Exile

by James Swallow

  Ramaas saw no point in addressing the meaningless question. ‘Where is the car that brought me here?’

  ‘Out . . . Outside . . .’

  Ramaas nodded once. ‘Take me to it, or you will join your brother.’

  *

  Horvat crouched next to the mess of broken glass and smashed circuitry that was all that remained of the iPhone, and he prodded it with a thick finger.

  Was it possible? Had some kind of computer virus been inserted into the device without him being aware of it? He scowled. Horvat had a distrusting relationship with technology that didn’t go much further than the cable TV box he used to watch pornography and the decades-old computer he was forced to write his police reports on. Immediately, he was thinking of the doughy Austrian in the Europol office. Did he have the balls to do something like this?

  Horvat decided he wasn’t going to wait around to see if Bojan’s paranoia was justified, and he set off toward the rear of the building at a swift pace. He knew his instinct was on the money when he found the dour-faced Englishman blocking his path.

  ‘Well, shit.’ Horvat kept his hands at his sides. The other man had a gun aimed in his direction. ‘What do you think you will do here?’

  ‘Hello, ugly,’ said Dane, venom dripping from the words. ‘Nice try with the fire. Didn’t take, though. You want to go again?’

  ‘Let me tell you a thing,’ Horvat said in a languid tone. ‘You are in trouble, English. I say you are out of your depth.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dane admitted. ‘I get that a lot.’ He advanced on him, raising the pistol. ‘Back up! I don’t care who or what you know, you’re not going to slither your way out this time.’

  ‘I am a policeman, not you,’ Horvat insisted. He looked around and caught sight of one of the Kurjaks’ men, the idiot he had met earlier. The youth was showing at least some intelligence by keeping low behind the punto banco table, sneaking around to where the foreigner wouldn’t be able to see him. ‘You don’t arrest anyone. You don’t shoot anyone.’

  ‘You reckon?’ The muzzle of the pistol dipped to aim directly at Horvat’s right knee. ‘We’ll see what –’

  The heavy report of a large-bore weapon sounded from elsewhere in the building and both men flinched at the unexpected noise. The idiot in the muscle shirt took it as the cue for his attack and burst out of cover, rushing at the Englishman. Horvat spun away, grabbing at a tray of poker chips and throwing them in their direction. Another shot rang out, closer to hand, and the bullet shrieked as it deflected off a marble support column.

  Grabbing for his own weapon, Horvat ducked behind a row of slot machines as a third shot cracked through the air.

  *

  Luka’s burner phone was an older model, the flip-open kind with a black plastic shell that snapped easily when Vanja bent it the wrong way. He twisted it apart and then threw the pieces into the gutter, kicking them through the mouth of a storm drain.

  His obligation to his cousin’s comrade fulfilled, the emergency 1-9-2 call to the cops over and done, he dashed back to his car and wrenched open the door. Vanja’s mind was still reeling with everything this man Dane had told him. All this talk about radiation and bombs . . . He shivered at the possibility.

  He was little more than a petty crook, if he was honest with himself, a driver for the Kurjaks and occasional muscle when it was needed. Vanja knew enough to be truthful about the men he worked for – but what Dane was talking about was way beyond their normal crimes. He thought about his cousin, Luca, back there in the hospital, worn out and pale. He thought about why someone would do that to him, and what else people like that could do.

  In an hour, Vanja could be a long way from Split. In a day, across the border, maybe looking to lie low with a pretty Slovenian girl he knew in Trieste.

  A gunshot rang out, then more a moment later. Vanja held his breath to listen for the approaching skirl of police sirens, but there was nothing.

  *

  The man collided with Marc in a rush and they started to wrestle for the pistol. Shots cracked wildly as he attempted to force the Kurjak thug away, but the other man was nimble and they moved into a kind of violent pirouette around one another, trading blows with neither of them getting the upper hand.

  That balance lasted only a moment and air gushed out of Marc’s lungs in a whoosh as he took a hard punch to the chest. Gasping, he dropped his head forward and tried to headbutt the criminal, but the blow was poorly timed and he only got in a glancing hit that shared the pain equally between them.

