by Chad Huskins
“And if he doesn’t? If I go down there and the boy just looks at me blankly, and has no idea who the At-ta Biral are?”
The apparition girl swallowed. “He won’t. He knows something, I know he does—”
“Nothin’ useful to me—”
“He does,” she insisted.
“I asked you how much you remember about that night. Do you remember what I am, what I do to people that f—”
“He does!” she screamed. “And if you don’t help, I’ll…I’ll haunt you!”
He laughed. “You’ll haunt me? What’re you, Casper the Bitchy Ghost now? You gonna rattle some chains, little nigglet?”
“You know I can. You see what I can do now. I can do that to you, point you out in public, scream, ‘Hey, everybody look, this guy’s name is Spencer Pelletier! There’s a reward out for him!’ There is, you know. Fifty thousand dollars, a reward set up by Interpol through the FBI. I read about it on the Internet—”
“Ooooh, the Great and Powerful Internet!”
“I could turn you in. I could do that. Even if I can’t touch you, I can do that much.”
Spencer snorted, more clouds came out of his face. “Bitch, if you tried that, you know what I’d do? ’Course ya do. I’d go right back across the fuckin’ ocean an’ strangle the life outta you and your sister. You see how far I’ve come just to keep my promise to Dmitry, right? We’re in Russia, by the way. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s no walk down the street from where you live, and I didn’t fuckin’ swim here.”
Kaley glared daggers at him. “Don’t talk about my sister like—”
“Like what?” he taunted further. This was fun. “How is she, by the way? Ever mention me? She miss good ol’ Uncle Spence?”
“She won’t even say your name.”
“Yeah? What’s she call me?”
“Monster,” Kaley said hatefully. “Laughing man. Anything but your name.”
“Helluva way to treat a hero.”
The apparition girl glowered at him. Spencer liked that; the look of impotent rage. It was delicious, and he couldn’t say why. “Let’s talk about the boy.”
“There’s nothin’ to talk about.”
“He knows something that could help you to—”
“You’d better know what the consequences are here if that boy knows nothing,” he stipulated. “If you continue on like this, just know that, while I can’t touch you, if you’re fuckin’ with me I’ll hurt that boy just to spite you.” Kaley flinched as if slapped. “That’s what I am, that’s what I can do. This is a dangerous fucking game you’re playing here.” Spencer hopped in the driver’s seat, cranked up the Subaru’s heat, then hopped back out and shut the door. “I’m gonna leave the engine runnin’, get her warmed up. Then I’m gonna go check this kid out, an’ if it’s all square like ya say, I’ll let him be. But if that boy’s a blank…” He chuckled, and headed back to the house.
The apparition waited a moment, then followed him.
Lyon, France
Detective-Inspector Aurélie Rideau had just finished texting her wife. Their anniversary was next weekend, and Rideau was reminding her not to let her forget.
Patricia texted her back: What happens if I forget to remind you? ;)
Rideau smiled: Then we’re both out of luck!
Stepping out the back of the black sedan, Rideau nodded a cursory thank-you to Sylvie, her driver and personal guard for the trip from the airport. She barely looked up from her phone before walking through the revolving door. The streets of Lyon were choked with tourists this time of year, mostly Americans, Canadians and Chinese. You could spot them on the sidewalk just by their dumb expressions. They crawled along quai Charles de Gaulle like happily lost zombies.
Patricia texted her again. Rideau checked it: Always putting the burden on me!
Rideau scoffed. Her wife always played pouty. That was part of her charm. As per their ritual, Rideau texted back: Why not? You’re never doing anything constructive.
That’ll get her goat. Rideau smiled to herself when she hit SEND and turned her phone off. She couldn’t be interrupted by personal calls; she had to go to work, if the message she received from Mitchell was accurate. She had a different phone for work, and she left that one on when she stepped inside the Interpol main offices. She and Sylvie both had to present their ID badges at the front desk, and were only permitted to pass the lobby and go near the elevators after raking the same badge over a scanner and running their thumbprints over another scanner.
