RED Hotel

by Fuller, Ed; Grossman, Gary;

  Time, he thought. Time to leave. Time for people to die.

  Reilly ran out of Schorel’s office. The general manager followed.

  “What’s going on?” Schorel asked as he caught up with Reilly in front of Madame Ketz’s shop.

  “Call security!”

  “Why?” Schorel insisted.

  “To evacuate!”

  Reilly looked at guests in the lobby. He read their faces, their manner, and mannerisms. He saw nothing that signified trouble. Smiles, light midday conversations. People staying out of the rain.

  He peered inside the flower shop again. He spotted a trail of dirt on the floor leading to the door. It didn’t mean anything to him until he saw a patch of dirt a few steps away that a housekeeper was sweeping up. Reilly ran to the woman.

  “Where did that come from?” he demanded.

  The woman didn’t understand English. Confused, she turned to Schorel.

  “Ask her! Now!”

  Schorel translated. She pointed to Bistango and explained in Flemish.

  “Dirt from the restaurant. Some workers must have—”

  “No,” Reilly shouted. “Not from there. From here!” He pointed to the florist shop. “To there!” Reilly ran into the restaurant.

  “M. Reilly,” the maître d’ said. “Are you looking for a table, I may be able to—”

  “No,” he said abruptly. Reilly continued a few steps further.

  What the hell am I looking for?

  He filtered out the questions from Schorel, the restaurant host, the cacophony of lunchtime chatter. Reilly concentrated. He divided the restaurant into quadrants. Near, front, back, sides. The windows. The kitchen. The private dining room. The art pieces. The entrance off the street.

  At that moment Reilly saw a man about to leave. He had no umbrella, no raincoat. As he pushed the door open, he looked over his shoulder and smiled at no one in particular. It was a sly smile.

  Reilly’s heart raced faster. Instinct and experience alerted him.

  “Mr. Reilly, will you be joining us?” the maître d’ asked again.

  The question broke Reilly’s concentration. He turned.

  “What? No.”

  Reilly shifted his gaze back to the man at the door. The man with the smile. Not sly. Satisfied. Satisfied and cruel. He seemed … Reilly searched for the word. It came to him. Smug!

  They were twenty feet apart.

  A waiter came between them. Reilly sidestepped to get a better view, but the man was gone.

  Damn!

  He maneuvered around another server. This put him in direct eye contact with the bodyguards posted outside the private dining room—and one thing out of place. The potted tree in line with the expensive statues.

  The dirt.

  The maître d’ was on him again. “Mr. Reilly, may I?”

  “What happened to the other statue?”

  “One of the maintenance crew broke it early this morning. The florist brought in the—”

  Reilly didn’t wait for the end of the sentence. He ran toward the tree. This drew eyes in the restaurant, the guards automatically stiffening. A hush spread through Bistango.

  The three guards stepped forward. Reilly continued to the tree. He knelt down, touched the ceramic pot. It was cold. Very cold. So was the dirt. Then he spotted a wire wrapped around the tree trunk up to about six inches above the potting soil.

  Facts, figures, and intelligence flooded his consciousness. Madame Ketz. Her regular assistant left. The replacement who lied about where she was. The tree that had been in the cooler. Cold temperatures that can throw off bomb-sniffing dogs. All of this in a second. And the man at the door. The man with the smile. Reilly looked over his shoulder. He knew who he was.

  “Everybody!” Reilly declared. “Listen to me!”

  One of the guards grabbed Reilly’s arm. Reilly brushed him away. A second guard came forward.

  “We have an emergency. You must leave. Now!”

  But which way? he thought.

  “Through the hotel. Turn right at the exit. Right, not left!”

  “Translate!” Reilly shouted to the host.

  The maître d’ repeated the order in French, but by now people were getting the idea. Everyone but the guards.

  “What the fuck?” the lead guard asked in guttural English.

  “Do it! Get your people out! Now! Through the lobby.” Then he added, “Walk!”

  “Why?”

  Reilly pointed to the wire sticking out from the bottom of the tree trunk.

