NATIONAL TREASURE

by Barry Faulkner

  ‘Didn’t I just! God, no wonder mum ditched him – why she ever got involved with him in the beginning I just don’t know.’

  ‘Well, the bottom line is that the Bogdans think she is still involved with him, or was up until his death, and they think your mum has their money.’

  ‘Which is why I am sitting in the back of a car in Romania.’

  ‘Yes. With ten intact fingers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That would have been next if we hadn’t got you out – another note to your mum for the money, neatly wrapped around one of your fingers.’

  Gold added, ‘Or ear.’

  Janie was visibly shocked. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘You do nothing –when we get back you disappear with mum, go to a hotel somewhere far away whilst I find where the money went. I’ve got some leads.’

  Gold gave me a sideways glance that said, ‘Really?’ I didn’t respond. I wanted to know one more thing. ‘What happened on the day you were kidnapped?’

  ‘Window cleaners.’

  ‘Window cleaners? They came in through your windows?’

  She gave a small laugh. ‘No, the landlord has a contract with a cleaning company to clean the outside of the windows. There was a buzz on the intercom and the man said he was from a company taking over the contract for the landlord, and could he come and take a look from the inside. I had no reason not to let him, and when I opened the door there were two of them. One gave me their flyer, and when I let them in and shut the door, that was it. I was bundled into the lounge, made to drink a small glass of water from the kitchen, and that’s all I remember.’

  Gold exchanged a glance with me. ‘Rohypnol.’

  I nodded agreement.

  ‘What?’ Janie asked.

  ‘They probably gave you the drug Rohypnol,’ I told her. ‘Known as the date-rape drug – knocks you out. How long were you unconscious?’

  ‘I don’t know. I woke up in the back of a big lorry, bound and gagged with sacks of animal feed all around me. I hadn’t been raped. It seemed hours I was in it, then I was taken out at the building where you found me and chained in that room.’

  ***********************************

  We travelled on, keeping a look out behind us, but the other traffic seemed normal; none moving up close with a gun held pointing our way from the passenger window. Well, that’s how they do it in the movies, so it must be true.

  ‘That’s not right.’ Gold slowed down and slipped into a short layby at the side of the road. Ahead of us the Romanian-Hungarian border post had a queue of cars waiting to go through. It shouldn’t have. Hungary and Romania are part of the European Union Shengen agreement, a pact between all twenty-six European countries to officially abolish passport control and all other types of border control at their mutual borders. The traffic should be driving straight through; it wasn’t. Each car was being stopped and searched.

  ‘Stay here until you hear from me,’ I said to Gold as I got out of the car and put my night visions on and switched on my comms.

  ‘Okay.’ Gold reached for her comms battery pack and switched on too.

  I waited until no cars were coming and then jumped the low fence into the farmer’s field that ran alongside the road. It was pasture, not a ploughed field, which made running through it quite easy. I moved a good fifty metres into the field where passing headlights wouldn’t pick me out and went towards the non-existent border, which seemed to be a hedgerow leading alongside the field down to the border post. I turned and keeping down made it quickly to the back of the concrete border post building. Gold had been right; something here was wrong. The cars leaving Romania were being stopped and searched by civilians, not uniformed border guards.

  I took out my gun, slipped the safety catch off and moved around the dark side of the building away from the queuing cars and their lights. Through the side window I could see two Border Control guards tied and gagged on the floor, with a civilian with a gun standing in the front doorway watching, as another three searched the cars one by one before letting them pass through; all carried guns. Bogdan’s goons had taken over the post; how the Hell had they got here so quickly. I scoured the area through the night visions and there it was: a four-seater helicopter sitting in the dark fifty metres into the next field. I moved over to it and using a handy rock smashed all the dials and switches, before making my way back to the side of the post. I called Gold.

