by Dana Haynes
“He’s impressed me, too. What happened when the guy keyed in the code?”
“Nothing, as far as the system went. We were watching live on the CC cameras. When I saw him enter the code for a fire alarm, I tripped it manually. He ended up thinking he’d done it. Bastard sat back down and finished his coffee!”
“Wanted to see if you’d arrest him,” Finnigan said. “You didn’t, and now they think they’ve got access to your security system.”
“We also got fingerprints off the man’s coffee cup. He’s Kosovar, as you predicted, Mr. Finnigan. And active military. Looks like you were right on all counts.”
Finnigan checked his phone, which lay next to the tablet computer. Still no voice mail or texts from Fiero.
“Are you there, Finnigan?”
“Yeah,” he said. “My guess is, the guy’ll be back. Tomorrow, either when the judge arrives, or the last thing before she leaves. They’ll trigger the terrorism alert, expecting you to rush her through the tunnels to that house you told me about.”
“And my men will be there to capture them. And you?”
“I’ll be around, man. You’ll give me the heads-up as soon as the asshole shows up in the Fireplace Room?”
“We will,” Renard said. “You’ve been right so far. We owe you.”
“Thanks, man. Good luck.”
They both disconnected.
Finnigan checked his voice mail and texts again.
Nada.
He knew what Fiero’s Plan A was. He also knew that, so long as Major Basha and Miloš Aleksić remained alive and out of prison, Judge Betancourt’s life was on the line.
But Fiero was off-comms. And she didn’t know that Shan Greyson was still alive.
Finnigan couldn’t picture himself as an assassin. At the end of the day—regardless of the type of paycheck he netted—Finnigan was a cop. Pure and simple.
Killing the bad guys wasn’t his style.
But a dramatic rescue?
That was more like it.
C69
Major Basha met with his senior officers, his captain and lieutenant, at 0500 hours in the kitchen of the Aleksić house. The lieutenant made coffee and distributed the cups. “I heard from the men in Italy,” he said. “They are en route to the Netherlands with four Muslims. Older ones. In their twenties.”
Basha accepted his cup and added milk and sugar. “I saw them in Vrčin, just after they arrived. Three men and a woman, I think. We have suicide vests for them?”
The captain grinned. “Yes, with live explosive. I don’t want the CSI people investigating them and finding fakes.” Though he spoke his native tongue, he pronounced the letters, see ess eye, in English, because he’d seen the TV show.
Basha nodded. “You’ll take two of them to the hit. I’ll keep two of them here at the house to tie everything together.”
He turned his attention to the young lieutenant, who wore a suit and tie with civilian dress shoes. “As soon as the refugees are on the scene, you’ll trigger the alarm from the … cafeteria?”
“The Fireplace Room, yes, sir.”
Basha turned to the captain. “At which point, the lambs will come to you. Hit them fast. I’ll monitor everything from here.”
The lieutenant looked at the collection of four Smith & Wesson revolvers laid out on the speckled Formica counter. They’d been loaded and wiped down for fingerprints. The bullets had been wiped, too. They would be left with the dead refugees. “These are fine guns, sir. It seems a shame to leave them with the ragheads.”
“The partnership with the Aleksićs has been more than profitable, lieutenant. We’ll buy more. And men …?”
He waited until they both were looking at him.
“The politicians in Pristina have sided with the Muslim scum, as we always knew they would. Most of our men are in the stockade. It goes without saying that we’re never going back home. But that doesn’t mean the work has to end. Or the profits. There’s good money to be had for professional soldiers. And I’ve never known better.”
The junior officers stood a little straighter. The captain said, “Thank you, sir. It’s been a good ride, serving with you.”
Basha shook their hands. And he offered them a rare grin. “I’ve saluted my last rear-echelon bastard. I can’t trust a military, or a government, that doesn’t have my back. So, good luck to you both. When this day is done, we shall make our fortunes when and where we choose.”
