by Lila Dubois
Chapter Two
Antonio Starabba walked around the vehicle, looking for anything that might be a clue as to why it was abandoned here and where the driver had gone next.
He’d traced the ambulance that had been used to transport Karl Klimek to a small town on the Slovenia-Italy border. He hadn’t been actively looking for Karl—a noted Dutch anthropologist, and missing member of the Masters’ Admiralty from the German territory—because at the time he’d been reported MIA, there had been no reason to believe Karl was in Italy.
Instead, Antonio had been continuing his ongoing search for the person responsible for the murders of a married trinity in Rome. There had been upheaval and tragedy within the Masters’ Admiralty in the past weeks. Amid all that, it would be too easy for Nazario, Christina, and Lorena’s deaths to be overlooked and forgotten. He wouldn’t allow that to happen.
With so many other duties taking up his time at work, he’d begun investigating the case in his off time. Antonio needed answers not only because, as a security officer, the safety of the people of Rome—the name for a territory of the Masters’ Admiralty that included Italy, Greece, all of Albania, and large portions of every other country that bordered the Adriatic Sea—was his responsibility.
But because Nazario, Christina, and Lorena’s bodies had been discovered on his family’s estate. That location was no accident. It was both a personal and professional threat against his father.
Giovanni Starabba was the ammiraglio of Rome, a role his father took very seriously, likening himself to Caesar. Giovanni had not been pleased to have three dead—mutilated—bodies found on the grounds of Villa Degli Dei—the family estate in the Italian countryside.
Giovanni—like the other leaders in the Masters’ Admiralty—believed the brutal killings were the work of the Domino, a longtime enemy to the secret society he, his father, and his sister, Sophia, belonged to and served. There were nine territories in the Masters’ Admiralty, spanning the United Kingdom, Europe, as well as parts of Eurasia. While the territories formed a larger whole, governed by the grande ammiraglio, the fleet admiral, who lived on the Isle of Man, the day-to-day operations were carried out by each territory’s leadership.
In Rome, Giovanni was the admiral, and he was assisted by a vice admiral and a security minister.
Antonio served under the security minister, Lorenzo Ricci, as one of six officers. Many in the Masters’ Admiralty likened the security officers to that of a black ops team, whose primary objective was to deal with the dark underbelly of the society, the parts most polite people didn’t like to discuss or even think about.
The cavalieri who served under the vice admiral functioned as both judge and jury in matters pertaining to the laws of the society, and were personal security for the territory admiral. The knights, along with the finance ministers who also reported to the vice admiral, kept the society running.
Antonio and his fellow security officers dealt with the darker elements that sometimes touched the Masters’ Admiralty—embezzlement, rape, and murder. His job was to protect the society and his territory at all costs. Sometimes the cost was high, both in terms of life and the weight on his soul.
Antonio had served his territory in that position since he was nineteen.
At thirty-one, he’d seen too much of the evil that lurked in some men’s hearts. It had made him tougher, something he’d considered a good change, one that made him effective in his job. However, his sister claimed each horror he’d dealt with had chiseled away at his soul and made him colder, more distant.
Antonio didn’t view that as negatively as Sophia did. His job required a certain level of detachment, the ability to view crime scenes without emotion in order to read the clues, to find the truth.
Though this current case had tested him like no other.
Because the bodies had been found on his family’s land, he’d taken the lead on processing the crime scene. After that, the investigation had passed to the knights, who had questioned those who knew the deceased, traced their movements, and followed standard investigative procedure. The knights were good at talking to people—sitting down with them over a coffee.
Antonio preferred different methods of getting information from individuals.
Normally, he would have left the investigation with the knights, but the death of the trinity in Rome wasn’t the only tragedy and crisis the Masters’ Admiralty was dealing with. Every knight and security officer in all the territories was stretched thin.
But for Antonio, it was personal.
He’d stood over their bodies. He’d picked up pieces of meat that had once been living, breathing flesh. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, rest until the killer was found.
And that led him to the missing Dutchman, Karl.
Ciril Novak had been on his long list of suspects in the brutal mutilations of Nazario, Christina, and Lorena. Ciril had been a low-priority suspect—a Serbian man with a spotty work history as a security guard for various high-end hotels and several stints in prison, including one for murder. The only reason Ciril been on the list was that after a bar fight, Ciril had gone home, gotten his dogs, and sicced them on the other man, whose only crime had been arguing with Ciril about a football match. The man had been ripped apart by the dogs.
The same way Christina had died.
When a facial recognition program Antonio had been running showed Ciril—dressed as a paramedic—escorting an unconscious Karl Klimek off a train and onto an ambulance in Milan, Antonio had been shocked, and he’d felt as if all his hard work on the case had started to pay off.
If Ciril had abandoned the vehicle anywhere but the Italy-Slovenia border, Antonio might have had trouble tracing it. But Antonio was not only a security officer for Rome, but a security specialist by trade. He knew how to track and find people. How to discover things people wanted hidden.