  ‘Okay, join the queue. There’s four of Bogdan’s men, they’ve taken over the post. Put Janie in the passenger seat and when you get here take out the one who comes to your side of the car – I’ll take the other three.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I moved back into the darkness and waited; I could see the Range Rover in the queue twenty cars back. It didn’t take long for it to be three cars back as the goons were looking for a man and a woman; their search was a quick look at who was in each vehicle and the inside of the boot if the car had one. I waited by the corner of the building in the dark, and as Gold drew up to the goon standing in front of her and holding his hand up to stop the car, I moved fast. Their attention was on the car; the one standing in the building doorway took my first bullet in the side of his head and crumpled to the floor. I heard Gold’s shot take out the goon on her side of the car before the other two realised what was happening and didn’t know which way to look; I took out the one standing at the front of the car with two body shots, and the one on the passenger side hadn’t time to turn my way before the bullet in the back of the head from such a short distance pushed him forward to slump over the car roof and slide slowly down past Janie’s look of horror as his bleeding head left blood smears down the passenger window beside her.

  I jumped into the back and Gold floored the accelerator; we bumped over the body of the goon in front and were away. We had a few minutes before the people in the cars behind would be able to gather their thoughts and get out, and then a few minutes more before the guards were released and able to call their base. They hadn’t seen us, so any description of the car was going to be amateur; and anyway, there’s plenty of Range Rovers in Hungary and we’d be in Debrecen and at the airport before anything organised could happen.

  Janie was quiet. I leant forward and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘You okay?’

  She half turned. ‘You just killed four people.’ Her voice shook.

  ‘I wasn’t counting.’

  I could see a smile on Gold’s face in the mirror.

  ‘They might have families.’

  Oh no, not that old chestnut again. I sat back. ‘Yes, they probably do –and probably the people they killed in the past had families too.’

  ‘Are there many people like you, Ben Nevis?’

  ‘Not many, but you’re lucky – mum hired the best.’

  ‘You’re a killer with no conscience.’ It was said quietly and without any malice, but she’d nailed me perfectly.

  ‘And you’re a young lady with all her fingers and two ears.’

  Gold stepped in. ‘Don’t worry, Janie. It doesn’t happen a lot, but sometimes the world isn’t a nice place, and things have to be put right.’

  Janie mirror-traced a blood smear on the outside of the passenger window with her finger. ‘I thought this kind of thing was just in films and Netflix.’

  So do a lot of people, Janie, I thought to myself, so do a lot of people.

  **********************************

  Everything at the airport was going smoothly, the pilot had done his job and the papers were all in order; nobody questioned that one person came in on the flight and three were going out on it. That’s the beauty of charter flights; officials have enough paperwork to navigate their way through with the regular timetable passenger flights, yet alone adding any for a light charter flight, especially at two in the morning. Mind you, the company I use are good; they register flights as ‘freight’, so immigration take no notice of them. Crafty, eh? It was as we taxied to the end of the runway that things hotted u
p.

  The pilot turned to me. ‘The tower want us to return to the parking area.’

  I shook my head. ‘No way, we go.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The pilot didn’t reply to the tower and put the intercom on speaker.

  ‘One seven four five two, return to your stand.’

  ‘One seven four five two to control, you’re breaking up – please repeat?’

  ‘One seven four five two, abort your take off – repeat, abort your take off.’

  ‘One seven four five two, your message is unclear – lots of static on the line. Please repeat.’

  By now we were on the departure runway and gathering speed. The pilot shut off the speaker and waved a thumb over his shoulder pointing behind us. I looked back and two cars with blues flashing were on the tarmac and gaining on us.

  ‘Friends come to see you off?’ The pilot was a sarcastic so-and-so when he wanted to be. I’d used him before, and he knew I wasn’t always strictly legit.

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Okay.’ He pulled a switch on the controls and a valve on each of the kerosene tanks on the wings opened, spilling the fuel out onto the runway behind us. ‘That should do it,’ he said after a few seconds and shut the valves.

