Exile
Page 8
Outside the windows of the hospital ward it was overcast. He had lost track of time. For a long while, it was hard to do anything more than concentrate on breathing, but gradually he began to sort out his thoughts and get his head straight.
Emergency vehicles had come for them, fire trucks and paramedics crowding the street as the apartment block surrendered itself to the flames. Marc managed to get Pavic off the car he had landed on and down to the pavement before others came in to take the policeman away. Someone led him into the back of an ambulance and then things went blurry for a while.
He searched his recollection, looking for specific memories – a masked face, a sneering grin. Franko Horvat had been at the building, Marc was certain of it. The corrupt cop had tried to kill them both, doubtless on the orders of the Kurjaks. And he was still out there.
Other memories, old and laced with pain, threatened to resurface, but he ruthlessly smothered them.
A nurse with a curt but motherly smile came and gently took the oxygen cylinder away, offering Marc a bottle of water in exchange. He accepted it, but he wanted more.
‘The man brought in with me . . .’ He started to speak, and the cracked sound of his own voice startled him. He pressed on. ‘The policeman. Luka Pavic. Policija. Where is he?’
The nurse’s smiled faded and she made a gesture across her shoulder, like the cutting action of a pair of scissors. ‘In surgery,’ she told him. ‘Is alive.’
He wanted to feel relief, but the look in the nurse’s eyes communicated more than her limited English could convey. Pavic was still a long way from safety.
Marc slid off the end of the bed and the nurse held up a hand to stop him, but someone else was approaching, and the official Europol identity card in the man’s hand was enough to warn the woman away.
Maarten de Wit looked tired and angry. ‘What were you thinking?’ He spoke in a quiet, intense growl. ‘I was right there when Schrader gave you your orders. There was nothing in them about cowboy tactics with the local cops!’
‘I told you something was going down today,’ Marc managed, rasping out each word. ‘You didn’t want to hear it. I had a time-sensitive lead on the Kurjaks – I followed it on my own initiative.’
‘You convinced Sergeant Pavic to go with you? Or was it the other way around?’ De Wit went on before Marc could take a breath and reply. ‘It doesn’t matter. That detail is moot at this point. The fact is, both of you were operating outside your authority tonight, and this is the result! Reports of shootings, a serious fire in a residential district. And I have learned there is a corpse in the building yet to be identified by the police.’
‘One of the Kurjaks’ trigger men. They were there to make sure we didn’t get out alive,’ Marc explained. He had already given a statement to one of Pavic’s fellow officers. ‘Came off the worst in it, though.’
‘Do not be glib with me, Dane.’ De Wit shook his head. ‘This is a very serious breach of protocol. NSNS is in Split at the invitation of the Croatian government and in partnership with local law enforcement. We have a well-defined mandate, and you exceeded it!’ He turned away, scowling. ‘We are investigators, not operational agents, not police officers! You have jeopardised the entire presence of our unit in this country, do you understand? This will reflect badly on Europol and the IAEA.’
‘What about the fact that I was right?’ Marc shot back, wincing in pain, his words coming out like a tiger snarl. ‘The Kurjaks were making a deal with somebody. I got photos of all the players.’
‘Pictures are not enough.’ De Wit dropped Marc’s backpack on the bed, and inside was the digital camera he had used on the rooftop. ‘Your property, I believe? This was recovered from the sergeant’s car. The images captured by your camera have already been turned over to the Croatian Special Police directorate.’ He paused. ‘Is that all you have? Show me some physical proof. Convince me this wasn’t just some reckless idiocy on your part.’
‘They had nuclear material on site.’ Marc’s tone hardened. ‘I saw trace evidence.’ He told de Wit about the CellRAD readings, and for a moment he thought that might be enough to take him seriously. But when the other man asked to see the smartphone, Marc’s shoulders fell. ‘It’s gone. Lost it in the fire along with my jacket.’
‘Then once more you have nothing but circumstantial evidence. What you say you saw could have been anything, just another of the Kurjaks’ signature fakes. I can’t go to Schrader with that.’ He leaned in. ‘The Serbs sell weapons and that makes them common criminals, and the remit of the police force. But we don’t hunt common criminals.’
