“Do you understand, Madam Manager?” Jana repeated.
The manager eventually managed to get out a “yes.”
“Good.” Jana softened her tone. “The request from your compatriot fit with something else you’d been asked to do, didn’t it?”
The manager forced out another “Yes.” Her face revealed her internal struggle. Eventually she admitted, “I thought it was part of the other Fico plan.”
Jana waited. “You had been asked by someone else about Fico?”
“Yes.”
Jana thought about the “other” Fico, the real Fico. It was becoming clear. She now knew why the shooter had come to the window when he had.
Jana encouraged the manager to go on. “You were asked to make a call, give a signal, when the real Fico was either eating breakfast in the breakfast area or leaving the hotel to start his day. A man paid you to do this, didn’t he? So you agreed.”
The manager sat mute.
“This is my last warning. The truth, or you go to prison. No more manager’s job. However, if you tell me the truth, nothing happens to you. It’s your choice. Make it quickly.”
“I won’t go to prison if I answer you?” the manager whispered.
“No problem,” Jana assured her.
The manager didn’t need any more prompting. “A man said that he wanted to proposition Fico about a business project and that Fico wouldn’t talk to him. He just wanted five minutes with him. That’s all. A few minutes. And he offered me so much money to do it, I couldn’t turn him down. So I agreed.”
“What happened?”
“That morning, Fico came striding out. I was going over receipts at the desk and looked up just in time to see him going out of the front doors. I dialed the man who had asked me to signal him about Fico to tell him that I was late with my call. Then I saw the student going into the dining room. When the man answered, all I could think about was I’d missed the signal and dialed him too late. So I said the maitre d’ had just checked Fico into the dining room. If the man was angry, I could point to the maitre d’. He had checked the name off. To all appearances, Fico had arrived, and I had fulfilled my agreement.”
“Describe the man who paid you.”
The manager gave Jana a description. Her word portrait fit Aidan Walsh.
“You didn’t know he was going to kill anyone?”
“Never.” The manager began to cry. “How could I know?”
“How could you know,” Jana assured her. “And how could you know that he was also after the student?”
Jana got up, putting a small bill down on the table top for a tip.
When she got outside, she called Trokan on her cell phone and told him that she was on her way to her house. Trokan tried to talk her out of it; Jana insisted.
“I’m ready,” she told him.
“You’re stepping into it,” he warned. “I don’t endorse your adventure.”
“We know that.”
Eventually he gave in, advising her to take her time. Jana agreed, and put her phone away.
Jana walked over to the window that had been replaced and faced the table where the student had been sitting when he was killed. The manager and the maitre d’ were gone; the waiter was cleaning up the coffee cups no one had touched. He saw Jana through the window and, picking up the tip she had left, mouthed a thank-you.
Jana turned away, strolling in the direction of her neighborhood, taking her time as the colonel had suggested. She thought of Denis Macek, the young student, sitting in the booth ready to enjoy his breakfast, not knowing that the killer who had been assigned to assassinate Fico was as ready to kill him. The killer didn’t make a mistake, Jana silently told the student. He was in the city to kill you; he was in the city to kill Fico. The fates had placed you in the booth instead of the real Fico. The killer was expecting to find the real Fico at the table; but he also had your photograph as someone else he was supposed to take care of. He recognized you and made a quick adjustment to his plans, really no adjustment at all: he shot you.
Jana had heard that there was such a thing as black magic. If there was, it had certainly been present that morning. “I’m sorry, Denis,” she murmured. “I know: magic has a way of going badly. Very badly. When it does, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The snow, which had stopped falling, began again. It would soon cover the city in white.
Perhaps Bratislava would look better to her then.
Chapter 47
Jana walked the last hundred meters through the blowing snow dragging her feet, trying to postpone the confrontation.
This time her spirits were not going to soar when she saw her familiar house. Instead, she would look for violations to her sanctuary, bruises on its walls, a cracked or broken window, splintered wood. Unfortunately, there was no way to delay further. Jana turned onto her walkway. Her tension increased as she walked up the steps to the front door. The entry was unlocked. As she had thought so many times, “Who would be stupid enough to break into a police commander’s house?” Today was different. She had to force herself to grasp the door handle, then urge herself to turn the knob. The door swung open and she walked inside.
Standing next to the door, gun in hand, was Aidan Walsh. Sitting on the living room couch was Assistant Director Mazur. A few meters away from him was Paola Rossi, a cigarette in one hand, her automatic in the other. Odd, Jana thought. She had never realized that Paola smoked.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” Jana managed, keeping her voice steady. “Always good to see old friends.”
Walsh closed the door behind her, then shoved her into the living room, following closely behind her. He quickly patted her down, removed her gun from its holster, and tossed it on the couch next to Mazur.
“Eat any candy today, Walsh? You should take the wrappers with you the next time you search a place. They’re incriminating.”
“Fuck you,” he muttered.
“Paola, you should stop smoking. Its bad for your health.”
“Shut your mouth, Matinova.”
Walsh propelled her toward a chair. “Sit down.”
“Kind of you to offer me a chair.” Jana sat. “I would make you all something to eat or drink, but my sense is that you’re only here for a brief time and would rather I dispense with a hospitable welcome.”
Mazur sat on the couch, a slight smile on his face. “I warned you against doing stupid things when you first came on board,” the assistant director reminded her. “Everything has its order, its place. Right from the beginning, you ignored this. So here we are, not a place I wanted to be. Your fault. You kept forcing the issue, blindly pushing ahead despite everything.”
