by Brian Drake
But not today.
“Wow, look,” Nina said. They were driving over a bridge, the Limmat River below. The river intersected the city and the wide waterway accommodated craft of all configurations. Nina pointed to an enclosed yacht, quite large, complete with blacked-out windows and a roof-mounted radar dish.
“We’re not buying a yacht, either,” Dane said.
Stone cleared the bridge and continued on, jumping on an expressway for two exits. Another couple of turns. But Dane knew they were still a few miles away.
“You see something, Dev?” Dane said. He unbuckled his seatbelt to look out the back window.
“Just making sure,” Stone replied. “There was a taxi sticking to us pretty good.”
Stone turned up Beethovenstrasse and the tall steel-and-glass Barclays building towered above all other structures on the street like a behemoth. Godzilla ready to pounce.
The parking garage across the street displayed a sign saying spaces remained, so Stone pulled in and found an empty slot in a back corner. The rest of the level was crammed with vehicles.
Dane exited the SUV with Hana. He told Stone to stay with the vehicle and directed Nina and McConn to scout for potential trouble.
Dane and Hana crossed the street, squinting against the sun’s glare off the glass of the huge bank building.
The lobby was polished mirror-bright. Spotless floor, walls bare but for a minimum of decoration. Teller windows lined the wall in front of them, each teller busy with a customer and a line fifteen deep. Dane led Hana to an area with six desks neatly lined three-by-three. Only one was currently occupied. The sign on the man’s desk said Special Accounts.
The man looked up from a chart as Dane approached.
“Ah, hello, Herr Dane.” He rose and extended a hand. Dane shook it with a smile.
“Peter, this is Hana Kader, she has a safe deposit box we need to access. Hana, Peter Bergstrom. Best banker in Zurich.”
The man actually blushed a little as he denied the allegation. He wore a suit more expensive than anything in Dane’s wardrobe. His round pot belly confirmed his middle age, but his hair was black as night.
“What is your account number, Fraulein?” He passed her a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Hana wrote out the ten-digit number. Bergstrom typed it into the computer, made a note of his own and asked Dane and Hana to follow him.
They went through a door marked Private and descended stairs to a maze of safe deposit boxes. Bergstrom led them down a row, turned left and stopped midway down the next row. He inserted a key in a box marked 047. Hana inserted her own key in the second lock and they turned at the same time.
“Return the key to me when you’re done,” Bergstrom said. “Time for a cigar later, Herr Dane?”
“This is a quick trip, Peter, sorry.”
“Next time.” Bergstrom departed with a smile. Dane and Hana waited until the banker was long gone.
She opened the door of the box and removed a rectangular case, flat black with no markings. Lifting the lid, she revealed the thumb drive inside.
“There it is. Everything my father collected on Graypoole.”
Dane picked up the memory stick and dropped it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Let’s--”
The overhead lights began flashing on and off. Hana gasped. The shrill tone of a fire alarm pierced through the ceiling.
Dane dialed Nina. “Somebody’s pulled the fire alarm, get ready.”
“Copy.”
Dane stowed his cell as Bergstrom hurriedly rounded the corner. “Fire alarm, Herr Dane, we must clear the building!”
25
Graypoole’s team in Zurich, led by one Michel Badeaux, closed in on the bank.
Badeaux, in a separate car from the SUV his men occupied, parked on the street. Through their interconnected earpieces, Badeaux’s crew said they were in the garage and weren’t far from Dane’s Mercedes.
“Only one man in the vehicle,” the crew chief said.
Badeaux, wearing aviators with a tan top-coat over a gray suit, stood outside Barclays watching the street. “Where are the others?”
“Must have exited before we got here.”
“I’m going inside. Wait for my signal.”
“Which will be?”
“The fire alarm, what else?”
Badeaux put his hands in the top-coat pockets as he headed for the front doors, the bright reflection off the glass unable to penetrate the aviators’ tint. He removed the sunglasses when he stepped into the lobby.
So if he were a fire alarm, where would he hide? Badeaux chuckled to himself. His right hand remained in the top-coat pocket and he flicked off the safety of the automatic hidden there. The gun was not his preferred Glock-18, which he’d left behind in Paris, but an untested nine-millimeter FN FNX. Sure, he had 17-rounds in the magazine, but no idea if the gun fired straight. There’d been no time to practice. He cursed his circumstances. Sometimes you had to improvise with what tools you had available.
He spotted the fire alarm. The red box with the pull-down switch was on the bare wall near the desks. Badeaux took two steps toward it and stopped. Across the floor, a door marked Private swung open and a paunchy gent came through, not even giving Badeaux a glance as he crossed to the teller cage to speak with a woman behind one of the windows.
Badeaux reached the alarm, pulled the lever, and dropped behind the desk a foot away. As the alarm blared, he took out the FN pistol and curled his finger around the trigger.
The paunchy man moved fast as everybody made for the exit. The man dashed through the Private door once again.
