‘I have my sign,’ he told them.
*
Horvat pushed open the glass doors and walked into the entrance hall of the Queen’s High casino, glancing around with an air of indifference. The place wouldn’t officially be open for hours, but as with most of the businesses belonging to the Kurjak brothers, there was always something suspicious going on there.
A stringy-haired blonde with her attention buried in a magazine looked up as he crossed toward the casino proper and she called out to him. ‘We are closed now!’
‘I’m not here to lose money,’ Horvat said, out of the side of his mouth.
The main room was empty except for a couple of old mamas running droning vacuum cleaners over the threadbare carpet, and a stocky youth in a muscle shirt and jeans standing near the roulette wheel. He saw Horvat and moved to intercept him as the blonde came in, still complaining.
The youth waved her away and blocked Horvat’s path. ‘What do you want? Too early for Senior Citizens’ Night, old man.’
‘Stupid little boy.’ Horvat opened his coat so the idiot could see the holstered gun and the black wallet holding his Policija badge. ‘I’ve got an appointment.’
‘No, you don’t,’ insisted the thug. ‘Cops don’t mean shit to me.’
Horvat’s patience was running thin. He hadn’t got much sleep over the past twenty-four hours with all that was happening, and he was running on nicotine and irritability. ‘Look, stupid. Bojan called me in. So go and get your boss and tell him Franko is here like he asked, or else your two girlfriends over there are going to watch me put your face through one of those slot machines.’
‘Bojan isn’t here –’
Horvat growled and put his hand on his gun. ‘Do I look like a fool to you? Go and get him.’
The youth paused, processing the risk. Horvat was old enough to be his father, but he had the weight and the reach to make good on any threat. ‘Bojan is in a meeting,’ he said, at length. ‘He told me not to admit anyone.’
‘The fuck?’ Horvat spat on the carpet and found the gaudy iPhone. ‘He better not be wasting my time.’ He tried to dial the single number in the memory, but the phone didn’t work properly, taking twice as long as usual to respond to every tab he pressed. He shook it angrily. ‘Shit! Is everything going to piss me off today?’
*
‘Okay,’ Marc said to himself, glancing up to look at the casino and then back to the laptop. ‘Can you park around the back?’
‘Yeah.’ Vanja’s reply was sullen. ‘What for?’
‘We’re going to find out if the Kurjaks really are playing with fire.’ With root access to Horvat’s phone, Marc began the work of turning the device into his inside man. First, he remoted-loaded a copy of the CellRAD app on to the phone and set it running; the moment the crooked cop went anywhere near a radioactive source, Marc would know about it. Next, he activated the phone’s mike and turned up the laptop’s audio output so Vanja could listen in. ‘Pay attention to this,’ he told him. ‘I need to know what’s going on in there.’
Vanja parked the car and scowled as Horvat’s voice issued out of the laptop’s tinny internal speaker. ‘He’s angry about something.’
‘Isn’t he always?’ Marc scanned the back of the casino. A fire escape door was propped open with an empty beer crate. He could see nothing but shadows inside.
An old, familiar tingle of anticipation gathered in him – the sense of a point of no return coming up fast, the go/no-go decision bearing down like an oncoming train. If he got out of the car, where would this end? Men in that building across the way had tried to kill him once already, and if he gave them another opportunity . . . Marc shook off the thought and turned his attention back to the laptop screen.
In the program window for the CellRAD app, the detector alert display suddenly flicked from green to yellow.
*
Ramaas smiled widely as he watched the Kurjak thug with the bloodied face shoot him a murderous look and gather up the man he had blinded on his shoulder. That one wanted to tear his heart out, and Ramaas might have been willing to let him try, if the older of the Serbian brothers had not ordered him out of the room.
At this moment, Ramaas felt invulnerable. Only a short time ago, his mood had been troubled by the news from Guhaad and the very real possibility that the Serbs had robbed him at this most critical of moments. But now he understood what had happened, and why it had occurred.
A final test of my resolve from the hand of Waaq, a challenge, he told himself. To see if I would court despair or cut through it and remain true. Here in this stale, cheerless room, a moment of transcendent truth unfolded, and as Ramaas processed it, he saw ever more clearly how it had been fated to happen from the start.
