Shadow Warrior

by Scott, Trevor

  Finally, the truth, Sirena thought. “Okay. Here’s what we’ve got.” She explained what they had discovered in France and German so far, along with Jake and Anica tracking the Italian in Switzerland. Sirena finished by explaining the link to the man living down the mountain, the Serb, Jakov Koprivica.

  “He’s never come up on our radar,” Sabine said.

  Sirena explained all of the intel she had on the guy.

  “That’s terrible,” Sabine said, “But I’m not sure we can bring him in based on this information.”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  “When those in our office knew about Anica working undercover to infiltrate a possible Serbian organization, she was nearly killed.”

  “That’s why you’re going to keep this from your people for now,” Sirena said.

  23

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  All four of them had put their guns away and walked to a large park along Höheweg. A number of high-end hotels were lit up brightly, electricity obviously free in this opulent city.

  Jake had verified the credentials of the two men, but they would not talk until they were sure they were far away from the pedestrian zone.

  Once they were in a secluded area, Jake turned to the lead agent and said in English, “Why were you following us?”

  “Because you were about to compromise our investigation into Giovanni Caspari,” the Italian said.

  “Maria is INTERPOL,” Jake surmised.

  “Yes, she is with us.”

  Anica chimed in. “You make her sleep with that man?”

  “No. She volunteered, knowing she would have to do certain things. She is a professional.”

  “If she wasn’t before, she is now,” Anica said, shaking her head.

  “Caspari is a bad man,” the Italian said. “He is responsible for human trafficking, smuggling drugs and weapons through Italy. Who knows what else?”

  “Why is INTERPOL investigating instead of the Italians?” Anica asked.

  Jake took this one. “Caspari has probably paid off certain Polizia officials.”

  “And politicians. Border patrols are paid in cash through an intermediary. We know Caspari is responsible, but we have not caught him directly.” The INTERPOL man hesitated long enough to check out Anica and then turned back to Jake. “We understand she is Austrian Polizei working for Europol. But who are you?”

  “A concerned citizen,” Jake said.

  “According to our people, you checked into your hotel under the name Karl Konrad, with an Austrian passport. But you do not seem to have much of a German accent.”

  “I studied English in America as an exchange student,” Jake explained.

  “I see. But why are you following and engaging Giovanni Caspari?”

  Jake expected this question. “That’s classified.”

  “So, you are not just a concerned citizen,” the Italian said. “What do you have on Caspari?”

  “Not enough,” Jake said. “I’ll tell you what. You give me something, and I’ll return the favor.”

  “We can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

  They could go in circles like this all evening, Jake thought. “Let me see your identification.”

  “Why?”

  Jake waved his hand and INTERPOL pulled out his ID. Jake took a quick photo on his phone and attached it to a text to a friend. It took just five uncomfortable minutes waiting in the cool night air for Jake to get a return text from his friend at INTERPOL.

  The text read, ‘The guy is legitimate. One of the good guys.’

  “Alright,” Jake said. “You check out. Did you hear about the bust in Konstanz?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That was Anica. Goran Goluža gave up Caspari.”

  The INTERPOL officer nodded his head. “We knew about a potential link to Goluža. We believe this organization is operating in every European country, but we have not been able to find the top leader.”

  Jake didn’t want to mention Jakov Koprivica. At least not yet. Not while Sirena was checking into the man. He said, “It could be a decentralized structure with a number of top leaders.”

  “A consortium,” INTERPOL surmised.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, this is a European law enforcement matter,” the INTERPOL officer said.

  Jake shifted his head to Anica and said, “She is with Austrian Polizei and affiliated with Europol.”

  “This is Switzerland,” he said. “Not a member of the European Union.”

  Now Anica chimed in. “Then I’m sure you have run your operation through the Swiss Polizei.”

  The INTERPOL man fought for his words, but he had nothing for a full minute. Finally, he said, “We followed Caspari from Lake Como, and have not had time to coordinate our efforts with the Swiss. What about you?”

  Jake didn’t need to tell this man anything, but he decided to at least keep things civil. “We are simply gathering intelligence for now. Once we get enough information, we’ll bring in the Swiss.”

  The INTERPOL man’s phone buzzed and he pulled it from his front pocket. He swore in Italian and switched to English to say, “We must go.” The two INTERPOL officers headed off toward the hotel where Maria was staying with Caspari.

  “Is it Maria?” Jake asked.

  The men stopped and turned to Jake. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she seemed nervous,” Jake said. “As if she thought Caspari might know about her.”

  “She sent her distress code,” he said.

  “Caspari has at least two security guards,” Jake said. “We can help.”

  INTERPOL nodded and hurried across the park toward the high-end hotel at the edge.

  Jake and Anica followed the two INTERPOL officers into the hotel lobby to the bank of elevators. They went up to the fourth floor together. When the doors opened, Jake stepped out first, saw the two security guards, and pulled his gun when he saw they were aiming their guns at him.

  Shots rang out in the corridor.

  With just a second to react, Jake scooted back into the elevator and simultaneously pulled his gun. “Two shooters,” Jake said. Then he went low around the elevator door and shot twice at the men.

