The Chronicles of Young Dmitry Medlov: Book One Page 26

  Dmitry yawned. “No,” he said, still a little groggy. That sounded too much like the last supper. Bad luck.

  “Khalid rang down a minute ago. He’s coming down to talk to you before we are escorted up to Boss Smirnov’s suite.”

  Dmitry stood up and stretched his long arms out. Looking down at himself in the mirror on the wall across from him, he rubbed his hand over his five o’clock shadow. “Bring me my kit. I need to shave.”

  “Da, da, boss. Did you hear what I said? Khalid wants to talk to you.”

  “I heard you,” Dmitry said, dragging into the bathroom. “Check him before he enters. Make his men wait outside. I don’t want any of Smirnov’s men inside of this suite,” he yelled out as he ran hot water in the sink. “And bring my shaving kit.”

  “It’s already on the mantle waiting on you,” Davyd said nervously.

  He tried to keep his composure, but he was just as edgy as Dmitry about the meeting. He had always been a lower level Vor, not even a captain, and now he was about to be in the presence of the Czar. Never in any part of his life had he imagined such a meeting.

  Dmitry shaved his porcelain colored face slowly, staring at himself in a daze. The feel of the cold steel against his skin made him only think of his mortality more. It was the tempo of the meeting that was driving him crazy. Everything was going far too slow. He wanted to cut through the semantics and get to the meat of the meeting, but he knew that was not the way the game was played.

  “When I’m Czar, I won’t fuck people around,” Dmitry said to himself in the mirror.

  “Did you say something, boss?” Davyd asked from outside in the bedroom.

  Dmitry hit the razor against the sink and ran it into the water stream. “Net,” he answered.

  Even to speak such a thing out loud was heresy, and he knew that, but Dmitry could not deny his inward goal. By the end of his life, he would be where Boss Smirnov was at this very moment – on top. He could feel it deep down inside, past the admiration, the fear, the nervousness and even the ambition. This was his birthright. Only, he did not know why.

  When Dmitry finished freshening up, Khalid was waiting for him in the parlor. He sat looking out of the window at the setting sun and sipping on a glass of vodka, waiting patiently. As Dmitry entered, he barely looked up. The man seemed to possess a certain calm that only came from a world of knowledge.

  Nothing moved Khalid to the point of losing his composure. He was a man in control of his own destiny.

  “I wanted to have a word with you before your meeting with the Boss,” Khalid said, gently setting his glass on the end table.

  Dmitry stopped at the bar and poured himself a small glass of vodka, then joined his new acquaintance in the adjoining chair. He sat down slowly, pulling up his pants as he sat and eyed the old, graying man. “Should we go over what I am to say to him?” Dmitry asked sarcastically.

  “More than that,” Khalid answered. “When you meet him, you might be a bit jolted by his appearance.”

  Dmitry was suddenly intrigued. “How so? Is he fat, unsightly?”

  A devious smile quipped at the old man’s wrinkled lips. “No. He is very poised, very formidable…much like yourself.” The gleam in his eyes spoke to something more.

  Dmitry prodded. “Then what about his appearance might jolt me?”

  Khalid paused, thought over something and dismissed what he was about to say. “I have found that the element of surprise works in all situations. I won’t say too much. What I have said should be enough to at least allow you to be on guard when you meet him.” He moved on, sitting up in his chair from his relaxed position. “You may take Davyd, no one else. He must not speak, unless spoken to and I doubt there will be a need. You get ten minutes. Boss Smirnov has somewhere to be this evening. Keep in mind that ten minutes is more than he normally gives anyone at your level. He wants definite, no maybes. He wants numbers, times, dates, and assurance that you have control over your organization. If he feels that this meeting is a waste of his time, you will be dismissed. If he feels that you have offended him in some way during the meeting, you will be killed.”

  Dmitry figured as much and quickly processed the information and nodded. “And if I prove to be worthy?”

  “Then you’ll hear from me.”

  “And if I prove to be a waste?”

  Khalid smiled. “Let’s hope for your sake that you don’t. No one who lays eyes on Smirnov, knows who he is, and is considered a waste, as you so aptly referred, lives long enough to realize his mistake.” Khalid spoke without flinching.

  Dmitry took a deep breath and picked up his drink. “Well then. Let’s get on with it.”

  ***

  If the Medlov crew had thought at any point that they were well organized or even well-funded when they arrived in Prague, they were sorely mistaken. Smirnov did not have a few men on guard; he had an invisible army of men who blended into the hotel like guests, but wore artillery under their coats like they were going to war. With high-tech head phones and surveillance equipment, they watched Dmitry and Davyd’s every move from the time that they left their hotel room until the time that they arrived in the Presidential suite.

  It was then that Davyd realized that his feeble attempts to clear Dmitry’s suite downstairs earlier had been laughable. Smirnov had video surveillance everywhere and probably had tapped into the hotel’s security as well. His men were well-trained, ex-military, in tip top shape and ready to kill on command. In essence, the Medlov Organized Crime Family was way out of their depth.