“Bonjour, Inspecteur,” said the British security guard at the front desk, practicing her French. “Huitéme étage?”
“Good morning, Katrina,” Rideau returned, practicing her English. “Yes, up on eight. Hey, you had the root canal, right? How’d that go?”
“Not as bad as I thought, ma’am. Thank you for asking.”
Rideau checked her e-mail on her work iPhone, as she habitually did every ten minutes. Then she zipped over to BBC News and CNN’s website to see what was being said about the subway bombing at St. Paul’s. So far, the death toll remained the same number; two people were killed, and four were injured. That’ll probably be shuffled over to Oskar Wahlström’s department before the day’s out, she thought.
She stepped into an elevator, and stepped out onto a bustling eighth floor of the Interpol HQ building. A sea of cubicles and kiosks greeted her; fax machines, personal computers, and various printers were dishing out the latest criminal activity coming from a range of news services around the world. Many nuggets of information were being sent via secure fax to countless embassies across the planet. At least two people shared a cubicle, each unit a small team that worked closely to sift through photos of known terrorists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and fraud artists to create profiles and lists of places they may currently be. All was being compiled to form accurate profiles and spread those out across the globe.
Rideau navigated her way past the people who were making phone calls, setting up videoconferences, and assisting law enforcement representatives in other countries with complex skip-tracing. Many were leaning back in their chairs, speaking into their Bluetooths and monitoring various video feeds, eating potato chips, and guzzling coffee and sodas. These people were the ones who made it happen. They were the blood of Interpol. They were what Interpol had been originally created for: communication.
Sylvie, her security guard, stepped out of the elevator with her and vanished from her side, likely to be retasked to another detail.
Rideau passed Vincent Marcello, who smiled and waved at her briefly, but continued spinning slowly in his chair while he communicated with someone across the world. “Yes, Director. Yes, you have that much correct. But the woman that you’re after is a con artist who’s fled to her home country. She lives in North Korea, and they haven’t been very uncooperative lately answering our questions—”
Rideau tapped Claudine Noëlle on her shoulder as she walked by. Noëlle was standing up in her cubicle and stretching, her dress jacket flung on the floor beside her desk. “Les numéros de compte ne sont pas assorti, monsieur,” she was saying into her mini-headset. “Je suis très désolé.” When she felt Rideau’s gentle touch, she whispered “Hello” to her before going back to her conversation. “Nous devrons regarder ailleurs—”
She had her own corner office tucked away in the east wing of the building, and it was one that usually had a beautiful view of a number of Lyon’s greater architectural achievements, but Rideau often kept the shades drawn over the Plexiglas windows. When she entered, she shut the door behind her and the room’s extra-thick walnut-paneled walls and soundproofing technology allowed it to diminish all the noise from the floor outside to a barely audible murmur.
Rideau set her briefcase on top of the table and took her jacket off. She looked at her watch. Still on time. The others would probably be waiting already. She established the link through Interpol’s protected servers, and within seconds the faces popped onto her scr
een. Her screen was cut into four sections. Only two of them were currently filled with video. The top left window was filled with her old friend Mitchell Hamis, a handler for the operative on the other screen directly to his right, Corvas Desh. The two of them were sitting side by side in one of the rooms of the safe house the IB and the CBI (India’s own Central Bureau of Investigation) had allowed them to work out of.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “How are we?”
“Fine,” said Mitchell. “You look lovely as ever.”
Rideau smiled politely. “Merci,” she said. Mitchell was ever the gentleman, and Rideau was not above flattery. She would take it wherever she could get it, because her cruel aunt and a deranged grandfather had raised her, making certain she knew she was homely. But sometimes the very cruel and the very deranged were the only honest people.
“Is Gregori there?” asked Desh.
“Not yet. But I’m expecting him…ah!” The door opened, and in stepped Gregori Matveyev, the six-foot-five-Russian with round and massive shoulders, head bald as a bowling ball and a severe face etched in stone. “Good morning, Comrade Matveyev. How are we this morning?”
