“You okay? Sometimes my guests get seasick.”
“I have spent time on the ocean. I’m good.”
“Excellent, we don’t want you puking all over my nice clean deck. Boris is not fond of cleaning up after our clients.” He nudged the throttles; the cruise ship was now closer by half. “I’m going to pass him on our port side.” The captain nodded left. “As we get closer I’m sure they will hail us. Too bad my radio doesn’t work in this weather.” He reached for a package of cigarettes on the console, shook another one out, and lit it. “You want one?” He offered her the pack.
“No, I don’t smoke.”
“A man—or a woman”—he nodded to her—“needs their vices. I think that smoking is one of the lesser of the evils. Even Boris nags me to quit, but what am I to do?”
The following radar blip was now fewer than two miles to their stern and closing fast, the cruise ship three miles ahead.
“If they are who I think they are, the boat is already at top speed.” He tapped the glass. “Damn, too fast. He’s still gaining on us.”
“Can they catch us?”
“Maybe.”
“He can’t.”
“He won’t.”
Through the rain, the cruise ship appeared like a great white city lit up for the holidays. Lights extended down the length of the upper decks and superstructure and then disappeared into the overhanging gloom two hundred feet above them.
“Big bastard,” Pavelić said.
The radio crackled again. “This is the Diamond Princess. To the boat approaching us on our port bow, please turn away. You are on a collision course.”
Pavelić left the microphone in its receiver and turned to Marika with a smile.
“How close?” Marika asked.
“Maybe a hundred feet. Hold on—it will be rough.”
Their shadow was now three-quarters of a mile behind them but still gaining. The Diamond Princess rose ahead of them with its great bow lit with floodlights. It was like an iceberg closing on them at almost fifty miles an hour.
“Can’t this boat go faster?”
“Maybe.”
In a matter of seconds, the great, blinding-white hull of the ship filled the windshield as they passed over the bow wave and raced the length of the liner. In a flash, they passed the entire length of the thousand-foot-long ship. When they cleared the stern, the launch lurched hard left and right as Pavelić took the wake head-on. Then it was dark and they were lost in the rain. The massive stern of the receding ship was rapidly consumed by the storm.
“Now we can go,” Pavelić said and pushed the dual throttles to the top of the control. The boat jumped like it had been kicked in the ass.
“Why not earlier?”
“And make them think we’re smugglers? We have a few minutes before he understands my trick. We are now lost in the shadow of the big boat. He will be confused, and when they pass he will look for us, but we will not be where he thinks. My hope is that he will give up the thought of chasing us, and with this weather, he can’t ask for helicopters. Maybe my ruse will work. We will see.”
Five minutes later. “Shit.”
“What?”
“He’s still coming and is faster than us. There is nothing in the Croatian navy, sad as it is, that can catch us. Yet these guys are gaining on us.” Pavelić turned to her. “Someone chasing you?”
“Possibly.”
“What do you mean possibly? They are, or they aren’t. It looks like they are.” Pavelić pushed the throttles, trying to squeeze another knot out of the Irena. Boris returned to the bridge with more coffee.
Steadily, the return radar blip on the screen inched closer. Every fifteen minutes it closed by another two hundred yards. At this rate, the chase boat would catch them in an hour.
“Boris, get my pistols and the rifles. I don’t want to be surprised.”
Boris disappeared down into the boat and returned minutes later. Boris set two AK-47s and three magazines on the large plotting table behind the console and handed his father a gun belt with two pistols secured in their respective holsters.
She noticed Boris’s belt and holster. “I see you have run into trouble before,” she said.
“One must always be prepared—I was told this is the Boy Scouts’ motto.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Marika answered.
“If there’s trouble, I want you to stay out of the way.”
Marika reached for one of the AK-47s, expertly removed the magazine, placed it on the table, and then pulled the ejection slide on the weapon. She deftly caught the ejected bullet. She then reloaded the bullet into the magazine, reinserted the magazine, clicked off the safety, and charged the weapon.
