by David Freed
“No.”
He wore a short black leather skirt, knee-high black boots over fishnets, an orange tube top under a studded, short-waisted denim jacket, and a straight ebony hair wig with bangs, like Cher’s. Too much makeup. Way too much perfume. It was his arms that gave him away. Too much muscle definition. The arms never lie. He fired up his cigarette as he fell in beside me.
“Whatever it is you’re selling,” I said, “I’m not buying.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing, honey.”
“Such is life.”
About three blocks from my hotel, I walked past a stone church that I had noticed driving in from the airport. I turned down a narrow side street. The hooker tagged along beside me, struggling to keep up on four-inch heels.
“Slow down, honey. Where do you go?”
“Nirvana, hopefully. But first, according to the Buddha, I have to perfect a state of dispassion. Then and only then can I achieve freedom from suffering.”
He turned his head, exhaling a stream of smoke, and glanced over his shoulder. “Are all Americans this weird?”
“We prefer ‘delightfully eccentric.’ ”
His backward glance and my gut should have warned me that what was weird was him hurrying along with me the way he was. I should’ve recognized that there was something telling in the anxious manner in which he looked back, over his shoulder. In hindsight, I realized that I hadn’t felt threatened by him. That was my mistake.
He accelerated his step, turned back in my direction with his hips squared and fists balled and punched me hard in the face. I knew instantly that my nose was broken. Whoever said you see stars when your beak breaks has never suffered a true break. What you see are entire galaxies. I shrugged off the shock of the blow and ducked a millisecond before he landed a second punch, a big roundhouse right, coming up underneath him and slamming him linebacker-style into the brick wall of an apartment building. I heard something crack. I’m not sure if it was his back or his skull. Maybe both. Either way, he dropped to the cobblestone street, moaning, and didn’t try to get up. I booted him right in his panties to make sure he stayed there. Why he’d attacked me was a question I didn’t have time to explore before it was answered for me.
Sprinting like Dobermans from around the corner, angling straight at me, were the two goons I’d seen in the bar with Charlie Manson less than an hour earlier. Something told me they weren’t coming to help me with my nose.
The taller of the two led the way. The street was dark but the light from the boulevard was close enough and bright enough that I could see the full-frame semiauto he was drawing from the shoulder rig under his flapping leather jacket. The pistol had an elongated barrel, equipped with what some might call a “silencer,” even though no such thing exists, despite what Hollywood would have you believe. A silencer really is a suppressor, designed to reduce the sound of the explosion a round makes when it’s discharged. No gunshot can ever be completely silenced. But that’s not really the point. The point is, he was swinging the barrel of the pistol toward me, and then he double-tapped two rounds on the run. That was his mistake, not stopping to aim.
I juked right and the bullets went left, thudding into a blue PVC recycling bin behind me. He didn’t get off a third shot. I didn’t give him the chance. As he came on, I rolled right and he pivoted awkwardly, trying to adjust his fire. His momentum and adrenaline had carried him too close to me. I kicked his feet out from under him, then quickly reversed, bending his wrist back, the one that was attached to his gun hand, slipped my index finger through the trigger guard where his index finger already was, squeezed, and put a bullet in his forehead.
Bringing up the rear, Goon Number Two screeched to a stop like he was in a Roadrunner cartoon, turned, and ran.
No dogs barked. No bedroom lights flicked on. Prague slept. My nose hurt like you can’t believe.
I retrieved the dead man’s wallet and stuffed it in my back pocket. His pistol was a 9-millimeter Grach, otherwise known as a Yarygin, a common Russian police sidearm. I took that too.
Less than a block away was the river. Making sure I wasn’t leaving a blood trail, I walked to the water’s edge and heaved the gun as far as I could into the calm, black currents.
THE NIGHT clerk peered at me in horror through the windows of the front door as I pressed the after-hours security button to be let in. I held up my room key for him to see. Reluctantly he pushed the buzzer. He stepped back as I entered the lobby, as though I might bleed on him. Persuading him that I didn’t require the hotel’s on-call physician took some doing.
