I saw the extent of the road up to the relatively distant curve enveloped in the same melting cloudiness, and this straight part passed from the speed limit sign towards the next bend, hairpin forsooth, seeing that the narrow highway made a sharp turn there on the brink of a precipice, while some declivity of the road was just in the direction of the most dangerous projection of the mountain. To do him justice, the colonel had chosen the best place for the action.
    Because we had outstripped our objects only for a few minutes, they did not keep us waiting too long.
    As soon as the Toyota appeared on the desert road, I directed my binoculars at its bumper and sent the first signal to the colonel. Further, I followed the approaching car with the naked eye for fear that a glint of glass would betray me lying ambush.
    The moment the car crossed the Rubicon I pressed the button for the second time.
    From this decisive moment, I found myself in my familiar "dimension of fight", and my perception was able therefore to take what was going on after that.
    The Toyota reduced speed a little, and immediately the Mazda of the colonel rushed out from behind the bend of the highway.
    The two cars had scarcely met when the boulder from the beach thrown by the strong hand flew out of the driver's window and hit the windshield of the Toyota.
    The addition of the opposite speeds was so destructive that the stone ball, not big but weighty, broke the windshield through, as far as I could judge, because it hadn't bounced back.
    The driverless car skewed sideways down the highway on the wet bitumen and went round the bend until I heard a crash.
    The Mazda made a U-turn and dashed after the disappeared car, and I jumped up and darted down the slope towards the bend.
    It took no more than thirty seconds to run to the Mazda already standing athwart the road, yet by then it was empty, while the colonel was by the car that had rammed the semicircle of the concrete bollards on the roadside along the brink and stopped, its right wheel hanging beyond any ground over the cloudy space.
    From the impact, the front left door had opened, and the swollen airbags had pressed the driver and his passenger to their seats.
    The bloody face of John was smashed with the splinters of glass of the broken windshield that had sagged in, its jags stuck in his shoulders over the white balloon of the airbag. Judging by the shrieks of the passenger, he was not so gravely injured, since the windshield had fallen into the car as a sheet of cracked glass holed only in front of the driver, but I couldn't visually estimate his state because of the back of the colonel in the foreground covered him.
    At last, I had the occasion to see the colonel infuriated, and it looked like the frenzy of a wild rabid bull attacking some unwieldy openmouthed hippopotamus, which did not let him pass.
    Time after time, the colonel threw himself forward and pushed the car with all might, and the Toyota being again and again shaken by the raging pushes of his heavy body was moving aside inch by inch from the brink of the rock.
    Without a second's hesitation, I flung myself forward, too, and pushed the cowling with both my hands.
    "Come on!" roared the colonel while we pushed the car together. "Come on, doc!"
    At the third attempt our concerted attacks were crowned with success, and the grey-haired geezer, red in the face from belching out obscenities, struggling to break loose from the seatbelt and slip out from under the airbag, involuntarily helped us to decide his own fate and sway the balance in our favor.
    The Toyota gave a lurch, and the colonel pushing it with his shoulder rested his left hand against the open door, whereas I leant on the cowling, when the hand of the outwardly senseless driver touched the back of the hand of the exultant colonel.
    And the instant the car lost its unstable equilibrium the bloody mask suddenly wheezed out one word, and this word was "Six".
    Then, after our violent push, the car gave a pitch, slipping off the brink, and we heard the fading last "fuck" of the betrayer that had gotten the deserved punishment after all.
    "Oops," I commented on a remote hollow bang somewhere below. "We've done it."
    The colonel did not share my gladness, though,-he silently scrutinized the point of the touch on his left hand.
    "What's the problem?" I asked. "Did you scratch the hand?"
    "Look at it, doc," the colonel said gloomily, showing a pink speckle on the skin. "It is disappearing sooner than you can do anything."
    And indeed, the dwindling dot was noticeable during some seconds, after which the skin acquired the former color.
    "It is a prick," I established the evident fact.
    "It is rather a jab without needle," the colonel corrected. "Do you remember my story about that interrogation?"
    "Yes, it was very breathtaking."
    "This is a mark of the same fountain pen for killing. Thus I have six hours till my sudden death."
    "Maybe here is an antidote to this poison?"
    "Such an antidote is in my department only. So near yet so far."
    "I am sorry to hear it."
