A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  I remembered Saleem’s maddened eyes when I dropped his hog-tied body onto the deck outside Ceres.

  “And he left?” Hollis asked.

  “Sometime during the night. He took Juwad’s gun and some clothes.”

  Neither Hollis nor I said anything. I was wondering whether this could be some ploy. But even if Bilal and Aura had decided to renege on our deal, and risk their secrets coming to light, why warn me that their vicious servant was on his way to kill me?

  Aura spoke again, maybe thinking we were still unconvinced. “Saleem left his phone behind. He probably expects we might track him that way.”

  “If he took the gun,” I said, half to myself, “he must not be planning to fly. Does Saleem have a car?”

  “Not one of his own. I suppose he could steal one.”

  A foreign visitor driving a stolen car across the continental U.S. I suspected Saleem was smarter than to try that.

  “Does he know anyone in the States? Someone who could provide him with transport?”

  Aura considered it. “He has relatives in New Jersey. Middlesex, I think.”

  Too far to drive down and pick up Saleem in Florida. But it was a place to start.

  “Check them,” I said. “Their accounts, their phones, whatever you can hack into. Do it fast. And anyone else Saleem might rely on.”

  She hesitated. “Bilal doesn’t know I’m telling you this. He would—are you still there?”

  My image had disappeared because I’d switched to a different app, to send something to Aura. I heard her phone beep as it arrived.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Who,” I corrected. “Cyndra. She’s one of the people Bilal threatened the first night I met you.”

  Aura was quiet. I switched back to the phone app and saw her staring, absorbed in the short clip Cyn had taken of herself, lifting weights and waving at the camera with that half-abashed, half-cocky grin on her face.

  I leaned closer to the camera. “Saleem knows where this girl lives. She’s what’s at stake.”

  “I understand,” Aura said.

  “Find a way to find Saleem or everyone loses.”

  “Yes,” she said again. “I’ll make it happen.”

  She ended the call.

  “We’re a long way from Miami,” Hollis said. “You sure Saleem is coming?”

  I nodded. His eyes had told me. Too many humiliations for the volatile gunman. First his boss marrying Aura and having to take orders from her. Then Bilal choosing me to break into the biotech firm instead of trusting the job to his right-hand man. And the cherry on top: my knocking him cold and tying him like a rodeo calf in the cryobank. I could imagine all of those events fueling Saleem’s resentful fire.

  What did he know about me, besides where Addy’s house was? He’d seen the Francesca, though without access to Aura’s magic tablet he likely didn’t know where it was moored. He may have seen the address of Bully Betty’s where I worked. But Addy was the likeliest tack. Even if Saleem didn’t find me there, he could still make good use of a hostage or two.

  “That was a nice trick,” Hollis said, tapping my phone and the video playing on repeat. The clip of Cyn deadlifting the barbell, setting it down, saluting ironically, over and over. “Showing her the girl. The soft touch, instead of pressuring her.”

  “It wasn’t a trick,” I said.

  Aura understood my desperation to protect Cyn. She’d lived with that feeling for weeks while her unborn children had been used as collateral. First by her ex-husband and then by me. Now that our fortunes had reversed, an appeal to her empathy was my best shot at stopping Saleem.

  And in case that went sideways, I had to get Addy and Cyn out of the line of fire. For the second time in a week.

  Shit, Addy was going to eviscerate me.

  Forty

  The more I thought about the Oxana M on the drive to Addy’s, the more I liked it. If Liashko had smuggled arms out of the conflict in the Ukraine, and if he was truly desperate to make this deal happen, he’d have played it very safe. Air travel was a nonstarter. Anything flying out of that war zone might have been searched down to the fuselage. He wouldn’t have sent the arms by land across all of Asia to the Pacific. Too many hostile checkpoints, too many rolls of the dice.

  Moldova was a friendly neighbor, and just a rock-skip away from the peninsula. Find a suitable freighter with a bribable captain—I couldn’t imagine that had been tough—conceal the arms in a deep hold stacked under tons of identical shipping containers, and have patience while the Oxana M made its long journey halfway around the world to the western U.S.

