The Beauty of Bucharest

by S. J. Varengo

  Without waiting for further instruction, Dan began walking in the direction she’d indicated.

  “Whoa! Slow down, soldier,” Nicole called, catching up to him and grabbing his arm. Dan stopped and looked at her.

  “I was under the impression time mattered at this point.”

  “It does, absolutely. But there are still procedures. There are still rules.”

  “Rules?”

  “Danny, please. You have to listen to me. You saved my life, and I will be forever grateful for that. But this is all brand new to you, and you still really don’t know what you’re doing. You understand this, right?”

  Dan nodded, a little abashed. He was working off some sort of mixture of adrenaline and exhaustion, combined with a healthy dose of system shock still lingering at the periphery of his consciousness. He was rushing headlong toward things he didn’t fully comprehend with no plan, just a vague feeling of having broken through some sort of wall of smoked glass. But now that he was on the other side, the view was no less smoky. He’d broken through into... what?

  “I’m sorry, Coley. You’re right. I’m not in my element by any stretch of the imagination.”

  She put her hand on his cheek. He felt the cool pressure of her soft hand, and with it a passed energy that was as much compassion as it was admonishment. “You’re part of this now. For better or worse. Wally would be shitting his britches if he had any inkling!”

  That brought matching child-like giggles from both of them.

  “But you’ve got to let me take the lead, and you’ve got to do exactly what I tell you to do. We have a big, scary job ahead of us, and there is always a chance it won’t end well for us. Frankly, that chance has increased a little just by your being here. But you are here, and I believe that’s going to make a positive difference, not a negative one. Logic and odds be damned.”

  Dan smiled. “Your support is well-tempered with a healthy dose of being absolutely appalled by my involvement. Nicely done. You’d have been great at firing people in a boardroom.”

  “A lofty achievement, no doubt. But right now, we’re looking at termination of a different sort. With extreme prejudice, as they say.”

  Dan felt a shiver run down his spandex encased spine. “Lead the way, O Captain, my Captain.”

  Nicole moved in front of him. As she walked, she turned, and in a lower tone than their prior conversation, she said, “Total silence from here on in. Be aware of where you step.” She pointed forward. “The way is lit up ahead, but if we need our flashes again, use yours sparingly. Keep it pointed toward your body unless you absolutely need to use it. Okay?”

  Dan put his finger over his mouth and nodded.

  “Good,” said Nicole, turning forward again.

  Ileana Gabor was uneasy. To say this was an abnormal state for her would be untrue. She was never really at ease, and that was what made her so valuable to Bogdan Grigorescu. He had told her, on more than one occasion, “I pay you to be paranoid.”

  This bout of disquiet, however, was more intense, more focused than her usual angst. Andrei should have dispatched the American bitch by now, and at least called to brag about the brilliant job he did of putting a bullet through her head. No, damn it! He should be here by now!

  In addition to being apprehensive about Andrei’s absence, she now had to report to Bogdan that something was amiss. And that was never good. She walked down the long, lushly carpeted hallway of the Crețulescu Palace, noticing, as she always did, the absolute sound-absorption the carpet created. She’d told Bogdan more than once that being able to hear people walking through the many halls of the palace was a good thing. He always waved her off and simply said, “I like the quiet and the soft beneath my feet.”

  Maybe so, but he wasn’t going to like this.

  She stopped in front of a tall door, beautifully constructed of mahogany, rich and dark, with engraved, vaguely floral designs. She raised her hand to knock, hesitated, then rapped three times.

  “Come!” came the slaver’s gruff voice from within.

  Ileana could smell his foul cigar before she pushed the door open, but once inside, the stench was overpowering. She’d long developed the ability to mask her disgust, but just barely.

  “What news? It’s almost time to make the sale. Is everything in order?”

  Ileana, who feared very few things in the world of men, was trembling as she shook her head. “I believe there is an issue.”

