The Malta Escape

by Chris Kuzneski

  Obviously something had gone wrong.

  But what?

  He stared at the burner phone in his hand to make sure that it had a signal. Then he casually glanced around the plaza to see if anything seemed amiss. Everywhere he looked, people were enjoying their day, completely clueless of what was happening inside the library.

  Just like he was.

  Volkov was too seasoned of a criminal to do something rash—like sneaking inside to see for himself—but the longer he sat there, the more exposed that he felt.

  Perhaps it was a mistake to send the entire team inside.

  Maybe I should have kept someone by my side.

  And then it happened.

  One of his men opened the front door of the library. He stuck out his head, checked for possible resistance, and then stepped outside. In his hands were the two gym bags that the Finn’s bodyguards had purchased in Valletta and had carried with them to the library.

  Volkov watched with fascination as his henchman took a deep breath, collected himself, and then headed toward the street ahead. He was halfway across the plaza when he spotted Volkov at a café table. They locked eyes for the briefest of moments—barely enough to register the glance—but in that instant, Volkov learned everything he needed to know.

  His plan had failed miserably.

  And the rest of his men were dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Interpol Headquarters

  Lyon, France

  Nick Dial leaned back in his chair and smiled.

  Somehow he had gotten through the day without a crisis.

  His meetings had gone smoothly. His employees had behaved. He even had time to eat lunch without any interruptions, an event that happened roughly once a decade.

  All things considered, it had been a good day for Dial.

  Which was a rarity during the past few years.

  As the director of the homicide division at Interpol—the largest international crime-fighting organization in the world—Dial was tasked with coordinating the flow of information between police departments whenever a murder investigation crossed national boundaries. All told he was in charge of 192 member countries, filled with billions of people and hundreds of languages.

  All of which kept him extremely busy.

  Just not in the way he would prefer.

  He would much rather be on the streets than in an office.

  For the first few years, he had been thrilled with his position. He wrote the rules. He set the budget. He handpicked the personnel. On a few occasions, he even went into the field to work on high-profile cases, including one that involved multiple crucifixions and another that involved several dead scientists in Stockholm.

  Dial didn’t get involved because he had to.

  He did it because he wanted to.

  Being an investigator was in his blood.

  Unfortunately, the election of a new secretary general at Interpol had changed Dial’s ability to get his hands dirty. Dial’s new supervisor wasn’t a former cop; he was a politician. And he had introduced Dial to a concept that he had quickly come to despise: optics.

  It didn’t matter if Dial was effective when assisting police departments in the field. His new boss was only concerned about the possibility of an international incident, which could potentially lead to bad press. An angry Dial had protested fiercely. He didn’t give a shit about perception; he only cared about justice. But he had been told in no uncertain terms that his participation in an active case would lead to his suspension and/or termination.

  And just like that, he hated going to work.

  Somehow his dream job had become a nightmare overnight.

  As luck should have it, a few of his friends were going through similar problems with their high-profile careers. One in particular had finally pulled the plug after ten difficult years. Dial had been tempted to call him during lunch to get an update, but had decided against it due to the time difference in the States. He knew his buddy had been a night owl when he had a job. There was no telling how late he would sleep in retirement.

  With nothing better to do, Dial decided to write him an email to see how things were going. He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts, and found the name he was looking for. His finger was just getting ready to click the envelope icon when—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  The sound was so loud and piercing that he could feel it in his—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  Dial cursed loudly as he tried to turn down the volume, but for some strange reason, the master volume didn’t have any effect on this—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  “What the fuck!” Dial yelled at his phone. Not only had this never happened before, but he didn’t even recognize the sound effect. His normal ringtone wasn’t a—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  “Answer your phone!” screamed Henri Toulon from outside Dial’s office. He was one of Dial’s best investigators but a royal pain in his—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  Now Dial was pissed. He stared at his locked screen, but no name or number appeared. In fact, the only thing on his display was a large, green—

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  Toulon screamed even louder. “I swear to Buddha, if you don’t answer your phone, I’m going to shoot you in your—”

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  Dial finally relented and hit the green button. “Who the fuck is this?”

  There was a slight delay before he heard a response.

  “The Pentagon calling for Director Nick Dial.”

  That took the starch right out of his shorts.

  “The Pentagon?” he said in a much calmer tone. “For me?”

  “That depends. Are you Director Nick Dial?”

  “Yes,” Dial said as he stood from his desk and closed his office door. As he did, he flipped off Toulon, who was already doing the same to him. “What’s this about?”

  “Please hold.”

  So he held.

  Seriously, what else was he going to do?

  It was the goddamn Pentagon.

  A few seconds passed before there was a click on the line, followed by a few more clicks, a couple of pops, and then finally a voice.

  “Nick? Are you there?”

  Dial recognized the caller at once. “Jon? Is that you?”

  “Hey buddy, how ya doin’?” Payne asked casually.