  Behind us the cars hit the fuel spill and danced together like two drunks on ice, spinning into each other and sliding across the runway out of control.

  Then we were airborne and heading home.

  Janie spent the flight back in silence. I thought it best to leave her alone with her thoughts. At Stansted Dick Clancy met us, introduced himself, put Janie in an unmarked police car with a couple of plain-clothed protection officers and sent her to Marcia’s house with strict instructions to talk to no one. I thought about going with her, but maybe best to let mum and daughter sort themselves out on their own in the peace of the family home. I knew there would be officers inside and outside the house, so I didn’t have any worries about their safety.

  Darkness was turning into morning daybreak. I invited Gold back to mine for breakfast, but like me she wanted to just relax and unwind so we went our separate ways. I said I’d call later that day, so home to a long hot bath and bed.

  CHAPTER 10

  Harry Cohen was slumped forward over his desk. The exit wound of the bullet that had killed him showed large and jagged in the back of his head.

  ‘The brothers are getting impatient.’ Clancy stood with me beside the desk watching SOCOs in their paper suits going about their forensic business around the body and the office. A pathway of PCR plates led from the door to the desk; we made our way back across them and stepped off into the outer office, where a distraught secretary was sitting with a WPC giving a statement. We ignored each other; not the time for any ribald banter.

  I’d managed just four hours sleep when Clancy had rung me at ten that morning. Cohen’s secretary had arrived for work and found him like this. The local force had gone in and secured the building, and when Cohen’s name was checked on the computer it had flagged up that the Organised Crime Unit had an interest in him and Clancy was alerted. We both got there about the same time. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Romania yet.

  ‘You didn’t say much about your Romanian trip when you landed last night. All go to plan, did it?’ He raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘Yes, pretty well – in and out. We weren’t expected.’

  ‘You didn’t upset the Bogdan family so much that this is the result then?’ He nodded towards Cohen.

  ‘Well, they’d be upset that they’d lost their bargaining chip with Janie gone.’

  Clancy nodded in agreement. ‘And they obviously thought Cohen had something to do with it and wasn’t of any further use to them.’

  The pathologist wandered over. ‘Pretty basic hit, single 9mm shot to the temple.’

  ‘Well, at least he didn’t suffer long,’ said Clancy.

  ‘He may have – he was tortured by the look of it.’

  ‘Really?’

  The pathologist referred to his notes. ‘Burn marks on his forehead – looks like somebody stubbed out a cigarette on him.’

  There are some nasty people around.

  ***************************************

  I rang Gold and arranged to meet her at the concourse cafe on Charing Cross Station. We use it a lot when a job’s in operation, you can take a window seat and see everybody approaching; you can’t do that in my office, and I thought it wise to give the office a wide berth as Cohen would have told his killers all about me, no doubt. If they didn’t know I was involved before, they damn well would now, and there were still four Bogdan brothers to worry about. Although with a bit of luck a couple of them were amongst the bodies we’d left in Romania.

  ‘You’re not supposed to do that,’ I admonished Gold as she poured herself a coffee from a thermos. ‘You’re supposed to buy it here.’

  ‘If I make it myself, I know it’s coffee and not dishwater. I don’t know how you can drink that.’ She nodded towards my cup of British Rail dishwater. She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Lovely. Right, what happened at Cohen’s then?’

  ‘Well, I think we stirred up the family so much yesterday that they decided to attack hard. I don’t know why they killed Cohen, he wouldn’t offer any threat – I’d have thought they’d have gone to Marcia’s house. Pretty obvious that’s where Janie would be.’

  ‘Or her flat.’

  I hadn’t thought of that – obvious, eh? ‘Of course, her flat – Cohen would have given them her address. I bet there’s a welcoming party waiting there.’

  ‘Wanna check it out?’

  ‘Later, leave them there for a few hours so they get bored and drop their guard. No rush.’

