by Allen Eskens
Garland interrupted Drago's daydream by charging through the door and saying in a winded voice, “He was in Minneapolis.”
“I heard,” Drago replied. “I am going there in the morning. Have your people ready a jet, a business charter that cannot be traced to Patrio, and find a private airport near Minneapolis where there are no cameras.”
“I'll send in an advanced team, to set things up for—”
“No!” Drago said sharply. “No advanced team. I will do this on my own. I don't want any eyes or ears involved beyond the two of us.”
“My people are all professionals, like you. They know how to keep secrets.”
Drago turned from the window to face Garland and spoke in a way that gave each word its own weight. “I am here because somebody knows my business who should not know my business. I have come to clean that slate. If things get messy in Minneapolis, only you and I will know what happened and why.”
“Good point,” Garland said.
“Pope was living under the name James Putnam,” Drago said. “Your job will be to get me the intelligence on this James Putnam. This will be a task you will do personally. You still know how to navigate the system, do you not?”
“I designed the system,” Garland said. “I'll get you the intel.”
“I want everything there is to know about this man and anyone in his life. I want to know about his bank accounts, his business associations, family members, mistresses. If James Putnam had a habit or a hobby, I want to know about it.” Drago handed Garland the pad of paper on which he had scribbled notes. “These are some of the supplies I will need.”
Garland ran his finger down the list as he read. “A laser microphone, a shotgun microphone, computer surveillance software, surveillance bugs, GPS vehicle-tracking devices, a second false identification, three throwaway cell phones, potassium chloride, and a syringe…” Garland stopped reading. “Potassium chloride?”
Drago did his best to hide his growing impatience with Garland. “If anyone in Minneapolis knows our business, it may be better that their deaths look natural, like a heart attack, rather than an assassination. I do not know what I will find once I get there, so I must prepare for as many contingencies as I can.”
“Of course,” Garland said, and continued reading the list. “Two nine-millimeter Glocks with suppressors, one M16. You want an M16? Drago, this is an urban mission. You're not going into Yemen, for God's sake.”
“I will also need a sniper rifle, maybe an M-40.”
“I'm not going to authorize a bloodbath.”
“I do not tell you how to steal from your countrymen; do not tell me how to do my job.”
Garland swallowed hard and continued in a voice that landed impotent on Drago's ear. “This is a surgical operation,” he said, “in the middle of America, farm country. How much risk can there be? You get in—you get out. This has to be kept under the radar, not on a scale that requires sniper rifles or M16s. I won't authorize that.”
Drago moved to Garland's desk and leaned across it, looking Garland in the eye. “Then you should be the one to go to Minneapolis. You should be the one to risk your life.”
Garland forced a coward's thin laugh out of his knotted chest. “No need to get testy, my friend. We've been together for too long, and fought too many battles together.”
“You will brief me on the intel before I leave in the morning.”
“I will try to.”
Drago had started for the door but stopped and turned to glare one last time at Garland. “You will not fail me,” he said. “We have been waiting many years for this day—for this mission. There will be no half measures. I will not stop until I have retrieved the property stolen from me. You will not stop until you have given me the supplies and the information that I need. If we fail in this, we will be hunted men. Everything you have here will be gone and you will live out your life in a cinder-block room with a stainless-steel bed. This is not a time to try. This is the time to do. You will get me what I need.”
Garland's face flushed red, and Drago saw the anger kicking to break free. In the end, Garland answered Drago with a single nod of his head.
When he fought in the Balkans, Drago Basta had no sense of strategy, no guile, no appreciation for the larger picture. His appetite for killing fed a hunger that burned in him and made him a killer, but not an assassin. He roamed like the animal he was—like Psoglav the Beast—cutting down those who stood in the way of Serbian domination. He rarely saw beyond his next victim. Wayne Garland changed all that.
Despite Garland's doughy penchant for self-preservation, he once had a brilliant mind for strategy. He taught Drago to play chess and taught him that, as in chess, their aim and their energies needed to go beyond merely removing their opponent's chess pieces from the board. He taught Drago to maneuver and slide, to expose a weak flank in order to draw the enemy into a trap, to create an open door and then entice the enemy into believing he had chosen that path himself. Drago would always be thankful to Garland for that, and he would use those lessons in planning Garland's own death.
But now, that need for strategy scratched at Drago's thoughts as he worked out the details of a plan to retrieve his property—a computer flash drive. At least it had been a flash drive on the day that Jericho Pope stole it from the Domuscuta. Now, who knows? If Pope stored it on an Internet cloud, Drago would need to find it and destroy it. If he kept it in his possession, it could be stored in anything that can hold digital information. That meant that Drago's search would have to include every memory chip in Jericho Pope's residence.
This all would take time. As Drago sat in a rental car and watched the morning sun reflecting off of the condo where Jericho Pope had so recently lived, he worked on the details of a plan he had been honing since he left New York.
