The Becić Connection

by Estelle Ryan

  “Or a Greek taverna?” Colin asked.

  “Yes.” Luka straightened and pointed to the right. “We’re close. The fort is... there it is.”

  I was taken aback by all the vehicles parked on the side of the dirt road. We slowly made our way past most of the large vehicles and parked closer to the narrow road lined with concrete walls. Colin parked next to an ambulance, his gaze alert, taking in everything.

  I had overheard Luka talking to another team about making sure the area was safe, but I’d incorrectly assumed it would be a small team. I counted another three SUVs, two large tactical vehicles with Croatian writing on the sides and one larger black truck with no markings on it at all.

  “A bomb disposal unit?” Colin looked at one of the tactical vehicles. He turned the engine off and pocketed the keys.

  “We need to cover all our bases.” Luka opened the door and got out.

  Colin and I joined him and walked to where Vinnie, Manny and Bruno were getting out of their SUV. The body language of all three men was similar to Luka’s: awareness of everything and everyone around them. I’d grown used to seeing it, yet I thought it must be exhausting to maintain such high vigilance all the time. Vinnie had once reminded me that I wasn’t much different. Just like my awareness of nonverbal cues had become an unconscious competence, their vigilance was second nature to them.

  Luka veered off and spoke to a tall man leaning against one of the vehicles with Croatian writing on its side. No sooner had we reached Vinnie and Manny than he joined us. “The area is clear. We have officers on the perimeter and the archaeologists are ten minutes out.”

  “Can we take a look around before they start digging?” Colin asked.

  Luka thought about this for a few seconds, then nodded. “Bruno will go with you.”

  “Sure, boss.” Bruno lifted his chin in acknowledgement.

  I hadn’t had any expectations, but the condition of the fort surprised me. None of the walls were unscathed. In a few places the walls had collapsed to reveal the inside of the structure. And as was usual with such places, graffiti decorated a few walls.

  We reached the entrance to the fort and I narrowed my eyes. Bruno rested both hands on the weapon slung around his shoulders while looking into the large courtyard. “I don’t know if we’ll find any buried treasures here.”

  “Never say never.” Colin smiled and looked at Bruno. “Do you know anything about the fort?”

  “Nope.” Bruno looked around, his eyebrows raised. “First time I’m here.”

  “Hmm.” Colin took out his smartphone and tapped on the screen. A few seconds later, he started scrolling. “Okay, so it says here the fort was built in 1904 by the Austro-Hungarian army. It was one of the strongholds of some external defence system that was supposed to protect Pula against enemy attacks from the sea.

  “Huh. They used traditional methods, using stone blocks, creating arches in brickwork and reinforced concrete. The moat was excavated from the rock underneath the fort. In 1918, the Italian army claimed it, then during the Second World War, it was used by the German Armed Forces, but in 1945 the Popular Yugoslavian Army of Liberation took control over it.” He paused and scrolled a bit more. “This is great.” He looked up. “The fort is now being used as an open-air theatre. Operas, plays, even youth theatre festivals. So where do you want to go first? The outside or inside?”

  “We’ll take the outside.” Vinnie pointed towards the overgrown path to our right.

  “You want to walk the moat, Vin?” Colin looked at the bushes and trees blocking the way.

  “I’m not dressed to go on a bloody safari.” Manny slumped and nodded towards the crumbling entrance into the fort. “Let’s go in.”

  The inside of the fort was as dilapidated as the outside. We entered a courtyard of sorts and I frowned. “Where are they hosting the concerts?” I couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying classical music, or any music for that matter, in this place. Crumbling concrete, weeds and a few beer cans covered the ground.

  “Hold on.” Bruno took out his phone and tapped the screen a few times. “Huh. No. There’s another structure a bit up the road that they fixed up for the concerts and things.”

  Manny jerked to a stop. “And we’re sure this treasure is here and not there?”

  “How far is it from here?” Colin asked.

