Northeast of Minsk, a restaurant called Let’s Go and Eat serves as a culinary way station for travelers who choose to avoid the urban congestion found along the Minsk Beltway. Highway 9031 connects two main arteries—one, a ray to the northwest, the other to the northeast—that jut out of central Minsk, into the Belarusian countryside. The highway begins at an intersection with the northeast artery, gradually veers to the southwest, until it reaches the outskirts of Kurapaty forest, passes Let’s Go and Eat, and then darts to the northwest, joining another artery 40 kilometers outside the city.
Mia Mathis had become familiar with Belarusian geography during her travels to, from, and through the former Soviet Republic during the previous three weeks. Her work for The Summit sent her to every corner of the globe, and she’d been in Belarus three times before, but never for more than a day or two while tracking down some criminal hoodlum who had the unfortunate luck of gaining her attention. It never ended well for the objects of her enmity. Mia had brought forth demise more than once on Belarusian soil.
She had nothing but trouble in mind for the four men in the sedan in front of her. She’d followed them since they left a safehouse in the center of Kalodziscy, a small town northeast of Minsk. Two men sat in the front seat, including Anatoly, the beefy Russian she’d watched guard the house by sitting in a folding chair outside, while also eating two large pizzas all by himself. He had a 1974-issue Kalashnikov rifle sitting on his lap, the same as he did throughout the day, only this time no pizza box rested on top. He also had a gun on his waist, which Mia thought he was too fat to access, and one on his ankle which didn’t worry her for the same reason. Another fat man drove the car. Back at the house Mia sat in her car and chuckled as she watched the driver try to execute a k-turn as they left, the man’s girth barely leaving enough room for his arms to reach the steering wheel, let alone maneuver the wheel back and forth.
The occupants of the back seat were of greatest concern to Mia. Two men, both smaller than the behemoths in the front seat, but still of decent size, sat in the back. Between them sat the most important person in the car, a young woman. She wore an oversized sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants as she walked to the car with one of the back seat men in front of her, and the other behind her. She wore her light blonde hair in a bun, and walked with a defeated sort of posture that reminded Mia of a middle-aged person beaten up in a life they hadn’t wanted or imagined. Someone who didn’t live, but to whom life happened. Mia had followed the woman for five days, beginning in Tallinn, a coastal city in Estonia, where Mia had watched Taras, a dapper Ukrainian who used his good looks to lure women, talk to her at a bus station. Taras could pinpoint a young woman in trouble with ease, and targeted them. Mia had seen enough traffickers to know how it worked. Taras complimented her, expressed concern for her situation, offered a sympathetic ear, and then a helping hand. Before she knew what was happening, the young woman agreed to go with him. At that point Mia decided not to follow Taras, but the young woman instead. She’d followed them across Estonia, into Latvia, and eventually through Belarus. From the safehouse in Kalodziscy she expected the journey to go one of two ways. If the traffickers planned to send the young woman to the Middle East, they’d take her to the airport in Minsk. If she was going to Europe they’d drive her into Lithuania to continue her journey to Germany, Poland, or the rest of Western Europe. Although The Summit had defined Mia’s mission as interrupting the trafficking network rooted in Tallinn, Mia knew that every mission had desirable secondary goals, and rescuing the young woman in the back seat of the car in front of her had become Mia’s immediate goal.
In the thirty minutes she’d followed the car, she’d devised a plan. She often had to evaluate the circumstances and come up with a plan in seconds, so half an hour to think about her next move seemed like an eternity. Three kilometers past Let’s Go and Eat, which was just past the Kurapaty, was an ill-conceived stop sign at an intersection with another artery from Minsk. Cross-traffic didn’t stop, so the traffic on 9031 backed up at the stop sign no matter the time of day. Mia planned to pounce as the cars waited. She’d approach Anatoly first, using her Russian language training to ask him for assistance, while relying on her physical desirability to put him at ease. Knowing that almost everyone around the world looks off into the distance when providing directions, Mia planned to wait until Anatoly’s gaze was fixed on the horizon, before punching him a single time in the base of the skull, knocking him out, and with a just a bit of luck and sound technique, damaging his medulla so that he stopped breathing. She’d have to grab the Kalashnikov in the next instant so the beefcake in the driver seat couldn’t grab it and end her days. As usual, she wouldn’t turn the gun on the men in the car. Despite working for The Summit, and risking her life on a daily basis, Mia never carried a gun—Those things are dangerous!—so she’d find other ways to dispose of the three men in the car. Much of the plan depended on how they reacted, and whether they were armed, but she knew that she had three advantages: her attack would catch them off guard, they would be stuck in a car, while she could move around, and no matter how tough they were, she was tougher.
