This time, the truck backed on to the hard shingle, reaching almost to the water. With the slope of the beach, unloading the dinghies was easier than at the first stop. The remaining passengers disembarked from their vehicles and waited in groups. The traffickers knew their business. Malky and Jack observed the efficient splitting of the passengers onto their separate vessels. The same mix of men, women and children as the first loading made their way down to the sea. The attendant guards shepherded the families on board.
An older man carrying a large backpack was having difficulty climbing into the dinghy. A minder approached. Jack couldn’t hear anything at the distance, but it was obvious the guard was shouting instructions. The old man stumbled and dropped to one knee as his baggage splashed into the sea. His aggressor dragged him up by the collar and gestured to the backpack. The dinghy was full and like the previous one, dangerously low in the water. The trafficker pulled the old man to the edge of the vessel and threw the belongings on board. As its owner attempted to protest, a vicious punch to the stomach doubled him over. Malky didn’t have the use of the glasses, but he could see the scene unfold.
“Bastard,” whispered the Irishman. “Gimme two minutes wi’ that sod, and he’ll wish he wasnae breathin’”.
“Steady,” hissed Jack, the bile of anger rising in his own throat. “A watching brief only, tonight. Remember?”
The aggressor half-threw, half-shoved the old man aboard. Two passengers caught his fall and handed him toward the centre of the dinghy.
Jack focused the lens on the snakehead. The headshot clearly identified a scowling face, a scar on his left cheek running through the edge of his lip. The camera recorded several more shots before Jack zoned in on the other gang members one by one. A total of eleven men, all captured in close detail. These images would be with May-Ling within a couple of hours. The sea-bound dinghies transformed into disappearing dark specks by the time the empty convoy retreated back to camp. Twenty minutes later, Jack and Malky headed toward the Mission’s billets.
CHAPTER 11
“Bitch!” said Torres. “The bitch must be crazy.”
“What?” asked Corrado.
His partner slammed a sheet of paper on the table in Hotel Pedrosa’s empty restaurant.
“She’s frozen what’s left of the balances in the investment account. And accounts in two of our other banks are also locked. I’m having the rest of the banks checked now. The bitch!”
Corrado stood up and reached for the paper.
“Let me see that,” he said. “I didn’t expect her to do that in her own bank. Stupidity on my part. But why the other banks? She doesn’t have the power or authority to order that. Somebody away above her does, somebody who can interfere in banks and force this kind of shit, Ruben.”
“Who?”
“Interpol. That’s who. Which means she’s jumped to the cops already and named us for the plane crash.”
“But neither she nor anybody at Interpol, or any police force for that matter, knows who we really are,” said Torres. “The accounts are all in different names, none of which are yours or mine.”
A man clutching more sheets approached the table.
“Boss?” he said, holding out the papers. “Only one more frozen, the rest are untouched.”
The accountant sat down and turned the sheets toward his chiefs.
“Give me the summary,” said Corrado. His calmness in times of crisis was a trait that never left him.
“As I said, only one more locked down,” said the numbers man. “A total of six hundred and twenty million dollars frozen, in various currencies. Of course I’ve instructed our lawyers to protest in the strongest terms. Legal filings will be made first thing in the morning at all four institutions. Each of these accounts has a linked name. We have seventeen other banks in jurisdictions less likely to draw attention, and every one of them in different account names, unrelated to the other four banks.”
“How much is in these others?” asked Corrado.
“Eight hundred million and change,” the man said.
“Proceed with the filings and move the other balances from the untouched accounts. Leave a modest holding amount in each meantime. We might be able to use the conduits later. Better safe than sorry. Get the cash secure. Report to me when that’s been done.”
“Yes, boss.” The man retreated from the restaurant.
Torres spread his hands and looked at his partner.
“What do we do now?”
“My dear Ruben, sure, it’s a lot of money, but not enough to stop us in a major way. Much of the cash is reserve anyway. There’s plenty of liquidity in the accounts that haven’t been stopped. We carry on with our business. The income from the people trade in Libya is regular. The profit on the other merchandise won’t fade. The lawyers will do what they’re paid for and will be successful, or they won’t. We can’t tell how that’ll play out.”
“What about Francine Louvet?”
“Ah, yes. The lovely, and it seems, a bit more unpredictable than we thought, Francine.”
Corrado leaned back, and lit a cigar. He drew deeply and blew a smoke stream up into the air.
“Francine is the only link to us. To you, to be more precise. She’s the one triggering the clamp on the funds. I would suggest she’s outlived her usefulness to us. If she’s dead, no court will ever be able to hear her as a witness.”
“I understand from our men on the ground, she has close-in protection,” said Torres.
“So did her father,” said Corrado. “So did her father.”
He lifted the cigar box and offered it to Torres.
“And at present, as you said, nobody knows of our involvement. Cigar?”
The partners wouldn’t have enjoyed their cigars as much had they been aware, contrary to Corrado’s belief, that their identities were known, and wheels were already grinding elsewhere.
