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Color Of Blood

Page 18

by Keith Yocum


  The flight to Basel was quick, and Dennis had to remind himself how small Western Europe really was.

  The only hotel room Dennis could swing was a ridiculously expensive suite at the St. George. He knew he’d get grief from accounts payable on this expense report, but the only other option was a youth hostel.

  This was Baselworld in Basel, Switzerland, the annual showcase of fine watches and jewelry from manufacturers around the world. Dennis could not believe his good fortune. Baselworld was taking place that week. Divine intervention!

  Basel, situated on a bend in the Rhine where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet, was a classic old-new European city: both charmingly quaint and modern at the same time. Sleek twentieth-century glass-and-steel buildings sometimes stood alongside five hundred–year-old brick-and-mortar residential buildings.

  But if he was a little put off by the city’s jarring juxtaposition of architectural styles, he was completely unnerved by the scene at the Messeplatz, the vast watch and jewelry exhibition hall.

  Thousands of people roamed the exhibition halls ogling the latest watches from the world’s manufacturers, most of which he’d never heard of, nor could he pronounce their names.

  The scene at the entrance of the Messeplatz was mayhem, with men and women of all nationalities squeezing through the exhibit-hall doors. It seems more like Christmas shopping at Tyson’s Corner Center, Dennis thought.

  Most troubling of all, for purely operational reasons, was the volume of people; when he read about Baselworld on the Internet, it never occurred to him that there would be thousands of attendees. Finding Garder—if he was even there—in such a mass of people was going to be extremely difficult.

  But Dennis felt he had two things in his favor: (1) Garder would never suspect that he’d be followed to Basel, of all places; (2) Garder wouldn’t know Dennis from an elevator operator since they had never met, and as far as Dennis was concerned, the guy didn’t even know Dennis existed. Now that the rogue agent had a million dollars to play with, he’d be cooing over the latest Patek Philippe timepiece. Dennis would ID him, call in the extraction team, and return to Langley a hero once again.

  After several sweeps of the Messeplatz, Dennis staked out a seat on one of the small cement walls at the entrance to the exhibit hall. On his second day he grabbed a piece of the wall with a clear view of the main entrance. It was cool and cloudy outside, but he wore sunglasses and had his trusty spiral notebook in his lap. Taped to a page were three photos: Garder’s official ID photo at Langley, Garder’s ID photo at the consulate in Perth, and a casual group photo of him taken at a going-away party in Langley for one of Garder’s friends.

  Still, Dennis was an investigator and not a fully trained field operative. To prepare himself, he concentrated on two physical features that he had culled from Garder’s Langley file: a broken nose in a high-school soccer game that had left Garder with a little notch at the top where the cartilage met the bone; and a thin, half-inch, horizontal scar below his bottom lip in the middle of his chin.

  After the first hour Dennis realized that he had the wrong vantage point, since he ended up watching the sides and backs of people as they entered the hallway doors, so he entered the hall and grabbed another position that allowed him to observe the registration area and the entrance to the exhibits. He only had to look at young men, of course, who were Caucasian, about five foot nine inches tall with black hair. Garder could have shorn his hair, dyed it blond, grown a beard, or done all of the above, but it was the best Dennis had to work with.

  After two hours of scanning he came down with a splitting headache and found his attention wandering. By lunchtime he was exhausted and ready for a drink, but he stayed at the entrance dutifully looking for his prey.

  And, he wondered almost idly, how many Japanese watch retailers did that country have? Nearly one in four visitors appeared to be Japanese.

  Dennis left at 1:00 p.m. and walked a block to a café. He had coffee, a pastry, a glass of red wine that he convinced himself would be good for his heart, three aspirins from a bottle he kept in his jacket pocket, and a large glass of water. For the first time since he left Dulles, he entertained the thought that he had guessed wrong, and that Garder was not in Basel, had never been in Basel, and would never be in Basel.

  He went back to the entrance and took up a position at his original vantage outside the building, since people were now exiting in solid numbers.

