Venice Black

by Gregory C. Randall

  OTHER TITLES BY GREGORY C. RANDALL

  NONFICTION

  America’s Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois

  FICTION

  THE SHARON O’MARA CHRONICLES

  Land Swap For Death

  Containers For Death

  Toulouse For Death

  12th Man For Death

  Diamonds For Death

  THE TONY ALFANO THRILLERS

  Chicago Swing

  Chicago Jazz

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Gregory C. Randall

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542048699

  ISBN-10: 1542048699

  Cover design by Jae Song

  This book is dedicated to my late father, John Charles Randall.

  CONTENTS

  THE BALKANS

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  TUESDAY

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  WEDNESDAY

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  THURSDAY

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  FRIDAY

  CHAPTER 47

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE BALKANS

  For more than a thousand years, the Balkan people have been the unwilling victims of warlords, kings, sultans, fascist dictators, petty tyrants, and communists. The rugged Adriatic coastline of the Balkans includes countless islands, deep fjords, fishing villages, and smugglers’ beaches. The region’s inland is mostly mountainous, with an extensive succession of valleys, each with its own assortment of villages and cities. Since around the time of the Crusades, three major religions have established themselves in these mountainous lands: Roman Catholicism among the Croats and Slovenes to the northwest; Orthodox Christianity among the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians to the east; and, starting with the Ottoman conquest of Serbia in the fourteenth century, Islam. However, these are just generalities. In reality, all three religions are mixed together in a stew of resentment and distrust.

  Bordered by Italy in the northwest and Greece in the south, today’s Balkan countries are but present-day chapters in a bloody book that will perhaps never be finished. At the very end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon ended the centuries-long control of a stretch of the eastern Adriatic coast by the Republic of Venice; the rest of the region belonged to either the Ottomans or the Habsburgs. After the conclusion of World War I—which began with the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929), only within twenty years to be occupied and partitioned by the Nazis. The Ustaša, the fascist organization in the independent state of Croatia, operated many of the vilest concentration camps of World War II. Their goal was to ethnically cleanse Croatia of Serbs, Jews, dissident Croats, and Gypsies. Around half a million men, women, and children were systematically liquidated.

  In the last decade of the twentieth century, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. In many ways, this declaration was the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its withdrawal from the regional politics of Eastern Europe. Chaos reigned. Over the following decade, other countries in the region asserted their right to self-determination. The resulting social and political anarchy led to another brutal and repressive wave of government-sanctioned massacres and cultural and institutional retribution, much of it justified by various leaders.

  An uneasy solution was eventually negotiated through the offices of the United States government. The Dayton Accords, as it was called, brought stability to the region; some even called it peace. However, in Bosnia and Herzegovina mass graves full of massacred civilians are still being found twenty years later. The politics and beliefs of the dead are now immaterial to the march of time. But to many, those dead are not irrelevant; they are missing parents, sisters, brothers, and children—and in the Balkans, as it has been for a thousand years, revenge is left for the living.

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER 1

  Pula, Croatia, Present Day

  Marika Jurić sat uneasily in the back seat of the Pula taxi. The Croatian driver and his vehicle smelled of rancid cabbage and stale tobacco. She was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. She wiped away the moisture on the inside of the window with her sleeve, and through the wash of rain drumming on the taxi’s roof, she waited for the signal from the motor launch that she had arranged to meet her. She had been waiting for almost an hour.

  Eleven hours had passed since she’d taken the last seat on the one o’clock afternoon bus from Zagreb and, for the first hours of the trip, sat soaked in her black wool suit. The rain had caught her as she slipped out the rear service entrance of the Palace Hotel overlooking Zrinjevac Park and walked to Zagreb’s Glavni Kolodvor bus station. She had waved off taxi after taxi, positive that foreign agents drove them, probably Serbians, or worse, Albanians. Rumors were that the bounty on her now very wet blonde head was a hundred thousand euros—alive only. Dead she was worth nothing. It was too cheap; she’d have paid ten times that to stay alive. Her black canvas bag, almost as wet as she, sat on her lap, its single long strap still over her shoulder. After the numbing trip across Croatia to the Pula bus station, she had chanced the only cab at the stand. Now soaked and shivering, she waited in the back seat of the fetid Pula taxi.

  “You need a drink, comrade?” the driver now asked, holding up a bottle. “You look like you could use one.” The meter said six hundred and forty-four kunas.

  “No, I’m fine. You are being paid to wait, not talk.”

  “No problem, comrade, just asking.” The driver raised the bottle and tipped it to his lips.

