by Matt Rees
“I’m just clarifying, Bill.”
“The American wanted the scalp. McCarthy was supposed to bring it to him. But he didn’t have it.”
“The scalp? What scalp?”
“I took it from McCarthy’s attaché case on the plane. It’s got to belong to one of the Chinese engineers. It’s black hair, very straight. It’s in my pocket.”
“I’m getting on a plane to Palma right away. I’ll be there to back you up.”
“I couldn’t locate the American after McCarthy went in the shark tank. But I heard McCarthy tell him about a guy on the plane. That guy was me. McCarthy figured out that I must’ve taken the scalp. He told this Wyatt that I was waiting outside the aquarium with a taxi.”
She saw what he intended. “Bill, be careful.”
“I can’t find him. But maybe he can find me.” He hung up.
The taxi driver was about to take a family of panicked vacationers away from the horror of the shark killing when Todd reached him. “Sorry, everybody. This guy works for me.” He opened the rear door and lifted himself up, standing on the rim of the door frame. He looked about, making himself obvious. Wyatt was there somewhere, he was sure of it. He got into the taxi and shut the door. “Melia Hotel.”
“What happened to your friend?” the driver said.
“He had a lunch date. Now go.”
The taxi rolled toward the medieval city and looped around behind the marina on the wide Avinguda de Gabriel Roca. The tall palms cast their shade on the road, and the sun flickered through them as the driver picked up speed. The great white yachts of people twenty million times richer than Bill Todd languished on the quays beyond the seafood restaurants. The owners of the yachts were wealthy enough that someone out there might have a motivation for killing them. No matter what inputs you fed into the equation of an ICE case, it always solved to money and murder. Todd touched his fingertips to the baggie in his pocket and wondered how Wyatt intended to turn the scalp of the murdered Chinese man into money.
He tapped through to the photos of McCarthy and Wyatt on his phone. He e-mailed them to Haddad in New York and copied Kinsella. He dialed Haddad. “I just sent you—”
“I know. Noelle already talked to me.”
“You’re running a check on Wyatt? The guy in the photos?”
“I’m working on it, Bill.”
“I meant to send them to Dom too. I just forgot. You know I was a bit—”
“I’ll forward them when I can. We can’t reach Dom just now.”
“What happened? Is he okay?”
“Last we heard from him he was about to drive to Prague. Since then, nothing.”
With Verrazzano out of contact, Todd was the agent with the most years of service behind him. It was time to give the team the direction it would’ve had from Dom. “Noelle’s coming here to Majorca. She should go to Prague, instead.”
“I don’t think she’ll want to do that.”
“Maybe she can connect with Dom.”
“I’ll call her.”
He paid off the taxi in the drive of the Hotel Melia and went into the dark wood and rich carpeting of the lobby. At the reception desk, a bony clerk in his late fifties lisped a welcome.
“I’m sorry, look, I have a reservation. But I don’t have my passport.” Todd did his best to seem flustered and tense. It wasn’t hard. “I’ve been robbed. I was at the airport and—”
“Please, sir, let me set your mind at rest. I’m very sorry to hear about your experience, sir. Please don’t worry. We will help you to arrange a temporary passport with your consulate and to get in touch with your credit card companies. Sadly, we are familiar with such situations. In the meantime—” The clerk gestured toward a welcome table with a tray of champagne flutes and a bottle of chilled cava.
Todd took a glass and had a long sip. This is what happens to rich people when the shit comes down, he thought. Someone gives them champagne. He reminded himself not to be on a government salary in the next life.
“Your name, sir?” the clerk said.
“McCarthy.”
The clerk handed him his key card. Todd went to the elevator. Up in his room, he savored the silence of the expensive hotel. From the balcony, he watched the sun sliding into the Mediterranean. The red warning lights came on at the tip of the cathedral’s spires, vivid in the darkening sky. On the avenue, the traffic light changed to red. A taxi rear-ended a Mercedes with a loud, terrifying percussion. Sometime after the sun came up, Todd wondered, was he going to hear that noise amplified ten thousand times?