They thanked him, gathered the Smith & Wessons, and headed out.
The lieutenant drove into The Hague and parked in a public lot a dozen blocks from the International Criminal Court complex. He gathered the empty attaché case he’d bought at a public market in Amsterdam. Forty minutes later, he was through the metal detector at the court complex and walking into the ground-floor Fireplace Room. He ordered a coffee from the waiter, then pretended to check emails on his smart phone.
He sat five meters from the wall-mounted keypad.
In the primary security control room, a guard peered at his black-and-white monitor and reached for his Nextel walkie-talkie phone.
“The same guy from yesterday … Yes, sir … He’s sitting at Table Seven. Over.”
Two blocks from the court complex, a three-car convoy sat parked. Michel Renard spoke into his matching walkie-talkie, thanked the guard at his monitor station, and switched frequencies.
“It’s a go,” he alerted the people in the second and third cars. One of those who heard him—in Car Two—was Judge Hélene Betancourt.
“The guards report that the terrorist is back in the Fireplace Room. We have to assume they have the complex under surveillance. This won’t work unless our primary is inside. Get the judge into the building and into her chambers. Then wait for my cue.”
Finnigan had taken a bus into Amsterdam the day before. He hung around a part of the city that was undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with buildings going up and new streets being paved. He walked the streets, whistling to himself. It was a Sunday, and that part of town, well away from the touristy core, was dead.
He needed a vehicle. A specific vehicle.
Twenty-five minutes later, Finnigan snuck into a truck stop and wandered about until he spotted a midsize truck from Ragusa Logistics. He stopped to tie his boot, making sure he was alone, then stood and ran his thumbnail around the edge of the logo.
It was a rubberized, magnetic sheet, exactly like the kind he’d spotted in the garage at the army base in Kosovo.
Finnigan peeled off the logo, rolled it up, and sauntered away.
Later, he’d get around to stealing the vehicle he really needed. And when he did, he’d brand it with the magnetized logo of Lazar Aleksić.
Anyone can steal a car. But to steal it and to sign your work with a very lovely fuck-you?
Bitch, please.
C70
Finnigan didn’t sleep well. He often didn’t before a mission. And never when he and Fiero were out of touch. Well before dawn, he was up and showered and dressed in black jeans and a black sweater and boots. He sent an email to his mom. Just chitchat. His sister Nicole was being promoted to sergeant of the NYPD. His mom beamed: Nicole was well on her way to maintaining the Finnigan tradition.
Yeah, Michael thought, but which tradition?
Next, he checked for a text from Fiero. Nothing.
Finnigan popped half a roll of Tums for breakfast and hiked from the cottage to a wooden ravine where he’d left the stolen vehicle, now adorned with the magnetized logo of Ragusa Logistics. He’d picked a good spot to wait; he wouldn’t be visible from the flying saucer house. But Finnigan could watch all traffic heading toward, and away from, the house.
Just past 6:00 a.m., a panel truck drove up toward the Aleksić house. It, too, had the Ragusa Logistics banner on the side. Finnigan spotted two men with soldierly haircuts and strong biceps sitt
ing in the cab.
He checked his smart phone.
No word from Fiero.
The panel truck took a corner. In back, Fiero and the three Iraqi boys rocked on their hard wooden benches. There were no windows in the back, other than the one pointing into the cab, and the driver had hung a jacket over a coat hook behind his seat, blocking the view. Fiero had no idea where they were. She just knew they were headed toward The Hague and Judge Betancourt.
She spoke to the boys, but slowly because they had trouble with her Algerian accent.
“These soldiers will meet up with other soldiers. Everyone is going to be armed. It’s important you don’t do anything stupid. Just do as they say, and we’ll get out of this.”
She didn’t believe that for a minute, but she didn’t want the boys taking matters into their own hands.
The eldest Iraqi looked her in the eye and paused. But then nodded. “We’re not used to taking orders from women.”
