Marked for Death

by Marked for Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘Only what she told us earlier. Much of what she said is based on overhearing bits of conversations, piecing together phrases and key words. But she was able to give a concise account of how Viskhan and his people are involved in the human trafficking trade, and that lately he’s been working almost exclusively with a broker connected to some group in the Middle East.’

  ‘Did she specifically mention Islamic State?’ Rink asked. Trey hadn’t mentioned any terror group in direct terms to me, but I’d assumed she was talking about the most active terrorist organisation based in the region. They had been behind other soft target attacks, the type that we believed Viskhan was helping to facilitate in Miami Beach within the next twenty-four hours.

  ‘No. She could only confirm that Viskhan and his buddy Cahill talked about “Syrians”. I ensured that relevant buzzwords were included in her testimony; I don’t think you need worry that what we’ve given the cops will be taken seriously.’

  ‘She still wasn’t able to pinpoint the planned attack, though?’ I went on.

  ‘Only that Viskhan mentioned a parade and that it was going to be spectacular.’

  Yeah, that was the extent of what she’d already told me. I’d made the connection with the planned 4th of July celebrations in South Beach. I thought of the IS-promoted attack in Germany where a truck was driven directly into shoppers at a Christmas market. A similar act during a parade would have terrible consequences, and that was before we included the presence of weapons. Jeff Borden was no weapons expert, but he’d been able to tell us that the truck at the port had contained handguns, automatic rifles and also larger armament boxes.

  ‘Pity it wasn’t Viskhan we trussed up and delivered to the cops,’ Rink said, ‘instead of some greedy-assed security guard who had no knowledge of the actual plot.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but that wouldn’t be as satisfying as killing the fucker ourselves.’

  Rink’s mouth formed a tight line. Killing Viskhan was our go-to plan. But I’d earlier contacted Walter Hayes Conrad and brought him up to speed on our situation, and it was at Walter’s urging that we followed a process where we could warn the authorities of the impending attack, supply the proof that would trigger a positive response and show us – including Trey, Velasquez and McTeer – as innocent victims caught up in the situation. He warned that if we went cowboy on this, there was little he could do to save our collective butts. Holding out on knowledge of an attack that might otherwise be prevented made us complicit in the plot, he’d reminded us. Even burning with a desire to avenge our fallen comrade, Rink had acquiesced to good sense.

  We’d done our bit to get the wheels moving now, and Walter had suggested that our best move afterwards would be to surrender to the authorities, and assist their investigation any way we could. He swore he’d do everything in his power to protect us, but unfortunately – because things had already progressed too far, and I in particular had been involved in a fatal shooting – he couldn’t supply an official cover story to us the way he had when we’d assisted Arrowsake in foiling the domestic terror attack in Manhattan.

  Despite Walter’s advice, there was no way I was going to surrender to the cops. Neither would I place Trey under their protection until I knew that Viskhan, Cahill and their people were firmly out of the picture. It sounds egotistical to say that she was safer in our care, but it was true. I had existed in a world where assassination and murder regularly occurred in supposedly safe environments, and occasionally committed by those trusted to protect the victims.

  ‘I’m with you, brother. Viskhan’s going down hard,’ Rink said.

  ‘Guys,’ Harvey cautioned, ‘I just heard the shower shut off.’

  His heads-up was so that Trey didn’t overhear us plotting to kill her husband. It didn’t matter. Trey would never feel safe while Viskhan lived. There didn’t exist an iota of loyalty – let alone love – for her husband in her. She would be a willing partner in plotting his death. It was the very reason why we were returning to the safe house in Flagami: I needed to interrogate Trey for everything she knew about Viskhan’s movements. He was connected, and doubtless he’d be alerted that he was about to be arrested, and would go into hiding before the cops got their hands on him.

  I said, ‘Harve, go tell Trey she can’t take that nap just yet. We’re only minutes out and we need to speak with her first.’

