by Dan Latus
His headlights lit up the tunnel through the forest. Tall, dark conifers on each side. The edges of the road were demarcated by linear mounds of dirty snow pushed aside and left by the ploughs over many months. A small herd of deer crossed the road a little way ahead, bounding and leaping to escape his lights. He dipped the beams and slowed, as much for his own sake as for theirs. Deer were big and heavy enough to do significant damage to a car designed for high-speed motoring on the autobahn.
Twenty minutes later he began to relax a little. He even grinned. Hell, he’d done it!
For the time being, he cautioned himself. But now he would have Olsson’s killers on his back, as well as anyone coming after him from Lviv, or from further east.
The cops as well, probably, when the people running the ski chalet discovered the body and raised the alarm. But what could they tell the police about him? He hadn’t even been asked to sign a guest book. So they didn’t have so much as a forged name for him. Just a description from the young guy on reception, if he could remember anything at all about the departed guest.
There would be something about the cars. Maybe the owner or manager would remember that their first guest had arrived in an Audi, not a Skoda. Maybe. But perhaps not if the only person around had been the young guy who had let him in last night.
What about the Skoda left in the car park? He thought for a moment and shook his head. It wasn’t his. He’d just taken it off the street. There was nothing to connect it with him.
Had he left anything inside the car? He didn’t think so. He’d had virtually nothing with him. Just the one little bag. Nothing else? Just fingerprints. That could be a problem.
He grimaced and then thought, oh, to hell with it! What was done was done. There was no going back.
To improve his chances, he decided to leave the road for Kosice that went on eventually to Bratislava, on the western edge of Slovakia. Instead, he opted to head south into Hungary. Putting another international border behind him might help, might give him crucial time while officialdom sorted out questions of jurisdiction, if they were on his trail.
Once in Hungary, he would head down to Vienna and then west to Salzburg, and on into Germany. With luck, he would be moving fast enough to get across a few borders before anybody looking for him had any idea where he was. The Schengen Agreement meant that borders in the EU were not what they used to be, but it didn’t mean that police forces could still operate only on their own patch. Not every country had signed up to it anyway.
Things were looking up, he decided with some satisfaction. He was well out of the hell hole that was Ukraine, and soon he would be deep into the safe part of Europe. And he had money. Lots of it! He chuckled at the thought. He could do a hell of a lot with the money. Even pay for petrol.
He kept going all day, and as it was getting dark, took a room in a pension not far from Regensburg in Bavaria. It was another ski chalet, basically, but several classes better than the previous one he’d stayed in. It looked lived in but well looked after, and not the kind of place where you might stumble across dead bodies nobody else had noticed.
He could have kept going, but he stopped when he did because he needed to work out what he was going to do next. Now he was out of the immediate danger zone, there was no point continuing to run like a headless chicken. He needed to run more like a wounded fox, a damaged creature admittedly, but one with all its wits about it still.
And there was Vlasta to think of. What on earth had become of her?
Taking stock, there was a lot of paper to wade though and assimilate. There was almost no unnecessary personal information amongst it, but it seemed that the man – Jack Olsson, according to the American passport – had been an arms salesman. He had been looking to sell a range of weapons, probably to anyone who expressed an interest and had the money to pay for them.
It looked as though he had been probing markets in Ukraine and Romania, and possibly Moldova. Not Transnistria, though, that slender strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine. Russians, and Russian weapons, if not Russia itself, had control there.
Probably not Slovakia either, where Olsson had met his end. The capital, Bratislava, on the other side of the country, was where he would have been if he had wanted to sell to the Slovaks. No, on balance, he had probably been focussing on Ukraine, given all the pressure the country had been getting from Russia in the east. The Ukrainians needed more and better weapons from somewhere. Otherwise, they could forget about the idea of being independent.
What about the money, all those American dollars? There was not much doubt about what that was for. It certainly wasn’t money that Olsson had been paid. Salesmen didn’t come away with bags of money that could be taken back from them once they left the building and turned the corner. It would have been intended to smooth the wheels of commerce.
In Ukraine, and everywhere else in eastern Europe, cash to smooth negotiations was an essential tool of the trade, just as it was when Western countries went on sales drives to Saudi Arabia, or anywhere in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. Anywhere in the world, if the truth be known. Even America. Maybe especially America.
Well, he concluded, he would put it to a damned sight better use than Olsson would have done. He was sure of that. No-one would be killed by it, now it was in his hands.
He wondered about Olsson. Who was he? Where had he come from? Who did he represent? A government, a company? There were so many passports in his possession that it was hard to know which, if any, was proof of nationality or citizenship.
A citizen of the world, then? He smiled grimly. Probably not. Somebody, somewhere, would have claim on him – and on the money. Whether it was a country or a company was a moot point, and scarcely seemed to matter anyway. Olsson had lost out. The money was his now.
This extraordinary windfall had arrived at exactly the right time. He had needed money badly. What he had earned with Viktor over the past couple of years had all been lost when he scrambled to get out of Lviv. He had nothing to show for his time there, nothing at all.