  “How am I doing? Holy shit, how do you think I’m doing?”

  Payne noticed his irritation from hundreds of miles away. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, Jon, it’s not. It’s not a bad time at all. At least, it wasn’t until the air-raid siren—or whatever that fuck that was—went off on my phone!”

  “Air-raid siren? What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Believe it or not, I was just getting ready to write you an email when my phone started making the most god-awful sound. It was this hideous ding-a-ling that just wouldn’t quit until I answered your call.”

  “Nick, I hate to break it to you, but that’s how phones work. They keep ringing until you hit the button and pick up.”

  “Aha! You knew about the button!”

  “All phones have buttons! Seriously, man. Have you been drinking? I know work’s been kind of rough for you lately, but you shouldn’t be hitting the bottle at the office.”

  “The Pentagon! Your call came through the Pentagon!”

  “Wait,” Payne said defensively. “How did you know that?”

  “Because the goddamn operator said this is the goddamn Pentagon! I thought there had been a missile launch or something!”

  “Randy!” Payne shouted into his phone in case Randy Raskin—the computer genius who worked as a researcher in the Pentagon’s subbasement but was Payne and Jones’s high-tech secret weapon—was still listening. “I just needed a clean line, not an introduction!”

  “Did you just call me ‘Randy’?” asked Dial, who was getting more and more confus
ed by the second. “And why do you need a clean line to speak to me?”

  “Let’s start there. Are you somewhere you can talk in private?”

  Dial nodded. “I’m in my office, and I sweep it daily for bugs. I haven’t found one yet, but I know my asshole boss is looking for an excuse to push me out.”

  “Wait. I thought you wanted to leave?”

  “I do, but I want to leave on my own terms. I don’t want to get fired.”

  “In that case, maybe we should end this call right here.”

  “Not a chance. First things first: who is Randy? And how did he hack my secure phone? This thing is supposed to be unhackable.”

  Payne took a deep breath. “That’s a long story.”

  “Well, you have my attention. In fact, you have my whole building’s attention. Seriously, you have no idea how loud that sound was.”

  “Trust me, it could’ve been worse. Randy once took the audio track of a gay porn movie and uploaded it to DJ’s phone as his ringtone. Anytime he received a call, he’d start hearing grunts and splashes and all kinds of nasty stuff, all at full volume. DJ tried his best to ignore it, but after two days, he was so embarrassed and angry that he literally shot his phone.”

  Dial laughed. “You’re right. That would’ve been worse. So who is this guy?”

  Payne knew that Dial still had a high clearance from his time at the FBI, so he felt comfortable giving him some basics. He didn’t reveal Raskin’s full name for security purposes, but he was able to explain some of the ways that Raskin had assisted them during their military days and how a friendship had grown from there.

  Dial sat down and took it all in before he asked the question that still hadn’t been answered. “And why did he hack my phone?”

  “I’m guessing boredom. To someone like Randy, a secure phone at Interpol probably sounded like a challenge. Obviously it wasn’t since my phone rang for less than thirty seconds before I heard your voice, so yeah, you should probably look into that—especially if you think your boss is trying to bug your office.”

  Dial shook his head. “No, you misunderstood my question. Why did you feel the need to call your hacker friend at the Pentagon to place a call to me in the first place?”

  “Oh, that. Well, it seems that DJ and I may have gotten ourselves into a little situation, and we were hoping our good buddy at Interpol may be able to lend us a hand.”

  Dial groaned. “Define little.”

  Payne glanced at the carnage in the library. From where he was standing, he could see multiple bodies, plenty of blood, and several bullet holes. Plus, for some strange reason, Jarkko was working the arms of one of the dead goons like a creepy puppeteer, just flipping and flopping his lifeless arms around, much to the amusement of Jones.

  “Actually,” Payne admitted, “little may be an understatement.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  There were very few people in the world that Payne and Jones respected more than Nick Dial, and the feeling was quite mutual. Together they had faced a lot over the years, and during that time, they had grown from casual acquaintances to trusted friends.

  The trio had met several years earlier at a pub in London that catered to Americans called Stars & Stripes. It was the type of joint where football meant helmets and shoulder pads, not yellow cards and hooligans. At the time, Payne and Jones were still in the military, and Dial was just starting his career at Interpol. The three of them had hit it off right away, and they had kept in touch ever since—occasionally bumping into each other in foreign lands.

  Once at an airport in Italy.

  Another time in the mountains of Greece.

  It was during that particular adventure that their friendship was truly forged, watching each other’s backs while battling a vicious foe and solving an ancient riddle on Mount Athos. By the end of the trip, Dial had met a hard-drinking fisherman named Jarkko and a famous historian named Ulster, both of whom would play major roles in the story that he was about to hear.

  Dial took a deep breath. “How bad is it?”

  Payne surveyed the scene. “On a scale of one to a hundred, I’d rate it a six.”