  For a full thirty seconds, Bogdan just glowered at her, his bushy black eyebrows slowly migrating until they almost came together, though they were practically hidden by the cloud of smoke from his cigar. Finally, he took a deep draw, then blew the smoke obnoxiously in Ileana’s face. “What might this fucking issue be, coming as I’m poised to make more money in a single transaction than you will ever see in your entire worthless life?”

  “It’s Andrei…”

  “ANDREI!” he bellowed, cutting her off. “That idiot is still on my payroll? That idiot is still breathing?”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles, Ileana. I’m in no mood.”

  “I told you that we’d intercepted a transmission from the gun runner Viktor Funar, about a possible American assassin…”

  “Old news. And dealt with, you told me. Funar is dead.”

  “Very, and we were able to identify the woman he was working with…”

  “Woman? They sent a woman to kill me? That’s insulting.”

  Ileana ruffled a bit but said nothing. Insulting indeed, she thought. “At any rate, we knew who she was, and when she arrived. I learned from the concierge at her hotel that she’d be dining at the Red Angus last night. I made an appearance and lured her into the catacombs, where we’d planted Funar’s body. Apparently, she killed Dorin…”

  “Jesus Christ, Ileana. This story gets worse by the second.”

  She nodded. “I know. Dorin showed promise. But there is good news. Andrei apparently ambushed her. He called me to tell me that he was about to kill her. He was to take care of that and get back here. I’d planned on using Dorin to help with the transfer, but obviously I needed to replace him, and Andrei was available.”

  “But?”

  “But he hasn’t returned.”

  “I don’t suppose he got so tired from killing the American that he lay down in the catacombs to take a nap.”

  “I fear something has happened to him.”

  “Do you, Ileana? Do you fear? I don’t believe you fear quite enough.”

  “Is there any way you could postpone the transfer?”

  Bogdan’s face assumed a look of disbelief that would have been comical if Ileana wasn’t sure that the continuation of her life was very much in doubt.

  “Ileana,” he said, “I am one of the most powerful men in Romania. My empire stretches the width and length of the nation. I can fart in Bucharest and someone will die in Tulcea.”

  I don’t doubt that one bit, Ileana thought.

  “But for all my grandeur, I am a gnat compared to the man who is purchasing Albu. I have at my disposal the substantial resources of a vast criminal enterprise. This man has the resources of a nation. Are you getting the picture?”

  The blue-haired woman nodded. “No postponement,” she said softly.

  “Well, then. What’s to be done about Ileana’s security detail?” Bogdan asked, passing the stubby hand holding the glowing cigar over his smoothly shaven skull. “Will she succeed in replacing the dead man with promise and the idiot who I truly hope is also dead? Will she come through with flying colors as she so often has in the past?”

  “There are two men on the house detail that can be spared. They are newer, but not too new. They’ve proven reliable.”

  Bogdan again vanished behind a cloud of cigar smoke that seemed to bend to his will and remain in front of his face. When at last it dissipated, he was smiling.

  “I know that you will do your job, Ileana. But I do not like bad news, and I do not like loose
ends. If Andrei is dead – and please God let it be so – then that likely means this assassin is alive. Untried men on the detail make me nervous, but if you vouch for them…”

  “I do,” Ileana replied quickly.

  Bogdan’s smile was cruel as he continued. “If you vouch for them and anything goes awry, I will personally kill them, and then I will kill you.”

  Ileana nodded, then turned and left the room, closing the door tightly behind her, in hopes of cutting off the smell of the cigar and the waves of angry horror emanating from the man on the other side of the portal. But it did not shelter her from either.

  Grigorescu’s reaction was not unexpected. It was not the first time she’d withstood his ire. Nor was it the first time the pig had threatened her.

