Einsteiner

by V. K. Fourstone

  “Move on, guys, will you,” said the policeman, in a genial mood. “We’ve had a complaint from the old woman in the house opposite. She says some strange characters got out of a van and then mysteriously went back, and now they’re sitting there with the engine running and making a stink, and are obviously plotting something. I understand everything, but she’s an old lady, why upset her?”

  “OK, chief,” Bikie responded. “Already gone.”

  The policeman walked away. They drove the van away a bit, and Isaac nodded in the direction of the shop. The shopman locked the door and was twirling the handle of the shutters, covering the display window. The guys could leave without any qualms of conscience: the first day of surveillance was officially over.

  They stopped a kilometer from the shop, at an empty lot where the van was concealed from the road by bushes. Bikie came up with an idea – let technology do the surveillance. In a blink of an eye he had linked up a web camera from his arsenal to the laptop and fine-tuned the image.

  It was almost dark when the friends got out of the van to stretch their legs, grab a bite and install the web camera opposite the cigar shop.

  When they reached the site, Isaac noticed an old woman on a chair in front of one of the houses. She was either dozing or enjoying the long-awaited coolness of the evening with her eyes blissfully closed. Bikie caught Isaac’s glance and nodded. They would have to wait. There was a little grocery shop on the ground floor just behind the woman.

  “Clear enough, life teaches proprietors to be vigilant,” Bikie explained to Isaac. “Or maybe she’s just feeling bored.”

  They took up a position on a municipal bench, pretending to be tourists resting after a hike and ate the pizza they got on the way. The old lady couldn’t see them, but if they turned round and craned their necks, they could see if she was still on her chair.

  It took quite some time before the woman finally got to her feet, yawned, grabbed her chair and retreated in to the house.

  “I’ll take the chair inside, so the damn thieves won’t steal it!” said Bikie, imitating an old woman’s voice so convincingly that Isaac could barely hold a laugh.

  Mindful of their earlier error, the friends took their time. They waited until the light came on upstairs, which meant the old woman was in her bedroom, and went out again, indicating that she had gone to bed. Only then did Isaac and Bikie get up and stroll gently in the direction of the cigar shop.

  Pretending to take an intense interest in a blossoming bougainvillea, Bikie quickly fixed the camera on the fence, hardly even slowing his already-slow stride. To look even more natural, he theatrically sniffed in the air from one of the lush purple flowers, breathed out noisily and walked on, whistling, beside Isaac. Isaac teased his friend, saying that today Bikie had indeed revealed his acting talent.

  The entire next day they observed the shop remotely. There was only one customer in the morning, an elderly gentleman with a cane and another three in the early evening.

  “Now that’s what I call a rush of customers!” Isaac quipped acidly. “Bikie, maybe we need to think of something else?”

  “I already have,” Bikie replied. “I’ve written a little program that responds to changes in the video image. It will be activated every time someone goes into the shop. Something like a remote motion-detecting sensor. Then at least we won’t have to spend the whole day long staring into the monitor. When someone goes in, the computer will chirp to us. And tomorrow we’ll visit the shop again and I’ll put another web camera inside. We’ll be able to see who’s buying.”

  The third week of surveillance was coming to an end, and the friends were gradually giving in to despair. The program that observed movement at the shop was working excellently, with no glitches, but in all this time cigars had only been bought on eight occasions. The demand for smoking material really was tending towards zero. They took turns keeping watch, making periodical visits to the port.

  They even wanted to talk to a salesman from the cigar shop to ask about the buyers, or with that watchful grandma, but they were afraid to scare off the Professor. You never know if the seller knows Link, and will warn him. So much wasted effort wasn't worth the risk. This shop was their only lead, to risk it was impossible, so they decided to be patient and wait.

  Sometimes cigars actually got bought.

  Isaac followed the first customer, who turned out to be a steward from the luxury yacht Carbonica, obviously not the right lead. Isaac had decided that they would follow all the customers who bought cigars. The next box was bought by some local individual with a beautiful villa in the town’s center. On three occasions cigars were delivered to different yachts, and once to a hotel. On one occasion Bikie had to drive off in a hurry and follow a young guy on a scooter to the nearby town of La Maddalena, while Isaac kept watch from the bench with his computer. And on one occasion they had to drive all the way to Cagliari, three hundred kilometers round trip, almost seven hours. The damn van guzzled so much petrol that they had to fill the tank and then hurtle furiously down the road to catch up with the car carrying the buyer. Thank God, they did. It was all futile. On three occasions the owner of the cigar shop delivered cigars himself, every time to yachts.

  Isaac saw the fridge with cigars so often that he started dreaming about it. And Bikie knew the exact number of cigars in it, so he could easily tell how many cigars one or another customer had bought.

  Meanwhile the money Wolanski had given them was running out. The island of Sardinia had proved to be far from cheap. Eventually they decided to sell the van since living in it had become unbearable, it was so hot and constantly burning petrol by using the air conditioner was getting too expensive. They made a serious loss on the sale of the van, but they didn’t really have any options. They moved into a budget hotel three hundred meters from the cigar shop and hired a cheap scooter for operational movements around the island.