****
Mac’s usual meticulous indexing and cross-referencing system rarely failed to produce whatever was requested of him. He dialled May-Ling’s direct number in London.
“Good day, my dear,” he said when she picked up the receiver. “How are you?”
“All the better for hearing you, Mac,” she said. ‘You have something for us this soon?”
“I’ve a couple of photographs for you. They’re a little bit grainy, taken a few years ago, and from a distance, in circumstances of no interest to you other than these guys are in them.”
“Guys, plural?”
“Yes. Your target man, Torres and his former fellow officer in the Legion I mentioned to you during our last call, Cornelius Corrado. Both are tough mercenaries by any standard, and the fact they’ve outwitted their former employers for so long shows they’re also clever operators. I’m sending the images through to you now. They were snapped about fifteen years ago, but unless they’ve had something as drastic as plastic surgery done, they won’t look much different today.”
“I’m grateful, as usual, Mac.”
“My sources tell me they move regularly from Europe into Central and South America,” said the SAS man. “The DEA has them across their radar screen occasionally, but never long enough in any place where they could get access to them. You were correct in placing them in Guatemala. How much do you know about the place?”
“Only that it’s a magnet for drug-running in Central America,” said May-Ling.
“Magnet is right. There’s at least half a dozen competing drug cartels moving stuff through the country, and these lads are either top dogs or close to it. They’ve got the local police in their pockets as well as a loose army of the local peasantry at their beck and call.”
“Which makes it difficult for drug enforcement people to do much about them, right?’ said May-Ling.
“Right,” said Mac. “Not that there’s any major local effort to go after the cartels. The hush money keeps that pacified. But it frustrates the hell out of the serious authorities from the States and our pals at Interpol.”
“I gathered as much from Marcel Benoit, Mac. Where do you get all this information from? The SAS hasn’t any reason to be in that neck of the woods, has it?”
“No, we don’t have anything live going remotely near the area. However, as a matter of courtesy, we exchange updates frequently with the other big players like the DEA. Plus I have my own network of eyes and ears in places I need to keep abreast of. Do you remember Rico, who was on that little engagement with Jules and your husband in Chile a few years back?”
“Yes, I do recall Rico. The boys wouldn’t stop talking about him when they got back from that sortie.”
“Well he’s been operating all over that continent for nigh on twenty-five years, for most of which he and I have been good buddies,” said Mac. “He’s one of my best intelligence sources. If ISP intends to go have a look-see down there, let me know. There’s no better man than Rico to have alongside.”
“Thanks for that. I’ll tell Jack. By the way, the scanner has just spat out the images you sent. I’ll catch up with you later. Goodbye.”
The eight-inch square black and white sheets were as grainy as Mac had described, but the confidence gazing out from each of the subjects on them was impossible to miss. Corrado’s face appeared weather-beaten in the old image, but the eyes peering at the lens carried an air of steeliness. A trimmed moustache held centre stage below high cheekbones. The picture of Torres would have graced the pages of the male model fashion catalogues.
No wonder Francine found this guy attractive.
The slight raising of the left eyebrow, the cut of the jawline and the eyes. Again, the eyes. Piercing, confident. Jack and the team would see these photographs soon.
May-Ling had additional viewers in mind for them.
CHAPTER 12
The attendance of a huge swell of influential and recognisable figures from the world of government, commerce and banking from every financial institution in Luxembourg, and many from outside of the country meant the service of remembrance for the late chairman of Banque Louvet had to be switched from the family chapel to a voluminous chamber in the Luxembourg parliament building. Francine had agreed to a respectful request from the main local television channel to cover the proceedings.
In the front row to the right, Marcel Benoit sat beside Francine and the old secretary. Four other family members filled the left hand pews. Jack and May-Ling joined the throng close to the front of the assembly. Sitting on easels adorned with black ribbon, two portrait paintings of the deceased banker, commissioned many years earlier, faced the gathering. Stewards busied themselves arranging the innumerable floral tributes in rows surrounding the makeshift podium.
Given the circumstances of his death, heavy police security presence at the service pervaded the entire morning. Plainclothes agents mingled with the large number of mourners, each door entrance and exit covered by special CCTV cameras fitted the evening before. Jack had briefed his teams to be observant, to note anyone who looked out of place or uncomfortable. He and his wife doubted the men responsible would show at the service, but ISP’s squad was ready and armed.
The quiet background of solemn hymnal music faded to a halt as the priest entered from a side doorway and made his way to the raised dais. The service began. Jack’s professional alter ego kicked in. He detested funerals and remembrance occasions. Over a military career of twenty years, he and his comrades in arms had attended far too many of them to commemorate lives taken violently, wasted, and they never became easier to stomach. This time, the man in the paintings whose death had come in such a horrific manner was a comparative stranger, but the killing of Jack’s own people was torturing the hell out of him. He snapped back into business mode. He turned his head slowly a few times, catching the eye of each of the close-in guards in sequence. The first three nodded the all clear sign. The fourth raised her chin gently. She had spotted something. Jack eased out of the pew and walked unhurriedly to the back of the chamber and stepped outside. The agent was waiting for him.