  Ileana did not like her boss. She laid her life on the line for him as a matter of course, and she was paid exceptionally well for doing so. She did not like Bogdan, but she liked the work. Let the brain doctors debate the nature-nurture questions. She did not know, or particularly care, why she enjoyed killing people, but she did. And Bogdan gave her the opportunity to do that. So she stayed. She didn’t give a skinny model’s tiny tit about the women. If they were stupid enough to fall into Grigorescu’s clutches, then they deserved their fate. The children bothered her a little, but she swallowed that. It wasn’t what Bogdan did that she hated.

  It was the man himself.

  She would expect some disdain for women from a man who sold them the way her grandmother had sold the shirts she sewed by hand. But to scoff at an assassin simply because she was female was short-sighted. It was stupid. Not to mention the person who kept his greasy ass alive on a daily basis was a woman.

  She caught herself almost hoping the woman was still alive, and that she managed to complete the mission for which she’d come to Bucharest. But she quickly shook that off. She was not likely to find another position like this one. Especially if the last line of her resume read “Reason for leaving previous position: Death of the man I was charged to protect.” Keeping the swine alive meant keeping the lifestyle she now enjoyed. And of course there was the matter of pride. If the American bitch killed her boss, that meant Ileana had failed. And Ileana did not fail.

  She quickly found the two men who would round out the transfer detail and informed them they would soon be given the opportunity to truly prove their worth. She did not react as they both visibly puffed like a pair of mating penguins at the possibility of showing their mettle.

  Finally, she went into a dark room, quiet aside from a bank of fans cooling a row of computers. On the desk sat five monitors, and on the wall were mounted four larger screens. Two of these showed a room filled with women, all of them sitting in darkness, only the night-vision capabilities of the wall-mounted cameras making them visible. She could make out Ana Albu even in the unnatural green of the night vision. After six months in Bogdan’s harem, she still shone like a brand new star, burst to life among a vast cloud of dust and debris. It did not take most women very long to crumble under the treatment they received once in Bogdan’s clutches. They were underfed, rarely allowed to bathe, and he tended to be very hands on with the merchandise. When a sale was pending, some were cleaned up, depending on the status of the buyer. Others were sold as is with no warranty, either written or implied.

  But the Beauty of Bucharest would not be broken, would not be humbled. She sat in the darkness with her back straight, her head held high. Of course, that was all part of the reason that Grigorescu was poised to make a billion lei, nearly a quarter of a billion U.S. dollars. As Bogdan had said, it was more money than Ileana would ever see. All for the life of one human being.

  She left the room and looked at her watch. It was ninety minutes until they were scheduled to leave for the river, where the buyer would be waiting on his yacht.

  Everything seemed to be in order. But Ileana was still uneasy.

  12

  The Viktor Vacuum

  In general, Dan had a fairly accurate innate sense of direction. He was quite good, for example, at feeling his way around parts of Denver with which he was less familiar, but Nicole had never really bought into his “internal man-map” line. It was a case of the age-old struggle between husband and wife: “I don’t need to pull over and ask for directions…” “Just ask that guy there.” “That guy looks like a crack dealer.” “Then he should know the neighborhood…”

  In the tunnels beneath Crețulescu Palace, however, and with the terms of the understanding they’d reached, he did not feel up to playing his part in the eternal pas de deux.

  “I have no goddamn idea where we are right now,” he admitted after they’d been following the maze-like underground for twenty minutes.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Everything seems to circle back on itself,” Nicole said, her voice rife with frustration. She’d rescinded the order of silence when she realized they had been going in circles. Now she shone the light around to the degree that Dan almost smarmily said something about her keeping the beam turned toward her body, as she’d instructed him. He sensed that this was not the time for pettiness, however.

  “Don’t you have schematics or something available to you?” Dan asked.

  “I no doubt would, if Viktor wasn’t lying dead in the catacombs. That’s the sort of thing you call your handler for.”

  “Sorry. I’m sure Viktor was a good man.”

  “He was probably the best handler in Eastern Europe,” she replied. “And he was a good friend. Far too good to end up like he did.”

  “You said they poisoned him?”