No matter. He was alive, and now he had financial compensation for what he had lost. It was a fair trade. He should have been as dead as the rest of them, and would have been if it hadn’t been for Vlasta. He certainly couldn’t complain now.
He stood up and wandered around the room. Was he safe here? He doubted it. Safe for the moment, perhaps, but the people who had stormed Lviv would know of him. They would be coming. He needed to make plans, and fast. Another opportunity to re-establish himself would not come his way. This was it. He had to make good use of it. Viktor, bless his soul, would have expected nothing less of him.
As for Vlasta, well, all he could do for the moment was hope she was safe. He had to put all thoughts of her to one side until he was safe. She, too, would have expected nothing less of him.
Chapter Seven
Washington DC, 3 September 2014
George Riley took his time getting there. He was in no hurry, and the crowds on the streets of the capital were something of a novelty to him these days. He was a stranger here now, he mused with a wry smile, and glad to be so.
Rafferty’s had received a lick of fresh paint since he was last here. Still a bar, though. He paused before he went inside and ran his eyes over the once familiar exterior. Still a bar, and no doubt still a good and quiet place to meet after a long, hard day.
He smiled and headed for the entrance. He didn’t miss those days, not really. He’d had his time here, in this city, and he wasn’t sorry it was over. He would just have liked to have been twenty or thirty years younger.
Ted Pearson was waiting for him at a quiet table towards the rear of the room. He had a beer in front of him and now he signalled to a waiter that he wanted one for the new arrival.
‘George! Good to see you. How the heck are you?’
‘Just fine, Ted, thanks. You? It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
Pearson was on his feet by then, and they shook hands.
&nbs
p; ‘Retirement’s suiting you, eh? I can see that from the look on your face.’
Riley chuckled. He was happy to chew the fat with an old colleague, one he almost counted a friend; they went back so far.
‘Country living suits me just fine, Ted. It’s a bit stressful at times, but no worse than here – and it’s no use complaining anyway.’
‘Stressful? What – wondering how deep the snow’s gonna be? Calculating if you’ve chopped enough wood to last the winter?’
‘All of that!’ Riley grinned. ‘How about you, Ted? Things good with you?’
‘Oh, you know. Nothing changes here. It’s still just one damned thing after another.’
Riley could imagine. He thought Ted looked as if he needed some retirement himself. His face was older, five or six years older, and what was left of his hair was brillo-pad grey now, going on white. The paunch that had always been there was significantly bigger, too.
‘To tell the truth, George,’ Pearson confided, ‘another couple of years will be enough for me – if I last that long.’
‘Making plans, eh?’
‘I sure am. But I’ll be going back West. Vermont wouldn’t suit me as well as it obviously does you.’
‘I can’t complain,’ Riley admitted.
‘I got a few little things to settle, and then I’m out of here.’
He paused and squinted into the distance. Riley waited, and sipped his beer. Something was coming. He knew that. He’d known it ever since he took the phone call. He just didn’t have a clue what it was.
‘Ted?’ he prompted.
‘Sorry, George. I was miles away, thinking of days gone by.’
‘That can be a bad sign, old friend. And you shouldn’t let anyone know, in case they start talking. Next thing you know, there’ll be a shrink waiting to interview you.’
Pearson grinned and picked up his glass of beer. ‘Remember Jack Olsson?’ he asked quietly before taking a long swallow.
Riley wondered if he was hallucinating. Alternatively, the acoustics in Rafferty’s were so strange he was picking up some weird stuff. Just noise, basically. Random noise that didn’t make any sense at all. That must be what it was, all it was. But Ted was looking at him, staring at him, waiting for him to say something meaningful.
He shook his head. ‘My hearing,’ he muttered ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s tinnitus. I ought to get it checked out. I blame the chain saw. You don’t always bother to put on the ear muffs when you’re in a hurry. You just want to have at it, and get the job done.’
‘George! Answer the question, dammit, not that I really need you to.’
Riley shut up and stared at his beer for a moment. ‘Jack Olsson?’ he repeated slowly. ‘Did I really hear you say that name?’
‘Remember him, George? Of course you do.’
Riley knew now why he had been asked here today. It wasn’t old friendship, after all. It was business, old business.
‘What’s this about, Ted? Something come up?’
‘We never did know what happened to him, did we?’
Riley shook his head. It was true. Jack, a good buddy, had simply disappeared one time. He had gone to Ukraine, and never been heard of again. His best buddy. Disappeared. Life seemed like shit sometimes.
‘How long ago was it?’ Pearson asked reflectively.
‘A few years.’
‘Ten, near enough.’
They sat quietly for a moment, resurrecting memories.
‘He was a good man,’ Riley said softly.
‘One of the best.’
‘So what’s this about, Ted?’
The mood suddenly changed.
Pearson locked eyes with him and said, ‘We think we may have discovered what happened to him. We want you to go over there, to Europe, and confirm it.’
‘I’m retired, Ted.’
‘You’re still the best man for the job.’
For Jack Olsson’s sake, Riley heard Pearson out.
‘As you know, George, we didn’t have a clue what had happened to old Jack. He simply disappeared off our radar. At the time, we assumed he got caught up in the attack in Lviv that wiped out Viktor Sirko. Remember him?’
