When I reached the bike I scanned the immediate area. All industrial. Nothing around but the café directly across from the warehouse, and I thought she wouldn’t dare go in there, after I’d told her what the kids at the park had said about Chudzik’s men taking their coffee there. Where the hell are you, Ana? The sirens grew louder; the police were getting closer. We had a minute, maybe two. I peered up the street, back down. Finally, my gaze fell on my feet. Directly beneath my boots on the blacktop were tire marks I was sure hadn’t been there before. A vehicle had peeled away from this spot within the past hour, since I’d parked my bike.
The realization hit me like a sack of rocks. Someone had taken Ana.
Gasowski had observed the ferocity in Ana’s eyes when I forbade her to come along. He knew she wouldn’t give up, that I’d be forced to bring her along to Pruszkow. Gasowski had warned them—Fisk won’t be alone. The lawyer Ana Staszak will be with him. Take her. She may be used as a bargaining chip down the road.
But no. It was worse. Ana knew too much.
They wouldn’t keep Ana alive for very long.
As the sirens rounded the corner, I jumped onto my bike and started the engine. Peeled away just as the first cruisers screeched into the warehouse parking lot, no doubt responding to a call of shots fired.
*
Marek Staszak was a member of the Sejm, the lower house of Polish parliament, not so dissimilar from the United States’ House of Representatives. His party was the Lewica i Demokraci, or the Democratic Left Alliance, which was a center-left political coalition, formed because its founding members felt that the largest opposition party, the Civic Platform, was too close politically to the right-wing Law and Justice majority. Currently, the Civic Platform party, a center-right coalition, was in power.
But just now, Poland’s politics didn’t matter. Finding a particular member of parliament did. Specifically, Ana’s brother. Marek Staszak was the only person in the country I knew I could trust, especially now that his sister’s life hung in the balance.
I rode back to Warsaw as fast as the BMW would carry me and made it in under ten minutes. I’d seen the semicircular Sejm building when I first went looking for Dabrowski’s law office the morning before. The complex had stood for more than eighty-five years and was unmistakable.
The trick, of course, would be to gain access.
“I am sorry,” said the guard at the gate, “but a visit to the Sejm must be booked by phone at least seven days in advance.”
“This isn’t a visit,” I said, still on my bike. “It’s urgent that I speak with Marek Staszak. He’s a member.”
“I am sorry,” the guard repeated, “but the Sejm is in session and the members cannot be disturbed.”
Too bad. I intended to disturb them.
“Listen to me,” I said, reaching into my peacoat. “Pan Staszak’s sister is in grave danger.”
The guard turned from me, looking annoyed. “Then you should call the police.”
When he turned back to me, he saw the Glock leveled at his heart.
I said, “I’m afraid that calling the police isn’t an option.” I gestured to his phone. “Now, rip that cord from the wall and open the gate.”
The guard did as I’d said, but I couldn’t trust him not to sound the alarm before I reached the Assembly Room.
“Now, turn around,” I said as I dismounted the bike. “Place your hands on the back of your head and walk slowly backwards until I tell you to stop.”
As he stumbled backward, the poor bastard pleaded for his life.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I told him.
I turned the pistol and cracked the handle across the back of his head and he toppled.
“At least not much,” I said.
*
I powered past the standing guard at the front door and got lucky with the layout of the building. The Assembly Room wasn’t too far from the entrance and members were already filing out. I asked a young woman in a smart suit where I might find Marek Staszak and she pointed to a group of men turning to the right.
“Marek,” I called out.
The statesman squinted in my direction. He had a boyish face. Had the same reddish brown hair as his sister, only it was cut short, and his eyes were a light brown. “Pan Fisk?”
I pushed through the crowd toward him.
“Yes, we spoke on the phone earlier,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Listen, we need some privacy.”
“My office is—”
“No, I mean outside this building. I had a bit of a bother getting past the guards.”
“What’s happened?” he said nervously.
I took his arm and led him to the exit.
“It’s Ana,” I said gently. “She’s been taken.”
Chapter 28
“Gasowski!” Marek shouted, firing a water glass across his living room. It smashed against the top of his fireplace and fell to pieces. “I should have known the son of a bitch is dirty. But my sister. I never dreamed he would put her life in danger.”
“If it’s any consolation,” I said, “Gasowski tried to talk her out of accompanying me to Pruszkow. Ana wouldn’t hear of it.”
“That’s my sister,” Marek said. “But no, it’s no consolation. When this is over I will have the son of a bitch killed.”
“First we have to find your sister,” I said, trying to get him to focus. “Any idea where Chudzik’s men might have taken her?”
“None,” Marek said, shaking his head as he tried to calm himself. “Without the police, I would not even know where to start.”
“Well, the police are out of the question, Marek. We can trust no one now except each other.”
“Any ideas, Simon?”
“The meeting,” I said. “Dabrowski will still be meeting with Talik. We need to determine the location. If we find Dabrowski, we’ll find Ana.”
“But how the hell do we do that?”