  Their frustration and despair would have overflowed long ago, but after the van, living in a cheap little hotel seemed almost like heaven. The relaxing atmosphere of the cozy Italian island also helped keep their dark forebodings at bay. Their evening walks immediately after the cigar shop closed would beat any psychiatrist treating an onslaught of a depression. Every morning and every evening Isaac jogged five kilometers to the sports ground where he worked out for an hour and then ran back. A little more of that and he would have to buy new clothes again.

  Days were exhausting, but evenings after the shop closed was when they could walk to the port or take a swim, and that inspired them with hope for the next day. The backdrop of luxury yachts and laid-back people had a calming effect on them. Now and again Bikie picked up another female tourist, while Isaac and Michelle exchanged phone calls and messages more and more often. He lied to her, saying that Bikie and he were already in Palermo, fearing that Michelle might decide to come to Sardinia. She probably had loads of friends here. He really did not want her to know that Bikie and he were living in a two-star hotel with a communal shower and a kitchen in the corridor. After Wolanski’s villa, his room seemed like the ultimate slum.

  After all, the womanizer Bikie had been right. After Isaac’s promising start with Michelle, the involuntary separation only enflamed their mutual feelings. This was especially true with Michelle, who was accustomed to men being willing to drop everything for her sake. The mysterious Isaac had gone zooming off on his own business for nearly a month which made him all the more interesting in her eyes. And what sort of business he had was a mystery too, but he obviously didn’t look like a criminal or a scam artist. No matter how hard she tried to find out where he was and what he was doing, she got nowhere. Nothing but excuses and evasive explanations.

  Isaac was not glad to be stuck on the damned island either. From what the doctors said, Vicky was improving, but there was still no question of recovery without surgical intervention. He wanted to see Michelle really badly but then he would have had to tell her everything and he couldn’t. It would be bad for the
cause, and there was no point in putting the girl to unnecessary risk.

  Isaac phoned Vicky’s hospital too having to explain every time that he was her brother, gradually returning him to that role for real, so he decided that his temporary lust for her was a result of stress and purely brotherly concern. Apart from everything else, getting to know Michelle has been very timely in that way too.

  Still there was this one detail that was bothering commissioner Pellegrini, and he called back in the Monaco branch of Collective Mind to find out what the board that had disappeared consisted of. The system administrator, now fit and well, told him that the most valuable part lost was a memory card, something that really ought to have been backed up constantly, but the instructions were not to do that, in order to protect from copies being made of the classified data base. Pellegrini frowned with the man’s ability to bore one to death with his work talk, thanked him for assisting the police and hung up without waiting for more explanations. Pellegrini hated people who talked too much and off the point, in fact he was afraid of them. That was just about all that he feared in life.

  As an experienced army officer, he had been through a lot and had a reduced sense of fear. The commissioner had also conducted hostage negotiations at least three times, all of them successful. Even though the last time, the success was relative – he had to shoot the hostage-taker in front of a young teenager. After talking the perpetrator into losing his guard with a promise to meet his conditions and go even further, Pellegrini put a bullet through his head. It was perfectly legal since the criminal was using the kid as a human shield threatening to kill him.

  There was also a similar incident, when a deranged drug addict was so desperate for a fix that he demanded his wife sell their only daughter, yelling that she was no good for anything anyway. He was so badly disturbed that he couldn’t even explain who to sell her to, he just yelled with foam on his lips, holding a knife to the girl’s throat.

  A neighbor saw the quarrel from the window opposite and called the police. The situation was critical; the junkie’s hands were trembling, leaving scratches at the child’s throat. He could blow his top any moment.

  The commissioner decided to act without waiting for the backup team. He assessed the situation and suggested to the junkie to take painkillers while waiting for heroin to be brought.

  Holding out his open left hand with the pills, the commissioner coaxed the freak to make a couple of steps towards him to take a look at them. Seizing the moment when the junkie loosened his grip to transfer the little girl to his other arm and the knifepoint lowered some distance away from the child’s throat, Pellegrini flung up his right hand and put a bullet straight into the man’s heart. In two swift bounds he reached the man before he fell down and grabbed hold of the little girl. The knife and the body fell almost simultaneously. The knife sprang back off the wooden floor with the blade pointing upwards and at that instant the body fell onto it. It was a ghoulish sight. The little girl didn’t even scream, she was completely stunned with fear. The commissioner liked to recall this story, but it at the same time he didn’t really like it.

  Later he visited the girl, made sure that she received free psychological care and even gave a part of his bonus to the mother, so that she could at least buy something for herself. Their home resembled a garbage dump: everything that could be sold or exchanged for drugs was gone and they used all sorts of trash in the household. The atrocious father used to bring home from the dumps everything that could have any value and there were even two cassette players there, which he obviously had not yet gainfully disposed of.

  Two years later when the little girl turned seven, she started calling the commissioner daddy, and he called her his goddaughter.

  The most repulsive memory was the way the dropped knife ripped open the man’s stomach, with guts spilling out and feces flowing out on the floor. Sometimes, when he stayed on late at work, the commissioner summoned up this picture from his memory to suppress his hunger pangs.