Despite the large shopping mall on one side, and high-rise condos on the other, signifying the never-ending encroachment of the countryside, Mia knew that she was approaching the darkness of Kurapaty forest, where tens of thousands of people were executed for opposing Stalin. Let’s Go and Eat sat just on the opposite end of the forest. Almost time to carry out her plan.
But just as she began looking for the bright lights of the restaurant, she felt the first impact on the rear of her car. It felt like a slight bump and did little to disrupt her. Mia recognized what happened right away and stepped on the gas, but so did the driver of the car that hit her. Mia drove a small two-seater whose acceleration was no match for the heavier car behind her. When the other driver stepped on the gas and hit the rear left corner of her vehicle, Mia felt the car begin to spin to the left. She tried to gain control, but she couldn’t overcome the force of the larger car. Her car spun as it crossed the oncoming lane. With no traffic Mia didn’t have to worry about being hit, but the momentum of the bump carried her across the lane, and nothing stopped the car from exiting the road, sliding down the small embankment, and flipping over once before coming to rest in the Kurapaty forest. Mia took a deep breath, and lifted her arms to make sure she could still move. She looked in all directions, but with the angle of the car on the embankment, and the density of the forest, she could only see out her shattered window. Just as she looked back to her window she saw a man put one hand on the ground as he fell to his knees next to her car. She didn’t have to use much imagination to know what he held in the other hand, so rather than waiting to see his face, she reached for the door handle, and pulled it, without knowing whether the door would open. She continued a fluid motion and swung the door open, knocking the man to the ground. As she saw the man fall, she unbuckled her seatbelt with the other hand, freeing herself from the car. She somersaulted out of the car, kicking the door again with her feet after it had ricocheted off of the man’s forehead. The man had rolled away, but before he could get to his feet Mia pounced on him, her right knee connecting with his nose and snapping his head back, blood spurting in all directions. Mia got behind the man, lifted his torso off the ground, planted her knee between his shoulder blades, and snapped his neck.
As she let the man’s body fall, she saw another man approach from straight ahead. She rose to her feet to meet him, but before she could take a step, a third man jumped on her from behind. As Mia flipped him over her shoulder onto the ground she cursed herself for not keeping an eye on the area shielded by her overturned car. She prided herself on having a constant awareness of her surroundings because she knew even a momentary lapse might cost her everything. She kicked the man on the ground four times on the side of his face, and felt his cheekbone collapse on the last kick. The man writhed in pain and rolled away from her, which enabled her to turn her attention to the man in front of her just as he reached her.
“You good fighter,” the man said in English with a Russian accent. “Or they bad fighters.” As usual, Mia ignored the macho pre-fight utterances from the man about to attack her, and decided to concentrate on finding a way to subdue him. She didn’t have to put much thought into it.
The man ran right to her, his arms outstretched, as if a professional wrestler playing the role of a bad guy and opening himself up to be defeated by the hero. Mia side-stepped the man, kneed him in the stomach, and as he hunched over she grabbed him by the ears, took two steps to her left, and held his head against the car door jamb with one hand, and slammed the door four times against the side of his head with the other hand. She felt the man crumple, and closed the door one last time, scraping the door across his face as he fell to the ground.
Mia sat on the ground, her heart racing, her breath shallow and steady. None of the three men showed any signs of life. She looked up toward the road hoping that no passersby had stopped. No other cars appeared, but she saw another man at the top of the embankment. As soon as Mia saw him he turned and walked away.
“Hey stop!” she said, jumping to her feet. “Get back here.”
Mia ran up the embankment just in time to see the man get in the driver’s seat. She heard the engine rev as the man pressed on the accelerator to speed away, but he put the car in neutral rather than drive and went nowhere. The delay gave Mia the window of opportunity she needed. She broke the window with her elbow. The man cowered toward the passenger seat to protect himself from the breaking glass, so Mia reached into the car, and turned the key in the ignition. The car fell silent. The man yelled, and flailed her arms at Mia in half-hearted punches. Mia punched him in the face, which stunned him into inaction.