  They quietly and orderly entered into the suite to witness true luxury that even outshined Lady Hutton’s taste. The room that Dmitry had been given a few floors down was overtly shabby in comparison to the king-like opulence of Smirnov’s quarters.

  The massive suite seemed to span the entire width of the hotel. Gold-gilded, antique furniture framed the rooms under large crystal chandeliers; beautiful wall-to-wall windows were decorated with fine linen curtains and the marble floors gleamed with perfection.

  In the sitting area, a man sat listening to classical music and eating dates, waiting on his guests while several men with large automatic weapons stood across from him quietly on post.

  Dmitry could see the man from a far and knew that it was Smirnov.

  “Davyd, you wait here,” Khalid said, pointing at a chair in the corner of the entryway. “Dmitry, you come with me.”

  Dmitry followed Khalid into the sitting room in a leisurely stroll, trying to hide his mounting nervousness that would have been evident if anyone could have heard his beating heart.

  As his foot hit the bottom step that lead down into the main room, Smirnov looked up into Dmitry’s eyes. A wide smile crossed the old man’s perfect pink lips, and finally he stood up to receive his guest. When he rose from his chair, brandishing blonde locks with large streaks of silvery gray, peering out of crystal blue eyes and standing over seven feet tall, Dmitry stepped back in disbelief.

  “Welcome, home,” Smirnov said to Dmitry with a knowing grin.

  Chapter Four

  The room began to spin. Reaching for something to hold on to, Khalid’s words finally made sense to Dmitry as he tried desperately to get his baring. Jolted, he swallowed down questions and made himself move his feet forward.

  Dmitry had never seen his father. Never known him. His mother had told both he and his brother that she had fallen to the fate of two brothers, well known for their station in life but brutal in all manners of humanity.

  Now, it all made sense. She had been the plaything of the Smirnov men. However, she had never uttered one word about their true identity and neither had anyone else. Maybe no one else knew, but how could they have been mistaken? Laying eyes on the man now, he knew, as must Khalid must have, that he was a son of the underworld Czar.

  The questions began to multiply. Holding back the sweat that begged to push through the pours of his skin, he stilled his racing heart.

  Though Smirnov was well aware of Dm
itry’s wide range of emotion, the man did not bat an eye of concern, excitement or even amusement. Instead, he offered a large, manicured hand, covered with tattoos and riddled with calices.

  Dmitry looked down at the hand offered to him, then stuck his own inside of it. The reality that he was actually face-to-face with his father was sobering. The man’s hand was cold, dead-feeling as though life had left it many moons before.

  Looking at his father in his face, he studied him curiously, still with his guard very much up.

  “Boss Smirnov,” Dmitry said, pushing words from his diaphragm. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to meet with you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Smirnov answered, motioning for the chair across from his own. His voice was deep and hollow. His eyes matched. “Please, have a seat.” He looked down at his Presidential Rolex and nodded at Khalid. “You can leave us, Khalid. Thank you.” Turning back towards his son, he placed a hand on his upper abdomen as he took a seat, crossed his long legs in his gray tweed suit and wiggled down in the comfort of his chair. With the tilt of his head, he looked Dmitry over once and smirked. “Dmitry Medlov…you’ve got ten minutes.”

  Dmitry’s eye twitched. This was not his idea of a family reunion, but what did he really expect? He was the spawn of a murderer. Pushing aside any notions of warmth, he focused. Rubbing a hand over his itching nose, he leaned an elbow on the arm rest of his chair and began. “Right. Well, then I’ll get to it. As you already know, I own Hutton Industries in whole. I control it, most of the stock in it and thus its future. The board was on its way…” Dmitry corrected himself by raising his right index finger. “Brenneman, excuse me, was on his way to diversifying Hutton’s Industries core businesses through working with you on the NightStar project. Only, after a horrible mishap, he’s out of the picture as well as the rest of the board.”

  “Yes, I heard about his unfortunate home invasion and the plane crash with the board. It seems that they can’t even find the black box,” Smirnov said with a smirk.

  “These things happen,” Dmitry said dismissively. “I’m interested in continuing the relationship between Hutton Industries and NightStar. I want to outwardly fund the scientists who are working on the cutting-edge technology along with cleaning the money that comes back to us for our black market sales. In fact, I already have someone in mind.”

  Smirnov looked at Dmitry, almost through him. “You have your mother’s frown.”

  Dmitry didn’t blink. “Ironically, it appears I have acquired nearly everything else from you.”

  “What is truly ironic is that Catherine Hutton ended up with you in her bed, not a whore who slept with half of the Vor, and then got pregnant by one.”

  Dmitry’s interest peaked. “You knew my wife?”

  Smirnov smirked again. For the boy to be so incredibly smart, he was equally as stupid. “Your wife and I had a bit of a working relationship at one point. Before I cut her off, she purchased a great deal of her arms for her work with the Free Right through me. However, we had a bit of a misunderstanding considering I was also selling to the very people who were attacking her workers.”

  “A serious conflict of interest,” Dmitry said as he pushed more questions to the back of his mind. It was better to keep a clear head at the moment.