  Burke had ordered me to keep my head down. Implying whatever deal he had planned with Liashko was happening soon. And I already knew that Special Agent Martens’s task force was aiming to catch Liashko on American ground.

  If I could find the container that held the arms, I could pass that information along to Martens. The ATF could follow the weapons off the freighter and have a SWAT team ready to spring when Liashko arrived.

  Closing the net on him, and on Sean Burke, too. I might have met my father just in time to see him imprisoned forever.

  It was true that Burke had saved my life. But my life had limited value, even to me. I couldn’t stick my head in the sand if a little recon work might mean ensuring Liashko’s weapons never left the Oxana M.

  Addy sat at her dining-room table, writing a note by hand. Probably a thank-you to Dorothy. From Cyndra’s room I heard the competing discord of music and Cyndra talking to a friend who might have different music playing on her side.

  The roller bag from their stay was still out, waiting on its wheels by the hall closet. I took it into the living room and unzipped it to lay it open.

  “Are you packing?” Addy said.

  “For you and Cyn. We have to relocate you for a while.”

  She slowly capped the pen and placed it in perfect alignment with the stationery. Her deliberate movement as palpable as a shout. “Absurd.”

  “I know it’s bad news—”

  “I mean you. What on earth is the matter with you?” She kept her voice low, so as not to alert Cyndra. Regardless, Stanley caught the shift in her tone and grumbled confusedly as he paced between the back door and the living room. “It wasn’t a day ago that you told us it was safe to come back here. Now you’re coming in like a rhinoceros, trying to charge right through any objections.”

  “We can argue later. Let’s get you to a hotel. I’ll explain on the way.”

  “No. If the situation is that dire, then we’ll go to the police. I refuse to live on the run. Or to subject Cyndra to that. She starts school in the morning, for Lord’s sake.”

  “Addy.”

  “I’m not having it, Van. I don’t know what’s happened lately, but you look twisted into knots. Certainly you’re not in your right mind.”

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Well if you’re frightened, how do you think I feel? Tell me what’s going on.”

  I sat down on the floor next to Stanley. Laying my hand on the dog’s panting ribs may not have given him much comfort, but it did some for me. As briefly as I could, I told Addy about Bilal Nath, and Aura and her eggs, and about the danger of Saleem returning.

  “I don’t know if Saleem will use you to get to me,” I said, “but we have to plan for anything he might do.”

  “Anything and everything,” Addy mused. “Small wonder you’re twitchy. You can’t protect everyone all the time.”

  “I don’t care about everyone,” I said.

  “Yes, you do. Despite your many faults, you do give a damn, Van.” She sighed. “Cyndra and I are going to go about our lives. I can tell the police we’ve had menacing telephone calls or somesuch, so they’ll keep an eye on the house. We’ll be careful.”

  A cop car cruising past every couple of hours wasn’t going to make me breathe easier. “What if Hollis or Willard and I stay close the next couple of days? I can take Cyn to school and pick her up.
”

  “Willard? He’s your very large friend? I imagine any trouble would give him a wide berth.”

  “They’re both smart. They’ll know what to watch for.”

  “All right. I won’t let my own obstinacy make things worse. But only for a day or two.”

  “I hope that’s all I’ll need.”

  “Where have I heard that before? And once Cyndra’s home from school tomorrow, we’ll both sit down with her and explain the situation. She’s old enough, and it’s unfair to keep her in the dark about her own life.”

  Old enough, and tough enough. Cyndra had come through harder times.

  “Deal,” I said. “I’ll take the night watch and see if Hollis can relieve me tomorrow.”

  “Now I think we’ll be sufficiently safe for twenty minutes while you make yourself useful and run Stanley around the block. Tire him out some so we can all sleep. Three days at Dorothy’s and the poor boy is ready to dig a hole through the floor.”