At least he knew where some of the bad guys were now. “Right here in beautiful Majorca,” he murmured. He set his champagne glass down on the nightstand and dumped the scalp beside it. He lay on the bed. It was more comfortable than any he had ever slept on. He put his hands behind his head and waited for the tall American to come kill him.
CHAPTER 23
The rental car sped along the highway that entered Prague from the west. Verrazzano came to in the passenger seat. For an instant, he thought it was morning and that it was time to get his niece up and dressed and feed her breakfast and hustle her off to school. Then a road sign informed him that the main rail station near Wenceslas Square was ten kilometers away, and a sharp pain in the back of his skull reminded him of the sleeper hold outside the lodge south of Bonn. German talk radio was blasting on the stereo loud enough to be heard over the wind through the open windows. He groaned. Tom Frisch drummed a happy paradiddle on the steering wheel and punched Verrazzano playfully on the shoulder. “And he’s back. For a while, I thought I killed you.”
“Why didn’t you?” Verrazzano massaged his bruised neck. His brain felt thick and clotted from the momentary shut down of circulation.
“We’re a team, Sergeant Major. We’re going to nail Wyatt, you and me together. Man, you’re as white as an English guy’s ass.”
“You’ve made a study of English guys’ asses?”
“I kicked a few in my time.”
Every fifty yards, they passed a concertina of metal and plastic that had once been a Darien or a car that tangled with one. The newsreader on the radio said the winner of Best Supporting Actress at last year’s Oscars turned out to have been run down and killed by a Darien while crossing a street in Santa Monica. “I must’ve missed that flick. Didn’t see a lot of movies in the detention center,” Frisch spoke over the start of the next item on the news.
“—the famous author of thrillers remains in a coma even as his book hits number one on the bestseller list,” the newsreader said, “after a Darien crashed into his Tesla on an interstate in New Jersey.”
“I almost went into a coma when I read that guy’s last book.”
“As calls mount for military action against the terrorists behind the Darien incident, the UN will hold an emergency debate later today in New York. Secretary-General Ban Ki—”
“Well, I guess we can rest easy now that the UN is on the case.”
“How’d you find me in Bonn?” Verrazzano said.
“In Washington, US Commerce Secretary Dick Bruce argued against military action in the Middle East, in a speech last night. Bruce criticized congressional pressure for the president to attack the Islamic State in revenge for the Darien crash—”
“You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out.” Frisch took a cell phone from his jacket and tossed it to Verrazzano. It was his. “When I put you under, you’d just read the last text from your Agent Haddad. The screen hadn’t even had time to lock. I got the address of the Bitcoin cashing place in Prague.”
“Bruce urged world leaders to turn their attention to China, saying that he believed Beijing to be behind the Darien crash. That, according to Bruce, is where any military action should be aimed.”
Frisch punched the off button on the radio. “I texted her back. Confirm this, I said. Give me that again, I said. I got the whole deal. See? I could’ve just killed you. I’ve got the information I need to get to the last Chinese engineer.
But here you are, alive. I told you, we’re a team, man.”
Verrazzano turned his face to the window. He had to weigh everything he told Frisch, and he had to endure the stress of knowing that the man beside him could turn on him at any moment. “I’m not working with you, Frisch.”
“One guy—no matter how good he is—won’t stand a chance in hell against Wyatt. He’s hooked up with the Chinese and moved into technologies that you and I could never comprehend. Any time I even think of Wyatt, I feel that ice in my belly, like I’m halfway dead. That’s real fear.”
Verrazzano watched the Prague suburbs flash by the window. A demonic image of Wyatt suddenly rose out of the tenements, swathed in fire and shooting red streams of pure death from his palms. The tires thumped over the ridges of tar between the concrete sections of pavement, a mirror for the ticking of Verrazzano’s heart, counting down the approach to the next figure on Wyatt’s path of death, the engineer Julie Jin. “It’s hard to separate the fear and the hate,” he murmured.
“You’re a good guy. You won’t go bad again.”
