The Beauty of Bucharest (A Clean Up Crew Thriller Book 1)

by S. J. Varengo

  “No,” she said. “There’s no other option. They have no other chance. We’ll do what we can. Maybe in the maze of the modern tunnels, we can hide them long enough to… to figure out our next move, but we have got to get them out of here. Now!”

  “Alright,” he said from behind her hand. She took it away and he said, “This way. Tell them, ‘this way.’”

  Nicole turned back to the women. “Pe aici, vă rog.”

  Ana moved to the open door and waved to the others. “Pe aici,” she repeated. At first, the women seemed paralyzed, even the ones who spoke up and said they would go, so the model reached out to the woman closest to her and gently took her hand. “Pe aici,” she said again, as sweetly and soothingly as Dan had ever heard words spoken. They began to move.

  Dan had stepped into the hall and pointed in the direction they needed to go. As one after another broken soul shuffled into the light of the hallway, he felt his heart breaking. How could one human treat another in this way? How could Grigorescu act as if they were just livestock? He saw that the majority of the women had at least some form of covering, though most of it woefully incomplete. But when the last woman stepped forward, and Dan saw that she was one wearing only dingy panties, trying desperately to cover herself. Without really thinking, he unzipped his spandex shirt and helped her put it on. He was considerably taller than her and it mercifully covered her to below the waist. As he helped her with the zipper, she looked at him, and like Ana, forced her face into an unfamiliar smile. “Să vă binecuvânteze,” she said.

  Dan turned to Nicole, shrugging his now bare shoulders to indicate that he didn’t know what she was saying.

  “She said, ‘Bless you,’ Danny,” Nicole said.

  Dan drew in a sharp breath to keep from weeping. It would not do to show anything like weakness when these women needed strength. But as he smiled back, a tear found its way from his eyes in spite of his effort, and the woman smiled more broadly. She reached up and brushed the tear away, then followed the other women. When Dan was sure the room was empty and that Nicole had them moving in the direction of the hidden door, he grabbed the dead guard by the collar and dragged him into the cell. As the body was pulled along, Dan saw that it left a very obvious smear of blood. He also saw that something fell from the dead man’s hand, and he reached down to see what it was. He realized it was an electric cattle prod. “My God,” he said to himself.

  He was about to drop it back on top of the corpse, but at the last minute decided to keep it, sticking it, business end pointed upward, into the waistband of his pants. Then he pushed the door shut and slid the heavy bolt into place. “Wait for me,” he said, running after the women, who by now were moving quickly as the slimmest trace of hope began to manifest itself in their souls.

  Ileana looked at her watch again and saw to her great pleasure that at last it was time to commence the operation. Into her comm, she said, “Claudiu, bring the woman up to me.”

  She waited for a moment for the guard to respond. Her earpiece remained silent.

  “Claudiu, you’d better not be asleep, you piece of shit. Bring the Albu woman!”

  Again there was no answer, and a cold chill ran through her veins. She ran down the hallway to the room with the monitors and threw the door open. But as she looked to the monitors connected to the night vision camera, she screamed in rage. In place of the green figures of the women, there was static on both screens. Into her comm, she shouted, “Everyone, basement level at once.”

  A few voices responded that she’d previously instructed them not to leave their posts. Sounding like an snarling animal, she said, “Come now, or your post will be a shallow grave!”

  In seconds, there was a rush of bodies running toward the closer of the two doors that led to where the women were kept down in the basement level of the palace. “Follow me, weapons ready!” she called as she began running down the stairs. Behind her, she heard at least two of the men drop their guns and was happy that neither discharged. Is everyone working for me a complete fool? she asked herself.

  Once at the bottom of the stairs, there were three hallways through which to pass before arriving at the long one housing the women’s cell. She ran as fast as she could, outpacing the men behind her. “Keep up, assholes!” she screamed over her shoulder.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she heard a voice behind her say. It took every ounce of her self-control to not spin around and shoot the first person she saw. It didn’t matter to her if that was the moron who had asked the question, only that she got to kill someone. The rage building in her threatened to hurt her if she did not vent it. But, she reasoned, if what she feared were happening, she’d have plenty of places for her bullets soon.

  She made the first turn and began to leave the others further behind, but she did not slow. “Come on, goddamn it!”

  Another turn, and for a full five seconds, Ileana realized she was running down the corridor alone. Finally, the first of her detail turned and appeared behind her, just as she was herself turning onto the final corridor before her goal. She reached the connection and slid to a stop, nearly stumbling on the uneven floor. As before, the men were just appearing behind her, and she took comfort in knowing that no one saw her misstep.

  Now she turned toward the onrushing men, their arms and legs akimbo, weapons pointing in every direction, more than one toward her. She held up her gun-hand for them to stop while putting a finger over her lips with the other telling them to quiet down. They began to slow before reaching her and were walking by the time they did. She indicated that she was going to look around the corner and mimed for them to be ready. She could tell that at least half of them didn’t understand what she was trying to say, but then one young man stepped forward, nodding his head. His gun was pointed toward the ground and he, unlike the others, was not breathing in gasps and wheezes. She recognized him as Marius, one of the two new men that she had picked to fill out the transport detail. Using hand signals, he indicated that she should look and that he would cover her. She nodded, almost not believing her eyes. Someone who is not totally dead from the neck up?