“What’ve you got, Viv?” he asked.
“A man at the side of the fifteenth row,” she started. “He arrived just as the priest came in. He’s wearing a heavy gabardine overcoat that looks two sizes too big for him. He kept staring at the front row where Francine is, and then at some of the other people. He’s nervous, Jack.”
“Good lass. Let’s have a decko at him, shall we?”
Jack and the agent walked back into the hall and looked down toward the end of row fifteen. It was empty.
“What? Where?” Jack whispered.
His eye caught a movement at the side door exit on the side where the man should have been. The sight of the gabardine coat leaving.
Jack and Viv exited the rear door, noiselessly signalling to two other agents to join them.
Forty metres ahead the man strode across the yard to where a car was waiting a further twenty metres away.
“Hey, you!” one of Jack’s men yelled.
The man turned to see where the shout had come from, then sprinted toward the vehicle. All four pursuers raced to try to catch him. As he ran, a black object with a wire attachment fell from his coat and bounced a few steps along the ground. The fleeing target stopped momentarily, but knew he would be caught if he tried to retrieve it. As he neared the car, the back door swung open, held ajar by another person’s arm. He half-fell, half-jumped into the vehicle as it accelerated away with a squeal of tyres, out of reach of Jack and his men.
“Got the licence plate?” he called, trying to catch his breath. “Make of car? How many people inside?”
Viv walked across the cobblestoned yard to pick up the item the man had dropped. A miniature, one-inch by half-inch camera, with a wire-squeeze shutter exposure.
“Whatever he got is on here,” she said. “It’s not damaged. It’s a top of the range surveillance camera, fits at the back of a coat buttonhole. That explains the overcoat. If I remember correctly, it takes forty high definition photos per second.”
“Good work, Viv,” said Jack, taking the camera from her. “I want to download this stuff first before we consider giving it to the police. Understood? I’ll tell Marcel about it. I’ll ask him to keep it quiet for the moment, and have him let the local boys do the CCTV stuff and ask for copies. Somehow I think our photographer and his pals will be long gone. The car’ll likely show up as bogus plates or stolen.”
He handed the camera back to Viv.
“I’ll be back to you within an hour with whatever’s on this,” she said.
Jack gave reinforced instructions to be ‘eyes-on’ at all times with Francine. She was occupied with a cluster of dignitaries at the chamber exit. Away from the edge of the crowd, Marcel Benoit and May-Ling listened while Jack told them about the surveillance camera and the chase.
“The boys got the plate number and car make. There were three people in the car. The driver, the guy with the coat, and another man in the rear of the getaway, all three wearing hats. If my guess is worth anything, probably covering most of their faces, but if we can have a look at the CCTV films, Marcel, who knows?”
“I agree there’s no need to give the local police the camera yet,” said the Interpol boss. “I’d be interested myself to know who was photographed on it, and I’ll see what I can do about the CCTV material. These are murderous people. I sense that Mademoiselle Louvet is squarely in the trigger sights of these bastards. Witness disposal, evidence removal, Jack. I will speak to her again separately about her need for the utmost personal caution, but I think it best not to mention this camera incident to her.”
“The same here,” said May-Ling. “We’re doubling her close-ins. She’ll only be out of sight when she sleeps and when she visits a closet in a rest room.”
The majority of attendees had left the chamber as Francine made her way across the room to them. Benoit hugged her tightly. Jack shook her hand and as before, tongue-tied, said nothing. May-Ling understood her husband’s emotional frailty about funeral services. S
he moved to take Francine in a warm embrace.
“I’m grateful you could come,” said the banker. ‘Anything to tell me so far?”
“Nothing at present,” lied May-Ling. “I believe Marcel wants a private word with you, so if you’ll excuse Jack and I?”
“Of course,” said Francine, taking Benoit’s offered arm and walking toward the chamber entrance. “I’ll see you later.”
****
The hotel suite oozed comfort, but the Calders had business squarely in mind as they sat at the living area table. From her attache case, May-Ling withdrew Mac’s pictures of Corrado and Torres and laid them on the table-top. Jack opened his own document bag and extracted a sheaf of prints, the product of the surveillance at the beach in Libya. The high definition photographs surrounded the less clear features of the two mercenary leaders.
“Let me guess,” said Jack, pointing to one of them. “This good looking bastard’s Torres?”
“Yes, it is,” said May-Ling. “And from the collection you have here, he didn’t appear on the beach.”
“I wouldn’t expect him to be close to the action,” said her husband. “I’m also certain he was nowhere near the service this morning. These guys get others to do the dirty work.”
A gentle, melodic chime interrupted the conversation. Jack peered through the peephole in the door before opening it to allow Viv to enter.
“That was quick,” he said.
“I told you, within the hour, boss,” the operative said, handing over a buff envelope.
Viv had enlarged the images to head-size photographs. The solemn faces of several of the attendees from the morning were captured in fine detail. Francine appeared in the majority of them.
DEADLY IMPASSE (Jack Calder Crime Series #5) Page 5