“And pistols?”
“More experience than I may have wanted during the last couple of decades.”
“Then at least stay behind me. Boris, in the locker in my cabin there is a steel box under the trap door. Please bring it.”
“Steel boxes, trap doors? What other surprises do you have?”
“Some I’d hoped not to have to use.”
Boris returned and set the box between the rifles.
“Ten minutes, then we will see what we have. This rain gives us some cover, but the radar doesn’t let us hide. Boris, lights out.”
In seconds, it was as if the Adriatic Sea had swallowed them. Pavelić turned all the instruments off or put their screens on the lowest display settings. Only a few red dots the size of fingertips glowed in the darkness. Outside of that, they were invisible from the outside.
“Son, take the helm and put your headset on. I’m on channel three.” The captain eyed her. “Stay here in the bridge. I don’t want a dead woman’s money.”
“But you’d keep it anyway.”
“Yes. But I wouldn’t be happy about it. I’ve never lost a client.”
“Maybe they are coast guard?”
“They would have hailed us. No, these are friends of yours. I assume you don’t wish to go with them?”
“Not willingly.”
“Good.”
“I’m going with you; I have a stake in this.”
He looked at Marika. “It is your ass, after all.” He took a quick look at the screen. “Two hundred meters. Grab one of those rifles and put on this headset.”
She secured the band of the headset over her damp head and inserted the earpiece. Then she picked up one of the rifles.
“Son, when I tell you, throttle down and put us in reverse as fast as she can handle it. Watch for the backwash. With any luck, they won’t expect this and will roar by us. We will see.”
Pavelić took the steel box with them up on deck. Marika and Pavelić, with the steel box between them, waited in the dark behind the gunnel. The rain had eased but not by much. Again she was wet. The deep hum of the Irena’s twin engines and exhaust masked all other sounds, especially that of the onrushing vessel. Marika didn’t know what to expect.
“Can you hear that?” Pavelić said. “Fifty meters off the starboard quarter. They are not coming straight on.”
Marika heard nothing outside of their boat. She looked where she thought Pavelić said he heard them. It was then that something massive materialized and replaced the rain: the sharp, high bow of a black speedboat veered toward them, its bridge fully illuminated.
“Now, son, now!” Pavelić yelled into his headset. “Hold on tight.”
The Irena slammed into the next wave and then instantly slowed. The black speedboat roared by, and multiple pistols fired on Marika and Pavelić. Bullets broke out the windows, and she heard wood splinter.
“My poor Irena!” Marika heard Pavelić yell at the same time he opened up with his AK-47. Unlike their boat, the speedboat was lit up like a Christmas party. Three targets stood at the stern, continuing to fire. One fell as Pavelić found the range and allowed for the motion of his boat. Marika aimed for the center and the engine and sprayed bullets into the hull just above the waterline.
The boats veer
ed apart; she could just make out the other boat in the rain.
“Boris, you okay?”
“Yes, the windows were shot out, but I’m good. Radar says they are returning.”
“Try to get us out of here, see if we can gain some separation and distance.”
The engines roared, and Boris turned the launch to port in a large curving arc. The shooters had turned the opposite direction and lost valuable time and distance. Marika could just barely hear the other boat over the sound of their engines.
“They are catching up, Father. To the starboard stern quarter.”
Pavelić pointed, and Marika could just barely make out the direction from his arm. Again the boat, still lit up, approached fast and hard.
“We’re losing speed?” Pavelić said.
“Losing oil pressure in the port engine; we may have been hit,” Boris answered.
“Dammit. Son, kill the port engine. We’ll make do with one. As the boat pulls up, I will tell you when to pull hard to starboard. Let’s shake them up a bit.” He turned to Marika. “What’s your real name, Ms. Unimportant? When I’m yelling, it’s easier to use a real name.”
“Marika.”
“Pretty. I knew a girl named Marika when I was a boy. Died in the war.”
