by Mark Greaney
Their plan was straightforward, but it had worked for them in the past in similar situations. When his vehicles pulled up out front, they’d start walking along in that direction, just three men out for an evening stroll.
And then, when Vukovic and his two guards were close to them on the sidewalk, the three Hungarians would pull pistols. Two would shoot the three on foot, while the third man would empty his handgun into the driver-side windshields of the two SUVs on the curb.
Three men attacking five didn’t sound like great odds, but the Hungarians knew they would have complete surprise on their side, and they were confident killers.
The leader of the group looked down at his phone. “Should be leaving the station about now. Probably another ten minutes till he’s here.”
Karoly replied, “We’re ready.”
And Florian said, “Quick and dirty. Like last year in Maribor.”
Zente, the leader, nodded. “Just like Maribor.”
* * *
• • •
While the Hungarians had chosen a closer position than the night before, Talyssa Corbu stood in the same darkened alcove she’d hidden in the previous evening. And also the same as the night before, she was unable to see the Hungarians because her sight line into their side street was obstructed by a corner building.
Unaware she wasn’t the only person here right now with aims on the Mostar chief of police, Corbu had a plan of her own. She would wait for the police chief to be dropped off, and then, once the man was alone in his flat, Corbu would walk across the square and knock on his door. Using authentic credentials in her pocket but hoping to flash them so fast the cop didn’t catch her name, Corbu would make her way inside and then pull out the little stainless steel pistol she’d bought on the street in Belgrade a few days earlier.
She’d demand answers from Vukovic, threaten him by waving both her gun and her credos, and just stay there and keep it up until she got what she wanted. That Corbu had never shot anyone, had never roughed anyone up for information, had never even been trained with handguns, was not lost on her. But with each passing day since she’d left her home, her limits had been challenged, broken, and thrown out the window.
She stood there in the alcove, checking the time on her phone and talking to herself over and over in a frantic whisper. “You can do this. You can do this.”
* * *
• • •
I shift my eyes left and right as my brain tries to take in and process the scene in front of me. In the distance I see three men in the dark next to a gray van in an alley near the home of my target, and they definitely do not look like part of his security team. They’ve got the bearing of police officers, but they are plainclothed, and from their furtive looks to Vukovic’s building and their nervous pacing around the alley, I think they’ve got some sort of mayhem in mind.
These guys are waiting for the chief of police of Mostar, and not to get his autograph.
My guess is they’re here to kill him, and I can’t let them do that. Not yet, anyway.
But the three men in the alley are just one part of the equation. Ahead and to my left, on the opposite side of the quiet little square, I see a lone man covered in a hooded raincoat doing his best to stay invisible next to a darkened mosque. A couple of vehicles have rolled through in the past five minutes, and both times I saw the figure in the edges of their headlights, and both times the man shuffled and bounced from one foot to the other with nervous tension.
Focusing on the black alcove helps me see him a little better now, even without the headlights. But I can’t make out a face. This guy is a lookout for the three in the alley? It’s the only thing that makes sense to me, but I can’t be certain. Otherwise he’s some sort of a solo act, just like me, because I don’t see anyone else around.
I’m inside a real estate office opposite the alleyway where the three men are standing by the van, maybe forty meters away. I broke into this business half an hour ago, wanting a secure place to watch the square, just to get a feel for the rhythm of the scene. A few passing vehicles, one or two people walking dogs on cobblestoned streets on a warm night, lights on in many of the windows of apartment buildings.
But a manageable location for my plan.
Except for the three in the alley.
And the other guy.
I know I have to remove the three closest to the building from the picture before Vukovic arrives, which, if he leaves work at the same time every night, could be in the next ten minutes. Steeling myself for what’s to come, I push the thoughts of the guy by the mosque out of my mind for the short term, put my hand on the latch of the door to the real estate agency, and take one deep breath. Then I step out onto the sidewalk and begin walking in the direction of the alley. I stroll past my target’s building on my right and continue forward, closing on the three men smoking in the dim light. I don’t look up at them; I just advance as if I’m planning on walking by.
I pass the building that shields me from the other man in the square, the bozo I take for the lookout for the muscle team, and then, when I’m just ten feet from the three men, I stop and turn their way. All three are looking at me; they drop their smokes onto the sidewalk.
“Hi, gents. Any chance you guys speak English?”
The man in the middle is the leader; this is clear in an instant. “What do you want?”
“I was just wondering what’s going on.”
“What?”
“C’mon. Three big dudes standing around a dark alleyway next to a rape van. What’s the plan here, fellas?”
“Keep walking,” says another of the three, and now I recognize the accent. These guys aren’t local. They’re Hungarian.
Scanning their clothing and their shoes as I speak, I say, “I think you guys need to call it a night. Go get a beer.”
They look at one another in confusion now, and my eyes burrow into the folds of their jackets, their front pockets, the cuffs of their pants. I don’t see any weapons printing there, but it’s dark and these guys seem like pros, so just because I don’t yet know where they are hiding their guns doesn’t mean they aren’t hiding guns.