    "I am, too. But so matters stand. If "ifs" and "ans" were pots and pans, as they say," muttered the colonel. "Well, doc, if I am to die, I must order my affairs. Jump in the car, and I'll explain to you what we should do now. The pity of it is that I've almost won."
    The late phrase was his utmost lamentation about such a catastrophic turn of his fate at the very moment of his victory. Like me, the colonel always took all surprises as accomplished facts and couldn't stand idle talks.
    "So, doc, the matter brooks no delay," the colonel returned to the subject when the Mazda started. "At first you must give me an honest answer to one question, and then we can continue."
    "I promise to be sincere," I said, guessing what question he was going to put to me.
    And I guessed right.
    "Tell me, doc, do you love her?" the colonel asked, driving the car. "I mean-do love. Or it is a mere passing fancy? Out with it."
    I understood that I ought to have spoken without equivocation in reply to such firing pointblank.
    "Okay, colonel, I'll tell you flat," I answered. "It is love, real love if you like."
    "Just so I thought," he remarked, looking forward. "Every cloud has a silver lining."
    "What are you implying by your lining?"
    "If you love her and your love is mutual, I might probably count on you in the matter of her future."
    "Here you may rely on me without "probably", colonel. I shall never leave her in the lurch."
    "Even so?" the colonel cast a sidelong glance at me.
    "I keep my word usually."
    "Yes, you're indeed a reliable support," he agreed. "I'll give you her, doc, but with the proviso that you will become a father to her son instead of me."
    "It was unnecessary to stipulate for that," I reproached him, inwardly laughing up my sleeve at granting me what I could have without any permission after his death.
    However, I again underestimated the ability of the colonel to calculate his future actions.
    "Perhaps you're right, doc," the colonel said, "but among my spiritual values my son is the chief one. Make a man of him like you."
    "I'll spare no effort, considering that he is predisposed to be a real man. Recently he was standing on my palm as a nail."
    "Really?" the colonel glanced at me.
    And for the first time, I heard a genuine emotion in his voice. It was-believe it or not-tenderness.
    "Anyhow, I reckon you won't lose on the deal, doc," the colonel continued. "You will receive something into the bargain."
    "To be honest, I am such a gainer in this deal that I never dreamt of having it at all."
    "As I said, you're a minion of fortune, doc." The colonel took his cell phone from the dashboard. "Now I can part with them with a clear conscience. Let's take a break for a minute."
    And then he struck a conversation with a girl in the ticket-office of the airport and reserved a ticket for the next return flight to the capital from which he once absconded.
    "I should be there two hours before the flight at least," the colonel informed me. "Thus I have three hours and a half, including the way to the airport. Therefore, doc, first of all we shall drop in to you. Can you simply slam the entrance door and leave the keys in the house?"
    "Why not if the Yale lock may be clicked."
    "As you are captive at present, there is no observation of your dwelling place, so take your belongings and return to the car as soon as possible. In the end, I shall call your landlord allegedly in the name of your John and let him know that you were forced to depart urgently. Further listen to me and remember, because time flies."
    "I am all ears," I interjected.
    "To put it in a nutshell, doc, you are to become my inheritor," the colonel rejoiced me. "If it were not for this mishap, I would have concluded my preparations and moved away from Europe with my family. Having access to those secret accounts, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and write off some part of the incoming profit from the working capital-for transferring to the account of one fund. Then from the fund, the money shifted to another account and so on. I was sure that the owner of the fixed and circulating capitals would be beware of controlling the transaction of his business lest he reveal his personality by such a control, and by now I have transferred a substantial sum to some accounts of Lucy. Besides, she already has a decent flat in Toronto in addition to her Canadian citizenship."
    "Wow!" I ejaculated involuntarily.
    "I avoided mentioning my name in the papers, and this clandestinity has turned out for the best, as you see," the colonel disclosed the secrets of his clandestine life to me with gallows humor. "I've prepared a blank marriage certificate and passport for my new surname, yet in view of the inconstancy of fortune, it will be your passport and certificate. In other words, doc, you will be both your husband and the father of her son."
    "I have no objection to family life, unless my desire to be philistine imperils their lives," I responded to the challenge thrown down by him.
    "Lion cannot be ruminant, doc. You will be what you are, like me," the colonel foretold. "Anyway, you are to own what remains to you, and I rely on your probity. Say where I should stop the car so that nobody will fix it."