“Get out of the fucking car,” Mia said, as she opened the door. The man howled in pain and fear, and collapsed to the ground as soon as he left the car. “Get off the ground. You’re going to get run over.” Mia picked him up by his shirt and pushed him across the road toward the other side, where her car had left the road. She got in the car, moved it up fifteen feet, and farther onto the shoulder to avoid getting hit by a passing car and attracting attention she didn’t want. She turned off the car, put the keys in her pocket, and raced across the road. She found the fourth man standing next to her car, holding a thick, meter-long piece of wood in his hand.
“What are you going to do with that?” Mia asked.
“I’m going to kill you if I have to,” the man said.
“Why would you have to do that?”
The man looked at the three men on the ground, then back at Mia, and said, “To protect myself.”
“I kill people for two reasons: either they try to kill me, or they’ve got it coming. If you don’t try to kill me, then you only have to convince me that you don’t have it coming.”
“I’ve got nothing to do with this,” he said.
“Then why are you here? Just out for a midnight stroll and then all hell broke loose?”
“They tell me to drive them, so I drive them.”
“Did they tell you to run me off the road?” Mia asked. The man didn’t say anything. He had been holding the piece of wood with one hand, like a sword, but added his second hand and held it like a baseball bat. “Maybe I should kill you. You tried to kill me five minutes ago by running my car off the road. I doubt you’ve done anything to redeem yourself since then.”
Mia took three steps toward the man. If he knew how little he and the large piece of tree intimidated her, he would have turned and run into the forest. That would have given him a much greater chance of survival than attacking Mia.
“I feel justified in killing you,” Mia said. “You tried to take me out. It’s only fair that I return the favor, right? Unfortunate that we have to do it here in Kurapaty. Lord knows this place has seen more than its share of human suffering. But you and your friends left me no choice.” Mia took two more steps toward the man, who took three steps backward, stumbled over one of his dead friends, and fell to the ground. He hit himself in the forehead with the large piece of wood. “Easy there, lumberjack.”
“I’m not a lumberjack,” the man said. “And they’re not my friends. I’m working for them. But now they can’t pay me, so I’m not working for them.”
“So I should let you live because they’re dead? That’s some shaky reasoning, LJ.”
“My name’s not LJ!” the man yelled.
“Your name doesn’t matter. You want to carry around a piece of wood like a lumberjack, I’m going to call you LJ.” Mia walked toward the man as he got back up on his feet. “You haven’t given me a reason not to kill you, so I guess this is where it ends, LJ.”
Mia ran toward the man, and he swung the piece of wood at her head, just as she expected. She ducked, grabbed the wood, twisted it from his hands, and threw it over her car. The man turned to run, but Mia grabbed him by his shirt, pulled him toward her body, and wrapped her arms around his throat. “Running isn’t wise. You better give me something good, or this is the end. Who are these men? How did they know I was following the others? Do they know my name?”
The man fell to his knees, but Mia couldn’t tell if it was a lame attempt to break free, or an expression of his all-encompassing fear. She pulled him back to his feet by his neck, and squeezed her arms tighter.
“Where are they taking the girl? Show me how to get there and I’ll let you live.”
“I don’t know anything,” the man said. “I’m an IT guy. They hire me because I can get them into any computer. I was doing work for them and they needed a driver and I was the only guy around, so they had me drive. They knew they might have to get out of the car to take care of you, so they wanted me to serve as a getaway driver. I’ve known them two days. I have no idea where they’re going.”
“You’re not helping yourself, LJ.” Mia squeezed tighter. “If I keep this up for another minute or two it’s curtains for you. I’ve already got three dead guys here. Gollyfuck, I don’t mind a fourth.”
“Killing me would be a horrible mistake,” LJ said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not? You just said you can’t help me, and you tried to kill me. I see no reason not to end your life.”
“I can piece it all together,” LJ said. “For you and everyone else.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything. How are you going to help me? What are you piecing together?”
“I can answer the question everyone wants to know.”
“What are you talking about? What question?”
“How did a traitor become President of the United States?”
Continue to Chapter 2: “The Roost”
Check back Monday, March 18 for the next chapter of Kompromised.
Brett Baker is the author of The Death Market, and the first two books in the Mia Mathis series, Must Come Down and For the Trees. You can purchase all three here.