by Tom Barber
Finishing the sweep, the point man turned to his Sergeant. ‘He’s not here, sir.’
The SWAT team Sergeant didn’t reply. A strong chemical smell was hanging in the air, as if the bathroom had just been cleaned.
Frowning, he sniffed again, the point man doing the same.
‘What the hell is that?’
Inside the parking lot in New York, the larger of the two men had just finished taking off the last of the white water-based paint when his phone vibrated in his pocket, indicating a new message. As the other man finished changing the plates, using the set they’d had on the vehicle from their recent trip to Scranton, his partner pulled the cell and read what he’d just been sent.
Find April Evans and do what you have to do.
I’m buying you more time.
Whistling to his partner and tossing him the phone so he could read the message, the big guy used the jet gun to sluice away the old white paint on the concrete then quickly stowed the gun and barrel back in the van. Slamming the doors, he jumped into the driver’s seat, taking his phone back from his partner as he climbed in beside him.
The larger man fired the engine and releasing the handbrake, headed to the exit with the van now black and with different plates from those it had arrived with minutes earlier. As they pulled back out onto the street and headed north, they passed a cop car to their left parked at a red light, the two officers inside checking out the van as it passed.
However, neither showed any interest in the vehicle and it continued on its way out of the neighbourhood, heading uptown and out of the search area.
At that moment inside a nightclub in South Brooklyn, a black-haired Eastern-European re-read a text message he’d received a minute or so ago, just to make sure he was reading it right. Then he turned, moving quickly through the club towards a booth at the back, past three other members of the organisation and several employees carrying cases of booze to the bars to stock up in preparation for business tonight.
At the back of the club, a thickset black-haired man sitting with a three-quarter full bottle of whiskey in front of him noticed his lieutenant approaching and poured himself another drink. At forty six years old, Vladimir Bashev was a man who’d fought his way up from the bottom. He’d survived because he was intelligent, vicious and brutal; he had no boundaries and no conscience which, coupled with his ambition, had resulted in him achieving his ultimate goal; induction into this prized circle in New York.
The club was in the Little Odessa neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the New York home of this particular Eastern-European Mafia; Bashev was the leader. The network that his crew was part of was far-reaching. The Prizraki, ghosts in English, had factions in Moscow, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh and San Diego, and Bashev was the current head of the New York branch, the most respected of them all here in the United States. Although formed eighty or so years ago back home, the gang had first arrived in New York in the 1970s and its members had rapidly built a formidable reputation in the criminal underworld, respected and feared in equal measure. They’d been dubbed Prizraki for good reason, operating in an environment of intense secrecy in which membership couldn’t be bought but earned.
However, the gang’s reputation hadn’t protected them from experiencing a shit-storm of a year, Bashev’s first and now possibly last in the city. He knew he couldn’t survive much longer if this continued. After the events of the past few months, paranoia had settled over the club like smog, flowing over them all as things showed no sign of improving.
The Prizraki and Bashev in particular were specialists at making people disappear.
This year, however, the situation had been reversed.
Swallowing a mouthful of whiskey, the strong alcohol slightly easing the foreign anxiety he was feeling, Bashev looked up at his lieutenant as he reached the table. Marat took his silence as an invitation to sit. As he slid into the booth, he pushed his cell phone across the lacquered table towards his boss, the device turned so the screen was facing the larger man.
‘Valentin just messaged me,’ he said in his native tongue, keeping his voice low. ‘Names and addresses. These are the people.’
Bashev paused, his glass halfway to his lips.
Lowering his drink back to the table he looked down, examining the message but not touching the phone.
He studied the list on the screen then glanced up at Marat.
‘I thought he was gone. He hasn’t been here in over two weeks.’
‘Said he’s been laying low, trying to find out who’s behind all this shit. And he’s done it.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Don’t recognise the names. But he said they’re behind the disappearances.’
‘How’d he get these?’
‘I don’t know; he didn’t say. But at last we have something, boss.’
Bashev scanned the list for a moment longer. Then he made a decision.
‘Go with Ilya, Sivic and Nemkov,’ he said quietly. ‘Call Valentin and tell him to meet up with you. Take whoever you find at these places out to Long Island. When you’re on your way, call me and I’ll meet you out there. We’ll find out if these people are involved soon enough.’
Marat nodded, pocketed his cell and rose, heading for three men by the door. He passed on their orders quickly before they all left the building.
Watching the four men depart, Bashev refilled his glass and swallowed, feeling the alcohol burn his throat and making his temples throb; whiskey always gave him a headache but he hated vodka, something he’d always kept quiet about. Glancing around the club, he looked at the remaining three men who’d stayed with him as security. Three enforcers; all he had left. The humiliation burnt as strong as the alcohol.
Cursing under his breath in his native tongue, Bashev took another mouthful of whiskey and kept his eyes on the door.
SEVENTEEN
At the motel outside Scranton the forecourt had been closed off, the SWAT truck now parked beside two newly-arrived CSI vans, investigators examining the scene.