   
    CHAPTER 17
   
    It was the most auspicious time between five and six o'clock for my secret evacuation, and this hasty retreat took less than ten minutes, as I kept in my head that the existing interim could not be prolonged.
    "Are you all right, doc?" the colonel asked me after I closed the door, having met no bystander in the street. "The matter is that you are entering Canada as a citizen of one of the visa-exempt countries, consequently you have free entry there. Besides, as a husband of a Canadian citizen, you have certain rights, and afterwards you will perceive resident permit and confirm your professional status. In short, you will be naturalized sooner or later and immigrate in such a way. I'll give her the telephones and address of her lawyer in Toronto, and he will acquaint her with all the documentation and advise both of you how to act in every situation and what is better to do. In accordance with the certificate, she had contracted this marriage one and a half years ago, in the time of your joint activities in that war hospital, and with this verifiable legend and your son to boot your marriage alliance cannot awake suspicion."
    "As far as I understand, she has considerable sums on her accounts by now, and I also have quite enough bucks to my name for any immigration," I broadened our bright horizons still more. "Because we complement one another so advantageously, we shall get settled gradually even there. In the case that our plans will go wrong, I am able to take part in the tournaments of mix-fight as an anonymous fighter."
    "For that, you're too unforgettable, doc," the colonel jested bitterly, meaning my two contacts with his woman with an interval of eighteen months between. "Let's go and ransack their magic casket in order to choose what citizenship is fitter for our task. Bear in mind that the game still isn't won for now, and we must allow for the existence of John's men here. They know that we are held prisoners at the villa by some special group, so we shan't be disillusioning them, because the identification of the victims of the present crash will last sufficiently long. We should pay attention to details, doc, for just in trifles we may drop a clanger."
    I remembered the bugs in telephones and the mini GPS tracker in the strap of my leather jacket hanging in the house and agreed mentally with the colonel.
    Fifteen minutes later the Mazda rolled into the courtyard of the villa and stopped in the carport.
    "Just a minute, doc, I'll take my forgeries out of one hiding place," the colonel said. "And I must tell her by myself about our changed situation."
    After he pulled his leather document case from behind the back seat, we came in the house through the same side door and appeared before Lucy reclining under the plaid on the divan, though she opened the gate for us via intercom. Apparently, she felt cold because of her nervous exhaustion, yet the fate had a new surprise in store for her.
    "Has everything gone off smoothly?" she asked, having searched the scowling face of the colonel.
    "Yes, the sally panned out beyond all expectation," he answered, gazing at her shivering under her thick warm plaid. "True some of us were successful to a certain extent."
    "What happened?" she instantly got tensed.
    "Everything indeed went swimmingly up to the last moment," the colonel pronounced evenly. "Their car almost slipped off from the brink of the precipice, but-"
    "But-what? Why do you hesitate?"
    "But before departing this life one wanker contrived to spoil our pleasure," the colonel set forth the crux of the matter, and only his using an abusive word was evidence of his utter despair. "The point is briefly that he had touched me with his pen and its poison will kill me in due time, namely after five hours approximately."
    Lucy turned as pale as a sheet and fell senseless on the divan.
    "I'll fetch her ammonia," I said, heading for the bathroom.
    "Damn it all!" I heard the muffled exclamation behind my back, though I expected to hear expletives much more obscene.
    When Lucy regained consciousness, the colonel became still more austere with her.
    "We've lost time on your swoon, girlie," he rebuked her severely. "You know well that my service is always fraught with unpredictability, so take yourself in hand, please. After my death, you won't be left to the mercy of fate, and within the next hour, I'll provide you with the necessary. Give me your passport and other papers, and from now on, you may consider doc your lawful spouse and the father of your son."
    "Why? Why is it he?" she murmured, dumbfounded.
    "He is the best candidature for your family future from all points of view. Firstly, he can be trusted to secure his family against every risk; secondly, the child will be safe as houses in his care; thirdly, he loves you."
    "Who said it?" she flinched.
    It seemed to me that Lucy caught on the hop would lose consciousness once again, and I entered into conversation.
    "I said it," I confessed. "There is no sense in denying what is evident. I didn't sin against the truth, and he didn't kill me for my confession, as you see; therefore, your self-justification is inopportune at present. Suffice it to say that you have nothing against this offer."
