by Chris Allen
Braunschweiger had quickly become the point man on everything to do with the Petrovic brothers. Of course, now everyone's attention had shifted dramatically from Dobrashin Petrovic, who was in custody, to Vukasin Petrovic, aka the Wolf, still at large.
Braunschweiger had been working through the night, trawling through hundreds of pages of Interpol reports from the past two decades relating to the Serbian mafia and organized crime figures, but still nothing surfaced on Vukasin Petrovic or the Wolf. His task now was to search the endless gigabytes of images and CCTV files Intrepid had managed to piece together since the operation commenced.
Overnight, Mila Haddad had confirmed a number of possible hits on passengers traveling out of Tunis in the past forty-eight hours with names meaning, or associated with, wolf. Of particular interest was a passenger by the name of Adolfo Mendosa, a Spanish citizen traveling on an EU passport. According to Mila, the name Adolfo meant noble wolf, which, given that the final destination on his travel itinerary was Seattle, suddenly made Mendosa a person of interest. Mila was in the process of chainsawing through red tape to access CCTV footage from Tunis International Airport in the hope that airport surveillance would assist in identifying him. The moment she had it, she would patch it through to Braunschweiger.
The details of Adolfo Mendosa's itinerary put him on a flight out of Tunis late on Friday night, via Marseille and Paris. He was scheduled to arrive in Seattle early Saturday afternoon - yesterday. What added to the serious interest in him, apart from the fact that he happened to be traveling to Seattle, was that the age on his passport was reasonably consistent with the actual age of Vukasin Petrovic, give or take a few years, and that the departure time from Tunis would have allowed sufficient time for him to leave the hospital in Mandia, travel the distance to Tunis International Airport and still make the flight.
The efforts of the XO and the New Scotland Yard team in London to examine the passenger manifests of every flight leaving Tunis since Friday notwithstanding, identification of the name Adolfo Mendosa and the discovery that Adolfo meant noble wolf did not occur until well after the flight had landed in Seattle.
The Key looked at his watch: almost 10am; about lam in Seattle.
So far, there'd been no reports of anything untoward occurring at the Seattle residence of Judge Clancy - whose daughter, Charlotte-Rose Fleming, was also staying there. And once the red flag regarding Mendosa had been raised, Intrepid had immediately contacted the US marshals who were protecting the judge and Ms Fleming, alerting them to the arrival of Adolfo Mendosa in Seattle and, importantly, the reasons for Intrepid's interest in him. In turn, the marshals advised Intrepid that Judge Clancy was visiting a sick relative in Ellensburg, two hours' drive away, while Ms Fleming had remained at the main residence in Sunset Hill. US marshals were on station at both locations.
Despite all the cross-pollination of information, including the fact that over eleven hours had transpired since Mendosa's flight had touched down at Sea-Tac International Airport, none of the local law enforcement agencies in Seattle had managed to locate him for questioning.
Braunschweiger left the control room to make more coffee. When he returned, he dropped heavily back into the seat in the center of the console surrounded by digital screens, rubbed his eyes, took a long drink of the strong brew and began.
He started by uploading images of all the key players associated with the hunt for Drago Obrenovic and placed them on the screen directly in front of him. He grouped them in a kind of family tree structure, Drago at its pinnacle. Bit by bit he added additional images of each person under their respective names until he had run the image sources dry. The whole process took the best part of three hours. He sat back and studied them all.
There were dozens of Drago, although none of them recent. And there were numerous images of Ivan Simovic, Dobrashin Petrovic and Lorenc Gjoka, all of whom were in custody. There were even police mug shots of those now confirmed as Zmajevi foot soldiers, like Muscles and the other baldies, all of whom had criminal histories. Although the most recent of those, excluding Muscles, were post mortem.
The only blank spaces sat beneath the file names Vukasin Petrovic aka the Wolf, Adolfo Mendosa and Raoul Demaci.
