“Probably.”
“We have proof positive.”
“Conceivably his men are following us to give us protection.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Good,” Jana nodded her approval. “Trusting people may be good; mistrusting them is even better.”
She saw a vehicle drive up the pumps next to them. Jana tensed, then relaxed when the driver got out of his car and walked into the office. Jana toyed with the idea of placing the transponder inside the wheel well of the other vehicle to lead their “followers” onto a false trail, then decided against it. The professor could see what she was thinking.
“Why not?” he asked.
“They’d quickly find out. If they think their bug is still safely hidden in the BMW, they’ll be content to follow where it leads.”
“They could try to kill us at any time.”
“They haven’t, though. Why? They’re herding us. I think they want us to lead them to someone. Someone they want perhaps more than us.”
“Who?”
“I’m going to meet Colonel Trokan in Vienna. They know that. They just don’t know where. Trokan is the key man running the investigation against them. He’s supervised the whole thing: me, Peter, Kroslak. So they want to get Trokan. They’re looking for that one unguarded moment on Trokan’s part in which to kill him. I think they’re depending on me to lead them to him.”
She turned on the ignition, pulling out of the station onto the highway.
“So, what are we going to do?”
“Lead them to him.”
Jana checked the rearview mirror. The same car was back in position. It had pulled off the highway and waited for Jana to get on with her journey so they could continue their game of follow-the-leader to Vienna.
Jana settled back in her seat, focusing on the road ahead.
Chapter 37
They rolled into Vienna with the professor asleep in the front seat. He was gently snoring, and Jana thought he looked cute curled up in the seat, so relaxed that she hesitated to wake him. She drove through the streets, eventually realizing that she would have to rouse him as they approached the Ringstrasse, the demarcation line between the outskirts and the inner ring of the once-fabled capital of the Hapsburg Empire. She shook him, and he sat upright, blinking at the sight of the buildings, realizing that they were in Wien.
“Very nice driving,” he complimented. “Quick.”
“It’s always quick from Prague.”
He swiveled to look through the rear window. “Too many cars. I don’t know which is theirs.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. However, we have to lose them to find them.”
He blinked, not understanding.
“Are you fully awake?” Jana asked.
He shook himself for a few seconds, then smoothed his hair back from the tangle he had created. “My blood has been fully energized, and I am now completely alert and ready to take on the world. What do I have to do?”
“I want you to collapse, Professor.”
“Collapse?”
“Yes. You’re going to have a fit on the street. I want you to rant, rave, whatever one does when they are having a fit. You are going to drop to the sidewalk, frothing at the mouth, while a crowd gathers and the police and the emergency medical people arrive. They are then going to cart you off to a hospital, where they will put you under observation for the next ten or twelve hours.”
He stared at her, his jaw open with surprise. “You want me to … perform?”
“A good word for it, Professor.”
“And what do you do?”
“I escape.”
“Leaving me behind?”
“I need a distraction, Professor. No, I need misdirection,” she said, putting it in his terms so he’d see what she meant.
“We’ve talked about it enough. They look at you and I identify them, and then I use the commotion to get away so I can meet Trokan. It’s not healthy for Colonel Trokan to have them peering over my shoulder, taking aim at him. After the meeting, I’ll come for you at the hospital.”
“I don’t like it!”
“Professor, we have to find a way to give them pause, even for a few seconds. That’s all I’ll need. You’re the one who has to do this; I have no one else. Besides, you’re the performer. I’m not.”
He mulled it over. “I used to perform for pay.” He looked at her meaningfully, a sly smile eventually appearing. He presented his cheek, pointing at it. “So, I’m waiting.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“One more,” he insisted.
Jana kissed him again.
“I told you that old men like younger women. What I didn’t tell you was that once in a while they also like to be kissed.” He sat back in his seat, a satisfied look on his face. “Having been paid, I am now ready to perform.”
Jana smiled. The professor was a very nice man.
She looked for a parking space on the street, then saw one marked no parking. They were not going to need the car, now that they’d reached Vienna; so Jana surveyed the street, saw the requisite number of pedestrians, then parked in the prohibited zone.
“Performance time, Professor. Wait for me to cue you.” They both got out of their automobile, Jana leaving the key in the ignition to make it easier for the police when they came to impound it.
The professor began rubbing his hands. “I always do this before a presentation. The heart pumps faster, the nerves become acute, all the senses are poised.”
“Stop walking for a moment, but keep talking.”
They stopped, Jana moving to face him, looking over his shoulder to see what their trackers were doing. A vehicle had stopped behind them. Three people were getting out. They were close enough to identify. Ryan, the Irishman whom Aidan Walsh despised, was first out of the vehicle, followed by Walsh himself. So much for their dislike of one another. A charade. They were close enough now to suggest they didn’t mind committing murder together.
The third person out of the car was Paola Rossi.