‘You’re wrong about them,’ Marc insisted. His voice cracked and he had to gulp down a mouthful of water. ‘They’re more of a threat than you realise – they’re dialled in. The Kurjaks have got their hands on something deadly, for real this time, and I think Franko Horvat is working with them. He was there tonight.’
‘Again, a meaningless statement without solid proof. Given what I know of the man, I imagine Horvat has an alibi for his whereabouts this evening,’ de Wit said blankly.
‘He always has an alibi.’ Marc remembered something Pavic had told him a few weeks ago. ‘That’s because he has something on everyone. But Horvat is a part of this. If we can put pressure on him –’
‘Stop.’ De Wit held up a hand. ‘Just stop talking, Dane. You need to consider your own circumstances. Schrader is going to review your conduct once we have dealt with our current operation. Until then, you are suspended pending further action.’
Marc tried to reply, but all that came out was an exasperated choke.
‘There will be an investigation. A man is dead. Sergeant Pavic is seriously wounded. You are in danger of facing criminal charges,’ continued de Wit. He frowned, pausing for a moment. ‘The pictures . . . I will have someone in analysis take a look at them. But right now, the focus of our field office is on the disruption of the toxic-waste trafficking network.’
‘So how did the thing at the docks pan out?’ Marc asked.
‘Small fish only,’ said de Wit after a moment, reluctant to admit that the operation had not been a success. He walked away, halting at the doorway. ‘Some advice for you, Dane? You do not have many friends here. I suggest you be careful about what you do next.’
*
‘You burned down our building,’ Bojan growled into the cell phone. ‘And now you have the balls to ask me to pay you?’ He prowled the length of the big Turkish rug in the middle of the office floor, moving back and forth as his brother watched from the sidelines. The room was over-decorated with heavy, dark wood and leaded-light panels on the walls. Through the floor, the steady thrum of music and slot machines underscored the tense conversation.
‘You said get rid of the evidence. I did that. And don’t pretend you’re not insured.’ Horvat snorted at the other end of the line, his voice loud over the speaker. ‘I probably made you a profit by doing it.’
‘Except that you didn’t get rid of anything. The cops snooping around there got out alive.’ Bojan tried to stay in control of his temper, and he moved to a bank of television monitors showing various camera-eye views of the casino below them. Tourist retirees were visible at the neon-drenched bar or lining the slots and video-poker machines, slowly gambling away their children’s inheritances. At the tables in the centre of the big room, the more serious players surrounded games of punto banco, American-style roulette or Texas hold ’em, humourlessly pushing cards or folds of euros back and forth across the green baize.
‘The police don’t have anything on you. I would know if they did.’
Bojan ignored the reply. ‘And the man we lost? Who pays his widow?’
‘Next time, employ better men.’
Neven grimaced and made a throat-cutting gesture, then turned away to help himself to a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a clean glass.
Bojan’s hand tightened around the phone so hard it made the plastic casing crack. ‘You’re testing my patience.’
‘We’re at the Queen’s High,’ Bojan told him. ‘No one is getting in here without us knowing it.’
‘Good choice. Now let me tell you where I am.’ He heard Horvat moving around. ‘I’m standing in the shitty little rooms where a certain nosy Europol analyst is living. I’ve searched it for you, in case he had something that could connect back to your . . . dealings.’
‘And?’ Bojan’s tone quieted. He glanced back at Neven. Both men waited for the reply.
‘Nothing. I’ll go back to the precinct house later. Poke around. Make sure everything is fine.’ He paused. ‘Unless you’d rather I stopped providing my assistance to your organisation?’
Neven silently mouthed a particularly unpleasant curse that had to do with Horvat and a farm animal, and wandered back across the room, toward the large metal case on a far table. He circled it warily, sipping his drink.
‘Keep it up,’ Bojan said, at length. ‘Just don’t set fire to anything else that belongs to us.’
‘I’ll try. I can’t get to the hospital right now, too much heat there. But don’t worry. I’ll catch the dogs for you.’ He cut the line, and Bojan’s annoyance boiled over. He hurled the phone at the wall and it shattered into pieces.
‘Son of a whore!’ Bojan spat. ‘Let’s pay someone to put a bullet in his face. The whole city would have a fucking party if that shit was dead!’
