Immortal Hate (Harry Bauer Book 5)

by Blake Banner

  He was making a face and shaking his head. “I really don’t think the Serbian Mafia are here…”

  “If El Serbio is who I think he is, Aguilera’s death will bring in a whole flood, not of Serbians, but of Albanians. And believe me, pal, ask anyone from the Bronx, those boys are bad, bad news. As soon as they smell an imbalance in power, they move in. They kill, they torture, they rape…they don’t give a shit. And they are the tightest damn group you ever saw. You don’t want to mess with those boys.”

  His eyes went wide. “So why’d you kill the motherfocker if you knew this guy was a fockin’ Serbian?”

  “Albanian. Because you told me you wanted me to. Anyway, it’s not a problem. The easiest way to communicate the fact that there is no imbalance in power, is to kill El Serbio straight away, asserting your power over the island.”

  His jaw was slack. He nodded. “Jesus fockin… OK…”

  “How many men have you at your disposal?”

  “Eight.”

  “Can you get more?”

  He puffed out his cheeks. “I already asked for reinforcements last night.” He added with incongruous pride, “I got the Cessna and my own airfield here, you ain’t seen that yet, but I can’t call for men two days runnin’.”

  I shook my head and sighed. “You asked for reinforcements to protect you from the guy who killed Aguilera, burned down the Tipic and killed all Aguilera’s men. That’s priceless.” I gave him a friendly smile. “Let’s start making some smart choices soon, huh?”

  He spread his hands. “Come on, man! Get off my back.”

  “OK, don’t be embarrassed to learn from me, Gonzalo. Think of me as a mentor. I’ve been around the block a few times, and between you and me, the Marines is the least of what I have done. Work with me, be a friend, and you will make some very powerful connections. You reading me?”

  He nodded. “OK…”

  “So what the fuck are you waiting for? Find out if there are any other Balkans on the island. Make sure the information is good. I’m going to the john.”

  I went inside and Carmelo pointed me to a door upstairs. He stepped back outside and I sprinted up to the can. If he had five downstairs, that meant he had three upstairs. I made a 3D model of the house in my head and decided where I would locate my three upstairs guards. Then I quietly opened the door and stepped back out onto the landing, with the Fairbairn & Sykes in my hand.

  Ten

  Surprisingly, he did not look unfriendly. His eyes said that I should not be in there, and that I should leave, but that he understood it was probably a mistake. He was sitting in an armchair made of dark, turned wood upholstered in sage green. His feet were on the bedside table and he had the French doors open onto a large terrace with spectacular views of the ocean. He had a cigarette in his mouth and he was shaking his head as he struggled to stand.

  “No, señor, this room private…”

  I was laughing softly, grinning foolishly. “I’m looking for the john…hacer pis, baño—”

  “No, no, no…no here…”

  I let him come to me. That’s the way you do it with the Fairbairn & Sykes. It’s not a cutting, slashing knife. It has razor-sharp blades, but above all it has a needle-sharp point, and as he put his hand on my shoulder to guide me back onto the landing, I closed with him and the blade slid deep into his liver. I laid him down quietly as he slipped away, wiped the blade on his Armani jacket, and went out onto the landing with the knife tucked up inside my sleeve.

  The other two were together, and I wasn’t expecting that. Though when I saw the view from the balcony I realized I should have. They could see clean across the open ground with the agave plants, giant aloe and banana trees, all the way to the pinewoods, with uninterrupted views of the drive, from the woods to the house. These guys had AK47s and a high-precision hunting rifle. One of them was standing on the balcony, the other was lounging, smoking on a sofa. They both looked astonished, and not as friendly as their dead pal.

  I grinned. “You speak English?”

  The guy on the balcony was already crossing the floor, wagging his finger and saying, “No, no, no…” and the smoker was getting to his feet, which brought them to pretty much the same place at the same time, right in the middle of the floor. They both babbled, “You cannot be here, señor!”