The speedboat’s bow pulled closer when Boris killed the damaged engine.
“All the shooters must be in the stern,” Pavelić said. “Open that box, will you?”
She clicked open the metal hasp . . . Holy hell. “Grenades?”
“Gifts from our troubled past here in Croatia. They are everywhere for a few kunas. Hand me two.”
The speedboat rapidly gained on them. It tried to slow down to match their speed, but it was too late, and within seconds the rear deck area again was exposed. More gunfire erupted from the speedboat. More bullets struck the Irena.
The captain held both grenades out to Marika. “The rings, pull them.”
If Pavelić could have seen her eyes in the almost total darkness, he would have been surprised by how large they were. Marika reached out and put both her hands on his. She felt the tops of the Russian-made grenades, and her fingers easily hooked into the rings.
“Now!” he yelled.
She pulled the rings free and fell to the deck as the boat pitched from the impact of the speedboat’s wake. Rolling over, she watched him throw the two grenades, one after the other, toward the passing boat. One hit the railing, bounced off into the sea, and exploded twenty feet behind the boat. The second landed in the middle of the stern deck, unseen by the shooters. Their gunfire continued. In the blackness, she felt Pavelić flatten himself next to her on the Irena’s deck as the second grenade ripped apart everything in the stern, and the lights in the speedboat’s cabin went out. The speedboat immediately stopped, the explosion having obviously destroyed some part of its propulsion system. As the Irena turned west, back on its original course toward Italy, the shattered black speedboat drifted powerless in the Adriatic Sea.
CHAPTER 3
Marco Polo Airport, Venice, Present Day
Alexandra Polonia, dressed in black boots, black jeans, and a short black leather jacket, stood braced against the cold early-morning wind that blew off the lagoon, a leather backpack hung on her left shoulder. Her single black ballistic-fabric carry-on bag sat at her feet. The narrow walkway of the quay was filled with groggy tourists newly arrived on early local and international flights. All, like her, waited for either the next vaporetto or available water taxi. Most were silent.
For at least thirty of her forty-two years, Alex Polonia had wanted to see Venice, Italy. She had dreamed of its exotic canals, romantic gondolas, and pigeon-filled Piazza San Marco. Hers would be a stylish trip, not one of those youth-hostel adventures that required sleeping in bunk beds with a dozen other people snoring well into the night. No, not her dream trip. She would have four bags: one for her cosmetics, one for her shoes, and two for her clothes so she would be dressed properly. It would be the romantic adventure of a lifetime—Venice, Florence, and Rome, and of course all with her husband, the once great love of her life.
Right now and for the next twelve years, however, Detective Ralph Cierzinski—her piece-of-shit ex-husband—was lounging in the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown for criminal conspiracy and operating a meth lab in a garage on Cleveland’s south side. Cierzinski, a veteran Cleveland police detective, received only twelve years because he turned on the other two cops involved in his operations. Cierzinski, to his credit, testified that his wife, Alexandra, a detective with fifteen years on the same Cleveland police force, knew nothing about his illegal business interests. Testimony that, except for Alexandra’s partner, her captain, and commander, no one believed. In article after article, Cleveland’s rag of a newspaper painted her with the same brush as her husband. She was told to sue the newspaper; she didn’t. At least the man had the balls to sign the divorce decree the day he climbed into the bus for the trip to Youngstown.
Standing on the water taxi quay at the Venice airport, her one black bag at her feet, Alex Cierzinski—now with her maiden name Polonia—was completely and entirely exhausted. The past year had been one insane day after another. Initially, before Ralph’s arrest, she had been placed on a joint task force with the DEA to find the source of the meth. When they discovered, during one of the sting operations at a south-side high school, that Ralph, using some of the students, was the dealer, she was immediately suspected of being involved. After her house was raided by her own people, her only way out and to save her own butt was to help the prosecution. She became part of an elaborate sting to collect evidence, nail her husband, and get the drugs off the street. Every day was an entanglement of deceit and lies.
