A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  I was sorry I’d said anything.

  Iosef went in feet first, Burke removing the belt strap from around his ankles. I lifted the torso. Burke arranged his hands at his sides, almost delicately, like we were about to lay Iosef to rest in a coffin. But it was simply to allow his upper body to slide smoothly along the rubber gasket.

  The surface of the caustic pool was five feet below, the vat only half full of the mixture. Iosef hit with a splash that echoed briefly off the stainless-steel walls.

  Disposing of the other three men went faster. We were practiced now. The only hitch was Stepan, the last, whose shoulders caught briefly on the sides of the porthole. Burke held on to the railing and raised his foot to push hard on one shoulder, then the other, and finally on the top of the stubbled, bloody head until the body broke loose.

  Stepan didn’t make as large a splash as he struck the liquid. Landed on his friends, a voice whispered. Burke closed the lid and tightened the handles.

  We walked down the stairs. I pulled my respirator off. Burke followed suit. The mask had left his face creased and drenched in sweat. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve.

  “Once they’re all the way gone, I drain the liquid into drums and bury those a long ways from here,” he said. “The vat gets scoured. Floors, too. Nothing any lab could detect.”

  I hadn’t asked. Burke was talking just to release tension, distract himself, whatever. It was my first hint of anything like human emotion from him, apart from anger or mockery.

  He grabbed the trash sack of torn clothes and the bag of the Russians’ possessions. I retrieved my jacket from the table. My T-shirt, stained with blood and worse, I rolled into a tight ball to carry away and dispose of later. I wouldn’t put it with the other men’s clothes.

  “Why am I still alive?” I said.

  “Because I didn’t want you dead.”

  “That’s no answer.” I looked at the vat. “You’ve killed plenty, just on Liashko’s orders. You’ve killed cops. I heard about Santora, the ATF agent. Why not me?”

  Burke grimaced. “You think it’s ʼcause I’m your daddy? I already told you that’s crap.”

  “So what’s the reason?”

  “Fuck off. That’s the reason.” Spit flew from Burke’s mouth. “You owe me, Shaw. I just put my neck out for you. You owe it to me to be dead.”

  He pointed. “Your truck’s outside. Take it and drive until you run out of land. Nobody sees you, hears you, smells you until I say so. I’ll let you know when you can play fucking Lazarus. Take it before I change my goddamn mind and burn you down to nothing with the rest of them.”

  His right hand had drifted behind him. Nearer the holster on his belt. It might just be a reflex.

  I left before I found out.

  Thirty-Eight

  My shambling steps brought me to the truck before my higher brain functions reminded me that I had no idea where I was. Or exactly when. It was still nighttime. Gut Burke’s barn, his personal abattoir, was the only structure in sight, surrounded by acres of what looked like fallow farmland. To both my left and right, horizons of low black hills marked the borders of a valley.

  My fingers fumbled with the phone. Just past five in the morning, and the map placed me in the southern part of Snohomish County. Stepan and his men had driven over an hour from where the luckless Gennady had fallen from the viaduct.

  At least they’d brought the Dodge with them. Burke probably had a convenient way of disposing of cars, too.

  My truck was missing most of a window and all of the air vent on the passenger’s side. A crack the width of my thumb ran through the dashboard like a sideways lightning bolt. Fragments of glass and blue plastic littered the seat and floor.

  But the engine started. And the truck moved when I touched the gas. And my hands and feet kept moving, too, just as mechanically.

  Wind blasted through the destroyed window on the highway. I was desperately thirsty, but if I stopped now there was no guarantee I could start again. Momentum was everything.

  Both the Dodge and I made it to the marina, though if someone were to ask me what route I’d chosen, they might as well have been asking me the way to the moon that had sluggishly sunk below the horizon during the drive.

  Hollis nearly ran to meet me as I tottered toward the dock gate. Had I called him and forgotten?

  “Did you know your headlight—” He stopped. “What happened to your face?”

  I stared, not understanding. My scars?