  Bruno walked closer to Colin and tilted his phone for Colin to see the screen. “Too far.”

  Colin nodded. “The coordinates would be different, Millard. This is the place.”

  “Dudes!” Vinnie came through a door leading into the fort and pointed back at the stairs behind him. “You need to see the view. It rocks.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he went back up the stairs. Colin raised both eyebrows at me and smiled when I nodded. We followed Manny to the stairs, Bruno behind us. We took a quick look around the first floor. The rooms were in the same bad shape as the outside walls. One room no longer had an external wall. I stopped a metre away from the ledge and looked at the activity of the teams on the ground.

  Vinnie called impatiently again and we left the room. Another set of stairs led us to the concrete roof of the building.

  “Over here.” Vinnie had climbed another set of external stairs to what I assumed was a lookout point. “The view, dudes.”

  The concrete ruins were being taken back by nature. Grass, weeds and even trees were reclaiming their territory. I followed Colin, stepping over grass that at one place completely covered three stairs.

  Vinnie was right. The moment I stepped onto the high platform, the view left me frozen in awe for a few seconds.

  The mid-morning sun glinted off the dark blue water of the Adriatic Sea. The sky was a lighter blue, no less magnificent. On the horizon was a cruise ship, the white exterior in contrast to the sky and sea. The greenery leading to the coastline made the view even more spectacular. It calmed me.

  “What did I tell ya?” Vinnie swept his arms wide. “Awesome, right?”

  “This is quite the view.” Colin looked away from the sea and looked around the fort below us. “It’s a pity it’s falling apart.”

  Nikki would appreciate the view more than I did. Her artistic eye would see things I didn’t notice. But she wasn’t here. She had admitted how exhausted she was and Pink had immediately volunteered to go to the villa with her. Zork and Francine had gone with them, all of them insisting on Martin joining them.

  While Nikki was sleeping and Martin resting, Zork, Francine and Pink had promised to find more information about Rene Sobin—Goran’s brother and very possibly his murderer. It made sense for Zork to join forces with Francine and Pink. We needed as much data as possible if we were to reach informed conclusions. If we were to prevent Florian’s disastrous event.

  “The archaeologists are here.” Bruno pointed at the grassy area where we had parked. Two cars and one small truck were pulling in next to the parked vehicles.

  I took one more look at the view and followed everyone down the stairs. We left the fort just as a team of four walked closer. One man was pushing an apparatus that, at first glance, looked like an electric lawnmower. It had a device parallel to the ground, rolled on four wheels, with a display between two handles.

  Introductions were made, but the archaeologists quickly lost interest in us. Their body language shouted their eagerness to explore the area, hopefulness in their expressions as they debated where to start.

  We walked back to the SUVs and watched them bring in another apparatus like the first that Luka had confirmed was ground-penetrating radar. Bruno left to chat to the other law enforcement officers, Manny was talking on his phone and Luka was sitting in the SUV, also talking on his phone.

  Colin leaned against the SUV and I shuddered. A layer of fine white dust covered most of the vehicle. He smiled at me and held open his arms. “Want to lean against me?”

  “No.”

  He laughed softly and lowered his arms. “Okay then. Want to wait in the SUV?”

&
nbsp; “No.”

  “Okay then.” His smile was gentle and he looked back at an archaeologist slowly pushing the radar in straight lines.

  I didn’t want to waste time just standing here and waiting, yet I didn’t move away. Francine, Zork and Pink were more than competent to find everything we needed to know about Rene as well as more information on Goran and Slavko. I’d heard Luka ordering Zork to look for any online chatter about an imminent attack, so that was also covered. Much of the information we needed was outside of my skillset to acquire.

  So I waited.

  Fifty-three minutes later, an excited shout pulled me away from listening to Colin and Luka discussing the role of technology in black-market art crimes. Colin grabbed my hand and we rushed along with everyone else to the left of the fort. In the moat.

