by Brad Taylor
On the night of the horror, she’d fled the police station blindly, running straight back down the hill toward the Mediterranean coast, no other thought than to get away from the killer chasing her. She’d gravitated to the familiar, not knowing what else to do, running to the Eze train station. By the time she’d arrived, she was ragged and sweaty, but thinking more clearly. She’d originally intended to take the train to Monaco, but decided to go to Nice instead. She didn’t know it nearly as well, but she was convinced the killer knew she frequented Monaco, and he would find her there.
She’d boarded the final scheduled train, hiding in an empty car. She’d made it to Nice without any problems, and had spent the night curled up in a restroom in the station, the door locked behind her. She’d slept fitfully, nightmares of her travails snapping her awake, causing her to sob uncontrollably until the exhaustion took over again. When dawn arrived, she was stiff and hungry.
She’d cleaned the blood off her clothing as best she could in the bathroom sink, then had dumpster-dived behind a bakery, finding yesterday’s bagels in the trash. She’d eaten in the shadow of the bakery, seeing the sign for departing trains in the distance, watching the numbers flip as the trains came and went. And an idea formed.
She could take a train from here and go deeper into Europe, to a nation more welcoming of refugees. She scanned the sign and was dismayed to see that all of the trains went to either Italy or somewhere else in France. That was no good. She’d lived like an animal in the Italian refugee camp for weeks, and she’d experienced the disdain of the French since she’d escaped that hell.
Leaving here for another French or Italian town would not solve anything. She’d be in unfamiliar territory with the same hatred. The numbers flipped on the screen, and she saw one train leaving for Geneva, Switzerland, in twenty minutes. Switzerland. She knew nothing about the country, barely knew it even existed, but it wasn’t France or Italy.
She’d had no money for a ticket, but from what she knew on the train that ran to Monaco—and had allowed her to escape to Nice—nobody ever checked for a ticket. She’d never once been questioned. Everyone seemed to buy a ticket out of honesty, but no authority ever confirmed. Supposedly there was a system to catch cheaters, but she’d never seen it.
She’d tossed the final bagel in the trash and went to the platform only to see a man in a train uniform checking tickets before letting anyone board. That was something new.
She watched for a moment, seeing him look at a ticket, then direct one couple back outside the ropes to the front of the train, where the first-class section was located. She watched closely, and they boarded without any further involvement from the train personnel. She walked down the platform, smoothing her hands against her jeans, attempting to clean up her appearance.
She’d sidled forward, took one look back at the conductor, then scampered on the train, seeing the first-class cabin mostly empty. She’d taken a seat in the back, and the train had rolled. Four hours into the trip, she traveled down the car to the bathroom and had seen a conductor punching tickets in the following car. She’d felt the blood drain from her face, the fight-or-flight instinct erupting within her, but there was nowhere to flee, and fighting would do nothing but get her arrested again.
The conductor advanced through the cabin, and she took a breath, entering the bathroom, praying he would pass. He did not. He knocked on the door, startling her. She flushed the toilet and exited, acting scared at the intrusion—although it wasn’t really much of an act. She prayed her young age would save her.
It did. He glanced over her head, saw the bathroom was empty, and after a few words, she was allowed to scuttle past him to her “family.”
She’d arrived in Geneva just as scared as when she’d landed in Italy on the Navy ship. But at least in Italy, she’d had her brother and father. Now all she had was herself.
She’d stopped in the station, sat on a bench, and pulled out the stolen phone. She googled the city, familiarizing herself with it.
In her heart she knew she should have thrown the iPhone into the trash or destroyed it outright, but she hadn’t. They’d killed her family for it, and so a stubborn part of her had kept it. It was a touchstone to her father and brother, like an unspoken oath. The murderers wanted it badly enough to take the lives of her family, and so she would keep it from them. Besides, she’d killed one of them. She was sure they wouldn’t quit trying to find her whether she had the phone or not.
She was too young to realize that the phone itself was a threat. A beacon guiding her enemies to her.
She’d spent the morning wandering around Geneva, looking for a mark to rob, the hunger growing stronger. She had no luck, because she was too afraid of hitting a local. She wanted a tourist. Someone who wasn’t familiar with the police system and how to alert them.
She realized what she truly needed was a target-rich environment. A place where only tourists would go, minimizing the risk of robbing someone who lived in Geneva.
She’d used the phone, and had found the Chillon Castle. She’d taken the train up the coast of Lake Geneva, happily finding it like the train from Eze to Monaco. Nobody checked for tickets. She’d left the train at the Chillon stop and walked to the castle entrance, taking a seat on a bench next to a trash bin, watching the people exit. Sooner or later, someone would use the trash can. She didn’t have to wait long. Within twelve minutes, a thin man with a sun hat had thrown his ticket away. She waited until he was across the road, then dug it out. From there, it had been a small matter to claim she was going back into the castle to find her parents, showing the ticket with the bar code. The lady at the entrance hadn’t even bothered to scan it.
She’d passed through the gate, the walkways flush with tourists, looking for a mark that would give her enough of a stake to eat for a few days. She decided on the fat man with the obnoxious kids. She patiently followed them through the castle until they rose to the second floor, entering a great room.