  “Whew!” Dial said, relieved. “I can handle a six. After that air-raid alert from your hacker friend, I was expecting a whole lot worse.”

  “Unfortunately, the six stands for the number of dead bodies that—”

  “Seven!” Jones shouted from across the way.

  “Hold on, Nick. We’re still counting corpses here.” Payne lowered his phone and shouted back to Jones. “Who the hell is number seven?”

  “They killed the security guard on their way in. And they stole our gym bags.”

  “Seriously? Why the hell would they steal our gym bags?”

  “Because our gym bags were awesome.”

  “Any surveillance?”

  “On the gym bags?”

  “In the library!”

  “Nope. They killed that, too. The whole system is kaput.”

  “Call Randy and see if he can help with anything—including traffic cameras on the surrounding streets. And please tell Jarkko to quit touching the bodies.”

  Payne got back on the phone. “Sorry about that. Kind of hectic here. We’re trying to get as much done before the police arrive. They’ll only slow us down.”

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Dial growled as blood rushed to his face. He could literally feel his body temperature rise while he listened to the update. “You need to start from the beginning, because right now I’m about to blow a fucking fuse.”

  “Was it something I said?”

  Dial didn’t find it funny. “Stop that shit right now, or I swear to God I’ll hang up this phone and hang you out to dry. This isn’t the time for jokes. This is when you fill me in on everything, and I decide if I need to put out an alert for your arrest.”

  Because of the complex nature of their friendship, Payne often forgot that Dial had been trained to handle death in a much different way than he had. In the world of the special forces, Payne and Jones had been taught to kill and move on without looking back, mostly because the military feared they might not be able to handle it if they paused long enough to see how much destruction they had brought into the world in the name of peace. After a while, they had built up such a tolerance to violence that they were able to joke about things that others wouldn’t.

  Not out of disrespect, but in order to keep their sanity.

  Meanwhile, Dial viewed things quite differently.

  As an investigator, he had been forced to study the moment of death, to closely examine all of the grisly details that soldiers tried to forget. He knew it was in the minutiae where murderers made mistakes, and that’s what was needed to catch a killer. Once a case was over and Dial was throwing back beers with his colleagues, the dark humor would come out—in hopes of washing away the stains that still remained—but until then, his job was to uphold the law.

  Or, at the very least, keep it in view.

  And that’s where things got tricky.

  Dial was no longer an investigator. He was an administrator. It wasn’t his job to go to a crime scene and look for clues. His duty was to pass on as much information as possible to the police forces involved in any crimes that crossed international borders. However, as the director of the homicide division of Interpol, he realized his opinion carried a lot of weight.

  With a single phone call, he could start or stop an investigation.

  Which was why Payne was calling him now.

  Without Dial’s help, they would be in deep shit.

  And Payne knew it.

  “Sorry, Nick. I truly am. I’m still amped up on adrenaline, trying to make sense of what just happened. Because I’m telling you, it doesn’t make sense.”

  Dial noticed the change in Payne’s demeanor and appreciated it. Like Payne, he had been shot at multiple times in the line of duty and realized it brought a rush of emotions that were tough to contain. With that in mind, he took a deep breath and tried to
calm down as well.

  “First things first: are you and DJ okay?”

  “Yeah, man, we’re fine. Banged up, but fine. Sorry, I should have led with that. Truth be told, my head’s still ringing from the grenade.”

  So much for calming down.

  “Grenade? You used a fucking grenade?”

  “Not us, Nick. Them. Just a flash-bang, though. Otherwise, DJ wouldn’t be standing.”

  “Who the hell is them?”

  “Listen, I’ll gladly fill you in on everything, but I need you to do something for me A-SAP. Reach out to the police in Valletta and let them know there was an assault on their national library that’s been stopped. Tell them who we are, and make it clear we’re the good guys. Otherwise, they’re liable to come in here with a SWAT team, running hot.”

  Dial knew Payne well enough to trust his assessment of the situation. If he said the threat had been thwarted, then Dial believed him. He immediately opened his office door and called out to Toulon, who was no longer flipping him off. “There’s been a shootout at the national library in Valletta. Seven down, but the situation is contained. Let them know we have a team inside. If the locals have any questions, they can call me direct.”

  “What team?” Toulon asked as he searched his computer screen for the contact information of the National Central Bureau in Malta. It was the duty of local NCB offices to monitor their territories and report pertinent facts to Interpol’s headquarters in France.

  “Payne and Jones.”

  Toulon had met them when they had stopped by Lyon to check out Dial’s office and to get a better sense of Interpol’s system of operations. Despite his reputation for hating everyone, Toulon had actually hit it off with the duo, much to the surprise of Dial. “Are they okay?”

  “So far, but they won’t be if tactical units storm the building with them inside.”

  “On it. Give them my best. I love those guys.”

  “Sorry about that,” Dial said to Payne as he closed his office door once again. “Henri says hi, by the way. Not to me, ever. Only to you.”