  I drove us to the safe house. The title was a misnomer. It was a room in a dreary motel buried behind a strip mall off 8th Street. As a neighbourhood, Flagami was characterised by neat, brightly painted and well-kept homes, and the motel was a blot on the landscape. Ours was the last room in a row of single-storey dwellings, rented – if you wished – by the hour, and with no questions asked. The kind of place where they boasted pay-per-view adult movies and coin-operated vibrating beds. It wasn’t very defensible, but we were currently off the cops’, and hopefully Viskhan’s, radar. I pulled the rental car into the space directly in front of our room. There were other inconspicuous vehicles arranged before other rooms. Some of them I assumed belonged to travellers who didn’t want to pay the exorbitant prices of the hotels closer to the airport, some of them by people taking benefit of the hourly rate. Nearby there was a mobile home-cum-trailer park, and it had an open-air swimming pool: through the car’s open window I could hear people enjoying the facilities, despite the fact it was growing dark.

  Harvey had the lights on inside the room. I could tell because he took a peek out between the blinds and a laser beam of light darted over the Chrysler’s hood. I flashed our lights in a prearranged signal, and watched him crack open the door and lean out. The lights behind him struck highlights off his bald head as he checked left and right before fully opening the door. We joined him inside.

  Harvey always looked immaculate. His dark skin glistened; his features were as perfect as those of a movie star. Even with his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows and his tie loosened, he still managed to look classy: as if the casual look was one ascribed to him by a team of professional costumers. Next to him I always felt shabby by comparison. He was statuesque, photogenic, and could have been a Hollywood star if he’d followed that dream, but instead he’d enlisted to protect his country. He met Rink as an Army Ranger, before Rink was drafted into Arrowsake. These days he split his workload between IT consultancy, private investigations and piloting helicopter trips for tourists – occasionally he teamed up with us when we required his particular skill sets. He was as much a part of the team as Velasquez and McTeer.

  Trey had finished in the bathroom. She stood towelling her hair dry, watching us expectantly as we circled in the room, looking for a place to come to rest. She’d dressed again in the clothing I’d hastily purchased early that morning; she looked and smelled fresh, though. If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d have pegged Harvey and Trey as a good-looking couple. Having had no opportunity to shower, I probably stank of creek water and sweat, and looked rough. I decided not to check in the mirror. The many small wounds on my face itched and I trusted they had formed tiny scabs on my skin.

  There was a large bed, a small chair. Harvey had spread his equipment on a small counter that ran down one side of the room, also used to house the TV, telephone and an archaic coffee maker. More of his equipment was on the bed. It didn’t leave much room for four of us to sit. There was no pecking order to our current team – even if Rink’s surname was in the letterhead of the company – but I let Rink take the chair. I dropped on the end of the bed, then lay back in the narrow space clear of Harvey’s stuff. I exhaled in relief, but then forced myself to sit: had I closed my eyes for a second I’d have probably fallen into a deep sleep.

  Rink narrated how things had gone with Jeff Borden, and I briefly interjected to clarify or strengthen a few points, bringing the others up to speed. All the while Trey watched us, the towel forgotten in her hands. Every now and then she winced, usually when the subject of torture came up. The truth was, Borden’s mistreatment had primarily been mental – not
withstanding the fact he’d been abducted at gun point, trussed up in the trunk, then tied to a chair in a burnt-out shed. We didn’t beat him; there had been no need. The simple fact that Borden believed we would happily hurt him was enough for him to comply with our demands.

  ‘He swore he’d no knowledge of a terrorist plot,’ Rink finalised his story. ‘He admitted only to arranging the transportation of the weapons from a shipping container onto a truck bound for some restaurant. Borden’s a punk-assed coward, and I believe him. Viskhan wouldn’t make someone as easily manipulated as Borden part of his bigger plan. Plus, I saw the truck he was talking about.’

  The two of us had discussed the truck during our drive back. Borden didn’t know the truck’s destination. Rink recalled that the company name had been on the side of the refrigerated box, written both in Cantonese and English, but he hadn’t committed any detail to memory. Borden had elected information we hadn’t prompted from him: he told us that after Dan StJohn and Rink fought, Cahill had told him to get the truck out of the port, but that they would have the contents transferred to a different vehicle in short order.