  “Shit!” The guard exclaimed in Russian. He signaled to his associates and they all but picked Gaiss up and hustled him out. They left the bankers to fend for themselves.

  Miklos crossed the street and established brief eye contact with Frederik, still sitting under an umbrella at the bistro. One nod. Frederik returned the signal and rose. At the corner, without a word, Frederik slipped Miklos an iPhone. The phone had only one number preloaded. Miklos slipped it in his pocket.

  Reilly rushed into the kitchen to warn the staff. Getting people out through the hotel was a risk, but anyone with the remote detonator would be quicker on the finger if he saw a panicked rush from Bistango. There also might be another device planted at the restaurant exterior, so to Reilly’s mind, the hotel exit offered the safest route—if they went calmly.

  “Walk. Marche. Ne pas courir. Don’t run!”

  Reilly decided to leave through Bistango, but not as calmly.

  The man posted at the window on the other side of the street saw Reilly exit, then, oblivious to the rain, look up and down the avenue. He dropped his binoculars and ran down three flights of stairs in under twenty seconds.

  Miklos angled away from Frederik and proceeded along the sidewalk up Avenue Louise. Frederik passed him at double the speed and took up a position fifty yards ahead. Miklos slowed. Another few steps and he’d have enough distance between himself and the restaurant. A safe distance. Neither man saw Reilly leave Bistango.

  The rain fell harder. Reilly looked to his right. People were filing out of the hotel. Liam Schorel and the paid security detail directing them away from the restaurant. The bollards had been extended. He heard shouts, though muffled by the traffic and rain. Orders to evacuate. Fast.

  Reilly tried to guess how much time had passed. A little over a minute since he entered the restaurant? Now another question. How much time did he have? He figured less than a minute.

  To his left, people were unaware of what was going on. But two members of the security detail immediately in front of the hotel were hustling cars away. Other officers began holding traffic, setting up a perimeter, and getting drivers and passengers out of their cars.

  Reilly had automatically gone away from the hotel. Instinct told him that was the direction his quarry went. The best place to observe the explosion. Something Smug liked to do.

  Miklos ignored the rain. He was solely focused on his mission. The assassin had a clear view of the corner from where he stood, but the obtuse angle prevented him from seeing the hotel’s main entrance and the mass exodus. He also failed to notice that traffic was backing up. Not that any of this would have stopped him at this point.

  He removed the iPhone from his sports jacket pocket. Time.

  The assassin began to dial the number of the Samsung phone which was buried in the pot: the cell phone with the thin wire antenna extending out from the chassis and wrapped around the tree. The receiving cell’s mechanism contained a motor with an asymmetrical wheel. The wheel would vibrate with the incoming call. The shaking would trigger a relay wired to twenty-five pounds of gelatinous dynamite buried five inches down.

  The charge was appropriate for the job. It would kill everyone within an eighteen-meter radius. Sixty feet. More as fire spread. There was the Russian delegation staying in the hotel, many of them eating lunch now. There were business executives and tourists, and most importantly, the pro-Russian oilman, whose death, on the heels of his brother’s, would become a dramati
c flashpoint, an emotional trigger that would give Russia its reason to invade Latvia.

  Miklos slowly punched in the memorized ten-digit phone number. He preferred the drama of entering one number at a time rather than just hitting the speed-dial button that Frederik had preprogrammed.

  Reilly ran across the street and up the sidewalk. He knew who he was looking for. He completely pictured him now. With a moustache, without a moustache. Short hair or long. Blond, black, or grey. Beard or clean-shaven. Younger or older.

  Through all the identities there was that cruel smile.

  Yes, he knew who he was looking for. He just hadn’t thought through what he’d do if he found him. And he didn’t have the gun he had wanted.

  Then … there! No more than thirty feet ahead of him.

  “Miklos!”

  The shout startled the Russian. He automatically turned to the voice.

  Miklos focused on the direction. He focused on the source.

  “Reilly,” he barely whispered.

  Miklos’ finger moved over the touch screen. He looked down and touched the last number.

  Reilly raced toward Miklos at full speed. He saw what Miklos had in his hand and how he looked up when he finished dialing and smiled that same smile. But he didn’t move.

