‘I know who you are,’ the younger man shot back, launching into another tirade. ‘And if you keep calling my sister, I’ll reach down your throat and pull out your lungs, superior officer or not!’
All the wind went out of Horvat’s argument in a flash. ‘What? Who is doing what?’
‘Marta told you to leave her alone, you pervert, so leave her alone!’
Horvat pushed himself away from the angry young cop. They were drawing too much attention for his liking. ‘What are you talking about, boy? I don’t know any bitch named Marta!’
‘What did you call my sister, Kovac? I’ll kick you up and down the room for that!’ Other cops were gathering in the corridor, hovering on the edge of intervening.
‘Kovac? Who is Kovac?’ Horvat waved his hands in front of the other man. ‘Someone tell this stupid prick what my name is!’
‘Good grief, Pavic! That’s Franko Horvat,’ said one of the onlookers. ‘Kovac works with customs out at the airport, you idiot.’
‘Oh, man.’ Pavic’s face fell, the fire ebbing from him, becoming the picture of contriteness. ‘Inspector. Sorry. I’m very sorry. I . . . I thought you were him, see, he keeps sending pictures of his –’
‘Get the fuck away from me!’ Horvat bellowed at the top of his voice, putting all his weight into shoving the younger man aside. The rest of the police officers watching the argument unfold were laughing at the turn of events, and more than anything that stoked Horvat’s rage even higher. ‘All of you useless morons, get back to work!’ He roared at Pavic. ‘And you! I see your face again and I’ll push it in, you understand me?’
Pavic backed off, apologising profusely, and Horvat stormed away down the corridor.
*
The commotion died off, and after a moment the door to the interview room opened and Marc looked up as Pavic entered. ‘I really enjoyed that,’ the cop grinned. ‘That arrogant cock. He’s given me shit more times than I can count, and still he doesn’t remember my name.’
‘He will now,’ said Marc, the Englishman’s attention snapping straight back to the laptop. ‘Nice job. Gotta move quickly, though, in case he’s smarter than he looks.’
‘You hacked the phone?’
‘As we speak . . .’ Marc’s fingers danced over the black keys of the portable computer as Pavic sat down across from him in the interviewer’s chair.
‘So how does this work? You got his password?’
Marc nodded. ‘Brute-forced it. Horvat knows to use a burner, but he’s not technically savvy enough to mess around with the core settings. So I’ve jailbroken his cell phone and rooted it, got myself logged in as a ghosted super-user and . . .’ He paused, and looked up again. ‘Am I getting too technical?’
‘Yes,’ Pavic admitted. ‘Just tell me, how illegal is what you are doing?’
‘Oh, very,’ said Marc. ‘Very, very. You having second thoughts?’
‘Not many,’ Pavic replied, after a moment. ‘I’m wondering how we will explain this all to the State Attorney.’ He considered that, then answered his own question. ‘I’ll say my informant got us the intelligence.’
‘There you go. Moral quandary solved.’ Marc tapped out another command with a flourish. ‘I’ve remotely switched off all the encryption and security.’ He turned the screen so Pavic could see it. ‘We now own Franko Horvat’s burner phone.’
Pavic looked at the clock on the wall. ‘That was fast.’
‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ Marc said.
‘Remind me to get you to sort out this “root” thing for my phone.’
‘Later, yeah.’ He tapped the screen. ‘In the meantime, look here. This string of numbers? That’s the call-log data for the last conversation Horvat had.’
Pavic licked his lips. He was starting to see the appeal of this clandestine stuff. ‘And we can track the location of the person he called with that.’
‘Well, someone can.’ Marc picked up his phone and dialled a number. ‘Jurgen? It’s Dane. I’m emailing you something. I need you to do me a find-and-forget, yeah?’ The nasal tones of the Austrian muttered in Marc’s ear and he frowned. He muted the phone and glanced at the policeman. ‘Give me a minute. He’s going to take some convincing.’
Pavic stood up. ‘I’ll get the car.’