Verrazzano turned sharply to Frisch in surprise. That was a mistake. The effects of the long unconscious spell made it feel like three punches delivered from different directions at the same time.
“That’s what you’re scared of, isn’t it? The possibility you might still be nursing something evil in here.” Frisch touched his chest, as he went down the off-ramp toward the station. “Some guys are so bad, they never come back. The worst thing they’ve done is the real them. Other guys make a mistake and they never forgive themselves. But you—you’re not going back to it.”
Frisch pulled over in a shabby street under a rail bridge. Even in Europe’s loveliest towns, the central station was surrounded by neglected neighborhoods filled with cheap hostels for migrant workers and stores advertising cut-rate phone calls back home to Sudan or Sri Lanka. In Prague the atmosphere of hustle and sting extended from the station’s taxi rank through the streets of flophouses and on into the popular tourist spots around the Charles Bridge. Frisch whooped with happiness as he climbed out of the rental car. The guy was entirely in tune with the lawless selfishness that defined almost every exchange in the Czech capital.
“Let’s go find little Julie Jin, buddy.” Frisch dragged Verrazzano out of the passenger door of the station wagon. Now he truly felt the effect of the stranglehold Frisch put on him in Bonn. It mumbled through Verrazzano’s skull, reeling against the hemispheres of his brain, tripping over synapses, and clutching at his limbic system. Frisch ran him down the sidewalk with his hand under his elbow. “Julie’s going to tell her story and we’re going to figure out how to get Wyatt. We’re going to finish this job together, man.”
They walked along a street of cheap clothing stores, most of them closing for the night. A Romany woman and her child huddled in the doorway of a dry cleaner, whimpering and holding their hands out for change. Verrazzano halted. He reached into his pocket and took out a fistful of coins. He gave them to the woman. Frisch put his palm flat against Verrazzano’s upper back. “Ain’t you a sweetheart. You give me any funny stuff and I’ll leave you in a doorway with your gypsy girlfriend—dead, you got me?”
They cut down a narrow street that ended in the bulbous dome of an Eastern Orthodox church. The traffic on the sidewalk was sparse. A few reedy African men sauntered home from their menial jobs. Another Romany woman bothered them for change. A single neon sign buzzed and flickered halfway along the block, showing a row of Chinese characters, a blood-red dollar symbol, and the words “Money Transfer” in English.
“According to your colleague Special Agent Haddad, that’s the place we’re looking for.” Frisch checked his watch. “Soon be nineteen hundred. It’s open late.” He led Verrazzano to an old Wolfwagen van across from the loan office. They stood in its shadow. “Now we wait.”
The Romany came toward them. She tugged her shawl around her stout body and yammered through lips that wrinkled about a toothless mouth. Verrazzano reached into his pocket and came out with the last of his change.
“You’re a regular Christian, ain’t you,” Frisch said. “Go ahead, give her the money.”
Verrazzano closed his fist around the change and swung. His punch caught Frisch on the jaw. The weight of the coins doubled the impact. Frisch twirled and went down. Verrazzano kicked him in the ribs. He went for a stamp, but Frisch caught his boot just in time and twisted it. Verrazzano came down on his backside. The concussion jumped up almost as fast as Frisch and joined in the battering. Frisch grabbed Verrazzano’s head and turned it sideways. He smashed his knee into Verrazzano’s temple and let him fall.
The change tinkled from Verrazzano’s hand onto the sidewalk. A charge burst down from his brain. He vomited into the gutter beside the Wolfwagen. The Romany scooped up the coins and hustled away.
“You got to pull yourself together, Verrazzano. You try that again and I swear it’s the last thing you’ll do. We may have to wait a couple days for this Chinese chick. But she could just as easily show up right now. Could be the loan office is about to close for the night. If she’s smart, she’ll come now, when there’s no one about. No one to track her back to her family.”
On his knees, Verrazzano looked along the ill-lit road. Would Julie Jin want to convert her Bitcoins and walk out into this neighborhood in the dark? “She could get mugged.”