  Without warning, another man half the distance to Miklos stepped into his path and raised a pistol. He hardly needed to aim. Reilly was that close.

  Reilly’s conflicting thoughts were: The gun. The bomb.

  A shot rang out.

  85

  The explosion would have drowned out the gunshot, except there was no explosion. Miklos looked at the cell phone. The number was still ringing. The wrong number. He’d lost his place and misdialed when Reilly shouted.

  Reilly stood waiting for the pain, the bleeding, the weakness in his legs, the end. None of it came. Instead Frederik dropped to the ground with a last look of shock that rivaled Reilly’s awareness that he was alive.

  “Go!” demanded a deep, measured voice from behind. A voice that caught up with him and said, “Take this!” The voice belonged to the man who had killed Miklos’ partner. The voice that gave Reilly his Sig Sauer P238 pistol with six rounds left.

  “Lenczycki!”

  “Damned straight,” said the yacht owner from the Caribbean, the ex-CIA agent, the observer who believed that Reilly had been right. He removed another Sig from a holster belted to his side and commanded, “Go!”

  They ignored the dead man on the sidewalk and the screams on the street. Lenczycki yelled for people to clear out of the way. The order from a man brandishing a gun didn’t go unheeded.

  Miklos began redialing. He had four more numbers to punch in, and while cell phone range wasn’t a problem, survival was. So he ran.

  The stalled traffic gave him a maze to traverse, and protection. Cars parked along the Avenue Louise sidewalk also helped. Reilly and Lenczycki separated. Reilly’s trajectory took him across the street in hopes of overrunning Miklos, turning, and cutting him off. Lenczycki followed Miklos’ exact route.

  As Miklos darted around the stalled traffic, a car door suddenly opened and slammed him hard in the chest. He dropped the phone. Miklos swore and shut the door on the driver so hard it broke the man’s arm. He reached down, picked up the cell, but it was dead. He swore again.

  Seconds. He had lost precious seconds and a working phone.

  Miklos glanced back. One of his stalkers was closing in. The other wasn’t in sight. That could mean he was trying to cut him off. Miklos sprinted right, back to the previous direction to buy more time. He reached for the Makarov pistol tucked in his jacket, stopped, turned, aimed, and fired.

  The only thing that saved Lenczycki’s life was the sudden pivot he made around a Passat. He lost his balance and fell to the left. Miklos’ bullet missed him, but pierced a man’s shoulder in a car behind him.

  With no time to take a second shot, Miklos sped ahead, adding another twenty meters—about half a block.

  But there were two chasing. As Miklos suspected, the second charted a sharp angle toward him from the opposite side.

  Reilly!

  Miklos didn’t just run. He skillfully maneuvered with a sense of familiarity. He knew the avenue and had the stamina to outpace his immediate pursuer.

  Lenczycki, back on his feet, rejoined the chase, yelling at pedestrians to move and banging car hoods to stop them from inching forward.

  Reilly kept Miklos in sight. He began to think that Miklos’ flight had purpose. Despite the twists and turns he took, Miklos seemed as if he kept returning to the same route, hugging the north side of the street.

  The foot chase took them by the prestigious shops along Avenue Louise—all busy with people gazing in store windows and international shoppers going in and coming out with name-brand bags.

  The avenue was crowded with bicyclists daring to weave around the bottleneck. The traffic, the horns, and the complaining made it easier for Miklos and harder for Lenczycki and Reilly.

  They ran past Chanel, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Versace, and Christian Dior. Then back into the street, crossing the trolley tracks, and scooting around cars.

  Miklos caught Reilly in his peripheral vision running parallel to him between the light-rail tracks and stopped vehicles. The Russian faked a turn into a Bose Store, knocking down a businessman. Then he sprinted further up Avenue Louise to Apostrophe and around a group of young women. More lead time. He used the passersby as cover and hit a woman hard going into the fashionable designer shop, Liu Jo.