  Low, but dense bushes covered at least six metres of the moat from side to side. The archaeologists had tried clearing a path, but I didn’t consider their attempt a success. I looked down at my boots and decided that I could tolerate light damage to the black leather footwear.

  “Bloody hellfire. If I wanted to go on a safari, I would go to Africa.” Manny grumbled, but followed Colin when the latter made no mention of the expensive Italian shoes he was wearing.

  I managed to get to the other side of the bushes without incident and continued on. A few metres ahead, the moat turned to the right, the area level with a type of wild grass low on the ground. I walked past a large tree growing out of the moat wall and followed the curve of the moat. And stopped.

  Manny and Colin were standing next to each other, staring at the scene in front of them. More people joined us and I stepped closer to Colin.

  Three men were digging what might become a trench. Another was standing with a spade in his hand, looking for an opening to join them.

  “What did you find?” Colin asked the man with the spade.

  “We don’t know yet.” He stared at the ground.

  “We bloody well know that, lad.” Manny shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “Tell us what the radar picked up.”

  The man glanced longingly at the others digging, but sighed and turned to us when Luka stopped next to Manny and cleared his throat. The man leaned on his spade and nodded at the ground-penetrating radar machine to our right. “It looks like three large rectangular items. We can’t say until we have it out of the ground, but we think we are looking at wooden chests.”

  “A treasure chest.” Vinnie chuckled. “Am I the only one wanting to say, ‘arrr, matey’? You know, pirates?” He looked around. “No? Nobody? Only me? Well, arrr, dudes.”

  Manny glared at Vinnie, his lips pressed in a thin line. He turned to the archaeologist and asked a few more questions, none of which could be answered until they had unearthed these rectangular items. It was interesting to watch the care these archaeologists took in removing the soil. They knew the approximate depth of the items and worked faster to remove the top layers of soil. But then the work slowed down.

  Two of them got down into the trench they’d dug and with what looked like small garden spades removed handfuls of soil at a time. It took another hour before their body language changed. Their movements were more careful and excited at the same time. I took a step closer.

  The shortest of the two men straightened and looked at us. “It’s a wooden chest. We’ll have to do tests, but it is unlikely to be from any time before the nineteen thirties.” He looked back into the trench. “We’re going to clear the soil from the sides, then we’ll lift it out.”

  They’d cleared the soil only halfway when the other archaeologists convinced their leader to open the box. It was crowded around the site and I felt the increasing need to move away from all the bodies around me displaying such strong emotions.

  Yet I stayed at Colin’s side. His face was lit up with the same excitement as the archaeologists’. He was bouncing on his toes and colour warmed his cheeks. The shorter man took great care brushing off remaining dust from the lid of the container before he gently felt around the seam where the lid rested on the body. It was a simple wooden chest. To my untrained eye, it looked strong and heavy, without any kind of decoration.

  “Looks like we’ll just have to lift it with the side handles.” The man nodded at his colleague and they each took a handle on the sides of the chest. He gave one more nod and they lifted. It was clear in both their bodies that they were taking great care to control their strength.

  A slight creaking sound came from the chest and then the lid lifted with ease. Colin leaned forward and inhaled sharply when the content of the chest became visible.

  “Oh.” Colin pressed his palms against the sides of his head, his eyes wide in wonderment. “All that silver. Is that a perfume box?”

  I didn’t know to which of the many dull items Colin was referring, but both archaeologists nodded enthusiastically. Both of them were opening and closing their fists in excitement, but didn’t reach for any of the items.

  I wasn’t familiar with these kinds of artefacts, so I didn’t know what type of plates and containers I was looking at. These pieces were in complete contrast to the photos I’d studied of the fourteen pieces of the Seuso Hoard. Those had been polished and the photos had been taken in perfect lighting conditions.

  The plates in the wooden chest were dull from years of being buried underground. Three of the plates were plain. I counted five that had intricate designs like the ones from the fourteen. But it was the smaller containers that appealed to me most. They were different shapes to those from the fourteen, but looked as if they were also richly decorated.