“I’m just your average police officer,” she reminded him. “That’s what we do. Or have you erased that, along with everything else that a police officer is supposed to be, from your memory?” She took in the other two with a quick glance. “When did you all decide to kill people for a living? What prompted you to steal, to cheat, to band together into a murder machine? Who made the first suggestion? Who thought it was a good idea?”
Paola walked over to her and hit her across the head with the barrel of her gun. The blow knocked Jana off her chair. Blood ran down the side of Jana’s face from the gash above her hairline. She lay on the floor, oddly enough, despite her daze, noticing that her boots still had snow on them. Jana forced herself into a sitting position, then, with more effort, up into the chair. She eyed Paola.
“Are we going to play ‘Beat the Police Officer to Death’ like you did to Kroslak? Or ‘Shoot the Victim’ like you did with the student?”
“Kroslak was an informant,” Paola muttered. “He deserved every kick we gave him. It should have lasted longer.”
“He was a policeman,” Jana corrected.
Mazur held his hand up for silence. “Matinova, we believe you have some material of ours. Kroslak had it. We think it’s now in your possession.”
“What would that be?”
&
nbsp; “The microfilm. The Romanian report.”
“Very good reading,” Jana affirmed. “I’d want it too, if I were you. Unfortunately for you, even as we speak, it’s being forwarded to police agencies in all the appropriate jurisdictions. We’re even sending a copy to your superiors, Assistant Director. I don’t think you’re going to be an assistant director much longer.”
“Too bad,” Mazur said.
“Just shoot the bitch,” suggested Walsh.
“Like you did the boy in the hotel, Walsh? And the phone bomb that killed the prosecutor? That was yours as well. The prosecutor’s secretary has identified you. You’re going down for that one, Walsh. And the others as well. Which one of you likes to use a garrote? Mazur, I’ll bet that if we examine their past, we’ll find Walsh had training in explosives. Maybe Paola likes a garrote?”
“She hasn’t got the papers we want. Let’s just do it and get the hell out of here.” Paola took a deep inhale of her cigarette. “We shouldn’t have come in the first place.”
“We couldn’t let her go.” Mazur shook his head. “A bad precedent if we let her walk. We had to finish the business.”
“So get on with it.”
Jana brushed blood from her eye, then wagged a bloody finger at them. “Kill me and it’s your heads that will roll. Look out the window.”
They stared at her, not quite comprehending.
“Look out the window!” Jana’s voice was stronger. “You can, from time to time, see unusual things in the snow.”
They continued to stare at her.
“The window! I brought you a present.”
Walsh walked to the window. Outside, in the swirling snow, was a skirmish line of police officers carrying assault weapons, some behind cars, others kneeling in the snow, all of them focused on the house.
Paola saw Walsh’s face change. She went to the window herself, looked out, then ran to the back of the house and peered through the kitchen window. More police officers. She ran back to the living room, walked up to Jana and put the barrel of her gun to Jana’s head.
“You won’t live to see it.”
She started to squeeze the trigger. Walsh pushed the gun aside before she got the shot off. He looked over to Mazur, asking for direction. Mazur went to the window to check out the line of police.
“Give the commander a towel,” Mazur said. “We don’t want her comrades to think we’ve been abusing her.”
“What?” Paola spit out.
“Paola, we can still walk on the other matters. If we kill their commander, we won’t crawl out of here alive. You know how police officers are when you kill one of their own.”
“He’s right,” Walsh agreed.
Jana slowly rose to her feet. Unhurriedly, she walked to the front door, still a little unsteady on her feet from the blow.
“I’d better let my colleagues in before they get impatient. We don’t want that, do we?”
She opened the door, took a last look back at them, then stepped out. Trokan was standing to the side of the front door. As she walked over to him, he signaled his men. Slovak police officers poured into the house. Trokan saw Jana’s scalp wound, his face becoming grim.
“We should have done without all of this and killed them when they first went into the house.”
“That’s not our way. It’s theirs.”
“I suppose. All the same, it would have been satisfying.”
“Did you get everything?”
“Everything. Electronics are a wonderful thing.”
“We needed their statements. What hard evidence do we have on Paola, Walsh, and the assistant director? They might have walked away from court without this. Now we can be sure.”
“Yes.” They walked toward the police vehicles. “A short time ago, they arrested the general in Prague. He claims that he was only thinking of your security when he put the tracking device in your car.”
“Maybe he was.”
“I don’t think so.” Trokan’s anger showed. “I always liked him.” He shrugged. “I suppose that reveals that my judgment is fallible.”
“No, it doesn’t. I have absolute trust in the colonel’s infallibility.”
“Are you making fun of me again, Commander?”
“Never, Colonel.”
They reached the vehicles. Jana looked back; her three colleagues from The Hague were being taken out of the house in handcuffs.
“I’m tired.” She relaxed against Trokan. Jana was more than tired. She felt drained.
Chapter 48
After they stitched up her scalp at the hospital, Jana went to the professor’s room. He was out of intensive care and Jana had arranged for him to have a private room, but it was empty. She asked the floor nurse where he was. The nurse pointed down the hall to one of the other wards. Before Jana reached it, she could hear the peal of children’s laughter. Jana knew what he was doing.
Not just the “Clown Professor of Magic,” as he had titled himself, but the “Crown Prince of Magic,” as she now thought of him. The prince was again in his kingdom.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
The Magician's Accomplice Page 27