  ‘Okay.’ Gold cleared some space on the table. ‘In the meantime I’ve been busy online this morning and calling in favours. Some interesting stuff.’ She pulled a folder from her shoulder bag and put a paper from it in front of me. ‘Harry Cohen’s phone calls for the last two weeks – lots to Marcia and quite a few to Club Bucharest, and four to Romania.’

  ‘Interesting – seems Harry was playing both sides.’

  ‘His bank statement is even more interesting.’ She flipped another paper in front of me. ‘In the last six months Harry Cohen’s little agency has moved three million through its account – bank transfers from Romania have come in regularly and gone out again pretty quickly to Belgium and Mexico.’

  ‘Narco capitals.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was getting the picture. ‘So Randall was using Cohen’s legitimate UK business account to get in the Bogdans’ money for drug deals, then sending it by bank transfer to his suppliers in Mexico and Belgium to pay them once delivery was made.’

  ‘Yes, and the timelines match – each amount coming in goes out about three weeks later with a shortfall of twelve percent, exactly twelve percent each time.’

  It was all making sense. ‘The three weeks being the time it takes for the drugs to be delivered, and the twelve percent skim being Randall’s commission.’

  Gold nodded. ‘I’d agree with that – and then the twelve percent goes to an offshore account of a business registered in the Isle of Man.’

  ‘Tax rate ten percent maximum.’

  ‘Correct, so Randall’s twelve percent of the three million transferred over the period is three hundred and sixty thousand pounds, of which he loses just thirty-six thousand in Manx tax, and everything is laundered and legal.’

  ‘And no bundles of cash changing hands and splashing around being washed.’

  ‘No, just a few clicks of the laptop keyboard. But there’s an open ending which ties nicely in with what’s going on. The last amount of a million in Cohen’s account didn’t go out to Mexico or Belgium, it went straight to the Isle of Man account.’

  ‘Have you got the dates it came in and went out?’

  ‘Of course. I’m ahead of you, Ben.’ She smiled. ‘The money came in to Harry Cohen’s account from Romania before Randall was k
illed, and went out to the Isle of Man a good seven weeks afterwards.’

  ‘This is all making sense. The Bogdans paid in advance for a consignment – the consignment that was supposed to be dropped from a small plane in Epping Forest – but when that went wrong and Randall was killed they didn’t get their drugs, and somebody took the opportunity a few weeks later to transfer all the money into the Isle of Man account.’

  ‘And obviously it wasn’t Randall – he was dead.’

  I agreed. ‘No, and it wasn’t Harry Cohen either – with a gun pointing to his head he would have folded and given the money back. He was killed because he was no further use to the Bogdans and knew too much about how they and Randall got the drugs into Romania. So whose account is it in the Isle of Man?’

  Gold shrugged. ‘Don’t know, can’t get any details. Offshore tax haven banks have the strongest security available – even your mate Clancy won’t get anything from them, they sit outside UK legal jurisdiction. If they don’t want to give you the information, they aren’t obliged to.’

  ‘If Harry Cohen knew whose account it was, he would have told the Bogdan brothers – and like you said, once they realised he didn’t know, he was of no further use to them. Bang bang, goodbye Harry. So who is this account holder, the mysterious third person? Is it the same person who was with Randall on the night he was killed in Epping Forest? What are we missing here?’

  Gold laughed. ‘That’s exactly what we are missing – the name of the third person. Randall’s partner, that’s what we are missing.’

  I took a sip of my coffee. It was stone cold; a bit like any leads to the missing person. I grimaced. ‘Urgh.’

  Gold held her thermos towards me. ‘Top up? It’s hot.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. If we don’t get any leads at Janie’s tonight, I’ll go and see Marcia Johnson tomorrow and get her to rack her brains and see if we can come up with any names Randall was close to. Let’s hope she has a good memory.’

  Gold checked her watch. I don’t know why; habit I suppose, because there’s a BR clock the size of Big Ben hanging from the concourse roof about fifty metres in front of the cafe.