  Things started to slip away from him. The Croatian got behind and caught Marc’s swinging gun arm, pulling him into a clumsy grapple, reaching up for a choke hold with the other. Marc struggled for a second, unable to bring the weapon to bear. Pain spread across his throat.

  Leaning forward as far as he could manage, Marc pointed the CZ 75 up and backward over his shoulder, turning the gun’s ejection port in the rough direction of his assailant’s head. He pulled the trigger as fast as he could, shots cracking uselessly into the mirrored ceiling overhead. Hot exhaust gas seared the back of his neck and he recoiled, but the fumes and spent 9mm shell casings hit the Kurjak thug in the face and he cried out in pain. He let go, clawing at his eyes.

  Marc spun around and hit him in the throat with the butt of the gun, sending the man down to the carpet in a heap.

  Another shot cracked across the casino, and a neon display in the shape of a fan of aces exploded as the bullet narrowly missed Marc. He ducked, glimpsing Horvat flee into a corridor across the room. The corrupt cop halted at the threshold, firing again to discourage pursuit, before he vanished from sight.

  Marc checked the CZ 75’s magazine and dashed after him. He grabbed a metal stool from in front of a slot machine and hurled it at the door, the weight of it slamming it open. He expected Horvat to be lying in wait on the other side, but no shots came back at him, and he shouldered through.

  Ahead of him were store rooms and offices. One door was already open.

  Coming in low, the pistol raised to eye level, Marc edged around the corner and pivoted so he could see the room beyond in glimpses without stepping out from cover. It had to be the boss’s office – the big power-player desk was a dead giveaway. A moment later, he knew for sure. Bojan Kurjak’s corpse lay on the floor, with most of his head missing.

  Horvat was standing in front of a dozen video monitors, swearing and pulling at the CCTV control unit jammed underneath the screens. He was attempting to remove it by force, but he looked like a pissed-off bear tearing at a box of food and unable to get it open. Sharper than he looks, Marc thought. He’s trying to get rid of any evidence that he was here.

  He entered the room and took aim at Horvat’s back. ‘You could just disconnect the hard drive, you dope. No need to wreck the thing. Turn around and put your hands up.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ Horvat spun with more speed than Marc believed him capable of, blindly firing off the last two rounds in his revolver as he came about. Marc shot back, diving behind a heavy leather chaise longue as the slide on his own gun locked open.

  Horvat didn’t waste time reloading and bellowed as he rushed him, turning the revolver to use it like a knuckleduster.

  Marc burst from cover and snatched at the first thing he could turn into a weapon – a free-standing bowl ashtray on a metal pole. He got a hand to it and swung the pole in an upward arc that made the tray connect with Horvat’s chin. Tobacco ash and the stubs of cigars scattered in the air, and the corrupt cop stumbled backward. Marc dropped the improvised weapon and went in after him, not thinking, just reacting.

  Horvat landed on a low coffee table with a cry of pain and Marc punched him hard across the face. He kept hitting him, over and over, as something broke loose inside; anger that had been buried and left to fester, now rising back to the surface in a red rush. Marc’s knuckles rang with the pain and then he gasped, abruptly releasing his grip on Horvat’s jacket.

  He put distance between the two of
them, uncertain where the moment of unexpected violence had come from.

  Movement on one of the security monitors drew his attention. Marc saw two figures on the screen. One was a large, dark-skinned man with a big pistol in his grip, and the other could only be Neven Kurjak, pale and frightened, trailing close behind. In Neven’s hand was the heavy steel case Marc had seen at the Dolphin Apartments. Fedorin’s asset. Right there.

  He glanced back at Bojan’s body and thought about the shot he had heard. It wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened in the room.

  Now the big man and the surviving Kurjak brother were threading through the back of the casino, disappearing from one screen to return on another as they passed into the kitchens. An exit door from there would put them next to the parking lot.

  Marc slotted a fresh magazine into the CZ 75 and threw an angry look at Horvat, who still lay moaning where he had fallen. After everything the corrupt policeman had done, Marc wanted him to pay for it, to suffer the indignity of being stripped of his rank, to face a severe prison sentence. But what was inside that steel case was far more dangerous than a single bent copper, and it could not be allowed to slip away.