  And I babbled over them, moving quickly toward them, “No, see, Gonzalo sent me. Gonzalo wanted me to tell you, good job, and you absolutely must not let me do this…”

  A friendly gesture will get through ten times more often than a jab or a straight cross, however fast you are. And if you are using a non-threatening expression and familiar language, your victim is as good as dead.

  The guy who’d been on the balcony didn’t know he was dying until he was practically gone. The blade slipped deep, slicing through his carotid and jugular, draining all the blood from his brain and snuffing out his consciousness. One moment I was placing my hand on his shoulder, the next he was in darkness.

  But when you haven’t got that friendly gesture to get you inside your enemy’s guard, there is nothing quite like the straight lead.

  It had taken me all of one and a half seconds to slip the fighting knife into the guy’s neck. Now his pal was struggling to process what the hell was happening. He was fast and he was professional, but even so his brain needed another second to catch up to what had happened. Half a second was all I needed to step forward with my right and smash my fist into the tip of his jaw. I don’t care if you are Mike Tyson with reinforced titanium jaws, that punch will put you down. It is fast, non-telegraphic and goes to the bull’s-eye.

  This guy’s eyes rolled and he fell back onto the couch as his dead friend sank to the floor. I removed the knife, used it to send the guy on the couch to the land of Nod, and went to the en suite to see if I had any blood on me. There was blood on my hands, and that brought out a bitter twist of my mouth, remotely related to a smile.

  I washed my hands and trotted back down to the pool. According to my watch, I had been less than five minutes. The rearguard were dead, the main army were cut off from any reinforcements, and now it was just a case of striking the death blow.

  So much for the theory.

  I emerged onto the terrace and saw everyone was as I had left them, except that Gonzalo was on the phone, pacing around the pool. He glanced at me as I came out and sat down. He spoke a little longer, brief staccato bursts, then hung up and walked over to sit at the table again.

  “How many of these fockin’ Balkans did you expect there to be?”

  I shrugged and shook my head. “I didn’t expect any. I just needed to know. If there is more than one we are playing a whole different ball game. How many are there?”

  “Two, him and another.”

  “How long has the other one been here?”

  “For certain, five years, but maybe longer, coming and going.”

  “Where is this information from?”

  “The mayor’s secretary, at the town hall.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “Kostadin Milojević.”

  I looked away at the pool and spoke quietly to myself. “Son of a bitch…”

  “What? You know this guy?”

  I was suddenly acutely aware of the three guys upstairs, and of the fact that the little detour I had taken on account of Helen, and to satisfy my own hatred of traffickers, was suddenly at risk of costing me the job and possibly my life.

  There were now two damned Colonel Kostas Marcovićs, and because I had played it too damned smart, focusing on my personal prejudice instead of on the job at hand, now I didn’t know which was which, and I was fast running out of time to find out—at least from Gonzalo. I had made a serious mess of things.

  I don’t know if it was a flash of inspiration or just plain desperation, but I looked at Gonzalo and said, “I need you to do me a favor.”

  “I’m getting tired of your favors, gringo. What is it now?”

  “I need you to br
ing Kostadin Milojević here, to see me.”

  “Are you kidding me? Man, I think you done too much fockin’ coke an’ is gone to your fockin’ head.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” I grinned. “Or maybe I’m just a better strategic thinker than you are. For reasons which I have already explained to you, it’s important that I find out who these guys are and why they are here…”

  Suddenly his hands were in the air and he was shouting, “OK! OK! OK!” He turned to Carmelo. “Go get Nestor and Oscar upstairs, take them, go get this fockin’ Kostadine, Constantine, whatever the fockin’ hell his fockin’ name is!”

  I said, “Wait!” but Carmelo was already moving through the door, calling “Nestor! Oscar!”

  At the corner of the house I could see the guy with the automatic rifle looking at me curiously, as was the guy at the far end of the pool. And now Gonzalo was frowning at me. “What’s the matter?”