  ‘It would have been handy knowing the details of that truck,’ Harvey said. ‘I might have been able to track it down before those weapons are offloaded.’

  ‘I might have slant eyes,’ Rink grunted in irony, ‘but I don’t read Chinese.’

  ‘Mikhail owns a Chinese restaurant,’ Trey offered.

  ‘Really?’ Harvey perked up, his fingers working unconsciously as if he was already at his keyboard.

  ‘Well, I say owns. The restaurant was off the books as far as I could tell, but Mikhail had an interest in it. He moved some of his newcomers through the restaurant before they were shipped out to other venues and lines of work.’ She didn’t go into the grimy details of what those lines of work entailed, but we all knew. ‘The restaurant was closed down months ago. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked.

  She gave an address in South Beach, not a million miles from where the planned 4th of July celebrations were due to take place.

  Rink and I shared a nod of agreement. Before doing anything further, though, I asked for Trey to sit with Harvey and collate a list of other premises that Mikhail Viskhan had an interest in. It was hardly likely that he’d be found at their Sunny Isles house from where Rink had earlier followed him. Specifically I asked that she think of places that weren’t easily identifiable as boltholes to which he could scurry while avoiding the police.

  I stood from the creaking bed, inserting the Glock taken from Dan StJohn into my waistband. Rink was armed with his KA-BAR and the second blade he’d acquired. We weren’t exactly equipped for taking on a bunch of armed mercenaries, or who knew how many would-be terrorists, but we didn’t care. We’d done our bit to satisfy Walter’s idea of lawful process; now we wanted to do our bit to satisfy ours.

  29

  I hadn’t eaten since sharing a meagre taco and muffin breakfast with Trey on Normandy Isle. I was ravenous, despite the effects of adrenaline in my system that dampened down my digestive system as it prepared my body for fight or flight. I could have wolfed down any number of the enticing dishes displayed in glossy photographs arranged on the restaurant walls, but that wasn’t about to happen. Trey had been correct when stating the restaurant had been closed for a number of months: there wasn’t even the slightest hint of aromas from the kitchens to suggest any of those mouthwatering dishes had been served in ages. Yet it was also apparent that the restaurant had been used more recently, except for other reasons.

  Instead of garlic, five spice or soya sauce, I detected a smell I was infinitely familiar with: gun oil. The scent was prevalent in the atmosphere; a number of firearms had been unpacked, oiled and assembled within the dining room. There was nothing as incriminating as crates or packaging left lying around, so I had to assume that the weapons had been repacked and moved elsewhere. Having first been brought from the port to the restaurant, the weapons had been transferred to another vehicle – as Jeff Borden had claimed they would be – and taken to another storage location. Or had they? There were rooms in the restaurant we hadn’t searched yet. Rink was stealing through the kitchens conducting his own search.

  I turned towards the front of the dining room. Large windows faced the road outside, but sheets of brown paper covered them so that pedestrians couldn’t get a glimpse inside as they passed. Streetlights cast their dim figures on the almost opaque paper so that they took on insubstantial shadow forms. All kept moving; nobody was out there attempting to find a chink in the coverings that they could spy through. The front doors were similarly obscured, but this time with drop cloths. We hadn’t entered by the front door but by a window around back that Rink had prised open with his knife. I doubted that we’d tripped a silent burglar alarm, but was alert to anyone turning up with a set of keys. Actually, I welcomed the prospect of someone turning up, because our brief recce of the premises hadn’t turned up any clues as to where we’d find Viskhan or his stash of guns, and they could help.