  The storm had followed Marika from Zagreb to Pula through the afternoon and into the night. It was as ardent now in its embrace of the wharves of Pula as it had been with the cobblestones of Zagreb. Thankfully, she’d finally dried out. If only her damp and clingy underwear didn’t feel so uncomfortable.

  The Volkswagen Golf taxi sat at the end of the l
ong wharf, the rain veiling any view of the Adriatic Sea. She again wiped away the moisture on the window and continued to stare into the storm. The man on the phone had said the price was ten thousand euros and to have it ready when the boat arrived.

  “Pay the man when you board,” the voice had said. “His name is Pavelić. The deckhand is his son, Boris. After you board, tell him where you want to go—I don’t want to know.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, just make sure you have the money. I get my cut from him.” After the instructions on which wharf and the time, the man had offered something about luck and fortune. For most of her forty-two years, Marika Jurić had made her own luck and her own large and well-hidden fortune. However, a fortune can only buy you things; what Marika wanted was retribution.

  She reached into the damp canvas messenger bag and ran her hand across the Beretta pistol to the bundle of euros in a Ziploc bag. Then her fingers passed over the money and touched the small thumb drive sewn between the layers of cloth. With a cursory look, no one would see or notice it. She traveled lightly and wished now she had at least placed some fresh underwear in the bag. Her clothes and suitcase were still in her room at the Zagreb hotel, along with an old passport and other identification. Those in her coat pocket were well-worn fakes. On these well-stamped pages, she was a Bulgarian. When they searched her Zagreb room—as she knew they would—they would think she had just gone out to dinner or a concert or a quiet and indiscreet assignation. The thought of dinner made her stomach rumble.

  “You say something, ma’am?”

  “No.”

  A week earlier, she’d finished her last interview in a small café three blocks from her hotel. The woman had given her affidavit and photos of her sons and husband to Marika. The woman, a Bosnian Muslim, was sure they had been dead for twenty years. The faded images of a strong-looking man and two intelligent boys of maybe twelve and fifteen with thick black hair were all that she had left of them.

  “I do not expect them to be found, maybe their bones someday. I have left DNA with the United Nations people, but only Allah can help now. I am not sure what I will do if they are found. Rebury them with our ancestors? I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Marika was never sure what to say. The questions had been asked: the usual who, where, when. No one asked how—to think of it was too painful. It had been her tenth and last interview from the same Bosnian village, all with women. She had found no men to interview, and the few grown boys from that time had been too young then to be a threat to the Croatian executioners.

  Now, on the wharf, all the paranoia that had been building for the last six months again began to manifest itself. Her hand shook as she removed it from the bag.

  “Maybe a sip,” she said.

  “Sure, comrade.” The driver passed the bottle over the seat.

  Marika held it to her nose. The bottle smelled like the taxi, but the vodka was tolerable. She passed the bottle back.

  “Not so bad, yes?”

  “It’s swill,” she answered. But it did give her a quick shot of warmth, something she had not had all day.

  Through the gloom, a strobe light flashed through the rain, once, twice, then a third time. Each time a different series, the sequence the man had told her over the phone.

  “I’m leaving,” Marika said, threw a hundred euros over the driver’s seat, and reached for the door handle.

  “You going out in this shit? Maybe you should wait for it to stop.”

  “No questions.”

  “Whatever you say, comrade.” The driver began to gather up the euros scattered on the seat.

  The door opened into the storm and rain immediately began to fill the interior.

  “If you’re going, be quick. I don’t want my cab soaked—comrade.”

  Marika glanced at the back of the head of the annoyed driver and pulled her pistol from the bag. Instead of firing a slug into the man’s skull, she swung the pistol’s muzzle and sharply rapped the side of the man’s head. He slumped forward against the steering wheel.

  “Sorry—comrade.”

  She slipped the pistol into her jacket pocket and walked to the edge of the wooden wharf illuminated by an overhead streetlamp. Without its light, she would have stumbled over the low iron railing and fallen into the harbor. The motor launch silently slipped up to the narrow-planked walkway secured to the face of the pier. A young boy holding a thick rope leaped from the launch to the planks.

  “Who are you?” Marika asked in Croatian.

  “Boris, ma’am. You?”

  “The woman with ten thousand euros.”

  She climbed down an iron ladder secured to the stone bulwark and then stepped onto the stern of the launch.

  “Go,” she said and looked up through the rain to the boat’s bridge.