  Right now it was time to end the working day, but Pellegrini kept on sitting there, going through his notes again while suppressing his hunger. The notepad fell out of his hands and opened at a page with the names of the witnesses to the terrorist attack. One of them was a dark horse, who had been overlooked somehow. Not even Captain Robert had said much; just that he was an ordinary young guy and the captain had checked him out and let him go. Pellegrini arranged a working trip to Monaco in order to meet him.

  However the search for Isaac Leroy was futile but Pellegrini, giggling to himself that the police had taken the victim for an accomplice, got a copy of his interrogation at the police station. There also was a registered report from certain Bongardt, a lawyer, and Leroy’s explanatory note. Post-traumatic syndrome as it is, Robert said, and Pellegrini agreed. As a real professional, he very soon dug up a whole heap of information about Isaac, though the guy himself was nowhere to be found. Leroy’s phone has registered for roaming on Sardinia. So he was in Italy, at least.

  The fourth week was coming to an end without any developments. After supper they felt drowsy, and it was time to get back to the hotel. Every time they put this moment off as long as possible since the bench on the street was way better than their room.

  “Oh, it’s time to get up,” Bikie moaned. “Get up or get it up? My smartphone always used to confuse the two meanings, automatically switching to ‘get it up’. The software developers were obviously guys with a lewd sense of humor.”

  As always Bikie had the urge to talk about women.

  “It would be good to get it up and in right now. The last one I had was really wild, well you don’t remember, of course… but anyway, she doesn’t count. As for an all night stand there were just the two Swedish girls, and a really long time ago a girl from the beach who was really boozed up and took a mighty effort to entice me.

  Bikie told the story with all the details, but Isaac wasn't listening. Now it seemed to him that all the conclusions were far-fetched, that Link wasn't there, the money was running out and the future was obscure.

  Another two futile days passed in surveillance of the cigar shop, and their hopes for success dissipated. They started looking for an alternative lead and reviewed the reports about Link over and over again but no new findings or ideas came up. A couple of times they took off on the scooter following buyers who left the shop. It was all pointless, all futile. The first time the cigars were delivered to a yacht again, the second time to a villa drowning in greenery where a respectable looking little old man met the courier at the gates and immediately lit up a specimen from his purchase. It was the same house in La Margarita that Bikie had already been to. This time they even saw the smoker, and it was not Link.

  The fifth week of surveillance was just beginning. The laptop chirped – they had brought a new batch of goods to the shop, but the computer signaled again almost immediately. Isaac looked at the screen. He saw the door of the little shop closing behind an elegant figure in a light dress.

  “Bikie! A girl, a girl has gone into the shop! She looked Oriental and quite young, as far as I can tell. She hasn’t been there before. You can’t see her now, but the salesman is rummaging in the fridge!”

  They ran out of their hotel, hopped on the scooter, started the engine and stood by waiting. Within a minute, the girl came out and walked towards her car, holding a large package. The friends managed to get a good look at her as she got into the driver’s seat. It was Yoshi! Her car set off unhurriedly. Bikie and Isaac followed.

  Chapter 18

  Pellegrini found out that Isaac’s apartment had been repossessed by the bank for debts and where he lived now was unclear. Questioning the neighbors didn’t turn up anything. Isaac hadn’t been on friendly terms with any of them.

  Isaac’s sister was in hospital, in a coma. Pellegrini visited the hospital and asked them to call him immediately if Monsieur Leroy shows up.

  The commissioner had a pleasant, warm feeling in his chest — as always
when he was not idling but focused on a case. Events and facts looked strange: Isaac moved out and lives nowhere, came to the Agency, but didn't download. All other donors injured in the attack went through afterwards, and this guy never returned. Though the need for the money didn't disappear. Maybe his sister is just a cover? On top of that, he sat together with Henri Cavalier, who suspiciously refused to communicate. That statement was strange. Also, judging by the roaming, Isaac visited Amsterdam, and London, and not just in somewhere, but at the University of Link.

  Pellegrini was passing down his hotel room like a tiger in the cage. This long-forgotten feeling – it will soon find and reveal the offender. That everything is a coincidence with a lot of accidents occurring around the innocent loser, Pellegrini couldn't believe. Isaac was clearly fishy. "Suspected partaking in the attack," - the Commissioner made a mark opposite to the name Leroy in his notepad. After writing that, the commissioner decided to speak with the physician of Isaac's sister. This conversation could explain something.

  “Let’s go through it again.” Bikie was a bit nervous.

  “Again, we’re reporters from a student journal and we’ve come to interview Professor Link.” Isaac wasn’t nervous, on the contrary, he had calmed down a little. “That cover story works just fine.”

  They were standing near the gates of a high wall around a mansion where Yoshi had dropped out of sight the day before. In the last few days they had thought through lots of different options. The absence of an entry phone seemed strange, they could not see any security cameras either. Bikie had wanted to launch a small drone, but Isaac was afraid its noise would alarm their game. And they did not have the money for an expensive noiseless one.

  The request of an interview would astonish anybody who opens the gate.