The man in the middle takes a step closer, and the others do the same. “Who are you? You are not police. You are not from here. Why do you care where we stand?”
I don’t answer immediately; I just stare the man down with a slight smile on my face. My actions are bizarre, true, but I have a plan. Right now I’m just talking to them, but I’m doing it in a way that ratchets up the heat slowly to the point where they will eventually realize that I am, in fact, a danger, and not just some oddball American tourist.
It’s all to elicit the reaction I’m looking for out of them.
But so far, I’m not getting what I need.
Time to turn the ratchet some more.
Still looking the men over, I lower my voice from its light and airy tone, giving it some heft. I say, “I’m the guy who’s going to stop you from doing your jobs tonight.”
This, plainly, is a threat, and I begin to get what I seek from the Hungarians.
In my business, we call them grooming cues. A subconscious touching of the area where a weapon is hidden when an armed person feels a threat and is readying himself to draw.
They all do it within seconds of one another. The big man on my left crosses his hands in front of his waist and surreptitiously pats just above and to the right of his crotch. This tells me he’s got a pistol in an appendix holster to the right of his belt buckle.
The man in the center unzips his coat and then, as he takes his hand away, brushes across the right side of his chest under his arm. From this I determine he’s also carrying a handgun, but in a shoulder holster.
And the one on my right may have multiple weapons, but his left hand slips nonchalantly into his pants pocket, and I can see he’s taken hold of something there. It’s
printing on the fabric now, and it looks like it could be a closed switchblade.
While this is happening, the leader of the group asks me again who I am and what I want with them. I can tell he is stalling for time, trying to figure out if I’m with Vukovic, if I’m some idiotic American mugger, or if I’m something else.
You got this, Gentry, I tell myself, psyching myself up for the violence that I know is mere seconds away. But while I do this I keep talking. “So if you guys just want to get back in that van and head home to Budapest, it would probably be for the best, because nothing good is going to come from—”
The man on my right takes a nonchalant step forward, but I read his intent. He’s closing the space, getting into striking distance, and I know this means his knife is coming out.
I could go for my gun but I sure as shit am not going to fire it right outside the home of the man I’m planning on snatching in a couple of minutes; it would turn the dark square into a mob scene of onlookers before Vukovic even arrives. Instead I keep talking, angling my body towards Knife Man so I can get a foot up in his face fast when he goes for it.
He goes for it.
Just as I shift weight he turns into a flurry of movement, lunging forward while pulling a switchblade. It opens with a click that echoes in the alleyway, but before he can stab me I send one of my size ten-and-a-half leather Merrell boots up and into his nose, and I hear the bone snap as his head pitches back hard enough to give him whiplash.
With my right leg still coming down from the kick I throw myself forward to the man in the middle, who is now drawing from his shoulder under his jacket. I pin his hand there against his weapon before he can pull it, and then, as soon as my right leg lands, I launch my left foot out towards the guy on my left, short-circuiting his appendix draw by kicking his hand at his belt, breaking one of his fingers as his pistol clatters into the alleyway.
I head-butt the man in the center now, striking my forehead against the top of his nose while still controlling his gun hand against his body.
My ears ring and pain fires from my head into my spine, but he falls back towards the wall and slides to the pavement, and I can tell by the blood that his nose is broken, as well.
No gunfire so far, which is good news, but this hasn’t exactly gone down quietly. All three of them made some sort of loud noise when I struck them, and the inevitable echo through the alley into the square makes me certain that the lookout in the alcove fifty meters away is aware his associates are in some sort of a melee.
I pull the gun out of the center man’s shoulder holster as he falls onto the cobblestones, conscious but temporarily out of the fight because of his broken nose. The guy on the right also has a busted snot box, but he’s pulling himself up by the back bumper of the gray van. From the looks of him I’ve got three seconds or so before he becomes dangerous again, so I turn back to the man on the far left.
Instantly I see that this dude still has a lot of fight left in him.
He’s lost his pistol but he draws a hooked knife from a belt sheath at the small of his back under his jacket, and he slashes wildly with his uninjured hand as he lunges my way. I duck the blade, shift to his right, and use the pistol I just lifted from the leader of the group to bash him in the left temple as hard as I can.
His arms cartwheel, he drops the knife, and he hits the back of the van face-first.
I thank the Lord the van doesn’t have a burglar alarm, because his impact shakes the vehicle on its shocks.
The Hungarian who had been on my right has pulled himself halfway back up to his feet, but by doing so he’s put his head in a perfect position for me to drop-kick him in the chin. He probably already has whiplash, but this time I just about decapitate him.
He falls down on his back, unconscious like the man next to him.
I point the leader’s gun in the leader’s face as I kneel and speak softly but quickly, knowing Vukovic should be pulling up right now, so there is no more time to hang out in this alley in plain view of the entrance to his building behind me.