  “Does it affect you to know that even your wife knew your father, yet she said nothing to you about it?” Smirnov asked with a devious grin. He was clearly enjoying tearing the young man’s world apart.

  “I’m sure that she had her reasons for keeping that information from me. Catherine had a way about her that you’d have to know to appreciate.” Dmitry clenched his jaw and raised his brow. “She ended up having the last laugh, really.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m sitting here with you, and I own everything.”

  He dropped his smile for the moment, pissed that Dmitry was able to keep his composure. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. You don’t own everything,” Smirnov said with menace in his eyes. “I still own most of the world. You just own a small sampling of the scraps, my boy. It’s nothing to be too proud of.” Running his hand over the rim of his glass, he breathed through his nostrils. “What of your brother…my brother’s son…or my son. We never had a paternity test as you could imagine. It wasn’t that important to either of us, but we did have a small wager going on who belonged to whom.” He watched Dmitry again, waiting for a response.

  Dmitry forced himself to not care and at the same time to prohibit the images of his mother-dead and bloody, beaten by a john - to haunt his meeting. “Ivan is just as confused, I suppose, as his mother was. He’s not very useful to me, but I keep him around. I guess you could say that I have an appreciation for family.”

  “Don’t pat yourself too hard on the back. It’s overrated…having a family. Trust me. Just this last year, I had my brother decapitated for being a greasy little fuck. It’s a shame that we made it through decades of our troubled youth, and I had to kill him as a older man. Life is funny.”

  “Sorry to hear it about your loss,” Dmitry said, feeling some strange relief to know that at least one of the two Smirnov brothers was dead.

  Smirnov smacked his lips and threw up his hands. “Genes are very funny. You could be my nephew or my son, as could Ivan. Hell, you could both be mine. You resemble both of us. But neither one of you were ever supposed to exist. Your mother was just a fertile pet. However, as you can imagine, when she dropped a litter of two worthless pups, we had to dismiss her…good bitch or not. She was eighteen when we sent her to the streets. Kirill was supposed to look after her. If I am not mistaken, he ended up having a try at her too.” He cracked a devilish smile. “She was tempting like that. Your mother. Only good for one thing.”

  Dmitry gripped the end of the chair. His nails dug into the leather. “You said you had to get rid of her. Was she a slave?”

  “No, she was a lost little tramp that your uncle and I entertained ourselves with. She was something of a supermodel. Long legs and pouty mouth, big blue eyes and a voluptuous body. No one would have ever thought that she was fourteen when we found her eating scraps out of a garbage can outside of our club. We kept her as long as we could, but with two starving, whining boys, she simply had to go.” He said so in a matter-of-fact tone with no sympathy or concern.

  “It’s unimportant. Water under the bridge. What I want to know is will you consider a new partner with the NightStar project? Even though I have a small scrap of the world to offer, it’s still more than what you have without Hutton Industries.” Dmitry pushed toward the end of his seat and looked at his watch. He only had a few minutes left and there was still plenty of convincing to do. He doubted very seriously that his father gave a damn about their blood link. There had to be a financial payout for him to listen.

  Smirnov lit up as he began to talk. “NightStar is my baby. I thought of it. I arranged it. And up until this point, I have funded it. You see, this is the new wave of weaponry, and it’s all about harnessing the power of mass destruction into assault rifles. A scientist from the USSR began the work before the fall of the country, but could not find funding after. I scooped him up and gave him a little incentive to continue, i.e. a life of luxury. Now that he’s here in Prague, the advancements in his work have exponentially progressed. So, it’s time to focus on moving from the baby stages of prototypes and plans on paper to tangible products ready for manufacturing and distributing to the highest bidders. So you see, Brenneman was never going to be a partner. He’s not a Vor, not a Russian and not even a real criminal.” Smirnov laughed. “He was merely a means to an end. He would have found the same demise that you provided him even if he had come to Prague. But I must admit that based upon the reports you were very original in your choice of torture. Still alive but barely and in such a brutal way. It reminds me of when I was a boy… the things that Khalid and I did were the stuff of nightmares.” He laughed as he reminisced.

  Dmitry returned an admiring nod, holding back his disgu
st by thinking of just how slowly to kill the old man when the time was right. “Great minds think alike then,” he said as he exhaled. “Just one question. You wouldn’t have killed him until he provided something. What was it that he was going to give you?” His eyes narrowed.

  “You are smarter than you look. I’m impressed. No formal education, yet advanced deductive reasoning.” Smirnov winked at Dmitry. “After he appointed me to the Hutton Board as I requested, I plan to have him killed.”

  Dmitry smiled. “Brenneman was a puppet. I, on the other hand, can offer you more than a seat on my board.”

  Smirnov liked the sound of that. He smiled. “Yes, you can, but the question is will you, my little bastard child?”

  “You said that NightStar is your project, and you have no partners. Well, I don’t want to be an equal partner, just a silent one. This will give us an opportunity to get to know each other better and build a foundation for other deals in the future, if you don’t mind me being a tad bit hopeful.”