The ambulance, bearing Slovenian markings, turned out to be an elaborately painted rental vehicle. Once he’d run the plates and spotted the vehicle on the network of video feeds in and around the train station, it had been a case of painstakingly mapping the course through traffic cameras and video surveillance at petrol stations and restaurants along the route.
The trail had stopped here, so he’d hopped into his Alfa Romeo and driven all night to the small border town of Gorizia. It hadn’t taken him very long to discover the winery where Ciril had ditched the ambulance. A quick call to the authorities yielded the information that a red Fiat Tipo had been stolen from a nearby residence three days earlier. It was the only vehicle stolen within a few hours of when Antonio had calculated Ciril and the ambulance would have reached this point.
Another vehicle. Another set of clues to follow.
There were no border checkpoints between Italy and Slovenia, which would have made it very simple for Ciril to load Karl into the back of the fake ambulance and cross into the neighboring country without risking capture. A thorough search of the back of the makeshift ambulance had yielded no clues about where Ciril was headed, but Antonio had learned how Karl had been taken. He’d discovered a half-empty vial of GHB, a common date-rape drug, laying on the floor near the empty stretcher. It was a particularly nasty drug that was commonly manufactured in home labs. At low doses, it caused nausea and vomiting. Higher doses would knock the victim out. What made it so effective—and dangerous—was the fact it was completely colorless and odorless. Karl wouldn’t have had a clue what hit him until it was too late.
Antonio walked to the boot of his car and popped it open, withdrawing the knapsack that contained his laptop. He went to the driver’s side door and sat down on the seat sideways, his feet flat on the gravel of the parking lot so he could rest the computer on his lap.
Firing it up, he did a more refined search, hoping to find something that would help him learn where Ciril had gone next. Finding nothing, he widened the search. The alert that had gone out on Karl indicated he’d been onboard a train headed to Athens. The fact that Ciril had taken him of
f the train before Karl made it to his destination seemed to indicate Karl wasn’t going to be in Greece.
Unfortunately, that left too many other countries in the way.
Antonio rubbed his eyes. He’d driven overnight to get here, so he was functioning on no sleep. That wasn’t particularly problematic for him. In his line of work, he was accustomed to working several days in a row on very little sleep. Time was not on his side.
Karl had been missing for three days. If Ciril was guilty of the murders of Christina, Nazario, and Lorena, Karl’s life was in serious jeopardy. Every minute counted.
Antonio would not consider the possibility that Karl was already dead.
He took a deep breath and widened the net, including Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo in his search. While he waited for the results, he clicked over to his email.
He sat up straighter when he read that Kalmar’s security officer, Leila Virtanen, was also missing. She was his point of contact with the Scandinavian territory of Kalmar. He’d tried to contact Leila last night, just before he’d left to pursue Ciril, for any updates.
Another person missing.
It could be a coincidence.
Antonio snorted. Could the two missing persons cases be connected? Karl was a scholar, and with the drugs it would have been relatively simple to take him. But Leila was a security officer. That meant she was dangerous and deadly.
The disappearances were probably unrelated. Coincidence.
His gut said they weren’t.
He had no idea how, but he needed to act. Now.
“What do you do?”
Leila raised her head, looking at Karl through the water sheeting over her face.
“Talk to me,” Karl said in English. His voice was hoarse.
He’d yelled and screamed the whole time their captor had been beating her. He’d offer himself to be beaten in her place, but it seemed she was being punished for fighting back when their captor had first grabbed her.
There wasn’t an inch of her body that didn’t hurt. He’d been thorough with his beating, an almost precise application of fists to her flesh.
“Leila. Leila!”
She raised her head again, not even realizing she’d dropped it.
Karl was looking at her with a mix of worry and conviction. She could practically feel him willing his strength into her.
“I’m a social media consultant,” she said.
“A social media consultant…and a security officer?”
She smiled at that, and he answered with a smile. Karl Klimek was a good-looking man. His face was leaner than in the picture she’d seen when the alert went out that he was missing. He’d last been seen in Paris, so Leila hadn’t done more than glance over the information, figuring there was very little likelihood he would be found in her home territory of Kalmar, which encompassed Scandinavia, including her homeland of Finland.
A violent shiver racked her, and she tried to scoot another inch to the side. The chain around her neck pulled tighter, and it didn’t get her out from under the flow of the water.
“Social media consultant is your spy cover?”
Karl jerked her attention back to their conversation and away from her discomfort. He was barely in better shape—he was strapped to a chair, immobile and, from the looks of him, both starving and dehydrated.
“I’m a sniper,” she said. “When they need someone shot from a distance, I shoot them.”
“How often do the stars align and the admiral of Kalmar needs people shot?”
“Not often,” she admitted. “So I do some…what is the word? Undercover work?” She was fluent in English, but the pain and cold made it hard to speak it.
“Ah, yes, I can see that. Who is going to suspect the gorgeous blonde of being a deadly sniper?”
Leila raised one shoulder, rubbing her cheek against it in an effort to push her wet hair off her face. “You’re only saying that because I’m letting you see me naked on the first date.”