  My mind was racing around the logistics and there was no way I could find to make this work. I didn’t waste time on self-recrimination; every fraction of a second was vital. Inside I could hear Carmelo’s boots thumping up the stairs. I told myself this was it and I would go down fighting, raised an eyebrow at Gonzalo and pointed at the guy at the far end of the pool.

  “Ask him,” I said.

  All I needed was a couple of seconds, and that was all I got. Both Gonzalo and the guy at the corner turned and frowned at the guy beyond the pool. They weren’t buying it, he wasn’t buying it, a four-year-old kid wouldn’t have bought it. But the couple of seconds they took to glance at him were all I needed to pull the Sig from my belt and put two 9mm rounds through the guy at the corner’s chest. I stepped to my right and put Gonzalo between me and the guy beyond the pool. The guy was shouting at Gonzalo in Spanish to move. I fired three times in rapid succession. The first slug went into Gonzalo’s leg and knocked him down. The other two went through the guy’s chest as he ran straight at me.

  That left Carmelo and the guys on the door, all three of whom had heard the shots and were charging through the house to see what the hell was going on.

  There was only one thing I could do. I dragged Gonzalo screaming to his feet and rammed the Sig in the small of his back as Carmelo and the other two stormed through the plate-glass doors onto the patio and staggered to a halt.

  Carmelo held up both hands and said, “Tranquilo…”

  Which Gonzalo echoed with, “Take it easy…” He was breathing hard and you could hear the pain in his voice, but he managed to croak, “No suelten las armas!”

  Don’t give up your weapons. A Colombian standoff. Only one thing was clear and that was that it wasn’t leading anywhere good. I drew breath but Gonzalo spoke first.

  “You kill me and you are dead. You threaten me, they know you ain’t gonna kill me, because if you do, you’re dead!”

  I jabbed the muzzle hard into his spine and snarled. “I can do a lot worse than kill you, smart-ass. And if you want to keep that leg, you’d better change your approach, pal.”

  For a second he froze, then screamed, “Rodéenle! Cójanle por detrás, pendejos. Son tres! El es solo uno, carajo! Carlos a mi derecha! Jerónimo a la izquierda!”

  It came out fast and shrill, and my Spanish was not good enough to catch it all. But I got Carlos on his right and Geronimo on his left, and when each of them took a step, that was all I needed to know. They were going to try to surround me and shoot me in the back.

  If you shoot a weapon enough, and often enough, aiming becomes totally intuitive. I shoot that much and more, and all I needed was a flick of my right wrist to blow a hole right through Carlos’s chest. His legs did a confused little dance and I didn’t hesitate after that. The next round went through Gonzalo’s leg, two inches above where the last round went. He screamed like a parrot on an estrogen high and I rammed the Sig back into his spine.

  “Any more smart ideas, genius?”

  “Don’t shoot no more! Don’t shoot!”

  “That’s a smart idea. Now, inside! Inside!”

  I shoved Gonzalo hobbling toward the house and Carmelo and Geronimo backed up through the plate-glass doors. My mind was racing but it was coming up with no ideas that made me want to jump and kick my heels.

  In the living room I jerked my head at two suede armchairs and snapped, “Sit!”

  Carmelo and Geronimo sat. Then I put Gonzalo facedown on the sofa and knelt on his back with the Sig shoved in the back of his neck. The blood was oozing fast from his leg and pooling on the cushions.

  I looked at Carmelo and Geronimo and wondered if either of them was brighter than Gonzalo. I decided they were probably brighter than your average amoeba and spoke to Gonzalo instead.

  “Shall we review the situation, Gonzalo? What do you think? First thing that strikes me is that you are bleeding out fast, and even if I don’t kill you, you’re going to die anyway. Pretty soon you’ll start to feel your consciousness slipping, then you’ll go into coma, and then darkness will close in. By that time, it will be too late.”

  When he replied, he whimpered. “What the fuck do you want, man?”

  “You should have done what I told you, instead of trying to be smart. Now it’s too late. You got money and stash here?”

  He nodded. “Yeah…”

  “OK, what you have not understood from the start, Gonzalo, but God knows I have proved it to you over and over, is that I do not want to kill you. I have been trying to help you from the start, and that is the only reason you are still alive. Are you beginning to see that?”