Jana had known that Paola was one of them since their visit to the archives, but had hoped against hope that she was not. So much for “hopes” and “wishes.” Paola was ready to commit murder with the others.
Their car continued up the street, passing Jana and the professor. Gyorgi Ilica was the driver. The pack that stays together murders together, Jana thought.
The professor was gabbling something that Jana could not understand.
“Esperanto,” he explained, seeing her lack of comprehension. “You said keep talking. I couldn’t think of what to say. That was Lesson One of Esperanto, or at least a part of it. It’s how to order a kidney pie. I learned it in England.”
“A man of many talents.”
“Many,” the professor agreed.
She and the professor began strolling again.
“Take a few more steps, stagger, then go into your act. Don’t be surprised when I scream.”
“Do you scream loudly, Commander Matinova?”
“Loud enough, Professor.”
He took a breath, preparing. “Be well, Jana Matinova.”
“The same to you, Professor.”
The professor abruptly gasped, clutched at his throat, and moaned, the volume gradually increasing. Suddenly he collapsed, his body going into spasms, his eyes fluttering, spittle coming out of his mouth. Jana screamed as loudly as she could. The passersby anxiously looked around for the danger. Almost immediately they realized that the professor was on the pavement, shuddering, having what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. One or two of them tried to aid the sick man. Jana shouted in German for someone to call an ambulance, then immediately pushed her way through the circle of onlookers to the doorway of a shop. The people who had gathered around the professor effectively blocked her trackers from seeing Jana dart inside. She ran past the clerks who had come to the front of the store, through the back door, and into an alley. She hopped on a streetcar before the p
eople who were following her even realized she was gone.
Within ten minutes, the Austrians, who have the most efficient medical services in Europe, had an ambulance at the site. They quickly loaded the professor onto a stretcher and had him in the ambulance within moments, sirening their way through the streets to Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the largest hospital on the continent. There was no question that he was going to get superlative treatment.
As for Jana, she took the tram all the way to Lerchen-felder Strasse, at the opposite edge of the Ring. She jumped off the tram when she spotted a large photography store that advertised reproductions. She checked the street to make sure that the car carrying the thugs, as she now thought of them, had not been able to follow her, and then walked inside.
The clerk she was served by officiously explained that the microfilm that Jana showed him would take some time to reproduce, going into a long technical explanation, only running down when Jana held up her hand and asked him to stop. “What’s the quickest way to reproduce enlarged copies from microfilm? I want them on a standard-size sheet of Xerox paper.”
“I can project and scan it. That should take only a few minutes, but will cost more, and that type of reproduction is not the best, so I can’t guarantee—”
Jana slapped the counter top. “Do it!”
The clerk ran to the back where his equipment was. In ten minutes, he reappeared with the microfilm in one hand and the Xerox-size copies in the other. He put them in an envelope, quoting the cost. Jana threw enough money on the counter top to cover it and jogged out of the store.
She walked to a small green area just off Lange Gasse and, perhaps to spite the Austrian dislike of anyone sitting on their park grass, or in response to her own need to relax in the simplest way possible, she sat on the lawn with her back against a lamp post and read the pages. She read them several times to make sure she had digested everything, then put all the paperwork back into the envelope and into her purse. She looked at her hand when she tucked the envelope away. It had a slight tremor. What she had learned over the past few days was so dreadful that it made her feel sick. It was truly bad, ugly to such a degree that Jana knew it would affect the way she looked at her world from now on.
Policemen learn not to trust. They learn that lesson over and over. It’s part of the bad side of being a police officer. This was one of those times for her.
Chapter 38
Jana called the Post Hotel, where she knew the colonel was staying, leaving a message for “Mr. Palicka” to meet her in an hour in the Schwedenplatz—Swedish Square—on the bank of the Danube Canal. She walked there at a brisk pace, glad to be able to engage in physical activity after so many hours of being cooped up in the car. The air was still crisp, perfect weather for striding through the city. The swarms of tourists were smaller then those in Prague, and less pushy, but the crowds on streets still provided anonymity. and she was at the square in less than a half-hour, giving her time to kill. Jana purchased an ice cream cone from an Italian ice cream parlor that advertised, both in German and English, the best ice cream in Austria, and slowly savored the cone while looking over the edge of the canal, watching people board a riverboat that gradually filled up and finally set sail down the Danube’s concrete tributary.
As the time for the colonel’s arrival approached, Jana surveyed the square, looking for any possible stalkers lurking in the nooks and crannies of the buildings, wondering, as well, what kind of problems the colonel was going to bring with him. She was carrying a very disturbing message for him in her handbag. The colonel knew that there was trouble with Europol, but he had no idea of the extent of the problem.