*
Marc left it a while and then exited the police station through a different door, his battered Swissgear daypack slung over one shoulder. He was trying his best to look inconspicuous as he looped around the car park to home in on Pavic’s black VW Golf, but with every step he took, a phantom pressure built up in the back of his head, coming on like a migraine headache.
It is not too late to turn back. The thought pushed its way forward until it was all he could focus on. Wipe the data on the laptop. Delete the intrusion software installed on Horvat’s phone. Convince Luka to let it go. Those were the steps he would have to take. There was still time. Marc could turn back from what he was about to do and no one would know.
He grimaced and his hands tightened into fists, the physical act an attempt to banish the traitorous notion before it could take hold and spill doubt. The looming sense of an ominous choice was rising up around him, and in a moment Marc would reach the point where he would have to finally commit to it.
It was one thing to spend weeks working on the Kurjak dossier only to be forced to put it aside on the orders of a supervising officer. It was very much another to willingly disobey that directive and break the law in order to stay on the investigation. Back in the interview room, caught up in the energy of the moment, it was easy for Marc to lose himself in the act. He’d been reactive for too long, doing little more than data mining and pattern matching. It felt good to do something risky, to go proactive for a change.
But now the spike of adrenaline was waning and he was thinking about what would happen if it all went wrong. Once before, going off-book was what had kept Marc Dane alive when his world had fallen apart around him, but he could not escape the cold reality of another truth – that over a year ago the same thing had ultimately caused the deaths of his MI6 operations team, among them a woman he had cared deeply for. Samantha Green and everyone else in OpTeam Nomad had paid with their lives for stepping outside the rules, and now here Marc was about to start down that same road again. He caught sight of Pavic sitting in the VW and he slowed.
Luka has a sister living in Dubrovnik, he remembered. His father is retired, out in the countryside somewhere. Marc was alone and disconnected, but if something happened to Pavic, the lives of good people would be ruined.
If Marc and Luka were going to do this, it would put not just their careers but also their lives in danger. It was a sobering fact to consider.
Pavic got out of the car and looked across the roof of the Golf. ‘What is it?’
‘Last chance to drop out,’ Marc offered. ‘We’ve got no backup, no one we can call on if things go wrong.’
‘Who are you trying to convince?’ Pavic beckoned him, without an iota of doubt in his eyes. ‘Come on.’
Marc’s reply was smothered by the chirp of his smartphone. He held up a hand to Pavic, and pulled the device from his jacket. Thicker than a regular cellular telephone, the S60 was a heavy-duty, waterproof handheld designed for industrial users, but Marc had co-opted it for himself with a few custom modifications – an integrated scrambler and a suite of software that stopped anyone doing to his phone what he had done to Franko Horvat’s. The caller ID belonged to Jurgen Goss, and Marc pressed the phone to his ear. ‘What have you got for me?’
He heard Goss let out a sigh. ‘Why are you doing this, Dane? If Schrader finds out what you are up, if she finds out I helped you –’
‘Schrader is results-oriented,’ Marc cut in. ‘I get her proof positive and she’ll come around.’ Both of them knew that part of the reason the woman was pushing hard to bring in solid arrests on the toxic dumpers was because Field Office #7 had made few good contributions to the NSNS’s mission in recent months
. Schrader and de Wit might be convinced to overlook any irregularities in procedure if he gave them a win in return. And despite whatever the Vienna office had said in the past, dismantling the Kurjaks’ operation would be a victory. ‘What have you got?’ he repeated.
Goss’s voice became low and conspiratorial. ‘Don’t ask me to do this again. The phone belonging to the recipient of the call log you gave me was last active when it pinged off a cell tower in the north of the city. I ran a back-trace to triangulate and found a probable location.’
The Austrian read out an address and something kicked off a spark of memory in Marc’s mind. ‘The Kurjaks have property all over the place in Split, bought up under shell companies. I’m pretty sure that building is one of them.’
‘I don’t want to know!’ Goss shot back. ‘I am deleting the phone log and everything you sent me the moment we stop talking!’ He paused, then added, ‘I think you should come back. Talk to de Wit. I will come with you. Perhaps together we can convince them to look at this.’
Marc shook his head. ‘You know what the answer will be. Thanks, Jurgen.’