  I sympathized. Every minute I would be guarding the house was a minute I wasn’t solving the root cause of the problem. But it was what had to be done. What was I fighting so hard for, if not this cobbled-together duct-tape-and-baling-wire family we’d made?

  Forty-One

  Harbor Island formed the heart of the city’s commercial shipping, and the Duwamish River was its primary artery, winding from the terminals off West Seattle to taper and scrawl crazily into smaller waterways south of the city. Industries reliant on merchant vessels crowded its shores: landscaping materials, food products, biodiesel plants. And dozens more boatyards and maintenance docks to service the tugs, barges, and tankers that sailed at every hour of every day.

  Hollis’s notes on the Oxana M told me the freighter was moored south of the Georgetown reach, across the river in the industrial part of South Park. I drove half a mile farther to a stunted avenue ending in a high razor-wired fence. The closest any car could come to the water on a public street.

  No company sign hung from the spiked gate. If you didn’t know what the place was, you weren’t supposed to be there. Past a collection of corrugated buildings, rust eating each of them from the ground up, I could see lifting cranes on cargo ships and multicolored stacks of twenty- and forty-foot steel containers, like a giant toddler’s toy blocks left to fade in the sun.

  Hollis had tracked down the Oxana M’s manifest, duly filed with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and a copy to the Port of Seattle. The freighter had arrived three days ago, offloading more than two hundred containers of industrial machinery and steel from Eastern Europe, textiles from North Africa, wooden furniture from Central America, and a thousand other goods. All from small companies, bartering on the cheap for a sliver of space in the Oxana M’s holds and accepting that it would arrive when it arrived, with no expectation of speed.

  A check of the local map showed a small park just south of the shipping yard. I left the Barracuda and backtracked to find it. The half acre of community land had more dead grass than living, but it let me walk right up to the water. Looking north, I had a sidelong view of the shipyard.

  Three freighters had been moored in a tight row along the yard’s long concrete dock. The biggest was the Oxana M. Over three hundred feet long, the white block letters of her name at the bow stark against the black paint of her hull. Two loading cranes extending from her deck nearly touched at their highest points, like a praying mantis’s forelegs. A white three-story-high superstructure enclosed the bridge and crew’s quarters at her stern.

  She floated high on the water, showing nearly as much red underbelly as black hull. Not completely empty of her burden. The container I wanted might still be aboard. If it was, it might be easier to find with the freighter’s legit cargo already offloaded and out of the way.

  Might, might, might. One assumption piled on all the others. I had nothing but a shipping container ID from a dead thug’s texts. No proof that the Oxana M was the ship that had carried it, or that the container was still aboard, or even that Liashko was smuggling arms at all. I was chasing phantoms.

  If I handed what little I knew over to Special Agent Martens, would it be enough to make the Feds hold to their deal and let Burke into WITSEC? Could I adequately explain where I’d gotten the shipping container code? Or would that be tainted evidence?

  I hadn’t signed any papers officially making me a C.I. for the task force. And no way could I tell Martens about the four men his good buddy Burke had murdered in saving my life, much less my own slaying of Gennady.

  And if they believed me about the ship? And all of my guesswork turned out to be right? It was too easy to imagine U.S. Attorney Stratton weighing his options, opting for the safer bet, securing the smuggled weapons, and declaring victory. With a little spin the bust would undoubtedly lend him a rocket in the polls—“CANDIDATE FOILS TERROR PLOT” would be a dream headline for any politician—even without arresting Liashko.

  An inner voice told me that would be best. Securing smuggled arms was a no-bullshit matter of national security. The life of one hitman couldn’t compare. No matter what he might be to me.

  I stayed in the small park and watched the freighter for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing was lifted on or off. Beyond the occasional ant-like speck of a sailor walking her deck, she might have been a ghost ship.

  When the evening grew too dim to see more than the wan yellow deck lamps and the white arms of the cranes, I gave up. The only way to determine if the Oxana M carried anything of interest would be to take a much closer look. Which would require some thinking. I couldn’t bluff my way aboard.