Bergstrom led the way back up the steps with Dane and Hana behind him, Dane clutching his gun close to his leg.
The alarm could only mean one thing.
As they reached the door, Dane said, “Stop,” and cut in front of Bergstrom, popping the door open an inch.
“Herr Dane, what--”
Dane held up a hand and peeked out.
The two bank guards were ushering out the last of the customers and staff. The shrill alarm was louder now. One guard spotted Dane and urgently waved him forward.
“Stay behind me,” Dane ordered. He moved through the doorway first, the other two behind him. The teller cage was empty, the loan desks deserted; there was not a soul other than the guards, yet the ghosts of battles past whispered all was not well.
Dane moved faster, Hana and Bergstrom shuffling to keep up and then a gunman in a top-coat rose from behind a desk.
Dane stepped in front of Hana. She collided with a yelp and fell, jostling Dane’s aim in the process. The gunman fired once. Somebody screamed. Dane fired once. The gunman’s head snapped back, painting the wall behind with a splash of red.
Dane yelled for the guards but they were already running with their own revolvers in hand.
Hana, still sprawled on the floor, was unhurt, but Bergstrom had fallen next to her and continued to wail. His white shirt was stained red, the gunman’s bullet having punched solidly through his shoulder.
Dane put away his .45 and helped the guards get the best banker in Zurich to his feet. The guards carried him out while Dane took Hana’s hand and broke right. Behind the loan desks was an emergency exit. As they crashed through the door into an alley and made for the street in front of the bank, the first fire engine pulled up, sirens loud. Traffic behind the engine stopped while everybody after the engine kept going and soon the street was nearly clear of vehicles. Plenty of pedestrians remained to watch the action.
Dane hauled Hana across the street. Nina met them at the sidewalk, her face full of concern. The three hustled for the garage. McConn caught up, staying behind Hana, and the sounds in front of the bank faded as they entered the parking structure.
“What happened?” Nina said as they hurried past the parked cars for the Mercedes a few yards away.
“One gunman. I took him out but--”
McConn shouted, “Get down!”
Three shooters
emerged from between cars across the aisle, each toting stubby CZ Scorpion Eon3 submachine guns.
Dane grabbed Hana by the shoulders and forced her between a truck and a van, the young woman letting out a shriek as Dane landed on top of her and Nina and McConn opened fire. The popping of their handguns was soon drowned out by the crackle of the Scorpions.
The truck and van rocked as bullets tore through metal, glass shattering, shards raining down on Dane. He felt a few cut his neck and sink down the back of his shirt. He cursed as Hana screamed again, the Scorpions going silent as Nina’s nine-millimeter cracked twice more.
“Gotta move,” McConn shouted, leaping over Dane and Hana to the aisle ahead.
Dane and Hana jumped up, Nina shoving Dane forward as they gained the next aisle and ran, keeping low.
“I got one,” Nina said, “but there’s two left.”
More Scorpion fire smashed into the cars blocking them from the gunners, Nina and McConn stretching out their right arms to fire blindly as they ran.
The Mercedes SUV screeched to a stop ahead of them, Stone shooting out the window. The Scorpions stopped for a moment. Dane and the others piled in and the shooters opened up again as Stone burned rubber for the exit. A stray round nicked the rear window. Stone reached the street and wrenched the wheel to the right, speeding down the empty road with the fire engine behind him, pedestrians agape and police cruisers approaching in the distance.
26
Stone made the first right, the SUV’s tires screaming again.
Dane fidgeted in his seat, then removed his jacket and pulled up his shirt. The pieces of glass dropped onto the seat. Only one was a little red and a bloody spot quickly appeared on the back of his shirt.
“Anybody got any holes in them?” Stone said.
Hana sat slumped in her seat, staring straight ahead. She was wedged between Dane and Nina and Nina put an arm around her.
“None that we weren’t born with, right, kid?” Nina said.
Hana concurred.
“Straight to the airport, Dev, we gotta fly.”
“They got General Walker,” Lukavina said.
“Oh, no.” Dane said into his cell phone, standing against the galley counter at back of Stone’s jet. They were still on the airport tarmac.
“He’ll live,” Lukavina said, “but he was shot twice. We were trying to protect him from the threat only to have that very threat living across the street from his house.”
“I’m sorry, Len.”
“Sometimes we can’t win.”
“Maybe you’ll like my news about Zurich. Stone is setting up the computer now so we can look at Kader’s files. I’ll get back with you when we have something.”
“No, you’ll send the information to me.”
“Of course, Len, after we pick out the juiciest lead.”
“Are you done fooling around?”
“You weren’t in San Francisco.”
“Wherever you go next, drop Hana off at the nearest US Embassy. We’ll pick her up. We’re moving her father into protective custody as well, until this is over.”
Dane said okay, hung up and joined the others.
Stone was at the table, busy with the laptop connected to the TV. The forward big screen was blank. “Almost got it,” he said.