  I moved deeper into the building, skirting around a service counter that adjoined the kitchen area. Rink had already moved on. I could hear his faint progress as he moved through an adjacent corridor. I went in the other direction, found a flight of stairs behind a closed door. They led down to a basement. It wasn’t a large space. We were barely above sea level, so basements weren’t a regular feature in that part of town. I found a dim room that was little more than a crawl space, almost filled to capacity with drooping power cables, copper pipes and machinery. I returned to the first floor. Another flight of stairs led up: there were rooms above the restaurant used – I guessed – as accommodation for the manager and his family when they were still in residence. For all I knew the guns could be up there, but before I got a chance to investigate I heard Rink call my name. I went to join him.

  ‘The hell is this?’ he asked as soon as I entered a room to the rear of the kitchens.

  It was a storage area. A number of refrigerators and chest freezers took up spaces along one wall; opposite them were large metal racks. Some of the shelves still held stained cardboard boxes and random pieces of kitchen equipment. But Rink wasn’t referring to them. He indicated a huge cooler that dominated the back end. It was almost like a room within the room, a large pale cuboid dominated at the front by two vacuum-sealed brushed steel doors. Neither was Rink’s question rhetorical. He stood before one door that he’d tugged open, and meant what was inside. I moved alongside him before I could tell what had disturbed him.

  On first perusal I could be forgiven for thinking the metal bars were parts of a secure cage system designed to hold fresh meat and produce; even the padlocks weren’t too sinister in that context. But the bars weren’t placed to keep thieves out, but to hold captives within each telephone box-sized cell. There were six individual cells, three to either side with a narrow space between down which a jailer could walk. In each cell there were two buckets, and God help the prisoner who mixed up their drinking water with their waste in the dark.

  We looked at each other.

  Trey had warned us that Viskhan moved trafficked slaves through the restaurant, but neither of us had suspected they’d be caged like feral beasts before they were moved on. I’d been thinking along the lines of them being forced into labour, washing pots and peeling potatoes, not this.

  Rink opened the next door.

  That compartment of the walk-in cooler was a single cell. There was a stained futon on the floor, some rumpled sheets. The ubiquitous buckets. But there was another addition that instantly soured my gut and put aside all thoughts of food. A large steel ring was bolted to the ceiling, and from it hung straps, on the end of which were buckled wrist restraints. On the slip-proof floor lay more restraints, and judging from their position it would force a standing captive to straddle while their arms were held aloft.

  Rink juggled his KA-BAR to a firmer grip. I pictured his thoughts. If they were similar to mine they i
nvolved gelding the bastards who’d used this room while raping their captives.

  We again exchanged a lingering look.

  ‘Even if he didn’t have Mack murdered I’d still cut off Viskhan’s balls for this,’ Rink said.

  ‘I’m with you,’ I whispered.

  Ghoulish fascination made me lean inside for a better view. Dried blood spatters dotted the floor and the rear wall. There was another smear of blood on the wall above the futon, and it was the handprint of a small woman or child. Repulsed, I’d seen enough.

  We backed away from the cooler. The stink wafting from inside was unlike any normal refrigerator I’d ever smelled before. Had there been people confined in the cooler while unsuspecting diners gorged on noodles in the dining room only a few yards away? Once those doors were sealed tight the cells beyond would be almost soundproofed. But I guessed not. The makeshift cells must have been used outside of trading hours.

  Backtracking through the kitchen, we whispered about having Harvey drop an anonymous email to the cops about what we’d found in the storage room: the more evidence against Viskhan we could send their way the better for us when it came to explaining our actions. Cops frowned upon vigilantism, but who could blame us for taking up the sword against a monster like Viskhan?

  I wanted to make a closer inspection of the dining area as that appeared to be where there’d been the most recent activity, and also the rooms upstairs, but again the opportunity didn’t arise. From somewhere to our right a door squeaked open and we both ducked for concealment behind the kitchen counters. I craned for a view through the service area adjoining the two rooms.

  Two figures entered the dining area through a side entrance on the far side of the building.

  Worst-case scenario: the cops had arrived to investigate a break-in. That wasn’t it. The best case: Viskhan and Cahill had returned to the scene of their crime. But that wasn’t it either.