  One of the archaeologists pushed in next to me and looked into the trench. She was a tall, willowy young woman, the expression on her face the same awe as everyone else. She smiled at me and grabbed my forearm. “This is fantastic!”

  I jerked my arm out of her grip and stumbled away from her. This was too much. Everyone was talking with increasing volume as the implications of their discovery became more real. Colin didn’t even notice my absence and Vinnie was teasing Manny about having tea in the silver cups.

  I took another step back and turned away. It would take a while before their excitement allowed them to continue excavating the first chest. There were another two chests that would elicit the same level of excitement. It was too intense for me. I walked back along the moat towards the entrance that was now without people.

  The further I moved away from everyone, the easier my breathing was. I nodded at the Croatian police officer who was standing by the narrow road between the vehicles and the fort, and walked back into the structure.

  Without thinking too much about it, I retraced our steps back to the roof. And took a deep breath as I stepped out of the staircase, onto the concrete roof. The soothing sounds of small waves breaking on the beach brought their own calming rhythm. The noon sun was reflecting off the sea, the clear brilliance of this time of day aiding in slowing down my heart rate.

  I walked around a fallen concrete column, my focus now only on getting to the top platform to enjoy the calming view of earlier. This was a place where I could clear my mind, mentally write Mozart compositions and sort through the mass of data in my head.

  I stepped around a bushy tree to reach the external stairs.

  Suddenly, an arm circled my torso from behind to pull me against a strong body, a hand slapping over my mouth. Instant panic brought blackness to my peripheral vision and I screamed against the hand on my mouth.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  I WAS BARELY HOLDING on to my consciousness. To this terrifying reality. The safety of a shutdown was beckoning me. Yet I resisted it with the last fragments of mental strength I had.

  “You’ve killed them!” A furious male voice grated in my ear.

  None of my usual coping mechanisms worked. I tried, but couldn’t recall a single Mozart composition. My breathing was shallow and erratic, and just as I tried to inhale deeply, the arm around my torso tightened and pulled me firmer against the male bo
dy and started moving backwards. Toward the other side of the viewing platform.

  “It’s all your fault.” He pulled me along. “Now I can’t stop the Collector.” His chest heaved against my back in what sounded like a sob. “They’re going to die tonight.”

  My whole life, I’d been working to empower myself. Feeling the last vestiges of my control slipping away infuriated me. I gave in to my frustration and screamed against the hand pressed hard over my mouth. His hand shifted slightly, now partly covering my nose, making it even harder to breathe. Blackness closed in on me.

  “Hey!” Colin’s shocked shout jerked me back from the brink of the shutdown. He was running towards us, the savage fury on his face unlike anything I’d ever seen from him.

  The arm around me tightened even more, the body behind me tensing. He increased his attempt to drag me away, but I couldn’t allow this. Keeping my eyes, and mental focus, on Colin, I pressed my heels into the concrete and resisted with everything I had.

  The last thing I saw was Colin reaching for me, his teeth bared. Then blissful blackness took me away.

  When I came to, I was sitting on the concrete in the exact spot where the man had dragged me. Colin was sitting cross-legged next to me, absently stroking my forearm. I studied him.

  He was glaring at a man sitting on the floor close to the stairs leading into the fort. Vinnie was shouting obscenities at the man, who was looking up at Manny and Luka. Manny’s posture was slumped, his face red with anger, the artery on his forehead prominent.

  I turned my focus to the man sitting on the ground. My would-be kidnapper. I immediately recognised his distinctive features from the many photos I’d seen.

  Florian Brasseur.

  Unlike the different expressions I’d observed on the photos, he was now exhibiting extreme fear. He was avoiding eye contact, his movements were jerky, his eyes bulging and he was blinking fast and much more than what was considered normal for men. Tears were streaming down his face.

  I looked back at Colin. The loathing on his face worried me as much as the growing bruise on his jaw. I tried to speak, but my throat was dry and painful from the screaming. I cleared my throat. “Colin.”