    "Is it true?" Lucy peered at the poker face of the colonel.
    "It is the whole truth and nothing but the truth," he confirmed my report, glowering at her. "What's the good of delving in your relations with one foot in the grave? As I see it, the actual state of affairs consists in your chance meeting here and in your short infidelity. Since you have been living alone very long for a young woman, I can understand your adultery, especially when it was such a perfect specimen as doc. Had you eloped with him, I would have enraged in earnest at your faithfulness, but under the given circumstances, I decided to derive some benefit from your infatuation."
    "Forgive me," Lucy breathed inaudibly.
    "Yes, I'll forgive you, girlie, yes, of course, I'll forgive you," the colonel answered in an unexpectedly soft voice. "I love you, too, not only this rascal."
    Tears filled her eyes.
    "Forgive me," she repeated in a whisper, stifling the sobs, and scalding tears were running down her cheeks. "Forgive me for my ingratitude. To you I owe what I have now, solely to you."
    "That's enough, girlie," the colonel stopped her effusion. "You must be steadfast in hardship. Bring your papers to me, and I'll marry you at last. And be ready for departure."
    *
    In the mentioned "magic casket" of the special group, the colonel found not only many blanks of various documents but also the sets of some appliances for forging these documents, obviously familiar to him, including a biometric camera.
    Having finished my photo session for the passport of the chosen citizenship, the colonel laid out all Lucy's and my diplomas and certificates on the table beside his open laptop computer and looked crossly at me.
    "Don't be lazy, doc," he snapped. "Soon I'll conclude this legalization and the registration of all the papers in the official organizations, and then Lucy has to call her landlady. After that, we immediately depart from here."
    "I don't ask-where," I said respectfully. "What am I to do?"
    "Check all the places where we might leave even a vestige of blood or of our presence in the house and in the courtyard. Later I'll remove the bugs out of the telephones, because the guys killed by you were obliged to disappear without leaving a trace, as though the tenant simply hastened to move somewhere. I propose to end by six, I hope. Come on, doc, we have little time to waste."
    During the next hour therefore, I was rubbing out the slightest bloodstains and the other remains of my murderous accuracy everywhere, though owing to the night pouring rain my forced labor was not too hard.
    I was rather glad to be occupied with work on the outside, for I felt somehow uncomfortable in the presence of my beloved, and we avoided looking at one another in awkward silence. Not that it was shame, yet by his magnanimity, the colonel made us feel ashamed in some degree, even if we couldn't but realize that he was prompted not so much by noble sentiments as by advisability. In the first place, he thought about his son who was inseparable from his "girlie", while I chanced by good fortune to be the only one who was able to defend them and take the burden of responsibility for them upon himself.
    In essence, the colonel profited by the occasion, and who could reproach him for that? Through some quirk of fate, he became our benefactor handing me both my love and my own son, and the very awareness that he did it in ignorance of the real card layout aggravated our guilt complex, although I dare aver we did not feel remorse or repentance for our previous deeds.
    As I coped with my task earlier than an hour expired, I came in the house and saw a big wheel suitcase and a pair of packed bags already standing in the salon.
    "I wonder how we are going to travel," I said to Lucy stowing her traveling bag with some rompers and other articles of child's clothing from the divan. "I must take a nap, or else I am afraid to sleep on the run."
    "Why he is sure that nobody will notice the absence of these casualties?" she asked, packing the bag.
    "Nobody knows about that visitor and his arrival. Since our captivity, all the henchmen of the local coordinator are out of the game and wait for his next command, because they mustn't see the members of the operative group. As to the visit of that dignitary, it was top-secret, and only two commanders were informed about it. Now both of them are dead, and we can arrange the further actions so as to create the impression that the group has liquidated us and removes traces."
    Here I again remembered the thingamajig in the strap of my leather jacket and hurried to the coatrack of the anteroom to extract this microscopic delator.
    I stuck the needle with the tracker behind the plinth, and just as I returned in my jacket to Lucy, the colonel went out of the cabinet with the document case under his armpit, carrying the silvery laptop and the small chest of forgery in his hands.
    "That's all," he let us know, putting the computer and document case on the coffee table and standing the chest on the floor by the bags. "Sit down both on the divan, and I shall acquaint you with the papers."