“If all goes well, you’ll live your lives in the West, meet a nice Muslim girl from the West, and raise daughters in the West,” Fiero told him, but with a smile. “Best get used to it.”
Twenty minutes later, the panel truck slowed, then stopped. She heard the crunch of small rocks or shells under the tires. She heard the clank-clank-clank of a metal gate sliding horizontally on brackets. She pictured the layout of the Aleksićs’ house and knew exactly where they were.
She reached instinctively for the left hip pocket of her jeans, under her borrowed skirt. But of course her phone wasn’t there. God willing, it was in Rome by now, being used for selfies with a doting aunt.
She had no way to connect to Finnigan.
C71
The driver waited until the gate retracted fully on its motorized brackets, then drove the panel truck into the grounds of the Aleksić family’s North Sea home.
One of the solders came out of the house to direct them to the spacious, five-car garage. The driver pulled in, and the soldier lowered the garage door behind them.
The soldiers let the four refugees out of the back. They looked stiff and sore.
The captain glanced at them. They were older than the usual victims—no wonder Lazar Aleksić hadn’t been able to sell them to his pedophile clients! But they looked fit enough. The girl was taller than he would have expected. All four looked like able recruits for ISIS or al-Qaeda. Put them in suicide vests and give them the Smith & Wessons, and they’d be believable.
Even the girl. The ragheads often use female suicide bombers, the captain thought. Such lunatics. He’d grown up with, and adopted, his father’s abiding hatred for Muslims. They were virtually a majority in Kosovo. That sat badly with the captain, whose family could be traced back nine generations of patriotic Kosovars.
“Corporal.” He nodded to the driver. “Any problems?”
“Operating Base Šar is shut down and most of our guys are in the stockade. I didn’t sign up for this to go to prison, Captain.”
“Do your goddamn job and keep your mouth shut, and none of us on this mission will be seeing any prisons, Corporal. Now, any problems with the cattle?”
“No, sir,” the driver replied. “They just sat there. I’ve never seen such a useless bunch.”
“They won’t be useless for long. Two of them come with me. Two stay here with the major.”
He turned to the refugees and picked them at random. “The two on my left stay, the two on my right, get them back in the truck. We move out in twenty minutes.”
Two of his soldiers brought out four Styrofoam ice chests and set them down in a stack, two wide, two high. The refugees glanced at them, so the captain placed his hand on the lid of the nearest chest. “No touch!” he shouted in English, then again in fractured Arabic.
The refugees either nodded or looked away in fear.
The captain turned to the corporal. “There’s sandwiches and coffee and bottled water in the kitchen, through there. Help yourselves. Hit the shitter. I’ll go find the major. We’re rolling in twenty.”
The Kosovars headed out of the garage and into the house. Another soldier walked around to the far side of the panel truck and began digging through a toolbox.
Fiero took two steps to her left, lifted the lid of the nearest ice chest, peered down, closed the lid, and stepped back in line.
The guard reemerged from the toolbox behind the truck.
The youngest Iraqi hissed at her. “He told us not to touch it!”
“It’s all right,” Fiero whispered. She turned to the eldest boy, the one who spoke Serbian because his father did business in the Balkans. “Did you follow what they were saying?”
The youth had, and translated: the refugees were being split up.
And Fiero decided she was in the wrong duo.
A soldier stooped and picked up one of the chests, walking it up the ramp into the panel truck. Fiero turned to the middle Iraqi. “Switch with me.”
He said, “Why?”
She wanted to say, So I don’t smack you, but thought, What would Finnigan do? She said, “It is the will of God that you stay with your brother.”
“Ah.” The kid nodded and stepped next to his older brother.
The Kosovar soldier carried the second Styrofoam chest into the panel truck.
When the driver emerged from the kitchen, he pointed to Fiero and the youngest Iraqi. “You two, back in the truck!”
Fiero replied in Arabic. “Can you tell us where we are going, sir?”