  “No, there.” He tapped his own cheek. I felt my face and wished I hadn’t. The burn line made by the trickling lye flamed anew.

  “Long night,” I said. I reached into my pocket for my keys and found Stepan’s phone instead. The sight of it lent me a sudden surge of energy.

  Stepan and his men had come to America. To handle important business for Anatoly Liashko. Lieutenant Guerin had told me Liashko was an arms trafficker. What had that business been? Or—I corrected myself—what was it still? Burke would surely pick up where Stepan had left off. Did the task force tracking Burke know about this yet?

  “You look . . . like a coffee would help,” Hollis said.

  “Water. Thanks. Meet you there.”

  But he stayed put, watching me as I returned to the truck.

  Good. Stepan’s crew hadn’t searched the Dodge. Aura Nath’s tablet, her hacker’s special, was still hidden under the backseat. I kept a USB and other charging cables in the center console. I grabbed them all and walked back, cords dangling from my fist like slain snakes.

  Inside the Francesca, Hollis cleared a pile of clothes and random junk off the settee—a beach towel covered the cushion dappled with the Finnish sailor Jaak’s blood—to allow me to sit down. I was already preoccupied with plugging Stepan’s phone into the tablet.

  The application within responded immediately, filling and refilling the tablet’s screen with rows of information—contacts, search history, times of use. I had to hand it to Aura. Her tool even translated the Cyrillic letters on the phone’s screen into English for my convenience.

  Within two minutes, the tablet pinged to mark completion of its task. I looked first for emails or texts. The earliest dated from only a week ago. Stepan had kept his use of the phone to a minimum. Maybe a byproduct of his boss, Liashko’s, penchant for security.

  “Paula was very pleased to know that Ondine won’t require her services any longer,” Hollis said, handing me a glass of water and putting a pitcher on the table.

  I mumbled some vague agreement in response, all my concentration on the phone’s single text message from an international number, consisting of fifteen characters: BTZU 742669 0 22G1.

  The pattern of characters was familiar, though I couldn’t place it right away. An account number? The text had been sent to Stepan yesterday morning, only hours before he and his crew had come after me. I wrote down the letters and numbers on a notepad.

  Stepan hadn’t used the phone’s map feature to find his way around Seattle. I scrolled farther down the pages of data. The SIM card had dutifully recorded each cellular tower that the phone had pinged while active, and every corresponding update of the location services. It made for reams of information, much of which was numeric coordinates and cell tower authentication keys.

  Most of the coordinates were the same. Stepan had remained stationary for at least half the day, and then he was on the move just after 3:00 p.m. local time. He’d stopped again one hour later, where he’d stayed until well after dark. I plugged those coordinates into my own phone. They matched the far south of the city, close by the Duwamish Waterway.

  “What’s the shipment?” Hollis said.

  Off my puzzled glance he pointed to the fifteen characters I’d written on the notepad. “That’s an ID for a freight container. A twenty-footer, general use model. See, you can tell from these numbers here.”

  I looked at him. “You’re a genius. Can you tell where it is?”

  “At least who owns it. BTZ, that’ll be the company
. The U just means standard freight. Hold on.” He found his own phone. I finished the water in two gulps and refilled the glass while Hollis typed.

  “Blacksea Tradepartners, a German firm,” he said. “But I suspect what you really want to know is who’s leased it. That’s nearly impossible without having the company’s own records.”

  “Maybe we can narrow it down.” I sat down to show Hollis the coordinates by the waterway. “A ship near here.”

  He screwed up his face in mock pain. “It’ll have to be a smaller freighter, if it’s on the river. Or we could be looking for a train. Thousands of containers go through there every day.”

  Damn it. Of course that was true, in the heart of the city’s international shipping. One twenty-foot steel box in a virtual sea of them.

  “Can you tell me anything more?” Hollis pressed. “What’s the cargo, or where it’s from?”

  “The owner is Ukrainian. The cargo is almost certainly weapons. I assume something packing more punch than small arms, if he bothered to send them all the way to the decadent West to sell them.”

