by Harlan Wolff
Snug, inside the Manhattan Club, sitting at the bar were the two men Carl had been hunting. The one with the scar was called Stanislaus, and the other was Jovan. They sat on their regular stools, as they had every night since they’d got back from Thailand. Both of the men wore flowery Versace silk shirts, open at the neck, and had gold medallions dangling on hairy chests. In front of them were dry martinis, shaken, but not stirred.
Two young women were sitting on the next two bar stools and being chatted-up by Stanislaus and Jovan. Teenagers in mini-dresses, with long eyelashes that fluttered, and they both smiled every time one of the men said something. They sat almost facing the two men, where the bar bent around, just before it reached the wall. Such women were the reason men went to nightclubs; they were perfect tens and dressed to the nines. Stanislau and Jovan leaned a little closer to their prey.
“Do you come here often?” the man with the scar across his eye, and the designer stubble asked.
“Oh no,” the taller girl said, “our parents always make us go to bed before eleven.”
“Good girls should always be in bed by eleven,” Stanislaus told them, and the girls sniggered and acted coy.
“If they’re not in bed by eleven, they should go home,” Jovan said.
“Don’t be naughty,” the other sister told him.
“So what brings you here tonight?” Scarface asked.
“Our parents went out of town for the weekend,” the taller sister said.
“Does that mean you can stay up late?” Stanislaus asked.
“All night, if we want,” the shorter one said, leaning closer.
“That’s a good reason for a celebration,” Scarface told her, “do you girls like champagne?”
“That’s a silly question,” the tall one told him, “of course we do.”
By the time the champagne bucket arrived, the two men were on their feet and had moved in. Now, Stanislaus was standing beside the seated, taller sister, and Jovan was standing behind the other one. As the crystal flutes got filled with bubbly liquid, the men put their large hands on the girls. There were squealing objections, followed by more sniggers and giggles, and the young women wriggled in their seats, carefully taking hold of the wandering hands and moving them to less intimate parts of their bodies.
After a while, the girls took the two men on the dance floor and gyrated for them; dresses fluttering and exposing thongs underneath. The Serbian assassins danced clumsily, but energetically, winking to each other as they passed backwards and forwards across the empty floor. After working up a sweat, the group went back to the bar.
Stanislaus and Jovan were blessing their incredible luck and kept the champagne flowing. By the time the second bottle was finished, both men were slurring their words, and the girls were letting them do whatever they wanted with their hands.
“Do you stay nearby?” Stanislaus’ girl asked.
“Around the corner,” Stanislaus slurred in her ear, sliding his hand up her thigh and under her dress.
“Is there champagne there?” she asked him.
“No, but we can stop and get some on the way. And there’s plenty of coke there and porn on the TV.”
“Oh, good,” she purred. “We like that kind of party.”
The sisters excused themselves to go and powder their noses, and as soon as they had left, the two men started slapping each other on the back with glee.
“It’s our lucky night,” Jovan said.
“The best night ever,” Stanislaus said.
The teenage sisters crossed the wooden dance floor, but when they reached carpet, instead of turning left to the ladies room, the two young women kept going. They walked out the front door and turned right, passing Carl and George still stamping their feet on the pavement. As they walked hurriedly by, the taller girl winked at Carl. Poor thing must be freezing in that tiny dress, he thought. Carl took the tamper from his pocket and tapped on the tobacco in his pipe to put it out. He put the tamper and the pipe in his overcoat pocket, and slapped George on the back. “That’s it, let’s go. We’re on now,” Carl told him.
Carl and George walked through the door into the warm nightclub but didn’t stop at the cloakroom to take their overcoats off. The two Serbians were sitting back down on their barstools now, not feeling well, and speaking gibberish to each other. It had been fifteen minutes since the sisters had put drops of clear liquid in their drinks unnoticed, and the Rohypnol, the weapon of choice of rapists, was now taking a firm grip.
“Bloody hell,” Carl told Stanislaus loudly, “we can’t leave you alone for five minutes. When your wife sees you this drunk, I’m going to get the blame again. Shame on you, Stanislaus, and Jovan don’t look at me like that, you’re no better than he is.”
Then Carl spoke to the bartender, or mixologist, as he preferred to be called. “Have my friends been naughty?” Carl asked. “I should really get them out of here before they start throwing up. They always throw up, and it’s horrible.”
“Always?” the mixologist asked in accented English, starting to get flustered.
“Oh yes,” Carl said, “always!”
The man George had put his arm around, slipped off of his barstool and slithered down to the floor. George helped him back to his feet as he muttered incoherently in Serbian. Carl put his hand in Scarface’s pocket and took out a gangster roll of bank notes in a shiny money clip. “I imagine they spent all the rent money again. You’d better tell me how much the damage is,” Carl told the mixologist, as he started peeling notes off the Serbian’s roll.
Carl and George held the two men up and led them, stumbling from the Manhattan Cocktail Bar. They talked to them on the way out as they helped them along, saying things like, “What are we supposed to tell your wife this time?” And, “Try not to throw up on the nice doormen,” as they reached the exit where a muscle-bound bouncer was holding the door open for them.