He believed that he would need money for the mission before him, but his thinking had been too limited. God showed him that with this gift, this blessing.
Ramaas ran his hand over the surface of the device. The cylindrical chambers inside it were faintly warm to the touch. ‘How does it feel?’ He directed the question toward the younger of the Kurjak brothers. ‘To finally see truth where before all you held on to were lies?’
‘It’s worth more than we paid for it,’ said Bojan, from across the room. ‘Much more. And with you as our partner, we can come out of this as wealthy men.’
Ramaas turned to look at him, closing the lid of the case with his free hand. The Kurjaks suddenly seemed very small to him, with all their fixation on treasure. ‘You think you know why I came here today, don’t you? For greed’s sake?’ He shook his head. ‘No. I do not want wealth. I want power.’
He took the digital phone from his pocket and dialled Zayd’s contact number. As always, his man answered after a single ring. ‘I am ready. What are your orders?’
‘We do not need them now,’ he said in Somali. ‘Cut all our ties to the gaal.’
‘I will contact you when it is done.’ Zayd ended the call and Ramaas took a breath, filled with a sense of how right this all was.
At the door to the office, another of the Kurjaks’ men stood on the threshold, unwilling to enter without explicit permission. Bojan turned his annoyance on him. ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Franko Horvat is on the floor,’ said the thug. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
Bojan swore violently and glared at the monitor screens behind his desk. Ramaas saw a lone figure on one of the displays, standing by a poker table. ‘Get rid of the pig,’ said the elder Kurjak. ‘I am having the worst fucking day of my life and I don’t want him in it!’
‘He’s not going to take no for an answer,’ complained the thug.
Before Bojan could reply, Ramaas made an expansive, sweeping motion with his hand. ‘Deal with your friend,’ he said, and with the order it was made clear who was now in charge here. ‘Your brother and I can have a conversation while you are gone.’
He rested on the edge of the desk, across from where Neven sat uncomfortably. As the office door closed behind him, he searched the other man’s face for any signs of further duplicity.
‘Tell me about this prize,’ said Ramaas, gesturing at the steel case with the Taurus pistol still in his hand. ‘I want to know everything.’
*
The indicator changed from yellow to orange and the RADIOLOGICAL DETECTION EVENT banner cut across the middle of the laptop screen.
‘Oh, shit. It’s in there.’ Marc’s mouth went dry and a flood of cold washed through him.
‘This is bad, isn’t it?’ said Vanja.
Marc managed a wooden nod and grabbed his phone, hitting the speed dial. ‘Jurgen Goss,’ said the voice on the other end.
‘Remember what I said to you in the hospital?’ He didn’t bother with any preamble. ‘Look, man, I’m sorry about this, but I didn’t give you the full story.’
‘Marc? Schiesse, where are you? De Wit is on the war path, he’s –’
‘Listen to me.’ Marc spoke over the other man. ‘I wasn’t certain about
it before, but I am now. The Kurjaks have nuclear material inside the city limits. I’m outside the Queen’s High casino, one of their fronts, and CellRAD is lighting up like a bloody Christmas tree. You need to get Schrader, tell her to come down here mob-handed with the local SWAT, a Hazmat team, the whole thing . . .’ He ran out of breath and started again. ‘Are you hearing me?’
‘Marc . . .’ Goss trailed off, and for an unpleasant moment it was as though the line had gone dead.
‘Jurgen, I am deadly serious. Let me send you the readings, the signatures are the same as before –’
‘I believe you.’ Goss cut him off. ‘Oh, I wish I didn’t.’ Marc heard movement as the other man stepped away from his desk to somewhere where he couldn’t be overheard. ‘I did what you asked, I ran the face you gave me. Nothing came up on the European criminal database, so I widened the search. Eventually I found him on the threat book of a NATO military intelligence server.’
‘Military?’ Marc echoed.
‘His name is Oleg Fedorin. Until recently, a general in the Russian Federation’s Strategic Rocket Corps.’ Marc listened as Goss explained how a story was circulating on the Russia Today news stream, a bulletin released out of Moscow this morning about Fedorin’s dismissal from the army because of ‘gross misconduct and sexual impropriety’.