‘Vaguely. Jack was visiting him, wasn’t he?’ Riley paused and frowned. ‘Doing some business there, I seem to recall.’
Pearson nodded. ‘That’s right. We were channelling arms through Sirko because we didn’t think the West’s guarantees to Ukraine were worth a damn. Hell, we expected the President to look the other way when – not if – the shit hit the fan. But all was supposed to be sweetness and light in those early Putin days. The Oval office didn’t want to hear a word against him.’
‘And they didn’t.’
‘When push came to shove, the guarantees made to Ukraine by the US, Great Britain and the Kremlin weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Some of us knew that all along.’
‘What about Jack?’ Riley pressed.
‘Yeah. Poor old Jack. Just recently a few things have come together that tell us how he ended up.’
‘He’s not alive?’
Pearson shook his head. ‘Sadly. We’re sure of that, if nothing else. Just recently, the Slovaks forwarded DNA material from some guy they’d had in their morgue for ten years. Don’t ask me why now! But they did it. A new broom doing some house cleaning, probably. Wanting to get the guy buried, or otherwise out of the way.’
‘Maybe they’re wanting more friendship? Afraid it’ll be their turn next, when Putin gets finished with Ukraine.’
‘Yeah.’ Pearson shook his head. ‘We really don’t need this, do we?’
It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.
‘Anyway,’ Pearson continued, ‘to cut a long story short, we identified the body as Jack Olsson.’
‘In Slovakia?’
Pearson nodded.
‘And they really didn’t know who and what he was all this time?’
‘Apparently. He was just a body to them. All his documentation was gone, along with a pile of money. His car, too. All they had was a body, and a car that wasn’t Jack’s. They could make nothing of it.’
‘You mentioned money. How much?’
‘Ten million bucks.’
‘Cash?’
‘Yeah.’
Riley whistled.
‘Anyway, it was Jack Olsson. So now we know Jack died in a small hotel in eastern Slovakia.’
Riley thought that was quite likely. The easy thing for Jack to have done would have been to board a plane in Kiev, but that could be risky if you were carrying stuff that would be hard to explain. Like $10,000,000. Safer to slip over the border at some quiet, out of the way, crossing point. Normally, at least. Perhaps he had been followed on this occasion.
‘So either he hadn’t been able to get to Sirko with the money or the deal fell through. Either way, he was on his way back out.’
‘Something like that. We don’t really know. But Sirko was hit at that time, remember? So maybe Jack aborted his mission.’
Riley recalled all that. It was starting to come back to him now, all this stuff he had put into deep storage these past few years.
‘Did the Slovaks say how Jack died?’
‘He was shot. Bullet in the head.’
Riley grimaced.
‘He was staying in some ski village, some little hotel there. A pension, I think they call it. The season was over. But it was still cold. Nothing happening.
‘The hotel had only one other guest at the time. Their record keeping wasn’t up to much. So we don’t know who that guest was – not from the hotel register, at least.
‘By the time the cops were brought in, the other guy had disappeared. They had no idea who he was. But they searched his room and the car he had left behind, and collected the evidence, what there was of it.’
‘What did they get?’
‘DNA’s wonderful stuff, isn’t it?’ Pearson said, looking up with a wry smile. ‘They got it for both the dead guy – Jack – and the other gu
est, the guy who might have killed him. So they had it, but they didn’t do anything with it for ten years. Then they sent it all stateside.’
Riley nodded thoughtfully and mulled it over. ‘Another beer?’ he asked eventually.
‘You buying?’
‘Sure. My pension will stand a couple of beers.’ He waved the waiter over and ordered, giving himself more time to think. ‘That all you got?’ he asked when he turned back to Pearson. ‘A pile of DNA?’
‘Pretty much. At least, until recently it was.’
Taking delivery of the beers took a couple of minutes. Then they got right back at it, the pace quickening as George Riley found himself being expertly reeled in.
‘You familiar with the automatic DNA matching programme we run?’ Pearson asked.
‘Not really. I’ve heard rumours of it, but I know nothing about it.’
‘It’s big stuff. We do a lot of it now, mostly terrorism related.’
‘Like the matching of voice recordings?’
‘Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. Anyway, we do it for recorded crime scenes. Just automatically punch the data in, and see if anything matches up.’
‘So what have you got?’
‘It’s very interesting. Some guy in England had his house burgled a little while ago – and guess what?’
‘You’re kidding?’ Riley stared, and thought about it for a moment. Then he smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it!’
Pearson grinned. ‘You’d better! It’s the same guy who ten years ago spent a night in the same little old ski lodge in Slovakia where Jack Olsson was staying and got himself murdered.’
‘A Brit?’
Pearson nodded. ‘Seems to be. We’d like you to go over there and take a look at the guy, George. Figure out if he really is the one who shot Jack. And if he is,’ he added ominously, ‘do something about it.’
Chapter Eight
London, 26 April 2004
He debated dumping the car in France and continuing on foot, or hitching a lift. He didn’t do it. After a couple of days, the car felt like home. He liked it. It held him and his belongings, such as they were. Not least, it held the bag with the money. How could he cope without it?