“Not terribly bad.”
“Is the French cuisine agreeing with you any more today than it was last week?” Metveyev had had a terrible bout of food poisoning the week before, and had seen it as a sign he should never have left the Motherland, and lamented his decision to come live with the “soft” Frenchies for the next five years. A man accustomed to grouse, but all in all Rideau was happy with the Director’s decision to bring him on.
The Russian ambassador and liaison with the FSB (Federal Security Bureau) gave her a dry look embedded in a wry smile. “Let’s not talk of these things. What have you heard?”
Rideau smirked, and turned the computer around so that Metveyev could see Mitchell and Desh, and so they could see him. “We’re both here, boys. Go ahead and tell the ambassador what you told me.”
Mitchell spoke first, cleared his throat. “We came into some information, uh, some video footage we’d been sent by an anonymous source on the inside of the trade. The port authorities at Sadarghat Port weren’t even aware of the transaction happening. No one was supposed to be on those docks at that time of night.”
“You’re sure it was them?” asked Metveyev. Rideau watched him reach into his coat pocket, pull out a mint, unwrapped it and tossed it into his mouth. “We have to be sure this time, before we make fools out of ourselves again.”
“It’s them,” said Mitchell. “Facial-recognition software positively ID’d this man.” He held up a printout with a picture of a thick-faced man, with a square Russian jaw, icy-blue eyes, a hard stare, and perfectly manicured blonde hair.
“Yuri Shcherbakov,” Rideau said. “I think you’re familiar with this man from the—”
“The Dutch revenge killings, da,” he said flatly. “Russian Mafia. They call him the Grey Wolf.”
“That’s correct.” Rideau watched Metveyev for any sign of surprise. It was said it was difficult to get an emotional response out of a Russian, to get their eyes to widen or their eyebrows to rise, but even still, she’d figured mentioning Shcherbakov’s name would provoke more than a flat statement.
The Dutch revenge killings had been a dark time in FSB investigations. The Russian secret service agency had done all they could do to keep a media blackout concerning those gruesome crime scenes, and most of them had been spun to the press as nothing more than random acts of violence. But a popular journalist duo in Amsterdam had done a great deal of digging, and had done their jobs so well that they had uncovered a few ways that the notorious Dutch syndicates were getting women out of the ports at night, selling them to their allies in Russian circles.
The Russian Mafia, like so many other syndicates, did not like interference from outside sources. They had tried bribing the two journalists in Amsterdam, but it hadn’t worked. And the journalists only became more curious about the Dutch-Russian connection when they got wind of key witnesses against the human trafficking rings that began dying in grisly scenes, and they began to hear rumors of a man called the Grey Wolf.
The first to die was Jacobus van den Broek, a member of the Dutch organized crime gang Skalla in Amsterdam. He was the first major arrest that Interpol helped to arrange with the Amsterdam Police Department. Two days before he was set to give testimony in court, van den Broek was found naked and bound on his living room floor, a fire poker that had been red-hot when it entered his anus was shoved completely inside, to its very handle. Autopsy and analysis of the crime scene indicated he was alive when this took place.
Then there was Aldo Daalder, owner of a modest wine company that was willing to testify that he and his family had been threatened unless they agreed to allow the Mafia use some of their shipping containers to move young girls back and forth between countries where the wine company did business. Daalder was left barely alive in a corner of his basement, tied to a chair by razor wire, where he’d nearly cut himself in half trying to reach his two daughters, four and six, who had been seated at a table across from one another and forced to play a game of Russian roulette. When the older sister had blown the younger’s brains out, someone had split the older sister’s head in half with an ax. Daalder died later of his injuries.
And there was Willeke Ommen, an avid dog trainer, who told Dutch police that her two sons had gotten mixed up in the business of the vory v zakone, and had become their proxy men in Amsterdam. Ms. Ommen went missing for several days before anyone went to check on her. Her dogs lay in pieces all about the house. Ms. Ommen herself was found in her bedroom, her stomach split open and her severed head shoved into the middle for no discernible reason. Her two sons were found floating in a lake a week later—the theory was, they hadn’t taken too kindly to their mother being so brutally punished, and someone had shown them what happened when their opinion differed from the Mafia’s.