Braunschweiger moved all the other image files across to the high screens on his left and kept Pet-rovic, Mendosa and Demaci open in front of him. Something occurred to him and he turned his attention to the emails he'd received from Mila Haddad. Increasingly he found himself drawn to this beguiling Ms Haddad he kept hearing about. He was fascinated by her wolf-name theory, which she'd convinced the general to see as more than just a theory, enabling her to put it into operation. He re-read some of her emails to him and smiled.
Concentrate, Braunschweiger. Concentrate.
Going through them again, he found the attached files he was after and brought them up on the center monitor. In front of him were two passport photos: one was Adolfo Mendosa and the other Raoul Demaci. He peered intensely at the screen until his brow furrowed. Then he enlarged both images and brought them up on separate screens above the center monitor. Another thought occurred to him and he returned to his emails, scrolled to the group listed "Morgan, A," and found what he was looking for.
Alex Morgan had emailed him an image recently provided by Charlotte-Rose Fleming. According to Morgan's email, Charly said that Demaci always avoided having his photograph taken, but she'd managed to find one taken at a party in Rome in which Demaci was clearly captured in the background. She'd been happy to provide it to Morgan to assist in identifying him. Morgan's final comment on the email said: "Good-looking bloke. Bastard. Maybe it's better if he stays missing! Joking, mate. Joking."
Braunschweiger laughed to himself, enlarged the image and flicked it up onto the screen alongside Demaci's passport photo. He picked up his coffee, rolled in his chair to the back of the small room, placed his feet up on the console and stared at the faces of Adolfo Mendosa and Raoul Demaci looking lifelessly back at him.
Hermann Braunschweiger remained fixated on the images for five full minutes until he had finished his coffee. By then, the intensity of his examination began to play havoc with his eyesight and his objectivity. There were definite similarities, he thought, but there were also enough differences to make a definitive match impossible. Still, he kept them up high and turned to phase two of his search: CCTV footage.
"Let's see,' said Braunschweiger, as he began tapping out commands on the keyboard, "if we can't smoke you out, Wolf man."
Chapter 73
SUNSET HILL, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA
The Wolf parked the hire car in 34th Avenue, got out noiselessly and went the rest of the way on foot. It was lam. The place was pitch black and stone-cold quiet.
He couldn't afford to come this far and blunder in without knowing the lie of the land. He'd already paid for a local crew to spend a week driving by the house and reporting back, so he knew there were cops on point at the Clancy house. He just needed to see the layout of the place and the street approaches for himself.
He'd decided that, once he'd dealt with the cops as covertly as possible - and he wasn't quite sure how he'd do that yet - he'd reduce the chances of an incident and lots of screaming at the house by playing it natural, walking straight up to the front door and presenting himself as Raoul Demaci, returned safely from captivity. She'd buy it; he knew that already. Once inside, he would get them both together, mother and daughter, kill them quickly and leave. It was important that both should die. Killing the judge was crucial to successfully achieving the original objective: to force the ICTY and Interpol to back off. Killing the daughter would make the Wolf a legend, not only of the underworld, and the only rightful successor to the role of sefa of the Zmajevi.
That left only Drago to contend with.
Drago. He spat on the ground as he moved along 34th Avenue, comfortable in the darkness. The time had come to kill the old fuck and be done with it once and for all, rather than fucking about with keeping the fac
tions onside. That ship had sailed. Once Drago was dead he would deal with the fallout. The son had to die, too. That was a given. Deflecting the blame would be a challenge, but not impossible. Maybe he could make it look like a murder—suicide between the two. A power struggle between father and son. That would keep the factions at bay.
He turned left, down Northwest 67th Street. He knew where he was headed. He'd done his map reconnaissance. Part way down 67th was a cul-de-sac backing onto the street that the Clancy house was situated on.
At the right spot, the Wolf found the laneway he needed that branched off from the cul-de-sac. He knew that once he'd made it past that last house and got to the end of the laneway, he'd have a clear view to the Clancy house. Then he'd take his time, get as close as he could, scope it out for as long as possible and backtrack to the car.