“My God, what happened?”
“One of your quaint little cobblestones jumped up and tripped me,” I said, breathing through my mouth because I couldn’t through my nostrils. “No big deal. I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure you don’t need the doctor?”
“I’m sure. There is one thing you could do for me, though.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You Europeans, I realize, aren’t big on serving ice in your drinks, like we Americans are. Would you happen to have any you could spare?”
“Right away.”
He made a beeline for the dining room and disappeared into the kitchen. When he returned, he was toting a pair of large plastic Baggies filled with crushed ice. I thanked him and jabbed the button for the elevator with my elbow because my hands had blood on them. He stared until the doors closed behind me.
My bathroom mirror revealed why he’d reacted the way he did. I had a one-inch gash under my right eye and the cartilage of my nose was noticeably bent, just below the bridge. The blood that had cascaded down my cheeks and chin was still wet. I ran warm water in the pedestal sink, got a washcloth, and cleaned myself off as best I could. Then I took off my shirt, emptied the Baggies of ice into the sink, and stuck my face in up to my ears. When my head was sufficiently frozen, I took a deep breath, gripped my nose with both hands, and reset it. Forcing myself not to scream and wake up every other guest in the hotel only enhanced the agony. I’ve sustained gunshot wounds; this was much worse.
If I could take comfort in anything, it was in knowing that bad guys tend not to call the police after bad things happen to them. They’re inclined to settle their own scores, so I was confident that Czech authorities would not be knocking on my door anytime soon and asking me about the man I’d left dead in the street. That’s assuming no civilians had actually witnessed the shooting and had traced me to the hotel. My confidence level was considerably lower as it related to the second goon and Charlie Manson, their boss who’d sent both of them to take me out. Where I was bunking in Prague was obviously no secret to Charlie; he’d stopped in earlier, before I’d even arrived. Why had he tried to kill me? What had I done or said that compelled him to make the attempt? I had to get out of Dodge before he came back and finished the job. Only I barely had the energy to move.
I lay down on the bed with a clean towel pressed on my face to catch any seepage. A ten-minute catnap, I told myself, and I’d be good to go. When I regained consciousness seven hours later, it was to the whine of a vacuum cleaner in the hallway outside my room and someone knocking sharply at my door. Sunlight filtered in through the curtains.
“Housekeeping, good morning. Housekeeping, hello?”
A key slid into the lock. I rolled out of bed, trying to get my eyes to work, grabbed a wine corkscrew off the dresser, and blocked the door with my foot just as it opened. If the maid was a ruse and Charlie and his troops were behind her, the first guy through the door was going to get a corkscrew in the neck. If it was only the maid, I didn’t want her seeing bloody clothes or towels strewn about before I’d had a chance to clean the room myself. No need setting off more alarms.
“Come back tomorrow. Thank you.”
She conversed in Czech with someone else out in the hallway—I assumed another maid. The vacuum cleaner stopped. They went away.
No one had come for me during the night. I doubted they would in dayligh
t, but you never know. My watch showed 1005 hours. That made it by my still-groggy calculations 3:05 A.M. in the Midwest where Buzz was. I sat back down on the bed, my face throbbing, and called him.
“This can’t be very good.” He sounded half asleep.
“You’re nothing if not perceptive, Buzz.” “Talk to me.”
“Went flying. Had some engine problems,” I said. “I had a hot start the other day. Got the plane airborne though.”
Buzz exhaled over the phone, suddenly very alert. “What type of plane was it?”
“Ercoupe variant. Not sure of the make.”
“Single engine?”
“A-ffirm.”
We spoke cryptically, in coded terms we’d used when we were both with Alpha: the night before (“the other day”), I’d killed a man (“hot start”), a single European of unknown nationality (“single-engine” “Ercoupe variant”), and had so far escaped arrest (“got the plane airborne”). I described as succinctly as I could, in case the line was bugged, how the meeting with Buzz’s intelligence contact, Charlie Manson, hadn’t gone well, and how I’d been ambushed afterward. Buzz told me he’d cable our embassy in Prague to alert them that I might be seeking refuge there.
