No Apologies and No Regrets

by Roddy Wix

On the road halfway between Milan and his villa Serge got a phone call from an associate at Grosserkopf. He tasked the man with tracking down the Rusikov brothers’ bank accounts and finding a way to get his twenty million dollars back. They no longer had need of the cash. Besides, they'd conspired to cheat him.

  “What the hell do you mean it doesn’t exist?”

  “Herr Malroff, I located every identifiable account they had. The combined balance is a few hundred thousand. Nowhere close to twenty million euros.”

  “Impossible," Serge stormed. "You will search again and you will continue to do so until you find my money. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, of course, Herr Malroff.” The man, though polite, felt less intimidated by Serge than some of Grosserkopf’s other employees. No fool, the fellow had been working on converting his own small fortune into gold for months. As a result he'd become fully transportable.

  “I want my money. Forty-eight hours.” Serge hung up without waiting for an answer.

  Serge forgot or never realized “Leprechaun” could work both ways. In reverse the program hid large sums of cash as small deposits in hundreds of thousands of accounts. Later, "Leprechaun" harvested the money and repeated the process. Once broken into tiny denominations the funds became invisible.

  Malroff spent the rest of the ride to Laglio drinking hundred proof vodka. His mood fell into decline and he was cursed himself for not bringing Lisle along with him. By the time she’d been brought to his suite back at the hotel he’d lost interest and her therapeutic massage skills, for once, failed to prove satisfying. No matter, he would be busy dealing with Frank Beretta and Anya. Then, with a clear mind he could relax, perhaps with Beretta’s beautiful widow.

  By mid-afternoon Friedrich guided the Maybach into the motor court at the villa. Unknown to Serge a Rolls Royce Ghost bound for the Farnazzi Spa and Clinic was setting out on the same route he had just traveled. The car's three occupants were a physician, a bodyguard-chauffeur, and a member of the Queen's extended family. The woman wore a colorful silk scarf over a wig of long dark hair. With large designer sunglasses it was impossible to identify the woman or her age.

  Elisabeth sat on the spacious rear seat talking to Frank Beretta by satellite phone. He had positioned himself on the heavily treed lakeshore opposite Malroff’s villa. The distance across the lake was only seven hundred yards. He'd bought a second hand kayak and secreted it in the dense undergrowth close to the water.

  “We are less than an hour and a half away from the spa.”

  “Understood.” Frank kept his conversation brief in the off chance someone wandered through the woods nearby.

  “Edwin will contact you when we arrive and again when Joey is safe. Our plan remains unchanged since I spoke with you earlier. I want to be out of the clinic by just after nightfall.”

  “Understood. Good luck.”

  “To you, too, Frank.”

  “Thank you.”

  Frank clicked off the phone and settled back in his nest of branches and leaves sorry he’d bought cigarettes. He couldn't run the risk of having his position sighted so the smoking lamp was "off". His thoughts turned to Joey and the friends he’d asked to go into harms way to save her. Beretta had to believe he made the right decision.

  Looking through a small spotting scope Frank detected no signs of activity other than sparse movement in what he now knew to be the kitchen. The dock and terraces were vacant and fluttering drapes created the only motion in the master bedroom. Serge's arrival on the opposite side of the house went undetected.

  Frank rarely found himself in the field lying in wait without one of his custom made sniper rifles. Shooting his target from his present position would have been easy. With the equipment available a shot of eight hundred yards was almost routine. Having only open water between his location and the master bedroom reduced the margin for error. The portion of the C4 he’d set on the first night could be detonated remotely, too, though this time he wanted to make sure the pig would not be leaving when he blew the house down. Taking unnecessary risk ran contrary to Frank's style, but Serge Malroff had become an exception to every rule in the book. In fact, in nearly forty years in this line of work he’d only killed two men at a distance of less than a hundred yards. One of them had been Ivan Rusikov.

  A mile down the opposite shoreline, the GraveRobber tried to decide which boat to steal for his assault on the villa. He’d found a private dock well situated for a theft. The place was secured by a chain link gate and fencing, but he could hop over in a single bound. Better still, a stand of trees and overgrowth screened the little marina from the road. With a choice of four different boats he settled on a small Zodiac with a fifty horsepower Honda motor. He was getting ready to hop the fence to check out the fuel tanks when he heard voices up on the road. Just a couple of kids, but the incident reminded him how keyed up he’d let himself become, so the GraveRobber picked a quiet spot in the shade, stretched out, and tried to calm down.

  He’d been lucky the day before as his escape from the clinic's property turned out to be much easier than expected. Around dusk, as a search party swept the woods, a security guard stopped beneath Tommy’s position to take an unauthorized smoke break. It would be his last. Slithering down through the branches Tommy held up on a limb about ten feet up before he dropped onto the unsuspecting man breaking his neck with an effortless twist of the head.

  The guard wore a black quilted jacket and hat bearing the official “Spa” logos. An inventory of his weaponry revealed a 9mm handgun and a small machine gun, both with extra clips of ammunition. The hapless guard kept a hunting knife on his belt next to a cell phone and his wallet held a little better than a hundred euros. GraveRobber, living up to his name, donned the dead man’s cap and jacket and snatched up the guns. He shoved the money and cell phone into another pocket making sure he turned the cell off in case someone was monitoring its GPS locator.

  After hiding the guard’s corpse under dense foliage Tommy set off straight up the hill. In under fifteen minutes he got to the road. The security fence didn’t pose much of an obstacle and less than half an hour after he killed the guard Tommy hitched a ride and was on his way into the village. When he got out of the carpenter’s small truck he handed over twenty euros in gratitude and left the cell phone under the front seat.

  After a good night’s sleep in a cheap room Tommy ate a big breakfast then set off up the lake to find an opportune place to borrow a boat. Now, only the wait for Serge remained.

  64.