  The temperature outside had climbed into the high fifties, and the sun began to poke through the cloud cover. He could see snow-capped mountains in the distance, and his attention began to wander. Sometimes he would notice an extraordinarily attractive woman and would allow himself the pleasure of following her with his gaze for longer than was necessary for the task at hand.

  At 3:20 p.m. the headache returned and centered itself directly behind his forehead.

  “Crap,” he muttered. Dennis stood up and stretched, balancing the notebook on top of the short brick wall. He raised his arms above his head and absently lowered his outstretched arms, windmill fashion.

  He accidentally brushed an older woman who was walking past.

  “Sorry,” Dennis said, grabbing the notebook. He was tempted to go back to his hotel, hit the bar, and then go to bed. He took one more cursory glance at the entrance.

  He saw two well-dressed Japanese men exit. They held one of the doors for two gorgeous young women that Dennis took for Scandinavian models; both were striking blondes at least six feet tall.

  Directly behind the women, a young man walked out, squinting a little in the glare.

  Dennis was stunned—the man could be Garder. He was about the correct height and had close-cropped, dark hair. Dennis glanced at the photos quickly and then back at the man walking toward him.

  Christ, he thought, it could be Garder, and he’s walking right toward me.

  ***

  There was a sensation of being rigid, as if she had been cemented in place. She regained her bearings and gagged at the taste of the sweet, medicinal vapors in her throat.

  Judy tried to raise her right hand to rub her sore neck, but her hand would not move. She tried to open her eyes, but something covered them, and worse, she realized her mouth was tightly bound over with something. She appeared to be lying flat on a hard surface and was restrained, with only her nostrils open. She took big gulps of air through her nose, creating a snorting sound. Something had been inserted into her ears so that she could barely hear herself breathe.

  “Hey,” she heard someone say, but the words were distorted and sounded as if they were coming from a cartoon voice.

  “She’s coming to,” someone else said. The words sounded high-pitched and silly. Judy briefly wondered if she’d had a stroke or some other neurological injury, but then she slowly assembled the few facts at her disposal: she had been grabbed at her front door and then drugged. She was bound to a table of some sort, blindfolded, and had manipulated sounds piped into her ears by an electronic device that distorted voices.

  This was a good sign; they wouldn’t be going through the trouble to change their voices if they didn’t plan to release her. So she waited, trying to calm her heart exploding in her small ribcage.

  She heard what sounded like laughter, and then felt a hand on the inside of her right thigh as it slid up between her legs. Judy twisted violently and heard a voice bark, “Stop it! Told you none of that.”

  This directive was followed by more laughter, and she estimated it came from perhaps two other people.

  Then a cartoony voice came through loud and clear: “G’day, Officer White. How are you doing?”

  Judy did not respond.

  “Can you hear me? Nod if you hear me.”

  Judy nodded.

  “Good,” the voice said. “You may have guessed that we’ve altered our voices with this nifty gadget. Kind of like an iPod for criminals, eh?”

  More cartoon laughter.

  “You know why you’re here, don’t
you?”

  Judy shook her head and sent out a muffled “No” through her taped mouth.

  “Come on, Officer White, you know what’s going on.”

  “No!”

  “Then we’ll make things so bloody crystal clear to you that even you—a copper—will appreciate the genius of this effort. We started by sending your lovely dad a message. I believe you could call that Phase One.

  Judy heard more cartoon laughter.

  “We have a very lucrative business here that is being bollocksed up. There are some very wealthy people involved in this import-export business, and they are extremely upset. Two of their shipments—one export at the airport and one import in Fremantle—were recently confiscated, and it made them very, very angry. So you’re probably wondering what that has to do with you then, yes?”

  Judy held perfectly still.

  What in God’s name are they doing? she thought. Don’t they know I had little to do with that bust? She felt a stab of fear through her chest and again tried to slow her breathing.