“Weather could be moving in,” he said. “I’d take off sooner rather than later.”
“I’ll check back in with you when I’m feet wet.”
“Fly safe, Logan.”
Even in self-defense, Washington generally frowns on contract agents terminating foreign nationals abroad, especially if those agents fail to complete their assignments, as I had mine. There would be inquiries back home, classified debriefings lasting days. I didn’t relish the notion of having to go through the process, assuming I made it out of Prague. More significantly, I couldn’t abide the notion of leaving the mission undone. I could feel my stomach twisting.
I took a quick shower and toweled off, grateful for the steam that covered the mirror and hid the reflection of my face, which I was sure looked worse the morning after. The shirt I’d worn and the washcloth I’d used to wipe off the blood, I stuffed into the empty ice Baggies. I’d find somewhere to dump them on my way to the airport. As I pulled on my jeans, I remembered the wallet that belonged to the man I’d shot. What I found inside of it was enough to make me risk staying in Prague longer than I should have.
ELEVEN
You can learn a lot about a dead man from his wallet. Sometimes what it doesn’t hold can be more revealing.
The man I’d shot carried no driver’s license, no credit cards, nothing with his photo on it. This suggested to me that he’d been working in an undercover capacity and had made an attempt to sanitize his identity. The wallet itself was nylon and olive drab in color, a tri-folded, zippered affair known in military circles as a “tactical” wallet. This suggested that he might’ve been in the armed forces at some point in his life. He was tall and powerfully built, like many soldiers. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t speculate on where he was from, though his choice in weaponry suggested Russia.
His wallet held 24,000 Czech korunas—about $1,000— and a Hustler Club international membership card with no name on it. There were also color prints of two photographs, both folded into fourths. The first was a grainy surveillance shot of me exiting the main terminal at Prague’s Václav Havel Airport. The second photo was identical to the one Kang pulled from his floor safe in the back room of his bodega in Rancho Bonita—Congressman Pierce Walton and the late Roy Hollister getting busy with two nude honeys in the back of Hollister’s jet. Scribbled in a man’s hand on the back of the picture was, “Slunná 7, Střešovice, Praha 6.”
Prudence dictated that I catch the first flight out of Prague— I could figure out when I got back to the United States what the dead guy had been doing with the two photos—but experience demanded other tactics. I had already established boots on the ground, as the expression goes. Countless previous ops had taught me that getting in to a target area often is more than half the battle. Getting out would have to wait.
I stuffed the korunas into my own wallet, refolded the photos, and shoved them into the back pocket of my jeans. The goon’s wallet and Hustler Club card I ripped up with the corkscrew and flushed in pieces down the toilet. After that, I went downstairs for breakfast.
If you’ve never personally gone through it, it’s somewhat difficult to know what it feels like, that heart-pounding moment when you open the door of your hotel room in a foreign land, fully expecting to find the authorities waiting with weapons drawn, and the relief that comes when you realize they’re not there. The respite, unfortunately, is temporary. Down every elevator and around every corner, there remains an unsettling anticipation, of being arrested at any second, or shot. It’s a feeling you never get used to, the hypervigilance, always looking over your shoulder. All you can do is compartmentalize the dread the best you can and, on that morning, anyway, eat like it’s your last meal.
The hotel’s complimentary buffet breakfast offerings were laid out in china platters on a long, linen-covered table, in a luxuriously appointed dining room better suited to royalty than a working stiff whose concept of haute cuisine is a bur-rito. Exotic sliced cheeses, buttery pastries, frittata, sausage, roasted potatoes, fresh-squeezed everything, coffee served in a silver decanter with steamed milk on the side. Other than an older Asian couple sitting in the corner finishing their meals, I was alone in the dining room. I parked myself on a chair covered in plush red velvet, under a crystal chandelier and at a location where I could maintain an unrestricted line of sight on every avenue of approach. I ate until my stomach ached more than my nose.