  He would have agreed to anything right then. He nodded and sobbed, “Yes, yes, please get me a doctor.”

  “So this is what we are going to do. Carmelo is going to go and get the cash and the stash, and bring it here to me. OK? Meanwhile Geronimo is going to keep watch to make sure I do not hurt you. Once the cash and the dope is here, Carmelo is going to go and get your doctor. Any argument, any delay, brings you a minute closer to death.”

  He muttered something in Spanish. Carmelo and Geronimo stared at each other for a second, then Carmelo ran. He ran to a door beyond the copper fireplace, pushed in and disappeared. The risk I was taking was about as high as it could get. At the very least he could be calling for backup or reinforcements. For a fraction of a second I allowed myself to give myself a mental kicking for being stupid enough and arrogant enough to get into this situation. Then I shut it down and reviewed the facts.

  Any reinforcements were at least a couple of hours away, and I planned to have this sewn up well before they could arrive. Second, spoils of war notwithstanding, I had no interest in his money or his stash. I just wanted the three of them to believe there was a plan underway, a plan in which I had a vested interest.

  Two minutes later Carmelo hurried in with four sports bags which he dropped in front of me. He opened them and I saw two of them were full of cash, and the other two were packed with plastic packages of either coke or heroin. It was impossible to tell which.

  I looked him in the eye. “This is it?”

  “Yes, señor, I don’ wanna play with the Jefe’s life. The big stash is in the garage, outside. We got a few kilos there. This is all the cash.”

  I nodded. “OK, then this is what you are going to do. You take the car and you go and get his doctor. You explain the nature of the wounds in detail, and tell him he is bleeding out fast. When you have delivered the doctor you go and you get Kostadin Milojević and you bring him here. Understood?”

  He was nodding. “OK, OK.”

  “You, Geronimo, take off your shoelace and make a tourniquet. Fast! This man is dying, for Christ’s sake! Carmelo! The keys to the car, fast!”

  “I got them!”

  He was feeling his pockets and Geronimo was bending down on one knee to get at his laces. I shot Carmelo first because he was the most dangerous and he was on his feet, so best able to respond. The slug hit his temple and his head whiplashed as blood and gore erupted from the back of his head. His knees folded and hi
s dying thought must have been that he had the key. That’s what you call irony.

  By the time Geronimo looked up I already had him lined up and I put two slugs through his forehead. There was no exit wound, so they must have lodged at the base of the skull. His eyes just stopped seeing. He sighed and sagged, and that was the end of Geronimo.

  Gonzalo had started to weep. He was very weak and I could tell he was close to death.

  “What do you want from me? Just tell me what you want. You can have it. Just take it, but get me a doctor, man. I’m dying!”

  I stood and looked down at him. Something inside me wanted to feel compassion, but I crushed it and remembered all the lives these bastards destroyed every day, routinely, without giving it a thought, the children they forced into prostitution, the men and women they tortured and murdered, just to send a signal to others.

  “I want two things, Gonzalo, and one of them might just save your life.”

  “Anything, man.”

  “You control all the rackets on this island, so which one is the Serbian refugee, Kostadin Milojević, or Constantino Marcos?”

  “You gonna kill me?”

  “That depends on whether you tell me the truth. I’ll know, believe me.”

  “And if I tell you the truth, you’ll get me the doctor, right?”

  “That’s the deal. Keep stalling and I’ll blow your other leg off.”

  “Constantino Marcos. They wanted him for war crimes. He escaped here, changed his name, got papers.”

  “Who got him the papers?”

  “Bloque Meta. He had contacts there. The fixed it for him and told us to leave him alone. They gonna kill me now if you hurt him.”

  I shook my head. “No, they won’t.”

  “Why?” He looked up at me and his face was pale, drawn with fear, wet and pathetic.

  “I told you I want two things.”

  “Yeah, man, anything. Take the cash. Anything man, just get me a doctor.”