Inside the room Carlos Goya had been renting, the SWAT Sergeant finished talking with one of the crime scene investigators and then stepped outside. He paused for a moment as he took a deep cleansing breath of air; the room wasn’t large and the number of people crowded in there combined with the lingering chemical smell had made it an unpleasant place to be.
Standing by the team’s truck thirty feet away, one of his men saw him reappear and approached, a cell phone in his hand.
‘Sir, you’ve got a call,’ he said. ‘It’s a Sergeant in New York. He’s the one who contacted the Department about the fugitive.’
Stepping forward, the SWAT team leader took the phone. ‘Waters.’
‘This is Sergeant Matt Shepherd, NYPD. I’m co-ordinating the search for Carlos Goya. Is he there?’
‘Afraid not, but he was definitely staying here,’ Waters replied. ‘The clerk confirmed it from your man’s file photo.’
‘How long’s he been at the motel?’
‘Nine days.’
‘No sign of him now?’
‘Afraid not, but there’s still a bag here. We’re thinking he either saw us and split or he’s coming back. We’re going to pull back and wait in case he does.’
‘Is there any kind of chemical smell in the bathroom?’
Waters paused. ‘How did you know?’
There was a pause.
‘Oh Christ.’
‘You know something we don’t?’
‘Has anyone swabbed the tub?’
‘Forensics showed up a few minutes ago. Hold on.’
Walking forward, Waters worked his way back into the motel room, stepping past the teams inside and going towards the bathroom, that acrid smell hanging in the air. An investigator was kneeling by the bath-tub with a testing kit, having just taken a sample. Swilling a small glass vial, he looked at the mixture as it turned pink.
‘What is it?’ Waters asked, the phone in his hand still connected to Shepherd in N
ew York. ‘Bleach?’
The man shook his head, holding up the sample. ‘It’s mostly sodium hydroxide. Lye.’
‘You hear that?’ Waters said down the phone.
‘I did,’ Shepherd said. ‘You don’t need to pull back and wait, Sergeant.’
Pause.
‘He’s not coming back.’
In New York, the blacked-out 4x4 carrying the four Eastern European Mafia enforcers was already on its way through South Brooklyn, heading towards the Bridge into Lower Manhattan. In the front passenger seat, Marat sent Valentin a message ordering him to meet them at their first stop then opened the text with the names and addresses again, burning them into his memory.
Thirty two years old, he’d been a mid-level guy until a month back when a sudden lack of personnel meant he’d received a quick promotion to become Bashev’s right-hand man. Unlike Vladimir he was New York born and bred, and before his promotion had been carrying out a variety of tasks, including body-guarding, chauffeuring and disposing of people, alive or dead. He had his own methods for the latter but the boss wanted everyone at these residences taken alive tonight so that’s what was going to happen.
Marat knew what awaited these people when they got to Long Island. The Prizraki were involved in a number of different enterprises; one of them currently being a housing development company used to launder money. Right now they had an extremely wealthy client whose home they were building to his exacting specifications; one of his requirements had been a large swimming pool, which had been dug out but not poured with cement yet. Each person on this list would be tortured for information regarding the whereabouts of the missing men; then their wrists would be broken and they’d be buried alive in a coffin laid in the swimming pool’s pit. Cement would be poured over the top, covering the boxes and any trace of the victims. Four inches of concrete and nine feet of chlorinated water was enough to protect from the best sniffer dog on the planet. It was very effective. The method had been used successfully many times before.
Nemkov drove onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the car holding the four mobsters anonymous amongst a stream of others heading in the same direction. Hidden by the blacked-out windows, Marat pulled out a suppressed HK UMP sub-machine gun from under his seat, slotted a thirty round magazine into the weapon and snapped the working parts forward. Aside from being fitted with a silencer, the gun was fresh out of the box and didn’t have so much as a scratch on it, Marat enjoying the distinct and comforting smell of gun oil. Behind him in the back seats, Ilya and Sivic followed his cue and pulled out two other silenced UMPs, the harsh sound of magazines being slotted into weapons and rounds being loaded filling the car.
As well as keeping their police records immaculately clean and their fingerprints rubbed down, the Prizraki always cycled their weapons, taking what they wanted from the guns they ran up and down the East Coast. It was expensive but unlike many other gangs in the city, none of them had ever been picked up from old ballistics evidence. To them, it was worth the cost.
No-one spoke, but then again none of them were the chatty type; each was keen to finally be able to administer some retribution. After the events and humiliation of the past few months, it was long overdue. They also knew if they didn’t find who was behind these disappearances and stop them, any one of them could be next.
‘Where first?’ Nemkov asked as they began to approach the end of the Bridge.
‘West 78th Street,’ Marat replied. ‘We take every person at the residence; women, children, whoever. If anyone resists, shoot them in the legs, tape them up and get them in the car.’
‘You said the boss wanted them alive,’ Ilya said.
‘They’ll survive long enough.’