  She edged to the corner and carefully peered around. She saw nothing… no one. And that, of course, included Claudiu, the guard who should have been standing outside the cell door. She motioned to Marius to follow cautiously, and he in turn whispered to the others, “Come on. Be quiet.”

  The column fell in behind him.

  Ileana walked down the lengthy hall toward the door, spotting the wide smear of blood on the floor while still some distance from it. Watching the far end of the hall, she continued to approach. When she reached the door, she saw that it was bolted, and she drew it back, pulling in a deep breath in hopes that despite Claudiu’s obvious misfortune, the women… no, she didn’t give a shit about the women… just the woman… she hoped Ana Albu was still within the chamber.

  But she quickly saw that the only resident was the rapidly cooling body of Claudiu. “Good, at least,” she said quietly, looking down at his lifeless form. Then, as though it were an entity complete with its own will and direction, a roaring scream exploded from Ileana’s chest.

  By now, Marius had taken a position in the doorway. The others attempted to push him inside so that they could see what had caused their boss to make a sound like a cross between the roar of a lion and the wail of an earth-trapped spirit. He turned to them. “Step the fuck back, you idiots!” They stopped pushing, and Ileana wheeled about and stormed toward the door, Marius stepping aside before she bulled her way into him. The man behind him was not so fleet, and she knocked him aside by smashing her gun into his face.

  She immediately turned left, heading in the only direction the women, and whoever was aiding them—for there could be no doubt that outside forces were at work in her domain—could have gone. Stomping down the corridor, she knew that by now Bogdan would be, at the very least, beginning to realize something was wrong. And after their talk earlier, she realized that if he was unable to del
iver the prize above all prizes, and further that her incompetence was the reason for that failure, she had probably seen her last sunrise.

  Her only consolation was that every member of the security detail except for the two men she assigned to remain by Grigorescu’s side whenever she was not standing there herself were already with her. So if he was going to kill her, it would have to be either by the hand of one or both of those men, or by his own. The bodyguards were formidable, but he was infinitely worse.

  Ileana was capable of great cruelty, and if she caught whoever had taken the women, they would learn that very soon. But Bogdan made her look like a nun in comparison. She had no other option but to recover the Beauty of Bucharest, and to kill the person who had taken her. Horribly.

  14

  Doubling Back

  “There is no way the Blue Woman hasn’t figured out that something’s wrong by now,” Dan called ahead to Nicole. He had taken a position at the rear of the group. Though their spirits seemed to be showing signs of revival with every step the women walked, there were several who were in very bad shape, and they were holding one another up, bravely making their way as best they could. The victims closer to Nicole seemed to be stronger, and Dan was careful to keep the rear guard moving fast enough that the others did not separate from them.

  After a few minutes, they’d reached the backside of the hidden door. From this direction, it was quite obviously that, with an old-style iron handle clearly visible. Without hesitating, Nicole turned it. The door clicked open and she stepped aside to allow the women, led by Ana Albu, to pass through. “Get on the other side and wait until everyone is out,” she told the model as she guided the others. Ana nodded and started encouraging them to move through the doorway.

  At last they were all through, the young woman wearing Dan’s shirt the last to go. “I’m sure you’re right,” Nicole said, finally answering Dan’s observation. “She must know. By now, it must have been time for them to take Ana out. That means she won’t be far behind us, and you can bet she’ll be the polar opposite of all alone.”

  “Yup. So…”

  “So what now?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I am very unhappy to have to tell you that I don’t know. But you’ve been on a bit of a roll. Any ideas?”

  Dan pursed his lips, a sign since his college days through his final day in the boardroom that he was tackling a tough mental challenge. The service corridors were intentionally confusing, but he reasoned that the bad guys would know them like the backs of their hands. He looked at the back of his hand, another long time mental exercise… allowing a random thought, in this case “the back of their hands,” to take the forefront while the rest of his brain continued to work on the question somewhere deeper and further back. As he absently glanced at his hand, he noticed a small scar that he didn’t remember getting. Now his mind diverted all energy to this odd blip. How could I have cut myself badly enough to have left a scar and not remember doing it?

  At that moment, his head snapped up. “Follow me!” he told Nicole, running through the door into the service tunnels.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” she called, following him through. Here he was charging ahead again. “The rules!” she called, more than a little angrily after him.

  “You can spank me later,” he called back. “Close the door tight. Make sure it clicks.” He jogged down the hallway, in the general direction of the corridor with the manhole leading up to the park. “Not that it will slow them down any, but my mom always taught me to close the door behind myself.”

  Her anger quickly abated. “Wiener,” she said, more or less to herself, though it made Ana Albu chuckle.

  “Oscar Mayer,” the model said. Now Nicole laughed.

  “Exactly!” She pushed hard on the door and heard the latch click. A few of the women closest to it exclaimed in surprise that it was no longer visible. “Come on, we have to follow my husband.” She started moving quickly after him.