The hour she had given the colonel came and went. Jana waited for an additional thirty minutes. She was preparing to give up when she saw Trokan enter the square. He was hurrying, with two other men, one on either side of him, alertly scanning the people they were passing. They were bodyguards. Jana recognized both men immediately, Benco and Elias, both of them officers from her division. Not Elias, she reminded herself. He was now “temporarily” assigned to the anti-corruption group investigating the deaths of Peter and the professor’s nephew. For the colonel to choose them to be his personal guards meant that he was now keenly aware of his danger. What Jana had to tell him would raise the threat level even further.
She watched the men walk to Laurenzberg, on one side of the square, then go down the steps and into the Griechenbeisi, a small Greek bar. Jana waited for a few more minutes to make sure they’d not been followed, then went after them, pausing only to follow the custom of throwing a coin down an open cellar door for good luck before she entered the bar proper. The colonel was sitting in the back of the bar, the two officers closer to the entrance, watching for any intruder.
Jana gave each man a brief nod and walked back to the colonel, sat next to him, and ordered a glass of wine.
“How are things at home, Mr. Palicka?”
“Not so well, thank you.”
“I’m glad you remembered the name. I was worried.”
“Palicka was my father-in-law. Hard to forget him. I remember when we came here with him. All he did was lecture me on why I should be nicer to his youngest daughter, ignoring the fact that she had begun the now long-standing habit of bombarding me with whatever was handy for her to throw.”
“Are the demonstrations in Bratislava ending?”
“The furor about the nationalization of the oil field is fading away. Everybody is now counting the money that they think will be coming directly into the nation’s pockets instead of the oil company’s. The prime minister and the minister of economics are being beatified as national heroes.” He took a sip of his beer. “It’s good to see you still in one piece, Jana.”
Their conversation took on a jocular tone, one they practiced when events were becoming grave, a buffer against their rising uncertainties.
“And I’m glad to see you without any unexpected marks of recent medical treatment, Colonel. I assume the two gentlemen are guarding you as a result of a threat or an actual attempt to kill you?”
“A bomb. Why is it that when assassins go after a high official, they invariably try to kill him with explosives rather than shoot him?”
“I hadn’t realized that.” Jana very carefully kept her shock at the news of the attempted bomb attack off her face, only a raised eyebrow signaling her concern.
“Maybe they don’t use explosives with everybody. But whenever some individual comes after me, he tries to blow me up.
“My driver took the car to run an errand for me. Boom! His wife was very upset.”
“Reasonable that his wife would be upset.”
“He was a nice young man.” Trokan took a sip of his drink, his tone changing. “The word on the street is that I am a dead man walking. My wife is now living at her mother’s, and I’m moving from place to place to make it harder for them, whoever they are. I was hoping that you might have information that might save your colonel’s body from being mutilated.”
Jana pulled the papers out of her purse and laid them in front of him.
“Kroslak found that they have committed a total of at least twenty-eight murders to date. There are probably more that he did not find. He is now one of the dead, so there are at least twenty-nine homicides.”
“They found him in Prague?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry for him.”
“Feeling sorrow is the least we can do.”
“The very least.”
He began reading, suddenly sucking in a breath from the shock of what he was reading on the first sheet of paper. “From what I understand,” Jana continued, “they killed individuals in a number of countries in Europe and Africa, and two in Brazil, one in Argentina and, for good measure, one in Washington. A rather odd assemblage of numbers for a group of police officers who are charged with keeping everyone safe. It appears that a part of Europol has become a corporate conglomerate whose main product is murder.”
T
he colonel went on to the next sheet of paper, as Jana continued her narrative.
“According to the figures that Kroslak discovered, they have earned a total of approximately nine million euros for the murders they’ve carried out. Not a bad return for their time. And no taxes to pay. A very successful business venture, which is a good reason for them to want us dead. Who knows, perhaps they’re considering expanding? That’s what a good businessman does.”
The colonel angrily went on to the next page, reading it with a restless energy, his tension apparent in slight body movements.
“You’re squirming, Colonel.”
“I’m upset.”
“So am I.”
“It gets worse with every page I read.”
“I know.” Jana felt her own anger beginning to build. She forced herself to remain calm, to keep her voice steady. “Most of the people they killed were either corporate or government officials. There are also three police officers on the roll of the dead.”
“Maly from the Czech Republic. I knew him well. A good man. The Englishman, Abbot, was an expert in corporate fraud. I attended a seminar he gave. A very bright person. The third one, the American police officer, I know nothing about.”
“The Americans will tell us.”
“Then they’ll demand that we take immediate action, probably forgetting to thank us for discovering the crimes at the risk of our own lives.”
He turned back a page to note the payment for the particular killing. “Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to kill the American. A bargain at twice the price,” he noted sarcastically.
“Your name is listed.”
“I saw. Not a great deal of money for the killers to murder me. I’m embarrassed that I’m worth so little. At least I’m worth more than the American.”
“Something to be proud of. When this is over, I’ll have to remember to tell all the troops.”
He made a rude noise, then continued to read.
“The killings of the university student and your friend Peter are not listed.”
The Magician's Accomplice Page 22