With that, the Wolf checked his surrounds, listening intently for dogs or any human activity. There were neither.
He moved in for the final recon. With luck he'd be back in his hotel room by 4am and would manage a few hours' sleep.
Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
Chapter 74
INTERPOL HEADQUARTERS, LYON, FRANCE
By early evening, Braunschweiger had sifted through literally days of CCTV footage.
He'd forgotten how many times he'd reviewed the scenes captured from the apartment block in Albania, where the Zmajevi had taken and held Charly. He found himself constantly tracking between the vision of the guy who, at the time, they'd referred to only as the friend of Lazarevic - really Dobrashin Petrovic - and the stuff Dave Sutherland had obtained of the guy who had murdered Judge de Villepin. Despite the deliberately altered appearance, it was definitely the same man, thought the Key, although neither his brother, Dobrashin Petrovic, nor the big Serb, Ivan Simovic, had willingly identified him as Vukasin Pet-rovic. That said, there'd been enough in their reactions to questions about the friend in Albania and de Vil-lepin's killer in France, to create a sufficient level of certainty in the minds of the Intrepid agents that it was in fact, the same man: Vukasin Petrovic, the Wolf.
France. France? Braunschweiger was in France, so what the hell was bugging him about it?
Time for more coffee and some food, he thought. He dialed up to the cafeteria and arranged for a meal to be brought down. Then he went out to the coffee room and fixed another strong pot. Walking back into the mini-operations room that had been his home away from home for the past twenty-four hours, Braunschweiger couldn't get his mind off coffee or food. Was there something there?
Sitting back down at the console, his eyes caught a name listed within his email inbox: Sutherland, D.
That was it. Dave Sutherland had managed to acquire from the local authorities in Bordeaux some additional CCTV footage that clearly showed Judge de Villepin out and about. The Key immediately began tapping on the keyboard and brought it up on the screen.
The digital location stamp on the top right corner of the screen, next to the date-time group, said Rue Sainte-Catherine #13, Bordeaux. The scene was a long shot taken along a section of Rue Sainte-Catherine from a camera that must have been situated on a pole 12 feet up, around the height of the awnings along the shop fronts. Perfect. It showed a strip of small restaurants, cafes and shops and, in the middle of the shot, having coffee and reading a newspaper at an outdoor cafe, was Judge de Villepin.
Braunschweiger spent the next forty-five minutes watching the footage in real time, enduring the infuriating stop-start of the time-lapsed digital images. Occasionally he would stop and scroll back to check something that had caught his attention before resuming again. But it was toward the end of the footage that he stopped suddenly, rewound and then paused. He leant forward to the screen to get a closer look before transferring the detailed snapshot up onto a much larger monitor to his right.
He'd paused the footage on a man, tall, dark, good looking and well dressed, who had been speaking into a cell phone and then turned away from a shop front. In the action of turning and walking away, his face had been captured perfectly for a split second by the CCTV camera. Gold!
With an expression somewhere between disbelief and elation, Braunschweiger's gaze switched back and forth between the CCTV image from Bordeaux on one screen and the passport photo and the picture Charly had provided of Raoul Demaci on the other.
"Scheisse!" he said. "No fucking way?'
There was no doubt in his mind - they were a definite match.
Chapter 75
SUNSET HILL, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA
Early on Saturday afternoon the weather in Seattle was sunny, albeit cool. A strong wind was blowing across Puget Sound and the yachts down at the Shilshole Bay Marina bobbed up and down on the swell, their hundreds of masts tipping erratically left and right like a bunch of unsynchronized, out-of-control metronomes.
The Wolf parked his car on 34th Avenue. He was now familiar with the street and the approaches to the Clancy house because he'd memorized the map and walked the ground during the night. As planned, he'd made it back to the hotel by 4am. He slept deeply and untroubled until mid-morning, ate breakfast in his room, checked emails, slept some more, then showered, dressed and headed out. He dressed casually but well, with expensive jeans, sweater and a tailored sports coat. His shoes were made for trekking, with reinforced toes and good traction. Not in the same league as his clothes but expensive for what they were. Necessary, too. You never knew when you'd need to stomp on a head, kick the shit out of someone or just shoot and run.