  “I believe that your AFP team has several informants they’ve planted in our organization. We thought we fixed that leaky faucet, so to speak, by shooting a very large hole in a very small man recently. We thought that would scare the other spies you have inside our organization. But then we recently lost a very large inbound shipment of merchandise, didn’t we?”

  Judy was so terrified that she felt nauseated. She had indeed heard rumors of informers on the government payroll feeding tidbits of intelligence back to headquarters, but they were not her informers. Surely they know I have nothing to do with any of the informers, she thought.

  “One of our benefactors is a bloody bright fellow,” the voice continued. “He’s convinced me that if your team has informers inside our organization, that it’s only fair that we have more informers inside your organization.”

  “We figure, Officer White—it’s just a guess, mind you—that you don’t know who the blood-sucking informers are working for your side. We could do all kinds of nasty things to you, and you still couldn’t give us the names of those vermin because we don’t think you know who they are.”

  Judy’s breathing grew shallow as she braced for the punch line that would explain why she had been drugged, tied up, and blindfolded.

  “So we have a better idea, which I think you’ll find much more appealing. Are you following me, Officer White?”

  Judy moved her head in the slightest nod, but in truth her mind was vacillating wildly between raw physical fear and planning for some way out of this mess.

  “This may come as a bit of surprise to you, Officer White, but we already have one source inside the AFP in WA, as well as several in the AFP back east—and let’s not forget the Crime Commission. You know, Canberra should pay their federal coppers a better wage. We’d stop having to pay them so much bloody cash on the side. Then again, we’d lose our leverage, wouldn’t we?”

  More laughter.

  “Everybody wants money, money, money,” the voice said. “Thank God for greed, or we’d be nowhere, let me tell you. So, let me stop babbling and announce Phase Two: wouldn’t it be better to work together and not at cross purposes?”

  The adrenaline made her bound body twitch with small, involuntary jerks. Her breathing was loud as she inhaled air through her nostrils.

  “Pull back the tape on her mouth,” the voice commanded.

  A pair of thick fingers dug into the end of the tape and pulled it, slowly freeing her mouth. She hungrily took in several large gulps of air.

  “That better?” the voice asked.

  “Yes.” Her own voice was now eerily distorted as well.

  “So let’s get to the point. You’d agree that we frightened the bloody hell out of your dad and mum. After he got the note, you did what you were supposed to do, right? You took it to your boss, and there was a big meeting among the crack AFP unit, and even detectives from the WA Police and Crime Commission, right? And a fucking PowerPoint presentation! Bloody good show with all that rubbish about the Golden Triangle.”

  More laughter.

  How in the hell did he know what went on inside the AFP? Judy wondered. What does he mean about more informers?

  “Now, you may have gathered we know a lot about you folks at the AFP, but we don’t know enough of what goes on there. We’d like you to join our enterprise by feeding us information that you think we’d find useful. We planted the note on your father’s car to scare the shit out of your family. We knew you’d go crying like a little puppy to your AFP mates about your poor, poor family. And we knew there would be a big meeting, and then all we had to do was grab you and show you we know what happens inside the AFP here in WA. Yes?”

  Judy lay there furiously processing this information.

  “Please say, ‘yes,’” the voice commanded.

  “Yes.”

  “So this is how it’s going to work: You’ll be contacted on your work email account from someone called Mandy, and Mandy will tell you how to communicate with us. Mandy may change things up a bit, but just do what she says. Don’t try to trace her emails; we have clever ways of spoofing them so that you’ll never find Mandy. That’s simple enough, isn’t it, Officer White? And of course we’ll pay you handsomely for your troubles. I don’t have to tell you that you shouldn’t be rash with your extra income, do I? Please don’t draw attention to your newfound wealth: bad form and all that.

  “And of course you won’t tell anyone at AFP about our arrangement because, as you can tell, we already have someone inside there. And the moment we hear that you’ve leaked this plan, well, there will be consequences, which we’ll explain in a moment.”