Garland found out that Pope lived with a girlfriend named Ianna Markova. A younger, less experienced Drago would have simply slipped into the apartment, killed its inhabitant, and searched until he found his property. But he was no longer that rash young man. If he killed the girl and found nothing in the apartment, he would have silenced the last echo of Jericho Pope. The girl may hold the key to where the drive lay hidden, even if she didn't know that she held that key. Drago had evolved since his years in Kosovo, and he knew that he needed to search her apartment without killing her. His plan—if it worked—would get her out of the apartment for a day, maybe more. That should give him enough time to tear the apartment apart.
Garland had given Drago a dossier on every aspect of Jericho Pope's life as James Putnam. Drago knew where Pope lived, where he banked, his hobbies, and his favorite websites. Drago also knew all about Ianna Markova. He knew that Pope and Ianna had been together for three years and that Ianna had once been a model—in a very loose sense of the word—and a dancer at a gentlemen's club before she met Jericho. Ianna had a mother named Magda Markova, who lived in a trailer on a small piece of land an hour north of Madison, Wisconsin. Ianna's father was deceased, and she had no living siblings.
Drago landed in Minnesota on that Saturday morning, carrying three pieces of luggage: a duffle bag with the weapons and his clothes in it, a rucksack with surveillance gear, and a laptop computer in its carrying case. The computer had been loaded with special encryption software that would allow him to contact Garland without a concern that their communication might be spied upon.
He stepped off the plane and into a taxi, instructing the cabbie to drive him to the main terminal at the Minneapolis–St. Paul Airport. Once at the airport, Drago walked into the office of Decca Car Rental, and, still using the name Walter Trigg, rented a nondescript Toyota Camry. From there he drove to a cheap hotel close to the airport, one with no surveillance cameras in its lobby. Walter Trigg checked in, requesting a room near the rear exit of the building, telling the clerk that such rooms are quieter, not telling her that such rooms allow him to come and go without being observed by nosy desk clerks. He dropped his duffle bag and computer at the room and
left with his backpack full of surveillance equipment to find the condo.
Jericho Pope's condo stood in a relatively quiet area on the edge of the city where the Mississippi River once powered enormous flour mills. Hugging the river's edge as it did, the condo had the feel of being secluded even though it stood only blocks away from the heart of downtown. Drago sat sideways on a park bench across the street, a bench that had once offered a scenic view of the river, a view that now stared into a growth of saplings. He used one of his Burner phones to call for a pizza delivery to the condo. Then he waited.
When the beat-up Ford Taurus carrying the pizza arrived, Drago casually stood and walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and headed back toward the entrance of the condo—just another passerby on his way to take a midday stroll across the stone-arch bridge a block away. He paused a few feet from the glass condo entrance and watched as the pizza-delivery guy pushed a button on the intercom in the vestibule. The door had a keypad with both numbers and a slot for swiping a magnetic key card. He would need to acquire a card. Not a problem.
The door opened and the pizza guy entered. Drago approached and stood next to a pillar just outside the entrance, using the distraction of the pizza guy to get a better look at the layout of the lobby. The security guard, nothing more than a kid in a suit and tie, had a phone receiver in his hand. The pizza guy tapped a foot on the tile floor and drummed his fingers on the cherry-wood reception desk.
Behind the desk, Drago could see a door leading to a small office. The door to the office was open and on the back wall hung a panel with rows of LED lights—the security panel. He'd seen panels like that before and knew breaking into an apartment without a security code would trigger flashing lights and a silent alarm. He would need to work around that. He could also see one security camera covering the vestibule and one behind the desk. He had to assume there would be more.
He walked away, head down, hands in his pockets, his thoughts coalescing around the shopping list of things he would need to get into Jericho Pope's apartment. The first would be acquiring a magnetic key card.
He crossed the street and returned to the park bench, keeping one eye on the condo behind him. Soon a car pulled into the small drive that led to the underground parking garage. A large door opened, and Drago counted. Five seconds for the doors to open. The car entered the garage and disappeared around a bend. Fifteen seconds after the car passed the sensors at the mouth of the garage, the doors began to close. Five seconds for the doors to close. That would be more than enough time.
Drago waited on the park bench for another car to pull into the garage. After fifteen minutes, a Volvo pulled into the drive. Drago stood and started walking toward the condo. But then he stopped. The Volvo had a female driver and two kids in the back. Drago had no compunction against killing women or children, but the mess and fuss and the noise of dispatching three made no sense. He wasn't in a hurry. He returned to his bench.
As the minutes ticked away and the lunch hour approached, Drago began to question his decision to spare the woman and her children. Then, a few minutes after 11 a.m., an Acura pulled into the drive. Drago stood and walked toward the condo. He could see that the Acura held a single occupant. The tint of the window prevented him from seeing whether the driver was a man or a woman, but that didn't matter.
Drago walked down the sidewalk at a casual pace, scanning the block ahead of him and behind. No witnesses. As the Acura passed through the open garage doors, Drago neared the condo and started counting. One…two…three…He pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes, which were covered with sunglasses. He glanced around—still, no witnesses. Four…five…six…The Acura would be around the turn now. Seven…eight…nine…Drago pulled the collar of his jacket up and started across the street. Another six seconds passed, and the doors began to close. Drago slipped into the garage as though he were the breeze itself.