A granite dining hall, the space was huge, complete with a giant wooden table and a fireplace large enough to park a car. Tourists wandered about, looking out the window toward the lake, or taking pictures of a sixteenth-century toilet that dropped the waste straight into the water below.
She closed within four feet of her target and caught the eye of another man who was looking at her. Tall, with a hatchet face and some sort of tattoo on his back crawling up his neck, he didn’t give off the vibe of a tourist. She backed off, pretending to read a plaque describing the fireplace. The man didn’t continue on. She went to the other side of the room, toward a sign with an arrow showing the way for the self-guided tour. The man followed, sending a bolt of adrenaline through her, her hunger forgotten.
She wasn’t the only hunter in the room. He was stalking her.
26
I found it.” The three words came through his cell phone, bringing a smile to Tagir Kurbanov’s face for the first time in days.
Finally. He said, “You sure?”
“Yeah. The phone signal’s sky-high, and the device you gave me has tightened to fifty feet of probable error, meaning it’s in the same room as me.”
“How many people in the room?”
“Probably thirty. It’s a big room.”
“So how do you know who has it?”
“It’s the girl.”
“The kid? She kept the phone? She didn’t sell it?”
He couldn’t believe it. He was convinced she would sell it as soon as she could, but when it had remained in the Nice train station for close to seven hours, he’d feared she’d simply ditched it in the trash for anyone to find. During that time, Tagir had had his hands full dealing with his actions at the police station—sterilizing the area as best he could, ditching the rental car that was under his now-dead partner’s name, and calling for further instructions from his Wagner bosses.
He’d awoken Dmitri Pavlov be
fore the sun crested the horizon, hoping the search for the phone was no longer relevant, but that was not to be. Dmitri was still fanatically adamant about retrieving it, and he’d given Tagir an earful about his “wasting time” instead of chasing it down immediately.
Disgusted, Tagir had listened to Dmitri rant, thinking, Clearly the company has my welfare at heart.
He’d said, “Dmitri, I just slaughtered an entire French police station and lost the partner you gave me in a single night. There were precautions I had to take. Some cleanup to execute.”
“We don’t have time for that. Every minute that phone is loose is a risk. You worry about being caught for what you did to find it, but you should be worrying about what will happen if it’s lost.”
“I’ll find the phone. It’s in Nice, and it’s been there for the night. My bet is the girl threw it in the trash.”
By the time he’d cauterized his connections in Eze and made it to Nice, the phone was on its way to Geneva, Switzerland. The second call to Dmitri hadn’t been as pleasant as the first. Dmitri started screaming, and through the projected anger, Tagir heard something else: fear.
He’d interrupted and said, “I need a crew. And not that Russian gangster crap you gave me in Eze. I need Wagner men.”
Dmitri started to protest, and Tagir had had enough. “Get me the men, or get the phone yourself.”
He’d hung up, then went into a bathroom to clean off the grime from the last twenty-four hours. He’d splashed water on his face, having no idea he was within arm’s reach of where his target had been less than three hours earlier. He caught his reflection in the mirror and paused, wondering what he had become.
A recollection of his childhood floated up, when he’d been about the same age as the target he was chasing. His brother hounding him through the woods, his mother hanging clothes in the summer air, his father chopping wood. Not a care in the world.
It was the last good memory he owned.
Shortly thereafter, Grozny was leveled and his family wiped out. And now he was hunting a girl not unlike himself. An orphan. A daughter of war. The difference was that he had created her condition. Regardless of what horrors had driven her to flee her country, he had been the one to wipe out her family.
He stared at his reflection, wanting to feel revulsion. Wanting the remorse to flow. It didn’t. All he saw was a man executing a mission, like so many others in a savage world.
She was nothing more than collateral damage. It wasn’t his fault she’d stolen the telephone. It was hers. He’d faced much worse in Grozny than he’d given her here, and he’d lived. Some are predators, and some are prey. That was simply the way of the world. She could live, too, if she wanted to become a predator. Like he had.
He saw the reflection grin back at him like an out-of-body experience.
That isn’t happening. Especially after what she’s put me through.
He left the bathroom and took a seat on a bench next to the entrance, waiting for a special arrival. At ten in the morning, four men walked into the lobby of the station, all heads on a swivel, analyzing the atmospherics. One was tall and lean, with a tattoo crawling up his neck. Two had bands of muscle rippling all over, to the point of being almost caricatures from a superhero comic, one with a ponytail and the other with a crew cut, giving them the look of identical twins who their parents were trying to keep distinct. The last was older, with glasses, a bulbous nose, and a shag of salt-and-pepper hair.
To the uninitiated, they simply looked a little rough, but Tagir knew who they were as soon as they’d opened the door. He could see the same aura of death surrounding them that he’d seen in the mirror earlier.
He’d given them an overview of what had transpired, and they’d taken the next train to Geneva. From there, it had been a simple matter to geolocate the phone to the Chillon Castle, making up for the trouble the girl had given him earlier. And now they’d pinpointed it.
Tagir said, “Are you sure it’s her? Do you see the phone?”