  Lenczycki kept his quarry in sight, but he couldn’t catch up. He also couldn’t risk taking another shot. Not with so many people. Not with the potential of getting shot himself by Federale Politie, which so far had not shown up despite Brussel’s constant state of alert.

  He began to slow, searching for Reilly. But by taking his eyes off his quarry, he lost him.

  Reilly didn’t. He saw Miklos run toward Serneels Jeux & Jouets, a world famous toy and games store.

  Miklos used a couple exiting to his advantage. He knocked them down. People gathered to help them. Another obstacle.

  Serneels? Reilly thought. Hostages? He quickly dismissed the notion. Escape.

  Reilly helped the man and woman to their feet. A winded Lenczycki caught up.

  “He’s inside. Go through. All the way to the back!”

  “Okay. You?”

  Reilly pointed as he began to run further down the avenue.

  Lenczycki pushed the glass door open and was assaulted by a surreal contrast. Somewhere inside the most opulent toy store he’d ever seen was a killer. But to get to him, he had to navigate through plush toys, porcelain and plastic dolls, a ceiling-high giraffe, classic replicas of cast-iron soldiers right out of his childhood, and high-tech playthings for today. In the room ahead were steam engines, remote control cars, handcrafted music boxes, and traditional parlor games. Row after row. Room after room. A child’s dream come true and a murderer he’d dreamt of capturing or killing for decades.

  But where?

  He kept his pistol tucked into his holster. His fingers on the grip.

  Through. All the way to the back, Reilly had told him.

  He cut in and around kids, new fathers, pregnant mothers, and salespeople. Children sat on the floor conjuring up fantastic adventures while others balanced on huge stuffed animals.

  And suddenly, he saw a door close ahead and to his left.

  Lenczycki nearly tripped twice over kids. Miklos had a good twenty seconds on him. It expanded to thirty because the former CIA agent had to wait for a family with a stroller to enter just as he was trying to exit.

  Once out, he got his bearings. He was in a luxurious, open hallway leading into a hotel. But not just any hotel. A magnificent, historical hotel. Posh, opulent, magnificent. Marble and inlaid parquet floors. Dark wood walls that framed shops filled with things he could never afford. Bronze statues and period paintings and further ahead, curved stairs to an expansive lobby adorned wi
th more statues, fresh flowers, classic artwork, and crystal chandeliers.

  Had Lenczycki entered from the expansive courtyard off Avenue Louise, he would have seen the marquee for Steigenberger Wiltcher’s, arguably the most beautiful hotel in Brussels. Its nineteenth-century façade shouted high-class comfort. But the retired operative was only focused on finding his prey again.

  Miklos slowed to appear as if he belonged. The last thing he wanted was to alert hotel security. He walked through the lobby, avoided looking into CCTV cameras, picked up a newspaper to cover his face, and followed another hallway.

  A half minute later, Lenczycki stood under the center chandelier searching for Miklos. He spotted his target ahead. The Russian bumped into a group of businessmen, disappeared in the mass, then reemerged.

  Lenczycki picked up the pursuit across the lobby, down a hall, and into a stairwell. The door was still closing when he reached it. Footsteps echoed from below.

  Lenczycki had his pistol ready. He raced down the stairs, taking each corner sideways to offer the narrowest profile if Miklos shot at him.

  The sound of another door opening.

  The former CIA agent felt he was catching up.

  He cautiously opened the door, his gun at the ready. It was clear left and right.

  Ahead more running. The sound of shoes landing harder on the lower level cement floors.

  Lenczycki, tucked his gun under his jacket as he passed housekeeping staff, an electrician, and the kitchen. Employees made way. The hall dead-ended. Two ways to go, and now no sound coming from either way.

  Lenczycki stopped. He couldn’t believe he had gotten this close only to lose Miklos. And then a crash from behind. Dishes in the kitchen and swearing in French.

  Lenczycki pivoted and ran back to the kitchen. The rubble on the floor, the screaming chef, and the hands pointing to a door told him what had happened and which way to go. He skirted the broken pieces, between stove tops and food prep tables. He pushed aside see-through plastic strip curtains and emerged in another basement hall that opened up to a loading dock. Beyond that, a driveway.