“Call your friend. Where’s your radio?” I fish around in his jacket but don’t find anything. “You’re using your mobile phones for comms?”
The man’s nose bleeds freely into his open mouth as he says, “What friend?”
“The lookout over by the mosque. The other—”
The headlights of two vehicles flash in the square behind me, reflecting off the glass of Vukovic’s building, and I know that in seconds the occupants of both vehicles will see me. I’m sure it’s the police chief and his security entourage, so I have to get out of their line of sight somehow. I hoist back my right hand and punch the leader in the jaw, knocking him out cold, same as his colleagues. Hurriedly I drag him behind the van, grab the second man by the arm, and pull him most of the way behind cover.
And then, just as a pair of Mostar Police vehicles turn onto the street that gives them a clear view straight ahead into my alley, I grab the third man, heave him up off the ground, shuffle one step back, and then fall with him onto the other two, mostly out of view behind the van.
But not totally out of view. My feet are sticking out from behind the van, as are those of the dude I’ve got in a bear hug. Looking down I see that the legs of the two men under me are protruding, as well. We’re a big pile of bodies, and we’d be obvious to anyone looking right at us.
But we’re twenty-five yards away, in a relatively dark alleyway, and I’m hoping like hell everybody in the two vehicles rolling to a stop now has their attention elsewhere.
Otherwise I have a shit-ton of explaining to do.
To my right the leader of the group moans softly and starts moving. I slam an elbow into his face, knocking the back of his head into the cobblestones, and the noise and movement stop.
Looking down between my legs, I see three men get out of the two vehicles. Vukovic is in the group, and they all head towards his building.
Nobody looks my way, which is good, but when the three go inside, the two vehicles roll off, which is bad.
Chief Vukovic has company tonight. A pair of bodyguards. It’s too late to snatch him on the street, and breaching his house without getting into a gunfight in the center of town isn’t looking too likely, either.
But just as I sit up and start trying to come up with a plan C, the man in my arms wakes up. He looks around slowly; clearly he’s in no position to put up a fight. I lean into his ear.
“Take your pals and go home. Heal up. If you’re ready in two weeks, come back for Vukovic. Kill him. But I need him alive right now.”
I don’t know if Niko Vukovic will be here in two weeks. He might be in jail, he might be in hiding, and he might be dead. But the Hungarians are my backup if I fail.
I climb to my feet, pushing the dazed man off me.
And then, just as I stand upright, I see the man in the black raincoat from the alcove step up onto the sidewalk, walking towards the police chief’s house.
He starts to turn in my direction, and I freeze again, but this time it doesn’t work. The man’s eyes lock on mine.
And now I see that this is not a man.
A young woman stares at me, mouth agape. She stops walking and stands there in the middle of the street.
The lookout is a woman? Why not?
Assuming she has put together the fact that I just beat the shit out of her three cohorts, I expect her to draw on me if she’s carrying a weapon. I’ve got my Glock in my waistband, and I begin to reach for it, but the lookout, standing twenty yards away, does something I don’t expect.
She turns to her left and runs, disappearing around the corner of a building in an instant.
I take off as well, giving chase.
TEN
I turn and search the darkened little square for the lady in the black raincoat. I don’t see her, but I do see the elongating shadow of a figure running
through one of the side streets to the east.
I leap onto and then over a bench and I race around little trees, up a steeply angled cobblestoned street. I cross a footbridge over the Neretva, passing where I saw the shadow, which I can no longer find, although I do catch a quick flash of movement ahead and on the left.
A car door shuts quickly. The driver fires the engine of the two-door hatchback. An instant later, headlights engulf me as the vehicle lurches in my direction.
I am not one hundred percent sure this is the black raincoat lady, but I like the odds. I definitely don’t want to fire my pistol and alert the entire neighborhood, but I draw it anyway, hoping the lethal weapon in my hand will force the driver to stop the lethal weapon barreling down on me before it runs me over.
Like magic, the Glock 19 does the trick. The car skids to a halt feet away, with me standing in its path, my gun leveled at the driver’s head through the windshield.
I move around to the passenger side and get in, still keeping the barrel trained on the driver. Only now do I see that this is, in fact, the woman in the black raincoat.
Her hair is covered by her hood, but wisps of dyed red hair poke out. Her skin is alabaster white, her eyes wide, heavily bloodshot and with gray half-moons under them.
And they are locked on the weapon pointed at her.
“You armed?” I ask it in English, because I don’t speak Hungarian.
“What?”
“Gun! Do you have a gun?”
I can see in her eyes that she does. After a moment she gives a little nod and speaks through the heavy breath that came from her run through the square and across the bridge. “It’s . . . in my . . . pocket.” She has an accent, but it’s faint. Her English is flawless.
I wait a few seconds, then say, “If you tell me which pocket, then I won’t have to run my hands all over you. We just met, after all.”