  “I saw two injection marks on his neck. Apparently, whatever they gave him the first time didn’t finish him, so they hit him with a second shot.”

  Dan let out a low whistle. “That’s one tough son of a bitch.”

  “He was a very tough son of a bitch. But I can’t dwell on that now. The compass app on my phone is alternating between appearing to work but leading us nowhere and not even trying to make the least bit of sense.”

  Dan rubbed his hand along the smooth side of the tunnel. “I wonder if they’ve installed ECM in the walls.”

  Nicole turned to her husband with her mouth open. “Oh my god. I bet you’re right! What made you think of that?”

  “It’s the sort of thing we’d build into a game to make a level wicked hard,” he answered, sounding more like a twenty-four-year-old developer than a fifty-seven-year-old retired executive.

  “It’s the sort of thing Bogdan would do to make finding the entrance to the palace… what was it? Wicked hard?”

  Dan smiled. “Go ahead. Laugh.”

  “I’m sorry, you just sounded so cute.”

  “Cute. Good. Yeah. Listen, if I thought about the ECM being operative, do you think maybe I might know a way to defeat it as well?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, I know how you’d have to beat it in a video game. We might get lucky. It might work in RL.”

  “‘RL?’”

  “Real life. Damn, you’re square for an international assassin.”

  “Ha. Ha. I knew what you meant. I just can’t believe you’re slinging all this adolescent lingo bullshit.”

  “Look, do you want to know how we might beat this or do you want to make fun of me?”

  “Teach me.”

  “The compass app on your phone has nothing to do with a real, magnetic compass. It’s GPS driven. Now a GPS signal is relatively easy to jam, and it’s almost as easy to spoof.”

  “Jamming I get. You lost me at spoof.”

  “If the Electronic Counter Measures…”

  “I know what ECM is, Daniel.”

  “If it is successfully jammed, then a counterfeit signal can be put in its place, and it can tell the GPS device whatever the bad guys want it to. It can tell you you’re heading north when you’re going west. It can say you’ve taken three right turns when you’ve actually doubled back on yourself. The added element of dim lighting at best, and no lighting more often,
makes getting screwed around fairly easy.”

  “Okay, that’s why I’m lost. Now get me un-lost.”

  “Do you really want me to?”

  “Don’t play around, Danny.”

  “Alright then, go that way,” Dan said, pointing.

  “We’ve already gone that way.”

  “A couple of times, yeah. We need to do it again.”

  Nicole let out a little sigh. She was willing to go along with Dan’s computer game logic for the moment, but if it looked like he was getting them nowhere, she had no problem shutting him down. Still, he seemed sure of himself in a very sexy way….

  “Stop!” Dan said after they’d gone only about half the length of the passage.

  “Why? We’re in the middle of a tunnel.”

  “Shh,” Dan said, holding a finger to his lips. He took the gun Nicole had given him, the .357 Magnum she’d recovered from the gorilla, and began tapping the wall with it. The metallic sound of the barrel on the smooth masonry work of the tunnel made a clinking sound that was a little too loud for Nicole’s liking, but she kept her reservations to herself. She assumed he was listening for a secret door or something, and she made a mental note to tell him he needed to stop watching spy movies on HBO. But a moment later, there was indeed a distinctive change in the timbre of the clinking. It still sounded like metal on masonry, but there was a bit more of a bass line. He stopped and turned to her.

  “Look for something that doesn’t look quite the same as everything else. Some kind of latch or mechanism.” He turned his phone away from his chest, where he’d been dutifully holding it per her instructions, and began to shine it up and down the wall in the area where the sound had changed. After a moment, he said, “Aha! Look at this.” He pointed to a white ceramic tile high on the wall, about seven and a half feet up from the floor. “Do you see?” he asked. “It’s not as shiny as the tiles around it.”

  “Yes, I see the difference. So, do something wicked cool.”

  “You need to stop,” he replied, smiling. “I break out one ‘wicked’ and you want to make it my catchphrase.”