    We obeyed his order and sat down side by side at the table, on which the colonel opened his document case.
    "So, doc, it is your passport with the same entry and exit stumps as in hers, which confirms your marriage certificate. Don't worry about their legality, because all the documents have been registered in due official lists thanks to the Internet. Besides, Vic has his new birth certificate for the future as born in wedlock. Here are Lucy's bank accounts in Europe and Canada and the copies of the contracts and other papers confirming her ownership in Toronto."
    "What do you mean?" Lucy queried with a stare of amazement.
    "You have a decent three room flat there," the colonel explained. "The originals you will take at this office of the lawyer looking after your affairs in Canada. Here are his telephones, address and such like, including his fees. He will help you with all juridical problems as well as with confirmation of his professional status. In a word, you may rely on him if you pay him duly. Take this files and credit cards, and in addition, you should have a certain sum in cash."
    "That is, you intend to give me all your money," Lucy said sadly with a bunch of bucks in her hands.
    "Yes, girlie, there's no denying the truth," answered the colonel. "I no longer need money. Finish packing and call your landlady. Say to her that you are forced to move urgently with your husband."
    "I'll rather call my housekeeper. What's about the bug in my cell?"
    "It is an element of deluding the eavesdroppers. You, doc, go and begin to load the baggage in my car."
    "I wake Vic?" Lucy asked permission.
    "Wait a bit, I'd like to stay with him for a few minutes," the colonel detained her. "In the interim, you may look at the electronic tickets for your flight to Canada. They are paid, and you are supposed to arrive in that town in the evening and be in the airport in advance, as the flight is after the midnight. Since you have Business Class seats, you will have the opportunity to sleep off these wakeful nights, and you, girlie, can have drinks of whisky to your heart's content. True I've reserved a compartment for you, and your train departs two hours later, so for sleeping you have the whole day ahead, too. The tickets are also paid, naturally. No, girlie, it is not philanthropy, I simply allow for covering your tracks. Therefore, leave your banks accounts for your future life. Do you understand now why I've forked out?"
    "Yes, I do," said Lucy with tears gleaming in her eyes again. "Thank you for everything."
    "Don't mention it," the colonel smiled at her. "Who else deserves to be rewarded by me? Come on, girlie, call your housekeeper."
    "Then I set to work," I dropped, taking the bags.
    On my return for the suitcase and traveling bag, the colonel just dismantled the telephone receiver and picked out a tiny coin of the bug.
    "Sometimes those who are overcautious make fools of themselves," he remarked. "They feared lest the local eavesdroppers hear them; that's why the rooms weren't bugged. Due to their prudence, no one knows what has passed here and her call is interpreted as a sign of concluding the presence of the group in the house. After that, the group must remove all the bugs, liquidate all the dead bodies, and vanish into thin air, imitating some unforeseen departure of the tenants. Mark you all of them will be sure of the reality of such a scenario even after having the news of the death of their boss in a road accident. Well, doc, go on carrying out all of it, whereas I'll stay alone with my chappie for the last time."
    Thus, some minutes later Lucy and I were standing in the salon and waiting for the colonel.
    Although I could hardly sympathize with him in his misfortune, nevertheless such a melodramatic situation in the child-room involuntarily stirred me to compassion. Undoubtedly, the colonel received his just deserts, but he met a sudden fateful blow with rare dignity and evinced real fortitude in his catastrophe, doing his utmost to provide the future of his son and woman and acting in the last hours of his life for their sake. Maybe it wasn't self-sacrifice, yet it wasn't widespread vindictive embitterness either; meanwhile, in the behavior of the doomed patients, I usually watched just the latter.
    It was impossible to take a liking to him, and still I never expected him to be so generous with his indurated heart of a coldblooded killer. Forsooth, he was a man of unbending spirit and of not altogether lost soul at that.
    And indeed, when I saw the colonel behind the banisters of the balustrade, it seemed to me that his cheeks were slightly wet after looking at his son.
    "You may wake the child," the colonel commanded Lucy. "Feed him in the car. Help her, doc, and I take the rest."
    By "the rest", he implied his laptop and the notorious "magic casket".
    *
    Fifteen minutes later, we rode over the town.
    Lucy was sitting on the back seat with Vic sucking his warm gruel out of the feeding bottle, while I wrestled with insuperable sleepiness, being on the verge of switching off without any motion.