Once inside, he ran around the bend and saw the taillights of the Acura as it settled into its assigned parking stall. Drago could see no other movement in the garage. He had about forty feet to cover to get to the Acura. He reached into the side pouch of the rucksack and pulled out a piano-wire garrote.
A man stepped out of the Acura with a briefcase in one hand and his car keys in the other. He aimed the remote and the car chirped. The man wasn't out of shape, but he had no idea of what was about to happen and so wouldn't be a problem. Drago stepped behind a pillar as the man walked around his trunk, a mere five feet in front of Drago. Drago closed that distance in two strides and wrapped the wire around the man's throat.
The man did what they all did. He grabbed for the wire, which was already digging into his skin and pinching shut his larynx. Drago threw a shoulder into the man and kicked his heel, dropping the man to the concrete between two cars, smashing his face into the ground and stunning him into inaction for a few seconds.
As the man regained his senses and realized again that he was being murdered, he fought to raise himself up. Drago lay on the man's back and held the garrote tight. As the man struggled to get up, Drago bounced on him and forced him back to the ground. Drago could already feel him growing weak, his life draining away. The man dug at the garrote around his neck, digging his fingernails into his own skin to try to get under the piano wire. After twenty seconds of struggling, the man slipped into unconsciousness from the loss of blood to the brain. After another minute or so, his heart stopped beating.
Drago looked around to make sure that no one had entered the garage during the scuffle. No one had. He retrieved the car keys from the man's hand and popped the trunk on the Acura. He dragged the man around to the rear of the car and poured his body into the trunk. Drago pulled the man's wallet out and read the name on the driver's license. Mr. Scott Cutcher would never know why he had to die that day.
He pulled a key card out of the wallet, closed the trunk lid, and then walked to the door connecting the garage to the elevator. As he walked, he peeked out from under the bill of his cap to spy for security cameras. He saw none in the garage. He slid the key card through a key reader on the door, and a green light invited him in. He opened the door just enough to see a security camera covering the elevator. He closed the door again.
The dossier Garland wrote up on Ianna Markova gave her a black Cadillac with personalized license plates that read “Ianna.” Her car was easy to find. Drago laid his rucksack next to the driver's door and pulled out a small, polycarbonate wedge. He worked it into the top of the door, carefully prying the door away from the car body a fraction of an inch. He then inserted a pump wedge—a rubber diaphragm attached to a small hand pump like one might find on a blood-pressure cuff—into the gap and began to slowly expand the gap so as not to set off the car's alarm. Once he had created a space of half an inch, he retrieved a telescopic antenna from his bag, extending it to its full length, taping its joints to prevent it from collapsing. He slid it through the gap and used it to push the door-lock button and unlock the door. He breathed a sigh as he opened the car door to no alarm.
He put his bag on the passenger seat and went to work installing the tracking device. He had to remove part of the dashboard to find the appropriate power supply. The Cadillac's own battery would power the tracking device for as long as the battery held a charge. He worked in silence, keeping one ear to the outside world, alert to any sound of human presence. He tapped into the power source, grounded the tracker, hid the device inside of the dash, and started reinstalling the dashboard.
As he finished turning the final screw, he heard a metal door close with a clatter that echoed throughout the concrete garage. He stopped moving and slumped to the floor of the car. He put his hand on the Glock in his shoulder holster. Footsteps—female footsteps—clicked on the cement floor, approaching him and the Cadillac. He slid the gun from its holster, aiming it toward the car's door, his mind racing with bad thoughts. Had he been sloppy? Had he left any of his tools outside of the car?
He shook his head to clear th
ose thoughts away. Of course he hadn't been sloppy. He was a professional. He ratcheted a round into the chamber and made sure that the silencer was screwed on completely.
The footsteps drew closer, and Drago resisted the urge to peek over the back of the seat. He would wait until she opened the door, then he would shoot her, put her in the trunk, and hope that Jericho Pope kept his secrets buried in his apartment and not somewhere else. The footsteps reached the Cadillac, and Drago heard the chirp of a car door being unlocked. It wasn't the Cadillac. The woman passed by the rear of the Cadillac and entered an SUV parked next to Drago. He eased his grip on the Glock.
After the SUV left the garage, he waited for silence to fall, ensuring that he was once again alone. He inspected his work—no scratches on the paint around the door, no gaps in the dashboard, no wires visible, no sign that he had ever been there. He stepped out of the car, locked the door behind him, and walked back to Mr. Cutcher's Acura, where he slipped into the driver's seat. On the visor, he found the remote control for the condo garage door and put that in his pocket, unsure whether or not he would need it. What else might he need from Mr. Cutcher? He had the key to get into the building when the time came. He had access to the garage if he needed that. He could think of nothing else.
Drago drove the Acura out of the garage and into Northeast Minneapolis. He found a parking spot on a side street where the car could sit for a few days before getting towed. The walk back to his rental car took almost an hour, but patience was crucial in his line of work.