‘We could afford to,’ Neven said quietly, his eyes never straying from the steel case. ‘We could afford to do a lot, if we make the right deal here.’
The elder Kurjak took the bottle and gave himself a generous measure of the liquor, downing it in one to hide the nervous twitch in his fingers. ‘We’ve shaken hands with the Devil, little brother,’ he said. ‘How do we do this? I can’t imagine any way to sell it on that doesn’t open us up to risk . . . The biggest risk.’
Neven gave a snorting laugh. ‘This from the man who helped me dupe the Aum Shinrikyo into thinking they were buying uranium rods? Everything we do is risk, brother. That’s why the reward is so great!’ He opened his arms and cast around. ‘Look at this place. For all we’ve done, it is still a trashy little hole in a town that hates us. Don’t you think we deserve better?’ He prodded his brother in the chest and topped up his glass. ‘Don’t you want to be richer than you’ve ever thought possible? Don’t you want to retire?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But retire alive.’ Bojan aimed a finger at the steel case. ‘Selling lies and weapons is one thing. The big players out there, they don’t give a shit if we peddle machine guns to people who are going to kill each other anyway. But that thing? We put it on the market and we will draw some real heat.’
‘So we sell it quick,’ Neven retorted. ‘Believe me, I don’t want it around any longer than you do.’ He cupped his crotch and grinned weakly. ‘I want kids one day!’
Bojan made a sour face. ‘So who do we sell it to, genius? The family over in Canada?’ He shook his head and answered his own question. ‘No. They’ll horn in and we’ll never see a penny.’
‘So we talk to the Ukrainians or the Georgians,’ insisted Neven. ‘Cut them in as brokers for a fair percentage. They can peddle it to the North Koreans, the Chinese, back to the Russian Army, for all we care!’
‘They would laugh at us,’ Bojan said, his jaw stiffening. ‘Then come in the middle of the night to kill us and take it for free.’ He shook his head. ‘Think, you skinny little prick! Where can we offload this where it won’t come back to bite us in the ass?’
Neven scowled as someone knocked twice on the door. Bojan called them in, and Big Mislav entered. The stocky man was one of the gun hands from the counting room, and he had a searching look on his face. ‘Boss,’ he began. ‘We just got a message, through the blinds. From a client.’
The ‘blinds’ were shorthand for a shell of low-security computer bulletin boards that the Kurjaks and their criminal associates used for coded communications. Hiding in plain sight, they could post seemingly innocuous messages that were really requests for meetings and the like. The Kurjaks mostly employed them in their money-laundering business, rinsing dirty dollars and euros through the Queen’s High casino downstairs and their various other legit business interests.
A sudden cold feeling crept up Bojan’s spine, like a precursor to something terrible. ‘Which client?’ he heard Neven asking, even as his mind went straight to the absolute worst answer he could hear.
Fate gave him exactly what he was afraid of. ‘The pirate.’
The colour drained from Bojan’s face and he sat heavily on the edge of his desk. How was it possible? How could he know?
Neven licked his lips and kept talking. ‘What does he want?’
‘He’s coming. He wants a meeting. Didn’t say why.’
‘Get the fuck out.’ Bojan found his voice again and snapped this at Mislav, who hesitated, uncertain of what he had done wrong. ‘I said, Get out!’ He raised his fist and the other man got the message, slipping back through the door.
‘The Somalian . . .’ Neven sounded it out, as if he was uncertain of the reality of it. ‘He’s on his way here?’
‘Is . . . is that scar-faced bastard a fucking mind reader?’ Bojan shook his head. ‘He can’t know that we spent his money on the bomb, he can’t know that yet!’ His gut churned and the whiskey burned in his throat. Panic threatened to bloom and he forced it down hard.
‘He doesn’t,’ Neven insisted. ‘This is just . . . it has to be . . . bad timing.’ He blew out a shaky breath. ‘No reason to get worked up. He’s come to us before to make deposits in person. You know that. He likes to look us in the eye from time to time, remind us who is working for whom.’ Neven nodded to himself and wiped away a bead of sweat. ‘Yes.’