  His jaw set, Marc sprinted out of the office and down toward the kitchens.

  *

  Inside Neven’s head there was nothing but a constant roll of thunder, as if the sound of the shot that had taken his brother’s life was trapped in an endless roaring cycle. The rushing in his ears and the shortness of his breath were making it hard for Neven to keep up with the pirate, but he did not dare to slow down in case Ramaas decided his usefulness was over as well.

  All the arrogance and superiority he assumed he had over the Somalian crumbled. In a single instant, Ramaas showed Neven who it was that wielded real power here, snuffing out Bojan’s life as easily as dousing a candle. And now Neven’s fate was tied to this psychopath. He kept looking around, hoping that they would stumble upon some of the men who were supposed to be guarding the Kurjak brothers, but the casino was empty. Too paranoid to bring in more muscle after taking the case from Fedorin, Bojan had insisted they keep a low profile. Now that decision was going to ruin them. Big Mislav, Erno and whoever was left had most likely abandoned him.

  He swallowed a gasp of fear and hauled on the steel case. It was heavy and the weight was uneven, so it swung back and forth as he carried it with him. Ahead, Ramaas reached a fire exit and kicked it open. Somewhere behind them an alarm began to sound.

  Ramaas looked at him, that dark and distorted eye glittering. ‘This is no time to be a brave man or a foolish man,’ he intoned. ‘Do as I tell you and you live another day.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Neven nodded, but Ramaas was already moving, breaking into a run across the car park, weaving around other vehicles toward the waiting Mercedes. He vanished out of sight and Neven released a panting breath, adjusting his grip on the case, now dragging it with both hands. Every step he took it seemed to weigh more, and all Neven wanted was to drop it and run. Bojan is gone. Nothing else mattered. He felt lost without his brother there to balance him.

  Another revolver shot sounded from the far side of the car park, and Neven guessed that someone – his driver – had stayed behind, stayed loyal. Now that man was dead too.

  ‘Neven Kurjak!’ The shout came from behind him, and it was such a shock that he half-turned and fell over the case, dropping it to the asphalt. A white guy with a ragged growth of beard and a mess of dark blond hair advanced toward him, a pistol in one hand and some kind of ID badge in the other. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them and step away from the case!’ he called out in English. ‘You’re under arrest!’

  ‘Who . . . ?’ Neven slipped back on his haunches. ‘You are not a cop . . .’

  ‘Europol, Division of Nuclear Security,’ snapped the man, brandishing the badge. ‘You know what that means?’

  Neven did. He slowly stood up, and he couldn’t deny how grateful he felt. Europol, the police . . . They would only take him into custody and send him to prison. And with what he knew, with the information he could trade for an easy ride, it was a far better option than being forced to serve as the pirate’s hostage and pack animal.

  ‘Where’s the big guy?’

  ‘He’s gone?’ Neven looked around wildly. He wanted that to be true more than anything else, but then he remembered the device in the case and he knew that Ramaas would never leave it behind. He reached out. ‘Please, you have to help me . . .’

  ‘Watch those hands!’ repeated the foreigner, and he edged toward the case. Where Neven had dropped it, the poorly secured latches on the lid had jolted free and now hung askew. The other man’s face shifted, an unreadable expression crossing it. ‘Open it. Carefully.’

  His fingers were shaking so much, Neven found it hard to obey, but then he got a grip and did as he was told. The man with the gun saw the workings inside the case and Neven wondered if he understood what he was looking at; then the man turned deathly white and that was answer enough.

  ‘Close it!’ he shouted back. ‘Lock that fucking thing up. Shit!’

  *

  The innards of a nuclear bomb tended to follow one of two designs. The implosion-assembly types were spherical in shape, made up of curved polygonal panels like the surface of an American football. Each panel was an explosive matrix that would go off at once, creating a wave of inward-directed force that would compact a plutonium core in on itself, unleashing the monstrous power of nuclear fission. The other kind was something called a gun assembly, which used a chemical charge to shoot two slugs of sub-critical uranium 235 into each other, with the same effect. Gun types were cylindrical and more mass efficient, or at least that was what Marc recalled from all the briefer files and Discovery Channel documentaries he’d seen.