  Ana laughed, more like a little girl’s giggle actually, and said, again in English, “You marry an Oscar Mayer wiener!”

  “That I did. Come on.”

  The women now started following Dan, though to Nicole it seemed like he was making odd, random direction changes, turning left when she felt, somehow, that they should have gone right, going straight through four-way passage crossings. But as she watched him from the middle of the group, she could see he was not wavering, not vacillating. He appeared to know exactly where he was going.

  After about five minutes of this, he stopped suddenly, just as he had when he found the hidden door that had led them to the women. He began tapping the wall with his gun again, also as before. Nicole wove through the women and made her way to where he was accosting the ceramic tiles.

  “Do you really think that will work a second time?”

  “I do. It’s like an unknown scar.”

  “An unknown… Daniel, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “I won’t bore you with the mental gymnastics that occurred to make me realize this, but I’m willing to bet that there’s a second hidden door, and that it probably leads either to another part of the basement, or maybe even directly into the Palace.”

  Nicole’s jaw went slack as she stared at him. “And you think, for some reason, that that’s a good thing?”

  Dan stopped tapping and looked at her. He was grinning, a little stupidly, she thought. “I do.”

  “You’re going to need to help me out a little here, Danny. We’re trying to get these women away from the Palace, not into it.”

  Ignoring her look of incredulity, Dan went back to work moving along the wall slowly, tapping with the barrel of the gun as he did. “You said that this Gabor woman would be coming after us and would be the opposite of alone. Judging from what she tried to do to you in the catacombs, does she strike you as someone who’d be pursuing us with a skeleton crew?”

  A flash of epiphany fired in Nicole’s head. “No! She’s going to be coming, all hands on deck.”

  “Which means…”

  “There’s probably not very many people in the Palace!”

  “Maybe nobody but your… mark.”

  “Oh, you’re picking up the lingo nicely,” she said. “It’s sexy.”

  He paused and turned toward her again. “Rain check,” he said with a smile. At that moment, a timbre change occurred as the gun made a more hollow sound, just as it had done when Dan had found the first hidden door. Nicole heard it and began looking for a telltale scuffed tile, but neither she or Dan could locate one.

  “Damn it,” Dan said. “I was sure I’d found something!” In frustration, he kicked the base of the wall, and when he did, they heard a now familiar click, and the seamless tiles separated to reveal another door.

  “Looks like you did. Nicely timed temper tantrum.”

  Dan looked abashed, but as he pulled the door open, he began smiling. Behind it was a staircase leading up. He was about to start climbing when Nicole put her hand on his arm.

  “Danny, you may be right that Bogdan is up there, but I don’t think he’s going to be alone. Even if Gabor brought the majority of her people with her, she won’t leave him unguarded.”

  “Okay?” Dan said, leaving unsaid the implied “So what?”

  She heard it anyway. “So, you have to let me go first.”

  With a flourish and a bow, Dan stood aside. Nicole put her foot on the first step, but stopped there, turning back toward the women. She spoke to them in Romanian.

  “We believe this stairway leads to the Palace,” she began. As had been the case back in the cell, the women made a chatter that clearly carried in it echoes of horror. The Palace was not a place any of them were eager to go, and Nicole could imagine the abuse they must have suffered in that place. She held up her hand and they quieted. “We believe that most of the guards in that place are probably behind us… following us. We think it may be safer upstairs right now. But…” She paused, dreading what she
had to say next. “…we think Grigorescu is probably there.”

  These words were met with outright shrieks of terror. For a moment, it almost looked as though they were preparing to turn and bolt back in the direction from which they’d come.

  “For God’s sake, shut up!”

  Nicole’s eyes widened as he realized that it had been Ana Albu that had spoken those words. She was also a little surprised that the group immediately stopped all noise. Clearly, they respected the young model.

  “These two people are the first glimmer of hope we’ve had since the Pig took us. If they think this is the best way, I believe them.”

  Nicole watched as the women considered this, but Ana was not done.

  “And I for one would love to see the Pig without all his big apes around him.”

  Nicole smiled and wished Dan spoke Romanian so that he could appreciate her choice of words. She mouthed the word “Gorilla,” hoping he’d get the gist, but he looked confused. She shook her head to indicate “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you later.”

  Ana was still rolling, “Because I promise you, if I see him and there is no one there to save him from me, I will claw his eyes out for what he’s done to each of us.”

  Nicole said, “Ana, he probably won’t be alone.”

  The model turned to face her and said, “Then I guess I will die clawing his fucking eyes out.”

  Cole shook her head. “None of you are dying today. He might have people with guns, but so do you.”

  “I’d like to rip his stinking little pecker off,” said a woman with a black eye and wearing torn shorts and a bra, making her one of the best dressed of the entire assembly. Now the noise from the crowd sounded far more like a rumble of anger, carrying the anticipation of revenge.

  “Alright then,” said Ana. “Let’s go. And let’s hope we do find the bastard.”

  With that, Nicole started up the stairs. The women pushed past Dan to follow her.