  Who the hell is the snitch inside AFP? she thought. They can’t believe I’m just going to flip like this? My God, they’re complete idiots.

  “Now, you can ask yourself why we need more than one helper inside the AFP in WA, and the answer is the same reason you folks have more than one helper—redundancy! If we lose one of our helpers, we’ll have another. And neither of you know who the other is. Isn’t this a brilliant plan! Neither will give up the goods because they’ll be found out by the other one. Don’t know why it took us so fucking long to figure out we need to act like coppers!”

  More laughter.

  “Well, as you can imagine, we didn’t expect you to accept our invitation without some reservations. And we’re not going to these extraordinary steps for the pure fun of it, mind you. I was looking for a bold step to get the situation under control. Put the tape back on her,” the cartoonish voice commanded.

  Judy felt it being reapplied and pressed down on her chin and cheeks to tighten the seal. She guessed, from the feel of it, that they had affixed a large strip of gauze into the center of a piece of duct tape. She felt a tinge of claustrophobia again as the tape was reapplied.

  “Officer White, do you know what this device is?” the voice said.

  She felt something heavy, metallic, and cold placed against her cheek, and convulsed slightly.

  “It’s a bolt cutter,” the voice said, “a right big one. It’s used to cut very hard cylinders of steel, like a padlock, for instance.”

  Judy swooned as if several sparrows were trying to fly out of her stomach.

  “Besides padlocks, this wonderful device can also sever fingers,” the voice said. She heard guffaws of cartoon laughter.

  She felt a hand grab her right wrist, even though it was bound to her side. She instinctively twisted her entire body as she tried to fight back.

  “Don’t worry,” the voice said. “We’re not going to use it on your fingers. We’re not that bloody stupid. But we’d like you to feel the immense power of this device and know what it’s capable of. Now stop twisting because you could cause an accident. Please, Officer White, calm down. Now, do you feel that? Those are the cutting blades; feel how they fit snuggly around your index finger?”

  Judy’s heart pounded as she felt the teeth of a huge pair of pliers placed delicate
ly around her right index finger. She could barely breathe as the two blades nestled against the soft flesh of her finger.

  “I think you get the idea, yes?” the voice asked.

  Judy nodded vigorously.

  “So, how do you think that strapping young son of yours—I think his name is Simon—would look if, say, he was missing two or three fingers? I believe he’s right-handed, yes?”

  “Stop,” Judy screamed through the tape. “Stop!”

  “I bet you think you’ll be able to move that son of yours and hide him somewhere, don’t you? But we’ll find him. You think the AFP will move you and your whole family to the UK? Perhaps the US? South Africa? And your parents? You think they want to move to a foreign country at their age? Doesn’t matter, we’ll find you and Simon. I can promise you we’ll take off all the fingers of Simon’s right hand, just leave a stump, and it would be your fault, Officer White. He won’t be able to button his shirts, or hold a knife and fork properly. Such a shame, and all preventable.

  “I’m sure you think we’re bluffing. So as a demonstration of our resolve, we are going to leave you with a little gift. It will be something that you can hide easily from prying eyes and yet will be a constant reminder of our enduring business relationship.”

  Judy felt several burly arms suddenly press down hard on her thighs, and she twisted her body as she felt her right shoe being taken off and her nylon sock daintily removed.

  In the millisecond it took for her to understand what was happening, and before she could scream through the duct tape, she distinctly heard someone yell, “No!”

  But it was too late. She felt something metallic and cold touch her foot, followed by a searing pain that swept up her right leg, then a clicking sound.

  Judy screamed and screamed, writhing so hard she thought she might have hurt her wrists. As she violently twisted her head, the tape covering her eyes parted at the edge just enough that, for a fraction of a second, she saw the shoulder of a man leaning down against her legs, while behind him stood a man with a bolt cutter. It appeared the man with the bolt cutter had short, bleach-blond hair, a deep tan, and a small, gold hoop earring on his left ear.

 

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