“Shut up that monkey gibberish and get in the truck!”
Convinced that the soldier didn’t speak Arabic, Fiero turned to the eldest boy. “Listen, but don’t react. There are suicide vests in the white boxes. I’ll be back for you, I promise. But if I don’t get back in time, do whatever you have to do, but don’t let them put these vests on you.”
The boy gulped. “By the grace of God, what have we done?”
“You survived. By getting out of Iraq. Do so again. Get out of here as soon as you can. Don’t wait for us. And whatever else happens, do not put on the vests!”
“I said, shut up and get in the truck!” the driver bellowed and waved his sidearm.
Fiero and the youngest boy climbed back into the truck, which now featured two ice chests with two fully packed suicide vests.
C72
Major Driton Basha walked down the stone stairs to the wine cellar of the flying saucer house. He kept a guard down here but without the keys to the cellar door. Basha carried those—indeed, he carried Miloš Aleksić’s entire key ring for the house and the cars. He unlocked the wine cellar and the stench almost made him gag.
They’d tortured the effete Englishman, Greyson, for a week. They’d tried pain, and that hadn’t worked. They’d tried threatening loved ones, but the man had no family. They’d gone through a source in Hungary who’d found a quantity of truth serum on the black market, and that eventually broke him down. Early reports were that the man was a homosexual, but Basha doubted it. He didn’t think homosexuals had such guts.
Greyson lay on the rough cement floor. He stank of sweat and shit and piss and burned flesh. All of his fingers were broken, and his face was red and pulpy, one eye closed and oozing pus.
Basha kicked him in the thigh. Greyson moaned.
“It’s important to me that you understand what’s happening,” he said, drawing a handkerchief and holding it over his nose. “Judge Betancourt is a racist fool. She has abused her power to persecute Serbians and Kosovars, and she has helped promote policies that serve Islamic terrorism. She should face a military tribunal for her crimes, and she should be hanged in the city streets. Alas, that’s beyond even my reach, Mr. Greyson.”
Shan groaned and opened one eye. Blood caked his slit lower lip.
“Thanks to you, she dies today. We drugged you, Greyson. And you gave up your security code. Oh, we know you
lied about it at first. More than once. But now we have your code and we’ll take the stupid cow’s life. And I just wanted you to know this.”
“Didn’t …” Shan said. Saying that much made his lower lip bleed again.
Basha leaned forward. “Sorry?”
“Didn’t … code … Fireplace Room …”
Basha laughed and nudged him with the toe of his boot again. “Oh, yes. So sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we did use your code in the Fireplace Room. It does work. And in …” Basha made a show of pushing back his sleeve and checking his watch, “… a little over an hour, we will use your code to kill the race-traitor bitch. I’d like you to stay alive until that’s done. I’ll check with you later. For now, please, ah …” he glanced around, “… enjoy the wine selection.”
Basha turned and exited, locking the door behind him.
On the freezing cold floor, Shan risked splitting his lip even further by forming a ghostly, wan smile.
Fiero, the young Iraqi, and two Kosovar soldiers dressed in civilian clothes rode in the back of the panel truck. Two ice chests sat side by side in the middle of the floor, surrounded by everyone’s knees. Both guards sat on the right-hand planks that rested above the wheel-well mounds. Fiero and the refugee sat on the left side. Fiero leaned back against one of the many tie-down rings.
She glanced toward the envelope-shaped window leading to the cab. The driver’s coat still hung there—Fiero couldn’t see where they were going, but the driver and the soldier riding shotgun couldn’t see into the back, either.
Two minutes outside the grounds of the flying saucer house, Fiero adjusted her hijab, freeing her shoulders. She leaned forward. “Permitted?” she said in English, and reached for the nearest cooler.
“No!” one of the guards spat. “Don’t touch.”
Fiero let thirty seconds pass. She leaned forward again and reached for the cooler. “Permitted?”
“I said no, goddamn it!”