  Hollis sat down. “You come across the most interesting people.”

  And sometimes I murdered them. A wave of fatigue threatened to knock me sideways.

  “Are you all right, Van? Your hand?”

  I looked. The glass Hollis had given me rested on my knee. Despite that, the surface of the water within bobbed and rippled as my forearm trembled in near synchronization.

  “Grab a bunk down below,” he said. “I’ll see what my friends down the docks can tell me.”

  “I’ll crash in the speedboat.”

  “You sure?”

  I was. For one reason, the sun would be up soon. The enclosed interior of the small craft effectively blocked nearly all light from outside, making it ideal for rest at any hour.

  For another, the sight of my shaking hand had brought back the memory of Stepan’s arm, in the vat, being inexorably swallowed by the corrosive solution as the bodies beneath his own shifted and settled deeper.

  It was entirely possible that I might start screaming, any second now.

  “Call me if you learn anything,” I said, carefully.

  Hollis frowned. “Not too soon. You need downtime.”

  All the way off the Francesca and down the dock, I kept my jaw shut tight, in case any sound tried to escape.

  Thirty-Nine

  My phone was ringing, and I fumbled to grab it from the radio shelf.

  “Hollis?” I said automatically.

  “No, it’s Wren. Were you asleep?”

  I blinked at my watch. In the pitch black of the speedboat cabin, its hands refused to resolve into anything more than a slim luminous triangle. “What time is it?”

  “About six-thirty. I texted earlier.”

  I pulled my phone away from my ear to look. Two unread messages. I’d slept for nearly twelve hours.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Wren laughed. “Well, I get now why you didn’t message me back. You sound really out of it.”

  “Feels that way.” I rubbed my face, trying to massage some sharpness back into my senses, and hissed at the sudden pain. The burn on my cheek had scabbed over during my hours of oblivion. The first rub cracked the scab wide open.

  Then my brain finally kicked in to remind me why Wren was calling. “It’s Sunday. We were supposed to get together.”

  “But that’s not happening. Hey, another time.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “You’re not going to try to talk me into still hanging tonight.”

  “No. Just . . .” What was I doing? “Just hold on with me for a minute. At least until I can apologize like somebody normal.”

  She didn’t say anything. During the pause I opened the cabin doors and slid back the hatch. Any warmth that had accumulated in the cabin from my body heat fled in a rush, replaced instantly by frigid evening air accentuated by the lightest possible drizzle, barely more than a fog. Welcome goose bumps popped to life on every inch of me.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “I’ll ride along. Are you all right?”

  “Getting there. I wasn’t thinking I would sleep so long, and—” I paused for a second, even though I’d already made the decision to come clean. “And I spaced our date. Last night wasn’t good.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  I had my face raised to the sky. Could practically feel my parched skin soaking in the water.

  “We don’t know each other, not yet,” I said. “I’d like to get there. Loading you down with a lot of my baggage might not be the way to start.”

  There was another pause. “I can stop just by hanging up. Hard to get safer than that.”

  “You know about me tracing my mother, Moira. I found a guy, here in Seattle, who might be my father.”

  “Oh. That’s loaded.”

  “Yeah. He denies it, barely admits he ever knew Moira, but . . . it feels right. Which is the shitty part of the whole situation.”

  “How?”

  “He’s not one of the good guys. I don’t know what to call him; he might be a full-on psychopath. Last night was violent. He wasn’t coming after me but I saw up close what he was capable of. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “Because you need to tell somebody, and I’m almost a stranger. It’s easier,” she said, like the answer was obvious. “So now you know. What he is. And you never have to get near him again.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What?” Wren asked.

  “I know him, yeah. I know part of him real well. The killing. Hard to keep him completely out of my life when that instinct is also a part of me.”

  “Do you mean what you did in the Army?”

  I was sharing a lot with Wren. More than I’d thought I could. But there had to be a line.

  “Right,” I said, and I hated myself a little for it.