‘What do NATO have on this guy?’ he asked, in a dead voice.
‘It is as scary as it is vague,’ Goss replied. ‘Fedorin is . . . I mean, he was flagged as having a connection to something with the codename “Exile”, but that’s all I could get with my security clearance.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Marc, this man is a real Cold Warrior from the bad old days. If he’s trading radioactives with the Kurjaks, they could have an ICBM in there for all we know!’
‘Tell Schrader to get here,’ Marc repeated, as Goss’s report echoed back and forth in his head. ‘I don’t care what excuse you give. Make it happen!’ He cut the line and looked at Vanja.
‘This is very bad, isn’t it?’ said the other man.
‘Your employers have just jumped into the premier league of global arms-dealing scumbags,’ Marc told him. ‘If I was you, I would get as far away from here as you can.’ He paused, then dug in his backpack for Pavic’s burner phone and tossed it to him. ‘There. You’re off the hook.’
Vanja shook his head. ‘The look on your face says something different.’
‘Yeah.’ Marc still had Vanja’s CZ 75 pistol, and he pulled it from the bag, checking the magazine and the presence of a round in the chamber.
What are you doing, Marc? The ghost voice, the Sam voice, was pushing back into his thoughts. You go in there, you’re on your own.
‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘Vanja, listen. Do one last thing for me. Call the police.’ Marc stuffed the laptop into the backpack and pulled the straps over his shoulders. ‘Tell them you saw a man with a gun walking into the Queen’s High. Tell them you heard gunshots and someone shouting about a dirty bomb. That last bit is really important. Dirty bomb, okay?’
‘What?’ Vanja threw a look toward the casino. ‘Why?’
Marc opened the door of the Fiat and stepped out, the pistol held low to his thigh and out of sight. ‘Because in a minute or two that’s what’s going to happen.’
SEVEN
‘Whenever I hear your name, my life takes a turn for the worse.’ Bojan snarled the words at Horvat as he slammed through the door and onto the casino floor. ‘You bring me nothing but shit!’
Horvat looked up from the poker table where he was leaning, tossing the gold iPhone on the green baize. ‘The problem,’ he began, ‘is that you believe I am the same as these imbeciles you surround yourself with.’ He nodded toward the youth in the muscle shirt. ‘I’m not your damned employee, Kurjak! We have an agreement. That doesn’t mean you get to order me around whenever you want!’
Bojan stopped in front of him and fixed Horvat with a look that was part exasperation, part fury. ‘What. The fuck. Are you talking about?’ He sounded out the words as if he was talking to a dim child. ‘Why are you even here? What’s wrong now?’
The first inkling of something awry trickled down into Horvat’s thoughts. ‘That’s what I came here to ask you! I’m right in the middle of trying to clean up this mess, and you tell me to stop what I’m doing and come out to this rathole?’ He picked up the iPhone and waved it at Bojan. ‘“Don’t make us wait?” I’m not at your beck and call!’
He watched as his words got through to the other man. Bojan’s gaze fixed on the gold smartphone. ‘I haven’t contacted you. Neven hasn’t contacted you . . .’ He surged forward and snatched the phone from his hand. ‘What have you done?’
‘I got a text message.’ Suddenly Horvat was thinking about how the phone was working slowly. ‘It came from your number.’
Bojan held up the device and shouted at him. ‘You fucking dinosaur! We didn’t send you anything! This has been tapped, someone is . . .’ His words caught up with him and he turned pale. ‘Were you followed? Horvat, did you lead them right to us?’
Horvat blinked, all his usual bluster gone in an instant.
Bojan rounded on the thug in the shirt. ‘This idiot has blown our location. Get everyone out!’
‘I never told anybody –’ Horvat tried to regain some of his poise. He wasn’t about to let the Kurjaks put the blame on him.
‘Shut up!’ Bojan dropped the iPhone on the floor and stamped on it. ‘You stay right there. I’ll deal with you in a moment!’