“Ana said there was a planner in Dabrowski’s office. Today’s date contained the initials T.Y. Maybe there’s more information about the meeting place. Besides that, Chudzik was a client. If we can gain access to Dabrowski’s files, we may discover some of the addresses Chudzik’s used in the past. We could get lucky.”
“How do we gain access to the files?” Marek said. “I am sure Dabrowski’s staff has been given instructions. As soon as we enter, they will call the police.”
“We’ll just have to make sure no one’s in the office when we enter,” I said.
Marek glanced at his watch.
“We cannot afford to wait,” he said. “Dabrowski’s office won’t close for hours. Ana might not have that long.”
I shook my head. “No need to wait until they close,” I said. “I have a plan.”
*
My plan wasn’t terribly original, but it had worked well in the past. Specifically in Japan. In Osaka. A wealthy businessman had kidnapped his daughter from her high school in Maui and flown her across the Pacific to sit in his office on the twenty-ninth floor of a high-rise in the Diamond District. I watched them for days. He never let the girl out of his sight. He was cool, had everything and everyone under control, just the way he liked. When that’s the case, you need to create chaos.
It was March 2005 when I arrived in Japan to retrieve the girl, and the country was bracing for the ten-year anniversary of the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Fueled by the media, tensions were high, fewer people were riding the Tokyo Metro, and people in Osaka were already fearing a copycat crime. Creating chaos was easy. All it took was a single phone call.
The entire Diamond District evacuated at once. The businessman did just as I’d anticipated, made straight for the garage and his waiting Mercedes-Benz GL350. He shoved his daughter into the back of the SUV and rounded the rear to get to the driver’s side. He never saw what was coming.
With the father unconscious, I snatched the keys and jumped into the vehicle. Told the girl I’d been sent by her mother to bring her back to H
awaii. She threw herself onto the front seat and hugged me. Kissed my cheek. That was the thing with my job. You never knew what kind of reaction you were going to get from these kids. Sometimes they loved you. Sometimes they stepped out in front of a night bus.
Here in Warsaw I didn’t want to scare anyone, but Marek and I really had no choice. Time was running out on Ana, running out on Lindsay. A sarin scare wouldn’t do the trick, but a small fire in a restroom on the second floor of Dabrowski’s office building just might.
As before, I had no difficulty getting past security. I didn’t even bother to stop at the desk, just bolted straight for the elevators and punched the button marked 2, while Marek waited for me in a nearby stairwell.
All it took was the book of souvenir matches I’d swiped from Pierogarnia and the small canister of Zippo lighter fluid Marek kept in his house. I balled up some brown paper towels from the dispenser and stuffed them into the wastebasket. I placed the wastebasket in the corner where the fire would do the least amount of damage. Then I sprayed the paper towels with lighter fluid and lit a match. Gray smoke billowed to the ceiling, finally kicking the sprinkler system on.
An alarm sounded. Tenants began spilling out and the building and it was empty in under ten minutes. I waited for the sprinklers to extinguish the small blaze, then Marek and I made for Dabrowski’s office on the ninth floor.
The entrance to the law office was locked, but it was all glass. A fire extinguisher parked down the hall did the trick. I told Marek to stand back while I wielded the extinguisher like a baseball bat, shattering the glass near the padlock. A few more smacks and I was able to get my hand through to unlock the door.
“We won’t have long,” I said over the sound of the fire alarm. “The firefighters will be checking each floor once they know the small blaze downstairs is under control.”
We went straight to Dabrowski’s private office, the one I’d watched Ana enter just the day before from my seat in the conference room. I thought about the strawberries and felt a pang of hunger deep in my gut. No time for strawberries. No time for thoughts of strawberries.
I lifted my right leg and kicked just below the doorknob with the heel of my foot. The door swung open and Marek and I entered.
“I never liked this sleazy bastard,” he said.
I moved behind Dabrowski’s desk and opened his drawers. The top contained a few thin manila file folders; the second down, pens and paper clips and such. The bottom drawer held his day planner. I lifted the brown leather book out of the drawer as Marek booted Dabrowski’s desktop computer. I flipped through the pages, found today’s date marked with the initials T.Y., just as Ana had described. No place or time. In the front of the planner were a number of pages devoted to entering important addresses and phone numbers, but not a single entry had been scratched in.
“Password protected,” Marek said in a huff, staring into Dabrowski’s monitor.
“Try your sister’s name.”
He glared at me. “Why?”
“Just try it.”
He punched it in. “Doesn’t work,” he said with an air of relief.
“What’s the Polish word for ‘password’?” I said.
“Hasło.”
“Try it.”
He tried it. “No good,” he said.
“Try the Polish word for ‘money.’”
“We will be here all year, Simon.”
“Type it.”
He typed it. “Nothing.”
“Move,” I said.
I bypassed the screen by hitting Escape, then clicked on the Internet Explorer icon. Facebook popped up. His e-mail address sat in a box at the top of the screen. In the box next to it was his Facebook password, represented by five black dots.
“Five characters,” I said.