That surprised a real laugh out of Karl. For a moment, while he laughed and she smiled, her body stopped hurting.
Then his laughter faded and discomfort sheeted her, even as the water did.
Their captor had attached a small sprinkler to the end of the hose, and then hooked the sprinkler to the ceiling above her head, creating a shower. Unlike a real shower, the spray was so broad she couldn’t get out from under it, at least not without nearly strangling herself. The cold water poured over her body, creating a puddle around her feet as it fell faster than the drain in the floor could siphon it away.
She was Finnish. She could stand up to a little cold.
But this wasn’t a little cold. The constant flow of water was wicking away her body heat. Naked, injured—she was fairly sure at least one rib was broken—she probably wouldn’t be able to withstand this for more than half a day.
“I’m an anthropologist and archaeologist,” he said.
She could have said she knew that from his missing person’s report, but instead said, “Tell me about it. I thought they were different.”
“They are. I hold PhDs in both.”
“Smart then.”
“Isn’t that a membership requirement?” Karl teased.
“Joo, it is.” Her feet were going numb. If she lost feeling in them, it would be easy, too easy, to fall. “Are you a legacy?” she asked him.
“I am. And two of my parents were also legacies.”
“Siblings?”
“Two brothers. You?”
“No.”
They fell silent for a moment. She watched blearily as Karl’s throat worked and his eyes slid shut as he grimaced. Then he smiled, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “I must say, the service in this establishment is terrible.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. The brief relief it provided her faded as she looked at Karl. He was suffering—that much was clear. “How long has it been since you ate something?”
“Since before I was taken,” Karl said quietly. “I hadn’t had anything to drink for two days before Six brought you in.”
“Six?”
“He has a number six on his shirt. Naming something gives us power over it.”
“Six,” she repeated. It was then she realized how ingenious this torture was. Here she was, sheeted in water, and Karl was dying of dehydration.
She experimentally balanced on one foot. Maybe she could kick water over to him. Her numb foot and bruised leg refused to hold her body weight. Off-balance, she fell, but not far. The chain he’d wrapped around her neck pulled tight. Her feet scrambled and splashed in the puddle. The chain was digging into the base of her skull and the bottom of her jaw. She could feel the bulge of individual links pressing into her windpipe.
Panic gripped her. She couldn’t feel her feet, couldn’t get them under her. With her arms cuffed together behind her back, she couldn’t reach up and grab the chain.
“Stop kicking!” Karl ordered. His voice was hard and sharp. “Right foot down. No, turn. Yes. Now left foot. Put it down. Stand up. Stand up, Leila.”
She couldn’t feel her feet but when he ordered her to stand up, she straightened her legs, trusting him. The pressure on her throat lessened, the chain collar sliding down her neck to rest on her shoulders and collarbone. She coughed, sucked in air, and managed to inhale water. Coughing more, she felt tears of frustration and fear prickle her eyes. She bowed her head.
“Breathe,” Karl said.
“Why?” she asked through a throat tight with tears. “Why us? What does he want?”
“I don’t know.”
Antonio clicked back to his search, scanning the data provided. Though on paper, he presented as low-to-average intelligence, Ciril seemed to be very knowledgeable when it came to covering his tracks. Straight property checks using his name yielded no results.
However, when Ciril’s name came up as a potential suspect in the triple murder case, Antonio had begun a file, using autom
ated search-and-query software to amass an information dossier.
Ciril hadn’t been his only suspect, so Antonio now had nearly a hundred or so files. With so many possible perpetrators, he’d had to start with the most likely suspects. Ciril hadn’t seemed intelligent enough to pull off the murder—and the only link was the MO of using dogs—which is why he’d been at the bottom of the suspect list.
But Antonio had learned long ago that no research was ever wasted, and just because a man might not have committed the crime he was investigating didn’t mean his name would never turn up again. If a person did enough to throw up a red flag, it meant they were a person of interest. Period.
In Ciril’s case, Antonio had acquired information regarding the man’s family history, past employment, current address, banking statements, and criminal record. He even had the names of the dogs who were set loose on the man killed after the bar fight. Ciril’s dogs’ names were completely unimaginative. It appeared the man was a football fan, and he’d named his pets after his favorite team clubs.
One name stood out.
Slaven.
NK Slaven Koprivnica was a Croatian team. When Antonio cross-checked the other dogs’ names with those of UEFA teams, none fell within the countries between Slovenia and Athens.
Antonio deepened the search, focusing solely on Koprivnica, home of the Slaven team. Using the names of family members and past girlfriends, Antonio researched property listings until he got a hit.
Ciril had a recently deceased uncle who owned a home in Koprivnica. A quick check revealed the uncle had been killed in a hit-and-run just three weeks earlier. The case was unsolved, the man’s estate not yet settled.
Which meant there was an empty house in Croatia. One that Ciril would know was empty, even if he didn’t have access to it.
Antonio plugged the address into his GPS and pulled out of the winery parking lot, onto the H4. Tacking another three-and-a-half-hour drive onto the six-hour one he just did was exhausting to think about, but his gut told him he was heading in the right direction.