Dane stood with hands on hips. Hana sat across from Nina, having barely touched her drink. She held the glass but had a stare fixed on the carpet. He went over and sat beside her.
“You okay?”
“I need to talk to my father,” Hana said.
Dane nodded and took out his phone. He called Kader direct, the line answered by one of his men.
“It’s Dane, Hana wants to talk.”
He handed Hana the phone and joined Stone at the table. He had the files on the thumb drive displayed on the monitor. “What do we have?”
Nina and McConn wandered over too.
Stone scrolled through pages of typed notes. “A lot. Kader basically kept a diary, making notes with corresponding dates and crossing out what wasn’t actionable any longer. But see these notations here, here? This is all stuff the CIA used to assassinate the elder Graypoole and go after his lieutenants.”
“Anything not notated that way?” Nina said.
Dane said, “Go to the end. We don’t want the old info. It’s useless by now.”
Stone jumped to the end of the file, finding more notes. “Here’s a recent entry.” He scrolled up and stopped when the screen filled with a photo of an older man.
“Mister Donovan Black. American father, French mother, lives in France on an estate. He inherited the place fifteen years ago from his maternal grandfather.”
“He’s a retired investor,” Dane said.
“How do you know?”
Nina said, “Because we worked for him once.”
“What kind of job?” Stone said.
“He wanted an armed escort for some expensive paintings. We moved them from one place to another.”
“Are you sure it was art?” McConn said.
“Never had a reason to check more than once,” Dane said. “He collects art. A lot of it.”
McConn continued, “Broke a hip six months ago so he walks with a slight limp and uses a cane, but he’s in decent shape for a man pushing 80.”
“Any hint he finances terrorists?” Dane said.
“None that I can find and there’s a note here that says why the CIA didn’t act on this information when Kader presented it. Could be they never made a connection. His official money trail is clean, but he does fund a charity that could be funky. Lots of redirects, but the Agency could never find definitive evidence, according to Kader. He argued otherwise but admits he found no hard proof. If he is funding Graypoole, the charity is where to look.”
“What does the charity do?”
“Supports art education in Europe. Every year he hosts an auction at his estate and the proceeds go to the charity.”
Nina said, “When’s the next auction?”
Stone highlighted a series of dates, many that had come and gone over the last few years, but only the most recent entry wasn’t crossed out. “Three days from now. Tickets are sold out but they’ll let last-minute people in for a five-thousand-dollar donation.”
“Let’s do it,” Dane said.
Black’s estate sat outside Guerande northeast of Pornichet. Dane and Nina, in a rented BMW, followed Route de Herbignae all the way to Kerguence Road. A short hook around a lake and the gate of Black’s property loomed ahead.
It was a very nice ride with little traffic and the lush countryside along Route de Herbignae made the ride even more pleasant. It was easy to forget why they were there, but Dane didn’t let that happen. Lilly Klove’s face was never far from his mind’s eye.
The five cars ahead passed through the gate one-by-one and then it was Dane’s turn to present his invitation to the guard. The guard wore a white shirt and black slacks with the name of his security company on one sleeve. No weapon. He spoke English, cleared Dane and Nina and told them to enjoy their stay. “Follow the other cars,” he added.
Dane steered the BMW along the access road.
The main house covered most of the property, multiple stories; two similar buildings sat on either side. The trail of cars led to the building on the left of the main house, so the other was either servant’s quarters or more guest space.
Valets met them at the front of the building. Porters unloaded the luggage. Dane and Nina’s porter loaded their suitcases onto a cart and led them inside.
The entryway opened on a large room with marble tile and support beams. Paintings hung on walls. Dane recognized a few. A Rembrandt. Van Gogh. There was a lot of money on those walls. A short elevator ride brought them to the fourth floor. The porter deposited them at their room and Dane tipped the man well.
They started to unpack and made small talk about the trip. Dane extracted the Stone-supplied shaver and turned it on. He continued the small talk as he moved aro
und the room. A light on the shaver remained green all around the room. He checked the bathroom and closet. The green light remained. Black’s people had not placed any eavesdropping devices in the room.
Yet.
Dane turned off the shaver. “Clear.”
Nina opened the curtains to let the sun inside. The view showed part of the countryside and the motorway they’d traveled on.
Dane joined her at the window. Two riders on horseback rode in the distance.
“It’s like a regular five-star,” she said.
Dane removed the Scoremaster from his case and loaded a magazine. “I’m thinking of what’s beneath the surface.” He put the gun in his shoulder holster.
“Come and sit down,” she said. “Relax a bit.”
Dane let out a grunt and took the chair beside her. He placed his arms on the armrests and stared ahead.
“What’s the problem?”
“Did we do anything wrong when we transported Black’s art?”
“If we did, he hid it well.”
“I don’t like being played.”
“This auction covers three days,” she said. “If we can’t come up with answers in that time, we need another line of work.”
“I’m bothered neither the CIA nor Kader found anything to hang on Black.”