The waitress’s grimace when she came to refill my coffee reminded me what my punching bag of a face looked like.
“That bad, huh?” I said.
“No, no, no.” She smiled and recovered quickly. “You look good. Really.”
I would’ve smiled at her lie, but it hurt too much. Her name, according to the tag she wore on her black waitress dress, was Tereza. Cerulean eyes, raven hair cut stylishly short, good legs. If only I were twenty years younger and not concerned about being thrown into a gulag at any moment.
“Are you from Prague, Tereza?”
“Yes.”
“Beautiful city.”
“Many things to see, yes?”
“For sure.”
Two men in suits walked into the hotel, too old and soft-looking to set off my alarm bells. I kept an eye on them regardless as they ambled to the front desk.
“Could you please do me a favor, Tereza?”
“Yes, certainly.”
I reached into my pocket and showed her the copy of the photo with the handwriting on the back. “Can you please tell me what this says?”
She knelt down to take a closer look. She smelled of vanilla body wash and tobacco. “This is address, Slunná 7 Street, in Střešovice. Very nice area. Like, um . . .” She tapped an index finger against her cherry red lips. “Like, Beverly Hills, 90210, yes?”
“Worth seeing?”
“Oh, yes. Very beautiful.”
THE WAITRESS wasn’t lying. The neighborhood known as Střešovice was upscale by any measure. Gated mansions. Leafy streets. Beautiful, cosmetically enhanced people. I asked the taxi driver to drop me two blocks from Slunná 7 Street, but his English wasn’t great. Only after I paid the fare and he drove off did I spot the street number and realize I was standing directly in front of Number 7.
The address translated to a classy, three-story villa with a red tile roof that looked out onto the boulevard through tall windows barred with decorative wrought iron. A high iron fence, the pickets of which resembled medieval pikes, ringed the estate’s immaculately kept gardens. Whoever lived there clearly wasn’t hurting for money. I didn’t gawk and kept walking, hoping I hadn’t been seen.
Less than a block away and across the street, amid a row of stylish boutiques and eateries, was a small, unpretentious café. Ladder-back wooden chairs lined a counter behind the front window
where one could park himself and keep an eye on the comings and goings at Number 7. I ordered an espresso, seated myself along the counter, and was about to call Buzz, to have him find out what he could about who lived there, when the villa’s front gate opened.
Out came a small, skinny dog with a jeweled collar. On the other end of the dog’s leash was Charlie Manson in his sunglasses, gray trousers, and a cream-colored crewneck sweater. Behind him was the goon who’d run from me hours earlier. The dog and both men were angling straight toward me.
I turned my back to the window as they passed, quickly finishing the last of my espresso, and fell in behind them. The goon was bringing up the rear, focused on his phone, texting as he walked. He had luxurious shoulder-length hair, Fabio-style, with a Fabio-like build and swagger. Big chest. Thin legs. Mucho time in the weight room. The bulge at the small of his back under his jacket wasn’t hard to spot if you knew what you were looking for. I quickly closed the gap between us and yanked the pistol out before he knew what had hit him, jamming the barrel into his spine.
“Keep your arms down,” I said to him quietly, “and keep walking, nice and slow.”
He did as I ordered.
Careful to keep the gun close between us so others on the street couldn’t see it, I quickly patted him down for other weapons. He was clean.
“Now tell your boss to stop.”
He said something in Czech. Manson turned and as he came to a halt I made sure he saw the gun, a Russian Grach like the one I’d ditched in the river. Other people passed us on the sidewalk, businessmen, students, young mothers. Eyes down, earbuds in, nobody seemed to notice what was going on or, if they did, pretended not to as they hurried along. Manson stared at the pistol in my hand with an ashen expression.
Ahead and to our left was a narrow alley. I nodded toward it—let’s go—and followed the two of them, the gun pressed into his goon’s back.
“Love your hair. What is that fabulous fragrance—lavender?”
“You are a dead man,” the goon said in a thick accent without looking back at me.