Within weeks of Ralph Cierzinski and some of his crew having been arrested, one of the codefendants, another cop, retired by putting a bullet in his brain, believing that his family would get his pension. They got jack shit. The other defendant, a policeman with Parks and Recreation, swore that he would have every member of Cierzinski’s family killed within a month, but the criminal justice system is often unjustly fair. Someone, while the defendant was in county lockup awaiting trial, shoved a broom handle up his ass. He died two weeks later from the ensuing infection. As far as Alex Cierzinski knew, the dead cop never gave the kill order. Besides, the moron was as broke as the Cleveland budget. It was a contract no one would take.
During Ralph’s trial, she began the process of taking back her maiden name, Polonia. She’d never particularly liked the name Cierzinski. Her father was pleased. He’d told the story many times: “When my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island on a steamer from Gdansk, Poland, the immigration official was Italian and couldn’t understand what your noble, yet sadly illiterate, great-grandfather said his name was. Our family is from a small village south of Krakow—Polanka is its name. The official said the name sounded like Polonia, the Italian word for Poland. It stuck. Since then, we have always had a connection with Italy.”
Alexandra Luisa Polonia . . . She’d loved her given name and now felt whole again, even though her life had been torn to shreds by the man she’d married. At least—one of many “at leasts”—he’d kept the accounts, dollars, and profits separate and hidden from their personal accounts. She paid a forensic accountant twenty grand to make sure that all their—her—remaining assets weren’t seized by the state. It took more money to prove to the Feds that her taxes were correct and that they didn’t need a piece of her soul for unpaid taxes on his illicit gains. The one piece of information that the state and the Feds never dragged out of Ralph Cierzinski was where he had hidden his money. When asked, he smiled. When threatened, he smiled. When told that they would ruin his wife, he smiled. The number thrown about in court was twenty million dollars, twenty million that the government wanted. When Cierzinski heard the number, he smiled. The government was no different than he was. They were just thieves with lawyers. The only time he didn’t smile was when he was asked who his backers or partners wer
e and adamantly answered, “I have no partners.”
The damp wind from the lagoon blew her shoulder-length blonde hair away from her face. She held the strands in place with her fingers and gazed across the water to a surreal landscape of towers and red-tile roofs that floated an inch above the lagoon. Around her, in the crowded harbor at Marco Polo Airport, hundreds of motor launches and water taxis jockeyed for positions against the pier. One massive municipal vaporetto, “Actv” stenciled on its side, slowly pushed its way through the chaos, almost upsetting the smaller boats that surrounded it.
“American?” a voice from one of the launches asked.
She looked at the young man and nodded.
“Excellent. Signora, you need a ride, maybe?”
Alex looked down at the gleaming mahogany motor launch; its bright work and chrome furnishings were immaculate. A length of hemp rope was wrapped about one of the colorful mooring sticks driven into the mud of the harbor. A young man in a striped shirt stood at the boat’s gunnel, fending off the stick, the wharf, and the other boats. “You need a ride? What hotel, I take you. Best price. These others”—he waved at the boats—“are pirates. I give the pretty signora a good price.”
The twelve hours from Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport to Philadelphia to Venice had drained every thought and dream from her head. She stared at the man.
“Signora, you waiting for someone. No problem, I wait. Signora?”
Alex slowly focused on the boat and the question, and affirmatively nodded her head, again tucking a windblown length of hair behind her ear. She picked up the bag and handed it to the driver, then climbed into the rocking launch.
“Sit anywhere you like. My boat and me, Giuseppe Anatole, are at your command. Please, signora, sit.”
Almost falling as the boat pitched in the turbulent water, she dropped her bottom on the brightly colored striped, upholstered bench on the port side.
“Someone else coming?”
“No, just me.”
“Where are you staying, signora?” Giuseppe asked as another boat pulled in between theirs and the pier. Horns blared from all sides.
Venice Black (Alex Polonia Thriller Book 1) Page 2