*
Marc pressed himself against the outside of the casino and peeked in through the open fire exit. A dark corridor clogged with piles of crates extended away into the building and he slipped in, holding the Czech semi-automatic in one hand and gripping his clip-on Europol identity card in the other.
He was halfway to the door at the far end when it opened and two older ladies in cleaners’ smocks pushed through, both of them agitated and fearful. They saw the gun and froze.
‘Police,’ he hissed, holding up the card as though it was actually a badge of authority, and not the thing that got him past the precinct security desk. ‘I mean, uh, Policija.’ He sighed and gave up, jerking his head at the exit door. ‘Ah, whatever. Just get out.’
They didn’t need to understand English to get the message, and they fled past him. Marc watched them go, and then crept up to the other door. He held his breath, listening for voices or sounds of movement.
He heard someone shouting, and then a snarled reply. The second voice he had heard only moments ago in the back of Vanja’s car. Horvat was still in the building.
Marc took a few deep breaths to even out his racing pulse and started forward again.
*
Ramaas listened to Neven Kurjak as the criminal talked in broken, halting sentences. English was not the mother tongue to either of them, but each knew it well enough to sift the words for nuance and intent. Neven knew that Ramaas held his life in his hands, and Ramaas knew that Neven was petrified of him.
He smiled wolfishly, considering the situation. The younger Kurjak brother talked about the device, hinting at its horrific destructive capabilities and once again returning to the matter of its material worth. He showed Ramaas a folder full of blueprints and technical schematics, and as the warlord pored over the inconceivably complex diagrams, a cunning idea began to gather in the back of his mind. He pushed it aside for the moment to let it mature. There were more pressing concerns to be dealt with at hand.
Neven told him the weapon could be remotely activated, rendered inert or detonated with a series of commands transmitted on ultra-low-frequency radio bands. Those commands were strings of seven letters. ‘I’ve memorised the code the Russian gave us,’ Neven insisted. ‘For safety’s sake.’
‘Good.’ Ramaas granted him a magnanimous nod. ‘God has given you a purpose.’
Neven shifted uncomfortably, uncertain what to make of his statement. ‘Okay,’ he managed, after a pause.
‘I think I will need a man like you,’ Ramaas went on, wandering to Bojan’s desk. The elder brother’s heavy-calibre Python revolver was still where he had left it, and Ramaas studied the weapon before exchanging it for the smaller Taurus pistol he had taken earlier. The big gun sat comfortably in his hand, and he decided he would keep it for his collection.
On the bank of security monitors he saw Bojan arguing with the interloper, and their voices were raised so much that in the echoing space of the empty casino, he could faintly hear them through the walls. He watched Bojan stride away and vanish from the sight of the camera. ‘Your brother is upset.’ Ramaas turned on Neven and he flinched as he saw the Python in his grip.
‘Horvat . . .’ Neven said the name, then took a weak breath. ‘He’s police. We pay him but . . .’
‘He always wants more?’ Ramaas cocked his head. ‘I know that kind. Men who think everything belongs to them.’
‘I’m not like that,’ blurted Neven.
Ramaas gave him a disappointed glance. ‘You are telling me a lie.’
The office door slammed open and Bojan entered at a rush, red-faced and sweating. ‘We have to get out of here right now,’ he insisted. ‘This place isn’t safe anymore. Horvat screwed up!’ His gaze shifted to his brother, then to Ramaas. ‘You need to go.’
‘I agree with that,’ said Ramaas, and shot Bojan through the head. The heavy revolver let off a deep peal of sound as it discharged, and the back of the elder Kurjak’s skull blew out in an aerosol of pinkish-grey matter. His body collapsed against a chair and slid to the floor.
Neven howled like a wounded dog and his shaking hands went to his face. He started stuttering in his native language, so Ramaas crossed to him and put the searing hot metal of the gun muzzle against his temple. He cried out and shied away, but Ramaas held him in place. ‘I did not like the way your brother spoke to me. I do not need him.’ He used the revolver to point at the steel case. ‘Pick it up.’
Neven got to his feet and hauled the case up from the floor. ‘Bojan . . . He’s dead?’ he managed, as if the reality of it was not quite clear to him.
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