With hands thrust inside the pockets of his coat, walking in the general direction of the house with affected nonchalance, he felt through the coat's lining for the pistol grip of the Accu-Tek HC-380 semi-automatic shoved into the belt of his jeans. It had been left for him at hotel reception by a local Serbian underworld contact. He'd decided against the pancake holster that came with it because he didn't want to have to explain it in the first few seconds of reuniting with the woman. Without the holster, he could dump the gun anywhere and retrieve it when he was ready.
As he approached the house, he saw a cop sitting in a smart-looking black SUV in the driveway facing out into the street. That's number one, he noted. Number two would be stationed at the rear of the house.
He saw the SUV was parked under a balcony to the right of an enclosed porch and so wasn't visible from within the house. The cop was checking him out from behind the wheel.
The Wolf maintained his casual indifference and kept walking, all the while whistling as he walked.
Both the US marshals on station at the Clancy house that day could hear the strange whistling from the easygoing guy strolling down the street, but neither were familiar with the tune. If they had been, it might have saved their lives.
As the Wolf prepared to enter the rear of the Clancy property through a cluster of trees that had overgrown the back fence, he reluctantly brought to a close his personal rendition of the inspirational and movingly patriotic "Boz.e pravde". It was the Serbian national anthem, "God of Justice".
Chapter 76
SEA-TAC AIRPORT, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA
From the moment he set foot inside the US frontier at Sea-Tac Airport, Alex Morgan had a taste of the celebrity treatment.
Met in the customs arrivals hall by a US marshal, he was waved straight past the customs formalities. His luggage, along with his gun, was retrieved from stowage and delivered to him on a trolley by a US Customs officer. At the same time, an officious and very respectful young guy suddenly appeared, introduced himself as airport customer service, and took control of Morgan's trolley.
Morgan signed for his gun, leaving it within the sealed, reinforced travel case, and handed the paperwork back to the Customs officer, who countersigned it. After shaking hands cordially, the marshal led him through the labyrinth of the airport's back corridors and office spaces, only accessible to those officially authorized to be airside. Eventually they arrived at a nondescript exit door at the end of a long corridor and walked out int
o the cool of late afternoon. Morgan was comfortable enough in his suit, but he was glad that he'd thought ahead and carried the trench coat with him rather than pack it into his luggage. Speaking of luggage, the kid with the trolley seemed to be struggling; he was nowhere to be seen, though Morgan soon heard a squeaky wheel approaching from behind.
The marshal handed Morgan a set of car keys and walked him over to an immaculate white Dodge Charger SRT8 waiting for him directly opposite the door. The trolley guy finally caught up with them, his jaw visibly dropping at the sight of the Charger. "Sweet wheels," he said. But with a stern look from the marshal, he shut his trap and began packing Morgan's luggage in the trunk.
"Now, who do I have to thank for this little beauty and the red carpet?" Morgan asked the marshal. They'd barely spoken a word throughout the entire rigmarole.
"The car is courtesy of the United States Marshals Service, major," answered the marshal genially. There was military bearing in the guy, Morgan noted; looked like he'd done some time. "As for the red carpet, I think someone big in London called someone big in Washington and, well, it's all way above my pay grade, sir." He smiled. "I just do as I'm told!'
"I get it," Morgan replied, slightly embarrassed. "I really appreciate your help, mate. Sorry if you got dragged away from duty just to come out and shepherd me around."
"Don't mention it," the marshal replied. "My partner and I are due out at the house in about an hour for shift change with the other team, Joe and Sam. I'll check in with you then."
"Sounds good!"
Morgan shook the marshal's hand warmly and jumped behind the wheel, instantly withdrawing his SIG Sauer P226 from the travel case and reinstating it to operational readiness.