  A man in dark clothes stared down at Marika, then turned away. Seconds later, the sound and vibrations from the engine under Marika’s feet began to increase. The launch slowly turned away from the small pier and into the storm. Within minutes it was lost to the receding lights of Pula and Croatia. Marika was soaked, again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Marika climbed the ladder to the bridge. A broad-shouldered man stood silhouetted by the array of red lights from the electronic gear spread across the cabin’s console. His bearded face and heavy brow reflected off the bridge’s window. He wore a watchman’s cap favored by sailors in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. He didn’t turn to look at his passenger.

  “Your name?” she asked.

  “Pavelić. Like Pavlov, the scientist who discovered why mangy dogs drool.”

  She slowly drew out the pistol and held it to her side, out of sight.

  “Where are we going?” Pavelić asked in Croatian.

  She looked about the bridge. It appeared new and well equipped. A large radar screen was mounted to one side, its probing band circling over and over. On the screen’s bottom, a line of dense green light reflecting the coastline pulsed with the radar’s rotating signal. The top of the screen reflected nothing but the open Adriatic Sea.

  “Okay, let’s start somewhere else then,” Pavelić said. “What should we call you?”

  “Unimportant,” she answered in Croatian.

  “That’s a strange name, but in my line of work, I hear it often. Do you have the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, place it on the console.”

  With her free hand, she did as directed.

  He turned to look at her for the first time. “Good, now where?”

  She heard the sound of a footstep behind her. Looking at the reflection in the window, she saw Boris standing behind her. His hands were empty.

  “My son,” Pavelić said.

  “We met.”

  “Good. Now that the rituals of smuggling have been completed, I still need to know which way to point my Irena. South to Ancona, north to Trieste, or west to Ravenna, maybe Venice; just tell me.”

  “Venice.”

  The captain smiled. “You are not the first I’ve taken there, but you’re the prettiest.”

  “Enough fuel?” she asked, ignoring the compliment.

  “Plenty.”

  “Food?”

  “Much.”

  “Good, then Venice.”

  “Damn, I told the boy’s mother that I’d be gone maybe one day—now it’s two.” He looked at the bundle of euros. “It will be morning when we arrive. This storm will pass in about three hours, and the seas are reasonably flat, so we should make excellent time. Unless, of course, we are delayed.”

  “Delayed?”

  “Yes, the Italians are not big fans of smugglers and sneaking people into their little bit of heaven. All these Syrian and Afghan migrants are making business difficult for me. The Italians, along with their European brothers, are sure the next refugee is some Syrian jihadi terrorist. This rain is a good cover, and maybe we can use some of the larger ships to hide our small radar signal. I can pay the fines, but I c
an’t lose my boat; the Irena is all I have. Also, for once I have nothing to hide—except you. So, I hope you are not wanted by Interpol or some government. You look like a Croat. That’s at least in your favor. I won’t deal with those Serbian pigs—ever.”

  “Those that want me are probably wanted by their own governments, so the less you know, the better.”

  “Excellent, just what I wanted to hear.” Pavelić lit a cigarette.

  For a half hour, the boat droned on into the storm, the slapping of the windshield wipers providing the tempo. Pavelić pointed to a small blip that appeared in the lower left of the radar screen. “Dammit, no miracle today.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe a Croatian patrol boat. They are always interested in who comes and goes.”

  “Heading toward us?”

  “Maybe, we’ll watch.” He edged up the two throttles, and the cruiser gained speed. “The next few hours will tell. At least this storm keeps away helicopters or aerial surveillance.”

  Thirty minutes later the coast of Croatia, with its brilliant radar return, had disappeared from the radar screen. The only return came from the single boat to the east—and it was gaining on them.

  “How far?” she asked as Boris handed her a large sausage on a plate and a mug of coffee. “Thanks.”

  “Refill mine, son.” He passed his mug to the boy. “Five miles, but closing. I think they want to see who would go out into this weather.”

  “And?”

  “I hope they think we are a fishing boat.”

  Fifteen minutes later a large return blinked on in the upper-right quadrant of the radar screen.

  “What’s that?” Marika asked.

  “My guess is a cruise ship. They travel at night so their rich passengers can pillage our fair cities during the day. She is about ten miles out. I have an idea.” The captain adjusted his course and aimed his boat directly at the ship. “At this speed and theirs, we should pass each other in fifteen minutes. Look, our friend is increasing his speed. He may have figured out my idea.”

  Marika ate the sausage, and the grumbling in her stomach eased. The coffee was tolerable.

  “You okay? Sometimes my guests get seasick.”