“What about the other guy, the one at the Hilton?”
“Of the two, he has my vote. Has LinkedIn with a picture that could be any of a thousand guys. Not Ledger’s face, of course, but a photo with details that match a likely disguise. And his Instagram is all funny memes and business stuff. He sells restaurant software to American chains doing business overseas. His Instagram avatar is a cartoon. Same goes for his Twitter. Lots of retweets from Forbes and Bloomberg, some Wall Street Journal stuff. And lots of pictures of restaurants all over the world.”
“So, you’re saying he’s trying to be anonymous?”
“That or he really is socially awkward and that’s why he has an emotional support dog.”
“Okay, I like that. Why’s the other guy have one?”
“PTSD. Not from the war, though. The roof of his church collapsed, and he was one of the few survivors.”
Stafford looked out the window at a light drizzle falling onto the Rotterdam streets. People hurried to get out of the rain. He watched a very pretty woman with incredible cheekbones and Jamaican braids walking through the shower with a joyful expression on her face.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll hit the Hilton first. Stay on it, though. If the other guy makes any kind of move, let me know.”
“Sure.”
Stafford hung up, nodded to himself, feeling good about the guest at the Hilton. He went out into the rain. He walked directly past a middle-aged woman wearing a dowdy cardigan who walk-jogged through the drops to get into the lobby. He had no idea who Peggy Ann Gondek was and did not even glance in her direction.
* * *
She, on the other hand, gave him a double take because at first glance she thought she was seeing Joe Ledger. But that second look convinced her it wasn’t Joe, not even in disguise. She turned away, forgetting about the man completely.
CHAPTER 80
ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Truth to tell … when I started talking to Toys, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to say.
Let’s face it, I’ve been on the world’s least fun autopilot for a while. I had information rattling around in my head, but I didn’t really have it collated in any useful way. That was the problem. Usually this far into a case, I’d have turned information over piecemeal to the TOC, to Church and Bug, to Doc and whomever else was on deck. Then they’d fire up the analytical monster that was Rogue Team International. They’d bring in MindReader and maybe tap our allies—Barrier, Kingdom, SEAL Team 666, Interpol, Mossad, Chess Team, Sigma Force. Nikki would be looking for patterns, and Yoda would be categorizing data into digestible bites. Maybe we’d call in Dr. John Cmar and his Bug Hunters if there was a bioweapon in play or Dr. Ronald Coleman if this was genetic. All the intellectual muscle would flex and they’d toss me a set of mission parameters that would put me and my team in play.
I’m mixing metaphors, I think. But you get the idea.
But I wasn’t playing that kind of ball game. I was way the hell out on my own. Until I started laying it out for Toys, I wasn’t even sure that I was chasing anything except blood.
Except …
Even though I was literally killing my way up the food chain toward Santoro and Kuga, there was the fact that I kept collecting flash drives and cell phones, laptops and printed files. On some level, the me that was Colonel Joe Ledger was still trying to do his job, to work the case. It made me kind of look inward and give a nod to the very weary Cop part of me. Still treating all this like a case. Collecting clues, processing evidence.
That should have been encouraging. It should have been a comfort.
It made me sad, though, and at that moment, I really couldn’t say why.
Toys listened very closely as I went through it from the beginning.
I told him about the lab technicians in the basement of Mitrović’s mansion on Trstenik Island in Croatia.
“Some of them talked,” I said, and my voice sounded like a specter’s—distant, thin, and dead. “Before I killed them, some of them begged to talk. None of them knew where Santoro and Kuga were. None of them had ever met them. So I told them to give me something. A name, a lead, a location. I … I told them that telling me was their only chance. That if they didn’t, I would kill them; and telling me might save them. They told me everything they knew.”
I looked down the neck of my beer bottle and found no absolution there.
“I killed them anyway.”
I glanced at Toys. His eyes were steady, focused. If there was judgment there, I couldn’t see it.
“They told me about a man in Italy. A man named Puccini. Like the composer. He was a middleman in the Kuga supply chain. Nobody of any real importance. There’s someone like him in every major city in every country. Someone to pass messages along, arrange for new papers and identities. Someone to provide a bed and a meal, or a key to a hotel suite and a girl. A minor cog with no direct blood on his hands. But he was inside the organization. Mitrović was a contractor. Like most of the other people doing research and development. Not in the family.”
Toys nodded but said nothing.
“I found Puccini. He…” I looked away. “He didn’t want to tell me anything.”
“But he did?” prompted Toys.
“He did.”
“Where is he now?”
“Unless the police have found him, what’s left of him is rotting in his basement. Tied to a chair.”
“Was he dead when you left him?”
“Very.” I sighed. “Did he need to die? Was he a risk for ratting me out? Fuck. I don’t know.”
“And I don’t care. Alive he was a risk.”
I shook my head. “You’d have made the worst priest. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’ ‘That’s okay, kid, it had to be done.’”
He almost smiled at that. “What did Puccini tell you?”
“He told me that Santoro made frequent visits to a lab in Johannesburg.”