    "Hey, sleepyhead, stop nodding," the colonel disturbed my sinking into a sleep.
    "Even Homer nods," I mumbled, surfacing back from the sudden abyss of my blackout.
    "Open my computer, doc," the colonel made an attempt to dispel my sweet dreams. "You should read it."
    I unfolded his laptop lying on the dashboard in front of me, and the colonel opened one of the files on the display in his turn.
    "Look here, doc. It is my message to my chief. Then it will be enciphered before sending, otherwise it won't pass through the filters. Read and I'll send it."
    The message was laconic but exhaustive.
    "Greetings, old chap,
    I feel compelled to report you that the group sent by you to seize me is no more, and that the local coordinator and his guest were killed in a car crash. All the witnesses of the operation have disappeared, too, and thus there remains no one knowing about it and its task. While liquidating the coordinator I was wounded by him, and the duration of my life was reduced to six hours. That's why I decided to send the information about that secret case to you and return to the country with the stolen program. Since I am supposed to die in the time of the flight, somebody must wait for my arrival in the airport. You are free to do with the information what you wish, as henceforth you are the only one who knows this secret. Naturally, I left no trace after the conclusion of my counter-operation. Accordingly, the case may be closed. Below I've attached the number of my flight and all the codes and passwords for access to that site with necessary explanation.
    All the best,
    Your old friend"
    "Further there is an attachment to the letter," said the colonel, stopping the car by a public telephone and closing the computer. "As I promised, I shall call your landlord."
    As I set the door ajar when he talked with my landlord, I heard his conversation, but he told just what he promised, having prefaced his notification with a reference to John.
    "So I can flummox my chief after that," the colonel expounded the continuation of his plan of action, again unfolding his computer. "To encipher the text takes some minutes, but perhaps there will be something in reply earlier than you will board your train."
    The answer came half an hour later while we disembarked from the car before the building of the station.
    "He has checked the codes yet, and he is ready to receive me," the colonel informed us. "However, as he expressed his thought, I also disappeared for them, that is, I shan't have any pension and even any grave with my name, just as I expected. Now give me your cell phones and purchase new ones at the first opportunity. To make doubly sure that nothing will come to light, I'll scatter their pieces along the road, as well as the details of my laptop. This time I take the main road to the airport because of lack of time, and so I'll throw away their chest into the water where the highway goes over the inlet. Be so kind, doc, as to take Vic from her for a while."
    I understood that he was going to bid us farewell and take our drowsy love child in my arms.
    The colonel embraced Lucy and stood so, pressing his cheek to her face, not kissing her and not uttering a word, as though absorbing her wholly with the memory of his body.
    Then his lips touched her ear and I rather guessed than heard his "Thank".
    "Come here, sonny," the colonel called Vic, who very reluctantly passed into his hands.
    "Be happy, kiddy," the colonel whispered, gazing into the eyes of his son. "Be happy with your good daddy."
    He tenderly kissed the forehead of the frowning dot and handed Lucy her offspring.
    "Let's finish our unloading, doc," he said with a sigh and stepped to his car.
    His next phrase ensued when I pulled Vic's folded pushchair out of the boot.
    "What do you say, doc, have I paid off my debts?" he asked in an undertone.
    "Yes, we are quits," I answered ambiguously.
    He apparently expected to hear some commiserating like "I feel sorry for you" from me, just as I-his "Don't forget me" to his son, yet neither that nor this was pronounced.
    Instead of such banal sniveling, the colonel said a few very strange words.
    "You were right, doc, God indeed exists," said he. "Otherwise, such an inglorious finale would never befall me in requital of my service."
    With that, he slammed the empty boot, got into his Mazda, and put the car into reverse, leaving us with our baggage by the railway station.
    "What he told you?" Lucy followed the car with her eyes in which tears stood as before.
    "Nothing special," I dodged a question, standing the unfolded pushchair. "He has begun to believe in Providence. I'll fetch for a luggage cart."
    *
    Only some separated episodes of our journey remained imprinted in my memory after the lapse of the twelve hours of this depressingly dreary day.
    As soon as we settled down in our two-berth compartment, I muttered on the verge of being out, "I need four hours' sleep. Excuse me."
    Hereupon I collapsed on my berth and fell into the abysmal darkness of the dreamless sleep.