“I don’t see the handset, but it’s her. She’s not from here, she’s acting skittish, and she has shown no connection to anyone else. I mean, what’s she doing here by herself? Makes no sense. It’s her.”
From inside his rental car, Tagir looked at the castle entrance, thinking. They could end it right here, if they could get the girl alone. He said, “Okay, vector in the others. I’m no good for this. If she sees me, she’ll bolt. She knows me by sight.”
“Tagir, we can’t take her here. There’s no clean area. It’s all tourists, and there are cameras all over the place. I’d recommend waiting.”
Tagir grimaced, but understood. He knew the urgency behind the mission, and didn’t want to wait, but it was good to finally have a team that knew what they were doing, instead of a jerk-off who thought gold chains and intimidation was a winning strategy.
He said, “Understood. If you get the chance, execute. If not, just keep eyes on and wait until she leaves. She’s not getting away. She’s alone in a world where she doesn’t belong. She has no friends to help her.”
27
Jennifer wanted to inspect every inch of the courtyard, reading one boring plaque after another about life in the Middle Ages, but I was itching to get into a position to support our other surveillance team. I said, “Blood, Blood, you got a vector yet?”
“Yeah. Well, no, but yeah. Knuckles and I are in the main dining hall, second floor. The Growler is pinging red, but the room’s full. He’s here.”
“And?”
“Looking at the crowd, there is no Syrian man in here. But I’ve got two jokers acting strange. They aren’t tourists. They’re something else.”
“Something else how?”
“Not sure, but they’re giving off a vibe. They aren’t here for the castle.”
Veep cut in, saying, “It’s more than two. It’s four. I saw two muscle heads enter who definitely weren’t tourists.”
I’d placed Veep at the entrance as rear security, telling him to analyze anyone who entered or left. I usually gave him a ration of shit about being a millennial, but he was very sharp on reading a crowd. On a mission in the past, he’d spotted men that I had missed. If he called them, I believed it.
I said, “Knuckles, what do you make of this? What’s going on? The phone was here before we entered. If Veep’s right, then those guys he saw don’t have it.”
“Maybe they’re hunting it, and my guys have it. They aren’t muscle heads. One’s thin, with a tattoo crawling up his neck. The other’s an older guy, but he’s hard.”
Which was exactly what I didn’t want to hear, but it was what had sprung to mind before I asked the question. I said, “Okay, so we have two targets that we think have the phone, and two targets that may be hunting it. I need a lock-on to both sets.”
Knuckles said, “Just sent you photos of our targets. You need to locate the other two.”
My phone dinged, and I pulled up the picture, seeing a lean guy with some sort of tribal art on his neck and a man with glasses and a shag of salt-and-pepper hair who might’ve passed for a college professor if not for his dead eyes.
I said, “Got it. Koko and I are going hunting. Keep eyes on. Veep, keep alert out there.”
He said, “Roger all.”
I turned to find Jennifer, and bumped into her standing right next to me. She looked at me expectantly and I said, “Done with the archaeological work?”
She smiled, now into the mission, holding out a map. She pointed and said, “This is Knuckles and Brett’s location. I say we go to the keep.”
“Because it’s more cool than that great room they’re in?”
“Yep. It’s the final battle position for the last stand of the castle. I figured you’d like that. And because they’ll see the muscle heads before we will on that side. The side with the keep is clean, no eyes on.”
I s
miled. “Lead the way.”
I gave an update to the team, and we walked across the courtyard, the castle keep rising in front of us like a granite tube puckered with slots for archers. We went up level after level, passing tourists along the way and clearing the small rooms and hallways that led off of the keep, not seeing our targets. Eventually, we went higher than the roof of the castle, reaching the top of the keep with an expansive view of the entire compound and the terrain beyond. We hadn’t seen the muscle heads.
I leaned out, searching the tourist crowd four stories below, and Brett called, saying, “The two suspects left my room, and the Growler dropped. It’s them.”
Knuckles said, “I’m on them. They’re heading to the prison in the basement.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement, going much faster than the leisurely tourists gawking at the sights. Two men forcing their way through the crowd, moving to the exit. And they were big.
I caught Jennifer’s attention, pointed at them, and said, “Keep eyes on.”
I got on the net, saying, “Got the muscle heads. They’re in the courtyard, heading toward the front exit.”
Jennifer glanced up and said, “That’s also the northern exit from the prison. You can get in from the north on the outside, or the south from the inside.”
I said, “Where are they?”
“Unsighted. They’re either headed down, or exiting.”
I turned to the stairwell, taking them two at a time, Jennifer right behind me. I said, “Veep, Veep, status?”
“Pike, they didn’t exit.”
“Knuckles, Blood, you copy?”
“This is Knuckles. We copy. What’s the ROE if they go kinetic?”
Meaning, what do you want us to do if the muscle heads try to take out the phone crew? Technically, there was nothing I could order them to do. We had Alpha authority only, which meant no interdiction of the target. But I could at least put my guys in harm’s way to prevent that. I was sure they were itching for such a thing, and more than willing to risk life and limb without the ability to do anything back.