  Neven Kurjak slammed the case shut as if he was closing the lid on Pandora’s Box, and it occurred to Marc that if the device inside it was another of their fakes, then Neven deserved an Oscar for the authenticity of his shit-scared performance.

  Marc expected to find something nasty in there – spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor, maybe, industrial-grade polonium or caesium for a radiological dispersion device – but somehow the possibility of an actual weapon seemed too big to be credible. Now he found himself shocked at thinking that small.

  Then reality came crashing back with the roar of a V8 engine, as the glossy black shape of a Mercedes skidded around the far end of the car park and hurtled toward him.

  Marc glimpsed an intent, expressionless face behind the steering wheel, as the driver turned the car into the weapon he would run Marc down with. Had he thought and not just reacted, Marc would have brought up both hands to guide his pistol toward the target, but a cocktail of adrenaline and fear was racing through his bloodstream and he acted on instinct.

  Fire blazed from the muzzle of his CZ 75, sparking off the grille and the bonnet of the Mercedes as the rounds raced up toward the windscreen. White craters appeared in the glass as shots hit home, but the car’s bullet-resistant windows shrugged off each impact as though they were hailstones.

  The vehicle screamed toward Marc and he vaulted aside before it could plough over him, but not quickly enough to get away untouched. He didn’t see the Mercedes clip his leg, only felt the sudden pain of the glancing impact as the energy of it shocked through his bones, spun him into the air and down again. Dazed and shaky, he felt blood through his bandages as the wounds from the fire reopened.

  Marc tried to rise, but his body defied him and he collapsed to the ground. Blinking through blurred vision, he saw the Mercedes lurch to a halt and the towering dark-skinned man climb out. He was saying something to Neven, giving him orders.

  It was hard to grasp the words through the tinny ringing in Marc’s ears. He snarled with effort and rolled over, levering himself up on one hand. Grit and loose chips of asphalt ground into the oozing cuts on his palm. When he looked back toward the car, Neven was in the back seat staring fixedly at the stee
l case, and everything else about him seemed dead to the world.

  A shadow blotted out the morning sun and Marc got his first clear look at the big man. He was aiming the large-frame revolver at Marc’s head, and in his other hand was Marc’s Europol ID badge, which he considered briefly, then tossed away.

  The man pulled the pistol’s trigger, and the hammer clacked harmlessly on a spent bullet. Marc couldn’t help but flinch, frozen in place as he waited for the sound of thunder. It never came. The man grinned and said something Marc didn’t catch. There were sirens now, getting louder, coming closer.

  Then the shadow was gone and the car melted out of Marc’s sight. He felt sick with dread and frustration, but it was all he could do to direct himself to the painstaking business of getting up off the asphalt, inch by aching inch.

  Hands came in from behind him and took some of the weight, helping Marc up the last of the distance. He sagged and heard Vanja’s voice. ‘It is okay. I have got you.’

  ‘Can’t let them go,’ Marc wheezed. ‘Stop them . . .’

  He pushed off from Vanja with as much effort as he could muster and staggered away, shaking off the pain, but around him there were only the shapes of white-and-blue patrol cars. The black Mercedes and the cargo it carried were gone.

  *

  Marc knew it wasn’t going to go well for him when the paramedics patched him up for the second time in twenty-four hours and turned him over to a pair of solemn, unsmiling cops. If they spoke any English, they didn’t acknowledge it, and Marc’s poor grasp of the basics of Croatian got no replies.

  They put him in the same interview room where he had hidden in order to spy on Franko Horvat’s smartphone, and he waited, anxious with every minute that passed, knowing that it was giving Neven Kurjak and the man holding his lead more time to get away.

  Marc put his thoughts in order and mapped out all the places where he had been injured over the past day, feeling the patched cuts and stiffening bruises. He was dog tired, propelled only by a fading wave of adrenaline and the need to get the warning out. There was a pencil and a legal pad on the table in the middle of the room, and he set about scribbling down as much as he could remember before the impressions grew hazy. Within a minute, Marc had generated a page of disconnected notes in his spidery, undisciplined handwriting.