“That would be Dr. Gerald Engelbrecht of Van der Vyver Biomedical Associates?”
“You know about that?”
“It made the news,” he said. “Depending on whose press you watch, it was either a terrorist attack or a theft gone horribly wrong.” He finished his wine, picked up the phone, and called room service. More wine for him—a claret this time—more beer for me. And some sliced lamb for Ghost.
While we waited for that to arrive, I went over what I could remember of my trip to South Africa. When I got to the part where I set fire to the place while Engelbrecht was still alive, I saw Toys wince for the first time. And that reminded me that he and Sebastian Gault had nearly burned to death on my first DMS gig, the Patient Zero case. Not that I had anything to do with it—they blew up the lab where Gault’s crazy-as-fuck girlfriend Amirah was turning Seif al Din into an unstoppable doomsday weapon. They say the body has no memory for pain. I’ve always disagreed, and when it comes to burns, those memories are quite persistent.
Or … maybe that wince was because of my callousness. Hard to say, and I didn’t ask.
However, he said, “How much of this is you on a revenge kick and how much is the Darkness?”
The waiter knocked at that point, so I went and answered the door, tipped him, and brought the booze over to where we sat. After I was sipping another cold beer, I finally answered.
“I really don’t know,” I admitted. “The memories are in my head, but it’s almost like I’m recalling details I saw in a movie. They don’t feel entirely mine, if that makes any sense.”
“Yes,” he said, “it does.”
We drank.
“What was next?” he asked. “Back to Italy?”
“No. Kraków.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Poland? Really? I … don’t think RTI knows about that.”
“Kuga probably does,” I said.
“What took you there? A sudden jones for cabbage rolls and pierogies?”
“I hit one of their money men,” I
said. “A banker named Wójcik. More of a bagman, really. He either arranges wire transfers or hand-delivers cash payments.”
“To whom?”
“Mostly people on the ground. Buyers working with terrorist groups, PMCs, and militias. A lot of his clients are in the States, and some in southern Canada. White supremacists, but not exclusively. Wójcik made over two dozen trips to the States over the last six years, making payments to radical fringe groups of all colors and all ideologies.”
“To what end? I mean, if they’re selling arms and providing cash to extreme white groups as well as, say, radical Black groups…”
“The hardest thing to remember about Kuga is they’re not political. They sell product, and they never stand in the way of the gunplay. From what I was able to get out of Wójcik, they’re not only selling the weapons but also stoking the fires via social media posts, mass mailings, published pamphlets, and all that. Funding transportation for rallies and counterprotests. Providing payment to help hire social media influencers to give them a bigger visible presence, and a greater potential threat, than they might otherwise have. Some of these groups were no more than half a dozen assholes sitting around in someone’s double-wide, drinking Budweiser and talking about how unfair the system was to them because it was trying to make things equal for Black- and brown-skin interlopers.”
“Interlopers,” said Toys, enjoying the word.
“He said the plan was to keep both sides on the edge of violence so that they’re each potential customers. Taking sides cuts your customer base in half.”
Toys sighed and nodded. “Somewhere in the great beyond, Hugo Vox is getting an enormous hard-on.”
“No doubt.”
“This thing with the radical groups in the States,” said Toys, “do you think Kuga’s trying to start another civil war? Wasn’t that a talking point before the last election?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “From what Wójcik said, any major outbreak of violence would only sell more guns. Kuga has the NRA leadership on the payroll, too. And, for the record, neither Kuga nor any of his people give a rat’s hairy dick about the Second Amendment except that maintaining the current interpretation of it is good for business. It’s not politics; they’re neither left nor right. They just want to sell product.”
Toys drank some wine, nodding as he swallowed. “As criminal enterprises go, it’s rather clever. Brilliant, actually. Let the ideologues handle the rhetoric and never let them know they’re really point men for a sales force. Bloody marvelous.”
I shrugged, then also nodded. “It’s smart business, if you’re a greedy, murderous sociopath.”
“Oh, I spit on parlor psychoanalysis.”
“Do you disagree, though?”
He sighed again. “Not at all.”
I told him about following the money based on the info Wójcik gave me and how that led me to a series of small hits. Each time inching toward someone who might put me on Santoro’s scent. However, each time I felt like I was getting closer, all I did was find another bad guy working for the company.
“What happened to these individuals?” asked Toys. “Or is that a pointless question?”
I said nothing.
“Ah,” he said. “So, let’s see, did all that mayhem finally bring you back to Italy?”
“Yes.” And I went over the hit on Fong. “His intel brought me here to Rotterdam, and I got some good intel about someone who actually does know where Kuga and Santoro might be.”
“Well, that’s bloody brilliant,” said Toys, brightening. “If you’re going out again, I’d be happy to accompany you.”
I shook my head. “The guy I’m looking for isn’t here.”
“Where, then?”
“Germany.”
“Where in Germany?”
“Someplace I can’t actually go,” I said. “Somewhere I can’t get to him.”