EIGHTEEN
Exiting Santiago’s and Goya’s apartment building on the Lower East Side, Archer walked down the steps to the sidewalk whilst unscrewing the cap on a small bottle of water. The bleeding from the cuts to his chest and arm seemed to have stopped but they were still sore and painful. He popped two painkillers a medic had just given him into his mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of water, feeling the cold liquid hit his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything apart from some prison chow given to him at midday in his cell but whatever appetite he might have had had been taken away by the sight of what had been lying in the bath upstairs.
He’d worked on the street for six years and as a counter terrorist cop for over three but he’d never encountered anything as disturbing as the sight of Santiago in that bathroom. It took a special kind of person to work in CSU but even they’d seemed slightly unsettled by what they’d found. There’d been no sign of anything unusual in the apartment when he and Hendricks had first entered, no smashed lamps or overturned furniture to indicate there’d been any sort of struggle, just a dead criminal dissolving in the tub.
Piranha solution, the CSU investigator had called variations of the concoction.
I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out why.
Goya and Santiago were dead, the pair who’d really killed Leann and shot him and Vargas. He should have been elated but he felt almost the opposite; it was a surprising anti-climax. Although they were both gone, their fates didn’t change Vargas’ current situation or his own prospects, which were looking pretty grim. He also felt slightly cheated; he’d have liked to have had the opportunity to reintroduce himself to the two men, especially after what they’d done to Alice and Leann Casey.
Feeling the bite of the cold wind as it whipped through his hair, he pulled his cell phone and dialled a number saved into the Nokia, lifting it to his ear and looking down the lamp-lit street as it rang. Behind him, Josh walked out of the building, moving down the steps to join his partner.
‘St Luke’s.’
‘It’s Detective Archer,’ he said.
‘Hi Sam. We’ve been wondering where you were.’
‘I was out of Manhattan and didn’t have any service. How’s she doing?’
‘Pretty good; sleeping right now. She should be ready to leave any day. ’
‘That’s great. We found who did it.’
‘They’ve been arrested?’
‘Not quite. They’re dead.’
Pause.
‘That’s good news. I mean, that you found them.’
‘I’ll be in touch. When she wakes up, tell her I called.’
‘Will do. Take care.’
He ended the call as Josh joined him on the sidewalk.
‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘Better.’ Archer paused. ‘Thanks, by the way.’
‘For what?’
‘For looking for me; the whole time I was in there, I was praying you guys would realise something was wrong.’
‘Just sorry it took so long. Neither of us could figure out where the hell you’d gone. Hendricks said you almost didn’t make it out?’
Archer nodded. ‘Sounds about right.’
‘Royston needs to pay for serving you up in there.’
‘What can I do? He’s a Lieutenant, I’m a detective who punched him out in front of his people. He holds all the cards.’
As Josh looked at him, Archer suddenly grinned.
‘It was almost worth it though.’
Josh smiled. ‘Try not to mention that in court tomorrow.’
‘I’ll do my best. Anyway, how’d you find out where I was?’
‘Your car was towed from outside Karen Casey’s. We went down there and she told us you got picked up.’
‘My car got towed?’
Josh nodded. ‘Afraid so.’
‘Goddammit. There goes another hundred bucks.’
He paused, the two men watching the officers down the street talking with residents of the building who’d been evacuated from the building.
‘How’s Isabel doing by the way?’ he asked Josh.
‘She’s great; she misses you. She got real worried when you didn’t call.’
‘She did?’
‘Of course. She worships you. We’ve got a mom
ent; why don’t you try her now? If she’s not asleep, Michelle can pass the phone over.’
Looking at his partner for a moment, Archer lifted his Nokia again as Marquez walked out of the building behind them, moving down the steps to join the two men.
‘Ethan’s checking Lister’s file with SDPD to try and work up some possible associates and potential suspects,’ she said. ‘Every squad car in Lower and Midtown Manhattan is combing the area for the white van.’
‘No sign of it yet?’
‘No, but we’ll find it.’
She went to continue but noticed Archer was looking at the phone in his hand.
‘You good?’ she asked him.
Nodding, Archer tilted the phone, showing them both the screen.
Josh Home was flashing there.
‘Your wife must be psychic,’ he told his detective partner, pushing Answer and lifting the phone to his ear.
On West 78th Street, the four Prizraki had arrived a few moments earlier at their first stop. The residential street was quiet, which meant they didn’t have to concern themselves too much with prying eyes, but they’d concealed their weapons under their leather jackets anyway, their hands tight around the grips, wanting to avoid attracting any unnecessary attention.
Standing on the sidewalk outside their car, Marat looked around the street but couldn’t see any sign of Valentin yet. Unwilling to wait and with the other addresses to visit, he turned and looked at the other three men.
‘Let’s go,’ he said quietly in their foreign tongue.
Without another word the four men headed for the front door of J Blake’s house, whoever the hell he or she was, pleased to see lights still on. There was someone home.
But although they were alert, none of them noticed they were being watched by a small dark-haired girl two floors up through a small gap in the curtains.
Dressed in her pyjamas and holding the house phone receiver to her ear with both hands.