‘You owe me,’ said the other man, and cut the call.
‘Well?’ said Pavic. ‘Yes or no?’
‘Green for go,’ said Marc, reaching for the VW’s passenger door.
*
Horvat pulled a packet of Ronhills from the pocket of his jacket and plucked out a cigarette, clamping it between his lips as he fumbled for his lighter. Ignoring the NO SMOKING signs, he marched over to the windows and lit up. He was still angry about that muscle-bound idiot who had made him look a fool in the corridor, and his mind was whirling with different ways that he could make the young sergeant’s life a misery from now on. He had plenty of friends among the uniforms, plenty of knowledge about their misdeeds and secrets to give him leverage. Right now, Horvat was annoyed enough to be willing to trade off something weighty just to see that moron reassigned to some dirty, dangerous duty. He grinned at the idea of the sergeant – What was his name, Pavic? – getting puked on by booze-soaked tourists on the seafront, or better still, knifed in the gut by some junkie in the nasty part of town.
Glaring out of the window, a figure crossing the car park caught his eye, and between drags on his cigarette, Horvat squinted. It was another of his least-liked people, the dog-faced English prick who always talked back to him. Horvat gave him the middle finger and willed him to stop and look up, but he never did.
Instead, the Englishman stopped to jabber away on his phone for a few moments, and Horvat saw him gesture toward someone in a car. The other person was the muscle-head sergeant. He’d taken off his uniform jacket, but it was unmistakably the same man.
They know each other? The question sparked a sharp intake of breath and Horvat coughed. He stubbed out the cigarette on reflex and processed this new bit of information.
Franko Horvat was not by any stretch of the imagination a good investigator, but what he did have were cunning instincts and a suspicious nature. He didn’t believe in coincidences; he held little faith in the idea of random chance. And now he was replaying every moment of that confrontation in the corridor with Pavic, sifting it for some sort of connection with the Englishman and those meddlers from the UN.
Down in the car park, Dane had ended his phone call and was walking toward Pavic’s car. They are up to something, Horvat told himself. He was certain of it.
Acting on the gut feeling he had learned always to trust, the inspector rocked off his feet and made for the elevator as quickly as he could, forcing his way in through the closing doors. Horvat slammed the button to take them to the ground floor.
Bojan Kurjak’s words came back to him. You want to make a bonus? Run some interference.
Horvat grinned to himself as he found the keys to his old Lada in his coat, and his fingers brushed briefly over the unregistered .38 revolver he habitually carried in a hidden pocket.
*
When Neven Kurjak had first met Oleg Fedorin, it had been on the pool deck of a rich dilettante’s yacht in the shallows of the Caspian Sea. He remembered the weekend clearly. Neven and his brother were at the sharp end of their business in those days, there on the boat under the cover of a three-day party, to meet with a group of Finnish neo-fascists who were interested in buying guns. The Finns had sadly turned out to be a waste of the Kurjaks’ time, believing they could trade on rhetoric rather than hard cash – but a chance meeting with Fedorin had rescued the trip from being a total bust. It became the start of a good financial partnership.
Neven got on with Fedorin, but Bojan thought he was arrogant and haughty, strutting about the place as if he was in charge of everything. Fedorin was used to that back across the border in Russia, where he wore the uniform of a ranking general in the Strategic Rocket Forces, but elsewhere he was just Oleg; scrupulously manicured and well-read Oleg, a man with a taste for the more relaxed entertainments on offer in South East Asia and a gambling habit that was in danger of becoming a serious addiction. Always the student of human frailty, Bojan had been the one to suggest they offer Fedorin a ‘consultancy’ role with the Kurjak International Shipping Company in return for helping him with his debts.
Fedorin was a good Russian, a true son of the Rodina, and adamant that he would do nothing to jeopardise the security of motherland. However, his reservations did not extend to fixing the books on arms and ammunition stocks, so that the Kurjaks could buy and resell AKMs to African militias or enterprising gang-bangers in North America. And with Fedorin’s connections inside the military, he had been useful in providing materials and documentation that gave the Serbians’ nuke scams the ring of truth.