The truth was that I had a name—including a key member of the Kuga organization with the unlikely name of Diego Casanova. However, Casanova was currently incarcerated in a black site prison in Berlin. I briefly considered asking Toys to ask Church about seeing if the man could be extradited and sent to Phoenix House for questioning. De Vries and Fong both said that he was in Kuga’s inner circle.
But I didn’t say any of that to Toys.
I wanted to, but the Darkness didn’t let me. And, yeah, that’s real damned hard to explain.
“There’s another guy whose name came up from a few of the people I … um … interviewed. Calls himself Mr. Sunday, though I doubt it’s his real name. He’s apparently a new hire—last several months or so—and serves as the head of sales. Does sessions with potential buyers via a platform like Zoom or Crowdcast, but on the dark web. Access only via a special encrypted video conferencing platform. I can’t find him, so that’s something you can tell Church. He can put Bug on it.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself? People are actually concerned about you.”
“People, but not you.”
“Let’s be real,” he said, and I took no offense. Not sure I’d cry real tears if he got run over by a bus six or seven times. “I’ll pass it along, though. And I have something to share with you.”
“What?”
“I talked to a few of my old cronies in the black market circles,” he said. “Apparently, your escapades have really pissed off our friends. Kuga and Santoro have sicced a specialist on you. A very dangerous chap named Stafford.”
I stiffened. “Michael Augustus Stafford?”
“You know him?”
“No, but that name came up. I assumed he was one of the Fixers.”
“Oh, he’s a lot more than that, mate. Stafford is easily the most dangerous button man in the business. Very discreet, very smart, and very dangerous. Ex–special operations. Expert in all the right stuff—weapons, unarmed combat, disguises, the lot.” He snorted. “He’s rather like the bad-guy version of you. Your evil twin. He even looks a bit like you, come to think on it. Blond-haired, blue-eyed all-American boy with rage issues and a penchant for scorched earth. Not sure where I’d place my bets if you two chaps were in an even match.”
“Let him take his best shot.”
“His best shot, Ledger, is likely to be the one you never see coming. He has an unbroken record for closing cases. And now you’re his newest target.”
I shook my head. “If he’s going to try to get between me and Santoro, he’d better be really damned good.”
“He is.”
“Then he’d better want it more than I do, Toys. And I want it a whole damned lot.”
We discussed the American Operation. We agreed that it was probably a misdirection.
Toys took a sip of wine, made a face, and set the glass aside.
“There’s one way to find out if there’s anything to it.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Go to America and arrange to let yourself be spotted doing it. Poke around in the militia thing and break some legs, cut some throats. If they send a handful of Fixers after you, then it’s no big deal. They just want you dead. If they send Stafford, you’ll know two things—that something’s really happening in the States…”
“What’s the other thing?”
“Which one of you really is the better killer.”
I smiled at him. “That’s actually a pretty good plan. Maybe I will.”
“I can help,” he said. “You need a bloody minder.”
“No doubt,” I said. Then I reached under the pillow, took out my Snellig dart gun, and shot him with a nice big dose of Sandman.
He slid out of the chair and into a heap on the floor.
Ghost looked at him and then me.
I said nothing. Finished my beer and began to pack.
CHAPTER 81
ROTTERDAM THE HAGUE AIRPORT
SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS
Mrs. Gondek was sipping mint tea out of a travel mug when Joe Ledger walked past. He did not look like Ledger, of cou
rse. He wore a very old-fashioned suit—fog gray with a faint powder-blue charcoal stripe—and had a very convincing black toupee over his blond hair. His eyes, today, were dark brown, and his mustache was in the clipped Eastern European style. His gait was tentative, selling the fiction of a man who has never quite found his courage in life. Perhaps a businessman who was somewhere on the more useful end of the autism spectrum, but not social, not visibly confident. His dog—white with brown and black patches—walked beside him, and Joe habitually touched the animal as if needing reassurance of the presence of his emotional support. All these items were writ small, so that they had a genuine and lived-in look.
She mentally awarded him a B-plus or perhaps an A-minus.
Her own disguise was one of the thousand variations of her usual kit. A floral dress of the kind popular in rural Italy, a thin white sweater, cheap but not garish necklace, with earrings that nearly but not quite matched. Sensible shoes for walking, and glasses that were merely functional but not stylish. If the circumstances called for it, there were enough separates and other items in her bag that would allow her to become anything from a fashionable tourist to a successful businesswoman to a Sacramentine nun, and she could make the transformation in any toilet stall in under a minute. Mrs. Gondek had been playing this game for a very long time, and she liked being good at it.
As Joe Ledger passed, he never once glanced in her direction. No reason he should. They’d only ever met once, years ago, and before he even had Ghost. The dog did not twitch. Her scent would not be stored in the animal’s vast canine vocabulary of scents.
When they were at least eighty feet down the terminal hall, she began to follow. She was able to walk quickly without ever looking like she was hurrying.
She watched Ledger head toward the gate for a flight to Rome. That was what Scott Wilson said he’d do. There was a good-size crowd in the waiting area, and she saw Ledger take out an e-reader, sit down in the section reserved for coach, and begin to read.
Mrs. Gondek nodded to herself and edged away to call this in to the RTI.
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