These killings and more happened over a one-year period, from Moscow to Amsterdam, and a few towns far outside that range that would later be connected. This had all come out about two years ago, and had underscored the growing problems with organized crime internationally, the same problems that Interpol had been discussing for more than a decade now. The Internet, as well as faster modes of travel, had allowed for organized criminal syndicates, terrorists, and even teams of heist experts to communicate, compare data and techniques, cooperate, and generally train one another. An endless series of back scratching going on around the globe, and everyone from the FBI to the CIA to the G-2 to the FSB to Mossad were racing to catch up.
This also underscored the increasing need for the International Criminal Police Organization. Interpol was created for one reason: enhancing communication between the multitude of police agencies in nearly two hundred separate countries.
As it turned out, the Amsterdam reporters had done their jobs too well, and had closed in on a few ex-Mafia guys that claimed to have met the Grey Wolf. They’d gone to meet with these informants, and neither one of them were ever seen again. Interpol had gotten the tip that the journalists were about to be executed, but hadn’t been able to do anything in time. It was one of Rideau’s great regrets, for she had been attached to that investigation, and even collaborated with the two journalists. Heesters and Steege, may you rest in peace, she thought.
The only potential lead they’d ever had on Yuri “Grey Wolf” Shcherbakov was a picture found on a security camera at the home of Willke Ommen. Facial analysis matched it with the face of a man seen entering Aldo Daalder’s wine warehouse a week before the tragedy that befell that man and his whole family. Before the two Amsterdam reporters vanished from the face of the earth, they said they thought they had a name to put to the face, though they never said where they got it: reporters protecting their sources, and all.
“So what did you find at Sadarghat Port?” asked Ambassador Metveyev presently. Rideau thought he sounded a bit impatient, like he had a thousand better places he could be.<
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On the computer screen, Mitchell said, “We collaborated with authorities in Bangladesh, and they told us the shipments were coming here, to India. We checked them out. They did come here. We’ve already identified the serial numbers of those containers and passed them out to CBI.” Mitchell and Desh had been stationed together in India for almost two years now, and had been working closely with the CBI. “We’ve actually located one of the girls, and she’s been shown this picture. She confirmed that Shcherbakov was at the docks when she and a few other girls were handed over to about a dozen Indian thugs. Thugs she hasn’t seen since.”
“It was a sale?”
“It was a sale, clearly. She says that neither she nor the girls came willingly, they weren’t trying to sneak into the country, and they weren’t buying their way to new identities or citizenship,” said Mitchell.
“Can you be sure she’s not lying?”
Beside Mitchell, Agent Desh put in, “If you’d seen the conditions she was in when we found her, you wouldn’t ask.”
Rideau looked at the ambassador. That seemed to satisfy him, yet it also seemed to bore him. He sighed, “All right. Send me all you’ve got. I’ll talk to my people at FSB, and as long as you keep the SB and CBI buttered up, we ought to move along with this at a good pace.”
Rideau thought that was a very optimistic assessment. The SB, or Special Branch, was the primary intelligence agency of Bangladesh, and were just as intransigent and careful with their secrets as the Russian FSB. Another problem that Interpol frequently found itself dealing with was the constant wait-and-see-who-divulges-secrets-first game. Both SB and CBI would want to see what FSB knew about the Grey Wolf, and if they were hiding anything, like maybe he was a government-trained assassin and not really Mafia-related. And FSB would want to wait on divulging all they knew until they had an idea of just how much SB already knew; it could sometimes be embarrassing to let someone know how long you’d suspected a man of such heinous killings, and yet hadn’t been able to do much about it. It made an agency look impotent, and FSB could not afford to look impotent, not with the whole world watching Russia these days for some of its questionable changes.