As soon as they were outside on the cold pavement, Carl and George bundled their victims into the back of the four-by-four. George got in the back with the drugged Serbians, and Carl jumped in the front passenger seat. The car sped away.
“All went well?” the driver asked.
“Yes, easy, as you can see,” Carl told him.
“I’ll let Gregor know,” the driver said, as he punched the buttons of his mobile phone.
“George, try and put seatbelts on them to stop them rolling all over the place,” Carl said.
The two assassins were leaning against each other, sleeping like babies.
CHAPTER 43
“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
– Bill Shankly
As the four-by-four drove through the Serbian night, a small jet took off from Bratislava on its long journey to Bangkok. The paperwork submitted with the flight plan claimed the flight was picking up a Slovakian businessman and his family, and bringing them home to Bratislava with their holiday shopping. The plane was registered to a charter outfit in Serbia, and the Slovakian businessman, sleeping soundly beside his fat wife in their pool villa in Phuket, knew nothing about it.
The black four-by-four with tinted windows had another hour or so of fast driving to go before it reached its destination, and in the passenger seat, Carl was impatiently puffing on his unlit pipe. Having nothing to do between adrenalin rushes was never easy, and it was making him grumpier than usual.
“Go easy on those drops, George, we don’t want them croaking before they’ve spilt their guts to the colonel,” Carl said.
The two Serbian hitmen were sound asleep on the backseat, sitting upright, squeezed three in a row with George behind Carl. George had been putting drops of liquid in the men’s open mouths.
“We don’t want them waking up either,” George said.
“No, we don’t.” Carl agreed.
“Isn’t this where you chomp on a huge cigar and tell me you love it when a plan comes together?”
�
�It’s not over yet,” Carl told him. “Check their pockets for ID.”
George went through their pockets and found two identity cards, a small bag of white powder, one roll of bank notes - the other was already in Carl’s pocket - and two hotel key cards. “Their ID cards are in Cyrillic,” George said.
“They are still proof of who they are,” Carl said, then he put his hand in his overcoat pocket and handed George two pieces of paper. “Those are their passport copies,” he said, “put them in the pockets with their ID cards, just to make sure.”
“Where did you get those?” George asked.
“From the colonel,” Carl said.
“I should have known,” George said.
George handed the roll of bills, the key cards, and the powder to Carl, and he put them in his overcoat pocket. Then he had second thoughts and took the bag out of the pocket, opened the top, and tasted the contents with his finger. Satisfied, he poured some powder on the back of his left hand and snorted it.
“I thought you’d given that up,” George said.
“I have,” Carl told him.
Carl couldn’t call Colonel Pornchai yet, because it was still early morning in Bangkok. So he typed a message and pressed send. The message was short, only three words: Arrival time confirmed. Satisfied, he put the phone in his pocket and went back to puffing on the unlit pipe.
As the four-by-four went around the next bend, they saw flashing lights, and the driver took his foot off the accelerator. The police had set up a roadblock and were checking all the vehicles in front of them. The driver pulled the car up behind a lorry and got in the queue.
“Fuck this,” Carl said.
“What do you think it’s about?” George asked.
“Migrants,” the driver said. “The police search for people smugglers on the roads now.”
“Shit,” Carl said.
“Fuck all migrants,” the driver growled.
“They’re just people, like us,” George said, and the driver gave him a dirty look in the rear-view mirror.
“Don’t worry about him, he’s getting senile,” Carl told the driver. “He from America, and so he doesn’t understand.” Carl would have said anything to shut the subject down. The last thing he wanted was an argument over European politics in front of a group of Serbian policeman; odds were they would side with the driver anyway.
The four-by-four eased forward.
“How do we play this,” Carl asked.
“Don’t say anything,” the Serbian driver said, “stay in the car and do nothing.”
When they reached the front of the queue, the driver got out and shook one of the policemen by the hand. While the driver went to the back to open the boot, another policeman walked around the car shining a torch in all the windows. On the backseat, George was pretending to be asleep to make a matching set. When the policeman got to the passenger window, he shone the light on Carl, then continued walking around the vehicle. The driver handed out cigarettes and chatted with the police. After a while, they went behind a police bus, and Carl couldn’t see them anymore.
“He wouldn’t be selling us out, would he? George asked.
“He’s Gregor’s man,” Carl said.
“How long do you get for kidnapping these days?”
“In Serbia? Fucked if I know,” Carl said.
“What do you think they’re doing?”
“I saw they had a brazier on the side of the road, probably standing around it to keep warm,” Carl said.
“What do you think they’re talking about?”
“How the hell would I know?” Carl said.
After a while, a policeman came from behind the bus and walked over to Carl’s door and tapped on the window. Reluctantly, Carl pushed on the button, and the window slid down. The policeman bent over, so his face was filling the open window and said, “Manchester United.” He gave Carl a satisfied grin and then straightened up and walked away.