  At a pub on Cloverdale I ordered a Cubano sandwich and a pint of brown ale while mulling over the problem. Before the food arrived, my phone chimed with a video chat request: Aura Nath. At least this time she waited before popping onto the screen, unasked. I mimed to the guy working the counter that I’d be right back and stepped outside to answer the call.

  “I’ve got something,” Aura said. Less hushed than her previous call; her husband must not be near. “Saleem’s brother in New Jersey FedExed an overnight envelope not long after we arrived in Florida. His emails had the tracking number, so I was able to place it. The envelope went to a shipping outlet in a strip mall less than a mile from our hotel here.”

  “That must be it,” I said. “Money, maybe, or identification.”

  “I’m ahead of you,” Aura said. “The brother’s credit card bought an Amtrak ticket here in Miami early yesterday morning. One adult in a Viewliner bedroom, going all the way to King Street Station in Seattle. Saleem must have boarded almost immediately.”

  Meaning Saleem had timed his departure to make a fast exit. Maybe he and his brother resembled each other enough that he could pass using the same ID and charge cards. Traveling by train fit my theory that Saleem wanted to hang on to the gun he’d lifted from his buddy Juwad. “Where’s the train now?”

  Aura paused while she looked over her notes. “Outside Washington, D.C. It’ll go through Chicago and Salt Lake on its way to Seattle. Arriving Wednesday morning at 10:25.”

  Good. Two nights and a day for me to devise a suitable welcome. For once Bilal’s people had me on a timeline that worked to my advantage.

  And Saleem would know that.

  “He must suspect Bilal might warn me he’s coming,” I said, “if they argued, and Saleem cut ties.”

  “That wouldn’t be like Bilal to hand him over,” Aura said, with a glance over her shoulder. “He prizes loyalty. He’s mad at Saleem for going against his orders, yeah, but he gets Saleem’s pride. They have that in common.”

  I thought about that. “Does your team have a secure way of communicating? If you’re staying off phones?”

  “Of course,” Aura said, like the question was Hacker 101. “We use portable networks sometimes to share information and stay off the Internet. Or remotely, we can use private drop sites.”

  Like dead drops in espionage. One party leaves information for another to retrieve without di
rect contact. “Would Saleem be checking those?”

  Her face hardened. “You’re asking me to pretend to be Bilal.”

  “I’m asking you to help me. To prevent Saleem from doing something we’ll all regret.”

  “But you already know where he’ll be: King Street Station, Wednesday morning.”

  “And I could miss catching him there. If that happens, I want a contingency plan.” I sent Aura coordinates of a location in Snohomish County. “Put this out on your drops for Saleem to find. Make him think it’s from Bilal.”

  “He’s my husband. It’s like betraying him myself.”

  “We’ve both got a gut check here, Aura. Because I don’t know how far I’ll have to go to keep all of us safe. Your family and mine. If you want me to believe Saleem’s acting alone, then help me stop him.” That was as close as I would get to premeditation on an open line.

  She was quiet for a long count. “I won’t know if Saleem sees it.”

  “It’s enough.”

  After another moment, she nodded. “All right. I’ll do it. And I’ll keep checking his brother’s credit card and other accounts.”

  “Thank you. We’ll get through this.”

  She nodded once more and hung up.

  A few days before, Aura and Bilal Nath had been my worst enemies. Now events compelled us to cooperate. Those circumstances might include my holding their future over a barrel, and them trying to keep their unhinged bodyguard from blowing me away. Still, a reluctant ally was better than none.

  I’d implied to Aura that I was wrestling with whether to kill Saleem outright. That had been a half truth. I’d already decided on a plan of action.

  Tomorrow I would tip Lieutenant Guerin to the arrival of an armed individual traveling with false identification on the incoming Amtrak Wednesday morning. That should be enough to get Saleem arrested and likely deported after a long tour of various holding cells. Not a permanent solution, but enough to get the gunman out of the way while my attention was on Sean Burke and Liashko.