    After the expiration of five hours, I opened my eyes and saw the peaked pale face of Lucy looking worn-out to the last degree but trying to fight her somnolence for laying toy's bricks with her cheerful son.
    "It is your turn to have a snooze," I told her at once. "I'll carry on your building."
    In view of this sleeping by turns, our first conversation as the newly wedded pair took place towards five o'clock when our merry chap was fed to satiety and put to the suspended cot to sleep, too, and it wasn't a talk about love, because an hour before that, I bought a newspaper at the platform of one of the stations and read in it about the dire consequences of the crash on the mountain highway and about an airline passenger who suddenly died of a heart attack on board in the air.
    At last, she and I were alone together and could talk over a cup of tea, so to speak, but notwithstanding the present placidity, I was still uneasy about our future.
    "Do you think it is all up with them?" I asked Lucy abiding in the same lassitude unlike me quite refreshed with my rest. "Maybe they must persecute us by their rules?"
    "In principle, we must have been liquidated," agreed she. "Yet we have disappeared as it is. If we reveal ourselves somewhere, then they indeed won't miss the opportunity to remove us. But for what would they hunt for us? We had a hairbreadth escape, and we shall keep mum about all that we witnessed. They know what our silence means to us, while in the case that we smell danger we shall be forced to save our lives. And then our only recourse will be to seek protection of their enemy, which entails giving away all our secrets. Besides, every hunt and tracing abroad cost dear and the expenses of every operation have to be grounded. Now that they have only just lost the whole special group and their local coordinator unexpectedly snuffed it, no one will approve such additional expenditure for the case formally closed, because at present they are in for a lot of trouble. Don't forget they ought to account for the death of that dignitary among other things, so I don't think that we may occupy their attention in the foreseeable future."
    "You're devilishly judicious for a blonde cutie!" I exclaimed, not raising my voice. "For such an explanation I would have gathered you in my arms and smothered you with kisses, but I am afraid I shan't refrain myself in the presence of the child."
    "Wait a little, Vic," said Lucy in a soothing tone and stroked my hand lying on the table between us. "Wait till our homecoming. Apart from everything, you have borne the brunt of this affair, and you should rest now."
    The train of the succeeding events resembled the scudding clouds, and these passing phantoms of our real actions were flashing across my consciousness and melting away behind, being fixed in my mind as some abstract accomplished facts, such as getting off at the terminus, or purchasing two new cell phones in the concourse, or taking taxi to the airport, or passing through the customs, or boarding an aircraft.
    Having put our sonny to his baby bassinet, we sank into our business class armchairs, and Lucy even took a sip of her whisky, yet no sooner had the airliner taken off than both of us fell asleep.
    *
    In the middle of the night, I woke without any reason and looked round, still half-awake, gradually realizing in the dim blue light and in the smooth humming of the flying airliner where I was and how I came to be here.
    Then, all of a sudden, I understood clearly what happened to me recently and why this sleeping beautiful woman was sitting beside me in front of this charming little boy sleeping in the baby bassinet.
    Today I had saved them, my glamorous beloved and my bonny sonny. Today I had broken the strangling coil of the impersonal implacable kismet twined round us. Today I had thrown off those gigantic invisible serpents back to the sea, from which they once emerged.
    Ultimately, I had shaken off their mortal grip, and the monstrous snakes receded, coming down to their cold and gloomy underwater world and carrying one of the denizens of the deep along with them to the bottom.
    I could not overcome the slippery power of the snaky envoys of that horrible kingdom of reptiles, but I managed after all to slip out of their coils, and now I was flying high in the sky with my young wife and my little son towards our new life beyond their reach and far away from the sea of their dark slimy abyss.
    I had no notion what life would be ahead there, yet I knew that henceforth I myself would always live for both of them and that even the correlation of the bipolarity of my nature would always depend on their lives.
    I gazed at my sleeping family saved by me in spite of everything today, and I felt free and happy.
    So I felt, looking at them, and such I was when seeing them beside me-free and happy, yes, free and happy....
   
   
    The End
   
   
    September 2015 - March 2017, Israel
     

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© Copyright Пучеглазов Василий Яковлевич (poutcheglazov@mail.ru) Размещен: 23/08/2020, изменен: 10/01/2023. 447k. Статистика. Роман: Проза

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