The driver’s door opened, and Gregor’s man got in the car, and they were off again. As soon as Carl had wound up his window, he asked, “What was all that about?”
“Nothing,” the driver said, “I told them you were English football hooligans, and you were all very drunk. This is normal for you English, no? And anyway, the police know me around here. My people control all this area.”
“What were you talking to them about?” Carl asked.
“Migrants,” the man said. “People smugglers are ruining our business. Our lorries get stopped too now, and it’s a big problem. I was telling them about a truck due through here in an hour.”
“And they believed we were football hooligans?”
“Why not? The game was at 7 o’clock.”
Carl had forgotten England had been playing the Serbian national team in a friendly match. He’d had more important things on his mind. “Who won?” Carl asked.
“We did,” the driver told him proudly.
CHAPTER 44
“If you have a fear of flying, don’t. The data are very clear: If you have to travel someplace, the safest way is by airplane.”
– Peter Diamandis
Forty minutes later, the four-by-four turned off the highway and continued for about five minutes on a bumpy road. They reached a grey concrete entrance and drove through it into an abandoned industrial estate. Between the derelict factories and warehouses, Carl saw a wide straight road that seemed to go on forever. Someone had been here since the communists left because all the streetlights had been cut off at the base and the median had been removed and levelled off with cement. This was another forgotten behemoth from the communist era, but now it was serving a gang of arms smugglers with far more capitalistic ideas.
“This is the place?” Carl asked.
“Yes, this is it. You can relax now; the police won’t come inside here. This place is protected,” the driver said.
Carl didn’t ask him who protected the place, or what it was used for. There are some things even a private detective didn’t want to know. The four-by-four parked off the road, behind a wall in front of a warehouse with no roof. Carl got out of the car and lit his pipe. He was feeling the cold so, when he’d lit the pipe, he stuck his hands in the pockets of the overcoat.
George came over to him and asked, “What time is it coming?”
“Should be around two,” Carl told him, stamping his feet to keep warm.
“And you’re sure you’re not going to come with us?”
“There are some loose ends I have to tie up first,” Carl told him.
“And you can’t tell me what they are?”
“Not yet, George. I have my reasons.”
“I don’t like Gregor’s friends,” George said.
“I know, but don’t worry, as soon as you’re gone, I’m getting out of Serbia.”
“Good,” George said.
Carl took the plastic bag from his pocket, poured some powder on the back of his hand and sniffed it up his nostrils.
“I hate it when you do that shit,” George said.
“It’s good they were carrying,” Carl said, “I won’t be sleeping for a while, and this will help.”
The pilot disabled the transponder just before he dropped his altitude. It was a full moon; the only day of the month he dared do this trick. The sides of the road below him were lined with reflectors that picked up enough moonlight for him to land without missing his target and ending up in a warehouse. He’d done this landing many times before and knew the makeshift runway by heart. Gregor’s friends in the East made their living smuggling arms, but today their cargo was going to be different, they were transporting assassins, full to the gills with a date rape drug.
Carl spotted the low-flying small plane as soon as it came over the horizon. First, as a distant red light, then he saw the nose glistening in the moonlight. Much sooner than he expected, the wheels were touching the road, the engines had been thrown in reverse, and the plane was taxiing toward him.
The four-by-four driver ca
me out of one of the warehouses, pushing a set of steps on wheels, so Carl ran to help him. They got the steps against the door and the next thing Carl knew, Gregor was running down the stairs yelling, “Hurry up, quick-quick, we need to be up in the air again before anybody notices the transponder’s switched off.”
The plane seated a dozen people, but on this day it had flown out of the airport in Bratislava with only the pilot, the co-pilot, and Gregor.
Carl, George, Gregor, and the driver carried the unconscious men up the steps one at a time, while the pilot and co-pilot stayed in the cockpit, with the engines running.
“You know what to do at the other end. I’ll have the colonel’s men in airport maintenance uniforms waiting for you when you land?”
“See you soon,” George said, and Carl patted him on the back as he went through the door of the plane.
“I guess that’s it then,” Gregor said.
“What’s the flight plan?” Carl asked.
“We make a stop for refuelling in Beirut, and that’s it. We should be landing in Bangkok about eighteen hours from now.”
“Beirut?”
“Sure, Beirut, the Serbians have friends there.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Carl said.
“And you’re certain everything will be alright when we get to Bangkok?” Gregor asked him.
“My people will be there when you land, and they’ll take care of everything. Just do whatever they tell you,” Carl said.
Gregor kissed Carl on both cheeks and followed George inside. “Hey, Gregor,” Carl shouted after him, “Thanks for everything.”
As Carl and the driver pushed the steps back to the warehouse, the plane turned around and took off. Landing on the road to take off again was completed in only a few minutes. As soon as the aircraft gained some altitude, the pilot turned the transponder back on, hoping nobody had been paying attention. He wasn’t too worried about it though, his boss had people at the airport, and they had come to expect transponder trouble from time to time.
“Why did you put those men on the plane?” the driver asked when they were back in the warm four-by-four.