But that had been several years ago, and the general had been promoted to the upper echelons in Moscow, where his past associations with Serbian mobsters were considered déclassé. So it had come as something of a surprise when Oleg Fedorin reached out to Neven Kurjak through a back channel with a demand to meet.
The communication had been brisk and to the point. Fedorin had a big-ticket item to sell, and a limited window in which to do so. Neven’s greed was constantly warring with his sense of self-preservation, and inevitably the former won out.
The man being patted down by one of the Kurjak’s thugs looked like the Oleg Fedorin that Neven remembered from that weekend on the yacht, but a version of him aged far more than the passing of years would suggest.
He looked smaller, somehow. As if he were carrying an invisible weight that was pushing him down. Neven glanced at Bojan and saw a faint smile on his brother’s lips. Bojan saw the Russian’s weakness and in it, opportunity.
Fedorin had only one man with him, an athletic type in his twenties with the build of a swimmer, wearing a hiker’s rucksack and a big coat that had to be concealing at least one firearm. He didn’t introduce him, but the way the two of them kept exchanging looks rang a warning inside Neven’s head. If it had been anyone other than the Russian, he would have backed out of the meeting immediately.
‘General,’ Neven began. ‘It’s been a while. We thought you’d forgotten all about your old friends in this part of the world.’
‘I forget nothing,’ Fedorin replied, with a tight smile. He scanned the other men in the room. ‘Are all these people necessary? Don’t you trust me?’
Bojan took in the dim space of the open floor with a sweep of his hand. ‘Security is paramount, general,’ he told him. ‘You understand.’ He jutted his chin at the bodyguard. ‘Who is this?’
‘Vladimir,’ offered the man with the rucksack, even as Fedorin was raising his hand to tell him not to speak.
Neven considered that. So Vladimir was new to this sort of thing, then. Someone with experience would have kept his mouth shut. ‘Last time I saw you, you had a dozen of your own troops. One is something of a comedown.’
‘Consider it a gesture of respect,’ Fedorin offered, still smiling. ‘I have that much confidence in you.’
‘Or is it that you don’t have the pull you once did?’ B
ojan wandered across the room. ‘We haven’t heard your name in a long time, Fedorin. Why is that?’
‘My more recent postings have been at top-secret facilities. You understand.’
‘Mmm.’ Bojan stopped and sniffed the air. He glanced at Neven. ‘You smell that, little brother?’
They had played this game before, and Neven knew his lines. ‘Desperation?’ Now that he looked at Fedorin carefully, he did see something anxious in the man’s manner, confirming his earlier suspicions. He decided to push the thought. ‘The urgent summons. The offer of something valuable . . . You’re on the run, I think.’ A flash of panic in Fedorin’s eyes made him sure of it, and he saw the same moment written on Vladimir’s face as well. Both of them, afraid for each other.
‘I don’t like to repeat rumours,’ said Bojan, ‘but I have heard people say things about you, Oleg.’ He deliberately used the man’s first name, tossing away his title and any possible play at superiority. ‘About your tastes.’ Bojan looked Vladimir up and down, and chuckled.
‘Oh.’ Neven suddenly understood what the actual relationship between Fedorin and his ‘bodyguard’ was, and a dozen trivial comments he had never considered from their years of association suddenly snapped into sharp relief. He was dismayed at himself for missing it, but then the ramifications caught up with him and he nodded. ‘I think I see. Did someone find you out, general? Someone who decided to use it against you?’
Fedorin drew back, closer to Vladimir. Fatigue grew in his expression. ‘My choice of . . . lifestyle does not sit well with the current administration of my country.’
‘We don’t care who you fuck,’ Bojan noted coldly, cementing their hold on the upper hand in this. ‘What do you want and what have you got to trade for it?’
‘I am cashing in my last chip,’ said Fedorin, with a weak sneer. ‘And quite frankly, if I could have gone elsewhere, I would have. But everyone else is being watched.’
‘Charming,’ muttered Neven, staring at Vladimir. ‘Seriously? He’s young enough to be your son.’
‘You need an escape hatch,’ said Bojan, staying on-topic. ‘You’re desperate!’
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