  “Is . . . Is there somebody you talk to about that? Your time overseas? I know just enough to know when I’m over my head.”

  “There’s a shrink I saw for a while. And I’ve talked with brothers from the regiment. But this—” I wasn’t finding the right words. Maybe there weren’t any, if I couldn’t go all the way. “This is just new to me.”

  “You noticed what you and this man had in common. You must have differences, too.”

  “Yes. Hey, I learned something about Moira. She was taking college classes. In social work, maybe toward a job with kids in juvie or foster care.”

  “That’s great.” She sounded enthused. Or relieved that our conversation was on a more positive beat. “Did you know she had an interest in that?”

  “I didn’t know anything about her as an adult.” And this might be all I’d ever learn. “It seems to fit. She was stubborn enough for the job.”

  “A trait she clearly passed on.” I could hear Wren’s smile.

  “Thanks for not hanging up. If I can push my luck, can we try again?”

  “I’m free Tuesday.”

  “I’ll set an alarm this time.”

  “Damn right.”

  I kept the speedboat stocked with spare clothes and other essentials. Including ammunition of various calibers and a Colt Commander automatic I’d taken off a guy less trained and less restrained in proper handgun usage than me.

  Liashko thought I was dead. That didn’t mean I was safe. I clipped the holster to the back of my waistband and wore a heavy flannel shirt like a coat to conceal the weapon.

  I was starved. The diner on Seaview might still be open, or I could hit Oaxaca in Ballard. My appetite could conquer an entire platter of pork with mole sauce, and beer.

  But the cabin lights of the Francesca beckoned first. I wolfed a protein bar to keep my stomach from eating my liver and jogged over.

  “Any word on the ship?” I said to Hollis from the dock.

  “Ukrainian, you told me. I’ve checked with two different fellows who might know. They say the same: there are no Ukrainian vessel
s currently at port anywhere in Seattle.”

  “Dammit.”

  “Hold on, now. I’m warming up. There’s a Moldovan freighter traveling under a Belize flag of convenience moored on the same stretch of shore you indicated. The Oxana M.”

  “Moldova is next to the Ukraine.”

  “That much I knew. The name of the home port is beyond my ken. Gweer-goo-lesti?”

  “Giurgiulești.”

  “Impressive. I expect the Army briefed you lads on all manner of fun places you might see. The ship sailed from Jeer-whatever the long way, out through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, through the Canal, and back up again. Taking short-hop jobs as they went, as most of these small cargo freighters do.”

  “Any chance you can get your hands on the Oxana M’s cargo manifest?”

  “A good chance, but that will be a long list. She’s not a big ship, as they go. A hundred meters or so in length, no more than thirty thousand deadweight tonnes in her belly.”

  “All right, I get your point.” It would take me half a week to search the Oxana M’s holds, even if I could do it in broad daylight. “Let’s look at the manifest. Maybe lightning will strike.”

  As if in answer, my phone buzzed on Hollis’s table. An incoming video call from a blocked number. An instant later, Aura Nath’s face appeared on the screen.

  We both stared at it. How the hell—?

  I stopped my own thought; the answer was obvious: Aura and Bilal had an unsettling amount of tech wizardry. Of course they might be able to jack my phone’s controls.

  “Are you there?” she said, looking into the lens. From our side, all she might see was the ceiling of the Francesca’s cabin.

  “What is it?” I said, picking up the phone.

  “Thank God.” Aura spoke softly. “I don’t have much time. Saleem is missing. I think he might be coming after you.”

  Hollis and I exchanged a look.

  “Why would your man do that,” I said, “unless Bilal ordered him to?”

  “No. Just the opposite.” Aura’s words came rushing one upon another. “Bilal and Saleem argued on our flight back to Miami. We told Saleem that we had what we needed now. Our time in Seattle is done. But Saleem insisted that you were an unacceptable risk, that you knew too much about us. He wanted to return. Bilal refused. Saleem became furious. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s never challenged Bilal this way.”