Bojan unconsciously mirrored the gesture. ‘Right. That’s it. We can handle him.’ He poured one more drink and used the burn of it to sear away his moment of secret fear, erasing the little weakness as if it had never happened. ‘We’ll see him. And we’ll do what we always do.’
Neven’s grin returned. ‘We bullshit our way out of it . . . or we shoot our way out of it.’
*
A harried junior doctor gave Marc a bottle of painkillers and told him he was discharged, but he couldn’t find the impetus to leave the hospital yet. Taking the bag de Wit had left behind, Marc found his way to an upper floor where Luka Pavic was in post-operative recovery.
He spent a few blank hours in a chair down the corridor from the injured policeman’s room, alternating between a fitful doze and an endless cycle of poring over the photos in the camera’s memory.
‘Dane?’ He looked up and saw Jurgen Goss standing over him. The analyst looked flushed and nervous. ‘You look terrible.’
‘Thank you,’ Marc retorted sarcastically. ‘You got my message, then?’ He had called Goss’s number the first chance he had and left a voicemail asking for help, half expecting that it would be in vain. He was heartened to see that he’d been wrong.
Goss handed him a plastic sling bag with some clean clothes and other stuff for use in emergencies. But as soon as he opened it, he knew something was off. ‘Did you go through this?’
‘No,’ Goss said glumly, ‘but someone has. I went to your flat, but the door had been kicked in. It was all turned over in there. You’ve been robbed.’
No, I haven’t, he thought. ‘Coincidence, that happening the same night? I bet you measure the boot-print and they’d match Horvat’s feet . . .’ He blew out a breath and began a quick inventory of the contents. ‘Thanks for doing this. I know you didn’t have to.’
Goss looked around, his hands finding each other. ‘Okay, look, I have to go. Schrader has called everyone in early to do post-raid work on the trafficker arrests. She is very pissed off that the dock operation pulled up next to nothing.’
Marc resisted the urge to say something cutting. The Austrian stepped away, but Marc grabbed his arm. ‘I need you to do something else for me.’ He scribbled down a URL and a nine-character password on a piece of paper, then pressed it into Goss’s palm. ‘This is a cloud server where I sent some pictures I took tonight, of the Kurjaks and their latest playmate.’
‘Dane . . .’ Goss started to object.
Marc went on. ‘I want to run his mug through the facial-recognition database, but de Wit has benched me, so I need you to isolate an image of this guy, put it in the system and see what pops.’ He held up the camera, zooming in on a shot of the Slavic man from the meeting. ‘Get me a name. And don’t talk to anyone else about it.’
‘I don’t know if –’
Marc shot the other man a severe look that silenced him. ‘I’m not kidding here, Jurgen. This is the real deal, and that man is in the middle of it. I am not going to sit on my hands until some mouse monkey in The Hague gets around to looking at those images. By then, it’ll be too late!’
‘Schrader knows I helped you with the phone trace!’ Goss blurted out, and he blinked. ‘She didn’t say as much but . . . she knows. She warned me not to follow your example.’
‘Oh.’ Marc felt a jolt of guilt that stopped him dead. It was one thing to risk his own future over this, but could he jeopardise the Austrian’s as well? Luka Pavic had worked with Marc knowing full well what the risk was, but Goss . . . The honest truth was that Marc had been using his friendship with the other man to get what he needed. ‘Right. I’m sorry. But I wouldn’t be asking you if this wasn’t important, Jurgen.’ Even as he said the words, he hated himself a little for doing so.
Goss swallowed and looked at his shoes. ‘Okay. Sure. I will see what I can find.’ He set off quickly, as if he wanted to get away before Marc pressed him to do more.
Glumly, Marc opened his weather-beaten backpack, stuffing the camera and the other gear from the sling bag inside. If Horvat or some Kurjak goon had decided to toss his place, they would have found nothing worth taking. Everything Marc needed in an emergency was in a custom-hidden compartment in the base of the Swissgear backpack, concealed behind layers of lightweight frequency-scattering materials designed to confuse metal detectors and T-wave security scanners. There was some money and two snap cover passports in there, parting gifts from his old friend John Farrier at MI6. Enough to get him out of the city, if he needed it. But cut and run wasn’t on his mind at the moment.