  They returned fire with a dozen shots.

  The Italian INTERPOL officers looked hesitant to Jake, as if this were the first gunfight they had experienced.

  Glancing around the door, Jake saw that the two men had been joined by a third man. Caspari. And they were rushing down the hallway toward the emergency stairwell.

  “They’re heading toward the stairs,” Jake said, and then rushed out the door and after the men.

  One of the men turned and fired at Jake. Vectoring to the right, Jake shot three times, dropping the man to his knees. But he must have only hit the man in the leg, because his friend was able to help him to the stairs.

  Hurrying to the hotel room, Jake stopped and waited for the INTERPOL officers to catch up. Anica was behind them.

  “Do you need to go after them?” Jake asked. “I hit one of them.”

  “We check on Maria first,” the INTERPOL man said.

  The hotel room door was locked, so the Italian shoved his shoulder into the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  Jake pushed the man out of the way and kicked the door alongside the handle. The frame gave way enough for Jake to shove his shoulder into the door and smash it inward against the wall.

  Moving quickly into the room, his gun out in front, Jake swept through the opulent old hotel room. He found Maria at the far end of the room at the edge of the balcony door. She was bloody and not moving.

  The INTERPOL men were now upon Jake, and both men gasped when they saw Maria’s beaten face. One checked the woman’s pulse, while the other got on his phone and called for help.

  “No pulse,” INTERPOL said. He immediately tried to perform CPR.

  Based on the amount of blood and the coloring of her skin, Jake knew this woman would not survive. Besi
des the beaten face, the woman’s neck was bruised thoroughly. Someone had choked her out.

  The second INTERPOL officer said an ambulance was on its way.

  Jake pulled out the car keys and handed them to Anica. “Go get the Alfa.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re going after Caspari,” Jake said.

  She smiled. “Meet you out front in ten.”

  Once Anica was gone, Jake leaned down to the INTERPOL officer trying to revive Maria. “She’s gone,” Jake said. “Her neck is broken.”

  The Italian continued compressions, but asked, “How do you know?”

  Jake thought back through his life and remembered the sound and look of those he had been forced to choke out and eventually break their necks. It was always a disconcerting event. “Trust me,” Jake said. “I know.”

  The INTERPOL man stopped and sat next to the young woman. He brushed the hair away from her lifeless eyes and then tried to close her lids, but they wouldn’t budge.

  “Hey,” Jake said. “You now have Caspari for murder. Get your ass in gear and arrest the man. Make the man talk.”

  INTERPOL swished his head side to side. “The Swiss will take on the murder investigation.”

  “Yes, but they won’t have all the data if we leave now,” Jake explained. “You can get the man first.”

  “How? They have a head start. They could be anywhere.”

  Jake didn’t want to give away what he knew, so he said, “You know about his place in Lucerne and Como.”

  The man nodded his head.

  Leaving the two men to wait for medical response and the Swiss Polizei, Jake casually walked out and took the elevator to the lobby. He found Anica waiting out front already with the Alfa Romeo.

  He got into the passenger side and glanced at Anica.

  “Is she dead?” Anica asked, and then pulled away from the curb onto the street.

  “Yeah.” Jake took out his SAT phone and found the app he needed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Away from here for now until I get a location. This place will soon be crawling with Polizei.”

  “They should have heard all of those shots and got here by now.”

  Jake had to agree. Not a great response time. But he could finally hear sirens approaching. Interlaken was normally a sedate, tourist resort town. Prime assignment for the soon to retire or the connected, he guessed.

  “Turn left ahead,” Jake said.

  Anica followed his order, picking up speed. “Are we getting on to the autobahn?”

  “No. Follow Grindelwaldstrasse.”

  “Are we going after these men?” she asked.

  Jake knew they could simply let INTERPOL and the Swiss Polizei handle Caspari and his men, but for some reason he thought he might be able to get more intel out of this man than the locals. They had rules; Jake made up his own rules.

  “They stopped in Grindelwald,” Jake said. “Have you been there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a beautiful ski resort and not much else. Looks like they stopped on the outskirts of town. Let’s see what this car will do on the mountain roads.”

  “You trust me?”

  “You grew up driving through the Alps.”

  She smiled and hit the gas.

  24

  Grindelwald, Switzerland

  It took them less than thirty minutes to drive up the mountain road from Interlaken to Grindelwald. Jake remembered the place from a ski vacation he had taken one winter when he lived in Innsbruck. That year he had hit nearly every major ski resort in Austria and Switzerland. The beauty of this place, unfortunately, was obscured by darkness and swirling clouds overhead.

  Just as they got to the outskirts of the mountain village, Jake had found out who lived at the address where Caspari and his men had gone.

  Now, they sat a couple of blocks away from the mountain chalet. GPS indicated Caspari’s car was still there, but they must have put it in the garage.

  “Nice place,” Anica said. “Who lives there?”

  “A doctor from Lucerne. A second home. The man is a surgeon.”

  “They’re patching up the man you shot.”

  “Yep.”

  “What do we do? Should we just call the Swiss Polizei? Or INTERPOL?”