“I think she’s got other worries.” Frisch rubbed his knuckles hard on the top of Verrazzano’s head, where the Chinese engineers had lost their scalps. Verrazzano flinched and gasped. Four African men walked out into the street to avoid him. Frisch spoke to them jovially. “Just another drunk English guy on a booze holiday.”
The Africans had seen enough British tourists puking pilsner onto the cobblestones of the Old Town to pay no attention now.
Verrazzano wiped his face. He glanced across the street. The lights outside the loan office silhouetted a slight figure in a denim jacket and a baseball cap. The woman turned for a moment to scan the sidewalk. The red neon of the dollar sign caught her features. She was Chinese. She watched the corner up by the main street. Something there grabbed her attention. Then she went into the loan office and shut the door.
Verrazzano followed her glance. The man on the corner was barely visible, but he was there, crouching by a delivery truck. Then he was gone. One element of his outline was obvious to Verrazzano, even through the fuzz that gripped his brain. The man held a pistol. Verrazzano raised his hand, pointing, trying to speak. He choked and gagged again.
“Cool it, buddy.” Frisch yanked him to his feet.
Verrazzano took himself back to a time when there was no danger and no pain. To the living room of his childhood home. He heard the piano and felt the keys under his fingers and watched his parents dancing and his brother and sister clapping along. He went there now, rolling his fingers through the trills of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” mimicking the way Ramsay Lewis used to play it.
“It’s her,” he whispered.
Frisch got it. He glared at the door of the loan office.
“And there’s also a—” The concussion filled Verrazzano’s throat with bile and stopped his voice. “At the corner. There’s a—”
Frisch bent over and took a short folding knife out of his boot. He flipped the scalpel blade out of the orange plastic handle and took a step into the street.
Verrazzano shook his head. “Don’t. For God’s sake.”
“Now we found her . . .”
“It was you?” Verrazzano’s thoughts raced and then crashed. “But you couldn’t have.”
“You’re right about that, buddy. I didn’t do a one of them. But Wyatt wants the scalps of these Chinese engineers, so I’m going to take him one.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“He’ll be glad to see me. He’ll get me a new ID and put me to work again. No more detention centers for me, Sergeant Major Verrazzano.” He put the H&K to Verrazzano’s head. “No more nothing for you.”
A man walked fast down the center of the street toward Verrazzano. The street light illuminated his scabbed face. The Krokodil called, “Frisch. Tom Frisch. Come out from there.”
Verrazzano grabbed the pistol from Frisch’s hand. The assassin thought he had killed the ICE agent. He should have been the one with the gun. The Krokodil had no idea that Frisch had turned the tables on him—that it was Verrazzano who had been about to be killed.
He struggled to take aim at the Krokodil. His brain couldn’t put together a steady image. He saw two or three of him, all moving different ways in the twilight.
“Frisch?” The Krokodil sensed something wasn’t right. “Wyatt wants to talk to you.”
The door of the loan office opened. The small Chinese woman stepped out onto the sidewalk. She saw the Krokodil in the road, his gun at his side. Instantly she took off, running toward the church. The Krokodil chased her.
Verrazzano held onto the rear bumper of the Wolfwagen. He reached for the handle on the back door and tugged himself up. Through the windows, he saw Julie Jin run around the corner. The Krokodil closed on her.
Every person who would die or lose someone they loved when the cars crashed, every kid who’d be crushed when their mother lost control of the wheel on the way to school, they all put out their hands and touched Verrazzano and soothed him, gave him focus. His head burst and his pain spattered the dark walls of the eighteenth-century buildings up to the fifth floor, but he was alive and he had purpose. He jogged down the street. After a few paces, he discovered that he hadn’t fallen down, so he went into a sprint.
Around the corner, the street was empty. Then a motion drew his attention. A man vaulting a wall. Verrazzano followed. He hauled himself over the shoulder-high stone wall and came down in an old graveyard. The tombs reached out for him. Not yet, he thought.
Thirty yards ahead, the Krokodil checked his direction and went right. The ICE agent struggled after him. He struck his thigh on a leaning gravestone and tumbled over a long, low tomb. He scrambled to his feet.