Marek ran his hands through his damp hair as I exited back to the password screen. I had a friend named Kati Sheffield who used to work in the Bureau as a computer scientist. Over drinks one night, she’d given me a crash course in hacking. She’d said at least one of five people used a weak password, and these people typically used the same password for every e-mail address, social network, and bank account. It was often the name or birth date of a partner or spouse, a child or pet. Frequently it was an anniversary, sometimes just a series of numbers like 1-2-3-4-5-6. Hometown, current city, university, the name of a favorite sports team. Often followed by a 0 or a 1 because many institutions required numbers as well as letters these days, and all your passwords had to be the same because you had hundreds of them and you’d never remember them all and you didn’t want to write them down. Might as well have no passwords at all then, right?
If you didn’t have your target’s information—birthdays, anniversaries, names of pets and favorite sports teams and such—you tried common words. Password itself was one of them. God, money, love, things that were important to the average person. Some variation of the phrase let me in. In the target’s native language, of course. Then in English. Hell, everyone nowadays knew English, didn’t they? Dabrowski certainly did.
Five characters. M-O-N-E-Y. Dabrowski struck me as that kind of guy.
I typed it. I was in.
Thanks again, Kati.
“Unbelievable,” Marek said. “When I get back to my office I’d better change my passwords.”
I glanced at him. “Something patriotic, I’d bet.”
He nodded. “Poland’s coat of arms,” he said. “In English. Plus a one at the end.”
*
After locating Chudzik’s physical file, we did some further exploring on Dabrowski’s computer. The images on the lawyer’s hard drive stunned us like a surge of electricity. They were vulgar, exhibited unspeakable crimes against children, depicted unfathomable violations of the young, pictures that would forever be trapped in my head, would haunt my mind like specters, rising at any moment to steal my breath, paint my skin as pale as paste, chill me to the bone. What bile there was in my stomach threatened to empty onto Dabrowski’s desk. Marek, too, appeared faint, even as he helped steady me on my feet.
“Dear God,” he said.
For the first time since arriving in Poland, I wondered whether the lawyer Dabrowski was more than just a middleman, a broker. Hundreds of images of child pornography were buried in organized fashion under innocuous file names on Dabrowski’s hard drive. All of them depicted children between the ages of four and fourteen. Both boys and girls. Made to pose either alone or with one another, frequently with a faceless adult man, or men.
None of the images were of Lindsay Sorkin, of course. It didn’t make sense that she’d have been caught up in this net. She’d been specifically targeted. Why her when there were any number of kids from the West who could have been snatched up just as easily, if not more so?
Still, I couldn’t help but feel that time had just become even more paramount than it had been before. As sure I was that Lindsay Sorkin hadn’t been taken to be sexually exploited, I was sure that these were the type of people we were dealing with. There was a network in place and Lindsay’s kidnappers would have used it, regardless of their ultimate purpose for taking her. Like it or not, this was the trail of bread crumbs we’d have to follow if we hoped to find her.
Next to me, Marek shook his head in disgust. “My sister has worked in this office for ten years. How could she not know this man was a monster?”
“Monsters can be clever,” I said softly. “A good deal of evil can be hidden behind a human face.”
“This monster was her mentor,” Marek conceded. “Her lover. To Ana, he must have been beyond reproach.”
I glanced at my watch. “We’ll need to be leaving,” I said. “The firefighters will reach us soon.”
“There were no addresses in Chudzik’s files,” Marek said.
“No,” I agreed. “But I did see something in Dabrowski’s discovery files that may lead us to him.”
“What?” he said as footfalls sounded from the hallway.
There wasn’t time
enough for me to answer.
Chapter 29
We hid in Ana’s private office, lowering the blinds and locking the door behind us. As we waited for the firemen to pass, I looked around the room at Ana’s framed photographs. Many of the pictures were of her and Marek at various ages and in different cities around Europe. There they were in London as teenagers, then Dublin and Edinburgh around the same age. Here they were in Milan in their early twenties, a trip that apparently took them north to Switzerland. More recently they’d traveled to Finland and St. Petersburg, Barcelona and Madrid.
Studying the photos, I couldn’t help but think of my sister, Tuesday, and what kind of relationship we might have had as adults. Hell, what kind of relationship we might have had as kids.
“People are beginning to return to the building,” Marek said from his spot at the window. “The firefighters may be leaving but they will be calling in law enforcement about that glass door we smashed in, so we had better be on our way.”
I nodded, tearing my eyes from a photo of Ana and Marek as children on the beach by the Mediterranean Sea.
We hurried out into the hallway, then bounded down the stairs to the first floor.
Once we were safely away from the building, I stopped him so that we could catch our breath.
“The witness list for the prosecution,” I said, after a few moments. “One of the men who testified against Kazmer Chudzik is a former member of a rival syndicate, the Wołomin mob. In the file there was an English summary of his testimony that stated that he’d had dealings with Chudzik under the guise of a general contractor seeking protection in exchange for a piece of his action. Sounds to me like a guy who might be willing to talk.”
Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels) Page 12