  “You have authority through Europol,” Jake said.

  “Although Switzerland is not part of the European Union, they have agreed to cooperate with us. But they expect us to call if we know the location of a known murderer.”

  That’s what Jake thought. But he didn’t have such restrictions. “We need to talk with Caspari before he can get a lawyer and shut down an interview.”

  “I follow the rules, Jake,” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice. She obviously didn’t want to disappoint him.

  “Was it standard procedure to jump in the river during a gun fight and disappear for days without contacting your office?” Jake asked. A bit harsh, he knew, but it would get his point across.

  “That’s not fair,” she said.

  “You’ve never explained why you disappeared.”

  Anica let out a heavy sigh. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. “I wasn’t sure who to trust. Somehow our operation had been compromised. Besides, I was really working for Europol at the time. I was used to working with more autonomy with them.”

  “I guessed that much,” Jake said. “Otherwise, Sabine Bauer wouldn’t have flown all the way to The Azores to recruit me. She had to think there was a mole in your organization.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “Not exactly. It was implied by her actions.” Jake considered what to do. He sure as hell didn’t want to get Anica in trouble with the Polizei or Europol. He also didn’t want to put her in harm’s way. “Alright. I’ll go and recon the chalet. My guess is the doctor will be working on the guy I shot, leaving the other man and Caspari. Not much of a problem.”

  Jake made sure he had a full magazine in his Glock, and he added rounds he had used at the hotel from the depleted magazine. Then he shoved the gun into its holster under his left arm and started to get out.

  Anica reached across and grabbed Jake’s arm. “Jake. Be careful.”

  “I got this,” he said, and then got out into the cool night air. Grindelwald sat in the shadows of the snowy glaciers of the Eiger, which Jake could see periodically when the clouds cleared.

  He made it around the side of the house with the garage, skirting a row of pines. Here chalets speckled the hills of green grass, with just enough trees to provide shade in the summer. The good doctor’s house was on a particularly steep section a few blocks from the train leading up the mountain to the Kleine Scheidegg ski area. In the summer, Grindelwald was base camp for those crazy enough to climb the north face of the Eiger.

  Jake rounded the back of the house, which would have a spectacular view of the Eiger if it were not past midnight. As he suspected, the door to the walkout basement wasn’t locked. He quietly went inside and slowly drew his gun. The sound of Wagner emanated from somewhere upstairs. As he slowly stepped up the stairs, he could now hear people talking. They were speaking Italian, so it was probably Caspari and his security guard.

  Once on the main level, Jake stepped into the lavish home of wood and wrought iron. The chalet resembled a medieval castle, with solid stone floors and lighting of flickering fake candles.

  He stopped suddenly when he realized the men were no longer talking.

  A flash of movement ahead, and then a muzzle flash. Instinctively, Jake shot once and heard what had to be a body crashing into the stone floor.

  When he sensed something to his left, Jake pointed his gun at Caspari. The Italian had a pocket pistol in his right hand.

  “Drop the gun,” Jake said, first in Italian and then in English.

  Caspari smiled and said, “I will set it down. It cost me six hundred Euros.” Then the man gently reached down and placed the small semi-auto handgun in the center of a stone b
lock. “Did you shoot my man?”

  Jake moved to his right until he could see the second of Caspari’s men sprawled in an awkward position on the solid surface, blood seeping from his chest and pooling outward.

  “He shot first,” Jake said.

  “At an intruder,” Caspari said.

  “I’m here on official business,” Jake lied. “You just killed an INTERPOL officer in Interlaken. The Swiss Polizei are looking for you. By now, INTERPOL has a Red Notice out on you. So, it’s not likely that you can claim I’m an intruder. You and your people had to conclude that I was law enforcement. Yet, your man still shot at me. Why did you kill Maria?”

  Caspari shrugged. “The bitch lied to me for weeks.”

  “Tell that to the judge before he sends you to jail.”

  Laughing, Caspari said, “Have you seen a Swiss jail? They’re like a high-end spa. Besides, she pulled a gun on me. I had no choice but to defend myself.”

  “Right. Stick with that story. Then why did you shoot at me as I got off the elevator?”

  “That was not me. It was my overzealous security detail—both of which you have now shot.”

  “Where is the gimp?” Jake asked.

  Caspari looked confused.

  Jake said, “The guy with the bullet in his leg.”

  The Italian said nothing.

  “Let me guess. Your friend, the doctor, the owner of this chalet, is pulling the bullet out right now. Doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “I’m taking you for a ride.”

  Just then an older gentleman in scrubs came around the corner. When he saw Jake with the gun, he stopped dead in his tracks.

  In German, Jake asked, “How is our patient?”

  The doctor glanced at Caspari, as if he was looking for an explanation.

  “He will live,” the doctor said. “I have sedated him. He will be out for hours.” Then he looked at the other man on his formerly nice stone floor. “But I’m afraid he will not be alright.”

  Jake waved his gun at the man. “Go back to check on your patient. No need to call the Polizei. I am already here.”

  Without hesitation, the doctor scurried off.